How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires? – Si Sheppard

¶1Okay, today I'm chatting with professor and military historian Sai Shepard. I want to talk to you about the conquest of the Astic and the Inca Empires because these are some of the most shocking events in human history. Um, unparalleled among all the military and diplomatic achievements ever made. You have a few hundred concistadors show up to a new continent they know nothing about and within a matter of years they subjugate empires which have millions of inhabitants in them. In the process of doing so, they are often winning battles where they are outnumbered 100 x to1, 1,000 x to1, and in many cases, not even taking a single casualty.

¶2They're doing this while upwards of 99% of their fighting forces are made up of the very natives that they're going to subjugate. And I wanted to have you on to talk about this episode. We're not going to focus on that. We're mostly talk about history here. But people think of AI takeover as this crazy sci-fi scenario.

¶3But this would not be the first time in history that an alien force with motivations that the natives don't understand is able to use diplomatic cunning and technological advantages to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and wellestablished order. And so I wanted to have you on to understand what happened here. So first I would love to hear the stories of what did Cortez do, what did Pizaru do, how did these conquests actually go down. >> Okay. Thank you.

¶4you. It's a great pleasure to be here. And yes, we're talking about the birth of our modern world which played out between 600 to 500 years ago and created the modern globalized community that we all participate in today. It began in the 15th century when Europe backed up against the wall of the Atlantic under immense pressure from external forces and cut off from the core economic power bases of the east, the sources of the spice and silk that had driven the global economy historically throughout Eurasia are finally forced to innovate. Key names like Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal work on turning the Atlantic Ocean from a barrier into a superhighway.

¶5generational knowledge acrewed from captains reporting in on tides and wind currents and whatever land they've managed to reconoiter building out the map as they go along are able to find a way around the south tip of Africa directly to India and therefore cut out the middlemen the Spanish meanwhile heading west we honor the story of Christopher Columbus in 1492 he sailed the sea blue that was entrepreneurship this was an expedition to arrive at the oriental markets by traveling west. Of course, his his figures were completely wrong, and he was saved by the fact that unknown to him, there was an entire continent in the place where he thought Japan, China, and the Spice Islands would be. Initially, that was perceived, ironically, as a disappointment, right? But over time, it became increasingly apparent this was a source of potential in land, in wealth, and in people that could be exploited. A key turning point happened in 1511 when a Spanish uh ambitious nobleman uh seizes control of Cuba to Velasquez.

¶6Um he sends out from this power base expeditions exploring the coast of we would call Meso America, Central America. Later in 1518, he assigns that task to a man who he's had a what tempestuous relationship with, a man named Hernand Cortez. He'd arrived in the new world in Cuba in 1511. He had some legal training. So he served as a notary and worked his way up to being alcal which is chief magistrate on Cuba.

¶7But he had much greater ambition. And he takes this warrant from the governor and runs with it. He begins recruiting men to a much wider and much more ambitious goal, not just to explore the coast, but to penetrate into the interior, to find out what's there, and to seize control of them. Uh when the governor realizes what Cortez is up to, um he tries to stop him. Uh this great moment on on 18th November 1518, he arrives at the waterfront just as Cortez gets into a boat to go out to his ships offshore.

¶8And the governor calls out to him, "What are you up to?" And Cortez assures him, "Don't worry, I I have this all under control." Um but of course, the governor had lost control at that point. Now it was Cortez's expedition. So this is the background. And again, as you say, he is literally going off the side of the map, right? He's entering terra incognita unknown to Europeans previously.

¶9His political antenna honed by years uh in the islands enables him to appreciate at a very early stage that there is a significant imperial power which has hegemony here in the mainland and that its subject peoples chafe under the authority of whoever this this lord or imperial power is. Uh he arrives in the lands of the Toonaxs who had recently been incorporated into the imperial orbit of a people who call themselves the Mecca, hence Mako as we know it. Um but have come down to history based on their mythical origins in a land called Alan as the Aztecs. So for simplicity sake that's what we'll refer to them as. Uh the Totten resented this authority as all subjugated and subordinated peoples do and they saw the arrival of these outsiders as a potential opportunity to throw off the authority that had been imposed on them.

¶10So having established this relationship with the Toonax, Cortez begins to march inland and he enters the territory of the Lush Collins who like an autoimmune system immediately rally to defeat him to to expel him from their territory. But he fights him to a standstill for such a period of time. The Lashkllins and he arrive at a new kind of arrangement. The Lash Collins again appreciate his strength, his power, his potential. They swing over to his side and will then his forwards serve as guides and reinforcements for his expedition deeper into the interior.

¶11Okay. >> Can we pause here and talk about the numbers? So how many men had Cortez brought with him? Even the Talasha Collins had much larger numbers than Cortez did. So even the standstill is an impressive military achievement especially because he's fighting without native support.

¶12So what are the numbers even at this point? >> A few hundred on Cortez's side and multiple thousands on the Lashkllin side. It's at this point that the critical technological differentials from the old and new world really begin to come into effect. Um the classic text which got me invested in this whole scenario in the first place is Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel. He enumerates in the title those critical advantages that the Spaniards had.

¶13Guns in reality weren't so significant once the native peoples got over the shock value. They appreciated given the very slow reloading times involved in firearms at that time that they weren't so significant as assets on the battlefield. But steel was critical. Uh local weapons were carved from wood and from stone and from obsidian that volcanic glass which is is razor sharp when horned to a point and quite dangerous as a slashing weapon. Uh but against the steel armor and especially the steel helmets that the concistadors were wearing uh it was much less effective and the concistadors were drawing on military traditions of the old world that went back incorporating long to steel sword blades.

¶14Um they used those as thrusting weapons to take out indigenous warriors who are coming in with cut and slash weapons which of course open up the side of the body to be taken out very early. So the combination of the technology with generations of inherited military training and skill meant that the concistadors had that critical edge on the battlefield. Now they weren't invincible. Um and Cortez again playing those mind games. Uh he was taking casualties and he was careful to bury his dead underneath the houses that they were sheltering in.

¶15So the Lash Collins wouldn't be aware that they were even having some successes in in hand-to-hand combat. It was as much a mind game as it was a physical game. And the ultimate weapon of course the concistadoros brought with them was their horses. I cannot emphasize or overemphasize enough how vital the horse was to the concistadors once they entered into the interior of of the American continents. Uh they had the external asset.

¶16They had sail power which enabled them to land anywhere they wanted on the coast. But in the interior the horse was decisive. There were no native equivalents. Um the horse originated in North America but it had subsequently died out. And the local peoples had not just no horses but no beast of burden generally that was not integrated into their uh economies into their their their ways of life or into their military.

¶17The Inca who we'll discuss in a moment they did have one which was the llama and when they campaigned their armies trailing for miles behind them would be these endless baggage trains of pack animals llamas. The Aztecs had had no equivalent. Their only domestic animals were the turkey and the chihuahua. And speaking of dogs, the concis also bought these big war mastiffs. These these fighting dogs which wore armor and were trained to take down men.

¶18Again, imagine the terrifying impact that would have for the indigenous people. But the horse was the critical asset on attack. You could blast through any native formation which didn't not just have the weapons, but the training or discipline to be able to stand up to mass shocked cavalry. And if things were going bad for the concistadors, they could retreat much faster than of course the enemies could chase them. So, Los Collins appreciate all these assets coming together and they see this as their opportunity.

¶19They were the holdouts, the last remaining major entity in Meso America, which were still able to go toe-to-toe with the Aztecs. They've been completely surrounded. The Aztecs were upping the ante every year with these ceremonial flower wars, which are becoming more and more obviously wars of conquest. And the lash colons have been cut off from the coast and from sources of salt. Right?

¶20So, they were being pushed to the brink. This is a Hail Mary for them. If we ally with these outsiders, these strangers who are just few in number after all, uh we may have some potential way to break out of this strategic trap that we've been we've had imposed upon us. So they lean over to the size of Cortez and they travel with him to Tinosh Titlan, the capital, the glittering jewel in the midst of Lake Tishkoko, uh the capital of the Aztec Empire. And again, this is a dramatic moment when Cortez passes through the causeways out into the city and encounters MTuma II, the Huay Latawani, as he was called, the great speaker, the emperor of of the Aztec Empire.

¶21And these two worlds come together at that moment. The interface between them was Cortez's interpreter/mistress, Donna Marina, Melanche, as she became known, who is translating from one side to the other. So the dialogue that occurs then is is one of those great um tipping points in in history. What was the perspective of Montuma the second? He was aware Cortez was coming.

¶22This is his empire. He has envoys and emissaries and scouts and spies everywhere and they're reporting back to him that the something has washed up on the shores of our empire and it is determined to meet with us. He initially bargains with Cortez urging him to leave. He provides him with precious gifts which of course just inflames Cortez even more. Um and just just once he's got hold of Aztec gold, he's just determined to go all the way to the center.

¶23So he continues playing this double game. His advisers, his council urged him not to allow Cortez to proceed to the capital. His own brother Quit Lauek uh tells him if you allow this man inside your house, he will take your house away from you. But McKazuma proceeds and from that he's been condemned by generations of historians. Right?

¶24This was a mistake to bring the concistadors into the heart of the empire itself. I actually think that was his best option whether he was aware of it or not because it was better for him to have Cortez as his guest within Tenoshitla than it was to have Cortez this random element at loose within his empire talking to the subject peoples inflaming them possibly against central authority. He felt perhaps Cortez was what he said he was an envoy from a great emperor on the far side of the vast ocean. A Cortez again with the mind games had no warrant to say he was a diplomat or ambassador for anybody. He kept telling anyone who listened, I speak for the mighty Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor.

¶25Of course, Charles the fifth had no idea who Cortez was. Cortez again is just winging it. The incredible improvisation here. And for a moment the stasis, the great turning point comes when word arrives from the coast that one of the Aztec regional military officers u on his own initiative has taken action against the concistadors left behind on the coast, the ones with the toenax and some of them have been killed. Uh Cortez seizes this as his pretext.

