Explaining the Age of Exploration

Summary

History 102: Explaining the Age of Exploration
Hosted by Turpentine on the Turpentine Podcast Network
Featuring Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Release Date: March 18, 2025

---

Introduction

In the episode titled "Explaining the Age of Exploration," hosts Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett delve deep into one of history's most transformative periods. They explore the motivations, achievements, and consequences of the European Age of Exploration, drawing parallels to contemporary societal dynamics and highlighting the intricate web of historical events that shaped our modern world.

---

The Spirit of Exploration and the Faustian Drive

Austin Padgett opens the discussion by emphasizing the Age of Exploration as "one of the most important events in history" due to its role in unifying disparate global regions ("[00:37]"). He introduces the concept of the Faustian spirit, a term borrowed from Oswald Spengler, to describe the West European drive to conquer and innovate relentlessly. This spirit is characterized by a quest to harness and control the natural world, often at great personal and societal cost.

Notable Quote:

"The Faustian spirit is... the West European drive to reach the finite, the finite point of something."
— Austin Padgett [12:23]

---

European Discoveries and Navigation Mastery

The hosts discuss the remarkable navigational and logistical achievements of European explorers. Rudyard Lynch remarks on the "navigation and logistics are absolutely insane," highlighting the complexity and audacity of charting unknown territories ([02:36]). They trace the rapid European mapping of the world by the late 1500s, noting the discovery of significant landmasses and the establishment of maritime routes that connected continents in unprecedented ways.

Notable Quote:

"By the late 1500s, the Europeans could draw a map of the world that looked pretty close to what we have today."
— Austin Padgett [11:34]

---

Comparative Exploration: Europe vs. Asian Civilizations

A critical comparison is made between European and Asian exploration efforts. While European powers like Spain and Portugal aggressively pursued new territories, Asian empires such as China and the Ottoman Turks had notable yet ultimately stagnated exploration endeavors. Rudyard Lynch points out that despite early dynamic exploration—like Zheng He's voyages—the Chinese bureaucracy eventually "ossified," limiting further expansion ([17:38]).

Notable Quote:

"Asian civilizations had completely ossified and they lost any interest in creativity."
— Austin Padgett [17:38]

---

The Portuguese Empire: Expansion and Innovation

The episode delves into the rapid expansion of the Portuguese Empire under the guidance of figures like Henry the Navigator. Austin Padgett expresses awe at Portugal's ability to establish a global network of forts and colonies from Africa to Japan within a century ([41:40]). Innovations such as rolling cannons and advanced naval technology gave the Portuguese a significant military edge, facilitating their dominance over existing trade systems.

Notable Quote:

"The Portuguese had this ring of forts along the west coast of Africa... and they built Nagasaki in Japan."
— Austin Padgett [41:40]

---

Economic Motivations and Colonial Capitalism

The discussion explores how Europe's market-driven economies and weak centralized governments fostered a unique environment where capitalism and exploration thrived. Austin Padgett highlights that "colonialism is a natural skill that you build up from external wars," linking military conquests to the growth of colonial enterprises ([60:00]).

Notable Quote:

"The Europeans thought we want to control as much money as possible because our governments are weak enough that we need physical gold to buy stuff."
— Austin Padgett [60:00]

---

Conquest of the New World: Aztec and Inca Empires

Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett examine the fall of the Aztec and Inca Empires to Spanish conquistadors like Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro. They discuss the combination of military prowess, strategic alliances, and the devastating impact of European diseases, which led to the rapid collapse of these sophisticated indigenous civilizations.

Notable Quote:

"With a group of less than 1,000 men, [Cortés] triggered so many of the Aztec subject states... and then conquered them."
— Austin Padgett [68:32]

---

The Treaty of Tordesillas and European Rivalries

The episode covers the Treaty of Tordesillas, a bold agreement between Spain and Portugal to divide the newly discovered lands outside Europe. Austin Padgett marvels at its audacity, noting how it allowed Portugal to claim Brazil while arrogantly mapping out global territories without regard for other European nations or indigenous populations ([83:30]).

Notable Quote:

"The Treaty of Tordesillas was one of the ballsiest moves in history."
— Austin Padgett [83:30]

---

Circumnavigation and the Legacy of Explorers

Focusing on the feats of explorers like Ferdinand Magellan and Sir Francis Drake, the hosts highlight the extreme challenges and high mortality rates faced during these voyages. Austin Padgett underscores the significance of circumnavigation in demonstrating Europe's newfound ability to connect the globe, despite the immense loss of life and resources ([89:07]).

