Joe Rogan Talks Lost Super-Civilizations with Yet Another Pseudoscience YouTuber

​Joe Rogan was at it again this week with a podcast exploring archaeological conspiracy theories. This time, Rogan interviewed Cassie Coppersmith, a YouTuber who makes videos about ancient stone constructions that average around 25,000 views apiece as of this writing. Other than appearing on other minor pseudohistorians’ podcasts, I can’t find any reference to her anywhere, so I imagine her Rogan appearance was her big moment in the sun. She doesn’t have much to say to Rogan that we haven’t heard before. Her schtick is the usual fringe ideas that rocks are too hard and too heavy for ancient people to have carved and transported without advanced modern technology. But her real purpose in appearing on the show was to give Rogan an excuse to rant about how much he loves Graham Hancock and just how unfair all those evil academics are for not accepting ideas without real evidence.

Coppersmith, who cites UnchartedX YouTuber Ben van Kerkwyk as her entry point into fabricated pseudohistory, follows the Graham Hancock playbook. (Jimmy Corsetti, Michael Button, Luke Caverns, and a host of other YouTubers get praise and shout-outs, too.) Here she is telling Rogan why archaeologists are not “investigating” the obvious prehistoric megalithic culture she sees at every site she visits:

You know, there’s carbon dating that only goes partway down. You know they 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. Um, so it’s become a theme with my work where I’ll go somewhere specifically with the megalithic architecture. You can 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 looks like just a copy of what’s underneath. It’s like they were really trying to make what they saw, but they just couldn’t.

​Later in the podcast, she claims that the lowest levels are “pre-Flood,” referencing Noah’s deluge.
 
This is straight out of Graham Hancock with a touch of creationism, and just as wrong now as it was then. As should be obvious, carbon dating doesn’t work that way. You can’t carbon date stone for one thing, but even assuming she means organic material, what would it even mean to carbon date “part way down”? The location of the material dated is noted in reports and, again, wouldn’t mean anything if it wasn’t connected to a specific construction level.
 
But what gets me is that idea that it is shocking that the biggest stones are on the bottom. Where do you think they are going to go? Balanced on top of tiny ones? Poorer quality restoration and repair work often appears above older construction because, almost by definition, those final, slapdash efforts are the last layer put on and thus are visible at the top. It’s not unlike all the medieval stonework that used to sit on top of the higher quality ancient Greek constructions on the Acropolis before the Greek government removed them.
 
My favorite part came a bit later when Coppersmith said she built her ideas by using A.I. to translate inscriptions on Cambodian temples to prove archaeologists are falsifying them. I didn’t quite understand when she said that “they’ve all been translated from Sanskrit to French,” but I think she is implying that she is actually translating published academic translations from French sources by having A.I. render them into English. Now, I’ve experimented with having A.I. assist in translation (and clearly note where I have done so), but I have a healthy respect for the limits of that approach and would never attempt to argue that archaeologists are lying about royal inscriptions (“putting words in their mouths”) based on a translation of a translation by machine in languages I don’t understand. If you want to make a radical revisionist argument, you need to have a command of the languages involved. What’s more likely, that every archaeologist is lying about what the Sanskrit inscriptions say or that Coppersmith doesn’t understand the idioms and culture of the Khmer rulers and thus the expressions they used in their inscriptions?
 
Later, Rogan would mention that Filippo Biondi apparently used ChatGPT and Grok to conclude there was a second Sphinx at Giza, suggesting that A.I. will prove a lost civilization right and archaeologists wrong.
 
At any rate, it’s hard to find the enthusiasm to write about three hours of a podcaster discussing things he barely understands with a YouTuber who is a knockoff of other YouTubers who were in turn rehashing Graham Hancock. We got a section where Coppersmith and Rogan discuss their believe that the elders of archaeology who are “giving out the PhDs” are “all about the timeline” and trying to defend their life’s work against revision—you know, the usual Graham Hancock-style conspiracy theory—leading into a long laundry list of complaints about the evils of academia and how they “attack” Hancock and Robert Schoch and refuse to accept their ideas.
 
In a very weird portion of the interview, Coppersmith tells Rogan that ancient people had bigger brains and that by “unlocking” their brain capacity, they might have had telekinetic powers—again, another Hancock idea, but one that comes from the false notion that we only use 10% of our brains, as filtered through the only thing that means anything to these idiots, movies:

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? Right? 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%.
 
Rogan: Like Limitless.
​
Coppersmith: Exactly like the Bradley Cooper movie. Remember?
 
Rogan: Yeah. And he kept the same size head.
 
Coppersmith: Or the movie Lucy with Scarlett Johansson.
 
Rogan: That’s the best one.
 
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 head-boarding. They were the elite. They were maybe building some of these structures. Who knows? And if you are if you are just an average Joe in that community, you want to look like them, right? All of us do it, right?
 
Rogan: Especially the elites of the time.
 
Coppersmith: Yeah.
 
Rogan: Especially the humans that you know were the kings and the pharaohs and all these different people. They wanted to have those heads.
 
Coppersmith: Mhm. Yep. There were some really interesting …
 
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 retrarded Joe Rogan shows where he’s talking to crazy people.”

Human brain size is not correlated directly to intelligence, not that either of them know this. Worse, she and Rogan speculate that the bodies of miniature, large-headed Grey alien-styles humans will never be found because they were so enlightened they destroyed their corpses and returned the dust to the Earth.
 
Along the way, a couple of hours in, Coppersmith and Rogan get to the underlying point beneath their shared fantasy of a lost race of pyramid builders. They agree that the “powers that be” (those nasty academics and the politicians who fund them—cough, ha!, cough, “fund”!—have they seen what politicians are doing to universities?) are trying to suppress Graham Hancock’s vision of a lost “Golden Age” because our society is “sick” and the elites don’t want the common man to recognize that he is heir a vanished spiritual world of enlightenment and flying rocks and communion with the gods because then they might stop working for billionaires and demand political change. “If you can convince today's society that we are the best we’ve ever been,” Rogan said, “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’ve ever been.”
 
Has he met Donald Trump? The whole conceit of Make America Great Again is that we are not the best we have ever been. Rogan is, of course, expressing a desire to restore the Christian notion of the Fall as a moral guidepost toward reorganizing society around a return to some imagined prelapsarian glory in his pseudoscientific version of the antediluvian world. The details get mixed up in the New Age version—since the time of Donnelly’s Atlantis, Eden has become conflated with the antediluvian civilization, despite God specifically declaring that civilization wicked in Genesis—and merged with Hindu ideas about cyclical time and the return of a golden age, but the general thrust is the same as it ever way: The past was better, and we must go back to a time before sin, when the divine intermingled with humanity.
 
There is more… so much more. If it was on Ancient Aliens, they discussed it, from Zep Tepi to pyramids constellation maps, from the Younger Dryas Impact to Sumerian kings with millennia-long lives, from psychedelics to dragons. And they accept the most speculative ideas about all of these. Dragons, Joe, aren’t the same the world over. The giant snakes of Greek mythology (δράκοντες) aren’t the same as the four-footed winged lizards of medieval legend or the multi-species hybrid creatures of Asian lore. “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?” he asks. No, Joe, it was not. You’re thinking of Games of Thrones.
 
They end a slight disagreement about whether the lost civilization vanished due to Noah’s Flood or the Younger Dryas comet—neither of which existed—but agree that this civilization was real and vanished without any trace but the stones Joe Rogan thinks humans were too lazy or too stupid to move.