¶26He marches into the palace of Mtazuma II, the Aztec Hule Latawani, tells him that for his own safety, he was now being taken under the protective custody of the Spanish uh and he should come with him or else there will be violence. And this is the moment when when when Mokuma's entire worldview just just collapses, right? Nobody had spoken to him like this before. Um his his psychology just just disintegrates at that point and he meekly allows himself to be led away. He tells his people, "Don't resist.

¶27I don't want bloodshed. I will I will pass with these strangers. Um and then once Cortez is rounded up, the officers at the coast responsible for turning on his men there, he has them in front of the emperor and the entire court burned alive, which is a form of punishment totally unknown to the Aztecs. And they watch this in grim silence. So once Cortez has seized the emperor himself, once he has Mocktuma, he already has the empire.

¶28He governs through what is increasingly becoming his puppet. Uh and Mocktuma seems to have of have fallen almost under the spell of Cortez, the classic Stockholm syndrome. Um he gives him grand tour of the city. Uh Cortez and again a subtle flex on his power has brigantines, small sailing boats built and he takes Mckuma with him on a sailing cruise on Lake Tishko and and the emperor is astonished at this new technology of using the wind to sail on the water. Um having the emperor was the key.

¶29So the emperor's mistake wasn't inviting Cortez into the city. He was making himself vulnerable by staying there also in an adjacent palace. If he had gone to some further location, made some excuse, a pilgrimage or or an expedition of some kind and had ruled through subordinates, Cortez would have been baffled and he couldn't go chasing after the emperor. That that would be obviously too provocative. But without the emperor there, Cortez would have had his options extremely limited.

¶30And I don't know what he would have done in that circumstance. But because McKazuma stayed in his capital uh he made himself the target and once he was taken this was the key to controlling the entire empire at that point. >> So obviously the story continues from there um no Triste what people may not appreciate about what happened here in both the Pizarro story of the Inca Empire which we'll talk about later and in the Aztec story is that in both cases the Spanish were themselves divided and in fact fighting each other. So, um, as you, uh, maybe you should tell the story how Velasquez sends this, um, uh, another expedition to go capture and arrest Cortez for going beyond the prerogative of his mission. >> Absolutely.

¶31This is the we left the governor on Cuba, of course, fuming. >> Yeah. >> Um, he rallies another expeditionary force because Cortez is stealing his thunder, right? And he sends us under Pelas, a larger force than the one Cortez brought with him originally. This lands on the coast.

¶32Cortez appreciates he has to move. So he leaves one of his subordinates, the hotblooded Alvarado behind in charge in Tonosh Titan. Takes as many men as he can to the coast. Confronts Denias defeats him in a minor battle. And again, the diplomacy wins over the entire expeditionary force that the governor had dispatched.

¶33He tells them, "Uh, my friends, why are we fighting? We have the empire at my disposal. Join with me and we can share in the riches." So he wins over the vast majority of this new force. So it becomes effectively reinforcements. Marches back to the capital.

¶34Uh he finds the mood has turned against him. The problem with not being in charge is is you can't be everywhere and his subordinate um assuming that the Aztecs were mobilizing against him decided on a preemptive strike. There was a festival. The aristocracy particularly the warrior cast were celebrating and and Alvarado just descended on them massacred everybody. Um the survivors rally the population and when Cortez returns he finds himself effectively under siege.

¶35Uh the people are so appalled now with the failure of their Hiwe Letoani. Uh when he tries to pacify them, they throw stones at him. Mortally wounded. He either dies or the Spanish finish him off because he's of no longer any use to them. So now Cortez is trapped in the city in Tenoshitland.

¶36He determines to break out. Uh and that is say no, the tragic night because so many of his men are left behind. They're either killed as they try to escape the city across the causeways or forced to retreat back to the palaces and they're taken alive and sacrificed subsequently. Cortez gets away with a minority of the troops still at his disposal um and makes it back to Lashkin territory. That was the critical aspect, the two features of the entire campaign.

¶37One, he has enough strike power with enough horses to defeat the Aztecs when they try to finish him off. The battle of Otumbbo, they feel he's on the run. They have the numbers. The concistadors are dragging their tails between their legs as they flee. Cortez himself is grievously wounded.

¶38Uh, we can finish them off. Um, and they had the numbers. They were winning, but again, Cortez identifies where the Aztec general is. He rallies enough horsemen to blast through the Aztec ranks and take out their command and control. The Aztec army disintegrates and the Spanish are able to flee.

¶39So, the battlefield advantages. They had their horses, their steel, critical, but just as critical was the diplomacy. If the Lash Collins had turned on Cortez at that point, he would have been finished or not one Spananiel would have survived. None of them would have made it back to the coast. But the Lash Collins see for their own reasons, not out of any generosity or humanitarian impulse to to welcome back the concistadors.

¶40They still see we are committed to these people and to our alliance. So they give Cortez shelter. He recovers physically, begins to rebuild his strength and is determined to go back to Toshitan. And for round two and this time we're we're not going to be indulging diplomatic nicities. The Lashkllins their own perspective on this.

¶41If you go to Lashkala the territory today, the governor's mansion there has murals on the wall and these depict the Cortez and the concistadors from the Lashkalan point of view. And it's fascinating to look at how the relationship is not between a superior and an inferior. It's between equals. You see them depicted in the same scale engaged in diplomacy between partners, not between subordinates and dominant figures. The Lashkllins drove a hard bargain.

¶42We want territory carved out of the Aztecs. We want our own fortress in Tonitland after this is over. uh they saw this as them using the concistadors, not the other way around, which is very important to bear in mind that the Aztec Empire from a distance, if you look at a map, seemed impressive, but this was an imperial construct and not just the remaining independent entities like the Lashkllins, like the Terrascans, who we can discuss later, were hostile to the Aztecs. So were so many of their subordinated peoples, the Totten coast, the Chalco states on the shores of Lake Teshoko. Um they chafed under Aztec hegemony and authority and they too saw the concistadors as an opportunity to finally shrug off the authority the demands uh of the Aztecs and get revenge in a lot of ways.

¶43So as Cortez builds up for the final campaign against uh Tenosh Titland against the new Hu Latawani Kit Laouak um and then he after he died his brother the last of the Huatawanis Ktomak um he has indigenous people flocking to his banner from all over Meso America right he's emphasized that he's still in the fight he still has those advantages more reinforcements are arriving at the coast and they're being integrated into the concistador army but the force that marches on ten Titlan the total numbers the concistadors were maybe 1/ half of 1% in raw numbers of that force the overwhelming majority were other messoamerican peoples who see this as their final reckoning with the Aztecs and this is the integration again of the technology with the diplomacy Cortez knows to take the city he has to control the lake and again the innovations they need sulfur for their gunpowder they have guns useless without gunpowder so an expedition goes into the mountains to the volcano Papa and they dangle with ropes inside the caldera of the volcano scooping out the sulfur they need as the critical ingredient for their gunpowder. >> Another one builds prefabricated brigintines boats in their different sections >> and then has untold numbers of porters human loadbearers bring these these pre-fabricated pieces over the mountains to the lake. They're assembled and then they're let loose in the lake and then now they have control over the lake, right? So bringing together the technology, the innovations with the local manpower and this is the force directed against Tennos Teland in the final battle. >> I actually didn't know those stories.

¶44That's that's crazy. One of the ways in which to the extent people are even aware of the story, they might not understand what actually happened is they have this model of the Aztecs or the Incas as this cohesive single nation. And I think a better model might be something like imagine if it's Russia and Ukraine have been doing trench warfare for a hundred years and imagine the animosity and then also the Russians are like taking tens of thousands of Ukrainians and like doing human sacrifices with them. Um and then if some foreign force comes in and says to the Ukrainians, we can help you march into Moscow, >> right? >> I think they'd have a pretty decent odds of getting getting some agreement there.

¶45>> Absolutely. The old phrase is the enemy of my enemy is my friend and diplomacy, war, that's war is very big. >> I don't think I actually appreciated the ambition of Jane Street's intern projects until last week when I got to see some of them for myself. For example, one intern spent part of his summer researching LLM memorization, figuring out how to quantify and reduce it without hurting out of sample performance. This matters because whenever Jane Street evaluates a new model on historical data, they need to know that its performance reflects predictive power, not just memorization of past [music] outcomes.

¶46Another intern built a custom activation checkpointing scheme. Activation checkpointing lets you trade compute for memory. You recalculate some activations during backdrop instead of storing them all after the forward pass. This in turn found a way to identify the activations that are cheapest to recomputee, but that still free up a lot of memory. and this [music] allowed his version to outperform PyTorch's native one.

¶47These are just two examples, but Jane Street has written about a bunch more. These writeups are coming out in bashes. The first few are live now, including these two, and the rest will be published in the coming weeks. If you want to read them, or if you want to apply for Jane Street's 2027 summer internships, go to janstreet.com/poresh. There's so many interesting questions to ask from everything from technology to um diplomacy to disease um to tactics.

¶48Before you get to that, I think just to round out the story, in many ways what's striking about the conquest of the Incas in Peru under Pizarro 10 years later is how similar it was to Cortez's story, how much he just basically followed the playbook. >> But I wanted people just people to have a sense of roughly what happened here. um starting I think maybe with the battle of Kaha Mara might be the most astonishing military lopsided encounter that has maybe ever happened in human history. So I would yeah if you can recapitulate a bit of the at least that battle and then just the overall story and then we can do some analysis from there. >> Absolutely.

