Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2039 - Michael Easter
Uploaded: 2023-09-26T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2039 - Michael Easter' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2039 - Michael Easter' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-09-26. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2039 - Michael Easter

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
We're up.
Hello, Michael.
Good to see you, buddy.
Yeah, likewise, man.
Last time I saw you, we were in elk camp in Utah.
We were indeed in elk camp.
It was a good time.
Yes.
So, I was just pointing out to you about these discoveries they found at the Boneyard
in
Alaska, and my friend John Reeves, who's been on the podcast before.
Jamie, I'm going to send this to you.
You got it already?
So, the most recent thing they found is evidence that looks like saw marks on
these bones.
It looks like they sawed these bones to get the marrow out.
Now, a lot of these bones that they've dated are 10,000 plus years old, and the
thing is,
the saw was really supposedly invented somewhere around 7,000 years ago.
I feel like we often think that early humans weren't as advanced as they
actually were.
Yeah.
And every time we make a new discovery, it just pushes it back.
It pushes it back.
And you learn that people were way more interesting, had a lot more tools, had
a lot more skills
than I think we think.
Yeah.
This is really interesting.
I mean, if they do date this, you know, some of the stuff they've dated is like
30,000 plus
years old that they've found out here.
The Boneyard is an amazing place.
I think it's the Boneyard, Alaska is the Instagram page.
Do you know where on the map it is in Alaska?
I do not know.
Okay.
Do you know, Jamie?
I sort of remember.
It's in the middle of Alaska pretty much.
Okay.
But this is amazing.
I mean, he's also found some bones from some animals that supposedly didn't
even live there.
Some cats, ancient cats.
The craziest thing is, it's a very small area.
He's excavating somewhere in the neighborhood of like six and a half acres.
And there's another place that's like somewhere similar in size.
Yeah.
And they're finding massive amounts of bones in these areas.
That's crazy.
Like woolly mammoth tusks and all this crazy stuff.
But this is really interesting because that seems to be really clear evidence
of tools that
were used to saw bone.
Another one they found.
Like, look at this.
And the cut is so clean.
So it really does look like a saw that they sawed to get to the marrow, which
is wild stuff.
I don't know if anyone has ever found anything like this before, but it's
pretty extraordinary.
Changes how we think about how advanced we were.
I mean, who knows?
I mean, maybe they could find out that the saw marks are actually only a
thousand years old
and someone had found these bones and tried to saw them a thousand years.
I mean, I don't know.
Humans are amazing because we're such great explorers.
That's something that I think makes us so unique among animals.
Yeah.
Right.
So Homo sapiens comes out and we take over the world in a very short amount of
time.
Yeah.
Right.
Neanderthals live 200,000 years.
They basically made it into Europe.
We get Homo sapiens.
All of a sudden, they move into the Americas.
We put freaking boats in the water and go to Australia.
We take submarines down to the bottom of the ocean.
We shoot off rockets into outer space.
We are a species that never stops exploring.
We want to know, what is that?
Yeah.
What's over there?
I want to find out.
Massive curiosity.
Massive curiosity.
And it's shaped us so much.
So my book, Scarcity Brain, which is coming out soon, it has a whole chapter on
this and why exploration is so important to humans as a species, but also how
it's changed.
So if you think about how people explore today, we still explore in a sense,
but it's mediated through the internet, right?
So it's like we have this urge to find information that can enhance our life.
Yeah.
In the past, you had to go there.
You had to go talk to someone.
You had to go up around the river bend.
You had to go, okay, where is this greener grass?
I'm going to go find it on foot.
And it's going to be, there's going to be some amount of effort.
Now, when we have this sort of information itch, we scratch it through a screen,
which in,
on one hand, that's great because we can get information quickly.
On the other hand, it's so easy to access and there's so little effort we have
to do.
I think sometimes we get overwhelmed by it.
And it's a very different form of information we can get today.
Yeah.
It's also, it's leading us into this seemingly inevitable path of this
conversion of humans and technology that seems to be happening without, whether
we like it or not,
that really doesn't seem to jive well with our biology.
Yeah.
It's hard to tell what is true and false today.
And I think there is less of a, well, now that we have screens, you don't have
to go talk to someone in person.
Right.
Right.
And if you want to learn something, even just 20 years ago, I was like, okay, I'm
going to go to the library.
I've got to go find out where this book is.
I've got to use Dewey Decimal System.
I've got to walk the stacks.
I'm going to find it.
I'm going to put in this time and effort and I'm going to learn something.
If I want to learn something about a human, I'm going to go talk to them.
Right.
I'm going to go face to face.
Like, hey, what do you think?
And I think now everything has become so easy that that can backfire a little
bit.
It's very easy to just, you know, scratch the information itch all the time.
And it's not necessarily leading to more understanding among humans.
There's a difference between knowledge and understanding.
Right.
Yeah.
I think if you pursue it, there's more information and there is more knowledge
if you really get after it.
But how many people do that?
How many people just read headlines?
I do that all the time.
I just read a headline.
I go, did you hear?
You know, and I didn't even go into the article.
And oftentimes you get in the article, you're like, oh, what is this based on?