Notable Quote:

"A majority of men died with Magellan being the first man to circumnavigate the world."
— Austin Padgett [89:07]

---

Cultural and Biological Exchanges: The Columbian Exchange

The conversation touches on the profound impact of the Age of Exploration through the Columbian Exchange, facilitating the transfer of goods, animals, and diseases between the Old and New Worlds. Rudyard Lynch notes how staples like potatoes, tomatoes, and horses reshaped societies globally, while diseases like syphilis devastated indigenous populations ([93:12]).

Notable Quote:

"Most of the things you know of are European or Eurasian. Between horses, cows, pigs... there's this huge globalized transfer of stuff around the world."
— Austin Padgett [93:12]

---

Psychological and Philosophical Implications

The hosts explore the psychological toll on both European explorers and indigenous populations. Austin Padgett reflects on the "sheer intellectual shattering" experienced by native societies encountering Europeans, equating it to severe psychological trauma ([73:07]).

Notable Quote:

"The discovery of the New World... opened up the room for modern science."
— Austin Padgett [53:35]

---

Closing Thoughts: The Enduring Legacy of the Age of Exploration

In conclusion, Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett emphasize the lasting legacy of the Age of Exploration in shaping the interconnected world we live in today. They highlight both the innovative spirit and the brutal consequences of this era, urging listeners to appreciate the profound transformations it initiated.

Notable Quote:

"The world that we have today... was made by these guys who nearly died and who did the absolutely insane thing."
— Austin Padgett [92:49]

---

Conclusion

This episode of History 102 offers a comprehensive and nuanced exploration of the Age of Exploration, balancing admiration for European achievements with a critical examination of the human and ethical costs involved. By weaving together historical facts, personal insights, and philosophical reflections, Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett provide listeners with a deep understanding of how this pivotal period continues to influence our present and future.

---

For more episodes and detailed explorations of critical historical moments, visit www.turpentine.co.

Transcript

[Whatifalth]

Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.

[Austin Padgett]

Hi, everybody. Super excited to have all you folks here for the next episode of History 102. And the topic today is the Age of Exploration, with our host, Austin Padgett.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Hola.

[Austin Padgett]

Hola. Como estas?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Muchas gracias, compador.

[Austin Padgett]

Si, senor. I'm still in Mexico, which is why the microphone quality is not so good compared to what it is back in Texas. But I frequently like to say that blank event is one of the most important events in history. I've said it about the Industrial Revolution, about the invention of science, about the Aryan invasions, et cetera, and I love the word arguable because I think reality is innately complex, and reality is innately deeply subjective. And so you can use a variety of metrics for things. And the Age of Exploration is definitely one of those events that's arguably one of the most important in history where it involves the unifying of the entire world and the discovery of the world by Europeans. Because beforehand, hand, the world had been completely divided. Not completely. You had the Eurasian system that used the Silk Road to communicate, and then outside of it, the world was much stuck in these small ecosystems. So the Mexicans spoke to their neighboring countries, the Africans were in their small part of Africa, and then the Europeans brought this whole world together, mostly in a period of 200 years. And that's incredibly impressive and even more so than the historic decisiveness. This is, I would think, the most epic period of history. There's just something deeply incredible and heroic and I would say, admirable in this, where a lot of these people were violent, brutal, crusading thugs. But there is something admirable and sailing around the world and having no concept of how you do it or how you survive. And I think it's awfully rich for our society that was built off the fruits of these men to call them bad when I don't think any of us would have the courage to do it.

[Rudyard Lynch]

The navigation and logistics are absolutely insane. And it was epic, you know, discovering all these different territories. And like you said, forever. We were kind of stuck in a Eurasian ecosystem. And then they discovered every other route at the same time. So I was. I was thinking for. For some of them, after a while, there was so much to discover, and it was such a routine process that it almost became formulaic. And I Bet there was at some points less of a feeling of wonder and exploration, which was a huge part of it. But I think there's an under rated other part where you get used to it because there's so many different new things to check off the box and you're just going through endless new areas.

