Lex Fridman Podcast
#446 – Ed Barnhart: Maya, Aztec, Inca, and Lost Civilizations of South America
Mon, 30 Sep 2024
Ed Barnhart is an archaeologist and explorer specializing in ancient civilizations of the Americas. He is the Director of the Maya Exploration Center, host of the ArchaeoEd Podcast, and lecturer on the ancient history of North, Central, and South America. Ed is in part known for his groundbreaking work on ancient astronomy, mathematics, and calendar systems. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep446-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/ed-barnhart-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Ed's YouTube: https://youtube.com/@archaeoedpodcast Ed's Website: https://archaeoed.com/ Maya Exploration Center: https://mayaexploration.org Ed's Lectures on The Great Courses: https://thegreatcoursesplus.com/edwin-barnhart Ed's Lectures on Audible: https://adbl.co/4dBavTZ 2025 Mayan Calendar: https://mayan-calendar.com/ SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: MasterClass: Online classes from world-class experts. Go to https://masterclass.com/lexpod Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex NetSuite: Business management software. Go to http://netsuite.com/lex AG1: All-in-one daily nutrition drinks. Go to https://drinkag1.com/lex Notion: Note-taking and team collaboration. Go to https://notion.com/lex OUTLINE: (00:00) - Introduction (08:59) - Lost civilizations (16:04) - Hunter-gatherers (19:36) - First humans in the Americas (29:28) - South America (34:57) - Pyramids (42:01) - Religion (55:05) - Shamanism (57:02) - Ayahuasca (1:03:15) - Lost City of Z (1:08:09) - Graham Hancock (1:15:11) - Uncontacted tribes (1:21:12) - Maya civilization (1:37:00) - Mayan calendar (1:52:17) - Flood myths (2:20:46) - Aztecs (2:38:12) - Inca Empire (2:56:13) - Early humans in North America (3:02:10) - Columbus (3:06:46) - Vikings (3:10:55) - Aliens (3:15:23) - Earth in 10,000 years (3:31:33) - Hope for the future PODCAST LINKS: - Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast - Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr - Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 - RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ - Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4 - Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
Full Episode
The following is a conversation with the founding members of the Cursor team, Michael Truel, Swale Asif, Arvid Lundmark, and Aman Sanger. Cursor is a code editor based on VS Code that adds a lot of powerful features for AI-assisted coding. It has captivated the attention and excitement of the programming and AI communities.
So I thought this is an excellent opportunity to dive deep into the role of AI in programming. This is a super technical conversation that is bigger than just about one code editor. It's about the future of programming and in general, the future of human AI collaboration in designing and engineering complicated and powerful systems. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Encore for unifying your machine learning stack, Masterclass for learning, Shopify for selling stuff online, NetSuite for your business, and AG1 for your health. Choose wisely, my friends.
Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, or take a survey or send me questions for an AMA, all of that would be great. Go to lexgerman.com contact. And now onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
This episode is brought to you by Encore, a platform that provides data-focused AI tooling for data annotation, curation, management, and for model evaluation. One of the things I love about these guys is they have a great blog that describes cleanly. I mean, it's technical, but it's not too technical, but it's sufficiently technical to where it's actually describing ideas, not BS.
blog posts on sort of the state-of-the-art, like the OpenAI 01 model that was just released. So sometimes they integrate it into why this is a part of Encore, why this makes sense, and sometimes not. And so I love that. I recommend their blog just in general. That said, when they are looking at state-of-the-art models, they are always looking for ways to integrate it into their platform.
Basically, it's a place to organize your data, and data is everything. This was true before the popularity and the explosion of attention methods of transformers. And it is still very much true now. Sort of the non-synthetic, the human generated data is extremely important.
How you generate that data, how you organize that data, how you leverage it, how you train on it, how you fine tune on it, the pre-training, the post-training, all of it, the whole thing. Data is extremely, extremely important. And so Encore takes data very seriously. Anyway, go try out Encore to create, annotate, and manage your AI data at Encore.com slash Lex. That's Encore.com slash Lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass, where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Carlos Santana on guitar, for example. I loved that one. There's a few guitar ones, Tom Morello too. Great, great, great stuff. But Carlos Santana, his instrumental Europa. I haven't quite tried to play that, but it's on my to-do list.
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