Transcript of Cassie Coppersmith Interview: Joe Rogan Experience #2528

Like sand or something?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes, abrasives of some sort.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And so the difference is, if you look at the lines as it’s drilling down, they’re thick and they don’t look the same. If you look at the ones in the actual artifact, they’re extremely tight. They’re way smaller and they’re tighter to each other and it doesn’t make sense. Like, you look at that, you’re like, that looks like a machine.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It does. And in this specific instance, it looks to me like the drill came from both directions, like they flipped it over and drilled from the top and then flipped it over again and drilled from the bottom. And that’s where it met in the middle. Wow.

The King of Jade Cong and the Theory of a Lost Civilization

JOE ROGAN: So what is— out of all these different artifacts, what’s the most puzzling one to you?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The Cong tube, which is the one on the left-hand side there. Yep. So that, you know, that is— it’s larger on top, smaller on the bottom, perfectly 90-degree corners. It’s got a round tube in the middle, but the artifact in general is square. So it’s just a very complex shape to create with that level of precision. And nephrite jade is a very hard stone.

So it would have taken— you know, people in my space talk about the Mohs scale of hardness just as a way of saying diamonds are a 10, you know, different stone levels. Those hard stone discs like diorite, that would be a 6 or 7. This is the same. It’s that hard. Wow.

JOE ROGAN: And so is the idea— well, I’m just assuming the idea is that there was a more sophisticated culture that probably existed predating that, and these are leftover artifacts.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It is only my opinion that that’s the case. I haven’t seen a lot of people talk about these artifacts at all. Jamie, if you go back to the picture you had just flashed on the screen— the reason I’ve developed this theory— so this is an image on the side of the largest Cong tube. It’s called the King of Jade Cong. It’s a 15-pound artifact that was found. And you can see the raised stone. So it’s the high-relief carvings that were later etched over.

That etching has become very famous. If you look at photos of the museum in Liangzhu, this image is everywhere. And I think that this was an image that was used by the Liangzhu tribe as like the image of the king, basically. And so I do believe that it was scratched over the top of an original, very interesting high-relief carving that you see in a lot of other artifacts. So I think that he basically found this— it looks like something that they maybe could not recreate, and then they kind of stamped their kingly symbol over the top of it.

JOE ROGAN: So this is very— it’s common in Egypt as well, particularly this theory among alternative historians, because you look at the complexity of some of the sarcophagi and some of the different things, and then you see the writing on the outside, which looks cruder. The writing is not as precise. The cutting is not as precise. There’s a lot of chips to it. It doesn’t look like they used the same materials or the same tools.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, and, you know, the question is, if you had the ability— there’s the King of Jade Cong — so if you had the ability to make an artifact in that kind of a shape, why would you not have also created the scratching over the top in that high-quality version? So why would you create the artifact like that and then just scratch over the top of it? It doesn’t make sense.

JOE ROGAN: There’s always— that’s always been the case that history shows that people who are controlling a region will take credit for everything. They’ll take credit for all the ancient stuff too. They’ll put their name on it. They own everything. And that’s famous with pharaohs. They did it with everything. And this is documented. We know that they wrote their name on things that they didn’t create.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, Ramses II was King Selfie, you know. He put his cartouche on everything.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, which— I mean, it sounds like what a dictator does. It sounds like what a pharaoh would do.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, it doesn’t mean that they made it. And for us to just assume that they did, knowing that people in great power behave that way, is kind of crazy. That’s our map of history. So how did you get down this road where you started looking at these objects and looking at the conventional historical timeline and saying something’s wrong here?

How Cassie Got Started

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Specific to the Chinese artifacts?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Or were you already on that path when you found the Chinese artifacts?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I’ve been on this path for a while. And, you know, my— the name of my channel is Secrets in Stone. And the reason I named it that is because I believe that the stones speak to you. They will show you exactly what the story is. So with these artifacts, just like the hard stone vases, it just is out of place. You know, it doesn’t make any sense. And especially in the British Museum, when you look at these with your own eyes, and then you read the story of how they believe that they were made, you know, it just doesn’t add up.

And so all you have to do, in any of these places, is dig 1 or 2 levels down, and you start to see a lot of inconsistencies.

JOE ROGAN: 1 or 2 levels. So meaning that the older stuff is the more complex?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. Or with the way that the archaeologists have interpreted a lot of these sites, there’s a whole lot of assumptions that are made. You know, there’s carbon dating that only goes partway down. You know, they’ll dig partway down, they’ll date it, it matches their story, and they write the report. They’ll take inscriptions, you know, especially in Cambodia, places like that, where a king has written an inscription, and they’ll say, “Yep, well, that king wrote on this, so this must have been made at this time.” And there’s really no further investigation.

So it’s become a theme with my work, where I’ll go somewhere, specifically with the megalithic architecture, you can see exactly where the old architecture was built. Oftentimes, it’s the lowest level. And then you can see where other cultures have come later and built on top of it. And it just looks like a copy of what’s underneath. It’s like they were really trying to make what they saw, but they just couldn’t. And so once you’ve kind of trained your eye for that, you go anywhere in the world and you see it.

JOE ROGAN: How did you start looking at this stuff?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Well, I went to Egypt 4 years ago and watched Ben van Kerkwyk‘s videos. You know Ben?

JOE ROGAN: Sure. He’s awesome.

Ancient Temples of India: Machining, Precision, and Lost History

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: So I watched a couple of his videos on the way to Egypt. That was my first kind of introduction to this. And then it just became a bit of an obsession for me. I like to go to the sites around the world that other people don’t really go to. So, you know, I think Egypt and Peru and Turkey, that’s— it’s all in good hands, right? Ben’s watching over Egypt. We’ve got Bryan Forrester down in Peru doing amazing work.

The sites I go to are the sites that nobody else really visits. So I just got back from India a couple weeks ago. I spent a lot of time in Cambodia. I went to Thailand. And these are the sites that I think, if you’re trying to make a case, or at least a strong enough case that people will consider, right, that there may be a different history than what we’re being told, I think you have to have more than 3 examples.

So if you can start to do a lot of research on these sites all around the world, you can have thousands of examples of nubs, for example, or megalithic architecture that looks very similar, these walls that look very similar all over the world. And it just makes— in my mind, it makes a much stronger case for it than just continuing to look at the same sites over and over again.

JOE ROGAN: It seems to me so much more likely that the timeline is incorrect, than the historians are right and everyone else is just a conspiracy theorist weirdo. The more you look at it, the more questions I have. Like that Kailasa Temple in India. Yeah, we’ve gone over that a few times, but Jamie pointed out something that they brought in about— was it like an army to try to destroy it? And they barely put a dent in the damn thing. Yeah, and they stayed for a long time. They’re trying to smash it up and they couldn’t do s* to it.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then you go, okay, well, how did they make this? And I saw a really wild YouTube video the other day where this guy was proposing that they used lasers and that it was all laser carved and that they had some sort of like super sophisticated laser setup back then. That’s why you’re not finding all the stone.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Well, you know, it’s like, what?

JOE ROGAN: Wait a minute.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Look, I think that’s absolutely possible.

JOE ROGAN: It sounds possible, but also so insane that we’re so wrong about the linear timeline of human history that they had f*ing lasers in India, like how many thousands of years ago, that they were using to carve an entire massive perfect temple out of rock?

Lathe-Turned Pillars and Evidence of Ancient Machining

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You know, I was just down at the Hoysala temples, which are in southern India, and they have these lathes, lathe-turned pillars. The pillars are feet across. They’re huge. And you walk up to them and you look at them closely and you can see the lathe marks on them. And archaeologists concede that they’re lathe-turned, but they don’t concede that it’s machined. So they basically say, well, maybe they were turned on a lathe. We’ll give you that. But that was probably human-powered or animal-powered. So these are—

JOE ROGAN: Oh my God.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: These are the lathe-turned pillars in southern India. I was just looking at these with my own eyes a couple of weeks ago. It’s completely unexplainable. And to think of the size of the machine that would be required— you say you turn that pillar sideways, you connect it to a machine on each side, and you start lathing. Jamie, I have a folder in my India pictures that—

JOE ROGAN: God, that’s so pretty—

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: —that has lots of evidence. So what you can see at sites like Hampi in India is you can see the evidence of lathing. So it almost looks like the setup that they would have used to carve these kinds of pillars. And it’s just sitting in kind of far-flung corners of these sites. Nobody addresses what they are.

And so the evidence is everywhere of this. It’s just, you know, it’s written off. It’s like, well, that must have been an animal-powered lathe. So I do think we have strong evidence for machining in ancient history. And in my mind, it doesn’t have to be machines. You know, there could have been other ways that they were doing this that we don’t even recognize.

JOE ROGAN: So what is this that we’re looking at?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: So this is at the museum in Hampi in southern India. And that to me looks like the lathe. So it looks like where a pillar might have been placed and the machine was spinning, some sort of a lathing machine. So I think it’s like the other side of these pillars, basically, like the end plates.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, exactly right. Okay. And so these pillars, how large are they? Can you— Jamie, can you go to that image in the lower right-hand corner, please? That one right there. God, I can’t get over how pretty that is.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: They’re so incredible in real life too.

JOE ROGAN: How tall are they?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Way tall. I mean, my head would probably go halfway up that pillar. They’re twice as tall as me.

JOE ROGAN: So immensely heavy. And what kind of stone is it carved out of?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: This is a chloritic schist. So it’s called soapstone.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so pretty.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: But there are lathe-turned pillars that are also granite. In southern India, it’s a soapstone. So when it’s quarried, it’s a little bit softer and then it hardens once it’s out of the quarry.

JOE ROGAN: Has anyone done an analysis of the geometry in these things? Like how precise it is— I’m looking at it. If you go to that, the one next to it, please. That one. Yeah, that one. When I’m looking at the precision of that and how many different pieces there are, I would love to know how uniform those are because it looks insane. That looks so beautiful.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s—

JOE ROGAN: We’re looking at— how do you say that word? Kopeshwar? Kurukshetra Mahadev. Is that how you say it? Mahadev. God, that’s pretty.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s incredible. And, you know, these sites have crazy energy too. You walk into them and you can tell that they were made with a lot of love. These pillars, you know, you can’t help but touch them.

JOE ROGAN: You’re allowed to touch them?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: Look at that. I would love to know what the precision of that is. Yeah, because really, imagine if it’s insanely precise, and then you have to explain that too.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Not just stone chisels and tools and stuff, but when you can see in the pillars, you can see where the lathe started at the bottom, and you can see where it stopped at the top. It’s just running. And, you know, a lot of people are like, well, turn it sideways. Is that some sort of a sound wave, right? Is it mimicking? Is it telling us something?

JOE ROGAN: I’m glad you brought that out. I’ve seen that too. Does that make sense?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I think so.

JOE ROGAN: Can I see that again, Jamie? Yeah, I was just trying to find out your question of how precise they are. Oh, here it goes. The pillars in— how do you say it? Swarga Mandap of Kopeshwar Temple are lathe turned with extremely uniform circular and polygonal profiles showing high geometric precision and tight alignment despite being carved from stone without mortar joints.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It says it resembles machine turned work.

JOE ROGAN: Resembles? Yeah, that’s cute. Isn’t it more likely that it was machine turned if it’s exactly— pillars are laid out with consistent spacing in the circular hall so that the open oculus in the ceiling remains perfectly centered, suggesting careful radial planning and load distribution. The temple uses interlocking stone and gravity rather than mortar, so the precise fit of the pillars into bases and beams is critical to stability and is cited as an example of advanced medieval Indian stone engineering.

Temples Built Upon Temples: Rethinking the Timeline

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: One thing that’s interesting when you go to these temples is you can see where they have moved these pillars into the temple. So the core of most of these temples, in my opinion, is the original megalithic part of these temples, the oldest stuff. But you can see where these pillars have been moved into new temples. And so you’ll see these crazy precise dark stones.

JOE ROGAN: This is a rotating pillar. What?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I think it used to rotate. It does not anymore. I actually saw that pillar.

JOE ROGAN: When did it stop?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I don’t know. And maybe that’s just a myth. I have no idea. But you can see where they moved these pillars from original temples, or maybe, who knows, maybe they found a workshop somewhere with these and they put them in the center of the newer temples. So it’s not precise at all, very crude stonework above and below them. And then they have this perfect lathe pillar right in the middle.

JOE ROGAN: So what is the timeline that they attribute to the construction of these?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Oh, you know, 1200 to 1500 AD.

JOE ROGAN: And why do they say that?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Because the kings that ruled during that time period wrote inscriptions on the pillars, in a lot of instances, on the sides of the temples, things like that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s all inscriptional evidence.

JOE ROGAN: I would need more evidence, you know?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Right. Well, what’s really interesting, I’ve done a lot of—

JOE ROGAN: That’s great. It’s graffiti.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, I’ve done a lot of research in Cambodia, and they date all of their temples based on inscriptions. And when you actually run these inscriptions through AI and you translate them, they’ve all been translated from Sanskrit to French. I then translated it from French to English. And when you read what the kings actually wrote, very seldom do they say, “I, King so-and-so, built this.” What they say is, “I installed a lingam. I brought a statue to this temple.” And so the archaeologists make a fairly big jump between what the kings actually wrote and saying, “Well, this king must have built this.” So, in a lot of instances, they’re actually putting words into their mouths.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. So, what is your belief in terms of the timeline of the construction of these things?

A Pre-Flood Civilization? India, Egypt, and Peru

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I mean, in the oldest instances, I personally believe that it’s pre-flood. So, more than 12,000 years ago. I think there are some that are probably older. Peru is— I just got back from Peru a couple of months ago. That’s fully unexplainable. You’ve talked about Peru on your show many times. Egypt is incredibly ancient. I actually believe that India is one of the most ancient places on Earth.

And were they different civilizations building there? What they built suggests that it probably was. Were they in contact with each other? I believe they were. You know, there’s enough similarities around the world that it feels like there was a communication network between them.

But when you look at the actual building styles between— take those 3 examples: India, Egypt, and Peru. They’re completely different, right? Egypt is very just blocks, very few decorations, especially in places like Deir al-Surian. It doesn’t— it’s just, it almost looks clinical, you know? But then you’re in Peru and it’s playful. There are these big pillowy blocks. And then you go to India and there’s carvings all over everything, right?

And so I do believe that there are certain places in this world that are substantially older. And I believe that for thousands of years, civilizations have been attracted to these places. And they build on top of them and they settle there. And so you just see generation after generation after generation of building on top of them.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it makes sense when you think about Kailasa because look how perfect it is now. And this is thousands of years after they attribute it to being built, or at least 1,000 years.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And it looks like there’s been zero erosion.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Now add a few thousand years to that, it’s going to look exactly the same.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And if you’re just generation after generation, not knowing who built it, and you get a version of, you know, this king said he did it, or this guy said he did it, like, how— add a few thousand years and it’s f*ing guesswork.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: 100%.

