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

Okay, today I'm chatting with professor and military historian Cy 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, 1,000x 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 gonna 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 motivations that the natives don't understand, is able to use diplomatic cunning and technological advantages to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and well-established order. And so I wanted to have you on to understand what happened here. So first, I would love to hear the stories of what did Cortés do, what did Pizarro do, how did these conquests actually go down?

Okay, 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. Key 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, they're heading west. We all know the story of Christopher Columbus in 1492. He sailed the sea blue. That was entrepreneurship. This was an expedition to arrive at the Oriental markets by traveling west. Of course, his figures were completely wrong, and he was saved by the fact that unknown to him, there was an entire continent in the place where he thought Japan, China, and the Spice Islands would be. Initially, that was perceived ironically as a disappointment, right? But over time, it became increasingly apparent this was a source of potential in land, in wealth, and in people that could be exploited. A key turning point happened in 1511. when a Spanish ambitious nobleman seizes control of Cuba, de Velázquez. 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. He 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 it. When the governor realizes what Cortés is up to, he tries to stop him. This great moment on 18th November, November 1518. He arrives at the waterfront just as Cortés gets into a boat to go out to his ships offshore. And 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's expedition. So this is the background. And again, as you say, he is literally going off the side of the map, right? He's entering terra incognita, unknown to Europeans previously. 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, and 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 called themselves the Mexica, hence Mexico as we know it, but have come down to history based on their mythical origins in a land called Aztlan as the Aztecs. So for simplicity's sake, well, that's what we'll refer to them as. The Totonacs resented this authority, as all subjugated and subordinated peoples do. And they saw the arrival of these outsiders as a potential opportunity to throw off the authority that had been imposed on them. So having established this relationship with the Totonacs, Cortés begins to march inland, and he enters the territory of the Laxcalans. who are like an autoimmune system, immediately rallied to defeat him, to expel him from their territory. But he fights them to a standstill for such a period of time, the Lashkarlans and he arrive at a new kind of arrangement. The Lashkarlans again appreciate his strength, his power, his potential. They swing over to his side and will then henceforward 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 Tlaxcalans 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?

FactA few hundred on Cortés's side and multiple thousands on the Tlaxcalans' side. It's at this point that the critical technological differentials between 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. OpinionGuns 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. that 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.

Mm-hmm.

FactThey 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. So 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 Cortés, 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 Tlaxcalans 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. I 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 beasts of burden generally. That was not integrated into their economies, into their ways of life, or into their military. The 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 masters, 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 shock cavalry. And if things were going bad for the conquistadors, they could retreat much faster than, of course, the enemies could chase them. So, the Tlaxcalans appreciate all these assets coming together, and they see this as their opportunity. They were the horsemen. Holdouts, the last remaining major entity in Mesoamerica, which was 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 last columns had been cut off from the coast and from sources of salt, right? So they were being pushed to the brink. This is a Hail Mary for them. If we ally with these outsiders, these strangers who are just few in number after all, We may have some potential way to break out of this strategic trap that we've been— we've had imposed upon us. So they lean over to the sides of Cortés and they travel with him to Tenochtitlán, the capital, the glittering jewel in the midst of Lake Texcoco, the capital of the Aztec Empire. And again, this is a dramatic moment when Cortés passes through the causeways out into the city. and encounters Moctezuma II, the Huey Latoani, as he was called, the great speaker, the emperor of the Aztec Empire. And these 2 worlds come together at that moment. The interface between them was Cortés's interpreter/mistress, Doña Marina, Malinche, as she became known, who is translating from one side to the other. So the dialogue that occurs then is one of those great tipping points in history. What was the perspective of Moctezuma II? He was aware Cortés 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 Cortés, urging him to leave. He provides him with precious gifts, which of course just inflames Cortés even more. And just, just once he's got hold of Aztec gold, he's just determined to go all the way to the center. So he continues playing this double game. His advisors, his council, urge him not to allow Cortés to proceed to the capital. His own brother, Cuitláhuac, 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, right? This was a mistake to bring the conquistadors into the heart of the empire itself. OpinionI actually think that was his best option, whether he was aware of it or not, because it was better for him to have Cortés as his guest within Tenochtitlán than it was to have Cortés, this random element, at loose within his empire talking to the subject peoples, inflaming them possibly against central authority. He felt perhaps Cortés was what he said he was, an envoy from a great emperor on the far side of the vast ocean.

Uh-huh.

Uh, Cortés, 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 Cortés was. Cortés, again, is just winging it. The incredible improvisation here. And for a moment, the stasis. The great turning point comes when word arrives from the coast that one of the Aztec regional military officers, on his own initiative, has taken action against the conquistadors left behind on the coast, the ones with the totem acts, and some of them have been killed. Cortés sees this as his pretext. He marches into the palace of Moctezuma II. Oh, my God. the Aztec, Huey Latiwani, tells him that for his own safety, he was now being taken under the protective custody of the Spanish, and he should come with him or else there will be violence. And this is the moment when Moctezuma's entire worldview just collapses, right? Nobody had spoken to him like this before. His psychology just disintegrates at that point. 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 Cortés is rounded up, the officers at the coast responsible for turning on his men there, he has them in front of the emperor and the entire court burned alive, which is a form of punishment totally unknown to the Aztecs. And they watch this in grim silence. So once Cortés 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 Cortés, the classic Stockholm syndrome. Um, he gives him a grand tour of the city. Uh, Cortés, 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 Texcoco. And, and the emperor is astonished at this new technology of using the wind to sail on the water. Um, having the emperor was the key. So the emperor's mistake wasn't inviting Cortés into the city. It was making himself vulnerable by staying there also in an adjacent palace.

