#449 – Graham Hancock: Lost Civilization of the Ice Age & Ancient Human History

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Graham Hancock, a journalist and author who for over 30 years has explored the controversial possibility that there existed a lost civilization during the last ice age, and that it was destroyed in a global cataclysm some 12,000 years ago. He is the presenter of the Netflix documentary series Ancient Apocalypse, the second season of which has just been released. And it's focused on the distant past of the Americas, a topic I recently discussed with the archaeologist Ed Barnhart. Let me say that Ed represents the kind of archaeologist, scholar I love talking to on the podcast. Extremely knowledgeable, humble, open-minded, and respectful in disagreement. I'll do many more podcasts on history, including ancient history. Our distant past is full of mysteries. And I find it truly exciting to explore those mysteries with people both on the inside and the outside of the mainstream and the various disciplines involved. 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 got Notion for note taking, Riverside for making amazing looking podcasts online, Element for hydration, Shopify for selling stuff online, and BetterHelp for your mind. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now onto the full adories. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, please do check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool. To me, Notion is hands down the best integration of LLMs into the note-taking process when there's a lot of documents, a lot of different kinds of documents, and a lot of different kinds of people creating the documents. In the same way that in the recent episode I talked about with Cursor, can query the code base, Notion generalizes that and can query the document base. So all the wikis and projects and all the notes that you take, all of that can be queried. You can ask questions about it. You can find stuff. You can summarize, especially when there's multiple people on the team, you can summarize all the progress made in a particular project, all that kind of stuff. You show up at the beginning of the day and you wanna know, okay, what happened yesterday? Where can I help? Those kinds of questions can be answered with Notion. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase, notion.com/lex to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is also brought to you by Riverside. It really is just an incredible platform for recording podcasts online. A lot of people are doing podcasts. And the natural question that people ask me and people ask on the internet is how to do it easy. I think Riverside is the place to go to achieve easy professional level quality on both the audio and the video. I've used it a bunch over the years to record remote podcasts. In fact, I need to be doing more remote podcasts. The point is the technology is super easy because you have double end of recording. So you have extremely high quality recording of both ends. All you do is just log in in the browser. It just works. I'm so glad this exists, it just works. And of course they have a bunch of nice features that are leveraging AI for example. You have a text based editor for both audio and video which is just incredible. The syncing of the multiple guests, obviously simple seeming thing, but hard to do seamlessly and flawlessly and they do just that. I mean, it's just incredible. They do, they pulled it off. It's not easy to pull off. And they make it look easy which is wonderful. So it's a product I recommend to a lot of people who are interested in doing a podcast of any kind. Like I said, I record my remote interviews with Riverside. Give it a try at riverside.fm and use code Lex for 30% off. That's riverside.fm and use code Lex. This episode is brought to you by Element. My daily zero sugar delicious electrolyte mix. I drink it throughout the day. I'm drinking it now. And I'm actually pretty low on water and electrolytes at the moment because I did a really hard training session. The training session was about an hour and a half and I think I only took one round off. There was just a hard training round after round after round. And by the end of it, I was just sort of both in the zone technique-wise, but also kind of psychologically accepting whatever happens in each particular puzzle that is Jujitsu. So I trained against some really strong dudes today. It was wrestlers intense. The technique was there too. So it's like it's a battle for everything. Lots of just attacking for submissions over and over and over. Everything in the transitions. There's no stalling in a particular position. It's just movement and movement and movement and constant attacks. Yeah, it was exhausting. Plus the heat, just all of that sweating and I usually don't drink during training. So by the time I'm done, I'm just like no water in me. And that's when the element really helps out. I go from feeling really shitty to feeling really good. So get a sample pack for free with any purchase. Try the drink element.com/lex.