[Austin Padgett]

There are both impulses, and I think it depends on the region you're in, where I've gone across pretty wide areas where I. When I was 18, I hiked 600 miles alone from the top of Massachusetts to the bottom of Pennsylvania along the Appalachian Trail. And I had a realization. I hiked the Appalachian Trail to learn life lessons. And I have learned whatever life lessons I need to learn in 600 miles. Another 2,000 miles of woods is not going to teach me. And then I caught giardia, which is this horrific intestinal disease. And my dad had to pick me up and I was sick for six. For three weeks I was drinking stream water because the hikers had told me that that stream water, if it came out of a spring out of the rock, was safe to drink without filtering it. And I used iodine tablets. And then I didn't. And then I caught giardia. And then I. I slept. I lived. I stayed outside a Cracker Barrel for three days in a motel. So I have fond memories of Cracker Barrel because when I had horrific giardia and this was the first bed I had slept in for a while, because in the trail you live in these tents. So I was in this hotel next to a Cracker Barrel, and I felt so much joy to be in a bed. And I was in such good physical shape at the time. I remember just being in the shadow, being like, holy crap, how am I this physically fit? And then feeling terrible from Jardia. And I'd just go to Cracker Barrel, but I'd be so happy to literally be in a bed and to have air conditioning. But moving away from my life stories, there is this sense when you're crossing terrain of, oh my God, do we have another thousand miles of water? And I imagine there's a great song called the Northwest Passage by Stan Rogers, who's one of my favorite singers. He's a Canadian folk singer and he has a lot of incredible music about the history of Canada. I love to go and talk more about it, but I don't think it's important enough for this video. And he has this song called the Northwest Passage about these British explorers trying to sail over the north of Canada to reach Siberia and then East Asia. Because the age of exploration was fundamentally about reaching Asia. And one of the lyrics goes, it's just talking about the infinite role of Canada. And he says it's. There's thousands of miles of terrain that looks exactly the same. And he talks about how this infinite terrain is almost maddening. It drives you crazy how far it goes. And he says the theme of the video is that the only thing that gives you the will to cross the. The horrific terrain of Canada, this is such a cat girl, Kulak like idea is the Faustian will. And so the video is how the Faustian European will was able to conquer the harsh terrain of Canada through its desire to conquer. And how he has the same desire to conquer.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Who has the same desire to conquer. Who's the.

[Austin Padgett]

Dan Rogers, this Canadian folk singer.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Oh, got it. Yeah, I guess that's. That's one explanation based.

[Austin Padgett]

And the Northwest Passage didn't work, though. So there was the Northeast Passage and the Northwest Passage. The Northwest Passage was trying to reach the Orient going through the Canadian Arctic. And then the Northeast Passage was Siberia. They were eventually able to make the Northeast Passage work in the start of the 20th century, but it was so dangerous and so expensive that it just fundamentally was not economic. And I think we just got the Northwest Passage to work in the 21st century. And the hope is that with climate change, that the Canadian Arctic will be ice free enough that we can continuously send freight through the Canadian Arctic. And it's interesting as well, where after Cortez conquered the Aztec Empire, which is one of those really incredible moments of history where it shows that the game we are playing is crazier than any fantasy novel and we're going to get to Cortez. Later, Cortez looked for another Aztec empire to conquer. And I'm like, my guy, you got one of the craziest historic moments ever. And you conquered this country of 20 million people and you want to do it again.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Like, I admire the balls who are better positioned. He's like, I already know how to do this. I have the blueprint. Give me the money, I'll start another company.

[Austin Padgett]

