Michael Button
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
Well, I only started the YouTube less than a year ago.
It's been a bit of a wild ride.
I mean, yeah, I started just under a year ago, but no one started watching until like March.
And then I think you see me just after that point.
And it's been a bit of a big, you know, journey since then upwards.
And it's been very exciting and very happy to be here today.
Very excited to be in Austin.
And yeah, looking forward to talk about some ancient history.
So I studied ancient history at university for four years.
And I've always been interested in history.
I've done history all the way through.
I was fascinated about history as a kid.
got to the stage of my life where it was, you know, thinking about going to university.
So I thought I'll do ancient history at university and study there for four years, graduated, all of that kind of stuff.
But there came a point during my degree where I was kind of, you know, a little bit, I didn't quite agree with the kind of high level ideas regarding the timeline of history and what we're taught about our ancient past.
It wasn't that I disputed anything that I've been taught and I have like great respect for the people that I met at university and my professors and I don't dispute anything that we were taught actually on the course but it was more the kind of high-level macro perspective of history that I found myself having more and more questions about and yeah, so... What bothered you?
It was kind of the big questions regarding the origins of civilization and how deep civilization goes and how complex human behavior, you know, I thought went way back further into history than what we were being taught.
And I wasn't too I just didn't buy this idea that nothing happened for like vast stretch of time because it was during my course that.
They found that modern humans, they made this discovery in Morocco in 2017 or 2018, I think.
And that was when I was at university.
It's called like the Jebel Irud site or something like that.
But they were modern Homo sapien remains.
They thought they were Neanderthal initially because they were so old.
They're 315,000 years old.
That's kind of like the estimate.
It goes up to potentially 360,000 years old.
And yeah, they thought they were initially Neanderthals of this age, but then they discovered a few more and they classified them as Homo sapien.
And when I saw that, I was like, how is this not kicking up more of a fuss?
Because before them, the oldest Homo sapien remains we had were...
around 200,000 years old.
And that had been the case for like a decade or something.
And before that, it was like 100,000 years old.
So this discovery pushed back the age of our species by another third, like 100,000 years.
So I saw that and I was thinking like, how are we still basing our kind of idea of history around the fact that nothing happened for, you know, 310,000 years, and then everything happened in like the last, you know,
10 000 years since the neolithic revolution i just thought that was odd because you know we've been in this anatomically modern form for so long and yet we were being taught that nothing was nothing had happened until you know the last 10 000 years and i just didn't make sense to me so that's kind of where uh where i started thinking about it and then we did this module at university i remember called uh
It was called something like Cataclysms or something, and it was all about how, in recorded history, natural disaster had a big impact on human societies and stuff like that, and how small, tiny changes in climate could massively disrupt human civilization and bring them all crashing down.
the case study they used was something called the late bronze age collapse have you ever heard the late bronze age yes yes when all these like powerful influential civilizations at the kind of peak of human progress around 1000 bc all simultaneously came crashing down and no one was quite sure why it was but the best theory we have is that it's um like a kind of combination of climate factors which led to trade disruption which led to
And then all these empires, like the Hittite Empire, the Syrian Empire, the palaces of Mycenaean Greece, the Egyptian New Kingdom, all within a 20 to 30, 40 year period, all came crashing down at the exact same time.
And I remember being hooked by that.
I was like, that's so crazy.
We don't even know why this happened, but it was like a half degree change in climate.
And so I remember starting to research how bad a climate had been during history and how bad it had been, like these big climatic episodes had been during prehistory.
And I started thinking like, wow, if that had caused all these civilizations to collapse, just a tiny half degree change in climate, which caused drought, which led to those civilizations collapsing.
Some of the stuff that had been happening during prehistory was so much worse than that.
And that got me thinking, like, how do we know that sophisticated human culture hadn't flourished, you know, 10,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago, 200,000 years ago, and collapsed due to climate change or natural disaster, volcanoes, comet impacts, anything like that.
And that's kind of what set me on the journey that along with the, you know, the discovery of the remains in Morocco and
That really got me thinking about the story we've told regarding our past and how I wasn't quite sure.
And yeah, that's kind of what made me initially kind of break away from the traditional timeline that we were being taught.
I feel like academics, as opposed to the alternative historians, are kind of more saying, we don't know, but here's a potential hypothetical scenario that could be possible.
Whereas I feel like more mainstream, for want of a better word, I don't really like using that because I don't think there's such thing as a mainstream.
It's not like there's a group of people that all collectively decide, but...
And some particularly vocal mainstream kind of historians and scientists seem to claim to know absolute truth about the past.
And that's just stupid.
Like, how can anyone know about what happened 100,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago?
And it kind of gets me a little bit riled up because at the end of the day, none of us know what happened back then.
So I think a lot more possibilities are, you know, possible than what many people appreciate.
Yeah, I think Gobekli Tepe is the biggest kind of smoking gun, at least for the idea that civilization is older and more complex than the traditional model suggests, because obviously, as you say, it's like 12,000 years old and it's massive megalithic pillars.
I mean, you know about Gobekli Tepe, probably most people listening to this will know about Gobekli Tepe, but it's such a clear sign that sophisticated human culture was present way earlier than the
conventional timeline suggests and i think that at least should throw a monkey wrench into a lot of these people's ideas regarding human civilization and when it began because clearly the toolkit for civilization existed 12 000 years ago so how why couldn't it have existed a little bit earlier than that and why if it existed then did it then take another 6 000 years for it to emerge in ancient suma which is the kind of traditional thought to be the earliest civilization so
Quebec-Litapé is fascinating.
It's a really interesting site.
I think it will one day be classed as civilization.
I'm almost certain that when enough time passes, we'll kind of look at that.
And because it's a whole culture, the whole Tashtapella culture, there's like 14 sites at least.
And they all have this kind of megalithic architecture.
They all have shared symbolism.
They all are clearly connected.
It's crazy how it's not defined as anything other than hunter-gatherers.
And even if you think that hunter-gatherers built Gobekli Tepe, then you need to massively update the definition of what a hunter-gatherer is, because clearly they had surplus.
They weren't just building these sites in their spare time.
And yeah, it's a truly paradigm-shifting site.
But I mean, everyone kind of knows about Gobekli Tepe now.
Yeah, there's like a study that was written or a paper that was written and they think it's the Pillar 43, I think it is.
It's kind of like a cosmic calendar and it's like almost a prediction model of an impact that could happen or already has happened and it's like a warning for the future.
I mean, that is still disputed, but I mean, there's been good research that's done into that that suggests that's what it is.
And it's certainly a site that has cosmic alignments and has been built with the stars in mind, which is something that we can say about so many ancient sites around the world, which is another thing that isn't really considered by scientists.
quote unquote, mainstream archaeology, perhaps as much as it should be.
So yeah, it's a fascinating site.
And I really think it displays a lot about how human ingenuity and civilization, I mean, people get a bit stuck with the word civilization, because we have this
a very narrow definition of what civilization is.
And it's basically based on the old model of Mesopotamia, which is ancient Sumer.
