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

Conquest of the Americas

0:00Okay, today I'm chatting with professor and military historian Sai Shepard. I want to talk to you about the conquest of the Aztec and the Inca empires, because these are some of the most shocking events in human history, unparalleled among all the military and diplomatic achievements ever made. You have a few hundred conquistadors 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 100x to 1, 1000x to 1, and in many cases not even taking a single casualty. They'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 it. We're mostly talking about history here. But people think of AI takeover as this crazy sci-fi scenario. But this would not be the first time in history that an alien force with motivation

0:59that the natives don't understand is able to use diplomatic cunning and technological advantages to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and well-established order. And so I wanted to have you on to understand what happened here. So first, I would love to hear the story as of what did Cortez do? What did Pizarro do? How did these conquests actually go down?

The 15th Century Atlantic shift

1:19Okay. Thank you. 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.

1:53Key names like Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal work on turning the Atlantic Ocean from a barrier into a superhighway. Generational knowledge accrued from captains reporting in on tides and wind currents and whatever land they've managed to reconnoiter, 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, are 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.

2:31Of course, 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. But over time, it became increasingly apparent this was a source of potential in land, in wealth, and in people that could be exploited.

Cortes takes command in Cuba

2:52A key turning point happened in 1511 when a Spanish ambitious nobleman seizes control of Cuba, de Velazquez. He sends out, from this power base, expeditions, exploring the coast of what we would call Mesoamerica, Central America. Later in 1518, he assigns that task to a man who he's had a somewhat tempestuous relationship with, a man named Hernán Cortés. He'd arrived in the New World in Cuba in 1511.

3:24He had some legal training, so he served as a notary and worked his way up to being alcalde, which is chief magistrate on Cuba, but 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 him. When the governor realizes what Cortés is up to, he tries to stop him. This great moment on 18th November, 1518, he arrives at the waterfront just as Cortés gets into a boat to go out to his ships offshore.

3:59And the governor calls out to him, what are you up to? And Cortés assures him, don't worry, I have this all under control. But of course, the governor had lost control at that point. Now it was Cortés' 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. His political antenna, honed by years 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.

4:31And that its subject, peoples, chafe under the authority of whoever this lord or imperial power is. He arrives in the lands of the Totonacs, who had recently been incorporated into the imperial orbit of a people who call themselves the Meika, hence Meiko as we know it. But have come down to history based on their mythical origins in a land called Aslan, as the Aztecs. So for simplicity's sake, that's what we'll refer to them as. The Totonacs resented this authority, as all subjugated and subordinated peoples do.

5:04And they saw the arrival of these outsiders as a potential opportunity to throw off the authority that had been imposed on them. So having established this relationship with the Totonacs, Cortés begins to march inland. And he enters the territory of the Lashkalans, who, like an autoimmune system, immediately rallied to defeat him, to expel him from their territory. But he fights him to a standstill for such a period of time. The Lashkalans and he arrive at a new kind of arrangement. The Lashkalans, again, appreciate his strength, his power, his potential.

5:37They swing over to his side and will then, henceforth, serve as guides and reinforcements for his expedition deeper into the interior. Can we pause here and talk about the numbers? So how many men had Cortés brought with him? Even the Tlashkalans had much larger numbers than Cortés did. So even the standstill is an impressive military achievement, especially because he's fighting without native support. So what are the numbers even at this point? A few hundred on Cortés' side and multiple thousands on the Lashkalans' side.

Weapons and tactical advantages

6:06It's at this point that the critical technological differentials from the old and new world really begin to come into effect. 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. Guns 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. Local weapons were carved from wood and from stone and from obsidian.

6:41That volcanic glass, which is razor sharp when honed to a point and quite dangerous as a slashing weapon. But against the steel armor and especially the steel helmets that the conquistadors were wearing, it was much less effective. And the conquistadors were drawing on military traditions of the old world that went back, incorporating long Toledo steel sword blades. They used those as thrusting weapons to take out indigenous warriors who were coming in with cut and slash weapons, which of course open up the side of the body to be taken out very early.

7:13So the combination of the technology with generations of inherited military training and skill meant that the conquistadors had that critical edge on the battlefield. Now, they weren't invincible. And Cortez, again, playing those mind games, he was taking casualties. And he was careful to bury his dead underneath the houses that they were sheltering in. So the Lush Collins wouldn't be aware that they were even having some successes 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 conquistadors brought with them was their horses.

7:45I cannot emphasize or overemphasize enough how vital the horse was to the conquistadors once they entered into the interior of the American continents. They had the external asset. They 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. 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 economies, into their ways of life, or into their military.

8:19The 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 no equivalent. Their only domestic animals were the turkey and the chihuahua. And speaking of dogs, the conquistadors also brought these big war mastiffs, these fighting dogs, which wore armor and were trained to take down men. Again, 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.

8:56And if things were going bad for the conquistadors, they could retreat much faster than, of course, the enemies could chase them. So the Los Calans appreciate all these assets coming together, and they see this as their opportunity. They were the holdouts, the last remaining major entity in Mesoamerica, which were still able to go toe-to-toe with the Aztecs. They'd been completely surrounded. The Aztecs were upping the ante every year with these ceremonial flower wars, which were becoming more and more obviously wars of conquest. And the Los Calans had been cut off from the coast and from sources of salt, right? So they were being pushed to the brink.

9:27This is a Hail Mary for them. If we ally with these outsiders, these strangers, who are just few in number after all, we may have some potential way to break out of this strategic trap that we've had imposed upon us.

Encountering Moctezuma in Tenochtitlan

9:39So they lean over to the size of Cortes, and they travel with him to Tenochtitlan, the capital, the glittering jewel in the midst of Lake Tishcoco, the capital of the Aztec Empire. And again, this is a dramatic moment when Cortes passes through the causeways out into the city and encounters Moctezuma II, the Hue Latuani, as he was called, the great speaker, the emperor of the Aztec Empire. And these two worlds come together at that moment. The interface between them was Cortes' interpreter slash mistress, Donna Marina Malinche, as she became known, who is translating from one side to the other.

10:17So the dialogue that occurs then is one of those great tipping points in history. What was the perspective of Moctezuma II? He was aware Cortes was coming. This is his empire. He has envoys and emissaries and scouts and spies everywhere. And they're reporting back to him that something has washed up on the shores of our empire, and it is determined to meet with us. He initially bargains with Cortes, urging him to leave. He provides him with precious gifts, which, of course, just inflames Cortes even more. And just once he's got hold of Aztec gold, he's just determined to go all the way to the center.