And that was El Dorado, where the Spanish took over the Inca and the Aztec Empire. And they were trying to look for another empire. They had a couple different places. They thought there might be one. They thought that there was the city of El Dorado in Venezuela and Colombia, where they kept on sending trips, none of which were successful. And then they also thought there are the seven cities of gold in the area around Texas and Oklahoma and the American South. Neither of which existed. And the thing with the Age of Discovery is it's a pretty short time period where by the time you get to the year 1650, the Europeans had mapped out most of the world. And they did a pretty impressive job where you cleaned up a few other places between. Between most of North America or most of them. Yeah, most of North America they didn't get the map for until it was the time of Lewis and Clark or the 18th century. Same thing with the center of Africa in the mid to late 19th century. And there are areas like Antarctica that were discovered later. But by the time of Sir Francis Drake's second sailing around the world in the late 1500s, the Europeans had crossed the Pacific Ocean. They had mapped out most of the coastline of the Americas. They had connected most of Asia. They were pretty deep into Siberia. They had circumnavigated Africa, and they were aware of the existence of Australia and Antarctica. So by the time you get to the late 1500s, the Europeans could draw a map of the world that looked pretty close to what we have today. And there's weird stuff. Like they thought there was this huge. They thought that there had to be an equivalent amount of land in the Southern hemisphere as the Northern hemisphere. And for reason, they made up this fake Terra Australis, which was this huge continent in the Southern hemisphere that connected Antarctica and Australia and those places. And that didn't exist. And it's. It's insane that within a century that the Europeans had. They didn't just cross the Atlantic, they also sailed around Africa into the Indian Ocean, they circumnavigated the world, and then they connected to Asia. And by the late 1500s, the Spanish had colonies in the Philippines. And they had met up with the Portuguese who were going in the other direction, where the Spanish had. Had sailed across the Atlantic, built an empire in Latin America, then they sailed across that, and the Spanish had a colony in the Philippines. And the Spanish even had armies attack Cambodia. And when in the Cambodian War, they had Aztecs and conquistadors fighting against samurai mercenaries. And then the Spanish had a colony on the Solomon Islands. And at the same time, the Portuguese went the other direction, around Africa, into the Indian Ocean. And the Portuguese had reached Singapore and China and Japan and the Far East. And both of those people started out very close to each other in the Iberian Peninsula. And they went opposite directions only to meet up again in the area around the Philippines and Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, they were. Because there was so much to discover and they were so good at navigating with the improved ships and their, you know, earlier expansion. They were doing things that had never been done before with confidence.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Like, all right, well, let's just go impromptu around the southern coast of South America. Not necessarily even something that was on the beginning of a planned trip like, so we really were. It expanded the territory, the technology shrunk, what was possible to the point where you had people taking similar risks around the Atlantic and the Mediterranean when the map was less discovered and the ships were less capable. It's just on another scale.

[Austin Padgett]

Oswald Spengler is a thinker who I've seen pop up in writer circles lately, and he's one of the most incomprehensible writers I have ever read. You should never read Decline of the West. You should just read summaries. If anything, read Amory de Reacor. But because Amory studies Spengler. And the reason I bring Spengler up is he talks about the Faustian spirit. And the Faustian spirit is the West European drive to reach the finite, the finite point of something. And so the Faustian spirit is we're going to sail around the world, we're going to invent the Industrial Revolution, we are going to harness the power of the gods itself. We are going to destroy our own religion and soul for power. And he says that the symbolism for the Faustian spirit is the cathedral with its point tipped up towards the tip of the cathedral spire. And I think there's something to that, because West Europe in this time period had this innate dynamism that propelled it. And when I talk about the most important events in history, I would like to cluster an event which McNeil, who's one of my favorite historians, calls the rise of the west, which is 1500 or 1400 until, let's say, World War I. In this time period, Europe had so many breakthroughs between science, between Industrial Revolution, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the settlement of the world, colonialism, all stemming from Western Europe. And especially so a circle. You drop a circle somewhere in France and most of that innovation occurs within a 500 mile radius or 1000 mile radius of Paris, England, France, the northeast of Spain, northern Italy, western part of Germany, etc. And this radius completely changed the world. And there's something insane in the European character that the second we can sail around the world, we will.

[Whatifalth]

We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors. What does the future hold for business? Ask nine experts and you'll get 10 answers. It's a bull market, it's a bear market rates will rise or fall. Can someone invent a crystal ball? Until then, over 41,000 businesses have future proofed their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one fluid platform with one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth giving you visibility and control. You need to make quick decisions with real time insights and forecasting, you're peering into the future with actionable data. When you're closing the books in days and not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next. If I had needed this product, it's what I'd use. Whether your company is earning millions or even hundreds of millions, NetSuite helps you respond to immediate challenges and sees your biggest opportunities. Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com Zen the guide is free to you at netsuite.com Zen netsuite.com Zen so it's a new year, 2025, and one of the recurring questions I've already been receiving is should I start my own business? Can I do it all on my own? Now more than ever, my answer is a resounding yes. With tools like today's sponsor, Shopify, it's never been easier to start pursuing your dreams. Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open for business and get your first sale, no coding or design skills required. They also help with the details like shipping, taxes, payments, and have social media tools that connect all your channels and create shoppable posts, allowing you to focus on the important stuff like growing your business. What happens if you don't act now? Will you regret it? What if someone beats you to the idea? Don't kick yourself when you hear this again in a year because you didn't do anything. Now established in 2025. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com momentofzen all lowercase go to shopify.com momentofzen to start selling with Shopify today. Shopify.com momentofzen.