Mm-hmm.

If he had gone to some further location, made some excuse, a pilgrimage or an expedition of some kind, and had ruled through subordinates, Cortés would've been baffled, right? He couldn't go chasing after the emperor. That would be obviously too provocative. But without the emperor there, Cortés would have had his options extremely limited. And I don't know what he would've done in that circumstance. But because Moctezuma stayed in his capital, he made himself the target. And once he was taken, this was the key to controlling the entire empire at that point.

So obviously the story continues from there. La 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 as— maybe you should tell the story how Velázquez sends this— another expedition to go capture and arrest Cortés for going beyond the prerogative of his mission.

Absolutely. This is the— we left the governor on Cuba, of course, fuming.

Yeah.

He rallies another expeditionary force because Cortés is stealing his thunder, right? And he sends this under Pelayo de Narváez, a larger force than the one Cortés brought with him originally. This lands on the coast. Cortés appreciates he has to move, so he leaves one of his subordinates, the hot-blooded Alvarado, behind in charge in Tenochtitlán, takes as many men as he can to the coast, confronts de Novais, defeats him in a minor battle. And again, the diplomacy wins over the entire expeditionary force that 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 has 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, he decided on a preemptive strike. There was a festival. The aristocracy, particularly the warrior caste, were celebrating, and Alvarado just descended on them, massacred everybody. The survivors rallied the population, and when Cortés returns, he finds himself effectively under siege. The people are so appalled now with the failure of their Huey Llatoani. When he tries to pacify them, they throw stones at him. Mortally wounded, he either dies or the Spanish finish him off because he's of no longer any use to them. So now Cortés is trapped in the city in Tenochtitlan. He determines to break out, and that is, as you say, La Noche Triste, the tragic night, because so many of his men are left behind. They're either killed as they try to escape the city across the causeways or forced to retreat back to the palaces, and they're taken alive and sacrificed subsequently. Cortés gets away with a minority of the troops still at his disposal. and makes it back to Tlaxcalan territory. That was the critical aspect, the 2 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. Cortés himself is grievously wounded. We can finish them off. And they had the numbers. They were winning. But again, Cortés 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 advantages— they had their horses, their steel— critical. But just as critical was the diplomacy. If the Tlaxcalans had turned on Cortés at that point, he would've been finished. Or not one Spaniard would've survived. None of them would've made it back to the coast. But the Tlaxcalans 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 Cortés shelter. He recovers physically, begins to rebuild his strength, and is determined to go back to Tenochtitlán and for round 2. And this time, we're not going to be indulging diplomatic niceties. The Laxcalans, their own perspective on this, if you go to Laxcala territory today, the governor's mansion there has murals on the wall. And these depict the Cortés and the conquistadors from the Laxcalan point of view. And it's fascinating to look at how the relationship is not between a superior and an inferior. It's between equals. You see them Depicted in the same scale, engaged in diplomacy between partners, not between subordinates and dominant figures. The Tlaxcalans 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, which is very important to bear in mind. That the Aztec Empire, from a distance, if you look at a map, seemed impressive.

Mm-hmm.

But this was an imperial construct and not just the remaining independent entities like the Laxcalans, like the Tarascans who we can discuss later, were hostile to the Aztecs. So were so many of their subordinated peoples. The Totonacs 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, the demands of the Aztecs and get revenge in a lot of ways. So as Cortés builds up for the final campaign against Tenochtitlan, against the new Huey Llahuani, Cuitlahuac, and then after he died, his brother, the last of the Huey Llahuanis, Cuauhtémoc, 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 integrated into the conquistador army. But the force that marches on Tenochtitlan, the total numbers, the conquistadors were maybe 0.5% 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. Cortés knows to take the city, he has to control the lake. Again, the innovations. They need sulfur for their gunpowder. They have guns, useless without gunpowder. FactSo an expedition goes into the mountains to the volcano Popocatépetl, and they dangle with ropes inside the caldera of the volcano, scooping out the sulfur they need as the critical ingredient for their gunpowder.

Wow.

FactAnother 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're let loose in the lake, and then now they have control over the lake, right? So bringing together the technology, the innovations with the local manpower, and this is the force directed against Tenochtitlan in the final battle.