JOE ROGAN: And to have archaeologists sift through dirt and find an inscription somewhere and go, “Oh, we nailed it.” Like, God, that’s such a disservice to what the complexity of the mystery of what we’re looking at is.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Just the Kailasa one is— I am obsessed with that place. I’ve watched like 4 or 5 documentaries on it, and we went over it on the podcast the other day with the CEO of Perplexity. It’s like, it’s fing bananas. It’s so crazy how precise— and one mistake and you’re fed. But yet it’s all geometrically aligned. They have no idea what they did with all the stone.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: That’s the big question.

JOE ROGAN: That seems so crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: They removed an entire cliffside mountain, and it was carved from the top down.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and put it where? Would you do it at all?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Good question.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so much rock. That’s not a little bit of rock. You would think there’d be some laying around. Even after thousands of years, you’d have like a pile somewhere, like, “F* it, anybody want some free stone? It’s over there.” No one’s going to take all the stone. You have millions and millions of tons of stone. That’s crazy. What’d you do with it?

The Challenges Facing Archaeologists and Academia

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I do feel for archaeologists. They go to a site and they’re like, “Gosh, maybe this feels a little older,” but the only evidence they have are potsherds that they can date. They can dig down and find cultural layers of cultures that, in their opinion, lived there afterwards. They’re dating that and they see inscriptions. And that’s the evidence that they have to make their case. But I do wonder how many of them are looking at these sites and saying, “Yeah, this actually doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

JOE ROGAN: A lot of the young ones.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I would think so.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve talked to them. I think this is the hierarchical— the structure of academics, in terms of these guys that are teaching university courses and giving out PhDs and writing books. They have a vast body of work that’s all about the timeline, about what they know, and they are the gatekeepers of information. And there’s a lot of ego involved with academics. I’m sure you know that. They get really shitty with each other. They’re vicious. They attack each other even if they’re wrong.

Like the whole Clovis First thing was the best example of that. The gentleman who proposed the theory that there were people here older than the Clovis people was destroyed by his own peers. And it took years before it was proven that he was correct. And not only was he correct, but he was correct by like over 10,000 years. Now they’re pushing it past 22,000 years ago because of the footprints they found in White Sands, New Mexico.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The peopling of the Americas.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, so humans have been here a long, long, long time. And this is just indicative of this pattern that happens whenever anybody comes up with any sort of an alternative theory that doesn’t come from the gated halls of academia. They’re just dismissed.

But academics have only been around for a few hundred years. We have to stop and think about how crazy it is that we’ve put the power in these people that we know are not always accurate, nor are they uncompromised, and they have ego problems. They have this structure of the people at the top that are giving out grants and funding and PhDs and reading people’s dissertations. It’s very social and very complex, and to deviate from the narrative is devastating for your career.

If they can destroy the guy who proposed that Clovis First was incorrect— that guy was an academic, he was established. Imagine if you’re a fing PhD student and you’re like, “I think you guys are wrong.” Well, you’re fed forever.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I used to work in corporate America, and there were a lot of things that I thought that I absolutely never said. So if you think about these young archaeologists, even if they see something and they think, “Gosh, I wish that I could dive into that and really explore how old this is,” they’re going to get shut down immediately and their self-preservation mechanisms are going to kick in because they’ve got a paycheck. You have to sympathize with the situation that they’re in.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I do. I completely do. Look, we’ve all worked for shitty bosses. It’s a terrible position to be in. And especially if your shitty boss is in charge of the distribution of information about the history of the human race. That is crazy. That is crazy to get ego involved in that.

Göbekli Tepe and the Problem with the Timeline

JOE ROGAN: When you see the attacks on guys like Graham Hancock and all these people that propose that there’s a bunch of data that confounds the timeline— like it f*s it completely up. When Göbekli Tepe came along, everybody was like, “Okay, we have a problem.” We have an 11,000-plus-year-old structure for sure. It was purposely buried 11,000-plus years ago. So how old is it? It’s at least 11,000 years old. That doesn’t make any sense because the timeline of civilization is supposed to be 6,000 years ago. So now we have immense stone structures with 3D carvings that are in concentric circles that’s 5,000 years older than that. Okay, these are hunter-gatherers. They were just assholes that in their spare time from killing antelopes, they decided they were going to build immense structures on top of a hill.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Well, don’t you find it interesting that the dating of Göbekli Tepe has not opened the door to redating other sites around the world? So when you talk about the stuff in Egypt, nobody’s really open to saying, “Maybe this is 10,000 years old. Should we look again?”

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: That story has been written. There’s been a period on it and it’s been put to bed.

Robert Schoch and the Water Erosion of the Sphinx

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, there’s actual geological evidence. And this is where Robert Schoch came into play. I have had him on the podcast before, and I remember watching that documentary on the mysteries of the Sphinx. He proposed that there’s water erosion on the outside of the Temple of the Sphinx. He’s taken photos of that erosion and brought it to other geologists and said, “What do you think this is?” And they said, “Well, that’s water erosion.” And then he shows them where it came from. They’re like, “I don’t want to have nothing to do with this.”

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. Just kidding. It’s the wind.

JOE ROGAN: Which is crazy. Imagine the timeline of human history is so controversial that you’re worried it would ruin your career if you spoke accurately about your field of expertise, which is erosion and geology due to rainfall. Thousands of years of rainfall means at the very least, the Sphinx is 9,000 years old.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: At the very least. But it’s probably way older than that, because you have to have thousands of years of rainfall from the time it was constructed to make these kind of deep fissures into the stone.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And it was buried for much of its recent history, which means there was not erosion taking place the entire time it was buried.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. The whole thing’s nuts. And the wind and sand erosion— that’s the argument against that, right? Because it was covered in sand. And if there was rain erosion like they’re proposing, it had to have been when there was significant rainfall in the Nile Valley. And that’s way back 9,000 years ago.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: A long time ago. Yep. And it breaks my heart a little bit that this conversation gets shut down. Because if you think about 23andMe— the number of people that have subscriptions to websites like that because they are extremely interested in where they came from. It opens up their world when they can see 4 generations back. People that belong to these subscription services will say, “I finally have a sense of belonging. I kind of feel like I know where I came from.” We as a humanity— imagine if we actually knew where we came from. I think we would feel a lot less lost.

Alternative Researchers and the Mysteries of Ancient Structures

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think it’s sad. I think it’s funny. I think it’s just another example of just how funny people are, how we’re so weird, we’re so full of it, and we’re just so filled with this desire to be correct and to enforce our narrative that we do it even with facts that are really significantly important for the entire world.

And I think it’s funny because it doesn’t work, because it’s only opened the door to people like you and people like Derrick and people like Graham Hancock and Ben van Kerkwyk and Jimmy Corsetti and all these people— Luke Caverns— they just spend enormous amounts of time making incredible content. Like all the stuff that Luke has done in the Americas, in South America— good Lord, there are so many mysteries. Explain away Sacsayhuamán. Explain away those stones. Help me out. How did people with no steel and no heavy machinery move these things into position— these 20-foot-tall immense stones that are cut like jigsaw puzzles? It looks like they were melted into place.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, it looks like a melted marshmallow stacked on top of a melted marshmallow.

JOE ROGAN: It’s literally bananas. It makes absolutely no sense. And then you have the weirdness of these elongated heads that they find down there— these skulls that are absolutely real skulls. These are not hoaxes. They have a 20 to 30% larger brain capacity in the skull.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I have personally seen elongated skulls in 4 different countries, and it’s not the same as skulls that were manipulated to be flattened.

Elongated Skulls and a Different Kind of Human

JOE ROGAN: That’s what’s different. There’s a very well-known practice where they would take boards and put them on children’s heads to elongate their heads. The question is, why were they doing that? Were they trying to emulate something that existed— another type of person that was here?

Well, it seems like it. And it seems like these skulls that they find, particularly in Peru, the bones are larger, it’s a larger face, they have a larger brain capacity, and they don’t have that sagittal suture that’s down the middle. So they’re literally a different kind of skull. It’s clearly human, or some form of human, but it has more brain volume and it’s built different than us. And everybody’s like, “I don’t see anything.”

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: They’re not like, “Hey, maybe there was a completely different species of human that existed along with us, just like Denisovans, just like Neanderthals, just like all these new ones that they keep finding fairly recently.” Like the one they found in China, the big-headed man. What was that one called again? juluensis? Homo juluensis? This is really recent— like a few years ago they found this. Okay, we don’t have the full picture, guys. We just don’t have all the data. And when you have these big skulls and you’re not even bringing that up, it makes me think— are you afraid to look at this? Because then you have to admit that you really didn’t know this, and you were walking around saying you’re an expert in the human timeline?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Imagine some of the capabilities of these people with that much more brain volume. Could they speak telepathically? Could they move stones with their minds, with sound? We don’t know what they were able to do. If you just unlock an additional 10% of your brain capacity— Joe Rogan’s brain capacity— think of all of the connections you would make. Think about all of the things you could do that you can’t do now. And now expand your brain volume by 30%, exactly like the Bradley Cooper movie, remember?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. And he kept the same size head.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Or the movie Lucy with Scarlett Johansson.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the best one.

Elongated Skulls and Trepanation

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Just unlocking her full brain and suddenly she was moving things with her mind. Right. So were these people able to do things that regular humans couldn’t? And that’s why they were emulated throughout history with cradle headboarding. They were the elite. They were maybe building some of these structures. Who knows? And if you are just an average Joe in that community, you want to look like them, right? You—

JOE ROGAN: —all of us do it, especially the elites of the time.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Especially the humans that were the kings and the pharaohs and all these different people. They wanted to have those heads.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep. There were some really interesting—

JOE ROGAN: —it sounds like we’re crazy people. Right? If I just tuned into this, it’d be like, “Oh great, another one of those retarded Joe Rogan shows where he’s talking to crazy people.” But then you see that— Jamie, pull up some of the images of those skulls. I know we’ve shown them a million times.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Jamie, I have a folder with skulls. I can show you some really interesting ones from England. That are on small bodies, so they almost look like fairies, and they have these giant skulls on these very small bodies. And it does make you think that probably had something to do with the mythology of fairies in England.

This was at Avebury, which is one of the big stone circles. When you walk into the museum there, there are these amazing anomalous elongated skulls on these very tiny little bodies. Whoa. The other interesting thing about elongated skulls—

JOE ROGAN: Are they children?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I don’t think so. No. There’s a woman named Maria Wheatley who writes all about these skulls that have been found all over England. That’s Egypt. Yeah, there it is. So this is England. This is one of the skulls, but this skull is very small. But if you look at the shape of it, their ears are in a different spot. They have huge eye sockets. I have another photo where there’s one still attached to a small body.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa, look at the size of that head.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Isn’t that interesting?

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Now this one may have been a child. I don’t remember specifically which of these skulls.

JOE ROGAN: Even if it was a kid, that kid’s going to be a football player.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: He already has a helmet.

JOE ROGAN: That kid has a giant head. But it doesn’t look right. It doesn’t look right.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It doesn’t look right.

JOE ROGAN: I have babies. They don’t have heads that big. That’s crazy. Even when a baby’s got a big head when they’re little and they can barely hold their head up, it doesn’t look like that.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep, little bobbleheads.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Another really interesting— Look how far—

JOE ROGAN: I’m sorry, but look how far it goes behind the spine.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And look how flat it is at the bottom in the back.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I mean, imagine holding that head up.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s the other weird thing about these elongated skulls. The part of the skull where it connects to the spine is in a different place.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes. Which makes sense. Otherwise, you know, you’d—

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Or I guess you’d probably— your head would fall backwards.

JOE ROGAN: Look at these. Look at these that don’t have that sagittal suture. That one that’s closest to us. That is crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. So that one’s in Peru. I saw that one a couple of months ago. It looks completely different than the skull right behind it.

JOE ROGAN: Right. It’s like a different kind of person.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes. Interestingly, in a lot of these elongated—

JOE ROGAN: So they have like one on the side and they don’t have the one down the middle.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. There’s another one that’s labeled Malta, and you can see the view of it from the top and you can see how it looks completely different than any of the other. So here’s an interesting thing that I’m not sure you’ve talked much about, Joe.

Trepanation and Ancient Brain Surgery

JOE ROGAN: Brain surgery.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The holes in the back of these skulls — it’s trepanation.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: So it was a surgery that they see evidence of in lots and lots of ancient skulls. And the question becomes, so if you don’t have a sagittal suture and your brain — we have the— our brain will fuse, right, as we grow.

JOE ROGAN: Sorry, but look at that, what it looks like. It looks like they used drills.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Doesn’t it? Like they just drilled a circle around that dude’s head?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: In a lot of instances, these people survived these surgeries. The question becomes, why were they doing it?

JOE ROGAN: Whoa, look at that top one. Scoop out some brain, bro. That’s crazy. Maybe they were trying to relieve pressure.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Well, if your brain doesn’t have all of the sutures that ours does, and your brain is fusing, there are some theories that suggest that these people were losing their connection with consciousness. So because their brains were so big, they had a lot of telepathy and things like that. So if you cut a hole in a fused skull, you still have access, right? It allows your— allows you, I guess, more space in your skull to access what you used to access.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s like relieving pressure in some way. This is the idea why they’re doing this trepanation. Maybe. I think we had a woman on who did trepanation to herself.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Oh my gosh, I’ve read about her.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, is she still alive? They were doing lobotomies until pretty recently.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I know, right?

JOE ROGAN: Like what this is. Yeah, right. When we knew better. Is she still alive, Jamie? I think she might have passed recently.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And her motivation for that, was it not for consciousness?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: She was out there.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: But isn’t it interesting?

JOE ROGAN: Lovely lady, lovely lady, but whoo, she was out there.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, I haven’t seen that episode.

JOE ROGAN: That lady had been on some trips. She had been to other dimensions many, many, many, many times. She passed away about a year ago. Yeah. So it’s a sweet lady too. She was so kind.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It begs the question, what was the motivation for doing that in these ancient examples?

JOE ROGAN: She described it in very glowing terms, the experience of trepanation when she did it. She did it to herself. So this is a photo of her. Is there a video of her doing it? I know there’s photos of the actual procedure for drilling a hole in her head.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It must be quite a sense of relief though.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Your brain’s no longer locked in your skull.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, is that really what it is? I don’t want to find out, but I mean, I know people that have had to have brain surgery because they had brain bleeding. Yeah, there it is. Oh my gosh, they just drilled a hole. It looks like they use a stick. What the hell? I think she did it. What is she using?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Is she doing it to herself?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. No, it’s the only way if you really want to achieve one with chakras or some shit.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You’re probably not going to get a doctor to sign up for that.

Examining the Skulls Further

JOE ROGAN: Jamie, can you find— there’s some images of those elongated skulls. There’s a few really spectacular ones that we pulled up the other day, and one of them is like the sagittal suture is completely missing, and it’s so big, and you’re looking at it like, “Okay, this is a real skull in a museum. Help me out. Help me out, anatomy experts. Why does it not have the features of a normal human skull? And why is it so big?” Like this seems completely insane. The AI told me why, but I don’t know if that’s— yeah. Shut it, AI. That’s a bunch of bullsh*t archaeologists got an AI and wrote some bad articles.