[Austin Padgett]

And that character, as in all things, are dualities. That character is the same thing that resulted in us being so delusional with wokeness and killing our own religion and splitting ourselves off from human nature. But it's also the thing that let the Europeans be great. And the thing that made me click for Spengler is I realized, wait, Spengler is just trying to Write a philosophy of history based off hermeticism, because every single concept in Spengler stems to a hermetic concept. And I don't want to get too much into that. But people who are trying to figure out Spengler and haven't, that's the skeleton key you should study.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And I guess the opposite of that is China, who closed off their exploration around a similar time. And yeah, you can see with the innovative societies in Western Europe where they're going through industrial age or reforms on the feudal system etc, they're used to change, they're used to striving for something. And I think you can get caught in a pattern with a lot of societies, especially more collectivist societies, where it's more about like securing that perfect stability, mastering bureaucracy like China did for a thousand years. When you master bureaucracy and live in that system, there's no room for the Faustian spirit because nowhere to go. It's kind of like mouse utopia in space like we talk about now.

[Austin Padgett]

That's a good point. And the Chinese did have the potential to do the age of Discovery where a lot of you might have heard of the voyages of Jung, he who in the early 1400s, 70 years before Columbus, he was part of the Ming dynasty under the Jungle Emperor, where the Jungle Emperor bucked the trend of the bureaucracy strangling China's authority. Where he fought a disastrous 15 year war in Vietnam, which China also gets screwed over by Vietnamese wars. And he sent Zheng he as far west as Kenya where he sailed through the Indian Ocean to reach the east coast of Africa. And there are still people of Chinese descent in Kenya today. And after his death he was trying too hard to break with the long standing trend. So the Chinese bureaucracy literally burned the fleets he had and they burned records of it and the Muslims as well. You'll have most Islamic explorers like Ibn Battuta who he went as far out as he was from Morocco, he went out to China, he went through India, across the entire Muslim world. And Tamerlane the Uzbek conqueror conquered from rush Moscow to Delhi and from Turkey to the western parts of China. And then the Ottoman Turks, they had fleets operating in Indonesia and the Muslims flipped Indonesia over. And the Turks had explorers deep in Africa, they had forces in Somalia. And so the Europeans weren't the only civilization that was sending men out. But what happened is that in the medieval period the Asian civilizations had some degree of dynamism. But by the time you get to the early modern period, the Asian civilizations had completely ossified and they lost Any interest in creativity. And this applies for all the major Asian civilization civilizations, whether Islam, India or China. And then the Europeans were the one who smashed through the system. And it's interesting because the dominant driver for the age of exploration was the European desire to reach the Orient, where, as an example of this, and you folks should really watch the Silk Road video, the Christopher Columbus's favorite author was Marco Polo, who was an Italian explorer who worked for the Mongol Khan in China in the 1300s. And he wrote his travelogues of Asia. And the goal for the discovery of the New World, as well as sailing around the bottom of Africa, which were the two big spurs for the age of discovery, was finding a new way to reach the Orient that broke the Europeans out of their dependence on Islamic middlemen who upcharged them. And the interesting thing is that when the Europeans went to the Orient, they glorified it as this advanced, hyper technological, incredibly wealthy, incredibly exotic society, because the scale of Asian civilization was in many cases greater than that of European. But then the second the Europeans did reach the Orient, they had a marked military advantage over them and just took over the ecosystem. And a depressing example of this is that the Europeans tried to reach, reach the orientation, because there was a myth of a great king called Prester John. And Prester John was this Christian monarch who had been split off from the rest of Christianity due to the Muslim empire. And the myth went that he was this immortal wizard who had a land the size of India and the size of India. And the European understanding of geography wasn't that great. They had all these incredible myths of stuff like the camel leopard and the lamb wool of Tartary and the Sargass Sea, which we talk about in the Silk Road video. More where the Europeans had these fabulous myths of what the rest of the world was. And they thought the Ganges and the Nile were the same river. So Prester John is supposed to live in this indeterminate region between Africa and India. And when the Europeans finally did sail around the bottom of Africa, or the Portuguese and they reached East Africa, they found Presto John and it was Ethiopia. And Ethiopia was in a dark age due to the collapse of its earlier monarchy. They had about 1 to 2 million people. It was a dark age. It was a backwater society that was only barely fighting off the Muslims. But it was this ancient Christian monarchy on the other side of the Muslim world because Ethiopia had converted to Christianity in the Roman period and they held onto it. And the depressing thing that's kind of symbolic for this is that the second the Portuguese found Prester John or Ethiopia, they had to defend Ethiopia from Muslim colonization. While their intention was to enlist Prester John in this enormous crusade to wipe out the Muslims.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Right. So it became a liability instead of a secret discovered ally. It reminds me of the blue wizards from Lord of the Rings or something that are supposed to be out in the oriental areas. And yeah, you mentioned some explorers from other countries going around. The thing I find really interesting about this period is. Oh yeah, and also you said the advanced civilizations. Right. Because in Asia they did have these very large cities. They had attained certain levels of advancement that you wouldn't normally associate without certain technological advancements. And it's interesting to hear like the. I forget what his name is, but some Japanese shogunate who first recreated guns after buying a couple from Portuguese guy. And it's amazing to think of these like feudal age super high skill artisan blacksmiths able to recreate a gun just based on it arriving. Like if you dropped off a musket in 1300s Italy, could they work it up in their shop? That's probably. That actually might be a good comparison. The only thing they couldn't get is they couldn't figure out how to close the barrel. And then the Portuguese guy taught him that. Yeah, next year. And then you also have, once this ecosystem is connected like you said, you have Chinese samurai mercenaries in South America. And New Mexico was actually a huge city in the 1500s or late 1500s, early 1600s. It was kind of like the center point, first European settled area in the Americas before North America took off. And it had like a million people, it was totally international. They were Japanese guys strolling through there and they had a bunch of paper, they were blowing their nose with it.