¶49When when Cortez consummates his his conquest of Tennerland in 1521, the last of the Hatawani surrenders to him and how he occupies the territory and most importantly the top of the social hierarchy the existing structure as much as possible is allowed to persist. The concis just decapitate the local nobility and insert themselves at the top. Now, this is the playbook that will continue to be applied less successfully throughout the rest of Meso America because the existing political entities there aren't so sophisticated, right? Nonetheless, there are rumors, there are always rumors of losses of gold and and more concistadors are now flooding into the new world to seek advantage of this. One of this is a distant cousin of Cortez named Franchesco Pizaro.

¶50met with with Cortez and got the playbook as you say about how this is to be done. And then again in one of these these concistador business ventures, he finds the funding for men and ships and begins pushing south down the west coast of South America, crossing the equator and and finally arriving in what is now modernday Peru. and he encounters what he's looking for a sophisticated culture on the scale in fact in terms of territory on a much broader scale than than Cortez had encountered in in Meso America. This is the land of the Inca. Uh when he arrived there was civil war.

¶51The previous Sappa Inca Wayne Kapak had died in 1525 and his two sons Adawalpa and Hascar turned on each other. um Advala had just won the civil war and he was proceeding to Kusko the Inca capital to be formally uh enthroned as the new Sappa Inca and that's when word arise to him that strangers have entered uh his realm and again we're talking 168 men uh pushed into the Andes mountains and are seeking him out for reasons unknown. uh he encounters them outside a place called as you say Kajimaka in 1532 and he sees not threat but opportunity and just like Mokuma II had been advised to not treat with this people so does Adhalpa's envoy who who reports to them these are not men of good faith we can take them out they tend to sleep together at night we can set fire to wherever they're staying and just take them all out in in one fell swoop but Adolf Halpa is interested in what they have to offer him he's seen seen the horses he's seen. In fact, Pizarro made a specific case of impressing uh the Sappa Inca with his horses. He sends one of his his key lieutenants to put on a display of horsemanship and and famously he charges right at the Sappa Inca and all his his court and the horse stops just inches from from Adhalpa's face snorting and breathing and Adhalper is absolutely stonyfaced and professes to be unimpressed and says, "I will meet with your master at a time of my choosing." After the Spaniards leave, he has all of his court, including his generals who flinched or showed fear, executed just to make the point that that we're not to be intimidated by these people.

¶52He sends a blocking force, tens of thousands of men, to cut off any retreat. And then he proceeds to meet with Pizaro um at Kajamaka with the vast expanse of his army. There's a saying in Peru that Adohala was planning to have Pizaro for lunch, but Pizaro ended up having him for breakfast. Once he enters into the confines of a narrow constricted courtyard space, that's when Pizaro lets off the ambush. He lets fly with all his his artillery and all his musketry for the shock value, unleashes his horses and the adhaler himself is is overwhelmed and taken prisoner at that point.

¶53So this again is the playbook, the copy book as you say, go to the top, seize whoever is at the very pinnacle of the social hierarchy, you control the entire structure. And ju just so people know the numbers here, the Incan Empire overall has some 10 million inhabitants. During this first battle where Pizaro encounters the emperor, he has some 160 190 concistadors. Um I think the numbers are unknown for exactly how many Attawa had, but he's facing off the army that has just basically clinched the civil war in the Inca Empire and is around tens of thousands of big some. I've seen some numbers that are like 100,000 or 200,000, but certainly in the high tens of thousands big.

¶54So 100 something against almost 100,000. That's the first battle. What is astonishing is that these 100 concisadors I think killed with the I saw some numbers that are like they killed like 10,000 uh of the enemy or at least thousands of Ottawa's troops. They suffer zero casualties. So they kill close to 10,000 of the enemy.

¶55They suffer zero casualties. This is the first encounter that the Inca Empire has ever had with the concistadors. I think that must have been shocking from both sides perspective. And I want if you can do some analysis here, how is it possible? How can you have an outcome, a military outcome where you can have literally a KD ratio of infinity [laughter] of, you know, 10,000 to zero?

¶56>> Yeah. Uh the concitos themselves admitted the night before that encounter there were so many campfires from the Inca army scattered across the hill surrounding Kajamaka. It looked like the twinkling of stars at night. Uh and and the concis themselves admitted when they saw the number of Inca troops filing into um this courtyard um they were losing control of their own bladders out of fear, right? They they knew what the risks were here.

¶57But the shock value of that initial impetus was enough to to carry them through. The Inca had never heard gunpowder weapons fired in in any format before. The the ancestral founder of their empire was Pachakuri. Um which means the the Thunderbear. But to see a real world exemplar of that must have been just beyond shocking.

¶58So the actual physical damage that the cannons and Hakabuses inflicted was relatively minor. But an explosion and the fact that these these strangers seem to be able to control the thunder must have been psychologically devastating. Uh and then it came down again to that steel and those horses, right? When Pizaro unleashed the horses, um this is something that the Inca, as you say, these are veteran warriors, the winners of a civil war, strategists and at a tactical level within the framework of pre-Colombian and warfare. They were the they were the top dogs, but this is something outside of their entire understanding of the universe.

¶59They'd never seen a horse before or knew what it could do. If you integrate a rider into the saddle with stirrups and the shock value of that charge, the they had no doctrine to push back against that. And the psychological impact was that that they tried to flee. They were piling up against the walls in their desperation to scramble over them to the point where the walls finally gave way under the press of all those bodies. Some of them escaped into the countryside and the Spaniards rode after them just running them down as they fled.

¶60And the only thing that stopped the massacre at the end was was night was falling and the Spaniards in darkness couldn't continue the pursuit any longer. So it's what happens when something totally outside the universe of even veteran warriors um plays out in a way that they have no mental appreciation of or or able to draw back in any kind of library of how do I respond in this situation. The fight orflight instinct just completely takes over and and the flight was the winner in this instance. As you say the only casualty was Pizaro himself. He's reaching for Adolf Walpin to take him prisoner and one of his more enthusiastic comrades slashing it and manages to to cut his hand as as as he does that.

¶61That was the only injury any of the concistro suffered at this critical moment. >> Yeah. So, yeah. Give give me a sense of how is it that you can have even even if they're on horses, how is it that they're just so impenetrable? It's like if you have a hund I guess intuitively you would think that if you have tens of thousands of troops, can't you just swarm a cavalry and many of them will die?

¶62but just, you know, like pull that guy in a steel armor off the off the stir-ups and take him down and then just kill him. >> Europeans knew how to do that. Um, the Swiss, for example, had already proved that a mounted knight could be knocked out of the saddle and defeated if you have men shoulder-to-shoulder, locked in place with long pikes >> to keep those horses at a distance and break up the impetus of their charge. But that requires one the technology and two the discipline, training and institutional knowledge to do that. Meso American warfare was very loose in its formation.

¶63Warriors with lot a lot of space between them which is the worst thing that you can do in regards to cavalry because the horses can take advantage of that looseness to just blast any formation that's is coming at them. Um now one depiction of the pre-colian societies is they were somehow childlike innocents and and and and couldn't have responded. They did try to and it's important to to bear that in mind at every level both the Aztec and the Inca sought to put in place counter measures to negate the advantages that the concistadors had. One of the critical exemplars is is confined space. the Aztecs when the Cortez showed up in 1521 for round two by drawing them into their city which was a network of islands connected by bridges and causeways um that minimized the advantages of the horses because that's not good horse country.

¶64They would learn to fight from rooftops and pelt the enemy with stones or whatever they could from from heights. They built man-sized holes in buildings so they could slip from one to the other where the horses couldn't chase them. And so they they learned to use those kind of advantages. They learned the stopping power of water. Interestingly, both completely underconnected.

¶65They had no relationship with each other. But against Cortez when he was taking one of the smaller cities on Lake Teshoko, it's La Palpa. Uh the Aztecs broke the dikes in the lake and flooded the city which which took out a number of of the concistadors and their allies. In that environment, of course, the metal armor works to the disadvantage of the concistador. It drags them to the bottom.

¶66Um if they'd waited until nightfall when the Spanish were sleeping they might have bagged all of them and the as the Inca too uh later when uh the concistadors moved on Tintambbo um again the Inca flooded the river allowed it to burst its banks and again bog down the concistador cavalry so that they were adapting. They took captured enemy weapons. They learned to fix concisador swords to the long to the end of long wooden poles improvising pike tactics again without being instructed to. They just intuited that keeping horses at a distance with long spears would be a way to negate the advantages that they had. They incored the bolus which they'd used for hunting the the the great birds of South America to tangle the legs of horses.

¶67One famous incident, an Aztec warrior allowed himself to be speared by a concistador and gripped hold of the spear, the lance as it was in his body, fixing the concistador in place so his supporters, his colleagues could swarm him and take him out of the saddle. So that they were trying to improvise. The Aztecs with their captured Spanish prisoners used them to learn how to use captured crossbows. The Inca when they captured Spaniards would use them to give instruction on how to use these firearms. And Manco Inca, the leader of the Inca resistance made a point of learning to ride a horse himself to demonstrate to his people that we can do this.

¶68So they were trying, but the learning curve was so steep and the time frame to internalize foreign technology and foreign tactics was too short for them to really be able to deploy it to their advantage. And this is worth emphasizing. Cortez takes over the AIC empire in what is now Mexico in two and a half years. So a couple hundred men, an empire of six million people, two and a half years. Uh Pizar does the same thing for the Inca Empire 10 years later in about 5 years.

¶69So it's insane how fast these conquests happened. Um and just how little time that the even though in principle they could have figured out ways in which to combat cavalry and things, just how little time they had to adapt. All the while their whole social structure is disintegrating, there's disease, etc. There's all this like psychological shock value. Now the obvious question to ask at this point before we go to other ones is if you reran the simulation again and again.

¶70If you just change a few things here and there, change the leader um uh changed change the leader for both the Aztecs or for the Spanish uh in these conquests in what fraction of the simulation do within a matter of a few years later the Spanish end up in control of these empires anyways? because when you first learn about them, it actually sounds like an outrageous and impossible >> um outcome that a few hundred men would take over empires of millions of people. And when you learn more about it, then you begin to think, well, I guess it couldn't have been any other way. But I don't know if that is your opinion. >> The there are the grand scheme of things.