And because that was the earliest known civilization for so long, we kind of constructed this whole idea about what a civilization is purely based on Mesopotamia.
But I don't see why that has to be what civilization is, because that was just one civilization.
And just because that was the earliest one we'd found for a long time and still is
thought of as such doesn't mean that that's the only way that humanity can flourish because humans are so adaptable we do so many different things and we're clever in different ways and we you know change to different environments and i think that definition has really kept a lot of people kind of boxed in when thinking about how sophisticated human culture could flourish in different places in different environments and with different pressures and
I think that's kind of forced people to not consider what other possibilities are out there.
And it all ties into this idea that we've had that agriculture leads to civilization.
But there's that bizarre thing that, you know, agriculture appears in multiple different places at pretty much the exact same time all over the world.
And that's never made sense to me because if agriculture was such a kind of vital invention for civilization to flourish...
then why did no one invent it for, you know, 310,000 years?
And then in South America, in Mesopotamia, in ancient China, and you could argue there's other different places that, so say there's like South America and there's Central America.
I mean, you could argue that's potentially connected, but a lot of people say it isn't.
So how can agriculture, if it's such an incredible invention...
be invented by multiple people at the same time, but no one else thought of it before.
It doesn't make sense to me.
Doesn't that seems like you'd figure that out in one lifetime.
I think the idea always has been that it's because of the climate, right?
So because of the Holocene, which began around 12,000 years ago, as we came out of that and we had kind of stable climate conditions that we still live in today, that's what enabled the invention of agriculture, right?
But then the question I always ask is, well, what about all the other warm periods that have come in the past, as the idea is that...
you know, stable climate led to agriculture, then why couldn't such a thing have happened in the Eemian period 120,000 years ago?
There's been four distinct warm periods that have lasted for like over 10,000 years while modern humans have been around, at least.
And obviously these Morocco remains of Homo sapiens, it's unlikely they're the earliest Homo sapiens that ever lived.
They're just the earliest we found.
We could be even older than that.
So considering we've been through four distinct warm periods before the Holocene, and if the argument is that the Holocene was what led to the invention of agriculture due to the stable climate, then why couldn't it have happened in the earlier warm periods?
That's the question I've always asked myself and been fascinated by.
Yeah, so this is the preservation problem, and this is something I talk about in my videos.
So I kind of always ask the question, like, what if human culture had flourished in the Eemian, for example, which was from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, what realistically would survive?
It's such a vast, vast length of time that it's really unlikely, at least as far as I can tell, and obviously I'm not a scientist.
I'm not like a, you know, a materialist.
I'm not any kind of, I'm just a guy.
I'm not even a historian technically.
But as far as I can tell, it's extremely hard for these, for any materials, but even our modern materials in our huge civilization that, you know, 8 billion people, industrial society, sending rockets to space, you know, all the crazy stuff that we're doing.
Even us, if we disappear tomorrow, I think it would be,
It's extremely unlikely that pretty much anything would survive when you get up to these huge timescales of like 100,000 years.
And so I've been doing quite a lot of, you know, research into this because I don't... I obviously don't want to, you know, get things wrong and put falsehoods out there and mislead people.
I don't want to look like a dickhead in front of like millions of people or whatever.
So I've been trying to like...
you know, debunk myself or play devil's advocate to myself on this point because, you know, that's the best way to make your argument airtight and no one's really out there debunking me.
I don't know if that's because I'm right or because, like, no one knows me.
Maybe that would change after a show like this, but...
I've been really looking into the kind of degradation of modern materials as much as I can and trying to work out how much would survive from a civilization like ours if we disappeared tomorrow in 100,000 years' time.
Yeah, of like an actual modern city.
And the scary truth is it's almost nothing.
As far as I can tell.
Cement buildings that would just deteriorate?
They would go like concrete would crack and you'd get CO2 in there and freeze-thaw weathering.
And over these huge timescales of like 5,000 years, 10,000 years, they would just crumble down into dust and be absolutely imperceptible.
I mean, I'm just doing this off the top of my head.
I haven't got any notes in front of me or anything, but...
As far as I could tell from my research, it's going to be a few like 10,000 years, 20,000 years max.
It's not going to get up to these timescales of 100,000 years.
It would just get overrun by trees again.
Yeah, because it's just such an incredible amount of time that all these materials that we build with are just going to corrode.
And they're going to rust away if they're metals.
They're going to oxidize.
They're going to flake until they're just tiny little fragments that just disperse in the sedimentary record.
And they're just invisible to see.
And same with concrete.
Same with even things like glass.
I've heard a lot of people say that glass would potentially survive because glass is a...
You know, it's a very durable material and glass would survive a long time.
But glass in the form of a human made recognizable artifact isn't going to survive in that form.
It's going to get crushed.
It's going to break away into tiny little nanofragments, into silica grains that are just invisible in the kind of archaeological record when you get up to these huge levels of time.
Yeah, I mean, I would say almost nothing would survive that long.
And again, with the caveat that I'm just some random dude who's investigated this on the internet and researched this myself.
If anyone out there is a material scientist, I'd encourage them to reach out to me.
But as far as I can tell, there are very few things that could possibly survive that long.
We're pretty crazy fucking apes, like we do crazy shit.
So things like nuclear weapons, like we test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere.
You could argue if we knew when to look and what to look for, we could see traces of plutonium in the atmosphere from our nuclear weapons testing, or you could see our nuclear waste deposits.
Or things like carved stone, because stone obviously survives a very long time.
Human carved stone, you'd be able to find that.
But just because ancient humans used stone tools doesn't mean they didn't use anything else.
It's just stone is the most likely thing to survive.
And the crazy thing is...
Joe, do you know how many homo sapiens sites we have from more than 100,000 years ago?
We have nine sites, nine glimpses, nine snapshots into over 200,000 years of history.
And we use that to extrapolate out what every single human was doing.
It's usually caves and it's usually just, you know, remains of fire pits and stone tools.
And that's kind of it.
And so we see that and we think, okay, they just lived in caves and used stone tools.
But it's nine sites, nine moments in time for 200,000 years.
Humans can do so many different things.
And as you say, right now we're sending rockets to space and people are living in very traditional ways of life.
And just because we find traditional ways of life in, I repeat, nine sites to cover 200,000 years, in my view, that's just what we can see.
That kind of points to my point regarding what would possibly survive.
Because if you think of all the human lives, stories, cultures that have...
potentially existed for our whole species existence, if we only have nine little glimpses from, and to be fair, that nine is, you could say it's up to 15 because some sites are debated, but either way, it's a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of human, you know, signs of human life.
Just because in that fragment, in that snapshot, in that slither, all we see is some humans with stone tools in caves, doesn't mean that nothing else was happening.
Yeah, they were clearly, even if you kind of look at the conventional model of history, the ancient Egyptians were wildly ahead of everyone else.
And the conventional model doesn't really give us any explanations of how they were doing what they were doing.
Yeah, the, what's it called, like SARS, TOPLER.
I mean, I don't know.