[Austin Padgett]

And other people off. You mean New Spain?

[Rudyard Lynch]

New Spain, Yeah, yeah, you said New.

[Austin Padgett]

Mexico, which had like five, which had like a thousand people or it had several thousand people. There is a difference there. But continue.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And yeah, and then they just. So they traveled through there on a mission from the shogunate to meet the Pope in Rome, getting back to the Christian connection thing to try and work in alliance with him directly. And they go through New Mexico and then they just show up in the southern coast of France and you think okay, if you travel around back in the day you're just going to get killed anywhere you go unless you're able to protect yourself. But unless there's an associated oppositional civilization or immigration threat or like some active cultural threat, if some totally foreign unique culture shows up on your shore and it's not viewed as a threat. Some interesting things can happen. Like in France, they saw these Japanese guys. They had no idea who they were. They didn't know what the country was in the 1600s. They didn't know where they came from. And they sent them all throughout different villages in France. And then these guys just made it. And then they talked to the Pope and then they went back and nothing came of it because they didn't actually have negotiating power because it was a. It was a rebel shogun. But it's just interesting to think of the world back then, just being able to wander through it and kind of having people help you along to get all the way to the Pope in Rome without knowing anything about who you are, what your country is.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, that you brought up an interesting fact. People forget where there was a lot of connection from Asia, especially to Mexico, and then indirectly to Europe, where the Mexican elite, under New Spain, they would buy these artisanal Japanese prints. And so it was the fashion among upper class Mexicans to have these Japanese artisanal. And the place I'm staying in Mexico, this is a great example. This Airbnb has Japanese style sliding doors. It wouldn't surprise me if this was something that the Japanese had. Or ceviche, the popular Latin American dish, is an attempt to make. So sushi stems from a Southeast Asian dish. And then the Filipinos who made the original version of sushi, when they moved to Mexico, in which they had this Asiatic community in Acapulco in the west coast of Mexico, they introduced ceviche to Latin America. And so there was this. This crossing of the Pacific that we forget about. And it's also interesting that out in the Philippines they have their own version of Mexican Spanish country music that's popular. And the ruling families of the Philippines are people of mixed Spanish blood. So the world has been interconnected for longer than we think. And you gave me a good transition to talk about the first major axis of the age of exploration, that being the Portuguese sailing around Africa to reach the Indian Ocean. And the Iberians deserve a tremendous amount of credit for the age of exploration, where I have the list of the ethnicities that have done the most in history, and I love the word arguable, where I don't want to know which of these is the most accomplished. You could say the Jews, you could say the Anglo Saxons or the English speakers. You could say the Germans, the Italians, the. The Chinese and other peoples, and the Greeks, of course, and we forget this, but the Iberians are one of the most accomplished peoples in history. And it's mostly due to accomplishments in this era of history. And I've been reading up a lot, a lot in Mexican history. We're going to have a Mexican history 102 and a Latin American history 102 soon. And you can tell that Iberia had all of this cultural creativity. And I'm going to call them Hispanics because that's the term for the peninsula Hispania, that being the Portuguese and the Spanish, where they were the ones who did most of the discoveries. And the. One of the very important points I want to convey, and this is one of the things Tom Bilyo said to me on his podcast. He said the underlying theory of your entire worldview is that humanity is biological. And that's something that stuck in my head where I'm like, wait. Or history is a biological process. That's things that stuck in my head where I'm like, wait. That actually is the underlying assumption of my worldview. And it hadn't clicked until then. But an example of this is that the reason Spain was the. The reason that Spain was the number one colonial power, as was Portugal, is that colonialism is a natural skill that you build up from external wars where the Spanish and the Portuguese had to fight the Muslims. And in the process of fighting the Muslims, they built up all of these social structures where 1492, the year that the Spanish reached the New World, was the year they wiped out the last Muslim kingdom. It was the year they discovered the New World. And it was also when the Inquisition went into overdrive. And it was also when Aragon and Port Aragon and Castile, it was the time period they fused into a single country called Spain. And I'm going to use the word Hispanic partly because it was unclear at this point that Spain would become an identity, because Spain was a fusion of Castile and Aragon, who were these own independent countries of independent ethnicities, independent histories and cultures and languages. And