¶71There there are multiple wheels that define history. The the grand wheels that grind slowly, geography and climate, and then the small wheels in the foreground are the individuals, the key players themselves. And this is an integration of that that process the big wheels with the small ones. Yes, if Cortez which could have happened on multiple occasions had been taken out early um the concistadors leaderless rules may well have disintegrated uh and the conquest may have been aborted at that that level. Um Pizaro again uh Adawa's critical mistake was inserting himself into Pizaro's trap.

¶72if he had sent an envoys to keep the negotiations at a distance, um he may well have been able to frustrate Pizaro's ambitions and and as the head of what remained, an integrated Inca Empire, he may have been able to use those numbers to to win the campaign in the short term. When the Inca did finally turn on the concistadors, um Franchesco Pizaro has seized Kosko. They stripped the temples of their gold and silver. Um, the sweat of the sun and the tears of the moon as it was called, shipped it back to Europe. Um, he goes back to the coast to set up Lima, what would become the city of Lima, the modern capital of of Peru.

¶73The danger with Kusco is the fact it's elevated and away from the coast, which is where the Spanish, of course, with their absolute monopoly over naval power, have the advantage. Um, his problem was he left his his half brothers in charge back in Kusco and they they provoke Manoena who've been set up Spazaro's puppet ruler into outright rebellion. He rallies his people. Um, he lays siege to Kosko. He takes Sakahuan, the great fortress that dominates Kusko and he has one of his generals, Quizo Yupangui, cut off reinforcements arriving from the coast.

¶74The Inca could win set peace confrontations if they used their terrain and their knowledge of it to their advantage. Pizarro from Lima on the coast is taking reinforcements and pushing them into the interior to relieve Kusco and and Quiso is waiting till they enter narrow defiles and passes through the mountains, blocking both ends and then using boulders and other materials to just obliterate them from the heights and more and more of these Spanish expeditions are being annihilated. So at that level when they use the terrain and their institutional knowledge of it to their advantage, the Inca are able to win set peace battles, but they can't seal the deal in Kusco and Mango makes the mistake of ordering uh Quiso to attack Lima. He feels we have the advantage now. I've bottled them up in Kusko.

¶75We've annihilated their relief columns. Um take out their city on the coast and the problem's over. Um but attacking Lima meant passing across open ground which made the Spanish then unleash their advantage. The general is killed and the whole assault collapses. Um back in Kusco, yes, there's a handful of Spaniards holed up in just a couple of of fortified buildings desperately holding on.

¶76Day and night they're under assault. The psychological aspect to it, the beating of drums and the chanting and the the constant rain of missiles to set their building on fire. They would have been wiped out except for two reasons. One, the open courtyards and plazas of Kusco are good terrain for cavalry and they still have their horses. And secondly, again critically, the asset through diplomacy of the local peoples, the subordinated uh midmma as they were called or Yanakona, surfs, the defeated and subordinated people, the Inca bought forcibly within their imperial structure, chafing under those authorities um see these outsiders as their chance to finally break free of Inca authority.

¶77So, strangely enough, as it may seem, more local peoples had and kept joining the besieged Spaniards during the whole uh battle of of Kusco, which played out over many, many months. And the Spani end up with more allies and they started uh during this battle because there were so many people within the Inca Empire. The from the Canari who were from Ecuador to the Chachapoa from the Amazon basin u to even the Ayamaka who used to be rivals with the Inca for control of Kusco itself increasingly side with the Spaniards and that local manpower was the critical asset. Without that yeah they would have been wiped out at Kosko. So again, it's the Spaniards inserting themselves into an imperial orbit um which from a distance looks impressive with its geographic expanse and its total population, but which have been ruthlessly dictated to by a a tiny elite of a hierarchy who would impose themselves over the entire system.

¶78Remember only a small number of people spoke Noatal, the imperial language of the Aztecs. Only a small number spoke Kachua, the imperial language of the Inca themselves. Uh it was the Inca Empire, but it was constructed from multiple multiple different ethnicities. And when they saw the chance, they took it to side with the Spaniard. >> Yeah.

¶79It's worth remembering that the Astics and the Incas are themselves sort of the equivalent of the concistadors >> in their own world, right? There's 100,000 or so actual Incas. They're controlling an empire of 10 million people. >> So, they are themselves an imperial force. >> Going back to the question then of how contingent these victories were, it kind of sounds like you're saying they are contingent, right?

¶80because you were pointing out all these cases in which if things had gone slightly differently, the seas of Kusco would have worked or um uh Cortez would have been killed in battle and stuff. >> The ultimate factor to go down to those those background forces, the great wheels that grind through history. Yeah. The geography and climate struck to one other factor. Um, the fact that Eurasia was so stacked with domesticable animals, sheep, cows, goats, mules, pigs, and above all, horses, and human interaction in biomes with those domesticated animals created the context for the evolution of contagious diseases, endemic or pandemic, um, that ripped back and forth through Eurasia, and we're familiar with all their names.

¶81Um, that never occurred in the New World. the people there had no acquired immunity to diseases such as the big one small pox but beyond that the whole galaxy of of communicable diseases that we're now familiar with as being universal I think even if the Aztecs Inca had won the short-term proximate victories uh the longerterm demographic crisis would have undermined the functional capacity of their societies to remain integrated and and to resist uh much longer the pressure within from their subject peoples as they felt the authority of their overlords beginning to weaken would have led to their their fragmentation um which is the overarching cycle of pre-colian societies generally they're extremely impressive in fact more impressive when you consider the disadvantages they had to struggle with their pyramids were built not through the assistance of beasts of burden or even the wheel but simply through pure manpower and the application of that to to construct it uh the subject peoples would have broken for freedom And we see the recurring cycle of of of Meso American history for example that when Cortez arrived Tennos Titland was one of the greatest metropolis perhaps on earth beautiful and and rich and heavily populated a 100 years later if he if he'd arrived in 1619 as opposed to 1519 he would have found a swamp with mosscovered mounds and hills rising out of it. The parallel to that of course is tutoakan the previous great metropolis which dominated Meso America. rose, it expanded, it attracted a huge population, it overstressed its environment and it collapsed. I think the Aztecs naturally would have gone the same way.

¶82So one way or another, the Spanish or even subsequent ways of European colonists would have entrenched themselves at the coast and would have perhaps more slowly pushed in land. It's possible that you would see a more balanced relationship between the colonists and the indigenous peoples, but I think in the longer term they all would have been folded into uh the grand European imperial framework. >> So we've gotten to the point now where if you have a computer-based task that a personal assistant could knock out in an hour, [music] AI can probably just do it for you. AI has gotten more and more general over time. So these new AI assistants need much less handholding than they used to.

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¶85We do know examples of other native forces who resist um European powers for a very long time. I think there's some uh platoon or army that has just finished off fighting uh in during the American Civil War that has to go down and then go fight um uh some native tribes because there was still even late into the 19th century, you know, native forces were able to resist European um incursions. Of course, we know with the Comanche and um and so forth. So it does seem to me that they like maybe just because they were so centralized, you get the emperor and the whole thing falls and whereas other tribes were more dispersed. >> You're absolutely right.

¶86The key term there as you used it was was dispersal, right? The vulnerability of of the Aztec, the Inca was that hierarchical nature of their society and and the absolute loyalty that the system had invested into whoever was at top of of the social hierarchical tree, the the huawani for the Aztecs, the Sappa Inca uh for the Inca themselves. taking that individual destabilizes the whole system potentially even means that it can be functionally governed through the use of intermediaries or even puppets. Um the dispersed peoples as you say the kamanchi um even the Maya in Meso America whose citystates jealously asserted and defended their autonomy against each other meant that the Spanish couldn't take out the Maya in in one fell swoop. they couldn't do to the Maya what they done to the Aztec link in they had to reduce their cities one by one and that was a long laborious process that took almost to the end uh of of of the 17th century to finally consumate and even then there was still smoldering descent in many ways you can go to the highlands of of Central America they still speak the ancestral languages of the first one before they speak Spanish uh yes colonizing powers can find aggressive bite back um just look at Kuster's last stand as late as 1876 here in America the entire seventh cavalry wiped out the little big horn because you know they lost the initiative and at that point they were fighting warriors who had come together temporarily riding horses firing guns and then dispersing afterwards.

¶87It was very hard to pin them down and that was often a frustrating aspect. It took a long process of what amounts to really total war to finally bring them to heal. Setting up barb wire everywhere and of course slaughtering the buffalo to take away the basis for their culture and and their food chain to to finally bring the last hold outs um to to to heal. So it can be a long protracted process. The Inca and Aztecs themselves found that out.

¶88They never contemated even incorporating their entire zones within their empires. Um the Aztecs had surrounded and was slowly reducing the lash colons. But to the west uh and what's Mikawaka and the Puruche people as they're called today the Terrascans had an empire of their own and they were able to go toe-to-toe with the Aztecs. Right. The first time the Aztecs crossed into Terrascan territory it was a disaster.

¶89A key reason for that was actually technology. The Aztecs had no connection with South America. The Terrascans somehow did. We know from linguistic evidence and and costume choice, some exchange of of flora and fauna. And above all in technology, the Terrascans could smell metal.

¶90Like the Inca, they could smell copper. And they used that to to form the the points of their arrows and their masked archers with their copper tipped arrows were decimating the invading Aztec forces. So the exchange if it had been on a broader scale to north and south would have been potentially an equalizing force. If the Aztec had had llamas from South America, it would have been dramatically to their advantage. >> There is tin in the new world.