10:52So he continues playing this double game. His advisors, his counsel, urge him not to allow Cortes to proceed to the capital. His own brother, Quitlahuek, tells him, if you allow this man inside your house, he will take your house away from you. But Moctezuma proceeds, and from that, he's been condemned by generations of historians. This was a mistake to bring the conquistadors 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 Cortes as his guest within Tenochtitlan

11:24than it was to have Cortes, this random element, at loose within his empire, talking to the subject peoples, inflaming them possibly against central authority. He felt, perhaps, Cortes was what he said he was, an envoy from a great emperor on the far side of the vast ocean. Cortes, again with the mind games, had no warrant to say he was a diplomat or ambassador for anybody. He kept telling anyone who'd listen, I speak for the mighty Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Of course, Charles V had no idea who Hernán Cortes was. Cortes, again, is just winging it, the incredible improvisation here.

11:56And for a moment, the stasis. The great turning point comes when word arrives from the coast that one of the Aztec regional military officers, on his own initiative, has taken action against the conquistadors left behind on the coast, the ones with the Totenacs, and some of them have been killed. So, Cortes sees this as his pretext. He marches into the palace of Moctezuma II, the Aztec, Huey Latvani, tells him that for his own safety, he was now being taken under the protective custody of the Spanish,

12:28and he should come with him, or else there will be violence. And this is the moment when Moctezuma's entire worldview just collapses. Nobody had spoken to him like this before. His psychology just disintegrates at that point, and he meekly allows himself to be led away. He tells his people, don't resist. I don't want bloodshed. I will pass with these strangers. And then, once Cortes 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,

12:59which is a form of punishment totally unknown to the Aztecs, and they watch this in grim silence. So, once Cortes has seized the emperor himself, once he has Moctezuma, he already has the empire. He governs through what is increasingly becoming his puppet. And Moctezuma seems to have fallen almost under the spell of Cortes, the classic Stockholm syndrome. He gives him a grand tour of the city. Cortes, and again, a subtle flex on his power, has brigantines, small sailing boats built. And he takes Moctezuma with him on a sailing cruise on Lake Tishcoco,

13:31and the emperor is astonished at this new technology of using the wind to sail on the water. Having the emperor was the key. So, the emperor's mistake wasn't inviting Cortes into the city. It 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 an expedition of some kind, and had ruled through subordinates, Cortes would have been baffled. He couldn't go chasing after the emperor. That would be obviously too provocative. But without the emperor there, Cortes would have had his options extremely limited.

14:05And I don't know what he would have done in that circumstance. But because Moctezuma stayed in his capital, he made himself the target. Once he was taken, this was the key to controlling the entire empire at that point. So, obviously, the story continues from there.

Rebellion and La Noche Triste

14:19La Noche Triste. What people might 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, maybe you should tell the story how Velasquez sends another expedition to go capture and arrest Cortes for going beyond the prerogative of his mission. Absolutely.

14:50We left the governor on Cuba, of course, fuming. Yeah. He rallies another expeditionary force because Cortes is stealing his thunder, right? And he sends us under Penfeyo de Navayas, a larger force than the one Cortes brought with him originally. This lands on the coast. Cortes appreciates he has to move. So, he leaves one of his subordinates, the hot-blooded Alvarado, behind in charge in Tenochtitlan, takes as many men as he can to the coast, confronts. De Navayas defeats him in a minor battle. And again, the diplomacy wins over the entire expeditionary force

15:20that the governor had dispatched. He tells them, 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. It becomes effectively reinforcements. Marches back to the capital. He finds the mood is turned against him. The problem with not being in charge is you can't be everywhere. And his subordinate, assuming that the Aztecs were mobilizing against him, had a preemptive strike. There was a festival. The aristocracy, particularly the warrior caste, were celebrating.

15:52And Alvarado just descended on them, massacred everybody. The survivors rally the population. And when Cortes returns, he finds himself effectively under siege. The people are so appalled now with the failure of their Huey Letoani. 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 no longer any use to them. So, now Cortes is trapped in the city in Tenochtitlan. He determines to break out. And that is, he should say, La Noche Triste, the tragic night, because so many of his men are left behind.

16:24They're either killed as they try to escape the city across the causeways, were forced to retreat back to the palaces, and they're taken alive and sacrificed subsequently. Cortes gets away with a minority of the troops still at his disposal and makes it back to Lashkalan territory. That was the critical aspect, the two features of the entire campaign. One, he has enough strike power with enough horses to defeat the Aztecs when they try to finish him off at the Battle of Otumbo. They feel he's on the run. They have the numbers. The conquistadors are dragging their tails between their legs as they flee.

16:55Cortes himself is grievously wounded. We can finish them off. And they had the numbers. They were winning. But again, Cortes 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. So the battlefield advantage is they had their horses, their steel, critical. But just as critical was the diplomacy. If the Lashkalan had turned on Cortes at that point, he would have been finished. Not one Spanier would have survived. None of them would have made it back to the coast.

17:26But the Lashkalan see for their own reasons, not out of any generosity or humanitarian impulse to welcome back the conquistadors. They still see we are committed to these people and to our alliance. So they give Cortes shelter. He recovers physically, begins to rebuild his strength, and is determined to go back to Tenochtitlan and for round two. And this time, we're not going to be indulging diplomatic niceties. The Lashkalans, their own perspective on this, if you go to Lashkala territory today, the governor's mansion there has murals on the wall.

17:57And these depict the Cortes and the conquistadors from the Lashkalan point of view. And it's fascinating to look at how the relationship is not between a superior and a 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 Lashkalans drove a hard bargain. We want territory carved out of the Aztecs. We want our own fortress in Tenochtitlan after this is over. They saw this as them using the conquistadors, not the other way around,

18:28which 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 Lashkalans, like the Tarascans, who we can discuss later, were hostile to the Aztecs. So were so many of their subordinated peoples. The Tottenhacks on the coast, the Chalco states on the shores of Lake Texcoco, they chafed under Aztec hegemony and authority. And they too saw the conquistadors as an opportunity to finally shrug off the authority,

19:03the demands of the Aztecs and get revenge in a lot of ways. So as Cortes builds up for the final campaign against Tenochtitlan, against the new Hue Latuani, Cuitlahuac, and then after he died, his brother, the last of the Hue Latuani, is called Tomac, he has indigenous people flocking to his banner from all over Mesoamerica. 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 conquistador army.

19:35But the force that marches on Tenochtitlan, the total numbers, the conquistadors were maybe one half of 1% in raw numbers of that force. The overwhelming majority were other Mesoamerican peoples who see this as their final reckoning with the Aztecs. And this is the integration, again, of the technology with the diplomacy. Cortes 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.

20:05So an expedition goes into the mountains to the volcano, Popocatapetl, 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 brigantines, boats, in their different sections, and then has untold numbers of porters, human load bearers, bring these prefabricated pieces over the mountains to the lake. They're assembled, and then they loosen the lake, and then now they have control over the lake.

20:37So bringing together the technology, the innovations with the local manpower, and this is the force directed against Tenochtitlan in the final battle. I actually didn't know those stories. 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 having been doing trench warfare for 100 years,

21:07and imagine the animosity, and then also the Russians are taking tens of thousands of Ukrainians and doing human sacrifices with them. And then if some foreign force comes in and says to the Ukrainians, we can help you march into Moscow, I think they'd have pretty decent odds of getting some agreement there. Absolutely. The old phrase is, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and diplomacy war, that's always very important. 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.