PredictionI 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. They have this model of the Aztecs or the Incas as this cohesive single nation. And I think a better model might be something like, imagine if it's Russia and Ukraine have been doing trench warfare for 100 years, and 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. OpinionThe old phrase is, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and in 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. For example, one intern spent part of his summer researching LLM memorization, figuring out how to quantify and reduce it without hurting out-of-sample performance. This matters because whenever Jane Street evaluates a new model on historical data, they need to know that its performance reflects predictive power, not just memorization of past 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. This intern found a way to identify the activations that are cheapest to recompute But that still frees up a lot of memory, and this allowed his version to outperform PyTorch's native one. These are just 2 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 2, 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 janestreet.com/twercache. There's so many interesting questions to ask from everything from technology to diplomacy to 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 Cortés's story, how much he just basically followed the playbook.

Yeah.

But I want people— 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 that has maybe ever happened in human history. So I would, yeah, if you can recapitulate a bit of the, at least that battle, and then just the overall story, and then we can do some analysis from there.

Absolutely. When Cortés consummates his conquest of Tenochtitlan in 1521, the last of the Hueyotlatoani 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, right? Nonetheless, 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 Cortés named Francisco Pizarro. He met with Cortés 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. And he encounters what he's looking for. a sophisticated culture on the scale, in fact, in terms of territory, on a much broader scale than Cortés had encountered in Mesoamerica. This is the land of the Inca. When he arrived, there was civil war. The previous Sapa Inca, Huayna Cápac, had died in 1525 and his 2 sons, Atahualpa and Huáscar, turned on each other. Atahualpa 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 arrives to him that strangers have entered his realm. And 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 say, Cajamarca in 1532. And he sees not threat, but opportunity. And just like Moctezuma II had been advised to not treat with this people, so does Atahualpa's envoy who reports to them, these are not men of good faith. We can take them out. They tend to sleep together. At night, we can set fire to wherever they're staying and just take them all out in one fell swoop. But Atahualpa 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 Atahualpa's face, snorting and breathing. And Atahualpa is absolutely stony-faced and professes to be unimpressed and says, I will meet with your master at a time of my choosing. After the Spaniards leave, he has all of his court, including his generals who flinched or showed fear, executed just to make the point that 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. StoryThere's a saying in Peru that Atahualpa 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, that'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 Atahualpa 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.

FactFactAnd 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, he has some 160, 190 conquistadors. I think the numbers are unknown for exactly how many Atahualpa had, but he's facing off the army that has just basically clinched the civil war in the Inca Empire and is around tens of thousands of big— some— I've seen some numbers that are like 100,000 or 200,000, but certainly in the high tens of thousands big. So 100-something against almost 100,000. That's the first battle. What is astonishing is that these 100 conquistadors, I think, killed— I saw some numbers that are like They killed like 10,000 of the enemy, or at least thousands of Atahualpa'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, where you can have literally a K/D ratio of infinity, of, you know, 10,000 to 0.

Yeah. The conquistadors themselves admitted the night before that encounter, there were so many campfires from the Inca army scattered across the hills surrounding Cajamarca, 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. The ancestral founder of their empire was Pachacuti, which means the Thunder Baron. But to see a real-world exemplar of that must have been just beyond shocking. So the actual physical damage that the cannons and arquebuses inflicted was relatively minor, but that explosion and the fact These strangers seem to be able to control the thunder. It must have been psychologically devastating. And then it came down again to that steel and those horses, right? When Pizarro unleashed the horses, this is something that the Inca— and as you say, these are veteran warriors, the winners of a civil war, strategists and 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 to the point where the walls finally gave way under the press of all those bodies. Some of them escaped into the countryside and the Spaniards rode after them, just running them down as they fled. And the only thing that stopped the massacre at the end was that 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 on any kind of library of, how do I respond in this situation? OpinionThe fight-or-flight instinct just completely takes over, and the flight was the winner in this instance. As you say, the only casualty was Pizarro himself. He's reaching for Atahualpa 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 conquistadors suffered at this critical moment. Yeah.

So yeah, 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 100, I guess intuitively you would think that if you have tens of thousands of troops, can't you just swarm cavalry and many of them will die, but just, you know, like pull that guy in his 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. Mesoamerican 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. Now, 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 Cortés showed up in 1521 for round 2, by drawing him into their city, which was a network of islands connected by bridges and causeways, that minimized the advantages of the horses because it'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 holes in buildings so they could slip from one to the other where the horses couldn't chase them. And so they learned to use those kind of advantages. They learned the stopping power of water. Interestingly, both completely underconnected. They had no relationship with each other. But against Cortés, when he was taking one of the smaller cities on Lake Texcoco, it's La Palpa, the 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 so the Inca too, later when the conquistadors moved on Ollantaytambo, again, the Inca flooded the river, allowed it to burst its banks and again bog down the conquistador cavalry. So they were adapting. They took captured enemy weapons. They learned to fix conquistador 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. StoryOne famous incident, an Aztec warrior allowed himself to be speared by a conquistador and 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 him. 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 that we can do this. So they were trying, 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.