¶91>> Yes. >> So no bronze, right? Whatever you not get bronze with copper >> and they never made it um that certainly not in Meso America where everything was was stone. They had the worst of both worlds. They could smelt silver and gold to attract the greed of the Spaniards, but they couldn't smelt iron to hold them off.

¶92>> Right. No, but you know before that you would have thought that they would have done copper to get good bronze. >> They they did have bronze in in in the in the anchor world. >> Oh, really? >> And if if the Aztecs had had access to that again, they'd have given them a much more aggressive fighting stunt.

¶93Bronze can't stand up against iron, but it's better than than stone. So, >> right. Yeah. Uh or obsidian. Um so, this is I think an important part of what happens here, which is that the Europeans are learning from each other, but the natives are not learning from each other.

¶94Right. >> So Cortez learns from the conquest of Hispanola. Of course, he has a ton of improvisation in the way he approaches the conquest of the Aztecs. And then Pizaro, you know, just knows the whole details of what Cortez did a decade earlier. Basically follow the same playbook.

¶95>> Yes. >> It's not clear to me that the Incas even knew the Aztecs existed. No. >> So you just have a much more accumulation of um knowledge uh than the other one is able to accumulate. >> Yeah.

¶96They're closed worlds. they were very much very insular in their in their societies. um to go further back in time. I think the the only divergence that would have given pre-Colombian peoples a real long-term chance to hold off the Europeans if we reverse the clock another 500 years back to leave Erikson and the Norse in Greenland. Um they knew of the existence of North America um Helerland, Markland and Vinland as they called them as they explored them and they tried to colonize the new world.

¶97Their numbers were too few. The local resistance was too fierce and they were they were forced out. If the Vikings had been able to claim a long-term presence in the new world, >> they may have been able to drip feed European technology, European beasts of burden, and above all European diseases slowly into the Americas. So that 500 years later when the concistadors did show up, they'd have met a people who had some resistance to European diseases, knew how to work iron, and were riding horses. If that was the case, all bets are off.

¶98is such an interesting history. What does the new world look like if the Vikings had actually set up there? That's that's very interesting. >> Um, what was Pizaro's greatest innovation on Cortez's strategy? >> Uh, I think essentially the the key to it was following the blueprint uh as closely as possible.

¶99Go right to the top, >> establish a coastal settlement which Cortez also was very invested in. you have a secure base to fall back to if what's happening in the interior is not playing out right a base on the coastline was originally with the concistadors but more broadly the Portuguese British French subsequently they would build those key strongholds uh on the coast which because of their monopoly over nautical technology means they were effectively unable to be extricated by any local or indigenous population and that's one thing that people tend to underestimate with the success of European expansion. Um, at the end of the day, they had the fortresses, right? And again, the long institutional knowledge of what a perfect fortress should look like, those jagged edge star >> parameters and and revitments and and battlements which maximized firepower. Um, even Eurasian cultures.

¶100Um, even even the theQing Chinese struggled to be able to to deal with that. The peoples of of the pre-Colombian Americas had had no real chance of storming defenses on that kind of a scale. The Inca Aztecs even didn't even have siege warfare. They didn't have siege weapons, battering rams, catapults, nothing like that. So, so once the Europeans dug into fortified positions, it was very hard to to to move them out of that.

¶101Um, Pizaro's own environment was was quite different from that of Cortez. The And I mean, the highlands of Mexico were quite elevated, but the Andes mountains, the the concistadors were moving into, I mean, I I've been at elevation and, you know, in the Himalayas and and I was struggling to breathe with the altitude sickness. So, so how they're able to to move to those heights and then be able to fight battles is is really astonishing >> with, you know, many uh dozens of pounds of armor and equipment. >> Yeah. that there it speaks to to their physical stamina honed over many years of hard living and the core motivations this this better be worth it.

¶102So that's why >> Cortez and and Pizaro were always kind of first among equals. They had to keep demonstrating success. Um, they had to be the alpha dog in all circumstances because around them were many ambitious men, some of whom had had titles or or or claims that were just as legitimate as as Cortez or Pizaro. And Cortez was always on top of that situation. Pizarro, of course, at the end lost control.

¶103Um, he met his end as as a rival faction stormed his his uh his his household and he went down fighting not against the indigenous people but against his fellow Spaniards. >> Right. What I find interesting about these conquest is that once the emperor is captured, Ottawa for the Incas and uh Maktazuma for the Aztecs, what is it that they think is going to happen? Why are they cooperating? What is the end story in which they come out on top?

¶104Do they think that the Spanish were going to leave if they gave them enough gold? Why are they what is their endgame there? >> That's a good question. I mean I think Mckazuma II um from the moment when Cortez seized him because previously the records of Mocktuma reflect that he was a pedalist autocrat. He centralized all power in the aristocracy.

¶105Previously it used to be possible to work up from outside the circle into the inner circle but he he he forbade that. Um he was almost stalmist in his his authority over his underlings. uh and he was the one who was amping up the uh ritualistic flower wars into successive campaigns of encircumment and annihilation for the lash carins. So he was in every sense of the word an autocrat. Um perhaps it's it's for the first time in his life being told what to do um just led to a complete psychological break because once Cortez had hold of him um he seems to have pulled a complete 180 switch and become essentially willingly uh Cortez's puppet.

¶106He was always trying to do what Cortez wanted in a way that would still be beneficial for his people but would not rock the boat so much in terms of Cortez's authority. Uh in the end it wasn't Cortez who disposed of it was his own people because they realized that he had sold them out and and he had to go. His being unilaterally deposed that had never happened before in Aztec history. He was the first Huy Latani to be repudiated by his own people and replaced by someone else. >> But what what did he think was going to happen?

¶107He seemed like he had his wits about him. Right. He did and the Spanish accounts refer to that he had a regal bearing was clearly intelligent. Um and he was adapted to the situation. He learned to speak Spanish very very quickly.

¶108He learned to play cards and and and chess. Yeah. So he was I think trying to integrate himself as much as possible. Um at the same time though I think he was also reaching out to his own people and he was waiting perhaps for his opportunity to to fully mobilize them. Perhaps he just felt he never quite got the opportunity to do that because bear in mind the deal was if he provided Cortez and he walked into that room and said I can fill it up this high with with gold and silver and Kazaro promised he'd be released at that point.

¶109Um perhaps he actually felt that this was a man of his word. But Pizaro in no case was uh and had him gared to death after getting what he wanted. So it may just be that he misinterpreted Pizaro as someone who was on the same level that kings don't do this to other kings. But he was dealing with a free booting entrepreneurist pirate essentially, not someone with operating in good faith. >> Yeah.

¶110Okay. So, zooming out, um, it's sort of interesting to think about what this Spanish New World conquest really accomplished. Um, so they're basically after gold and silver. In a weird way, they're sort of like paper clippers who don't really care about this indigenous culture or even the productive capacity of this new um new continent. They just care about these metals which are not in and of themselves productive assets, right?

¶111They can't generate wealth. They're basically like crypto if you think what gold and silver are. So, they're just obsessed with this. Um initially, we were talking about this yesterday. This helps them fund the um you know Europe's in a tough spot at this time because the Ottomans and other forces are this the reconquest just happened.

¶112So the um Spanish have been fighting off Arab armies that had control over parts of the Arabian Peninsula and they use this gold and the silver to uh I guess help pay for the defenses back at home. But if you think about what's really happening here, there's no new net wealth that has been generated, right? It's just basically redistribution among Europeans where if they're using bullion as currency, now the relative ratio of bullion has changed. So you get inflation plus like some redistribution. It's basically the government printing more money.

¶113It doesn't create more stuff. >> Uh there's no productive at least initially the Spanish are not getting any new productive capacity out of the new world. What does change is that during this period the Ming dynasty is in charge of China and it has really messed up the um the circulation of paper currency. Nobody trusts it. Every time there's inflation they just make up a new currency and people's stocks of wealth are totally worthless.

¶114And so now the Spanish set up these silver mines in the new world and they ship that silver off to China. Uh, and China is then sending millions of pieces of porcelain and tons and tons of silk and spices and fine goods to Europe. Um, basically hundreds of tons of real goods. Um, I don't know if it might have been thousands of tons in exchange for basically a medium of exchange basically to make up for the fact that they don't have a reliable means of exchange at the time in the Ming dynasty. And I think that is an important interesting piece of like what is a function of the Spanish um colonies in the new world.

¶115It's not generating any net new wealth in the grand scheme of things. It's basically helping get I don't know Chinese stuff for free in some sense. >> Yeah. The the concistadors really didn't appreciate what they'd accomplished. Many of them some of them died doing what they did.

¶116>> The ones who were lucky or good lived long enough to settle down on what were called incomendas. local estates with many of the local peoples to farm the land for them kind of of peon um surfh serum. Um the later iteration was the bureaucrats right once the concistadors had cleared the ground the bureaucrats would arrive from Spain and they would begin running and administering uh what would become Mexico, Peru, South America generally. The concistadors in South America rebelled against that. had to be put down by force to retain South America within the Spanish Empire.

¶117Once that was accomplished though, the whole process became very integrated into the Spanish imperial orbit, the first empire in which the sun never sets. Once the Spanish had discovered and exploited a mountain of silver at Potosia, what's now Bolivia, uh they put the last piece and puzzle for of the puzzle in place for for true globalization. Right. Initially the gold silver was all going east as you say into the coffers of of of King Philip V and sorry King Charles I 5 and then his son King Philip II for their wars of evangelical defense and expansion against the Ottomans um to keep the Netherlands under their control to ideally through the Armada bring the one true apostolic faith of Catholicism back to England. Um most of those ventures of course were failures and as you say um the net impact for Spain was was ultimately quite negative because by infusing Europe with this enormous expansion of liquidity through the silver that was pouring off the treasure ships every year arriving uh in Spain.