21:39For 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 outcomes. Another intern built a custom activation checkpointing scheme. Activation checkpointing lets you trade compute for memory. You recalculate some activations during backprop instead of storing them all after the forward pass.

22:10This intern found a way to identify the activations that are cheapest to recompute, but that still free up a lot of memory. And this allowed his version to outperform PyTorch's native one. These are just two examples, but Jane Street has written about a bunch more. These write-ups are coming out in batches. 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 jainestreet.com slash Tworkesh. There's so many interesting questions to ask from everything from technology to diplomacy,

22:45to disease, to tactics. Before 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 want just people to have a sense of roughly what happened here. Starting, I think, maybe with the Battle of Cajamarca might be the most astonishing military lopsided encounter

23:17that 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.

Pizarro targets the Inca Empire

23:26Absolutely.

Pizarro targets the Inca Empire

23:27When Cortez consummates his conquest of Tenerife in 1521, the last of the Huey Latamani 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 conquistadors 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 Mesoamerica because the existing political entities there aren't so sophisticated.

23:57Nonetheless, there are rumors, there are always rumors of lost cities of gold, and more conquistadors are now flooding into the new world to seek advantage of this. One of this is a distant cousin of Cortez named Francisco Pizarro. He met with Cortez and got the playbook, as you say, about how this is to be done. And then, again, in one of these conquistador 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 finally arriving in what is now modern-day Peru.

24:28And 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 Cortez had encountered in Mesoamerica. This is the land of the Inca. When he arrived, there was civil war. The previous Sapa Inca, Huayna Capac, had died in 1525, and his two sons, Adahualpa and Huascar, turned on each other. Adahualpa had just won the civil war, and he was proceeding to Cuzco, the Inca capital, to be formally enthroned as the new Sapa Inca. And that's when word arises to him that strangers have entered his realm.

25:02And again, we're talking 168 men pushed into the Andes Mountains and are seeking him out for reasons unknown. He encounters them outside a place called, as you said, Kazumaka in 1532. And he sees not threat but opportunity. And just like Moctezuma II had been advised to not treat with these people, so does Adahualpa's envoy, who reports to them, these are not men of good faith. We can take them out. They tend to sleep together.

25:32At night, we can set fire to wherever they're staying and just take them all out in one fell swoop. But Adahualpa is interested in what they have to offer him. He's seen the horses. He's seen, in fact, Pizarro made a specific case of impressing the Sapa Inca with his horses. He sends one of his key lieutenants to put on a display of horsemanship. And famously, he charges right at the Sapa Inca and all his court. And the horse stops just inches from Adahualpa's face, snorting and breathing. And Adahualpa is absolutely stony-faced and professes to be unimpressed

26:04and says, I will meet with your master at the 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 we're not to be intimidated by these people. He sends a blocking force, tens of thousands of men, to cut off any retreat. And then he proceeds to meet with Pizarro at Cajamarca with the vast expanse of his army. There's a saying in Peru that Adahualpa was planning to have Pizarro for lunch, but Pizarro ended up having him for breakfast. Once he enters into the confines of a narrow, constricted courtyard space,

26:38that's when Pizarro lets off the ambush. He lets fly with all his artillery and all his musketry for the shock value, unleashes his horses. And Adahualpa himself is overwhelmed and taken prisoner at that point. So this, again, is the playbook, the copybook, as you say. Go to the top. Seize whoever is at the very pinnacle of the social hierarchy. You control the entire structure. And just so people know the numbers here, the Incan Empire overall has some 10 million inhabitants. During this first battle where Pizarro encounters the emperor,

27:10he has some 160, 190 conquistadors. And I think the numbers are known for exactly how many Adahualpa 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. I've seen some numbers that are like 100,000 or 200,000. But certainly in the high tens of thousands, big. So 100-something against almost 100,000. That's the first battle. What is astonishing is that these 100 conquistadors, I think, killed...

27:41I saw some numbers that are like they killed like 10,000 of the enemy or at least thousands of Adahualpa's troops. They suffer zero casualties. So they kill close to 10,000 of the enemy. They suffer zero casualties. This is the first encounter that the Inca Empire has ever had with the conquistadors. 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,

28:12where you can have literally a KD ratio of infinity? Of, you know, 10,000 to zero.

The shock of Cajamarca

28:19Yeah. The conquistadors themselves admitted the night before that encounter there were so many campfires from the Inca army scattered across the hills surrounding Kajamaque. It looked like the twinkling of stars at night. And the conquistadors themselves admitted when they saw the number of Inca troops filing into this courtyard. They were losing control of their own bladders out of fear, right? They knew what the risks were here. But the shock value of that initial impetus was enough to carry them through. The Inca had never heard gunpowder weapons fired in any format before.

28:54The ancestral founder of their empire was Pachacuti, which means the thunder bearing. But to see a real-world exemplar of that must have been just beyond shocking. So the actual physical damage that the cannons and hakuibuses inflicted was relatively minor. But the explosion and the fact that these strangers seemed to be able to control the thunder must have been psychologically devastating. And then it came down again to that steel and those horses. When Pizarro unleashed the horses, this is something that the Inca... As you say, these are veteran warriors, the winners of a civil war,

29:25strategists at a tactical level within the framework of pre-Columbian Andean warfare. They were the top dogs. But this is something outside of their entire understanding of the universe. They'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, they had no doctrine to push back against that. And the psychological impact was that they tried to flee. They were piling up against the walls in their desperation to scramble over them

29:56to 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. And the only thing that stopped the massacre at the end 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 plays out in a way that they have no mental appreciation of or able to draw back in any kind of library of how do I respond in this situation? The fight or flight instinct just completely takes over

30:28and the flight was the winner in this instance. As you say, the only casualty was Pizarro himself. He's reaching for Adahualpa to take him prisoner and one of his more enthusiastic comrades is slashing and manages to cut his hand as he does that. That was the only injury any of the Conquistros suffered at this critical moment. Yeah. So give me a sense of how is it that you can have, even if they're on horses, how is it that they're just so impenetrable? It's like if you have a hundred, 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,

31:01but just, you know, like pull that guy in a steel armor off the stirrups and take him down and then just kill him? Europeans knew how to do that. 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.

31:32Meso-American warfare was very loose in its formation. Warriors would want 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 through any formation that's coming at them.