I'm always a little bit suspicious when you make sensationalist claims with new technology.
And that doesn't mean it's wrong.
Yeah, you have to be suspicious because it's bonkers.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
I would love it to be true, obviously, because, you know.
Let's look at this honestly.
But I mean, I think, I mean, there's definitely something below the Giza plateau, like the
That's always been written about in ancient sources and these kind of scans.
And then people kind of... You have stories of people going down into labyrinths that aren't accepted by Egyptology.
And there's definitely massive mysteries surrounding Giza and the construction of the pyramids and what could potentially be below the pyramids.
And this kind of new pyramid scan project has the potential, I think, to make big progress in understanding what is below Giza.
Until there's better data out there, I'm not going to jump to any conclusions and declare that this is evidence of a lost advanced technology civilization.
They'd probably try me because it already doesn't make sense, their explanation for the construction of the pyramids being wooden sledges and stone chisels or whatever they say.
It already doesn't make sense.
It's already so ridiculous that I wouldn't even be surprised if they tried to explain away these massive columns.
I don't even see any evidence that the Great Pyramid at Giza.
I mean, what's the evidence that that was a tomb?
I mean, I don't think they've ever found a body in there.
It's just a chamber which they've called the King's Chamber.
I mean, I'm not an expert in ancient Egypt by any respect, but it's always baffled me that they're so determined that the pyramids are tombs just because some later pyramids have had mummies and pharaohs and sarcophagi found inside them.
That doesn't mean anything.
And you find bodies in, like, you know, buildings today.
And that doesn't mean the purpose of that building was to be a tomb.
Christopher Dunn's work.
I haven't read his book, but I know a bit about it.
And it's interesting.
I mean, he's like a serious guy, isn't he?
And he has quite serious theories that...
Yeah, which would be crazy, wouldn't it?
The whole of like ancient Egypt and the Sahara Desert in general just doesn't make sense to me because when you look at the Sahara Desert and the fact that it was green for 9000 years and then it stopped being green at precisely the time that we're told ancient Egypt emerged.
That doesn't make sense.
That defies how civilization works.
Why would a civilization only emerge after the climate got worse?
That doesn't make sense at all.
The Sahara Desert is vast and obviously covered in sand and extremely hot, extremely difficult to survey, politically unstable.
And there's basically been no archaeological work done across the whole.
And the Sahara Desert is massive.
It's like the whole of North Africa, right down to... I mean, it's massive.
You could fit the United States in there.
You could fit anything in there, like a whole...
like preceding civilization for 9,000 years leading up to ancient Egypt.
Like it's the perfect place.
It's right by Mesopotamia.
And yet we have this blank spot for the 9,000 years before the development of civilization, which is kind of also the gap between, I mean, it's a little bit less than this, but the gap between Quebec and the birth of civilization, we have this huge area, which would have been perfect for civilization full of rivers, lakes, grasslands, perfect climate.
And it's just missing.
So my theory is that things were happening in the Sahara Desert when it was green, in the Green Sahara, for those 9,000 years.
And then because it was really quick, that's what I don't think people realize is that when the Sahara Desert turned from, you know, green lush paradise, whatever you want to call it, to a desert, it was like a few centuries.
It's called rapid desertification.
It flipped, not overnight, obviously, but in a few centuries compared to 9,000 years, it's a rapid change.
And for any kind of culture that was living there, you wouldn't have noticed it straight away.
But in 50 years, you'd be like, fuck, it's getting a bit hot here.
Like shit is going on.
I think maybe people migrated to the last stretch of green that was still available to them, which was the Nile River.
And then the kind of survivors or the migratory populations developed around the Nile River and using the kind of experience and knowledge that they had from their lives and the kind of history of their cultures in the Green Sahara period, that is what led to ancient Egypt.
I mean, that's just a theory.
Yeah, the kind of explanation away of that also never made sense to me, that it's wind and sand, because when you see pictures of the Sphinx, even from when they kind of found it in Napoleonic times, it's buried in sand.
And there's records from the Egyptians themselves who excavated it effectively because it was covered in sand.
So if it quickly gets covered in sand, how could it be eroded by wind and sand?
If it doesn't take very long for it to kind of get filled up with sand, then how does wind and sand erosion even count?
I've never seen anyone kind of explain that away.
Because it's so limited.
When was the, do you know when the Sahara was covered in water?
I'm not even sure when that was.
I mean, some people say that there's like a mass flood during the kind of Younger Dryas period, which I think is.
But even not too long ago, like, you know, kind of 12,000 years ago or whatever, they had these massive river systems, like the Tamarasset River System.
40 million years old.
Of course, they're mammals, aren't they?
Everyone's just killing everything else.
But when did we do that, Joe?
That is the question.
Because a lot of people would claim to think, and the kind of consensus always is, that we didn't do that until 12,000 years ago.
We didn't settle down and form permanent communities until the Neolithic Revolution.
And I think that's one of the major...
paradigms, if you like, that we have regarding our past that simply doesn't make sense in light of new evidence.
Yeah, this is the Colombo structure, and this is something I talk about a lot in my videos because I think it's a crazy find, and I don't understand why it's not kicking up more of a fuss.
If I'm the guy that has to kick up the fuss about it, then I'll be that guy because...
Basically, the idea has always been that humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers that moved with the seasons and lived in caves or just kind of walked around for all of our history until the Neolithic Revolution, the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago.
And no earlier than that did we ever settle down and live in permanent settlements.
But the Colombo structure was something they found a few years ago in modern-day Zambia.
And what it is is this...
These pieces of wood, and I'll get to the point about why this wood has survived in a minute, because obviously, you know, wood surviving this long is crazy.
So the Colombo structure is these pieces of wood that have been joined together deliberately, cut in notches and connected together, tapered and secured at right angles.
And they think it was either a kind of raised walkway, like a kind of raised platform or a house, a dwelling, a hut, some kind of structure.
Why this is so paradigm shifting is because not only does this kind of scream that humans potentially lived in permanent settlement.
Sorry, I haven't even said this.
This is 476,000 years old.
So this predates Homo sapiens.
As in, what do you mean allegedly?
I guess, yeah, it could have been us.
But what they attribute it to is Homo heidelbergensis, who's our last common ancestor with Neanderthals.
So they're kind of the human species that came before Homo sapiens.
So I guess you're right.
It could have been Homo sapiens, and we're just not sure how old we are, but...
It's kind of attributed to Homo heidelbergensis.
And the only reason this structure survived at all is because pretty soon after its construction, it must have fallen into a bog.
And then that bog kind of got solidified over by the sun.
And then it was preserved in waterlogged sediment, which protected it from decay for almost half a million years until it was discovered by us recently.
I think about five years ago, maybe.
Was it 2019 or something?
So, another monkey wrench.
I would say it's a massive monkey wrench because not only does it kind of really dispute this idea that we didn't settle down until, you know, 12,000 years ago with the Neolithic Revolution.
Because, I mean, it's a structure.
I mean, and it's just because it's so unlikely, it's so unbelievable that this would have survived.