¶118um all they were doing was importing inflation and pushing prices up to levels and real wages in Spain actually fell during this period because yes there was excess liquidity but this meant prices for even staple goods were much higher than they had been previously and the ultimate negative effect was that the the seductive drug essentially of having silver on tap meant that Spain never developed towards what we call functional capitalism. it never developed capital markets or or or or independent um banking systems the way that were emerging in places like the Netherlands and England during this period. So those powers moved ahead while Spain and Portugal were left behind. Didn't really fully industrialized during the 19th century were left very rural and and poor and backward by the 20th century. Still now they're catching up from that.

¶119So the average Spanish gain from this was was was quite marginal. Yes, we can afford fleets necessary to face off against the Ottomans at Leanto in 1571. Um, which is good, but but in terms of the development of the society, that really plateaued and stayed that way for hundreds of years. The other side of the equation, as you mentioned, is China. Yes.

¶120Once the Spanish had fully become able to exploit the silver mines of South America, um they could then take advantage of their developing knowledge of the Pacific oceans, wind currents, to send those those great ships west to the Philippines, to Manila, their base in the Orient, and from there meet with merchants coming from Japan, from Siam, and most of all from China, bringing goods with real practical value for exchange for that extracted silver, right? So, as you say, the the Spanish are buying goods with value with a excs liquidity and and the real benefit from that is not something that's that's structurally to the advantage of the country as a whole. So, yes, what the concistadors did was historically put the last pieces of the puzzle in place for true globalization, right? Trade is no longer trans Eurasian or even transatlantic. It's trans global.

¶121the networks now affect everybody at some point along the line. And the Ming found that out in the mid640s when there was a cash crisis having fully transferred the basis of exchange in their empire to silver when access to silver was cut off or at least minimized for a number of reasons. During the first half of the 17th century, the Ming at the worst possible time with the munchu at the gates could no longer fund their armies. They couldn't pay to put a military in place to hold them off. So the Manchus moved in at a moment of supreme advantage, blew out the Ming and replaced them as the new hedgeimons over the the Chinese imperial zone.

¶122>> Yeah. It's interesting to contrast the Spanish who had immediate and outrageous successes in the New World with the English >> around the same time who are setting up um the colony in Virginia. And there's so many uh letters from that time where people are complaining about the Virginia company is just literally a waste of English money and uh Yeah, exactly. And just like everybody's dying. >> They're not getting there's like nothing to farm here.

¶123There's nothing to get out of this. U in the long run, of course, >> guess the British did lose control of the new world, but for a while they did gain these productive new colonies in the new world. And I I don't know what the right way to think about this. I mean there is this uh way of thinking about maybe the Spanish set up this extractive >> because they had this very quick initial success. They set up a very extractive uh settlement which um didn't result in net productive capacity in the long run.

¶124Whereas the British were forced because there was no you know just like crazy bullion floating around. they were forced to build up some productive capacity uh uh build up these kinds of institutions that would allow them to make most use of America, Canada and so on. >> Yeah. You look at the Netherlands and and great and England, the two late comers to the game of imperialism, Protestant powers marginalized for that reason in Europe and the Netherlands especially has nothing natural resources absolutely zero. So in that environment, you're forced to innovate and think about how you can uh achieve capital gain and and true economic expansion.

¶125Everybody wants the quick fix. Understandably, we play the lottery for that exact reason, right? But be careful what you wish for because you may just actually get it. And those societies that have arrived at the quick fix, whether that's um gold or silver or or or monocultural crop production of some kind, which which gives you a monopoly on on on its provision, um they become satisfied with that. They become trapped within an environment that exists solely for that purpose and they don't develop beyond the essential thresholds that that allows for.

¶126Even here in the US, we can look at the difference between the north and the south, that geographic line. Um below that line, yes, you can get the quick fix. You can put all your capital into buying slaves and have them work at providing cash crops, which is tobacco, the original one, uh, indigo and sugar, and of course the big one, cotton. The North didn't have those advantages. You couldn't just buy land and then extract the resource from it.

¶127You had to think about how to make money. And that's why all the investment money in the north was going into things with long-term productivity into trade and commerce into advanced capital markets in the banking system and of course into industrialization right and that all happened in the north. So when the rupture came in the 1860s and the north and south went to war all those advantages were with the north not just population but the industrial base the capital markets necessary for it to put in place a winning long-term strategy for actually defeating the south in that conflict. Um that again is is is the long-term lesson that that having life too easy from the beginning leads to a certain um I don't want to call it laziness but but lack of vision perhaps in in alternatives that may in the longer term actually be more advantageous. >> So earlier in this episode I asked Sai if you could rerun the conquest a thousand times how often do the Spanish end up in control?

¶128What if the Aztecs had learned iron working from the Vikings or the Spanish hadn't brought smallox or Cortez had died earlier? Obviously, with history, counterfactuals are just thought [music] experiments. But with software, you can actually test them. The antithesis software testing platform runs your system through thousands of parallel histories, letting you explore any counterfactual you want. How does your software perform if a packet gets dropped?

¶129What about when the network drags or the machine dies midright? Importantly, you don't have to come up with these counterfactuals. One big problem with traditional testing is that it only covers a distribution that you know to test for a bug. You first have to imagine it. [music] These tests are sort of like the flower wars.

¶130The asset success in these ritual battles against known rivals made them feel like the best military in the world, but they're still unprepared for Cortez. Antithesis solves this by steering your tests for you, injecting faults and making things as adversarial as possible. That way, your software gets tested against scenarios you'd never imagine, but they could still arise in the real world. Go to antithesis.com/cash [music] to learn more. Going back to the Azinkas, one thing that's remarkable here is just how bad their strategy and tactics often were.

¶131For example, because Aztec military conflict was based around capturing victims for sacrifice, there are many cases where Cortez himself was laying on the ground and had been, you know, knocked off his horse, but instead of just killing him on the ground and get guarding their advantage, the Aztecs were trying to like seize him to go uh have some sacrifice water and this allowed him to uh get himself out of the thorny situations. Um, another huge mistake that these would happen in these conflicts is that in the traditional way in which this military conflicts would happen is that the general would be um garnished and a plumbed with all this extra you know decorations basically which would make him easy to identify in a battlefield. >> And if you have cavalry that can just see here's where the general is let's go get go directly to him, kill him. The whole enemy force will route. It just makes your entire chain of command.

¶132You might have 100,000 troops, but then your general dies and everybody else routes. Another example, the battle of Cusco, couple hundred Spaniards defending against this huge uh rebellion. If the rebellion had just kept attacking at night, instead of only attacking during invade, the Spaniards would have never gotten a chance to rest and would have just, you know, been depleted pretty quickly. But instead they would let them rest rest at night, wouldn't use their overwhelming numbers to do rotations. They would attack at different times.

¶133Now why I find this confusing is that it's not like the concisadors arrived at the doorsteps of a bunch of peaceloving hippies who didn't know anything about war. >> Aztec society society was organized around warfare. All adult males were trained to be warriors. It was the it was basically like the Sparta of the new world, right? So how do we understand how a very military uh focused culture did not have the strategic wherewithal to do this improvisation that you know Cortez was doing improvisation bizarre was doing a bunch of improvisation why weren't they able to do the same thing?

¶134There are a lot of factors, one of which is that cultural, the religious aspect to it. The warfare uh was rewarded by increase in status. Um the warriors would be recognized for bringing captives back to Tinetland for sacrifice. Uh there was even like a a hierarchy in terms of of the prisoners, right? That four Tonaks were worth one Chichimac because the Chichimac were a wilder tribe to the north and fought more fiercely than the Totenox did.

¶135to a degree there's a certain overlap with with European cultures. There was great advantage throughout the feudal era in taking your enemies alive as opposed to killing them because then you could ransom them back to their families and you can come out of that ahead in terms of at least financial gain. In a way, the Aztec model is it makes more sense because sacrificing your enemy means you'll never see him again. Whereas selling your enemy back to his family means he's up for round two and you might face off against the same guy across a future battlefield. even kings um the kings of France after the battles of Portier and and and Pabia were captured and and then subject to to various indignities.

¶136So to a degree there was a certain level of overlap but more holistically you're right. Yes the Aztecs did fight ideally to capture not to kill and there were multiple episodes when they did have Cortez himself under their knives but was so desperate to haul them off um his compatriots sometimes sacrificing themselves were able to to rescue him. So that was an aspect of their warfare ingrained in their culture in in their faith and the religious expression of the values of of an entire people. Difficult to to tilt that within the framework that we're talking about. I'd be asking people here if we're fighting aliens from another planet to give up Christianity because there's too much invested in terms of its morality and and more effective combat skills would be derived from from following some other faith.

¶137It it it was not possible to reorient an entire society in that limited time frame to do that. um the Costco situation we could to use a famous film example the movie 300 right the Spartans are able to hold the pass at the because against overwhelming numbers it's very very narrow and within Kusco the surviving concistadors fell back to two heavily fortified buildings with narrow entrances and the streets of Kosko are quite narrow as well um which means that even those overwhelming numbers could only be channeled down through those those narrow avenues and those could be blocked relatively effectively even by the small numbers of kung and their increasing numbers of native allies um able to put in place with their metal armor blocking operations that could hold those kind of of of frameworks. Beyond that, when the pressure came off, then they would unleash their horses largely through the wider plazas and then the surrounding countryside looking for isolated detachments to take out. And this effect was was demoralizing on the Inca. They initially had the advantage, right?

¶138They were rallied by Manco. We're going to deal with these these these barbarians once and for all. But as the frustration of the siege drags on, there's more and more defections, men slipping away at night either to to switch sides or just go back to their homes and families. Right? Again, this army is huge, very diverse.

¶139Uh and many of those recruits are people's who've been subjugated and have no institutional loyalty to the Inca. The bottom line is they need to get home to their farms to get the harvest before the winter. And the nature of warfare in the pre-Colombian America and in Europe for much of its history was driven by the annual cycle of planting and harvesting the crops. You need the men on their farms to do that because if they're not there then you face a very hard year coming up. If you don't have enough crops set aside to get you through the winter and and the following year.