31:48Now, one depiction of the pre-Columbian societies is that they were somehow childlike, innocent, and couldn't have responded. They did try to, and it's important to bear that in mind. At every level, both the Aztec and the Inca sought to put in place countermeasures to negate the advantages that the conquistadors had. One of the critical exemplars is confined space. The Aztecs, when the Cortes showed up in 1521 for round two, by drawing them into their city, which was a network of islands connected by bridges and causeways,

32:21that minimized the advantages of the horses because that's not good horse country. They would learn to fight from rooftops and pelt the enemy with stones or whatever they could from heights. They built man-sized halls in buildings so they could slip from one to the other where the horses couldn't chase them. So they learned to use those kind of advantages. They learned the stopping power of water. Interestingly, both completely under-connected. They had no relationship with each other. But against Cortes, when he was taking one of the smaller cities on Lake Texcoco, it's La Palpa,

32:52the Aztecs broke the dikes in the lake and flooded the city, which took out a number of the conquistadors and their allies. In that environment, of course, the metal armor works to the disadvantage of the conquistador. It drags them to the bottom. If they'd waited until nightfall when the Spaniards were sleeping, they might have bagged all of them. And the Aztecs, the Inca too, later when the conquistadors moved on Olatintambo, again, the Inca flooded the river, allowed it to burst its banks and again bog down the conquistador cavalry.

33:24So they were adapting. They took captured enemy weapons. They learned to fix conquistadors' swords 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. The Inca employed the bolas, which they'd used for hunting, the great birds of South America, to tangle the legs of horses. One famous incident, an Aztec warrior allowed himself to be speared by a conquistador

33:57and gripped hold of the spear, the lance, as it was in his body, fixing the conquistador in place so his supporters, his colleagues, could swarm and take him out of the saddle. So 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

34:27that we can do this. So they were trying, but the learning curve was so steep and the timeframe 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 Aztec 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. Pizarro does the same thing for the Inca empire 10 years later in about five years. So it's insane how fast these conquests happened and just how little time

34:59that 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, et cetera. 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 re-ran the simulation and again and again, if you just change a few things here and there, change the leader, change the leader for both the Aztecs or for the Spanish in these conquests, in what fraction

35:30of the simulation do within a matter of a few years later the Spanish end up

Contingency and historical wheels

35:35in control of these empires anyways? Because when you first learn about them, it actually sounds like an outrageous and impossible 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. There are the grand scheme of things. There are multiple wheels that define history. The grand wheels that grind slowly, geography and climate. And then the small wheels in the foreground are the individuals, the key players themselves.

36:06And this is an integration of that process, the big wheels with the small ones. Yes, if Cortez, which could have happened on multiple occasions, had been taken out early, the conquistadors, leaderless, rudderless, may well have disintegrated. And the conquest may have been aborted at that level. Pizarro, again, Adhualpa's critical mistake was inserting himself into Pizarro's trap. If he had sent envoys to keep the negotiations at a distance, he may have been able to frustrate Pizarro's ambitions. And as the head

36:36of what remained an integrated Inca empire, he may have been able to use those numbers to win the campaign in the short term. When the Inca did finally turn on the conquistadors, Francesco Pizarro has seized Cusco, stripped the temples of their gold and silver, the sweat of the sun and the tears of the moon, as it was called, shipped it back to Europe. He goes back to the coast to set up Lima, what would become the city of Lima, the modern capital of Peru. The danger with Cusco is the fact it's elevated and away from the coast,

37:07which is where the Spanies are coursed with their absolute monopoly over naval power have the advantage. His problem was he left his half-brothers in charge back in Cusco and they provoke Manco Inca, who'd been set up as Pizarro's puppet ruler, into outright rebellion. He rallies his people, he lays siege to Cusco, he takes Saxahuaman, the great fortress that dominates Cusco, and he has one of his generals, Quizo Yupanqui, cut off reinforcements arriving from the coast. The Inca could win

37:38set 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 Cusco. And Quizo is waiting until 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

38:08set peace battles, but they can't seal the deal in Cusco. And Manco makes the mistake of ordering Quizo to attack Lima. He feels, we have the advantage now. I've bottled them up in Cusco, we've annihilated their relief columns, take out their city on the coast and the problem is over. 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. Back in Cusco, yes, there's a handful of Spaniards holed up in just a couple

38:40of fortified buildings, desperately holding on. Day and night, they're under assault. The psychological aspect to it, the beating of drums and the chanting and 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 Cusco 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 Mitma, as they were called, or Yanakona,

39:10serfs, the defeated and subordinated people of the Inca had brought forcibly within their imperial structure, chafing under those authorities, see these outsiders as their chance to finally break free of Inca authority. So strangely enough, as it may seem, more local peoples had kept joining the besieged Spaniards during the whole Battle of Cusco, which played out over many, many months. And the Spaniards ended up with more allies than they started during this battle because there were so many people within the Inca Empire, from the Canaria

39:40who were from Ecuador to the Chachapoya from the Amazon basin to even the Ayamaca who used to be rivals with the Inca for control of Cusco itself, increasingly side with the Spaniards and that local manpower was the critical asset. Without that, they would have been wiped out at Cusco. So again, it's the Spaniards inserting themselves into an imperial orbit, which from a distance looks impressive with its geographic expanse and its total population, but which had been ruthlessly dictated to

40:11by a tiny elite of a hierarchy who had imposed themselves over the entire system. Remember, only a small number of people spoke Nahuatl, the imperial language of the Aztecs. Only a small number spoke Cachua, the imperial language of the Inca themselves. It was the Inca Empire, but it was constructed from multiple, multiple different ethnicities. And when they saw their chance, they took it to side with the Spaniards. Yeah, it's worth remembering that the Aztecs and the Incas are themselves sort of the equivalent of the conquistadors in their own world, right?

40:41There's 100,000 or so actual Incas that are 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? Because if you're pointing out all these cases in which if things had gone slightly differently, the seas of Cusco would have worked or Cortes would have been killed in battle and stuff. The ultimate factor to go down to those background forces, the great wheels that grind through history, yeah, the geography and climate

41:11structured one other factor. 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, that ripped back and forth through Eurasia and we're familiar with all their names. that never occurred in the new world. The people there

41:42had no acquired immunity to diseases such as the big one, smallpox, but beyond that, the whole galaxy 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, the longer-term demographic crisis would have undermined the functional capacity of their societies to remain integrated and to resist much longer. the pressure within them from their subject peoples

42:12as they felt the authority of their overlords beginning to weaken would have led to their fragmentation, which is the overarching cycle of pre-Columbian 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 construct it. the subject peoples would have broken for freedom. We see the recurring cycle of Mesoamerican history,

42:43for example, that when Cortes arrived, Tenochtitlan was one of the greatest metropolis, perhaps, on earth, beautiful and rich and heavily populated. A hundred years later, if he'd arrived in 1619 as opposed to 1519, he would have found a swamp with moss-covered mounds and hills rising out of it. The parallel to that, of course, is Chihuahuan, the previous great metropolis which dominated Mesoamerica. It rose, it expanded, it attracted a huge population, it overstressed its environment and it collapsed.

