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Home » Transcript: YouTuber Michael Button’s Interview on Joe Rogan Experience Podcast #2368

Transcript: YouTuber Michael Button’s Interview on Joe Rogan Experience Podcast #2368

Read the full transcript of YouTuber Michael Button’s interview on The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast #2365, August 20, 2025.

The Beginning of a YouTube Journey

JOE ROGAN: Nice to see you, man. Nice to meet you.

MICHAEL BUTTON: You see, man. Pleasure.

JOE ROGAN: I love your channel, man. It’s really great. You’re really doing some really interesting videos. When did you get started?

MICHAEL BUTTON: Thanks. Well, I only started the YouTube less than a year ago.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

MICHAEL BUTTON: It’s been a bit of a wild ride.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t even know how I found it. It was like one of them YouTube recommends. Things just popped up and I don’t remember which one it was. It was something on ancient history.

MICHAEL BUTTON: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And I was like.

MICHAEL BUTTON: 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 journey since then upwards. But 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.

From Academia to YouTube

JOE ROGAN: So did you start off on a traditional academic journey and then sort of get sidetracked into a YouTube career? How did this work?

MICHAEL BUTTON: 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. I was fascinated about history as a kid and got to the stage in 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. And it wasn’t that I disputed anything that I’d been taught. And I have 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.

JOE ROGAN: What bothered you? What were the questions?

Questioning the Timeline of Civilization

MICHAEL BUTTON: 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 vast stretches 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.

JOE ROGAN: Was that Denisovans?

MICHAEL BUTTON: No, no. So I can’t remember this. 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.

JOE ROGAN: How old were they?

MICHAEL BUTTON: They’re 315,000 years old. That’s kind of like the estimate. It goes up to potentially 360,000 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 sapiens.

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 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, 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 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. That just didn’t make sense to me. So that’s kind of where. Where I started thinking about it.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse

And then we did this module at university, I remember, called. 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, tiny changes in climate could massively disrupt human civilization and bring them all crashing down.

And the case study they used was something called the Late Bronze Age collapse. Have you ever heard of the Late Bronze Age?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, yes.

MICHAEL BUTTON: When all these, 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 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 Mycenae in Greece, 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. We don’t even know why this happened, but it was like a half degree changing climate. And so I remember starting to research how bad climate had been during history and how bad it had been, these big climactic episodes had been during prehistory.

And I started thinking, 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, 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?