When I saw that one with the little kid or the small thing with the big back of the dome, could that be explained by just like a random anomaly? Yeah, for sure. It depends on how many there are. But go to the images of those skulls so we could see that crazy one. I don’t know why Google just changed and there’s no longer— they don’t like you anymore. No, like the whole website has changed. They hate you. I noticed it yesterday.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You can’t—

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, that is weird.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You’re being sabotaged.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, because they’re trying to get you to use AI. Yeah, it’s all gone. Oh, that’s so gross. Just write images. Yeah, see, now they’ll show you. Okay, so it’s the one on the far left upper corner. It’s right below it. Sorry. There you go. That’s it. That’s the one.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Look at the eyes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, the whole thing is nuts. The fact that that is a real skull, it should freak everyone out that no one is— that this isn’t the front page of the New York Times, that this isn’t something that everyone’s investigating. Like, this is not a physical anomaly. This is a completely different skull. That’s not a regular human skull at all. The capacity is so much larger. You cannot explain that by headboarding. You cannot explain the size of the f*ing eye sockets. It’s crazy.

You imagine looking into something— who’s that one lady that has crazy big eyes? She’s an actress. Do you know what I’m talking about, Jamie? She’s really pretty. She’s got big giant eyes that pop out of their head. I’ve seen that too, but they’re not that big. The point is like those eyes would be fing enormous. Like if that person was in front of you and they had skin on with those eye sockets and that head, you’d be like, “Yo, I want you to meet my friend Mike.” They’d be like, “What the f?” That is not what it looks like. That drawing is way too normal. That head’s way bigger than that too, by the way.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And the eyes are nothing—

JOE ROGAN: —nothing like it. They’re not even in the same place. Like those eyes are in a different place. Those eyes are in a nutty place.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I mean, that image on the right, the woman, that could be what they looked like if they were cradle headboarders.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. And her face looks flattened too. Yeah, like the whole thing looks— which is such a gross thing that they did to try to emulate these people.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Imagine tying a baby up on a board and telling it to stay. Look at that one.

JOE ROGAN: Look at that one to the left, Jamie. Left, right below that. Yeah, that one. Look at that one.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: What the hell is that with the trepanation?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But help me out. Tell me that’s a person. Help me out. That is not just an elongated skull. That’s crazy. That’s not—

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I wonder if that’s a real photo.

JOE ROGAN: I know that. Well, almost a potential plaster even.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I don’t think I’ve seen that one before.

JOE ROGAN: Make this stuff. That is true. That is true.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Rocky Mountain Sasquatch Organization.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s a reputable source. Yeah, I don’t— they are the best Sasquatch organization. I try not to judge all of those. I’m just clicking the photo, but they have all the real information. There’s a lot of misinformation in the Sasquatch community. Oh yes, but that is the only place that shows up. There’s got to be other ones. Well, that one in the middle and the top and the left. Yeah, right there. Click on that. Look at those three.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Like, that almost—

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, still the same one. Those are all the same one, or are these from different angles? Yeah, well, the one in the middle looks different than the one on the left. Definitely.

Elongated Skulls and Ancient Civilizations

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Look at the recreation below though. At least his eyes are big.

JOE ROGAN: He looked like— okay, that’s a good one. That’s a good— that’s a good representation of what those people— those people— tell me that dude can’t read your mind.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: 100%.

JOE ROGAN: The dude on the left, he comes up to you with those beads on, it’s like, I’ll do whatever you say. And you’re like, okay, I guess we’re communicating with the mothership. Yeah, like, look at the size of his head. Please go back to that image again. Yeah, that’s— is that real?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, and most of the hair on these elongated skulls is red.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, that’s so wild. Yeah, that’s so crazy. Go back to that last image, please, where you see the dude. Like, that guy— imagine running into that guy at a Mayan temple. You’d be like, oh Christ, they’re real.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: 100%.

JOE ROGAN: Like, that’s a different kind of person. Like, that seems— the eyes are f*ing massive. That seems like a totally different kind of person.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes. Has very different abilities than the average human.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. I mean, if the brain is what differentiates us from all the other intelligent animals on this planet, and a human— it looks just like a human but different— has a brain that much bigger than ours, what is that? That’s a real thing, folks. These— we’re not making this up. These f*ing skulls are real. That’s crazy. Yep, that is crazy. There was a person like that.

Museums, Missing Artifacts, and Suppressed Evidence

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The only museum I’ve been to in the world that has any sign that indicates it may have been alien is Malta. When you walk into the museum in Malta, it actually has a poster that talks about the lack of the sagittal suture. It has a picture of an alien on it.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Mm-hmm. And they leave their skulls out. A lot of these museums, especially the ones in southern Peru, they’ve sort of tucked them away. They’ve put them in dark cases so it’s harder to take pictures of them. You can’t— they’re not out there in the open where it’s easy to pop around each side of it.

JOE ROGAN: They’re probably worried about them getting stolen too. There’s an issue that I’ve been informed about with ancient artifacts, that there’s a whole underground market where really wealthy people want to buy Egyptian artifacts. And there’s a lot of scandals involved with a lot of these people that are in charge of these artifacts, where artifacts go missing and people get rich. And, you know, they sell books that nobody buys, and all of a sudden they have a mansion.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. On a government salary and you can slip one of these vases away.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And sell it, you’re going to make a lot more money than you’re going to make working for the government.

JOE ROGAN: Not just vases, but even skeletons. There’s evidence of skeletons going missing.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Skeletons they found in a sarcophagus, and then all of a sudden they said, nope, there’s no skeleton. And then there’s clearly documentation that they found a skeleton that leads back decades ago. And then today they’re saying, no, no skeletons. Like, where’s the skeleton?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Nothing to see here.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And some of that— that’s the weird thing is like some of these skulls that they find, if you could find the entire skeleton, you’d imagine that is a very big person. These are not normal-sized people. Like whatever the structure that’s— unless they have an enormous head and a little tiny body. If they have a proportionate head to their body, you’re looking at a 7, 8-foot-tall person. This is a huge head.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, and there’s giant lore all over the world in every ancient civilization.

JOE ROGAN: And in the f*ing Bible.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I don’t believe that that’s imaginary, and I don’t believe it’s myths. I think that it’s remembering.

The Fossil Record and Lost History

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think it is too. I think there’s probably a different version of people that existed. And I think the real problem is we’re dealing with the fossil record. And the reality of biological life is neither you nor I is very likely to leave behind a fossil. So, 1,000 years from now, no one’s going to know who you were, and no one’s going to know who I was. And they’re not going to be able to tell from our bones. You’re not going to find them. They’re going to be absorbed by the ground, and that’s a wrap.

And in order to get a fossil, a very specific set of circumstances has to take place. And so, you know, we’re lucky that we have some skulls. We’re lucky, and there’s, you know, 1,000 years old, 2,000 years old, however old they are. But you get back to 10, 11, 12,000 years ago, 15,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, good luck.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: There’s nothing left.

JOE ROGAN: Good luck unless you’re finding it in the permafrost, like in Alaska. Like my friend John Reeves, he has that place, the Boneyard in Alaska. He’s the best.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: That’s so cool.

JOE ROGAN: That place is crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Have you been?

JOE ROGAN: No, he keeps trying to get me to go out there, and I will eventually, I promise. But the spot is absolutely bananas. He’s finding all kinds of insane things out there, including animals that aren’t even supposed to have existed in that area. So they’re rewriting the idea of what was alive and what animals were alive, different cats and different bears.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like we don’t know that much. We’re basing— like, think about all we know about the dinosaurs. It’s amazing how much work they’ve done. It’s amazing how many dinosaurs they’ve documented. But if you look at the amount of dinosaurs that actually lived over the hundreds of millions of years that dinosaurs roamed the Earth, there’s a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of these dinosaurs that we find that are fossilized. Most of them are gone forever, including who knows how many species that we’re completely unaware of. We have no evidence of whatsoever.

Now think about an intelligent species that probably buried their dead like we do, or maybe even burned them. You know, we don’t know what they did. Or, you know, maybe they were even more enlightened. They did the Tibetan sky funeral where they let themselves get eaten by vultures. You’re not going to find anything, right?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: No, you’re absolutely right. It feels like people should be just maybe a little bit more open to our past.

Independent Researchers and the Racism Accusation

JOE ROGAN: I think people are. I think the problem is some of these— and I say some, it’s only some of these academics. There’s a lot of people that are deviating from that now. And again, it’s a lot of young people. You know, like guys like Michael Button. Do you know who he is? Yeah, he’s great. He went to school, got a degree, and was like, I think there’s more to this, and I think I could do a better job doing a YouTube channel where I just research these things thoroughly and provide you with a very balanced perspective on how crazy all this stuff is and how none of this really makes sense if you use the conventional timeline.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep, and people are hungry for that information.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I am. I’m obsessed.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Thank goodness that the internet has democratized it so people like me can get on there and put a video on and just see what people think.

JOE ROGAN: And you really learn a lot when you see people like you get attacked, you know, and people like Jimmy Corsetti and all these people, like, they go after people so hard and they always take the same line. They always take—

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s always racism.

JOE ROGAN: Racism, exactly. That’s what I was going to say, which is so crazy because no one’s attributing the Indian temples to anything other than Indians.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Like, it’s not racist. It’s just saying— I’m saying Indians from like a long-ass time ago. Yes, it’s the same people.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s something to be even more proud of.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. Yeah, it’s crazy. Like, no one is saying that the people in Peru, humans in Peru, didn’t make that stuff. No one. No one’s saying that, right? That’s exactly what we’re saying.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: What we’re saying is probably the people in Peru were incredibly sophisticated before the flood. Yeah, that’s probably what it was.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Egypt, it doesn’t make any sense that they’re shutting that down. To extend your timeline, if you’re able to, to 20,000 years ago, that’s twice as much to be proud of.

JOE ROGAN: Right?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Right.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s just the academics who have firmly stamped 2500 BC. Bam! This is what we know and we’re going to stick with it.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Despite all the hard evidence, like the geological evidence, disputing that is really weird because like, look, guys, rain does a very specific thing to stone over thousands of years.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: This is hard evidence. Right there. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s right there. And you don’t really know when it was built. You’re just guessing. But this isn’t really much of a guess. This is actual evidence.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And for them to not even consider that and to just dismiss them— and it’s just lucky that guys like Robert Schoch had tenure. And lucky also that he wasn’t an archaeologist. He’s a geologist. And what are they going to fault him for? His methods? The way he did it? What he said? No, you can’t really because it’s pretty rock solid.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: We should be leaning on these geologists and saying, what do you see? And then informing our theories based on what they’re saying.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Not the other way around.

JOE ROGAN: Ben van Kerkwyk has done amazing work on some of the erosion that’s around some of the pyramids and some of the bases of some of the structures around the pyramid. And it seems like there’s many levels of construction and that the oldest, oldest stuff has a preposterous amount of erosion, like an insane amount of erosion.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Absolutely.

Angkor Wat and the Ancient Temples of Cambodia

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I’ve spent a lot of time researching Cambodia. If you look at— so, there are 8 different pyramids in the immediate Angkor Wat area. And these pyramids are massive. And when you walk up to them, you can see how incredibly ancient they are. And the dating on these pyramids are, you know, 900 AD to 1300 AD. So not very old, the official dating.

But when you stare at the stones, you can see the same thing you see in Egypt. You see just ancient weathering patterns down the sides of them. You can see how the whole site has been rebuilt. And they don’t talk about it, right? So the entire history of Cambodia, nobody is open at all to exploring that it might be older than 800 AD.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s look at some photos of Angkor Wat because it’s another incredibly bizarre place. And when people use the conventional timeline to date it, it’s not— it’s amazing and it’s beautiful, but it’s not as crazy when you really— if you take into consideration that no one really knows when it was built and the possibility that it’s actually 11,000 years old, 12,000 years old, maybe even older. It almost kind of makes sense.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Have you done—

JOE ROGAN: Because it would look just like that.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. And the temples or the towers inside the core of Angkor Wat, in my personal opinion, the core of Angkor Wat, it’s got 3 different layers. The core, I think, is extremely old. It’s got these 5 central towers. They look almost melted. So you can see the 5 in the middle. As you move out by each layer, all of the iconography in Angkor Wat changes. So in the center, it’s all deities, it’s religious symbolism. As you move out, it becomes war scenes and elephants and battles, right? So you can see where each successive culture has built onto the outside of Angkor Wat, but the core of it looks enormously old.

JOE ROGAN: And let’s get some photos of the core of it.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Have you ever discussed the LiDAR findings around Angkor Wat?

JOE ROGAN: I have not.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Jamie, I have some photos in my Cambodia folder.

JOE ROGAN: Trying to dance the line of looking at these before I switch over to your stuff. God, look how beautiful that is. Look how the trees’ roots are growing all around it.

The Mysteries of Cambodia

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Cambodia is one of the most special places on this earth. Whoo!

JOE ROGAN: Imagine what that was like during its prime.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Oh, that’s the Bayon Temple, the temple with 218 faces. Wow, enormous faces.

JOE ROGAN: So, are those— those are clearly different stones brought in.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, they’re individual stones to compare to the other stuff we’ve seen where it’s—

JOE ROGAN: Right, correct. Yeah, very different. Yep, very different kind of construction. Yeah. Spectacular, but maybe makes more sense than like Kailasa.

LiDAR Discoveries at Angkor Wat

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: In 2012— that’s a great photo, Jamie. In 2012, they did a LiDAR survey in Cambodia, and what they discovered in Cambodia completely shocked the world. So you can see Angkor Wat in this photo is right in the middle of that giant moat. There were huge mound fields all around Angkor Wat, inside this moat and outside of Angkor Wat. And then if you go south of it, you can see these giant spiral embankments. If you just zoom out a tiny bit, Jamie, do you see those spirals in the bottom left side of the screen? Those are from one side to the other. They’re a mile long. Yeah. So these are the geometric features at Angkor Wat.

JOE ROGAN: And these are hidden from the naked eye?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes. They’re under the jungle canopy. Nobody knew that these were there until 2012 when the LiDAR results came out.

JOE ROGAN: Holy sh.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: There are mound fields that are a mile— this particular mound field is a mile long. It’s got— it’s a 10 by 10 mound field. And these mounds are enormous. They’re like 30 feet across. And there’s no explanation at all for what these are.

JOE ROGAN: And they didn’t even know they existed.

The Western Baray: A Massive Mystery

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: They didn’t even know they existed. So this is Angkor Wat from the air. Very, very interesting. That western baray where you see, that’s a man-made— it’s the largest hand-cut reservoir on Earth. It’s 8 kilometers long and 2 kilometers wide. So you can see the old Siem Reap International Airport just south of it. That’s the size of this thing. It is enormous.