Yeah, and this is worth emphasizing. Cortés takes over the Aztec Empire in what is now Mexico in 2 and a half years. So a couple hundred men, an empire of 6 million people, 2 and a half years. Pizarro does the same thing for the Inca Empire 10 years later in about 5 years. So it's insane how fast these conquests happened. And just how little time that the— even though in principle they could have figured out ways in which to combat cavalry and things, just how little time they had to adapt. All the while, their whole social structure is disintegrating, there's disease, et cetera. There's all this psychological shock value. Now, the obvious question to ask at this point before we go to other ones is, if you reran the simulation again and again, if you just changed a few things here and there, changed the leader, changed the leader for both the Aztecs or for the Spanish, in these conquests. In what fraction of the simulation do, within a matter of a few years later, the Spanish end up in control of these empires anyways? Because when you first learn about them, it actually sounds like an outrageous and impossible 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.

PredictionThere 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. And this is an integration of that process, the big wheels with the small ones. Yes, if Cortés, 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, Atahualpa'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 of 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, Francisco Pizarro has seized Cuzco, 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 Cuzco is the fact it's elevated and away from the coast, which is where the Spaniards, of course, with their absolute monopoly over naval power, have the advantage. His problem was he left his half-brothers in charge back in Cuzco, and they provoke Manco Inca, who'd been set up Pizarro's puppet ruler, into outright rebellion. He rallies his people. He lays siege to Cuzco. He takes Sacsayhuamán, the great fortress that dominates Cuzco. And he has one of his generals, Quizo Yupanqui, cut off reinforcements arriving from the coast. The Inca could win set-piece 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 Cuzco. And Cuzco 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 set-piece battles, but they can't seal the deal in Cuzco. And Manco makes the mistake of ordering Cuzco to attack Lima. He feels, we have the advantage now. I've bottled them up in Cuzco. We've annihilated their relief columns. Take out their city on the coast and the problem's 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 Cuzco, yes, there's a handful of Spaniards holed up in just a couple of 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've been wiped out except for 2 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 yanacona, serfs, the defeated and subordinated people 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 Cuzco, which played out over many, many months. And the Spaniards end up with more allies than they started during this battle because there were so many people within the Inca Empire. From the Canarii, who were from Ecuador, to the Chapoya 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, yeah, they would've 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 by a tiny elite of a hierarchy who would impose 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 Quechua, 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 But the Aztecs and the Incas are themselves sort of the equivalent of the conquistadors in their own world, right? There'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 siege of Cusco would have worked, or Cortés would've 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 structure, 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 had 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, PredictionThe 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 as 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. And we see the recurring cycle of Mesoamerican history, for example, that when Cortés arrived, Tenochtitlan was one of the greatest metropolises perhaps on Earth, beautiful and rich and heavily populated. 100 years later, if he'd arrived in 1619 as opposed to 1519, he would've found A swamp with moss-covered mounds and hills rising out of it. The parallel to that, of course, is Teotihuacan, the previous great metropolis which dominated Mesoamerica. It rose, it expanded, it attracted a huge population, it overstressed its environment, and it collapsed. I think the Aztecs naturally would've gone the same way. So one way or another, the Spaniards or even subsequent waves of European colonists would've entrenched themselves at the coast and would've perhaps more 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, AI can probably just do it for you. AI has gotten more and more general over time, so these new AI assistants need much less handholding than they used to. For example, SpaceX AI gave GrokBot access to their contracts, vendor spend, and usage data and asked it to identify potential savings. It ended 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 by 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 6 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, which has been making a bunch of small things in my life easier. Go to x.ai/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 was still, even late into the 19th century, Native forces were able to resist European incursions. Of course, we know about 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.

OpinionYou're absolutely right. The key term there, as you used it, was dispersal. The vulnerability of the Aztec, the Inca, was that hierarchical nature of their society and the absolute loyalty that the system had invested into whoever was at the top of the social hierarchical tree, the Huey Llatoani for the Aztecs, the Sapa 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 and Inca. They had to reduce their cities one by one. And 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 ones. them before they speak Spanish. Yes, colonizing powers can find aggressive bite back. Just look at Custer's Last Stand as late as 1876 here in America.

Yeah.

FactThe entire 7th Cavalry wiped out at the Little Bighorn because, you know, they lost the initiative. And at that point, they were fighting warriors who had come together temporarily, riding horses, firing guns, and then dispersing afterwards. 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 within their empires. The Aztecs had surrounded and were slowly reducing the last colonies, but to the west, And what's Micahuaca and the Purépecha people, 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 of 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, to form the, the points of their arrows. And their massed archers with their copper-tipped arrows were decimating the invading Aztec forces.

Hmm.

So the exchange, if it had been on a broader scale between north and south, would have been potentially an equalizing force. PredictionIf the Aztec had had llamas, from South America, it would've been dramatically to their advantage.

There 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. That's 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've thought that they would've done copper, tin, get bronze.

They did have bronze in the Inca Oh, really? And if the Aztecs had had access to that, again, they'd have given them a much more aggressive fighting stunt. Bronze 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.

Right.

So Cortés learned 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 Cortés did a decade earlier, basically follows the 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.

PredictionYeah, they're closed worlds. They were very much, very insular in their societies. To go further back in time, I think the only divergence that would've given pre-Columbian peoples a real long-term chance to hold off the Europeans, if we reverse the clock another 500 years back to Leif Erikson and 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. So that 500 years later—

That's right.