But that kind of suggests that it's not the only one.
There could have been loads of these, like structures everywhere.
Yeah, and obviously people may be saying, well, look, clearly things survive.
But this is an extreme edge case scenario where it's like so unbelievably unlikely that this wooden structure would kind of sink into a bog and then that bog be, you know...
solidified over and then it would stay in that preserve like it's a and that they would find it and then they would they would find it exactly because you know 476,000 years in the sediment yeah exactly because we don't dig that far and look for anything sophisticated because we think you know nothing happened back then and then you find this and it really suggests that humans were living in much more complex societies and they were I mean they the fact that they had the cognitive capacity to
to plan, structurally engineer, and build a structure completely flies in the face of what we've always thought about ancient humans.
Because we've always had this idea that... There's been this very popular idea in mainstream historical thought that...
humans only got smart around 50 to 60,000 years ago.
And that's just Homo sapiens.
We've always thought that other human species never got smart, never achieved what we call behavioral modernity.
And this has always been the kind of idea that we went through this cognitive revolution around 50 to 60,000 years ago.
And the most obvious proponent of how entrenched this is in kind of academic thought is, have you ever read the book Sapiens?
Yeah, by Yuval Noah Harari.
It's an extremely popular book.
It sold something like 60 million copies worldwide.
By far the most popular book about prehistory and the story of Homo sapiens ever written.
And sapiens didn't kind of do anything new.
It didn't – I think Harari himself would admit this.
It kind of just collected the consensus of academia and presented it in a nice digestible way to the kind of layman audience.
But he took this idea that's always been present in academia regarding human intelligence, which is that while we've been around for quite a long time, we didn't achieve behavioral modernity until 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.
And that's when we started apparently displaying complex cognitive traits like abstract thinking and planning and burying our dead.
And complex language and things like that.
But this just completely flies in the face of that, because if we had the capability to plan, construct and engineer a structure 476,000 years ago...
That means, you know, mainstream anthropology was off by over 400,000 years regarding the advent of intelligence and the advent of permanent living.
And that's, I mean, that's quite the error.
So that kind of suggests they could be off by similar margins about other developmental claims because, I don't know, that's a big, big error.
Yeah, and there's loads of these bottlenecks when you look at our kind of genetic history.
And I mean, does that suggest that something happened?
And supervolcano isn't the only thing.
There's so many others.
Yeah, because, I mean, aside from the preservation problem, which we kind of already talked about, when you get up to these massive timescales, you know, very little is going to survive.
Especially when you think about what early humans were likely building with.
Like, it's probably the things they could find in their environment.
Like wood, hide, plant remains.
That's always been thought of as myth or pseudoscience.
It's kind of the most popular idea of lost civilizations was civilizations of the Amazon, and it was always dismissed.
Well, here's what's really crazy.
Have you seen the evidence of Detroit where trees are going through houses?
And that's like 50 years, less.
Or if you look at Chernobyl, the kind of exclusion zone where no one lives, it's already trees everywhere, and nature is already taking root after less than half a century.
And then 100,000 years.
Seriously, what's going to be left?
There's so much evidence.
And this kind of puts into the cognitive revolution argument, which is, you know, that we were the only smart species.
Like our name that we gave ourselves, Homo sapiens, literally means smart man.
It's always been the idea that we're the smartest humans and that's why we won.
And to be fair, we did win.
Yeah, we might be the most evil, or we just might be the luckiest ones, you know?
I think they were just as intelligent as us, to be honest.
Well, I mean, that's a claim that probably some people would dispute, but I think there's lots of evidence that they were very smart.
But did we even... I mean, maybe they got wiped out by something like disease, or did they even get wiped out?
Because if you even look at the DNA of non-African humans, it's something like 20% in some populations is Neanderthal.
But we're very, I mean, we're very closely related to Neanderthals.
I think we're on the brink of quite a massive shift in our perspective regarding prehistory.
It's that quote, isn't it?
Science advances one funeral at a time.
I hope it doesn't take that long, though, to be honest, Joe.
I hope it's just in the next few years.
Yeah, well, I think the advent of the internet and shows like this or the medium of podcasting has really kind of democratized the access to information and allowed people with theories that potentially wouldn't have been able to get out there in the pre-internet age where they were kind of...
You had to go through a kind of academic institution to get a theory heard or debated.
Now, anyone can say anything for better or worse, and that can reach millions of people.
And then if it's an idea that's popular, then it can kind of be in the public eye and then it can be debated properly.
And I think that's only a good thing.
Obviously, there are negative aspects to that.
But I think that will increase, you know, ideas regarding prehistory, for example.
I think it will increase the rate in which these things will get accepted because people
Once the evidence is out there and once you start talking about the Colombo structure, for example, and how it completely flies in the face of both these paradigms regarding permanent living and human intelligence, it's out there now.
People can look it up and people can see that this is completely kind of opposed to what we've always been taught regarding prehistory.
Yeah, the fact they base it on Heidelbergensis is literally just because we found some Heidelbergensis remains like 200 kilometers away.
And they're like, OK, Heidelbergensis.
Yeah, it's kind of great.
I mean, that's the thing about history is it's all based on massive assumptions.
It's not like a hard science.
It's interpreting evidence.
Like, that's how we do it.
But that's why I don't get... Well, it's the only way to do it right now.
It's the only way to do it.
So that's why I don't get why people make these definitive conclusions and then don't allow anybody to kind of speculate or hypothesize about anything else.
Yeah, they've built a whole career around it and they've, you know, as you say, it's their identity.
They've been the knowledge, the keeper of knowledge on a particular subject.
And when I, I mean, I don't agree with absolutely everything Graham Hancock says, but when I look at, you know, these ideas of
You know, human intelligence potentially stretching back 500,000 years as displayed by the Colombo structure or permanent living.
And I would argue that it could go back a lot further than that.
So when you look at when you kind of take into account that these abilities could have stretched back half a million years.
When I then look at someone like Graham's work, it seems so plausible.
I don't see why it's seen as so outrageous.
Because 12,000 years ago, which is kind of when he proposes, there could have been a sophisticated civilization that was potentially wiped out by a cataclysm.
When you look at that from the perspective of, oh, yeah, we've been intelligent for half a million years, it seems very plausible to me.
To be fair, the guy that found it, the archaeologist that found it, said that he never could have imagined that pre-Homo sapien, and again, it might not be pre-Homo sapien, it could be Homo sapien, but he said it's completely paradigm shifting that they had the capacity to plan and build something like this.
There's no fuss about it.
It's just a paper was written and it was put out there and then that's it.
In some ways, they already are.
I mean, we can't explain how they did it, even based on the kind of conventional model of history.
fuck are you talking about yeah they just don't want it and it does kind of make me worry like i don't really delve into the kind of conspiracy side of things because i mean i just i try to stay kind of based in not me i go right in i mean i do i do in my own time and stuff i mean in my own head and stuff but in terms of like what one do you dive into in your own head the most
I sometimes combine the UFO one with the ancient civilization one.