¶140So for all those reasons the ENK yes with those huge numbers weren't able to really overwhelmingly apply them at the same time. If they'd caught perhaps the entire concistador army marching through one of those mountain passes um yes they may have been able to win a set piece battle in that environment. The horses can't charge up the steep slopes >> both ends if they're blocked cleverly with boulders and with trees mean the infantry is not going anywhere either. You have them essentially um pinned down. All the advantages would have been useless at that point.

¶141metal armor won't protect you from a two-tonon boulder rumbling from the heights uh right into your face. If they've been able to arrange that on small scales they were, but to get the entire concisadors in one place at one time like that, that never happened. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

¶142It just basically was not enough time to accumulate the strategy >> or >> again it's that shockingly short steep learning curve. It just wasn't wasn't enough time. No. >> Yeah. So in retrospect you have these outrageous battles with you know thousands of debts on one side and zero deaths on the other side.

¶143Um but my understanding is this came as a surprise to the concisadors as well. And so how how were some hundred odd men willing to go confront an empire of 10 million people and say your job is to take this over. You know, it would be sort of like dropping a hundred Marines into into like 18th century England and being like, "Okay, you better come out the other end with with control over Parliament. It just how how is this a thing that they were willing to do?" >> The the kind of classic pushpull factors, right? They came from a proud land, a new country, Spain come together in 1492.

¶144Um and they were aware their history was one of of struggle um uniting the peninsula and and and consuming the reconista. So they had a proud warrior background but little to show for it really. Um again the the quality of life particularly in extra madura which is the the province in Spain where so many of these concistadors originated from was a land of hardship. It was small farms and and and dusty terrain and unproductive and they were aware of a wider world around them and as like so many men have throughout history. Um they see their only path forward as being anything more than dirt farmers is to seek a career of high- risk and potential even fatal outcomes but possible great reward as well.

¶145Right? men have have joined armies, militaries, fought in campaigns, not even their own, even other peoples for for many centuries, millennia now for for that reason. And the attraction of of the new world, right, once they're aware that out there is a whole new land where it's possible for even a small man like myself to become something, to become somebody, all I have as an asset is is my fighting skills. And yeah, I could keep fighting in the campaigns against the Moors or against the Turks, but um those are high-risk, low return ventures. Yeah, I'll be fighting in my home waters, but what will the potential rewards be?

¶146These Turks can fight, right? The message I'm getting from the far side of the Atlantic is the the risks there are much lower and the potential rewards much higher. It means traveling across a vast ocean. It means essentially u being very self-reliant and and falling in with men who are just as cutthroat as I am. >> How important is religion in the morale of these soldiers?

¶147Because in retrospect, we're like, okay, they were able to take on huge armies, but they didn't know. They didn't even know that there was an empire there to take over. They didn't know where its capital was. They'd never seen it before. They knew nothing about what are the alliances that they need to maneuver.

¶148Um what are the sizes of the armies we need to face? What is the basic terrain and geography that we need to navigate? And so I'm still trying to understand how they gained the confidence, you and your couple hundred buddies, to go and take on a huge empire. Is I don't know, but did they just think they God would make sure that they're okay? Yeah.

¶149How do I understand that? >> Cortez and Pizaro both had, you know, men of the cloth traveling with their expeditions to provide for their spiritual needs. >> Um and and Cortez and Pizaro in retrospect would make a great deal of this in their writing, right? They were they were professed to be outraged particularly by the Aztec cult of human sacrifice which was integral to to their society. Um I I don't see any reason why that would be untrue.

¶150I mean it would be shocking to actually see that happen. And Cortez when Mocktuma invited him to the top of one of the two great pyramids in Tinosh Titland. He remarks the priests were door from head to foot in black um um clay or or or body paint and and the interior was was black with with spilled blood and it stank bomb. So I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be genuinely mortified by that and they they would take a certain degree of legitimacy from tearing down the ancient idols of these superstitious peoples and raising them up to the one true faith. You can salve your conscience in many ways by doing that.

¶151that in real terms I'm here for what's what I can take but I am performing the will of God and therefore I have some absolution what I'm called to account at the end of the day so men will sometimes seek to find a higher purpose in what are very low endeavors which is what was playing out at that time um again coming to the motivation the initial conquests were relatively easy the island populations in the Caribbean what we now call Puerto Rico and and Hispanola um Cuba the peoples there were were quite low on the tree were not unified, did not have a significant military presence. Of course, on islands, there's nowhere for them to run. Um, you could run into the mountains of Cuba, but eventually they would all all be hunted down. So, the feeling was the pickings here are pretty easy, and the enthusiastic attitude was, "Well, why would it be any different in the mainland?" Of course, they did run up against heavy fighting. And some of them would say afterwards, the veterans of wars against the Turks, this was some of the hardest fighting I I've ever I've ever been through.

¶152Um but by that point they'd seen that the potential rewards are much higher as well. When they arrived at Lake Tishko they would marvel as if we had just arrived in Atlantis. Right. Right. To be in this place on this lake with these cities arranged around its edges and the biggest city of all in appear to be floating on the water like Venice except even more dramatic with its high temples and >> um to them this this both aed them and inflamed that that greed that they had.

¶153And Cortez himself admitted as much to Mckazuma's envoice. He he said, "My men and I suffer from a disease of the heart that only gold can cure." So Mckazuma sent him feathered headdresses and all the the traditional regalia. He sent him jade and obsidian, which in the Aztec world would have been symbols of great regard. And Cortez was happy to put on the headdress and he sent it back to the king. But the little trinkets of gold that he was getting, right, that was was the real uh end purpose.

¶154And the local peoples would would talk about how the the Spanish were were chattering like monkeys as they were were picking up these gold and were fascinated by it. >> Yeah. By the way, um Bernell Diaz, who wrote like was on this Cortez's expedition and wrote a firsthand account of what happened afterwards, he basically says in his account that basically in every single town we come across, even in small outlying villages on the empire, every temple, every city just has tons of human sacrifice uh remains left over. So this is just an endemic part of the society that I guess must have horrified the Spanish. I mean they weren't exact um it's hard to square any sort of humanitarian uh even plausible motivation to the Spanish.

¶155They were just very willing um and I think maybe even worse than almost any other European conquest ever. Uh the Spanish in the New World just massacre huge swats of innocent women and children. Uh like the literal genocides, intentional genocides, not just disease. um yeah, crazy amounts of uh rape and assault. So there wasn't a sense of like we're freeing these people from the shackles of oppression or at least there's no plausible story you could tell where there's that that's what you're doing.

¶156But >> they would argue in the long term isn't these people's interests, right? But of course in the short term, as you say, I the the accounts are are unambiguous about this throwing men and women to those huge hunting dogs that they brought with them to for sport to watch them being torn apart. um they could rationalize that in Meso America in reference to that cult of sacrifice which was in endemic ingrained into the mentalities of those people. There were a regular cycle of sacrifice and that would peak according to particular crises, major campaigns or or the like. There are accounts, again, these are distorted accounts, but an almost industrial level of human sacrifice that that the parade of prisoners who've been drugged to keep them pacified stretched from the pyramid complex all the way through to the causeways.

¶157One after the other, they'd be worn up to the the the top of of the pyramids to the temple complex. Four priests each would take an arm and a leg, while a fifth one would use an obsidian blade to open incision and and pull out the heart, which we offered to the gods. I've been to those pyramids, the ones that tu to walk in, the the steps leading up are very very narrow. You almost have to walk up sideways um deliberately so because when the heart had been taken out and burned, the body would be tumled off the far side and the steps were so steep to allow it to tumble all the way to the bottom and then the warrior who' taken that prisoner would then take the flesh home to be consumed. It was the consumation of his victory as a warrior to take on literally internalize the defeated enemy.

¶158So this was as you say it it it's a cycle that the world is better off without. I'm not going to make any excuses for it. But the motivations of those who did that that was not selfless. It was at best a beneficial side effect window dressing on a process of colonization and even literal genocide. And it had even less validation in South America because there was no such tradition at all.

¶159The Inca would very occasionally take a virgin sacrifice um into the high mountains where she'd be drugged and you can still find the mummified corpses of these girls. But that was very rare and very specific. There was no ingrained culture of mass human sacrifice at all. >> Okay, here's a question I find very interesting. Why is it that the Spaniards are able to weaponize the divisions between the different native forces to their own advantage, but the natives are not able to do the same with the Spaniards.

¶160So, we know that the um there were significant divi divisions among the Spaniards, right? Literally, there's a whole much larger force that is sent over to arrest Cortez. Uh similarly, we didn't get into this much, but in the um in the in Pizaro's expedition, his second in command, Almagro, is pissed off that basically Pizaro is getting all the spoils. He comes back lay siege to Cusco after Mango is laid siege to Cusco and captures it. Um, and so they were literally fighting, you know, in multiple cases in both these expeditions.

¶161The Spanish are fighting each other while they are taking over a much larger empire. And why is it that the MOinka or Mazuma are not able to use these divisions to their own advantage to um stay in power? >> That's a good question. The critical difference is this is happening for the concis within the Spanish orbit. They're all they're all Castillians.

¶162They're all Spaniards. um shared common backgrounds for most of them and their confrontations were were personal rivalries um within their system. If confronted by an existential crisis to pit them against each other, I think they would have failed because their bottom line was they would have united if they felt there was a common cause against them that would have forced them to do that. U whereas for the local peoples these are differences between entire societies both the external and internal factors here. Um Quit Laouak who succeeded his brother Montazuma II as Hu Latawani after driving the Spaniards out during Lo Triste.