The official archaeological story of these barays is that they were hand-dug, and that they were used to water rice. There’s one on the left side, that’s the Western Baray. There’s an equally large one on the east side. So there are 2 of them that are 8 kilometers long on each side, 2 kilometers wide, just an enormous volume of dirt would have had to have been removed to create these. And there’s no discussion at all about what they were for, how they were made. They’re just attributed to different kings based on inscriptions found in the corners of these sites. So if you want to talk about mysteries, in my humble opinion, Cambodia is one of the most mysterious places on Earth.

JOE ROGAN: How old do they think this reservoir is?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Like 900 AD. So not old at all. And there’s no explanation for how it was done. Just to excavate the Western Baray is the equivalent of 53 Giza-sized pyramids of dirt moved out of it. So this is it today. You can see there’s a temple in the middle of it.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so big. That’s so crazy that they supposedly dug that out by hand.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You can see this from space. NASA’s taken photos of it before. There’s no explanation for what they were doing there.

JOE ROGAN: What is the images of the pyramids up in the corner?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: That’s the 50 feet. Yeah, that’s the equivalent. So 138 million cubic meters of dirt to dig that out.

JOE ROGAN: How deep is it?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s 5 or 10 meters deep. And I believe that they dug out the inside and then they built these large walls, retaining walls on the outside. So I don’t think that there’s huge piles of dirt somewhere. I think that it was just deepened, and then they built the walls around them to retain them. But there’s a lot of really interesting complex things going on with these barays.

Revisiting the Kailasa Temple

JOE ROGAN: This reminds me of— I had Perplexity dig up something on the Kailasa Temple. Yeah, let me find it here. I was just going into like, do you know how many people they thought made it? I guess I’ll ask you that first. Do you know the conventional method? They said 250 people made it over five and a half years. Sure. The problem with that is— I’d like to hire those dudes. It started to tell me like that’s kind of okay, but then it started to get— it was like actually the hardest part with this is going to be removing all of that rock.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, it didn’t say where it is, but it just was going into the math. This is all the Perplexity did. It’s all this math on— this is Kailasa.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, the amount of stone that can be removed every day.

JOE ROGAN: And it just would have taken— 250 people is a fourth of the potential, the number they tried to destroy it with for 3 years. And with the same tools, I guess. They just had some sort of metal.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: This says 5.5.

JOE ROGAN: They tried to destroy it for 3 years. That had to have been a really frustrating 3 years. 1,000 guys tried to destroy it for 3 years. You imagine that? That is crazy. And that’s just exaggerated, you know? Yeah, they couldn’t do anything. That’s really crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You know how mad that king was? He’s like, “Just destroy it.”

JOE ROGAN: Imagine what a dick he must have been. Oh yeah, to want to destroy that. This is the problem with kings.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s the problem with kings.

JOE ROGAN: Good lord, that’s wild.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: So yeah, Cambodia is incredibly mysterious and nobody talks about Cambodia.

How Cassie Got Involved with Cambodia

JOE ROGAN: Would you like some coffee?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Sure. Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: So how did you get involved in Cambodia? How did you— what was the first thing that you looked at?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I went there for the first time 3 years ago. It was a quick stopover. We were getting ready to hike the Sơn Đoòng Cave in Vietnam. You know, the largest cave in the world.

JOE ROGAN: I saw that on 60 Minutes.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. So we had that trip planned and I said, well, Cambodia is right next door. Maybe we should just pop over there for a week. So we did. And walking on these sites, it’s the same thing I was talking about earlier. I like to hire local guides just to hear what’s the story that they’re telling you, what is the official history. And the story that they told me just doesn’t match what you see with your own eyes, right?

So they say that the earliest civilizations there built in brick, and then they built with stone— over time, they developed the ability to build with stone. But all of the brick is on top of the stone. It’s on top of these massive pyramids, right? So it doesn’t make sense that the oldest stuff is at the top. So I started sort of questioning the history of Cambodia.

I got into these LiDAR results, which are really fascinating. I mean, they discovered entire unknown cities in Cambodia with LiDAR. So on top of the Kulen Mountains, which is the plateau where they quarry all of the stone for Angkor Wat, all the sandstone, there was an entire massive city on top of that plateau that they had no idea was there. There were pyramids, there were 2,000-acre reservoirs, there were mound fields, there were massive causeways, and it was all just hidden under the trees, the jungle.

So in 2012, sort of the cat was out of the bag in Cambodia. And what’s interesting is that it should have made international headlines. You know, these spiral embankments that are a mile long on the south side of Angkor Wat, nobody knows what they are. Nobody has a good explanation for what they are. Archaeologists say, maybe it was a garden feature. Maybe it was fishing. And in my mind, you don’t build mile-long earthen embankments in the shape of a perfect spiral unless you have a very specific reason for doing that.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think that reason was?

A Theory About Water

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I don’t know. I’m starting to put together a theory about— I think it all had to do with water. They were channeling water down from the Kulen Mountains, which is about 50 miles away from Angkor Wat. They were channeling water down, building 16-kilometer diversion channels, taking the water way out of the way, running them through mound fields into these giant reservoirs. All of these reservoirs have pyramids connected to them. And it’s one system after another of reservoirs with temples in the middle, pyramids connected to the outside. It feels like a massive industrial undertaking.

And I’ve gone back and forth. Does it have to do with energy? Possibly. I personally think it had something to do with how they were treating the water. Like, if they could get it structured, maybe, right? So that it was better for plants, better for people, better for animals, better for consciousness. There was a massive undertaking happening there that just isn’t addressed at all by archaeologists. Nobody’s tying together these different systems and saying, “Gosh, that was a monumental undertaking. I wonder what they were doing that for.” It’s all just rice farming is the official story.

JOE ROGAN: Can you show me that LiDAR image again? I’m looking for more. I keep running into just the scientific papers about it.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: They have the LiDAR images locked away.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they’ve done a bunch of studies on this, and there’s some cool photos, but I’m trying to find— can you go back to the ones that we were just looking at though that she provided? Because I want to see the patterns. Yes. Yeah, that. Okay, that. Perfect. Like, so those features are weird. That’s really weird.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: They’re huge. They’re a mile long and half a mile wide, like that yellow square.

JOE ROGAN: And they’re symmetrical.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And they’re perfectly symmetrical. And this isn’t the only place in Cambodia that has these.

JOE ROGAN: And so we’re probably looking at an intensely sophisticated civilization.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes, absolutely. The moat you see dug in the middle of that structure, that was built during the Khmer period, which is the civilization that all of this is being attributed to. They’re the ones that dug that through the middle. So I don’t even think they knew that this was here.

JOE ROGAN: It was just completely covered.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. They just dug right through the middle of it.

JOE ROGAN: And so this is probably really, really old. And people have lived in that same place. Look how crazy that looks. That’s almost crazy.

Koh Ker and the Hidden Dam

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Every inch of ancient Cambodia is engineered. There’s a site called Koh Ker. It’s about 200 miles northeast of Angkor Wat. They discovered a 7-kilometer-long man-made dam that created a 2,000-acre reservoir.

JOE ROGAN: Look at that image. That’s hers.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, they didn’t know that this was there.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I was on a tour with Derek Olson last November, and we actually took the tour group out to the corner of Angkor Wat and walked those mounds. And what’s interesting is when you’re out there, you actually can’t tell that the mounds are there until you’re kind of on top of them, and then you look around and you’re like, “Wow, I’m feet above the rest of the landscape.” And then you kind of keep walking because these things are 30 feet across. So you keep walking and then suddenly you’re at the bottom of the landscape. So I don’t think that they knew it was there.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. It’s so big that without LiDAR, you’re really not going to get an understanding.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: So that picture. Yeah. So there’s a good example of the jungle canopy being kind of stripped away. This is what it looks like from the air without LiDAR.

JOE ROGAN: So there’s no way you would know.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: No. Wow. Entire cities, 7-kilometer-long dams, huge reservoirs. They didn’t know about any of this until LiDAR came out.

JOE ROGAN: That’s incredible. Also, look how the trees are just growing back in. That’s so dope. Look how awesome those roots look.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: That’s the Lara Croft temple. It’s called Ta Prohm.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, really?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. Lara Croft was filmed at this temple.

JOE ROGAN: For real?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: For real?

The Temples of Cambodia and India

JOE ROGAN: They actually let her film there? That movie?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. Pretty dope.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. Tourists love it.

JOE ROGAN: That tree just overcoming the building’s amazing.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: They have their hands full in Cambodia with preserving these temples because the jungle’s actively tearing it down.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it looks like the jungle’s trying to consume it with that tree. Absolutely. Like, eventually it will.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Eventually, if more trees grow like that, it’ll break down all the stone underneath it.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The structures, I believe, are older, like the pyramids. They’re a little bit more impermeable to these kinds of things. The newer temples, like the one you see on the screen, they just get ripped down. It’s a little bit inferior construction. So it’s newer, obviously. I think the Khmer actually built those. And so those just get ripped down immediately by trees. But the really old stuff, the pyramids, if you see photos when they excavated it in like the 1920s, they were fully intact.

JOE ROGAN: You were talking about the center of it. That it’s different, that it looks older. Is there any clear images of like what that looks like?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Of the pyramids or of Angkor Wat?

JOE ROGAN: Angkor Wat, the center.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I don’t think I have photos in that folder, but you can—

JOE ROGAN: Because you were talking about the difference between the iconography.

The Spiritual Imagery of Angkor Wat

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, if you search just the central towers of Angkor Wat, you’re probably going to find images of that. It’s 3 layers that get higher and higher as you get toward the middle of Angkor Wat. And in the middle of it, it’s just carvings that blow your mind. And they’re all spiritual in nature, which is something you see all over the world.

In India, where I just was, it was the same thing. The older structures, it’s spiritual imagery. And then as you move out to the newer structures, it’s all war scenes. You can see the de-evolution of human consciousness.

Yeah, so these are from the center of Angkor Wat. It’s deities, it’s beautiful 3D carvings. You can stick gum wrappers through these, so they’re fully enclosed. You can stick a gum wrapper behind these stones.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. God, it’s so pretty.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s so beautiful.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s so interesting that the people that probably built it first had no interest in war. No interest in war, or at least had a very enlightened perspective.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It does support the idea of— I know you’ve talked about the yuga cycles on this show, but the idea of human consciousness having reached its peak 12,000 years ago and has just been slowly devolving ever since. You can see that in the imagery in some of these temples plain as day.

So yeah, there’s a lot of images of war scenes on the outer layers of Angkor Wat, but in the middle it’s totally different. Same in India.

Dating the Ancient Temples

JOE ROGAN: Now, does anybody have an idea? Like, does anybody have a compelling theory as to when these were made that, like, is backed by any kind of evidence?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: No. I mean, you can look at carbon dating, and you can poke holes in the carbon dating all day long. So, they’ll carbon date wood samples. These are made of stone. You can’t date stone. There’s reconstructions that have happened on all these sites that are brick. And then there’s wood doorways that are put in and they’ve carbon dated the wood.

The wood in a lot of instances is coming back older than the accepted date of the temple construction in general, which is a little bit problematic. So like there’s a pyramid called Bakong, which is the oldest accepted pyramid in Cambodia. That one’s dated to like 800 AD. The wood samples in the repaired sections of Bakong are from the 600s. And they say, “Well, that’s generally the same.”

And so you have to ask yourself, if they were reconstructing and rebuilding these sites — say they were doing that during the Khmer times, they were using bricks and they were using wood to repair these sites — they were doing that in 600 AD. So how old is the pyramid itself that they came there and repaired? How old is that core structure?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and to assume that it’s the same age is crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s crazy. Yeah. And it’s a bit of a circular argument, because they date a temple based on an inscription. And then they look at other temples that don’t have inscriptions. And they say, “Well, this one looks a lot like this one.” So, they place it in the same time period. So, it just becomes this big circular logic of all of it fits the story neatly, based on one inscription.

JOE ROGAN: That seems so silly.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It really just doesn’t make sense. It seems much more likely that there’s a giant mystery.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And especially when you look at the difference in the artwork and the way it looks. Will you show me, Jamie? This— they say that this one took 300,000 workers, approximately 30 years, and they never finished.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Angkor Wat. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And this says they also started it around 1116 CE.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. It doesn’t make any sense.

The Bahubali Statue in India

So I was recently in India a couple weeks ago, and I saw something there that was the most impressive thing I’ve seen with my own two eyes. It’s called the Bahubali statue. I have photos in the India folder. It’s 1,000 tons. So it’s as big as the biggest destroyed structures, or the biggest destroyed statues in Egypt, but it’s still standing. It’s in India. It’s on top of a mountain. It’s made of granite. That’s a person at the bottom of it.

JOE ROGAN: Holy sh.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s made of white granite. The jury’s out on whether it was moved there, built somewhere else and moved there, or whether this was built at the top of the hill from living stone. But in my mind, this thing is clearly machined. It’s absolutely perfect. Those ears are 5.5 feet long.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. Look at the lips and the fingernails and everything. Look how crazy the precision is.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s perfect. Look at the head. So these are all photos I took while I was there. It stands 60 feet tall. It’s 1,000 tons. So it’s the largest standing statue on Earth from ancient times.

JOE ROGAN: And where’s the stone supposedly coming from?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Well, the story is — and I actually think I believe it — the whole mountain is granite. And so, in order for this thing— so that’s just it poking out above the temple that’s built around it.

JOE ROGAN: That’s mad.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s insane. The story is that basically it was—

JOE ROGAN: Look at the leaves on his arm—

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: —that they built it out of living stone, that it’s still connected to the mountain. And it kind of looks like that when you walk around it. You can see this rough stone at the bottom. But it looks very different than the stone from the mountain itself. So, this is a white granite. You can see how it almost looks like living stone. And I can’t imagine how you could have erected that and moved it to the top of this mountain. So, I personally believe that it was found and built there.

JOE ROGAN: So, there was a large stone that was there, and they just went in and chiseled the statue out of it?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep. It represents Bahubali, which is a Jain statue. And Bahubali was a man who achieved enlightenment by standing still for a full year. So, the ant and cobra hills at the bottom, and then the vines grew up around him.

JOE ROGAN: Oh.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: So, he’s the picture of enlightenment.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. Just look at that image. How was that built?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I sat in front of this thing for 2 hours, just entranced by it. And the beautiful thing about the temples in India is they are all living temples. So, they’re actively being taken care of by the community. They’re active places of worship. They’re not off in the jungle breaking down. They’re being taken care of. And this looks like it was carved yesterday.

JOE ROGAN: And what timeline is this attributed to?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: About 980 AD.

JOE ROGAN: And why do they think that?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Because of those very unsophisticated inscriptions at the base of it.

JOE ROGAN: Can I see those inscriptions? Yeah, right there.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

The Inscriptions and the Question of Authorship

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, not so sophisticated. They look really shitty.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: So they carved those around the base and they said, “I built this.”

JOE ROGAN: Look how clunky those inscriptions are. This paragraph here on this thing I showed you about Angkor Wat shines a little light onto that. I’ll let you read it.