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 off.

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 Cortés's strategy?

I think essentially the key to it was following the blueprint as closely as possible. Go right to the top, establish a coastal settlement, which Cortés also was very invested in. 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 effectively unable to be extricated by any local or indigenous population. And that's one thing that people tend to underestimate with the success of European expansion. At the end of the day, they had the fortresses, right? And again, the long institutional knowledge of what a perfect fortress should look like. Those jagged-edge star parameters and revetments and battlements which maximize firepower. Even Eurasian cultures, even the Qing Chinese struggled to be able to deal with that. The 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 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 Cortés. I mean, the highlands of Mexico are quite elevated, but the Andes Mountains that the conquistadors were moving into, I mean, I've been at elevation in 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 many dozens of pounds of armor and equipment.

Yeah, it 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 Cortés and Pizarro were 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 Cortés or Pizarro. And Cortés was always on top of that situation. Pizarro, of course, at the end lost control. He met his end as a rival faction stormed his capital. His household, and he went down fighting not against the indigenous people but against his fellow Spaniards.

Right. What I find interesting about these conquests is that once the emperor is captured— Atahualpa for the Incas and, uh, 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 gave them enough gold? Why are they What is their endgame there?

That's a good question. I mean, I think Moctezuma II, from the moment when Cortés seized him, because previously the records of Moctezuma reflect that he was a pitiless autocrat. He centralized all power in 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 Tlaxcalans. So he was, in every sense of the word, an autocrat. Perhaps it's for the first time in his life being told what to do just led to a complete psychological break because once Cortés had hold of him, he seems to have pulled a complete 180 switch and become essentially willingly Cortés's puppet. He was always trying to do what Cortés wanted in a way that would still be beneficial for his people, but would not rock the boat so much in terms of Cortés's authority. In the end, it wasn't Cortés who disposed of him. It was his own people because 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. FactHe was the first Huey Latoani to be repudiated by his own people and replaced by someone else.

But what if it turns out, what did he think was going to happen? He seemed like he had his wits about him, right?

He did. And the Spanish accounts refer to that. He had a regal bearing, was clearly intelligent, and he was adapted to the situation. StoryHe learned to speak Spanish very, very quickly. He learned to play cards and, and chess. Yeah. So he 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 them. Perhaps he just felt he never quite got the opportunity to do that. Because bear in mind, the deal was if he provided Cortés and he walked into that room and said, I can fill it up this high with gold and silver, and Cazaro had promised he'd 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 garrotted 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 pirate, essentially, not someone operating in good faith at all. 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 paperclippers 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. OpinionThey're basically like crypto if you think of what gold and silver are. And so they're just obsessed with this. Initially, we were talking about this yesterday, this helps them fund the— Europe's in a tough spot at this time because the Ottomans and other forces are— the Reconquista has just happened, 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 defences back at home. But if you think about what's really happening here, there's no new net wealth that has been generated, right? It's just basically redistribution amongst Europeans where if they're using bullion as currency, now the relative ratio of bullion has changed. So you get inflation plus some redistribution. It's basically the government printing more money. It doesn't create more stuff.

Right.

There's no productive— at least initially, the Spanish are not getting any new productive capacity out of the New World. What does change is that during this period, the Ming Dynasty is in charge of China, and it has really messed up the, um, the circulation of paper currency. Nobody trusts it. Every time there's inflation, they just make up a new currency, and people's stocks of wealth are totally worthless. And so now the Spanish set up these 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 if it might have been thousands of tons, in exchange for basically a medium of exchange, basically to make up for the fact that they don't have a reliable means of exchange at the time in the Ming Dynasty. And I think that is an important, interesting piece of like, what is a function of the Spanish 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.

FactYeah. 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 or good lived long enough to settle down on what were called encomiendas, that's local estates with many of the local peoples to farm the land for them, kind of peon serfdom. The later iteration was the bureaucrats, right? 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 and exploited a mountain of silver at Potosí in 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 Philip V and— sorry, King Charles V and then 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 through the Armada bring the one true apostolic faith of Catholicism back to England. Most 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 on 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 than they had been previously. And the ultimate negative effect was that 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 by the 20th century. Still now, they're catching up from that. So The average Spanish gain 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, They could then take advantage of their developing knowledge of the Pacific Ocean's 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. And so as you say, the Spanish are buying goods with value, with this excess liquidity. And 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 transatlantic, it's transglobal. 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 transferred the basis of exchange in their empire to silver. When access to silver was cut off, or at least minimized for a number of reasons during the first half of the 17th century, the Ming at the worst possible time with the Manchu at the gates could no longer fund their armies. They couldn't pay to port. 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, the Chinese imperial zone.

Yeah, it's interesting to contrast the Spanish, who had immediate and outrageous successes in the New World, with the English around the same time who are setting up the colony in Virginia. And there's so many letters from that time where people are complaining about the Virginia Company is just literally waste of English money and—

Lives.

Yeah, exactly. 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, of 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 what 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 just crazy bullion floating around, they 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.