43:14I think the Aztecs naturally would have gone the same way. So one way or another, the Spanish or even subsequent ways of European colonists would have entrenched themselves at the coast and would have perhaps almost slowly pushed inland. 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 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,

43:45AI can probably just do it for you. AI has gotten more and more general over time. So these new AI assistants need much less hand-holding than they used to. For example, SpaceX AI gave Grokbot access to their contracts, vendor spend, and usage data and asked it to identify potential savings. You then end up finding over $100,000 worth, mainly made up of unused SaaS seats and unnecessary add-ons. I tried this on my own spend and Grokbot found more than I expected. It went through all my SaaS tools and figured out which seats I should stop paying for

44:15by looking at the last active date for each user. It looked at my billing settings and told me which tools I should pay for annually instead of monthly. And it also messaged me about a couple subscriptions it doubted that I was actually using, like LinkedIn Premium and asked me if I wanted to cancel them which I did. All in, Grokbot found over $5,000 of savings even though we're a pretty small team. It seems quite likely that within six months I'll get to completely eliminate some of the most annoying and least productive feeling hours of my week. You can already give real work to AI assistants like Grokbot

44:45which has been making a bunch of small things in my life easier. Go to x.ai slash bot to try it out. We do know examples of other Native forces who resist European powers for a very long time. I think there's some platoon or army that has just finished off fighting during the American Civil War that has to go down and then go fight some Native tribes because there is still even late into the 19th century Native forces which are able to resist

45:16European incursions of course you know with the Comanche and so forth. So it does seem to me that maybe just because they were so centralized you get the emperor and the whole thing falls whereas other tribes were more dispersed. You're absolutely right. The key term there as you used it was dispersal. The vulnerability of the Aztec, the Inca was that hierarchical nature in their society and the absolute loyalty that the system had invested into who was at the top of the social hierarchical tree. The Huilatuani for the Aztecs,

45:47the Sape Inca 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. The dispersed peoples as you say, the Comanche, even the Maya in Mesoamerica whose city-states jealously asserted and defended their autonomy against each other meant that the Spanish couldn't take out the Maya in one fell swoop. They couldn't do to the Maya what they'd done to the Aztecs. They had to reduce their cities one by one

46:17and it was a long laborious process that took almost to the end of the 17th century to finally consummate and even then there was still smoldering dissent. In many ways you can go to the highlands of Central America and they still speak the ancestral languages of the first one before they speak Spanish. Yes, colonizing powers can find aggressive bite back just like at Custer's last stand as late as 1876 here in America the entire 7th Cavalry wiped out the Little Bighorn because they lost the initiative and at that point they were fighting warriors who had

46:48come together temporarily riding horses firing guns and then dispersing afterwards. It 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 heel setting up barbed wire everywhere and of course slaughtering the buffalo to take away the basis for their culture and their food chain to finally bring the last holdouts to heel. So it can be a long protracted process. The Inca and Aztecs themselves found that out. They never consummated even incorporating their entire zones

47:18within their empires. The Aztecs had surrounded and was slowly reducing the Lashkallans but to the west and what's Micahuaca and the Puripuche people or as they're called today the Tarascans had an empire of their own and they were able to go toe-to-toe with the Aztecs. The first time the Aztecs crossed into Tarascan territory it was a disaster. A key reason for that was actually technology. The Aztecs had no connection with South America. The Tarascans somehow did. We know from linguistic evidence and costume choice some exchange

47:49of flora and fauna and above all in technology. The Tarascans could smelt metal. Like the Inca they could smelt copper and they used that to form the points of their arrows and their massed arches with their copper tipped arrows were decimating the invading Aztec forces. So the exchange if it had been on a broader scale between 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.

48:20There is tin in the New World. Yes. So no bronze? Why did we not get bronze with copper and tin? They'd never made it certainly not in Mesoamerica where everything was stone. They're 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. Right. No but you know before that you would have thought that they would have done copper tin to get bronze. They did have bronze in the Inca world. Oh really? Okay. And if the Aztecs had had access to that again they'd have given them a much more aggressive fighting stunt.

48:50Bronze can't stand up against iron but it's better than stone. Right. Yeah. Or obsidian. 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. So Cortes learns from the conquest of Hispaniola. Of course he has a ton of improvisation in the way he approaches the conquest of the Aztecs and then Pizarro you know just knows the whole details of what Cortes did a decade earlier basically follow

49:20the same playbook. 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 knowledge than the other one is able to accumulate. Yeah. Their closed worlds they were very much very insular in their societies. To go further back in time I think the only divergence that would have given pre-Columbian peoples a real long-term chance to hold off the Europeans if we reverse the clock another 500 years back to leave Ericsson

49:51and the Norse in Greenland they knew of the existence of North America. Helluland, Markland and Vinland as they called them as they explored them and they tried to colonize the New World. Their numbers were too few the local resistance was too fierce and 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

50:21so that 500 years later when the conquistadors 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 up. That would be such an interesting history. What does the New World look like if the Vikings had actually set up there? That's very interesting. What was Pizarro's greatest innovation on Cortez's strategy?

50:46I think essentially the key to it was following the blueprint as closely as possible. Go right to the top establish a coastal sediment which Cortez also was very invested and so you have a secure base to fall back to if what's happening in the interior is not playing out. A base on the coastline was originally with the conquistadors but more broadly the Portuguese, British, French subsequently they would build those key strongholds on the coast which because of their monopoly over nautical technology means they were

51:17effectively 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. At the end of the day they had the fortresses. Again, the long institutional knowledge of what a perfect fortress should look like. Those jagged edge star parameters and revetments and battlements which maximized firepower. Even Eurasian cultures, even the Qing Chinese struggled to be able to deal with that.

51:48The peoples of the pre-Columbian Americas 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 once the Europeans dug into fortified positions, it was very hard to move them out of that. Pizarro's own environment was quite different from that of Cortez. I mean, the highlands of Mexico were quite elevated but the Andes mountains that the conquistadors were moving into. I mean, I've been at elevation

52:19in the Himalayas and I was struggling to breathe with the altitude sickness. So how they're able to move to those heights and then be able to fight battles is really astonishing. With, you know, many dozens of pounds of armor and equipment. Yeah, that speaks to their physical stamina honed over many years of hard living and the core motivations. This had better be worth it. So that's why Cortez and Pizarro

52:50were always kind of first among equals. They had to keep demonstrating success. They had to be the alpha dog in all circumstances because around them were many ambitious men, some of whom had titles or claims that were just as legitimate as Cortez or Pizarro. And Cortez was always on top of that situation. Pizarro, of course, at the end, lost control. He made his end as a rival faction stormed his household. And he went down fighting not against the indigenous people but against his fellow Spaniards. What I find interesting

53:21about this conquest is that once the emperor is captured, Atahualpa for the Incas and Moctezuma 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? Do they think that the Spanish were going to leave if they give them enough gold? Why are they... What is their end game there? That's a good question. I mean, I think Moctezuma II, from the moment when Cortez seized him, because previously the records of Moctezuma reflect that he was a pedalous autocrat

53:52he centralized all power on the aristocracy. Previously, it used to be possible to work up from outside the circle into the inner circle, but he forbade that. He was almost Stalinist in his authority over his underlings. And he was the one who was amping up the ritualistic flower wars into successive campaigns of encirclement and annihilation for the Lashkallans. So he was, in every sense of the word, an autocrat.