And I think what happens if, you know, a civilization from a million years ago got so advanced that we can't see them and then that's what the UFO thing is.
It's just someone from this earth that doesn't really need the space anymore and they're just watching us.
Sometimes I think about that.
But obviously I don't talk about that in my videos because I don't need to give anyone any more ammunition to send for me.
What does that refer to?
Is that from habilis to...
So I've heard people say that, and I've always thought, I guess that must be from Homo habilis to Homo erectus from just over a million years ago.
I think there could be something to that.
I mean, because, you know, ancient cultures have always used psychedelic substances and basically all the way up until Western civil society kind of took hold.
It's always been an integral part of human culture and human society.
And then us in our modern world have decided to outlaw that.
And I think that's a tragic mistake, to be honest with you.
So I didn't even buy that, though, because Heidelbergensis have the same cranial capacity as us, and they go back 900,000 years.
But maybe that's Erexus they're talking about.
Well, that would fuck everything up because the Africa thing, that would really fuck everything up.
I mean, it could happen.
Well, it wouldn't really even fuck it up.
It would just push it back.
I mean, we're not even supposed to have left Africa until this time of the cognitive revolution.
And that's always been one of the points like, oh, look, we got smart.
We left Africa 60,000 years ago.
But that's never made sense to me either because Homo erectus managed to migrate out of Africa and colonize loads of Asia and parts of Europe.
over a million years ago.
And if they're supposedly, you know, inferior to us, then how can they make this massive leap?
And Heidelbergensis did it 600,000 years ago.
And if they're supposedly inferior to us, how come they did this?
And so, I mean, I don't know.
I try not to delve into the out of Africa thing because it gets a little bit controversial sometimes.
That's never made sense to me, that, because it clearly wasn't white people that built the pyramids.
It's quite sad, really, isn't it, to be honest?
Like, there would have been a lot in... I'm not sure 100% what happened with that.
I'm not sure if it was one burning or... Just several burnings, yeah.
But clearly a lot was lost.
Yeah, it's the Sumerian one does too.
And that ties into the Green Sahara thing that I was talking about.
I mean, they have king lists that go back this far.
And yeah, we say that some of them are myth.
And to be fair, they have kings that reign for like a thousand years, which...
I mean, unless you're talking some kind of alien thing, then that probably wasn't human.
But that might just be because it would have been a long time ago for them, too, when they were writing these king lists.
But it doesn't mean that their civilization only started with the first dynasty.
What we've decided is the line between myth and fact, because that's a modern interpretation after the fact.
They never made such distinction.
And the whole – the pyramids thing kind of plays into the fact that stone is one of the only thing that survives.
And pyramids are these massive stone constructions.
Like ironically, they would be one of the only things from our – not that they really count as our civilization, but –
From the modern world, the pyramids would be one of the only things that could survive in 100,000 years.
So it makes you think, like, how long have they been there?
And I think the Egyptians definitely undertook some kind of construction project around the time of 2500 BC.
Because there's records of them saying they did stuff.
But that doesn't mean – because they have all these records, but there's no records of how they built it.
And no one's claimed, they didn't claim credit for the pyramids, which is weird.
They're doing some good work on this, aren't they?
People like... Christopher...
And they appear right at the start of the Egyptian dynasties.
Perfectly symmetrical.
And the faces are just incredible.
And this is another point regarding culture that could have flourished back in 100,000 years ago or whatever.
We're always looking for ourselves in the past.
But there's so many different ways that we could have gone because why did it have to be mass farming, mass population growth, and then, as you say, kind of industrial progress?
It could have been so many different forms of human development and human lives.
Well, it could have been if they had enough animals, they mostly ate animals.
Yeah, it's not good for us.
So many different ways that culture could have flourished.
And yeah, we're always looking for and we just don't know where to look as well on the record.
Like one point people always make in like my comments and stuff to try and debunk me is like, oh, we would see pollution.
We would see kind of lead signals in the atmosphere or whatever if there was like a...
a big civilization 100,000 years ago.
But that's only the case if it was someone on the scale of us now.
It went back in time.
And that sounds so crazy.
But then you look at the kind of length of time we've been around and it's still quite recent.
And that lines up with the Sphinx, doesn't it?
That's the processional cycle.
I think it was from NASA, but I'm not 100% sure.
But it was from a kind of scientific journal that...
Earth is hit by what they define as a cataclysmic impact every 100,000 years.
So that's an impact that's capable of wiping out a third of today's population every 100,000 years.
And 100,000 years sounds like a long time, but again, we've been around for 300,000 years.
So theoretically, we've been hit by a cataclysmic impact three times already during our story.
And that both has the potential to completely wipe out anyone that was doing anything sophisticated, but also to wipe the record clean.
And that's not the only thing you've got, you know, super volcanoes, as we talked about, you've got pole shifts, you've got solar flares, you've got glaciers just scraping across the landscape and just completely erasing the record.
You've got sea level rise.
Sea level rise is a massive one because, I mean, where have we always lived?
And if you look at the kind of fluctuation of...
Sea level rise over the last 100,000 years, 200,000 years, 300,000 years.
Sea level is going in and out by hundreds of kilometers at a time and nothing is going to be left.
The thing is, when you go through these kind of systems and I'm I've sort of got experience of this.
Obviously, I was never a professional academic or anything like that.
I did history for four years.
I was kind of inside and I got to the point where it was almost, you know, it was do this as a career, become a professional academic or not.
It's very hard to kind of even think this way because everyone around you is thinking within these boxes that we've created for ourselves.
And so it's very hard to kind of open your mind.
And you kind of have to do it in private as well, because no one else is talking in those terms around you.
And you're surrounded by people that think in quite limited terms.
And I don't say that to kind of be offensive or, you know, doubt anyone's intelligence.
And it means that no one is... It's very hard to think outside the box when you're kind of in that culture.
And I think that's kind of what creates these...
rigid systems of thought that we have.
Yeah, I mean, that's the best example.
And they hated that as well.
And I wish that, you know, we've seen a surge in interest in ancient history and prehistory and, you know, the story of our species through people like Graham Hancock, who have kind of created a massive interest in this subject.
But instead of embracing that, they see it as a threat.
And I think that's really sad, to be honest.
Yeah, I think it kind of hurts the discipline in general, because if you kind of like embrace that and like brought him into the table and spoke to him and kind of agreed to have the discussion, then it would create a much kind of more healthy debate around these things.
And when you talk about the Clovis kind of narrative, it...
Because we think that we know what happened and thus we know what didn't happen, it means that people aren't even looking for stuff that now we know was there.
So they didn't dig deeper than the Clovis layer until very recently because they knew that humans weren't around until Clovis.
But obviously that was wrong.
So they could have missed so much stuff and they probably did.
To be fair, I think Graham mentioned it on the show, the Saruti...
Mastodon site, which is like 130,000 years ago in America.
I mean if that's human and which it kind of looks like it is That's debatable though, right?