OpinionYou look at the Netherlands and England, the 2 latecomers 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 the quick fix. Understandably, we play the lottery for that exact reason, right? But be careful what you wish for because you may just actually get it. And those societies that have arrive 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, that 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, into 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— I 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 Cy, if you could rerun the conquest 1,000 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 Cortés had died earlier. Obviously, with history, counterfactuals are just thought experiments, but with software, you can actually test them. The Antithesis software testing platform runs your system through thousands of parallel histories, letting you explore any counterfactual you want. How does your software perform if a packet gets dropped? What about when the network drags or the machine dies mid-write? Importantly, you don't have to come up with these counterfactuals. FactOne big problem with traditional testing is that it only covers the 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 against known rivals made them feel like the best military in the world, but they were still unprepared for Cortés. 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/thorcash to learn more. Going back to the Aztecs and 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, StoryThere are many cases where Cortés himself was laying on the ground and had been knocked off his horse, but instead of just killing him on the ground and guarding their advantage, the Aztecs were trying to seize him to go have some sacrifice fodder, and this allowed him to get himself out of thorny situations. Another huge mistake that 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 plumed with all this extra, you know, decorations basically, which would make him easy to identify on a battlefield.

Mm-hmm.

And if you have cavalry that can just see, here's where the general is, let's go get— go directly to him, kill him, the whole enemy force will rout. It just makes your entire chain of command— you might have 100,000 troops, but then your general dies and everybody else routes. Another example, the Battle of Cusco. 100 Spaniards defending against this huge rebellion. If the rebellion had just kept attacking at night instead of only attacking during the day, the Spaniards would've never gotten a chance to rest and would have just been depleted pretty quickly. But instead, they would let them rest at night, wouldn't use their overwhelming numbers to do rotations. They 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.

FactAztec society, Inca society was organized around warfare. All adult males were trained to be warriors. 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 that, you know, Cortés was doing improvisation, Pizarro was doing a bunch of improvisation.

Why weren't they able to do the same Yeah, 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 4 Totonacs were worth 1 Chichimec because the Chichimec were a wilder tribe to the north and fought more fiercely than the Totonacs 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 is— it makes more sense because sacrificing your enemy means you'll never see him again, whereas selling your enemy back to his family means he's up for round 2 and you might face off against the same guy across a future battlefield. Even kings, the kings of France after 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 Cortés himself under their knives, but were so desperate to haul him off, um, his compatriots sometimes sacrificing themselves were able to rescue him. So that was an aspect of their warfare ingrained in their culture, in their faith, in the religious expression of the values of an entire people. difficult to tilt that within the framework that we're talking about. It'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. OpinionIt was not possible to reorient an entire society in that limited timeframe to do that. The Cusco situation, we could, to use a famous film example, The movie 300, right? The Spartans are able to hold the pass at Thermopylae because against overwhelming numbers, it's very, very narrow. And within Cuzco, the surviving conquistadors fell back to 2 heavily fortified buildings with narrow entrances. And the streets of Cuzco 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 that 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, right? Again, this army is 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 in Europe for much of its history was driven by the annual cycle of planting and harvesting the crops. You need the men on their farms to do that because if they're not there, then you face a very hard year coming up if you don't have enough crops set aside to get you through the winter and the following year. So for all those reasons, the Inca, yes, with those huge numbers weren't able to really overwhelmingly apply them at the same time. If they'd 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.

Yeah.

Both ends, if they're blocked cleverly with boulders and with trees, mean the infantry's not going anywhere either. You have them essentially pinned down. All the advantages would've been useless at that point. Metal armor won't protect you from a 2-ton boulder rumbling from the heights. right into your face. If they'd 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, yeah. It just basically was not enough time to accumulate the strategy.

Or again, it's that shockingly short, steep learning curve. It just wasn't, wasn't enough time.

Yeah. So in retrospect, you have these outrageous battles with, you 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 were some 100-odd men willing to go confront an empire of 10 million people and say, your job is to take this over? It would be sort of like dropping 100 Marines into 18th-century England and being like, okay, you better come out the other end with with control over parliament? It just— how is this a thing that they were willing to do?

The kind of classic push-pull factors, right? They came from a proud land, a new country. FactSpain had only come together in 1492, and they were aware their history was one of struggle, uniting the peninsula and consummating the Reconquista. So they had a proud warrior background, but little to show for it, really. Again, the quality of life, particularly in Extremadura, which is the province in Spain where so many of these conquistadors originated from, was a land of hardship. It was small farms 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, have fought in campaigns, not even their own, even other people's for many centuries, millennia now, for that reason. And the attraction of the New World, right? Once they're aware that out there is a whole new land where it's possible for even a small man like myself to become something, to become somebody. All I have as an asset is my fighting skills.

Right.

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 can fight, right? The message I'm getting from the far side of the Atlantic is 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 falling in with men who are just as cutthroat as I am.

How important is religion in 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 about what are the alliances that they need to maneuver, um, what are the sizes of the armies we need to face, what is the basic terrain and geography that we need to navigate. And so I'm still trying to understand how they gain the confidence you and your couple hundred buddies to go and take on a huge empire? I don't know, but did they just think God would make sure that they were okay? Yeah, how do I understand that?