¶163He sent emissaries to the Lashkllins to the Terrascans to build an expanded or new triple alliance to come together as native people with a common interest against these outsiders and the Lashkllin younger generation thought about it. But the old men who still retained power, who had been fighting against the the Aztecs for decades and saw them as as in the end the existential threat um repudiated this possibility. The Terrascans wanted nothing to do with the Aztecs. No, we we are enemies and always had been and always will be and this is your problem and and maybe you'll get taken out. Not no loss to us.

¶164So they couldn't overcome the kind of institutional hostilities which go way way back through their history. the only way that that the indigenous people could have played the same game uh and to a degree this did happen later was to play different European powers off against each other. But of course the problem for for the Aztecs for the Inca was the Spanish were the only game in town. They were the only outsiders they'd encountered. If the English, French, Dutch, even the Ottomans had been players in New World colonization at that very early stage, it may have been possible for local peoples to identify, okay, these are different cultures, right?

¶165we can play them off against each other to our advantage. That may have been the game, but at that time it wasn't possible. >> Now, we should talk about the um I know you spent a little bit of time thinking about the what happened in all these other episodes of colonialism as well. Um why so in India for example, we do have many different European powers and why was it not possible for the Mughals to play them off each other indefinitely to keep control over India? the Mughal I mean it peaked under orang at the beginning of the 18th century subsequently his successors didn't have whatever you call it the the authority the the the charisma the re whoever you want to define [laughter] it um to maintain that that hegemony which he established by almost taking over all of India and and the Mughals at root had the same problem that the Manchu did when they conquered the Ming in the 17th century and they built theqing dynasty China the greatest physical extent it ever had, but they were always outsiders.

¶166Um they they were not indigenous to the population. In the background, there was always that vague resentment that were being ruled here by foreigners. And that was okay while they were going from success to success. But when the momentum halts and it begins to to to roll backwards, um that's when the local power brokers begin to feel to themselves maybe we have more to gain from breaking away from the empire than we do from remaining within it. Um so both Mughal India and and Manchu China had that kind of of fatal defect as it were coded into the ultimate basis for their authority.

¶167Um so even without the Europeans I I think the Mughal Empire would have peaked and it would have disintegrated. Now what would have happened next would be more like a patchwork quilt of different authorities some larger some smaller. The Maratha Confederacy I think would have been a major player but not one that could incorporate the entire subcontinent within its authority. And of course we look at Chinese history it's the constant cycle of the rise of a dynasty its peak its decline into anarchy and then the rise of a new imperial hegeimon in the region. So that cycle would play out um I think regardless of whether the Europeans intervened specifically in terms of why the British took over at the end well in its bluntest terms the Royal Navy rules the waves and in terms of projecting power the Brits were able to force the French >> out of Canada and out of India because they control the sea lanes and although the French had in terms of population and military a larger force if you can't project that force it's really of no value to you.

¶168So this is very interesting because it makes sense why the British could have been one of the major powers in India um uh where you know there's the Maratas there's the the remainders of the Mughal Empire there's many other factions and then there's this British outpost they've gotten rid of the French you know the British have got Bengal why is it that they were able to consolidate where nobody else is able to consolidate and I think one hypothesis here is that we often talk about advantages in technology but we don't talk about advantages in sort of governance or in terms of uh organization. And the eastern trading company was like a company. It had a board that could fire and hire CEOs and lieutenants and whatever. It wasn't called the CEO obviously. And so it wasn't necessarily like the the most competent people who were in charge of the Eastern Journey Company.

¶169It were like pretty competent people, Robert Clive and his underlings. Um and you would have instances for in for example I think the navab of Bengal uh at right before the British are able to gain control of Bengal which is the initial tax base that they set up in order to further their conquest. Uh Alivari Khan is considered to be a pretty good ruler who was able to hold the British at bay and stuff and then he dies and his prince is this like kind of crazy psychopathic guy who um uh doesn't listen to advice and so forth. So uh because there's this like monarchical tradition across all these principalities in India, there's just going to be sooner or later a bad king and that king cannot stop uh will not be able to stop uh the British incursion. Um they might even lo people there's also all these forces around these principalities who are like who are we going to lend money to?

¶170Who are we going to like lend our troops to? Um and they realize there's a bad king right now. The British seem pretty competent. I'm going to make an alliance with the British instead. Um and similarly with the um case of the asex maybe even more so the overwhelming majority of the troops forces that the British are using are Indians right >> boys.

¶171Yeah. >> Uh sea boys. So I think this is an underrated thing of just um be yeah being able to delegate competent people and then like being able to replace them uh one after another if they get killed or if they resign or something. There's not going to be some crazy succession crisis that creates this anarchy that then somebody else can swoop in and take control. >> Absolutely.

¶172The just to give one example, the British were winning the hundred years war because the king of France, Charles the 6th, was was insane. He was convinced he was made out of glass, for example. And then the English lost the hundred years war because their king Henry V 6 was insane and he would just shut down months at a time. Mental ages just couldn't function >> in in non-democratic environments. Yes.

¶173the corporations for the reasons you outlined, profit driven and therefore not loyal to bloodlines or any other kind of extraneous circumstances, but just looking for the most competent leadership and and a capacity to exchange and replace people are much more flexible than those kind of hierarchical states. Even in many ways, you could argue in democratic societies, the corporations can still maneuver them because they're untied to to particular loyalties and it's just their brand awareness that they're trying to push. The British and Dutch were late to the game of imperialism. Um, and you wouldn't give them much a chance given the differentials, but they unleash the power of the free market as you say, the the East India Company, the English and Dutch equivalents, the British Hudson's Bay Company, which is really what what made Canada as we understand it today. Um, those corporations um driven by those motives acting with almost planet potentiary powers at vast distances had the flexibility on the ground to take advantage of local circumstances to insert themselves into diplomatic arrangements which have persisted for centuries with all the accumulated grievances.

¶174Here we're the fresh newcomers. We have obviously skills of what we do as you say taken control of the tax revenue of Bengal effectively took control of the entire political orbit. What can you do without taxation? reorient that towards the shareholders, force the local people to stop producing these crops, even if it means millions starved to death, in order to produce opium to take advantage of that is was devastating in its impact in political structures that had no real environment where that was was part of their established traditions. And even the concistadors, even the Vikings, if we go back far enough, these were business operations.

¶175The Vikings would be men who would assemble with what weapons they had enough capital up front to pay for boats to go raiding to make this profitable by looting churches and monasteries. That's what the concistadors were. They they were free Buddhas operating within a capitalist system. These were not desperados of the lowest of the low. Many of them had some education.

¶176Um a lot of them were hidalos which is the lowest rung of the petty nobility in Castile who inherited titles and attitudes but not much assets beyond what they could put up as soldiers of fortunes. They call themselves companyos which is colleagues or companions not seldos. So this whole operation was if you like the most raw unbridled capitalism at its finest pulling assets to derive enormous profits from very risky ventures. Maybe to close us off, the thing I find really remarkable in these stories, we've talked about how lopsided these battles have been, how quickly this conquest proceeded. In the grand scheme of things, the technological advantages that the uh Kisadors had over these empires are not that shockingly big, right?

¶177As you mentioned, guns at these time are not good enough to actually be that helpful during battle. So, it's basically horses and it's steel weapons. In fact, I think I don't know if we've talked about this, but towards the ends of these conquest or the middleles of these conquests, the metal is weighing them down and it's really hot and stuff. So, they're even like receding to the cotton armor that the natives are using. So, it's not even the armor.

¶178It's really just that they had >> better like, you know, metal swords instead of obsidian uh obsidian blades and that they had horses and that's enough to let a couple hundred men take over entire empires. I you know that you can draw analogies to what might happen in the future. Um we don't even have to go there. I just I just find it sort of remarkable that what yeah how little it took for them to be so dominant. >> They could they could win battles.

¶179They could not have won the war though at the end without the support of those indigenous allies. So so those overwhelming numbers. Yes. You're right. They would they would always keep the helmets to protect the head but many of them were ditching the metal armor in favor of the local stuff because that was good enough as protection against local weapons.

¶180they would not have done that and carried it back to Europe. That would have made them too vulnerable. But here you adapt to the circumstances. You got more freedom of mobility. It's less exhausting wearing cotton than it is uh to wear metals.

¶181So they would make that that adaptation. They would even sometimes for very prized allies again as a way of integrating them into the Spanish coalition is provide them like local chiefs and warlords with Spanish weapons just to emphasize that the you're so special to me. And this this was effective in binding them together. And and they were very very clever in in identifying the local sub chiefs beneath the Aztec layer of authority who would be receptive to the idea of why are you taking orders from them when you get a better deal from us. Right?

¶182They knew for example in the Aztec Empire was called the triple alliance because it was set up in in 1428 by the first Shu Latani um as a coalition between the three city states, Tishkoko and Tuba. um in 1516. So so like two years three years before Cortez arrived in Meso America um the chief of of king of Teshko died and his two sons fought a civil war for who would succeed him. Mazuma stepped in and gave the title to one of those brothers. So what does the other brother do when the Spanish show up?

¶183He immediately sides with them to get within his own family. His own family was on both sides of this war. um this is his path to getting what he feels is his due being the king of tishkoko and and in the broader sense if I'm under the Spanish versus under the Aztecs maybe these newcomers will give me a better deal so there was that seductive quality at the elite level now what they didn't understand was so many of them thinking they were using the Spanish to their advantage they didn't appreciate the numbers in which the Spanish and later Europeans would arrive right their closed worlds didn't allow them to think about people from such vast distances could come in such huge numbers and in the And as happened in for example Australia and New Zealand that we'll become the minority in our own country the demographic tide they didn't appreciate in the long term would work fundamentally against them. >> Yeah. Okay.

¶184So the analogies to AI there are so obvious it's not worth spelling out. Uh but I think that's actually an excellent place to close. This is um uh such a bizarre shocking and interesting part of human history and I I appreciate you coming on and telling us all about it. >> Real pleasure. Thank you for having me.