Yeah, it is debatable, but it's also it could be human It could easily be human because it kind of looks like human markings on bones I mean, so it looks like scrapings like they're scraping the marrow out of the bones or some some kind of primitive
But why couldn't it have been human?
I mean, it didn't necessarily have to be Homo sapien, but why couldn't another human species have got to the Americas?
You could argue that Homo erectus seafared 800,000 years ago, which is just mental.
Well, they reached places that were isolated, and some people say they kind of floated there accidentally.
Which is possible, but it seems a bit weird that you'd then survive and colonize a place.
I mean, Neanderthals were definitely making boats, and this points to how intelligent they were.
They were making sophisticated boats and sailing across the Mediterranean and colonizing places like Crete well over 100,000 years ago.
I mean, bigger journey, to be fair.
But then, I guess, if you go across the top.
That's why you're doing it.
If you go across the top and kind of hop down along the coast, then not so hard.
They have to be coming from the south.
I mean, there's the kind of theory regarding the Polynesian kind of island chain, you know, hopping across to Easter Island and then making one last hop across to South America.
But people have always done crazy.
Just the fact that they did it in the 1400s is bananas.
And they did that with tech that was, you know, no tech.
They just did it with the stars.
And also, that's not the first one.
Someone didn't just develop that and was like, here you go.
I just fucking made a computer.
It was clearly a long history of very, very technical stuff in ancient Greece.
And it could well have been the ancient Greeks, but also it could have been like, well, what's the history of this technology?
What do they think it was for?
I think they thought it kind of like tracked the lunar cycles and the kind of elliptical movements of... Have you seen the 3D AI representation of what it looked like when it was fully done?
I think that's the Homo erectus thing.
There's like so many ancient sites that are all built with kind of acoustic...
And even if it didn't get cooked, what would you do with it in 10,000 years?
If you found that, you wouldn't know what that was.
It does feel like a bit of a risk, doesn't it?
Everything we've ever learned and discovered and thought about is all just... Well, you know what happens when your phone dies and you don't have a backup phone.
I think they would decay relatively quickly, I think.
I mean, I'm not sure, but lots of them would, I think, when we're talking big time scales.
I think it's unlikely that anyone else was doing space travel and stuff.
Yeah, maybe not impossible.
I don't think there's anything on the moon, for example.
I think we'd probably see that.
Yeah, I guess the argument for that is we wouldn't be here if it wasn't.
If it wasn't the exact right.
The thing is you can kind of trick AI to say whatever you want it to say.
Yeah, and that's almost the bad thing about it is it kind of becomes your own little echo chamber after a while if you want it to, if you can kind of convince it to.
It's a crazy thing, though.
The kind of advent of large language models and artificial intelligence is mad.
Even in my lifetime, like I was born in 97, didn't really have, I had to dial up the internet.
I remember when I was a kid and then, you know, smartphones came along and then obviously things like AI and it's just, it is pretty ridiculous.
I mean, they were definitely doing some pretty mad stuff.
And then if you look at those kind of granite boxes they made, it's a completely smooth surface.
I mean, they clearly had some form of technology that we don't attribute to them.
I think that's undisputed.
I mean, it is disputed, but I don't see how you can logically kind of look at what they were doing and not think they had some kind of
technology that, you know, we don't traditionally attribute them to.
But whether that means they were like some crazy advanced civilization or it was built by some other advanced civilization, you know, that's a bit more hypothetical.
But they were clearly doing stuff that we can't appreciate today.
So that logically suggests they had, you know, something that we don't understand, right?
Ancient Greece was very inspired by ancient Egypt.
So, I mean, it could have well come from there.
It's all about interpretation, isn't it?
All of history is about interpretation.
It's not a hard science like, you know, physics.
I mean, physics is kind of crazy too.
It hurts my head, man.
That's too much for me, all that quantum physics stuff.
Have you ever heard of the Silurian hypothesis?
It's kind of linked to this ancient civilization stuff.
It's the idea that there could have been an advanced civilization on our planet 100 million years ago, a non-human one, that was...
advanced and industrial and we just wouldn't see any trace because of how long ago it was and they could have been here and you know we just wouldn't know because it's been so long it's kind of like where i come from with my kind of human idea obviously it's a further uh time span but it's been it was proposed by two physicists is why i uh why i just thought of it just then this guy called adam frank and uh
Well, it's just the idea that if it had, we wouldn't know.
And because the Earth's been around for so long and complex multicellular life appeared, you know, relatively early in our, like, four billion year history of the Earth or whatever, I'm not sure on the dates, but we've been around, the Earth has been around for so, so, so long.
And we know that intelligence can emerge because...
It emerged with us and happened relatively quickly when you look at the kind of massive timescale that the Earth's been around and how long multicellular life has been around.
So their idea is kind of like, well, what if, you know, a civilization in the kind of era of the dinosaurs had, you know, become very advanced and an industrial society?
And they say we would see absolutely no evidence like that.
When I'm talking about human civilization, we would see some potential evidence like rock, carved stone or whatever, but they would say you wouldn't even see the nuclear waste deposits because it's that long ago that nothing would survive.
And then I think about that and I think, well, isn't it almost more likely that something did happen considering we know that intelligence can emerge relatively quickly?
Multicellular life has been on the planet for so, so, so, so, so, so long.
A limited understanding of the fossil record.
Why couldn't something have happened before?
Well, I feel like if you kind of survive, you know, a lot longer than we have and you kind of get to a different like kind of level of intelligence, then why would you need the kind of physical body?
Why would you need the physical realm?
And why couldn't you kind of...
And we don't even blink at that.
You get pissed off if it doesn't work.
You're like, well, fuck, how can I talk to this guy in Australia?
Instantly, like, why is my phone not working?
Yeah, we adjust very quickly to... Real quick.
Yeah, how technology develops.
And it's just getting faster and faster and faster.
It makes you think, where will we be in 100 years, in 500 years, if nothing happens?
Yeah, I kind of flip between like quite a pessimistic outlook and quite an optimistic outlook on these things.
Like sometimes I think like it's just gone and we're never going to know and we can speculate for as much as we like, but it's gone.
And then sometimes I think, no, like you never know.
There's so many places that are just completely unexcavated, completely unexplored that we haven't looked at.
Like, you know, believe the Sahara on the ocean floor by these.
Could I have some coffee, please?
And all these places that, you know, we haven't explored.
And as you say, technology like AI.
You know, I think sometimes I think, yeah, maybe we are going to make like these massive discoveries that are going to completely shift our understanding of history.
And as you say, the kind of geyser, the findings beneath geyser, that could be a moment.
And I'm always looking for that.
But then sometimes I flip again and think, you know, maybe we'll never find anything.
And I just don't know.
Maybe I'm just speculating for no reason and I should just stop.
I love his channel, but I haven't seen that.
And that begs the question, why underground?
Why do we find all this underground construction all over the world?
That's his theme music.
I even recognize that.
He's written a lot because he was like one of the first people to- Oh, it's Flanders Petrie.
Yeah, Harar is definitely a site.
Yeah, because he was one of the first people in.