Oh, this is bullshit.
And then you go further and then you find out, oh, no, no, no, it's not real at
all.
Right.
There's a lot of layers.
And what made me start thinking about this is I'm sitting at home and I get
this email.
And it's from someone who claims that they're with NASA.
And they go, hey, we got this astronaut.
His name is Mark VandeHei.
We do this program where if an astronaut wants to talk to someone, we'll put
you two in touch.
And you can FaceTime with him while he's in outer space.
And I'm going, is this like the new Nigerian print scheme?
What do you need from me?
Just access to my bank account.
No big deal.
At what point do I hand over the credit card?
Right.
But I go, okay, because it's at nasa.gov.
I'm like, okay, that seems kind of legit.
They could spoof that, though.
I'm sure they could.
I've gotten emails from me.
Joe at nasa.gov?
No, back in the day, I got an email that was from my website, from an email
that I don't have.
Yeah.
And I was like, what is this?
That's wacky.
Yeah.
But I go along with it, right?
And so they set up this video conference.
I have to download this special software.
And I'm thinking, this is where it comes in.
Yep.
And then all of a sudden, I'm waiting for this guy to show up.
And then, bam, there he is.
And I know it's not a long con, because the dude is floating in outer space.
He's up in the ISS.
So he had read The Comfort Crisis, my last book, and just wanted to chat.
So NASA will do this to sort of give astronauts a boost to talk to someone else,
anyone they want to talk to.
And what came out of that conversation was that he is up there for the sole
purpose of getting information
that can hopefully help us live on as a species should we have to leave this
planet and go find another.
But sort of back to what we were talking about, for him to do that, he has to
put in this mind-body effort to go get that information, right?
He literally has to go up into outer space to figure these things out.
And he talked about how oftentimes when he will come back home, and he'll go to
schools, he'll go to universities,
he goes, at some point in every talk, I had this run of like 30 talks, where at
the Q&A, someone would always ask me if the world is flat.
And he goes, I did not know how to take that, because I would kind of just, you
know, know.
And then they would start to fire off facts, and he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah,
but no.
And so I think that that, with minimal barrier to entry, you can find
information that confirms your worldview
and just follow that strange rabbit hole, even though it's not leading anywhere.
Yeah, that rabbit hole is the wildest one, that there's been this long-standing
conspiracy to deny the fact that the Earth is flat,
to hide it and obscure it, and that all of these space agencies all over the
world are all working in cahoots to try to perpetuate this hoax.
Yeah.
Well, I can tell you when he, one, he took me, you know, around the ISS and
showed me the place over Zoom.
And then, two, at one point he flips the screen and shows me the Earth.
And at least in that instance, I can tell you that it was round.
Maybe it's just a disc.
Could be.
That's what a lot of the in-deep people think.
They think it's a disc.
I think it's all a religious thing.
They think that they're going off of some passages in the Bible where they
refer to the firmament.
And they refer to, like, they believe somehow there's, like, this dome over the
Earth and that the stars are just lights.
And the reason why the moon landing is fake is because the moon is not real.
I read that one today.
I was like, oh, boy.
And then, you know, some people think that stars are fake.
They don't think space is real.
They think it's all a con by Satan or someone.
And then that all these space agencies are in cahoots with Satan, which is
really wild if you think about, like, did they deny satellite?
Like, how much did they deny?
Did they deny satellites like, do you believe in DirecTV?
Is that a satellite?
Okay.
Do you believe that the satellites are taking photos?
Are they taking any?
What about the weather patterns?
What about their ability to discern weather patterns as they move across the
globe?
What about the flight patterns?
What about the fact that you could actually track planes as they go around the
globe?
Like, what do you think about that?
Yeah.
You know, I mean, Japan has a very sophisticated satellite system where they're
taking high-resolution photos of the Earth, like, every few seconds.
Right?
Isn't that what it is?
Yeah, a few people do that.
Yeah.
Private companies that do that.
And they think that's bullshit.
That's all lies.
But it's like, what do you have to, like, what are you getting out of that?
Like, why would they do that?
That's, I don't understand what they think the motivation is.
I think that some things are complicated in life.
And I think that humans really like certainty.
So we are a species who just crave certainty.
There's actually some fun studies where people will choose to get shocked by an
electric zap rather than wait to see if they're going to get zapped.
Like, just get it over with because I want to be certain about this thing.
And so I think that a lot of conspiracies, even though they seem complicated
because, you know, there's the board with the strings going everywhere.
At the end of the day, they give certainty to something that is uncertain and
is complicated.
And that can sort of be relieving.
You go, okay, well, this world being flat doesn't jive with my worldview.
I think X, Y, Z.
This doesn't make any damn sense.
And then you can go, oh, well, what if it's flat?
And then there's, like, sort of this trail you can follow online where at the
end it goes, bam, you got it.
You're good to go.
I think people are always looking to find things out that they've been lied
about.
So I think they believe they don't trust the government.
They believe, you know, various conspiracies and, like, the Gulf of Tonkin,
ones that have turned out to be true.
And then they go, oh, okay, what else?
What else?
And there's something very exciting about it.
Also, a lot of the people that are really into it f