#2528 - Cassie Coppersmith

**Joe Rogan** (0:01)
Joe Rogan Podcast, checking in. The Joe Rogan Experience.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:14)
Very nice to meet you.

**Cassie Coppersmith** (0:15)
Nice to meet you.

**Joe Rogan** (0:15)
I've enjoyed your content online.

**Cassie Coppersmith** (0:17)
Thank you.

**Joe Rogan** (0:19)
I got first introduced to you by a video you did with his channel's Megalithic Marvels. Yes. And it was about ancient Chinese artifacts that don't make any sense. Yes. And it was so fascinating. The moment I saw it, I reached out to my guy. I was like, I got to talk to her because this is crazy.
So please explain to people what these artifacts are and what's so bizarre about them.

**Cassie Coppersmith** (0:44)
I first saw these artifacts in the British Museum. So they have an entire whole wall full of them. And they're made of nephrite jade, which is an extremely hard stone. And they just look, they look machined. They look way too precise for the tools that they say built them. So I started doing some research. I haven't been to the site in China. It was built by the Lanzhou culture, so archaeologists say.
But it's two different kinds of artifacts that are really famous. One is called a sung tube, which is a tall tube that's circular in the middle and square on the outside. And extremely precise geometry. The other one are these big round B disks that almost look like a giant flat doughnut that are perfectly flat on top. You know, there's the precision versions of these, just like you see all over the world, and there are versions that are much cruder. So it almost seems like the civilization had this. My theory is that these were not unlike the hard stone vases in Egypt. So it was something that this culture either was gifted or found, and it turned into a very cherished object, like a grave good for them. So you find these tombs in Lanzhou, China, that have literally thousands of these jade artifacts in them.
And it's not unlike the hard stone vases that you see in Egypt, where you find those in the graves as well.

**Joe Rogan** (2:21)
So what's the timeline where these pieces are attributed to?

**Cassie Coppersmith** (2:25)
So these are really old. I mean, the earthworks and the community around the Lanzhou culture is securely dated by archaeologists to like 3400 BC. And then, you know, just so it's about the same actually, as the graves that were in Egypt with the hard stone bases. So it's very, very old.

**Joe Rogan** (2:51)
And at the time of this culture, what were their tools? Like, do we know?

**Cassie Coppersmith** (2:57)
Well, the archaeologists say that it was made with strings. So they would take strings with sand or some sort of an abrasive, and they would cut the jade that way. And then they would use copper tools, stone hammers, those kinds of things, to shape it.
So the explanation doesn't make a lot of sense. Even the hole down the middle of the B-disc is a perfect... I mean, you can see the drill marks on the inside of the B-disc.

**Joe Rogan** (3:28)
Do we have some images of these things? Yes.

**Cassie Coppersmith** (3:31)
Jamie, I have a China folder.

**Joe Rogan** (3:34)
Because the images on... And by the way, that channel, Megalithic Marvels, Derek's channel, excellent. Really fun. So great. Great stuff. Yeah.

**Cassie Coppersmith** (3:41)
Derek is the one that got me into all of this.

**Joe Rogan** (3:43)
Shout out to Derek.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:44)
Shout out to Derek.

**Joe Rogan** (3:45)
So this is... How do you say it? How do you pronounce that? V-disc. V-disc. V-i-disc.
And how big is this?

**Cassie Coppersmith** (3:53)
So that thing's about nine inches across. Perfectly circular, perfectly flat surface on the top.

**Joe Rogan** (4:00)
Like measured to what tolerance?

**Cassie Coppersmith** (4:04)
You know, I don't know the answer to that, and I don't know that there have been a lot of deep scientific studies on the precision of these, right? The archaeologists assume that this culture made them with bamboo and strings.

**Joe Rogan** (4:18)
Okay.

**Cassie Coppersmith** (4:19)
So yeah, that picture, Jamie, you can see the inside of the actual artifact in the bottom right. That's drilled.

**Joe Rogan** (4:28)
Yeah.

**Cassie Coppersmith** (4:28)
Right? And the one on the left is an experiment these archaeologists ran with a bamboo core down the middle of the jade, and you can see the difference between the two.

**Joe Rogan** (4:39)
How far did they get down with the bamboo experiment?

**Cassie Coppersmith** (4:43)