“Building of temples by the Khmer kings was a means of legitimizing their claim to political office and also to lay claim to the protection and powers of the gods. Hindu temples are not a place of religious congregation. Instead, they are homes of the god. In order for a king to lay claim to his political office, he had to prove that the gods did not support his predecessors or his enemies. To this end, the king had to build the grandest temple palace for the gods, one that proved to be more lavish than any previous temples. In doing so, the king could make visible his ability to harness the energy and resources to construct the temple and assert that his temple was the only place that a god would consider residing in on Earth.”

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Interestingly, in Cambodia, all of the pyramids were the first structures claimed by the kings. So the first king built the first pyramid, the second king built the second pyramid. So what I think they were doing is they were going into this landscape and they were finding these incredibly sophisticated pyramids. And just like that paragraph suggests, they said, “Wow, this is the coolest thing I can find around,” and they wrote their name on it.

And then once all the pyramids were taken, then they started claiming the barays, they started claiming the really nice temples. Like, there’s a temple called Banteay Srei, which is a red sandstone temple. It’s beautiful. It’s one of the coolest places I’ve ever been. They claimed all of these places first. So all of the coolest stuff in Cambodia is the oldest. And then once everything was claimed, then they started building new ones, like that Bayon Temple that you saw with the faces and the smaller stones. So that’s what I think happened in Cambodia.

JOE ROGAN: Jamie, can you go back once again to that giant statue and the inscriptions on it? Those inscriptions are weird because it’s so shitty. Like, look how bad the lines are, how squiggly they are and broken up.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And there’s another photo in there of the rest of the inscriptions. They’re even worse. I mean, these are actually very nice compared to the ones that are—

JOE ROGAN: But not when you consider the grandness of the actual statue itself. The statue is so spectacular.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, I mean, look how they wrote it just up any space that they could find. They wrote their name there. But it looks entirely different than the rest of the statue.

JOE ROGAN: Right. It looks super clunky.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It really does. It’s a stark contrast.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The toe on this statue is 3 feet long. The ear is larger than most humans.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so crazy. Like, looking at it, it’s so—

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Isn’t it incredible?

JOE ROGAN: Imagine the time that it would take to make something like this with chisels.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes. And there was nothing else made like it.

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, like, what are we talking about in terms of metallurgy back then?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Oh, hammers and chisels.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, did they even have iron?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, they did. They had iron.

JOE ROGAN: So they had iron chisels. And this is, again, was it 900?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: 900 AD.

JOE ROGAN: God.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And it’s almost perfectly symmetrical.

JOE ROGAN: And you think it looks machined?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I do. It looks very similar to the Egyptian statues. I have some side-by-side photos in the folder.

The Gommateshwara Statue and Ancient Mysteries

JOE ROGAN: Can you focus on the neck, Jamie? Go back to the neck, because one of the things that was crazy about when you saw the image of the neck, like, look at the lines. I know, like, what is that?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: There’s lines, similar lines like that on the large statues in Cambodia, and there’s similar lines like that on the large statues in Egypt.

JOE ROGAN: This one reminds me of Mount Rushmore. Didn’t we make that by hand, or no? I don’t know. I think they use dynamite. I’m just kidding. It’s like, that’s the only thing in my head I can think of. No, that’s true. Mount Rushmore’s immense.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And this is white granite, so this is an extremely hard stone.

JOE ROGAN: What was Mount Rushmore made of? I don’t have to look. I just was thinking of it. It’s like we made that, you know, 1,000 years later. That is true. That is true. But we did that with machines. They had machines back then.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, they had jackhammers. They had all kinds of stuff back then.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And these were civilizations that were at war, but somehow they found the time to carve this.

JOE ROGAN: I just— I’m wondering what those lines in the neck are supposed to represent. Yeah, the statue’s so beautiful.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Isn’t it amazing?

JOE ROGAN: God, it’s so incredible. Maybe they were going to make something and stopped. You know how dope that would be if that was in your backyard? I’d never get anything done.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You can see this thing from 50 miles away. It’s up on top of a mountain, and it’s at the peak of the mountain. So from 50 miles in each direction, you can see this massive statue just staring serenely.

So if you— it’s a Gommateshwara Bahubali statue. There’s a couple of different ones. This one’s the best one. So that’s the 3rd picture to the right.

JOE ROGAN: The one in the middle.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. So yeah, that’s a drone photo of it when I was there.

JOE ROGAN: That is crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s crazy. And it’s the largest ancient standing statue in the world. And very few people talk about this thing.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve never even heard of it until today.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. So that was probably just a big-ass rock that was there and they chipped away everything to make that.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I mean, there’s two options. One, maybe it was a big rock, but look how much would have had to have been reduced. And look at the stones to the right. You can see how different they look than the statue itself.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think it’s possible that stone was moved there?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I think it’s possible it was moved there. Not with any technology we recognize today, but I think it’s absolutely possible. It would have had to have been taken to the top of this mound, which is like 650 feet high, and stood up.

But even if it wasn’t, even if it was a standalone boulder like the ones you see below it, that’s still an extraordinary feat to carve that thing in almost perfect symmetry in a way that looks very, very machined.

JOE ROGAN: That is bananas.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. So you climb the mountain. It’s like 650 steps. You have to do it barefoot because it’s an active temple. On the way down, it got real hot.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you can’t even wear socks?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You can wear socks, but it’s slippery.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, so you gotta wear them grippy socks if you want to wear this.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I didn’t think of that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, like, for Pilates.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

A Living Sacred Site

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s an amazing place. And it’s still— the beautiful thing about it is it’s still just revered as a holy site. So people, the Jains, take pilgrimages there. Every 12 years they have these major ceremonies where they pour milk and honey and things like that over the top of it. They build a big scaffolding, so they will climb up to its head and pour these libations over the top of it, and it is just being continuously worshiped.

And when you sit up there, to get a little bit spiritual for you, you feel different. You feel like you are being healed. Like, we had a plane to catch, and I didn’t want to leave. We sat in front of that. It was my brother and I, and we sat in front of it for as many hours as we could before we had to go catch our plane.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. Wow. What was going on back then?

Ancient Civilizations and Lost Knowledge

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: That’s—

JOE ROGAN: This is the real big question. Like, what was the height of sophisticated civilization 10,000, 12,000 years ago? What was it really like? And how much information did we lose because of the flood?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. What’s interesting is if you look at Jain mythology, so they talk about these great half cycles that are an incalculable number of years, and they’re called Tirthankaras. So they’re like the kings— they’re not kings; they’re like the enlightened ones of the period.

The first Tirthankara, Bahubali was the son of that enlightened being. He was described as being over a mile tall, fully enlightened. He was described as millions of years old. And these are their myths that go back to an incalculable amount of time. And that’s just in this half cycle. So they just describe these major cycles of time. And the images that they’re building at the top of these mountains are of these enlightened beings that are part of these ancient myths.

JOE ROGAN: Jeez. You know, when you go into their ancient scriptures and you read about things like Vimanas, like the flying crafts, and we were talking the other day about they had some sort of a description that seems to sound like a nuclear bomb, and you had to use it for very specific reasons, and you had to get authority to use it.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And yeah, even, do you know what a Shiva lingam is?

JOE ROGAN: No.

Shiva Lingams and Ancient Energy Devices

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: In my Cambodia folder, there’s some photos of it. So in most of the Indian temples, there’s a Shiva lingam that’s usually described as a male component inside a female component. So it’s meant to represent both sides of the polarities. And they’re at the entrance of most of these temples, and they’re small, they’re maybe like 2 or 3 feet long.

But in Cambodia, there are giant Shiva lingams. There are ones that are probably almost 20 feet long. And you can see those at sites like Koh Ker, you can see them at the top of Phnom Bakheng Mountain, which is right by one of the big barays.

In India, the Shiva lingams are even bigger. If you go to the ancient texts, and they talk about these things, they describe them as infinite pillars of light and fire. So are these Shiva lingams, these giant Shiva lingams, actually— I don’t believe that they’re what we say they are today. I think that they were extremely powerful. Maybe a weapon. I don’t think so. Maybe an energy device.

But if you look at modern-day stonework, and then you tie it into the old myths, that’s when it becomes really, really interesting to me.

Yeah, so that Shiva lingam that the man is standing on in the top right photo, that’s at Hampi in India. These are always surrounded by water. They’re always in roofless shrines. Very megalithic temples. The one in the bottom right, that’s not AI. That’s a real photo of these Shiva lingams. It’s 40 feet high, originally in a roofless temple. By large bodies of water.

Were these actually— I mean, I think that these were all something very different than what we’re being told today, which is just a spiritual carving.

JOE ROGAN: So you think this has something to do with energy, and that’s why they’re surrounded by water?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, I mean, in the ancient texts, they’re described as an infinite pillar of light and fire. That’s what a normal Shiva lingam looks like that you see all over the temples.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Which is just like a beautiful fountain.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: A very small version of these monumental ones that you can find in Cambodia and India.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very phallic looking.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep. Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So go back to the big ones. An infinite source of light pillar.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Pillar of fire and light.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what they’re described as?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: What the hell is that?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Like, what were they doing with these things? They always face north. They’re always in a roofless temple. They always have major water features next to them.

JOE ROGAN: Is that how they made power? Maybe power? Yeah, I think that’s what she’s implying— applying electricity or something, some kind of power.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The myths suggest that there was something going on there.

A Different Path to Technological Sophistication

JOE ROGAN: Well, this is the question that I always have when we think about technology— we always think about it in the context of what we understand currently. And if you think of human beings, the way we’ve progressed to get to where we are now is through internal combustion engines and transistors and all these different technologies that we have right now.

There could have been a completely different direction that they went in and achieved similar or more spectacular sophistication in this different direction.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And the idea that this is the only way to go is kind of crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, it doesn’t have to be mechanical.

JOE ROGAN: Especially when this is a fairly sick society in terms of our value system and, you know, what we— we’re a mess.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Like, objectively.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes. Mentally, physically, we’re as sick as we’ve ever been. It’s the only reason our lifespan is increasing is because we’ve overcome it with technology.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Right? We’re as sick as we’ve ever been, as unhappy as we’ve ever been. I think that’s part of the reason that the powers that be don’t want us talking about golden ages. So if you can convince today’s society that we are the best we’ve ever been, life is as good as it’s ever been, that’s much more palatable than we are as sick as we’ve ever been. We’re as unhappy as we are.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think that people are actively trying to enforce that narrative because of that, or do you think they’re just reinforcing their own current beliefs?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I think a little of both.

Gatekeeping and Conventional Archaeology

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they know. I think there’s a lot of these people that are conventional archaeologists, conventional timeline proponents. I don’t think they really study at all. I don’t think they do. I think they try to discredit some things and they do it very disingenuously.

Like some of the people that have gone after Graham Hancock, the things they say are really kind of crazy. But I think they’re doing it because they’re trying to reinforce their own closely held beliefs and this gatekeeping of information, being the person that’s the expert. There’s this appeal to expertise in an area where you have very little data.

It’s like you really can’t be an expert in something— especially like timelines of stone. Like, how do you know? You don’t really know, right? You don’t know.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So let’s go from there.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: We don’t know. Yeah, that’s an okay thing to say.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Or I’m open to the possibilities.

The Second Sphinx and the Future of Ancient Discovery

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think they’re trying to promote it because they think that we want to establish that human beings today are sick and let’s not pay attention to an enlightened golden age when people were different and they were concentrating much more on the spiritual aspects of human life, and they had deities that were spectacular, and they had technology that was above and beyond.

I think they’re just not willing to entertain it. And again, I think that’s like what they say about science, that science moves on and progresses one funeral at a time. I think that’s the case with archaeology as well. I think there’s a lot of these people that just, they have to go away. And then the new people coming up, a lot of them are watching YouTube, a lot of them are reading these papers, a lot of them are looking at the work of Filippo Biondi that’s underneath the pyramids, and they’re going, “Hey, explain that.” Because you really can’t, and they try to dismiss it so hard, but that technology is like— if you trust the science, you got to trust the science, and that technology is proven.

Not only that, they use that technology to accurately get the dimensions of things like that particle collider that’s 1.2 kilometers into a mountain.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So if they have that and they can use that on a known specific structure, they know the dimensions of it, and then they get a reading that’s the exact dimensions of that specific structure, it’s because technology works. Right.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But they don’t want to even entertain it because it’s too crazy. Like, if what he’s saying about what’s underneath the pyramids is correct, the whole timeline’s gone. Like everything’s gone. Like, it’s like, okay, yep, we don’t know s*.

The Second Sphinx Discovery

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: He just basically announced that he discovered a second Sphinx. And if you look at the layout of the Giza Plateau, it actually makes sense that a second Sphinx would be there. The structures under the pyramid are very difficult to prove out because you have to dig or excavate under the pyramid to do that. The second Sphinx, if it’s there, is simply buried by a pile of sand. So that would be a very easy thing to dig out and to prove — yes, Filippo Biondi’s technology is showing something that’s actually there.

JOE ROGAN: What does the second Sphinx look like in the images?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: He just had a conference in Italy, and his translated version of his talk at this conference just came out, I think, yesterday. Or the day before. And he shows all of these scans that he’s done from space. And he kind of puts them together and shows the shape of the structure that he’s seeing under the ground looks a whole lot like the existing Sphinx.

And he actually used AI and ran probabilities against his scans. So he went to Grok and Google Gemini and all of the different AIs and effectively said, “If you look at my data, what do you think the odds are of a Sphinx being under the sand?” And AI came back in almost every instance higher than 80% probability that it is a Sphinx based on the data that he’s showing. Whoa, that would be incredible.

JOE ROGAN: That seems easy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And like I said, all you have to do is— so when they excavated the tombs that are right next to where Biondi believes the Sphinx is, they took all of the sand from those and piled it directly on top of the Sphinx, not knowing it was there. And so you just need to move this sand out of the way and dig down, and you can prove whether it’s there or not.

JOE ROGAN: Haven’t people disputed that, though? Like, aren’t there some photos where that mound didn’t exist from, like, the 1930s or something?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Right. Yeah. So that’s when they excavated those tombs. They took that sand and they piled it there. So initially, when Biondi talked about this, like on Matt Bell’s podcast, when he announced this, people came out immediately and said what he thinks he’s seeing is actually a modern pile of soil. But what he’s showing is below that in his scans.

So I think it’s a big opportunity for the people in Egypt to go out, do a little mission, dig down, see what’s there, and you can prove — yes. The Dream Stele, all of these, a lot of these different traditions talk about 2 sphinxes. And the geometry from the air, you can see where he believes he found the Sphinx — geometrically, it looks very similar to where the first Sphinx was found in relation to the different pyramids.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: So yeah, I think it’s like—

JOE ROGAN: Go back to that. Just talking about it. I know, but they say it’s false. Well, I love how they say that “viral claims of second buried Sphinx at Giza are false, archaeologists say.” Well, how do you know if you didn’t dig? How do you know? And again, the Sphinx was buried. This is like what’s really important. Like when Napoleon found it, it was buried, right? So that was what— what year was that? I don’t know. What year is Napoleon? 17s? 1700s. I could see the head though, right? Yeah, that’s it. Just that.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. So if the entire Sphinx— yeah, if the entire Sphinx is buried, I guess my point is it’s very hard to prove his claims of what’s under the pyramids because that’s a—

JOE ROGAN: Look, there’s a picture of that.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: That’s a real excavation in color.