54:23Perhaps it's for the first time in his life being told what to do just led to a complete psychological break because once Cortez had hold of him, he seems to have pulled a complete one-of-the-switch and become essentially, willingly, Cortez's puppet. He 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. In the end, it wasn't Cortez who disposed of it. It was his own people

54:54because they realized that he had sold them out and he had to go. His being unilaterally deposed, that had never happened before in Aztec history. He was the first Huey Latuani to be repudiated by his own people and replaced by someone else. But what it was to do with Atahawapa? What did he think was going to happen? He seemed like he had his wits about him, right? He did, in the Spanish accounts refer to it. He had a regal bearing, was clearly intelligent and he was adaptive to the situation. He learned to speak Spanish very, very quickly. He learned to play cards and chess.

55:25So he was, I think, trying to integrate himself as much as possible. 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 fully mobilize him. 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 gold and silver and Pizarro had promised to be released at that point. Perhaps he actually felt that this was a man of his word, but Pizarro in no case was and had him

55:56garanted to death after getting what he wanted. So it may just be that he misinterpreted Pizarro as someone who was on the same level that kings don't do this to other kings, but he was dealing with a freebooting entrepreneur's pirate, essentially, not someone operating in good faith. Yeah. Okay, so zooming out, it's sort of interesting to think about what this Spanish New World conquest really accomplished. So they're basically after gold and silver. In a weird way, they're sort of like

56:27paper clippers who don't really care about this indigenous culture or even the productive capacity of this new continent. They just care about these metals, which are not in and of themselves productive assets, right? They can't generate wealth. They're basically like crypto, if you think of what gold and silver are. So they're just obsessed with this.

Silver, bullion, and global trade

56:47Initially, we were talking about this yesterday, this helps them fund the, you know, Europe's in a tough spot at this time because the Ottomans and other forces are, the reconquest does just happen, so the Spanish have been fighting off Arab armies that had control over parts of the Iberian Peninsula. And they use this gold and this silver to, 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

57:18that 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. You get inflation plus like some redistribution. It's basically the government printing more money. It doesn't create more stuff. 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 circulation of paper currency. Nobody trusts it.

57:49Every time there's inflation, they just make up a new currency and people's stocks of wealth are totally worthless. And so now the Spanish set up the silver mines in the new world and they ship that silver off to China and China is then sending millions of pieces of porcelain and tons and tons of silk and spices and fine goods to Europe. Basically, hundreds of tons of real goods. I don't know, it might have been thousands of tons in exchange for basically a medium of exchange basically to make up for the fact

58:20that they don't have 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 colonies in the new world. It'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 conquistadors really didn't appreciate what they'd accomplished, many of them. Some of them died doing what they did. The ones who were lucky were good,

58:51lived long enough to settle down on what were called incombiendas, that's local estates with many of the local people. It was to farm the land for them kind of peon serfdom.

59:03The later iteration was the bureaucrats. Once the conquistadors had cleared the ground, the bureaucrats would arrive from Spain and they would begin running and administering what would become Mexico, Peru, South America generally. The conquistadors in South America rebelled against that, had to be put down by force to retain South America within the Spanish Empire. Once 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

59:34and exploited a mountain of silver at Potosia, what's now Bolivia, they put the last piece of the puzzle in place for true globalization. Initially, the gold, silver was all going east, as you say, into the coffers of King Charles V and his son, King Philip II, for their wars of evangelical defense and expansion against the Ottomans to keep the Netherlands under their control to ideally,

1:00:04through the Armada, bring the one true apostolic faith of Catholicism back to England.

1:00:10Most of those ventures, of course, were failures. And as you say, the net impact for Spain 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 in Spain, 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

1:00:40than they had been previously. And the ultimate negative effect was 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 independent 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 industrialize during the 19th century. Were left very rural and poor and backward

1:01:11by the 20th century. Still now, they're catching up from that. So the average Spanish gained from this was quite marginal. Yes, we can afford fleets necessary to face off against the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571 which is good 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, once the Spanish had fully become able to exploit the silver mines of South America

1:01:41they could then take advantage of their developing knowledge of the Pacific Oceans wind currents to send 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. So as you say the Spanish are buying goods with value with excess liquidity

1:02:12and the real benefit from that is not something that's structurally to the advantage of the country as a whole. So yes what the conquistadors did was historically put the last pieces of the puzzle in place for true globalization. Trade is no longer trans-Eurasian or even trans-Atlantic it's trans-global. The networks now affect everybody at some point along the line and the Ming found that out in the mid-1640s when there was a cash crisis having fully

1:02:42transferred 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 Manchu 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 hegemons over the Chinese imperial zone.

1:03:14Yeah. 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 were setting up the colony in Virginia and there's so many letters from that time where people are complaining about the Virginia company is just literally a waste of English money and lives and just like everybody's dying they're not getting there's like nothing to farm here there's nothing to get out of this in the long run

1:03:45of course I 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 don't know the right way to think about this I mean there is this 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 settlement which didn't result in net productive capacity in the long run whereas the British were forced because there was no you know just like crazy bullion floating around

1:04:15they were forced to build up some productive capacity 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 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 achieve capital gain and true economic expansion everybody wants

1:04:46the quick fix understand it 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 gold or silver or monocultural crop production of some kind which gives you a monopoly on its provision 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 even here in the US we can look at the difference between the north and the south

1:05:17that geographic line 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 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 you 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

1:05:48into advanced capital markets and the banking system and of course into industrialization 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 that again is the long-term lesson that having life too easy from the beginning leads to a certain

1:06:20I don't want to call it laziness but lack of vision perhaps 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? What if the Aztecs had learned ironworking from the Vikings? Or the Spanish hadn't brought smallpox? Or Cortez had died earlier? Obviously with history counterfactuals are just thought experiments but with software you can actually test them

1:06:50The 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? What about when the network drags? Or the machine dies mid-right? 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 These tests are sort of like the flower wars The Aztec success in these ritual battles

1:07:20against 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 that could still arise in the real world Go to antithesis.com slash for cash to learn more

Tactical mistakes and sacrifice culture

1:07:44Going back to the Aztecs Incas one thing that's remarkable here is just how bad their strategy and tactics often were for 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 guarding their advantage the Aztecs were trying to like seize him to go have some sacrifice water and this allowed him

1:08:14to get himself out of the thorny situations Another huge mistake that these would happen in these conflicts is that in the traditional way in which this military conflict would happen is that the general would be garnished and aplumbed 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