originally Queen Isabella, who married Ferdinand to make Spain, she was going to marry the king of Portugal. So that would have made Portugal and Castile a single country. And then Aragon and Catalonia would have maintained independence. But the Spanish empire operated into these battle startups where buddies would just meet up together, they'd invest in an expedition, and then they just conquer someone and they'd give the king of Spain 20% of the profits. And this was actually an Arab invention originally. And the Arabs used it to conquer Spain and the Spanish used it to fight the Arabs. And the Spanish had built up as well as the Portuguese, the Hispanics, they had built up this cultural identity of we are Christians fighting against Muslims. They had built up the tools for colonialism because the north of Iberia had to colonize the south of Iberia. And they also built up a naval tradition. And the Portuguese started out by attacking the north coast of Africa. And they wanted to conquer Morocco because they really disliked the Muslims. And Henry the navigator was the great man who built the Chinese, not the Chinese, the Portuguese empire. And he was very invested in trying to reach the Orient through sailing around Africa and also trying to circumnavigate the Muslims to partly reach Prester John. And so the Portuguese made this effort to sail down the coast of Africa. And it was actually a quite heroic thing. Where they had never seen Africa beyond a certain parallel before, where they just kept going down the coast. And they would build these forts along the coast, or they build these sort of towers. When they passed each tower, they would know that the Portuguese ship had made it that far before turning back. Because the Portuguese were absolutely terrified of what Africa was like. Because beyond a certain latitude, it's just the Sahara. And the Sahara is as wide across as America, top down, as well as is wider than America across this horizontally. And they thought that the further you sailed south, you just hit the sun and there is no southern hemisphere, it's just fire. And they were terrified of that. And they had similar myths for crossing the Atlantic. As an example, where they. They had this myth of the Sargass Sea, which is. There is an area called the Sargasso Sea in the dead center of the Atlantic. And they have big seaweed there. And they said in the Stargaz Sea that. That the seaweed was so great it would capture ships and then sea monsters would eat the men. Or they had other stories that you had these whales, these whale, sorry, these turtles that were so huge that you'd mistake them for islands. Then you'd step on them, the turtles would go down and kill you. And they had a lot of really cool myths about stuff like this. And the Portuguese, around the 1450s, they eventually hit black Africa. Because Africa, northern Africa, is filled with Arabs. The new you got the Sahara, which is unpopulated. Then you have black Africa, sub Saharan Africa beneath it. And the Portuguese started the slave trade there, where they actually brought these black slaves to sugar plantations in South Portugal. So you had a significant black population in South Portugal. And the Portuguese built these forts along the coast of Africa for slave trading and for ivory and that stuff. And this established state formation along the coast. Of Africa, where the Congo state converted to Christianity. And they developed in the sort of polarity with the Portuguese. And the Portuguese hit this issue. Where off the coast of Namibia is this place? I forget its exact, exact name, but I think it's called the Skull Coast. Let me look up if that's the real name. There's the Skull coast off the coast of Namibia. Oh, it's the Skeleton Coast. And the Skeleton coast is one of the most dramatic regions on earth. It's like something out of a sci fi novel or a fantasy novel where this region of Namibia is dead dry. It's the Kalahari Desert, one of the most inhospitable deserts in the world. And the thing is that along the coast of Namibia is these rocks and these ocean currents that smash the ships into rocks. So no one could make it into down the coast of Namibia without getting crushed against the rocks, which is why it's called the Skeleton Coast. What did the Portuguese do? They sailed 1,000 miles west into the Atlantic, catch an ocean current which then took them out down the bottom of Africa. So they just said, we can't sail the coast, let's go straight out in the Atlantic. And they actually reached Brazil. And it's more than likely that the port we'll get to why. But it's more than likely that Columbus did not in fact discover the New World in this time period. But the Portuguese and the English already knew about the New World, where we have mountains of evidence for that. Where the Portuguese hit Brazil and they made Brazil a colony as they sailed too far west to get her on the Skeleton Coast. And then they circled the bottom of Africa, which they called the Cape of Storms. And then for propaganda reasons, much like Greenland, where Greenland was an icy land. And then for real estate development reasons, Eric the Red called it Greenland. And they called it the Cape of Storms. And then for publicity reasons, they said, no, this is the Cape of Good Hope because we need to psyop men into sailing because men will not sail through the Skeleton Coast. And then the Cape of Storms turns.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Out good hope means you hope you don't die.