JOE ROGAN: So I mean, you could easily see, given a different geographic layout, a different topographical layout, that if the whole body could be covered— well, if you’re in a different place and the sand comes in in a different way and it piles up even higher—

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s on the west side of the Giza Plateau. The current Sphinx is on the east side, and then you have the 2 pyramids in the middle.

JOE ROGAN: So it is possible that sand could have just covered that over thousands and thousands of years.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Absolutely. And it would be easy to prove that it’s there.

JOE ROGAN: Or that it’s not.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Or that it’s not. Or that Biondi’s full of s*. Yeah. Or maybe he’s not, right?

JOE ROGAN: He might not be. Well, they have also found chambers inside the Sphinx that they know are real.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So chambers that are proven that they know exist, this technology also shows them.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And in Biondi’s new scans, he also shows cavities inside that Sphinx.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

AI, LiDAR, and the Future of Archaeological Discovery

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: What he believes are— okay. So it’s really exciting. And I think, if you think about where this field is going in the next 5 or 10 years, and think about the opportunities with AI and all of this technology — look what was uncovered in Cambodia with LiDAR. Look what’s happening in Egypt with scans from space.

If you take AI and you start to compile — I used to work for a mining company, and mining companies use LiDAR, or forestry companies, or environmental companies, they all scan the Earth with LiDAR. If you could use AI to compile all of the scans all over the world, imagine what you could start to identify that nobody’s identified before as ancient structures. I think you could fundamentally change this discussion in the next 5 years just using AI and different kinds of technology that we’ve never been able to do in human history. We can translate untranslatable texts.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’ve seen that. I’ve seen what’s really fascinating when they do these scans of scrolls from Pompeii. Have you seen that?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The Vesuvius Project?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s amazing. Like, they’re completely wrapped. And they’re covered with ash. Like, they’re super delicate, but they’ve been able to use scans to actually read the text on those scrolls.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s amazing.

JOE ROGAN: Incredible.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And there’s an incredible amount of ancient texts that have been untranslated. What is hidden in there?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Not just the languages that we don’t know how to translate, like Rongorongo script in Easter Island, but translatable script that nobody’s paid attention to. The thousands of Sanskrit writings — what’s hidden in there?

JOE ROGAN: Right.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I think it’s a really exciting time to do this work, and I personally believe in the next 10 years, there are going to be extraordinary discoveries that I think it’s going to be very hard to argue that we need to at least reexamine our history.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, without a doubt. I think that’s already the case. Thanks to people like you, and thanks to people that are making these videos where you could see this — it’s just so puzzling. I mean, the timeline doesn’t make any sense. It also doesn’t make any sense in terms of a linear timeline of technology. Like, what were they using? How did they move this stuff?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And why?

JOE ROGAN: Why? Yeah, why?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Why were they building these things? Why were they building them where they were building them?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Sacred Sites and the Energy of Ancient Places

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: If you think of the Earth like a human body, were these sites built on the acupuncture points of Earth? They were built in highly energetic places. When you go to these sites, you feel different. People describe spontaneous healings. I have different dreams when I visit these ancient sites. I do a lot of meditations. And when you meditate on top of a pyramid in Cambodia, you drop in immediately. You are, as a human, resonating with these sites in a way that you don’t when you’re not at them. And so I believe personally that they were building these sites in these places for a reason.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it makes sense. And the idea that different places don’t have different energy is just one of those things that people like to say — that we’ve got a clear understanding of what energy is and what is different about these different places. It’s just different geology. It’s just there’s nothing special. There’s nothing.

But we don’t really know that. There’s so many things that we can’t measure, and we definitely don’t understand why certain places have a different effect on human beings. I mean, just wilderness has a different effect on human beings. Forest bathing is a real thing. Hugging trees actually is good for you. Grounding, walking barefoot on ground is actually good for you. And we don’t truly understand why. There’s something in some way that we’re connected to the earth that we don’t quite understand.

A Wilderness Quest and the Healing Power of Silence

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Right after I left my corporate life, I did basically a wilderness quest. Picture it like a Native American vision quest where I spent 4 days on the side of a mountain with no food, no tent, nothing — just a journal and myself for 4 days with no food.

JOE ROGAN: Why did you do that?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It was because I needed to heal from the corporate life that I had lived. I needed to recover.

JOE ROGAN: I’m bad at jobs. How bad are jobs that it’s better to have no food and be sitting on a mountain for 4 days to get your head straight?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: What I’ll say about that experience is I think that humans don’t let themselves get completely silent any longer. So what you’re saying about nature healing you — over the course of 3 days, your body gets very weak and the voices get a lot quieter. And suddenly, really, the only thing you hear is your soul or God or whatever word you have for it. And you watch the stars pass at night and you’re sitting there all day. And it was one of the most special experiences I’ve ever had.

JOE ROGAN: Did you bring water? What did you do?

Ancient Wisdom and Lost Civilizations

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You have basically 3 liters of water per day that you hike into this area and you just sit with the water and that’s it. The last night of it was really cool because what you’re supposed to do, it’s meant to be a healing and kind of rebirth. Right? So the last night you set up rocks in a circle, and you, at sunset, you enter the middle of the circle. And you’re keeping an all-night vigil. So you’re watching, you literally watch the constellations move all night. And you’re supposed to try— I succeeded, but barely— to stay awake until the sun comes up.

And so the idea is that you’re entering as one person, and you’re leaving the next morning as another person. And so the Native Americans with their vision quests, they’re doing it right. I think that we have completely lost our connection and ability to tune into ourselves and to tune into the earth. And quests like that are really amazing.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. And it’s being blunted every day by phones and TVs and screens and Wi-Fi.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Just flipping through TikTok. It’s different than sitting with yourself in complete silence.

JOE ROGAN: What a complete polar opposite to corporate life.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes. Yeah. Thank God. Corporate life has its place, but yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it has its place. I want an iPhone. Yeah. Somebody’s got to make a laptop.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Totally. And people need to make a living, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s just there’s other ways. Not for everybody. I mean, we need people to not get it so that they keep working. So we have stuff.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep, exactly. Or, at least to spend a portion of their life doing that.

Ancient Structures and the Cosmos

JOE ROGAN: And then, well, when you think about ancient civilizations and how much time they spent in ritual and how important these things were to them and how they had this very strange connection, like a lot of these ancient structures, particularly the Aztec structures and Egyptian structures, they mirror the constellations. And so, they had an understanding of their place in this universe. They knew how to make these temples so that the pillars— the summer solstice, the sun would part through the middle of the pillars and light these corridors. Like, that’s incredible sophistication. That’s incredible planning. This understanding of when the sun’s coming up exactly at a specific time of the year was the longest day of the year, to the knowledge that the sun’s moving in the sky, but it’ll be back on this day, and this is where it’s got to be, so this is where we have to build.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And they encoded that in stone.

JOE ROGAN: And they didn’t miss. They didn’t get it off by half a foot or 6 inches. No, it’s like right there. Sun in the center, right up the middle. Like, how did you do that?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: How did you do that? You did that while you were hunter-gathering? Like, what are you talking about? This is bananas.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: In the spring equinox, the sun rises exactly over the center tower of Angkor Wat. Like, perfect. They knew. They knew exactly what was happening, and they built their structures around it. Which gets back to the why, right? Like, yes, how did they build this? It’s mind-blowing. But why did they build it? Why did they build it the way that they did? Why did they build it where they did?

JOE ROGAN: Look at that.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Isn’t that incredible?

JOE ROGAN: That is bananas.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Look at all the people just straight, straight up the east side.

JOE ROGAN: What are the odds? I mean, they’re pretty small that you would nail it like that.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You definitely get fired if you were off a little bit.

JOE ROGAN: That is crazy. It’s so crazy. It’s so crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The ancients were really in tune.

Disconnection from the Ancient World

JOE ROGAN: What was it like? I mean, how much time do you spend thinking about what society must have been like then?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Almost every day.

JOE ROGAN: I wonder what humans are like if we’re not on this path that we’re on, with propaganda and gaslighting and technology and being inundated with just nonsense all the time and wrapped up in materialism and brands and bullshit and popularity.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I think we’re in touch with each other. I think we’re in touch with the earth. I think we have a deep relationship with God. It’s all of the things that people are still searching for today. We just feel fully disconnected from it. And I think that’s why these ancient sites are so appealing to people, why people travel all over the world to see them. It creates a sense of wonder and awe in us that very few other things do.

The Mayan Civilization and Chichen Itza

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’m really fascinated by the Mayan civilization and the timeline of them because that’s another one that’s really weird. Yeah, like the Mayan structures are so strange. That’s the only place that I’ve been, the only ancient place I’ve been is Chichen Itza. And when you’re walking around, you just go, what were these people like? Like, what was it like living here?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Were you there when you could still climb it?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, me too.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we went in the ’90s. Maybe early 2000s. Yeah, early 2000s. And it was stunning. It’s weird. It feels weird.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: There’s a lot of ancient stuff in Mexico. Yeah, the Olmec things are really mysterious. The Mayan structures, their myths— it’s old in southern Mexico.

JOE ROGAN: Well, how about the Aztec stuff where they didn’t even make those temples? That’s what I didn’t know. I didn’t know that until fairly recently.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I mean, it’s no different than the Khmer in Cambodia.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but at least they said it. They said, “These are the place where the gods were born.” That’s how they described it. Yeah, we attribute those temples to the Aztecs. But they were like, “Nope, they were already here.”

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, well, but then who?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The Incas say the same thing in Peru. “We didn’t build these. These were already here.” But we don’t listen to them. We’re like, “You guys don’t know what you’re talking about. People wrote myths. Those are just stories.”

JOE ROGAN: Silly people.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

Ancient Kings, Timelines, and the Flood

JOE ROGAN: One of the things we talked about the other day was that there’s a bunch of different cultures that have a timeline of the kings, where they ruled for thousands and thousands of years. Like, one king ruled for thousands of years. And then you have the flood, and then you have the ages of these people drops off pretty radically and then becomes a normal age like human beings. And we look at that and we go, “Oh, well, that’s just myth back then.” Until it’s history. And it’s the same texts, like, in the same depictions of these kings, where they have accepted dates— the 5,000-year-ago, 4,000-year-ago kings. “Well, yeah, that guy was real.”

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But these other ones that lived for 3,600 years? “No, that’s not real.”

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Same with the Jains, like I was talking about earlier. There are 24 Tirthankaras. All 24 have lived according to the Jains, but archaeology has only recognized the last 2 of them because those were the only timelines and lifespans that kind of fit. But when you talk about the way back days, that’s just myth.

JOE ROGAN: What do they say their timelines were?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Oh, I mean, millions of years. And the first Tirthankara was over a mile tall.

JOE ROGAN: Oh my God.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: But it’s consistent across the world. The Jains talk about it, the Hindus, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Bible— all of them talk about very long lifespans and giant statures. Is it coincidence that all of our ancient myths talk about the same things? Or might it have been true?

The Book of Enoch and the Nephilim

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, then there’s the Book of Enoch, which Anna Paulina Luna turned me on to. She’s like, “You got to read that.” And I’ve read it twice now. I’m like, this is the most bizarre depiction of a human story. The Watchers came down and mated with the daughters of men and created the Nephilim, who were giants who destroyed and consumed everything, and were wiped out by the flood? What?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And the accepted biblical texts barely hint at that. They still talk about it.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: But the extra-biblical canon— the stories are much more like the Book of Enoch.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: There’s a reason, I think, that those were excluded from the Bible.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they were excluded by rabbis.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I know.

JOE ROGAN: Because they didn’t jive with the Torah, which is hilarious. Like, you get to discover— and they all were in the same caves in Qumran. Like, the version of the Book of Enoch was in the same as the Book of Isaiah. They were all in the same scrolls.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just like, what?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: How do you guys leave this out? Like, imagine if they taught that. At church on Sunday, you’d be like, “What are you saying?”

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. You know, David and Goliath.

JOE ROGAN: The Watchers?

David and Goliath: How Tall Was He Really?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I think it’s interesting that you can totally accept that David and Goliath is a real story. And Goliath was a giant in the Bible.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Right?

JOE ROGAN: How tall was he supposed to be, though? Couldn’t he be like a really big guy from Iceland?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I think he was described— the way that the Hebrews described it is that they made them feel like grasshoppers. The giants, the Nephilim, made them feel— they were like, “We are as if we are grasshoppers.” So I think that they were meant to be very, very large.

JOE ROGAN: It would be really nice if they found a Bigfoot somewhere.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I love Bigfoot.

JOE ROGAN: Not a Bigfoot, not the animal. I mean, like a giant foot, like a stone.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Exactly. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: David and Goliath. So, he was supposed to be 10 feet tall, often calculated as roughly 9 to 10 feet tall. The thing about that is like, people are full of shit and they can make up a story. “The guy was so big, he was 10 feet tall.” Yeah, but meanwhile, he could have been like the Mountain from Game of Thrones. Totally a real person. Yep.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Any of our basketball players today.

JOE ROGAN: Who says he was 6.5 feet tall? Scholars? Dead Sea Scrolls? The Dead Sea Scrolls. So 6 cubits in a span, often calculated as roughly 9 to 10 feet tall in the ancient Hebrew text. Greek and Dead Sea Scrolls texts say 4 cubits in a span. So that’s only 6.5 to 7.5 feet tall, depending on how the cubit was defined. So that makes sense. So, who knows?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: 9 to 10 is pretty big.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, 9 to 10 is big. But if the Dead Sea Scrolls are correct, then it’s only 6.5 feet. So, he’s a basketball player.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s not even a really tall one. There’s— who’s the biggest basketball player now? How tall are they? There’s a kid that’s like 14 that’s almost 8 feet tall.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: What?

Life Extension, Longevity, and the Future of Aging

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know if he’s going to make it to the NBA or anything, but just plop it in. Oh my God, that’s so crazy. That’s so big. So you gotta imagine, but you gotta imagine with technology. So they’re working right now on life extension technology, and they’ve already figured out a way to reverse the age of skin cells, and they’re on their path to being able to stop human aging. And maybe potentially even reverse it.

If that technology becomes implemented— this kid’s 7’9 now. Jeez. 20 years old though, he’s actually playing basketball, but— jeez. So he’s bigger than Goliath by a lot. Goliath would talk shit about him. Write a story about it. He got his ass kicked by a basketball player.