1:08:45will rout it just makes your entire chain of command you might have a hundred thousand troops but then your general dies and everybody else routes another example the battle of Cusco couple hundred Spaniards defending against this huge rebellion if the rebellion had just kept attacking at night instead of only attacking 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 at night wouldn't use their overwhelming numbers to do rotations

1:09:15that would attack at different times now why I find this confusing is that it's not like the conquistadors arrived at the doorsteps of a bunch of peace-loving hippies who didn't know anything about war right Aztec society because 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 focused culture did not have the strategic wherewithal to do this improvisation

1:09:45that you know Cortes was doing improvisation Pizarro was doing a bunch of improvisation why weren't they able to do the same thing there are a lot of factors one of which is that cultural the religious aspect to it the warfare was rewarded by increase in status the warriors would be recognized for bringing captives back to Tenochtitlan for sacrifice there was even like a hierarchy in terms of the prisoners like that four Totenaks were worth one Chichimec because the Chichimec were a wilder tribe to the north and fought more fiercely

1:10:16than the Totenaks did to a degree there's a certain overlap 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 could come out of that ahead in terms of at least financial gain in a way the Aztec model 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 the kings of France

1:10:46after the battles of Poitiers and Pavia were captured and then subject to various indignities so 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 were so desperate to haul him off his compatriots sometimes sacrificing themselves were able to rescue him so that was an aspect of their warfare ingrained in their culture and in their faith and the religious expression

1:11:16of the values of an entire people difficult 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 more effective combat skills would be derived from following some other faith it was not possible to reorient an entire society in that limited time frame to do that the Cusco situation we could to use a famous film example the movie 300 the Spartans are able to hold the pass of

1:11:46Thermalpoli because against overwhelming numbers it's very very narrow and within Cusco the surviving conquistadors fell back to two heavily fortified buildings with narrow entrances and the streets of Cusco are quite narrow as well which means that even those overwhelming numbers could only be channeled down through those narrow avenues and those could be blocked relatively effectively even by the small numbers of conquistadors and their increasing numbers of native allies able to put in place with their metal armor blocking operations

1:12:17that could hold those kind 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 demoralizing on the Inca they initially had the advantage they were rallied by Manco we're going to deal with 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 switch sides or just go back to their homes and families again this army

1:12:47is huge very diverse and many of those recruits are peoples 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 the nature of warfare in the pre-Columbian America and 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

1:13:19a very hard year coming up if you don't have enough crops set aside to get you through the winter and the following year so for all those reasons the Inca yes those huge numbers weren't able to really overwhelmingly apply them at the same time if they caught perhaps the entire conquistador army marching through one of those mountain passes 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's not going anywhere either you have them

1:13:50essentially pinned down all the advantages would have been useless at that point metal armor won't protect you from a two-ton boulder rumbling from the heights right into your face if they've been able to arrange that on small scales they were but to get the entire conquistadors in one place at one time like that that never happened yeah yeah it's basically it 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 yeah so in retrospect you have these outrageous battles with

1:14:20you know thousands of deaths on one side and zero deaths on the other side but my understanding is this came as a surprise to the conquistadors 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

1:14:51the 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 push-pull factors right they came from a proud land a new country Spain and we come together in 1492 and they were aware their history was one of struggle uniting the peninsula and and consummating the reconquistas so they had a proud warrior background but little to show for it really again the the quality of life particularly in extra madura which is

1:15:22the the province in Spain with so many of these conquistadors originated from was a land of hardship it was small farms 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 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 men have joined armies militaries fought in campaigns not even there

1:15:53aren't even other peoples for many centuries millennia now for that reason and the attraction of the new world 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 my fighting skills and yeah I could keep fighting in the campaigns against the moors or against the turks but those are high risk low return ventures yeah I'll be fighting in my home waters but what will the potential rewards be these turks

1:16:23can 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 being very self-reliant and and falling in with men who are just as cutthroat as I am how important is religion and the morale of these soldiers because 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

1:16:54about what are the alliances that they need to maneuver what are the size 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 I don't know but do they just think they God would make sure that they're okay yeah how do I understand that Cortes and Pizarro both had you know men of the cloth traveling with their expeditions to provide for their spiritual needs and

1:17:24Cortes and Pizarro in retrospect would make a great deal of this in their writing right they were professed to be outraged particularly by the Aztec cult of human sacrifice which was integral to their society I don't see any reason why that would be untrue I mean it would be shocking to actually see that happen and Cortes from Moctezuma invited him to the top of one of the two great pyramids in Tenochtitlan he remarks the priests were daubed from head to foot in black clay or body

1:17:54paint and the interior was black with spilled blood and it stank a bomb to be so I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be genuinely mortified by that and 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 solve your conscience in many ways by doing that that in real terms I'm here for what I can take but I am performing the will of God and therefore I have some absolution when I'm called to account at the end of

1:18:24the 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 again coming to the motivation the initial conquests were relatively easy the island populations in the Caribbean what we now call Puerto Rico and Hispaniola Cuba the peoples there were quite low on the tech tree were not unified did not have a significant military presence of course on islands there's nowhere for them to run you could run into the mountains of Cuba but eventually they would all be hunted down

1:18:55so 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've ever been through but by that point they'd seen that the potential rewards are much higher as well when they arrived at like Tishkoko they would marvel as if we'd have just arrived in Atlantis right to be in this place on this lake with these cities arranged around its edges and the biggest city of all appeared to

1:19:26be floating on the water like Venice except even more dramatic with its high temples and to them this both awed them and inflamed that greed that they had and Cortes himself admitted as much to Moctezuma's envoys he said my men and I suffer from a disease of the heart that only gold can cure so Moctezuma sent him feathered headdresses and all the traditional regalia he sent him jade and obsidian which in the Aztec world would have been symbols of great regard and Cortes was happy to put on the headdress and he sent it

1:19:57back to the king but the little trinkets of gold that he was getting right that was the real end purpose and the local peoples would talk about how the Spanish were chattering like monkeys as they were picking up this gold and were fascinated by it yeah and by the way Bernal Diaz who wrote like was on this Cortes expedition and wrote a first-hand 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

1:20:27temple every city just has tons of human sacrifice 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 it's hard to square any sort of humanitarian even plausible motivation to the Spanish they were just very willing and I think maybe even worse than almost any other European conquest ever the Spanish in the new world just massacre huge swaths of innocent women and children like the

1:20:58literal genocide intentional genocide not just disease yeah crazy amounts of 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 right where there's that that's what you're doing but they would argue in the long term this is in these people's interests right but of course in the short term as you say I mean the accounts are unambiguous about this throwing men and women to those huge hunting dogs they brought with them for sport to watch them being torn apart they could

1:21:29rationalize that in Mesoamerica in reference to that cult of sacrifice which was 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 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 one after the

