Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2368 - Michael Button
Uploaded: 2025-08-20T17:01:15.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2368 - Michael Button' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-20. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2368 - Michael Button' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-08-20. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2368 - Michael Button

Joe Rogan podcast check it out the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan
podcast by
night all day hey man nice to meet you you too man pleasure I love your channel
man it's really
great you're really doing some really interesting videos when did you get
started thanks well I only
started the YouTube less than a year ago that's crazy he's been a bit of a wild
ride I don't even
know how I found it it was like one of them YouTube recommends things it just
popped up and I I don't
remember which one it was it was something on ancient history yeah and I was
like yeah it was
cool 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 but it's been very exciting and very happy to be here today
very excited to be in
Austin and yeah I'm looking forward to talk about some ancient history so did
you start off on a
traditional academic journey and then sort of get sidetracked into a YouTube
career like how did this
work yeah basically 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 like I was
fascinated by that history as
a kid and 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
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 and 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
what bothered you like what were the questions 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 was that Dennis Owens
no no homo sapiens so I can't remember this
it's called like the Jebel Irude
site or something like that but they were modern homo sapien remains they
thought they were neanderthal initially because they were so old how old were
they
they're three hundred and fifteen thousand years old uh that's kind of like the
estimate it goes up to
potentially three sixty thousand years old so they're super old and
yeah they thought they were initially neanderthals of this age but then they
discovered a few more and
they were 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 two hundred thousand years old and that had been the case for like a
decade or something and
before that it was like a hundred thousand years old so this discovery pushed
back the age of our
species by another third like a hundred thousand 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 three
hundred and ten thousand years and then everything happened in like the last
you know ten thousand
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 ten thousand years and that 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 it
small like tiny changes in climate could massively disrupt human civilization
and bring them all
crashing crashing down and the case study they used was something called the
late bronze age collapse
have you ever heard the late bronze age yes yeah it's 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
societal unrest and then all these
empires like the hittite empire the syrian empire the palaces of mycenian greece
uh the egyptian new kingdom all within a 20 to 30 40 year period all came
crashing down the exact same
time and i remember being hooked by that i was like that's so crazy like 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
you know bad climate had been during history and how bad it had been like these
big climatic episodes
have been during prehistory and i started thinking like wow if that had caused
all these civilizations to
collapse just like 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 uh 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 the term prehistory
is weird isn't it because it's like according to what what we find yeah you
know i mean how do we know what
historical if there was a great cataclysm like if the younger driest impact
theory is correct
what you know how much history would be written down what would be left how
would you find it what
would you know yeah you know we're we're that's one of the things that disturbs
me the most is the
arrogance that some academics have to having a definitive understanding of the
exact timeline of agriculture
civilization and then modern humans yeah it annoys me 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 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 a hundred thousand years ago or two hundred thousand
years ago and it kind of
gets 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 than
what many people
appreciate and yeah did you ever see there was a video documentary back in the
day something about the
mysteries of the sphinx and um there was this archaeologist that was mocking uh
graham hancock's
ideas and dr robert shock's ideas about the timeline saying you know talking
about things that existed
pre-10 000 years and he was saying whatever he was like laughing like what
evidence is there of
any civilization from 10 000 years ago this was literally i think around the
same time that they
discovered gobekli tepe yeah like that this guy was mocking it i think slightly
thereafter they
discovered gobekli tepe which threw everything into a tizzy because now you've
got something that was
absolutely covered it they believe intentionally somewhere in the neighborhood
of 11 000 years ago
yeah i think gobekli tepe is the biggest kind of smoking gun for a at least for
the idea that
civilization is older or 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 summa which is the
kind of traditional
thought to be the earliest civilization so kobekli tepe is fascinating i love
it it's a really interesting
site um 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 tashtapela culture
there's like 14 sites at least and they all have this kind of megalithic
architecture they all have
shared symbolism they all clearly connected like it's crazy how it's not
defined as anything other than
hunter-gatherers and if even if you think that hunter-gatherers built gebekli
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 it's a truly
paradigm shifting site but i mean i mean
everyone kind of knows about gobekli tepe now but not everyone but but also as
spectacular as what they've
discovered so far is they have only unearthed five percent of it which is even
more bizarre yeah because
you've got so much stuff that's underground you have no idea what's on those
pillars you know there's
speculation that one of the pillars from gobekli tepe that is unearthed is some
sort of a calendar of
events and they believe that it depicts some sort of a disaster like that these
whatever how they they're
making these images to be associated with either an impact or something but
there's a timeline that's
inscribed in these pillars yeah they 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 there's kind of like a cosmic
calendar and it's like a
almost a prediction model of an impact that could happen or already has
happened and it's like a
warning for the future that 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 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 you know
quote-unquote mainstream archaeology perhaps as much as it should be um so yeah
it's a fascinating site and
i really think it displays a lot about how human ingenuity and civilization for
i mean people get a
bit stuck with the word civilization because we have this a very narrow
definition of what civilization 