Cortés and Pizarro both had men of the cloth traveling with their expeditions to provide for their spiritual needs. And Cortés and Pizarro, in retrospect, would make a great deal of this in their writing. They professed to be outraged, particularly by the Aztecs, 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 Cortés, when Moctezuma invited him to the top of one of the 2 great pyramids in Tenochtitlan, he remarks the priests were adorned from head to foot in black clay or body paint. And the interior was black with with spilled blood and it stank abominably. 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 salve 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 the day. So Men will sometimes seek to find a higher purpose in what are very low endeavors, which is what was playing out at that time. 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. And 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. So the feeling was the pickings here are pretty easy. And the enthusiastic attitude was, well, why would it be any different in the mainland? Of course, they did run up against heavy fighting. And some of them would say afterwards, the veterans of wars against the Turks, this was some of the hardest fighting I've ever been through. But by that point, they'd seen that the potential rewards are much higher as well. When they arrived at Lake Texcoco, they would marvel as if we'd just arrived in Atlantis, right?

Right.

To be in this place on this lake with these cities arranged around its edges. And the biggest city of all appeared to be floating on the water like Venice, except even more dramatic with its high temples.

Right.

And to them, this both awed them and inflamed that greed that they had. And Cortés himself admitted as much to Moctezuma's envoys. He said, Factmy 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've been symbols of great regard. And Cortés was happy to put on the headdress and he sent it back to the king. But the little trinkets of gold that he was getting, right, that was 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 Díaz, who wrote, like, was on this Cortés expedition and wrote a firsthand account of what happened afterwards, He basically says in his account that basically in every single town we come across, even in small outlying villages on the empire, every temple, every city just has tons of human sacrifice 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, Opinionthe Spanish in the New World just massacre huge swaths of innocent women and children, like literal genocides, intentional genocides, 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. Right.

Where there's— that's what you're doing. But—

They would argue in the long term, this is in these people's interests. But of course, in the short term, as you say, the accounts are unambiguous about this, throwing men and women to those huge hunting dogs that they brought with them for sport, to watch them being torn apart. They could rationalize that in Mesoamerica in reference to that cult of sacrifice, which was endemic, ingrained into the mentalities of those people. There was 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 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 other, they'd be borne up to the top of the pyramids to the temple complex. 4 priests each would take an arm and a leg while a 5th one would use an obsidian blade To open an incision and pull out the heart, which we offered to the gods. StoryI've been to those pyramids, the ones at Teotihuacan. 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 then take the flesh home to be consumed. It was the consummation of his victory as a warrior to take on literally internalized the defeated enemy. So this was, as you say, it's a cycle that the world is better off without. I'm not going to make any excuses for it. But the motivations of those who did that, that was not selfless. It was at best a beneficial side effect, window dressing on a process of colonization and even literal genocide. And it had even less validation in South America because there was no such tradition at all.

Yeah.

The Inca would very occasionally take a virgin sacrifice sacrifice into the high mountains where she'd be drugged. And you can still find the mummified corpses of these girls. But that was very rare and very specific. There was no ingrained culture of mass human sacrifice at all.

Okay, here's a question I find very interesting. Why is it that the Spaniards are able to weaponize the divisions between the different native forces to their own advantage? But the natives are not able to do the same with the Spaniards. So we know that the— there were significant divisions among the Spaniards, right? Literally, there's a whole much larger force that is sent over to arrest Cortés. Similarly, we didn't get into this much, but in Pizarro's expedition, his second in command, Almagro, is pissed off that basically Pizarro is getting all the spoils. He comes back, lays siege to Cusco after Manco Inca has laid 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 other 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'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 crisis to pit them against each other, I think that would've failed because their bottom line was they would've united if they felt there was a common cause against them that would've forced them to do that. Whereas for the local peoples, these are differences between entire societies, both the external and internal factors here. Cuitláhuac, who succeeded his brother Moctezuma II as Huey Lotlani, after driving the Spaniards out during La Noche Triste, he sent emissaries to the Tlaxcalans, to the Tarascans, to build and expand their own new Triple Alliance, to come together as native people with a common interest against these outsiders. And the Lashkarlan younger generation thought about it, but the old men who still retained power, who had 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. No loss to us. So they couldn't overcome the kind of institutional hostility. which go way, way back through their history. The only way 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 the Aztecs, for the Inca, was the Spanish were the only game in town. They were the only outsiders they'd encountered. If the English, French, Dutch, even the Ottomans had been players in New World colonization at that very early stage, It may have been possible for local peoples to identify, okay, these are different cultures. 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 know you spent a little bit of time thinking about 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 Aurangzeb at the beginning of the 18th century. Subsequently, his successors didn't have whatever you call it, the authority, the charisma, the rizz, however you want to define it, to maintain that hegemony which he'd established by almost taking over all of India. And the Mughals always at root had the same problem that the Manchu when they conquered the Ming in the 17th century and they built the Qing Dynasty China the greatest physical extent it ever had. But they were always outsiders. They were not indigenous to the population. In the background, there was always that vague resentment that we're being ruled here by foreigners. That was okay while they were going from success to success, but when the momentum halts and it begins 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 Manchu China had that kind of fatal defect, as it were, coded into the ultimate basis for their authority. So even without the Europeans, I think the Mughal Empire would have peaked and it would've disintegrated. Now, what would've happened next would be more like a patchwork quilt of different authorities, some larger, some smaller. The Maratha Confederacy, I think, would've 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 British took over at the end, well, in its bluntest terms, the Royal Navy rules the waves. And in terms of projecting power, the Brits were able to force the French Yeah. Out of Canada and out of India because they controlled the sea lanes. And although the French had, in terms of population and military, a larger force, if you can't project that force, it's really of no value to you.