But if you can imagine this technology being implemented in the future and then being refined and then getting to a point where they really have it mastered, like we have with so many medical interventions that we have today, you could get to a point where someone could live to 1,000 years or several thousand years. And if you’re the king, of course, you’re going to want that technology. And you’re also going to be very protected. So you don’t have to worry about dying in other ways unless somebody usurps you.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So the Sumerian Kings List and some of these, like the Zep Tepi List, you look at that and you go, well, what are they saying? Like, why did— why was this guy 6,000 years old?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: How did he rule the country for 30,000 years? That sounds insane.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But it doesn’t sound insane if they master biological aging, which is not impossible. It’s not impossible. Not only is it not impossible, they’re actively working on technology that’s going to allow that to happen in our lifetime.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You think it’s going to happen in our lifetime?

JOE ROGAN: 100%. Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The human quest for immortality.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I think you’re going to extend life. You’re going to extend biological life in a significant manner. And maybe for the sake of looking at things through rose-colored glasses, maybe that’s a good thing. Because one of the things about humans is we barely have enough time to figure out how much of life is bullshit, while you’re wrapped up in it. And then if you have responsibilities, you get married, you have a family, you have a mortgage— there’s no time to recognize how fruitless a lot of your thinking and behavior is, and how stupid a lot of the things that people concentrate on are.

But as you get older and older, you get better at it. I’m way better at it now than I was 20 years ago. Way better, way better at life. I would imagine I’m going to be better still 20 years from now unless I’m decrepit. So 20 years from now, I could be all worn out and my back hurts. Get off my lawn. You get stupid.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Not in my backyard.

JOE ROGAN: You get goofy. You get goofy because you get old and sad and you’re not healthy anymore. But if you were 80 years old and healthy like a healthy 30-year-old, you’re wise at that point. You have an immense amount of life experience.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Totally.

JOE ROGAN: And then if you live another 100 years on top of that, you go, oh my God, I was so stupid when I was 80. Back when I was 80, I thought I had it nailed. But now that I’m 180, now I see.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The question is, if your lifespan is expected to be 200 years, then do you work until you’re 160? So does it just expand the stages that we’re all going through now and you just work longer?

JOE ROGAN: Well, it depends on what work is. So if work is your love, why not? It really depends on what work is. So if it’s hard labor, that doesn’t sound fun. I don’t want to be an 800-year-old roofer. It seems like, geez, my hands are going to be so brittle.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: But if you’re going to live to 1,200 years, you’ve still got a long retirement.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think retirement’s out the window if you can stay healthy. Because the whole idea of retirement is like, why are we retiring? We’re retiring because we hate our jobs.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, well, maybe if you loved your job, you wouldn’t want to retire.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Totally.

JOE ROGAN: George Carlin died on the road. He died in a hotel room, I think in Las Vegas.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You know, and you hear lots of stories of people working their entire careers, retiring, and then promptly dying. Oh yeah, within 6 months they have a heart attack and they die. And they had all these big plans and they just never see them through.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They just feel like the end is near and that the creeping doom, the existential angst in the back of your head is probably contributing to a lot of your decay.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Because you’ve kind of checked out. That happens a lot with spouses. The husband dies and the wife dies shortly thereafter. My grandparents— my grandmother died and my grandfather died within a year.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. That’s what happens when the woman dies first.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. It’s so much harder for the man to live without her.

JOE ROGAN: Is it?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, I think so.

JOE ROGAN: Why is that?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I mean, if you think of all the old widows, the women live— my grandpa died 15 years ago and my grandma’s 93. She’s still living. She’s still going.

JOE ROGAN: That’s interesting.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: She knew how to cook for herself and clean and things like that. But had it been reversed, I’m not sure that he would have lived that long.

JOE ROGAN: Maybe so. Depends on the relationship. I’ve seen a lot of relationships with older couples where the woman becomes like the caretaker. I think dudes get dumber quicker when they get older.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: No comment.

JOE ROGAN: They’re just worn out by the time they hit 80. A lot of times the wife tells them things like, “Okay, you’re right, you’re right.” And then they just fall into that role where the wife is in charge of everything.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Have you seen the stats on the expected lifespan of a man that’s married versus not married?

JOE ROGAN: No.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Jamie, I don’t know these off the top of my head, but they’ve done studies that talk about basically the lifespan extension that happens with men when they have a woman in their life.

JOE ROGAN: Is it longer?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: Interesting.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, then when there’s no woman, it’s filled with cocaine and hookers, so that exactly takes years off your life.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And lots of burgers and beer. You’re not eating a salad, right?

JOE ROGAN: Loneliness is worse than cigarette smoking. They found that.

Loneliness, Connection, and the Human Need for Community

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Totally.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, loneliness is like one of the worst things that can happen to people. And the term spirituality is kind of tainted in a lot of ways because there’s a lot of goofy people that use that. Like, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.”

The term unfortunately has like a stink to it. But there is a connection that we have to each other that’s not as simple as we would like to think. We need each other. We need each other in very profound ways, and it’s actually important for our survival.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s why the worst thing they could do to you in prison is put you in solitary confinement.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: We are a pack animal.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. We’re supposed to be connected to each other, and it’s not a preference thing. That’s why when someone says, “I’m a loner,” I’m like, okay. Either you’re the only one that’s like that, or you’re full of shit, or you want to pretend you’re mysterious. You like to be alone. We attribute strength to that. Like, “Oh, he doesn’t need anybody.”

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And it’s so hard now to build your tribe. You no longer live where your grandparents and your parents lived. You are out there on your own. You’re spending hours on your phone. You have a community that you feel like is a community, but it’s not. You don’t have a tribe anymore.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and then people find their own tribes, and usually they’re political.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they get ideological or religious.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You want to fit in.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and that’s what we do. That’s why when you see so many people that are religious devotees, like, why are they willing to do that? Why are they willing to wear those clothes? Why are they willing to act that way? Well, it’s because everyone’s doing it and you want to be a part of it, and there’s some good feeling of community to where everyone’s kneeling at the same time and saying the same things. There’s something to that that is very profound with human beings.

And if it’s directed in the wrong way, it could be incredibly destructive. But if it’s directed in the right way, if it’s real ceremony and real worship and real openness to the cosmos and to God and to spirituality— like real true understanding, real connection with the universe— then it’s probably a lot better than the way we’re doing it.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: 1,000%. I think that’s why the psychedelics are coming back in such a huge way. It’s people accessing that part of themselves that have been shut down their whole lives.

The Eleusinian Mysteries and Ancient Psychedelic Rituals

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I’m glad you brought that up because I think that’s the missing element, and I think that’s what probably was very prevalent in the ancient times. This is the work of Brian Muraresku. Do you know about his stuff? The Immortality Key?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Oh yeah, yes.

JOE ROGAN: I actually got super fortunate that my family and I were in Greece when he was going to be in Greece. And so I got a tour of Eleusis with him. He took me there and he showed me all the different places, and it feels so strange. Like you’re standing in the place where these people had these Eleusinian mystery ceremonies, and it just feels weird. My family got a little weirded out because I was like holding on to—

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I was like standing there.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Like a connection.

JOE ROGAN: It felt f*ing strange. Like I was holding on— I had my hand on this wall and my daughter was like, “Are you okay?” I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. I just don’t want to talk right now. I just want to sit here and try to soak this in. “Is Daddy upset?” No, no, no, not upset. Like, your dad’s just holding a rock.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s a little destabilizing for a child.

JOE ROGAN: I know, like, “Is Daddy okay?” They thought it was cool too, but it’s hard when you’re 12 or 13. It’s hard to go, “Oh my God, what a special place.” They’re like, “Yep, old stuff. What are we eating?”

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Rocks, cool.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, we took them to the museum in Athens, and one of my daughters loves museums. The other ones couldn’t be bothered. She’s bored by it all. But I was like, “This is crazy. These people lived 2,000 years ago and they made this stuff. You know how nuts this is? How did they do this? What were they doing? What was this society like?”

To be able to just see this, the work of people that they’ve left behind, and you just imagine the amount of time that’s taken place, and then you put yourself back into that timeline— we just assume that this way that we are, this is how people are, because this is how people are today. It’s so hard to put your mind into what it must have been like to live back then.

The Mystery of Ancient Civilizations and Lost Timelines

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: If you go to places— earlier this year, I went to Easter Island and Peru, and both of them are described as the navels of the world. You know, so they have these origin myths in both of these places. And when you’re in these places, you have different dreams. You sleep really well. You feel just good. You feel like you’re on peptides. You know, you just feel, you’re like, oh my gosh, I feel so healthy. I feel healed.

So the land itself where they built a lot of these ancient places is powerful. You know, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we see the Moai in Easter Island built around this absolutely incredible place, or Cusco, which is such a beautiful place that you see these stone walls. I think that they built there because of the energy that was there already.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think was before that? And like, what is this timeline? How far does it go back? Like, what is the origin of sophisticated civilization? Like, what is the year? When does it all start happening?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I wonder sometimes if the purpose of building structures like that is so people like you ask those questions. That’s the whole point. Well, maybe is to blow our minds and get us to think about consciousness and the history of our species. The fact that we’re sitting there having this conversation is because of the stones that were built who knows how long ago.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And maybe that was the point.

JOE ROGAN: It certainly could have been a part of the point, because what we’re doing today, when we talk about our society being sick and superficial and silly, all of our structures are temporary.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And they’re ugly.

JOE ROGAN: Well, some of them are cool looking. I think some are cool.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Some of them, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They’re cool. They’re certainly not Angkor Wat cool.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, they’re cool. But the point is, like, they are all essentially temporary. 1,000 years from now, none of them will exist. They will all be absorbed by the Earth. And that’s hard for people to understand. If you’re walking through Manhattan, you’re like, “This will always be here.” Nope, nope, nope, it won’t. It won’t. If everybody just left and you came back 5,000 years from now, there wouldn’t be sh here.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So then it leads me to this question: the timeline that we’re looking at, if you’re looking at a pre-flood timeline, you know, 11,000, 12,000 years ago, things were sophisticated. Maybe it’s way longer than that, because if you have 100,000 years of super sophisticated civilization, what does that look like?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: What do people look like then? And this is one of the things that people are proposing when they look at anatomically modern human beings. So anatomically modern human beings — and then not these Peru skulls, but whatever, just you and I — they’ve pushed that back now to 1 million years. So, okay, why did it take so long before people just like you and I figured out agriculture, figured out civilization, figured out cities?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: What were we doing that whole time?

JOE ROGAN: What was going on? And is it possible that it’s just when you go back that far, you don’t find anything? You don’t find anything. That seems more likely to me. And when you look at the immense erosion that Ben van Kerkwyk has pointed out to the really older stones in Egypt, where you can clearly see they’ve built on top of them on the outside, when you see this intense erosion, like, this is tens of thousands of years of erosion. Well, what if it’s 100,000? What the f* is left? What if it’s 200,000?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: What’s left from 100,000 years ago? Maybe some stones. Myths and spiritual traditions, or 10,000 years ago. That’s the only thing that makes it through cataclysms: the human stories, spiritual traditions, and these megalithic stones.

JOE ROGAN: And a real cataclysm, if you’re talking about the destruction of civilization itself, how many of those people even know the stories? How many live? How many scholars survive the apocalypse? How many? I mean, we know that 70,000 years ago, the Toba volcano, the supervolcano, wiped people out down to the point of less than 100,000 people on Earth. It’s just 70,000 years ago, right? 100,000 people.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: We have been on the brink so many times.

JOE ROGAN: Can you imagine, like, one Eagles football game, right? Take that crowd. That’s the entire population of Earth now.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, right.

JOE ROGAN: One packed UT game, that’s everybody on Earth. And now we have to branch out and go to China and go to Africa and go everywhere. That’s all the people on Earth.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: That just shows how amazing and resilient we are.

Reevaluating the Conventional Timeline

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and also fragile. And also it really shines a light on the preposterous nature of the conventional timeline. It really does, because it’s like, look guys, there’s so much evidence that there’s holes in the story. At what point in time do you stop and say, look, a lot of these people did great work and they made these conclusions based on the understanding that they had at the time. But as time has gone on, there’s come a point where we have to reevaluate this. And if you don’t reevaluate it, you’re going to lose all the respect of the people that are paying attention.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Totally.

JOE ROGAN: Because there’s too many people that are looking at this and saying, “Hey, no one’s discounting or discrediting your work. No one’s saying you’re a bad person. No one’s saying you’re an idiot.” It’s like, this is what we knew back then. But to say that this is all we know and any new information, as profound as it might be, like 1.2-kilometer structures underneath the Great Pyramids — that doesn’t mean that you’re an idiot. It just means that this is an ongoing thing. It’s not done.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: We haven’t figured it out yet and we’re not going to for a long-ass time. This is a long trek. And as LiDAR improves and as the radio tomography and all these different things that they come up with, and then imagine the advances 10, 20, 30 years from now in their ability to look — look at sub-Saharan Africa. Very little expedition’s been done there. And they’re like, what?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Let’s LiDAR sub-Saharan Africa.

JOE ROGAN: There’s whales there.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I’ve seen the whales.

JOE ROGAN: Whales.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, okay, so they’re incredible.

JOE ROGAN: What the f*? You find whales in the desert? Okay, what else is out there? Is there a city under all that sh? Like, what is that? What is in there?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: You know, it’s funny though, you can reveal cities under the jungle and nobody talks about it, right? You know, they just did that in Cambodia, and it’s not headline news around the world that there are entire cities being found in the Amazon jungle or in Cambodia. It just is one quick headline and then everybody ignores it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s good for us because it gives us great podcast content. You know what I mean? Because it’s the only way people could find out about it. And again, it’s science. The LiDAR scans of the Amazon are spectacular.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Incredible.

JOE ROGAN: And you look at it and you go, oh my God, there was probably millions of people living here. This is not like a bunch of tribal people that are shooting bows and arrows all the time.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: They were engineering the rainforest.

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah, and the fact that more people aren’t talking about this is a little stunning to me, but I just think they don’t get informed. And then they also assume, you know, you see some YouTube headline that’s got big fancy font and people are older than we think. Like, “Oh, go on, I went to Cambridge, f* off.”

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And you have a lot of AI stuff out there that’s just complete bogus.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: So it’s hard to know what the truth is.

Ancient Structures and Hidden Discoveries

JOE ROGAN: Sure. And then there’s a lot of weird stuff, like the Sage Wall in Montana. I’ve watched some videos on that. I’m not convinced. I think that might be a weird geological formation. But it doesn’t look like it. Parts of it really look like it’s stacked stones.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I think that during the Ice Age in North America, it was an extremely harsh time. With walls of ice, right? So if the Younger Dryas happened the way that I believe it happened, North America would have been just almost wiped clean. If there were ancient structures here, they probably didn’t survive the way that they did in Egypt and other places like that.

JOE ROGAN: Certainly not under the glaciers, right? Oh, I just found— what’d you find? I see the middle of the desert here. I’m going to zoom in. Desert. Desert, desert, desert, desert, desert, right? Until— whoa, an ancient fortress!

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: How old is it? How old do they say it is?