1:21:59other they'd be worn up to the the top of the pyramids to the temple complex four priests each would take an arm and a leg well a fifth one would use an obsidian blade to open an incision and pull out the heart which we offer to the gods I've been to those pyramids the ones that you to walk in the the steps leading up are very very narrow you almost have to walk up sideways deliberately so because when the heart had been taken out and burned the body would be tumbled 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'd taken that prisoner would

1:22:29then take the flesh home to be consumed it was the consummation of his victory as a warrior to take on literally internalize the defeated enemy so this was as you say 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 even less validation in South America because there was no such tradition at all yeah the incubator very

1:22:59occasionally take a virgin sacrifice into the high mountains which should 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

1:23:29natives are not able to do the same with the Spaniards so we know that the there were significant divisions among the Spaniards right literally

European governance versus native fragmentation

1:23:37there's a whole much larger force that is sent over to arrest Cortez similarly we didn't get into this much but in the in the in Pizarro's expedition his second in command Almagro is pissed off that basically Pizarro is getting all the spoils he comes back lay siege to Cusco after Manco Inca's lay siege to Cusco and captures it and so they were literally fighting you know in multiple cases in both these expeditions the Spanish are fighting each

1:24:08other while they're taking over a much larger empire and why is it that the Manco Inca or Moctezuma are not able to use these divisions to their own advantage to stay in power that's a good question the critical difference is this is happening for the conquistadors within the Spanish orbit they all they're all Castilians they're all Spaniards shared common backgrounds for most of them and their confrontations were personal rivalries within their system if confronted by an existential

1:24:40crisis to pit them against each other I think that 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 whereas for the local peoples these are differences between entire societies both the external and internal factors here Kuitlahuek who succeeded his brother Moctezuma the second as Huele Tawani after driving the Spaniards out during La Noche Triste he sent emissaries to the Laschcalans to the Tarascans to build an expanded or new triple

1:25:12alliance to come together as native people with a common interest against these outsiders and the Laschcalan younger generation thought about it but the old men who still retained power who have been fighting against the Aztecs for decades and saw them as in the end the existential threat repudiated this possibility and the Tarascans wanted nothing to do with the Aztecs no we are enemies and always have been and always will be this is your problem and maybe you'll get taken out not no no loss to us so they couldn't overcome the kind of

1:25:43institutional hostilities which go way way back through their history the only way that that the indigenous people could have played the same game 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

1:26:15different cultures we 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 I don't you spent a little bit of time thinking about the what happened in all these other episodes of colonialism as well 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 Jeb at the beginning of the

1:26:4518th century subsequently his successes didn't have whatever you call the the authority the the charisma the riz to maintain that that hegemony which he'd established by almost taking over all of India and and the Mughals was at root had the same problem that the Manchu did when they conquered the Ming in the 17th century and they built the Qing dynasty China the greatest physical extent ever had but they were always outsiders they were not

1:27:16indigenous 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 roll backwards 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 so both Mughal India and and Manchu China had that kind of fatal defect as it were coded into the ultimate basis for their authority so

1:27:49even without the Europeans 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 hegemon in the region so that cycle would play out I think regardless of whether the Europeans intervened specifically in terms of why the

1:28:20British 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 all of the French had in terms of population and military a larger force you can't project that force it's a really of no value to you so this is very interesting because it makes sense why the British could have been one of the major powers in India where you know there's the Marathas there's the the remainders of the Mughal Empire there's many other factions and then there's this British

1:28:54outpost 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 organization and the Eastern Eternity Company was like a company it had a board that could fire and hire CEOs and lieutenants and whatever it wasn't called a CEO obviously and so it wasn't necessarily like the

1:29:27most competent people who were in charge of the Eastern Eternity Company were they're like pretty competent people Robert Clive and his underlings and you would have instances for in for example I think the Navab of Bengal 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 Oliver Di Khan is I consider 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 doesn't listen to

1:29:59advice and so forth so because there's this like monarchical tradition across all these principalities in India there's just gonna be sooner or later a bad king and that king cannot stop will not be able to stop the British incursion they might even lose people there's also all these forces around these principalities were like who are gonna lend money to who are we gonna like lend our troops to and they realize there's a bad king right now the British seem pretty competent I'm gonna make an alliance with the British instead um and similarly with the um case of the Asics

1:30:34and Incas maybe even more so the overwhelming majority of the troops forces that the British are using are Indians right uh sepoys so I think this is an underrated thing of just um be yeah being able to delegate competent people and like be 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 the just one example the British were winning the hundred years war because the king of

1:31:05France Charles VI 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 VI was insane and he would just shut down right months at a time mentally he just just couldn't function in in non-democratic environments yes the 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 a capacity to exchange and replace people are much more flexible than those

1:31:35kind of hierarchical states even in many ways you could argue in democratic societies the corporations can still maneuver them because they're untied 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 and you wouldn't give them much a chance given the differentials but they unleashed 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 those corporations driven

1:32:05by those motives acting with almost plenipotentiary powers at vast distances had the flexibility on the ground to take advantage of local circumstances to insert themselves into diplomatic arrangements which persisted for centuries with all the accumulated grievances here we're the fresh newcomers we have obviously skills of what we do as you say taking 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

1:32:36in order to produce opium to take advantage of that is it was devastating its impact in political structures that had no real environment with that was was part of their established traditions and even the conquistadors even the vikings if we go back far enough these were business operations the 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 conquistadors were

1:33:06they they were freebooters operating within a capitalist system these were not desperados of the lowest of the low many of them had some education a lot of them were hidalgos 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 compañeros which is colleagues or companions not soldados so this whole operation was if you like the most raw unbridled capitalism at its finest pooling assets to derive enormous profits from very risky ventures

1:33:41maybe to close this off the thing i find very remarkable in this story is 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 conquistadors had over these empires are not that shockingly big right as you mentioned guns at this 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 we i don't know we've talked about this but towards the ends of these conquests or the middles of these conquests the metal is weighing

1:34:13them 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 it'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

1:34:50battles they could not have won the war though at the end without the support of those indigenous allies so so those overwhelming numbers yes actually they'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 they 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 have more freedom of mobility it's less exhausting wearing cotton than it is uh to wear metal so 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

1:35:23chiefs and warlords with spanish weapons just to emphasize that you're so special to me and this this was effective in binding them together and and they were very very clever 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 they knew for example in the aztec empire was called the triple alliance because it was set up in in 1428 by the first shiwi latwani um as a coalition between the three city states of tenochtitlan tishkoko and tukuba

1:35:58um in 1516 so so like two years three years before cortez arrived in mesoamerica um the chief of of king of tishkoko died and his two sons fought a civil war for who would succeed him moctezuma stepped in and gave the title to one of those brothers so what does the other brother do when the spanish show up he 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

1:36:30of tishkoko 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 end as happened in for example australia and new zealand that will become the minority in our own country the demographic tide they didn't appreciate in the long

1:37:03term would work fundamentally against them yeah okay so the analogy to ai there is 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