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 remainders of the Mughal Empire, there's many other factions, and then there's this British outpost. They've gotten rid of the French. you know, the British that 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 East India Trading 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 most competent people who were in charge of the East India Company, where they're like pretty competent people, Robert Clive and his underlings.

Yeah.

And you would have instances, for example, I think the Nawab 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 de Khan is considered to be a pretty good ruler who was able to hold the British at bay and stuff. And then he dies, and his prince is this kind of crazy psychopathic guy who doesn't listen to advice and so forth. So because there's this monarchical tradition across all these principalities in India, there's just going to be sooner or later a bad king, and that king cannot stop— will not be able to stop the British incursion. There's also all these forces around these principalities where like, okay, who are we going to lend money to? Who are we going to lend our troops to? And they realize there's a bad king right now. The British seem pretty competent. I'm going to make an alliance with the British instead. And similarly, with the case of the Asics and Incas, maybe even more so, the overwhelming majority of the troops, forces that the British are using are Indians, right?

Sepoys, yeah.

Sepoys. So I think this is an underrated thing of just Yeah, being able to delegate competent people and then being able to replace them 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. Just to give you one example, the British were winning the Hundred Years' War because the King of France, Charles VI, 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. He would just shut down for months at a time mentally, just couldn't function. function. 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 kind of hierarchical states. Even in many ways, you could argue in democratic societies, the corporations can still outmaneuver them because they're untied to particular loyalties and it's just their brand awareness that they're trying to 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 East India Company, the English and Dutch equivalents, the British Hudson's Bay Company, which is really what made Canada as we understand it today. Those corporations driven by 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 had persisted for centuries with all the accumulated grievances Here, we're the fresh newcomers. We have obviously skills at 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 starve to death in order to produce opium to take advantage of that. It was devastating in its impact in political structures that had no real environment where that was part of their—

Right.

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 upfront to pay for boats, to go raiding, to make this profitable by looting churches and monasteries. That's what the conquistadors were. They were freebooters operating within a capitalist system. These were not desperados or 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 fortune.

Yeah.

FactAnd 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. Absolutely.

Maybe to close this off, the thing I find really remarkable in these stories— we've talked about how lopsided these battles have been, how quickly this conquest proceeded— in the grand scheme of things, the technological advantages that the conquistadors had over these empires are not that shockingly big, right? As you mentioned, guns at this time were not good enough to actually be that helpful during battle, so it's basically horses and it's steel weapons. I don't know if we've talked about this, but towards the ends of these conquests or the middles of these conquests, the metal is weighing them down and it's really hot and stuff. So they're even receding to the cotton armor that the natives are using.

Yes.

So it's not even the armor. It's really just that they had better metal swords instead of obsidian blades and that they had horses. And that's enough to let a couple hundred men take over entire empires. You can draw analogies to what might happen in the future. We don't even have to go there. I just find it sort of remarkable how little it took for them to be so dominant.

StoryOpinionThey could win battles. They could not have won the war though at the end without the support of those indigenous allies. So those overwhelming numbers. Yes, you're absolutely right. They would always keep their 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've made them too vulnerable. But here, you adapt to the circumstances. You got more freedom of mobility. It's less exhausting wearing cotton than it is to wear metal. So they would make that adaptation. They would even sometimes, for very prized allies, again, as a way of integrating them into the Spanish coalition, is provide them, like local chiefs and warlords, with Spanish weapons just to emphasize that you're so special to me. And this was effective in binding them together. And they were very, very clever in identifying the local subchiefs 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? They knew, for example, in— the Aztec Empire was called the Triple Alliance because it was set up in 1428 by the first Huey Latuani as a coalition between the 3 city-states, Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tacuba. In 1516, so like 2 years, 3 years before Cortés arrived in Mesoamerica, the chief of— king of Texcoco died and his 2 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. This is his path to getting what he feels is his due, being the king of Texcoco. 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. PredictionAnd in the end, as happened in, for example, Australia and New Zealand, that we'll become the minority in our own country. The demographic tide they didn't appreciate in the long term would work fundamentally against them.

Yeah. Okay, so the analogy to AI there is so obvious it's not worth spelling out. But I think that's actually an excellent place to close. This is such a bizarre and shocking and interesting part of human history. And I appreciate you coming on and telling us all about it.

Real pleasure. Thank you for having me.