There's so many all over the world as well.
Ancient people were always building underground construction, and we can't explain how they did it, who did it, or why they did it today.
And again, no one in the mainstream really kind of looks into that.
Is that the number, like 2,000 people?
All of it underground.
And the kind of argument is that they built it to kind of protect themselves from an invading army, but that's never made sense to me because if you were attacking those people, you'd just block the entrance.
And so who built that and why and how old is it?
Because again, it's stone that could survive for so long.
Well, I guess it could be the remnants of an earlier culture that was wiped out and they had a memory of maybe passed down through myth.
Look at how nuts that is.
Another great one is Longyu Caves in China, which is just, there's just zero explanation of what that is or who built it.
There's no record of its construction.
Have you seen Longyu Caves?
How old is that supposed to be?
They have no idea who built it.
It's just like, well, what is this?
And they don't know who built it.
There's no record of who built it.
They don't know what it was for.
There's no deposits of stone.
There's no tools found nearby.
Do they have a theory of the timeline?
I mean, to be fair, it's in China, so it's kind of like it's not.
And it's just like, who's building that and why?
Oh, this is Mike Collins.
He's great, Wanderer and Wolf.
Yeah, that's the case for so many of these things.
It's like it could be natural, but then... Not this one, though.
This is definitely not fucking natural.
I think the carvings are modern.
Not the parallel lines.
They don't know what they are.
They have no idea why the parallel lines are there.
But I think the kind of...
carvings depicting like mystical Chinese stuff is a kind of modern addition.
Might be worth checking.
Oh, I hope they didn't do that.
But that site has just always baffled me.
Because again, if you look at the Wikipedia page for that site, it's just like three lines.
But it's like, what the fuck is this?
So the carvings, are those really old or are those modern?
Because I did a little video on, I mentioned this in a video during my research of that.
But like how and what using what?
And also they're all so precisely identical.
It's like what tool are you using to make sure this was so identical?
Yeah, and that's the thing with all the other things in Egypt is people have carved hieroglyphics onto there, but that doesn't mean that that's when the original thing was built.
It's just unbelievably big.
And then you have to times that by 24.
carvings unless they maybe they're trying to make the carvings to make it seem like it was older and people would come wander and just come look and it'd be a tourist attraction like maybe without art they didn't think it would get enough people to visit i think it's also to kind of connect it to kind of you know bro more like contemporary cultural china rather than because i mean who knows how old this could be that's crazy because it's stone that's so crazy the fact that they just found it
Someone found Gobekli Tepe in the 60s, and they didn't think it was anything, so they left it.
Yeah, it's like that guy fucking missed the boat a little bit.
Yeah, some American archaeologists found it in the 60s.
I can't remember, but they found a little bit of it, and they were like, oh, this is clearly just some contemporary Bronze Age society.
Don't worry about that.
Yeah, that was the find of your career.
The whole 5% excavation thing is so puzzling in Quebec.
To be clear, that's kind of how...
That's like normal practice, I think, for archaeology.
But you would think that Gobekli Tepe is like a bit more of a, it's a special case.
destroying what's underneath it.
I think that's like a microcosm of the problem with a small section of very vocal kind of mainstream archaeologists.
I think the whole tree controversy regarding Gobekli Tepe is... Because it was Jimmy, right?
He can't go there anymore, you know.
He did a video, yeah.
And he's good at it, man.
He puts together arguments really well.
And you just mentioned the reshot structure thing.
I've watched his videos on that, and it's interesting, man, the way he kind of connects what Plato was saying about Atlantis and brings it all to the reshot.
It's interesting stuff.
Well, it's because you can't prove it.
They had to move them.
Well, the idea that myth doesn't hold any kind of use in understanding the past is just ridiculous because the myth is powerful because it's the thing we've collectively remembered as a species, isn't it?
So why would we dismiss that as a kind of, you know, historical record?
And then you've got examples of like indigenous cultures that...
They remember kind of scientific information through myth.
I always go to this example of these kind of islanders during the tsunami in 2004.
It was the Andaman Islands and the kind of, you know, Western scientists or whatever went to the island after the Boxing Day tsunami.
And they were like, oh, everyone's going to be dead.
Like they're all going to have been wiped out by the tsunami.
And they were fine because they had this myth in their culture that when the sea recedes, you get to high ground because then the waves are going to come that will eat men.
And that myth, you know, that has encoded scientific information regarding tsunamis and that saved their culture's lives.
And they had like no casualties compared to, you know.
Western or modern people who were devastated.
Everybody else was like, wow, look at all this sand.
Yeah, and they were like, I thought the beach was over here.
Yeah, and they all got fucking killed.
And then these people with their myths, scientific information, survived.
It's just further testament to the power of nature.
We just constantly underestimate nature.
And that was just a little wiggle in the ocean.
Yeah, and just any kind of culture that was possibly around, it's just wipes, completely wiped clean from the earth.
Yeah, and that's quite a small thing.
And if that happened over a city, that's like millions dead.
If that estimate is correct, that we're hit by a cataclysmic impact once every 100,000 years, then, I mean...
300 million year old wheel.
Are you on TikTok a lot?
Like where are you getting this one?
I've just seen it about and like it looks like a wheel.
It doesn't mean it is a wheel, but it looks remarkable.
Well, there's some of the stuff from... Yeah, that's the thing.
It just kind of looks like a wheel, and they found it in a mine, and then they flooded the mine, which is a bit weird.
But there's a couple better images of it.
I don't know if they'll be on this page, but, yeah, there you go.
It's like spokes in a wheel.
I mean, it could be natural, but, I mean, what the fuck is that, you know?
No one has an explanation?
No, I mean, I didn't really know about the ones on Malta because I went there and kind of researched it.
But those ones, they don't dispute.
They're definitely man-made.
Yeah, so this is Turkey, not Malta, but again, I mean, you've got these cart ruts that look like, you know, some sort of track, and it's millions of years old, and then you find that wheel nearby.
That's fucking crazy.
Yes, that's like Darren Pugh.
It's right in the same place.
So you've got this fossilized wheel and these fossilized cart ruts from hundreds of millions of years ago.
Why would you flood that?
I think it was something to do with, like, just... I don't think it's, like, some conspiracy, like, hide the wheel, hide the wheel.
But, I mean, maybe it would.
But I think it's more just, like, the practice of what they would... They would finish their mining thing and they found this wheel.
What are we talking about?
I mean, it would be like the Silurian hypothesis.
It would be another... It wouldn't be human unless... I mean, we'd have to radically rewrite everything if that was human.
It's just different intelligence from other species.
It's the same problems.
If they're living on Earth, they're dealing with the same kind of physics.
They have to move materials around.
Why would you not come up with the same kind of thing, like a wheel?
It's a simple invention.
What is the conventional explanation of these wheel tracks?
All I know about the ones in Malta, and they definitely say they're man-made.
I don't know about these ones in Turkey.
I haven't really looked into it.
Well, they're near that.
I don't think they directly lead to like Derinkuyu or anything, but they're nearby.