JOE ROGAN: No one knows what it is. What? Yeah, they’re assuming that maybe it was a hiding place for Jews when they were being persecuted and taken out of there, but according to this, no explanation. It’s just in the middle of the desert.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Whoa. Sand, straw, and clay.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa. Look at the dunes. Imagine if it didn’t just— imagine deciding to build there in the middle of nowhere.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Why did they build?

JOE ROGAN: What else is around it? You know what’s hiding underneath next to it. God, what did it look like when it was first built? And what is it made out of? Sand? Stone? What is it made out of?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It said sand and clay, which means it’s probably newer.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, sure. But my point is, it’s hiding under the desert and then just in the middle of nowhere and no one— I’ve never heard of it being brought up on here by anybody.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: One big sandstorm and that thing’s gone, right? Buried.

JOE ROGAN: Look at all the sand. Well, the crazy thing is to think that that sand was all jungle and before that it was ocean.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I know, it’s so insane.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Seeing the whales in the middle of the desert is a surreal experience.

JOE ROGAN: Surreal. Have you seen them in person?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. What is that like? How close do they let you get?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Oh, you just walk right up to them. There’s just like little rocks on the ground outlining the skeletons. Wow. But when we were driving out there, they had security concerns. So we had a security car in front of ours, then ours, and one behind us.

JOE ROGAN: Look how bonkers that is.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, it looks like dragons. It’s just otherworldly. It’s so neat.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s a long drive though. It’s like a whole day.

Dragons, Ancient Myths, and Artistic Depictions

JOE ROGAN: Well, the dragons thing is a weird one. Because there’s— this is one of the things that The View made fun of me for. Joy Behar said, “He believes in dragons.” So I changed all my headings of my social media account to “Dragon Believer,” because I think that’s so funny.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: But you and millions of other people around the world, and almost every ancient civilization, believed in dragons.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very odd. It’s very odd that they all have this story of these ancient serpents. But also, they were really bad at their depictions of actual things. And one of the things that I pointed out to Jamie was when I visited Italy a few years ago, I went to this really old church. And they had this stone mosaic artwork that was of Jonah and the Whale. I think that’s what it was, but this whale does not look like a whale. It looks really weird. It’s this really weird-looking thing that’s supposed to represent a whale. Why? Because they never saw a whale. So they’re making their own version of what a whale—

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: —from the stories, right? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: See if you can find that. I know it’s on my Instagram. Super old. I think it was probably 10 years ago. But whatever the f* that is, like, okay, that’s how they— that’s it. Like, look at that thing. Isn’t that dope?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: That doesn’t look like a whale, right?

Dragons, Dinosaurs, and Ancient Artifacts

JOE ROGAN: At all, right?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: But looks like a griffin.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it looks like some kind of a monster that lives in the ocean. So this is like their version of describing what a whale looks like, right? So when they’re describing dragons, like, what are they really describing? Do they actually fly, or are we talking about like crocodiles? Like, what are we talking about? Are we talking about like some sort of extinct dinosaurs that survived, and then, you know, they only made it for a few thousand years ago?

Because there’s things that we know existed during the human timeline that they just don’t exist anymore. They went extinct. Yeah, you know, giant sloths, for instance. There’s a bunch of North American animals, 65% in fact, of all North American megafauna didn’t make it after the Younger Dryas impact.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: So, what is the serpent? What is the dragon? Why does China have one? Why does Japan have one? Why does Eastern Europe have one? Why do so many ancient cultures talk about this one specific thing?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And the Bible references it like 34 times.

The Serpent Across Ancient Cultures

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: What’s interesting though is in most of the ancient civilizations, the serpents or the dragons are meant to be guardian figures, right? So, they were presented in a positive light. They weren’t evil. But in the Bible, the serpent is actually the trickster, you know. So, it’s one of the only traditions in the ancient world where the serpent is— it’s suggested that the serpent is evil.

JOE ROGAN: In Adam and Eve, in that depiction.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, you know, he tricked Eve. Yeah. But in front of all of the temples in Cambodia, there are giant naga, which is like the 7 or 9-headed snakes. And they guard the liminal space between the outside world and the temples. So that’s their purpose, right? When you see a naga, it means you’re entering a temple, you’re entering the zone of the gods. So it was always positive, except for in ancient Christianity.

JOE ROGAN: The King James Version is the version that says dragon, but it’s probably a translation issue, maybe. Ah, interesting. So sea monster, serpent, translated in many modern versions as jackal, sea creature, or monster depending on the context. But dragon often renders Hebrew terms like Tannin, which is a sea monster, serpent. Interesting.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Fire-breathing reptiles.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s just like, what were they? Like, why were there so many versions of this? Was that a real thing? And is it a real thing from 11,000 years ago? Is it a real thing from 20,000 years ago? 50,000 years ago? And again, when it comes to the fossil record, like, how much evidence would there be of that thing existing, right? They didn’t even find dinosaurs until like, what, the 1700s or something, right? Yeah, whenever it was. And then there’s a lot of people that think dinosaurs are fake, which is fun.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: There’s all sorts of rabbit holes you can go down.

Dinosaur Skeletons and Museum Recreations

JOE ROGAN: Well, they have a point in that a lot of what you go to see in the museum is not an actual dinosaur skeleton. It’s a recreation.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Totally.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, because the actual skeletons are probably somewhere else. That is a fact. And then it’s also the fact that they take like portions of it and then they recreate what’s missing and then create a skeleton.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Make a lot of assumptions.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s a lot of assumptions. Yeah, well, this is why in the science museum in Bozeman, Montana — we talked about this before— I went there with my kids once, and they have a raptor. And on one side of the raptor, it’s what we think of, like, from Jurassic Park, that it had, like, scaly skin like a lizard. And the other side, it’s covered in feathers, the bird, which is— yeah, this is the alternative perspective.

This is Gus, the most complete dinosaur T-Rex skeleton, 61% complete, and it is for sale right now. Oh, how much does that cost? You want to guess?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: $20 million?

JOE ROGAN: No, no, more, more. The bids are going up. $80 million. Yeah, I mean, the expected is somewhere in the $65 to $80 million range. Whoa. And it’s 60% complete? 61%. Yeah, so that means you’re getting 39% bullshit when you buy it. I don’t— I think they’ve just left some of it out. Oh, they filled it in. Oh, okay, so that’s what’s left. That’s actually what’s— so there’s some stuff missing.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Doesn’t look like his little arms.

JOE ROGAN: He does, they’re right there. See, there’s some— okay, some stuff, some ribs and shit. That looks pretty— I don’t know, it looks pretty complete. That looks pretty complete. That’s sick. There was a house that I looked at that was for sale in Malibu once, and in the house, they— it came with a dinosaur. If you paid an extra million dollars, you get to keep the dinosaur.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they had a raptor skeleton.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: That seems expensive.

JOE ROGAN: It was a little high. A little high. Well, the house was a little high. It was— it’s probably worth $50 now. Nobody wants to live there.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: I think a lot of times about what it would feel like to be hunted from the sky. Oh, right, the pterodactyls. Yeah, sometimes you’ll be hiking in the desert and you’ll see a hawk fly over you and you’ll get that shadow.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And just imagine if it’s just this massive hunter just coming for you. There’s nothing you can do, right?

JOE ROGAN: When did those die off too? Gus has some bite marks on his ribs. Whoa, that’s crazy. I wonder if that’s postmortem fossilized bite marks.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, that could have been somebody scavenging him.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, could have been. So Trinity— so it’s valued between $20 million and $30 million, the highest presale estimate ever placed on a dinosaur at auction. Yeah, I think there’s already some higher bids than that though currently. I bet there’s a lot of dorks out there with a lot of money want that shit in their house.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: People love to touch history.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, Elon’s probably going to have that shit at SpaceX.

Show and Tell: Ancient Arrowheads and Spear Points

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Oh, do you want to touch some history?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, sure. Yeah.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Okay, I brought you a little show-and-tell. Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Ooh, exciting.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: So I grew up in western Nebraska. On a giant corn farm. This is called a Jimmy Allen point. This is 9,500 years old.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s a spear point. So it was being chipped basically when Göbekli Tepe was at the height of its building. Wow. 8,500 to 9,500 years old. My grandpa had a load of rock delivered to his house, and that was in it. So they would dredge this river rock from the rivers, the Platte River, and deliver it to your house. And he found that in his yard.

JOE ROGAN: Holy sh*t.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Isn’t that an incredible experience? That’s amazing to touch it.

JOE ROGAN: That’s amazing. I don’t know how old this one is, but this is from here.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Oh yes, that’s a pretty good one.

JOE ROGAN: This is actually better. This one’s really—

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: That one’s substantially older than this. Yeah, I bet this is 2,000 years old. That one’s almost 10.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: So I’m going to show you something else. It’s just a part of one, but this is part of a Folsom point, which is 12,700 years old. So that was definitely created to hunt something that’s extinct now. You can see the flute up the middle and look at the work on the sides of it. Wow.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: It’s the most incredible stonework. And you see that over time. It went from Clovis to Folsom and then down the line to points like this. And it just, you know, became— yeah. So those are— this would have looked like that if it was full. Wow. You’re seeing the central flute on this one. But both of these were found out on my farm.

JOE ROGAN: That’s pretty amazing.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, I saw you talking to Taylor Sheridan about arrowheads, and I thought to myself, I wonder if Joe would like to hold a 9,500-year-old spear point.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I did love it. Thank you. Thank you for letting me hold that. That’s pretty dope. It’s pretty incredible too when you think about the history of North America, that when Europe and China and all these other parts of the world had developed sophisticated civilizations and machines and all these different things. And these people were living a very nomadic hunter-gatherer life, like essentially in the Stone Age, all the way up to the 1600s, 1700s, until—

Ancient Mounds and Pre-Flood Civilizations in North America

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Except for some of the mounds. So some of the mound structures, like in Louisiana, I think those are about 9,000 years old, I believe. And those are massive platforms, right? Like earthworks that are almost at least unexplainable for why they would have built them. And that was pretty old. I don’t think any of them have been dated to pre-flood.

JOE ROGAN: So this is post-flood, whoever was here. So if people lived here, so the White Sands, New Mexico footprints are all pre-flood.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: That’s 23,000. Yep.

JOE ROGAN: One thing that’s interesting is those people were barefoot. Right? So, the question is, like, what was sophisticated civilization like in North America then? Because it seems like North America in particular, because of the fact that up until 11,000 years ago was covered in ice— most of North America was covered in like a mile high of ice. It’s so hard for us to think. Chicago, gone.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Can you imagine?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, gone. Montana, gone. Yeah, everything’s gone. Colorado gone. Yeah, everything’s completely covered in a mile of ice. And then 11,000 years ago, it all goes away real quick, and then you have the Great Lakes. Yeah, which is so strange. And then if you look at Randall Carlson’s done an amazing job of like sort of illuminating like what kind of a mass of water it would have sent rushing through the entire country.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: At the time that these things were almost instantaneously melted. Like, how insane that must have been if huge asteroidal impacts slammed into these ice caps.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: 2 miles of ice looks like next to a city. Oh my God. That’s so crazy that everything that we see when you drive through Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa, all that was under all that.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, my husband’s from North Idaho, and you can see all of the ancient remains of these lakes, you know, these ice dams that burst. Yeah, just float over the landscape. And I think Randall Carlson is especially gifted in describing these events. Yeah, making it real for us.

The Younger Dryas Impact and the End of Ancient Civilization

JOE ROGAN: Well, he’s obsessed, and he spent so much— when I met him, I met him in Georgia. Well, I did a show in Atlanta, and I met him like 2005 or something like that, and he was explaining it to me back then. And I had never heard that before. I was like, what? Like, that was my first introduction to the Younger Dryas Impact Theory. And that’s when it started putting all the pieces together. Okay, well, that’s what ended civilization. That’s the— and now that we know that that’s a real event, because of core samples, because the, you know, they’ve been found, they find layers of iridium, which is very common in space, very rare on Earth, and these micro diamonds that appear when you have impacts.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: The black mat. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They know that it happened. So some big events happened. I think they think 11,800 years ago, and they think again, like 10,000 years ago. They think it happened more than once.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Would kind of make sense that it took so long for civilization to reemerge.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. And the question is, did that civilization that was alive at the time know that it was coming? Right. And what did they do to prepare?

JOE ROGAN: Right. Or could they have even?

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: And did they know that probably the only thing that was going to be left after that is stone? So what is encoded in that stone for us to read today?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s the weirdness of things like Egypt. When you look at the pyramids and the dimensions and how the dimensions align with the, you know, the dimensions of Earth and the distances to the moon. And yeah, it’s all— the whole thing’s very weird. It’s very weird.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Doesn’t seem like coincidence. No, it seems like they knew exactly what they were doing. And what is the, you know, the one language that’s going to survive? Geometry, math, right? Astrology, right?

JOE ROGAN: It’s universal.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Stones are the things that are going to survive. Myths, right? So it’s messages being passed down to us today. And now people are looking and paying attention, and just, it’s a complete obsession for me. I don’t know how anybody thinks of anything else besides ancient history.

JOE ROGAN: Once I get into it, I feel the same way. It’s too amazing.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah, I mean, it’s too amazing.

JOE ROGAN: It’s certainly a puzzle. And if it wasn’t for people like you and other people that are doing similar things, most people would be very blissfully unaware of how nutty what the actual physical history of the Earth is.

The Power of the Modern Age in Uncovering Ancient History

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Yeah. And, you know, until recently, a lot of this— first of all, people couldn’t travel around the world. They couldn’t read scripts that weren’t in their language. Archaeologists were exploring sites and their papers were going to the universities. And so, we didn’t have the opportunity to see these global patterns the way that we do now.

To link, okay, I see the same thing in Egypt that I see in India. Like this 1,000-ton statue is in India, and it’s also in Egypt. What about these walls? They’re the same. I don’t think it was as easy to do that back in the day. You know, even the people that were deep into the research in Egypt in the 1800s, they weren’t traveling to Peru.

So we are at a very unique time in history where we can look across all of it, especially in the next 10 years when we’re leveraging AI and other technologies from space-based scanning or whatever, I think it’s going to fundamentally change the way that we view the history of the world.

JOE ROGAN: I think so too. And so thank you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your channel. And thank you for all your interest in this because it’s absolutely fascinating.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Thank you for having me on. This was so fun.

JOE ROGAN: My pleasure. Let’s do it again.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Okay. Would love that. All right.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you.

CASSIE COPPERSMITH: Bye, everybody.

Related Posts

• Transcript: FBI Director Kash Patel Interview on American Thought Leaders
• All-In Interview: w/ Saronic Co-Founders Dino Mavrookas & Vibhav Altekar (Transcript)
• Transcript of Andrew Wilson Interview: Joe Rogan Experience #2535
• Transcript of Darryl Cooper Interview on Iran Deep Dive: Tucker Carlson Show
• Transcript of Elizabeth Lane Interview on Propaganda Network: Tucker Carlson Show