And then so then you start to think, what if Derinkuyu is like, you know, to be fair, I think that's probably manmade.
But, you know, it's stone.
So, well, I'm sure it's manmade, but like what kind of man?
And it could have been man adapted.
It could have already been something there.
And we kind of changed it.
It wouldn't even have to be a human.
It could be any kind of life.
It's just intelligence.
And then you got Denisovans or Denisovans, however you pronounce that.
And they just reclassified that.
Dragon Man scholars, Denisovan.
And that's a huge... Yes.
Well, then you kind of get into the thing of like giants and stuff.
And like, could giants have been real?
And there is giant primates that have been like confirmed, like Gigantopithecus or whatever it's called.
You have hobbit humans like Homo Florensis.
I don't know how you pronounce that.
So you have hobbit humans.
You have giant primates.
Why can't you have giant humans?
Especially when you get up to these, again, it's the preservation problem.
And there's also the, I think it's called Meganthropus, which is... Yeah, that's what it looked like, supposedly.
Meanwhile, he probably had a calculator.
They make everything look like that.
Everyone's stupid and walking around in...
And they combine that with that kind of spirituality and everything.
Disconnected from the stars as well.
And we're just all kind of rushing around in this really hectic life of just like, you know, got to do this, got to do this and just not sitting back and kind of appreciating.
I mean, they have all those drill holes, don't they?
And they find all these cool drills.
And people are like, well, that's normal.
And there's that spiral thing.
I can't remember what it's called, but what's it called?
Chris Dunn did like a, he put like a thread around it to show it was a spiral.
And these are serious people.
These are engineers that are saying this kind of thing.
The problem is that archaeologists and Egyptologists are all a certain type of person that don't have the expertise in recognizing machined artifacts.
He's a this, he's a that.
And he's more popular than them as well.
And all he's doing is asking questions and putting forward a thing.
I don't think Graham would ever claim to be certain.
He's just saying this could be possible.
He's just trying to figure this out.
And that's the position he always has come from.
But they kind of see it and they say, how dare you claim that you have proof?
And I don't think he's ever said he's got proof.
But no one... Yeah, I mean, we wouldn't be able to talk about these things without, you know, mainstream.
And often these people, this is the thing that they've worked on and the kind of biggest success they've had in their lives.
And they don't want that taken away.
But I mean, I don't know.
I hope that things are going to shift over time and over the next few decades we're going to see a big... One funeral at a time.
That is the Max Planck quote, isn't it?
But I hope it doesn't have to take that long.
But I think it's, I don't know, our adherence to these ideas has kind of distorted our understanding of history and has kind of prevented us from looking for things because, you know, we assume that these things... Oh, shit, sorry.
Almost unplugged the microphone.
That wheel is still freaking me out.
But we just don't look for these things.
Have you seen any of Jesse Michaels' stuff?
He's the UAP kind of guy, isn't he?
I do kind of delve into that, but I don't talk about it or anything.
Is this to do with the mummy?
Yes, the tridactyl mummies in Peru.
Yeah, that's the one.
Yeah, he's cool, man.
I watched his show on here.
Isn't there also, I might have made this up, but isn't there also like depictions of this in kind of ancient?
Yeah, that's pretty crazy.
And then there's other weird artwork of things that look alien in South America.
The same part of the world where you're finding these things?
And they're, like, perfectly done as well.
And they're perfect, like, you know, lines and shapes and geometric drawings.
And they keep finding new ones.
I mean, South America is just, you know, it's... I think South America and Egypt slash Turkey are the two kind of areas that are the most kind of, you know, mysterious.
And, like, there's so much going on there that I think we haven't quite...
acknowledged how much mystery there is still left and yeah fascinating especially when you throw this in i mean i haven't really i haven't looked into this at all but crazy gonna have to start watching jesse like what is that yeah and what if they find out that's not a human at all well i mean it doesn't look like it doesn't look like a human no right like i mean it could be i guess it's kind of some bizarre mutation
Yeah, if that's real, that kind of changes everything.
That's like an incredible fake if that's a fake.
What are the chances we have got everything?
Because these people seem to think that we've got it all worked out now.
The chances are zero.
It's never been the case.
And we've always thought we've had it all worked out all the way through history.
It's always like, oh, now we know the answers.
And there's always a major paradigm shift around the corner.
So what's around the corner now?
Something like this or the ancient civilization thing.
And that's why it probably is coming out in this kind of day and age, because the internet's not been around for very long.
Mummified hand is made up of bone and skin suggesting that it's not fake, unless it was somehow made using real bones, flesh, and skin.
But how would you fake it?
Man, if I wasn't doing the ancient history thing, I'd love to talk about this stuff as well.
It might be the same thing.
I mean, you never know.
I'd love to maybe make some connection.
But the thing is, I just don't want to give anyone more ammunition to come after me and shit.
They're probably coming after me after today.
The kind of stories from however long ago match to the mummified bodies.
Do you think that's linked in any way to all this kind of mysterious stone construction we find in South America that no one can really explain?
But the thing is, if it was an alien, why would it look so human, if that makes sense?
Unless it came from this planet, I suppose.
So would you say it's from another planet?
It might be from here.
Because if it's got the kind of similar kind of like primate form.
Yeah, well, it's all kind of, it's like this, I mean, you probably know more about this than me, but my only exposure to the kind of UAP thing was traditionally through, I'm a big fan of Blink-182 and there's Tom DeLonge.
Oh, I've had Tom DeLonge on.
Yeah, you've had him on.
You've had Travis on as well.
You need to get Mark on.
He's complete the set.
I've always, I'm in a band.
He's always been an inspiration for me.
I make music and he's been a big inspiration for me.
But he always got me into the UAP thing from a while ago.
But why did they think it was negative?
Just because it's like the truth?
Was this pre-election?
Was this before he became president?
I think... Was it Biden?
Yeah, like look at the drones.
Yeah, no, that's a real thing.
Couldn't it just be, you know, like advanced weapons or technology that, you know, we have or, you know, your government has that could...
It doesn't have to be alien just for it to be like more advanced than like the kind of public knows about, if that makes sense.
I mean, why would they tell us what the most advanced thing they have is?
That's not going to be public information, is it?
300-million-year-old wheel.
We don't know what's going on now, so how can we know what's going on?
That's what this guy says anyway.
you just do a great job so uh i hope you get a lot of views and uh you keep doing it and i'm i'm happy that you're doing it and i'm really uh happy that you came here well thank you joe i mean it's been a great honor to be here to be out in austin i've loved it it's incredible what an experience and yeah it's been uh really fun talking to you and i'm super appreciative of the opportunity yeah so thanks so much my pleasure so tell everybody how to find you um social media stuff
Just put my name in.
I'm Michael Button, and I'm on YouTube, I guess, and they'll probably find me if I'm doing my job correctly.
That's me on the screen.
Michael Button 1, yeah.
There's someone else out there who's got my name, apparently.
Yeah, so don't go to Michael Button on YouTube.
Fuck the other Michael Button.