[Austin Padgett]

Wait, really?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Well, no, I'm just joking. Sort of, you know, they can kind of.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

In a way that it works both ways. But yeah, that's a perfect example with the Portuguese about how their ability to move around the world increased so drastically that it outpaced like their ability to prior to discover because like Portugal ended up in Brazil just by accident, just by taking a detour. Probably got caught in the. Probably were riding the Canary Current. Like it was easier for them to go all the way across the ocean and back and down the coast and they could just do that. And they did it so dramatically they hit another continent. So yeah, it's just they could. The terrain opened up in a way that was never there before.

[Whatifalth]

We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.

[Sponsor Speaker]

Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere from self driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming and fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or oci. OCI is a blazing, fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, plus all of your AI and machine learning workloads. OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking, so you're saving a pile of money. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to oci, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters and Soon Know AI. Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new US customers with minimum financial commitment. Offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this special [e-mail] cognitive that's oracle.com cognitive I looked it up.

[Austin Padgett]

The Cape of Good Hope is the it stems from the idea that if you reach this far, you can make it to India. So you're kind of indirectly right where it's like, psych. If you haven't died by this point, you'll be in India. And so the Portuguese did make it into the Indian Ocean in 1496, I believe so right after Columbus. And Columbus initially went to the Portuguese to fund his expedition and they just said no, because they said, our scheme with Africa, we're too invested in it. We think it's going to work. And there's an interesting story I frequently think about where the Portuguese reached the east coast of Africa. Then they reached India, where the first Portuguese explorers in India, they ran into the South Indian kingdom, where India has had such a stratified caste system, especially that part of India, that if you were low caste, you couldn't step within 30ft of a high caste priest Brahmin, or make eye contact with him. And so the Portuguese reached the state and south India, where the king, who was of a lower caste, could not sit at the same table as the priests who are a higher Caste, who are his subjects. And it speaks to the ossification of that system where the Indian Ocean was possibly the wealthiest trade system in the world because India was incredibly wealthy. India was. The average Indian was quite poor. But because it was an extractive system, the highest level of Indians were stunningly wealthy, as well as the spice trade, where Europeans were heavily motivated by the incredibly expensive spices that Southeast Asia produced and India produced, where pepper, which we keep at just diners, was an incredibly expensive substance. Well, same thing with cloves and same thing with tarragon and all those things. And there's this meme I love where it's VC today. And it shows like, like I told you my story of my buddy who made a crypto hedge fund to save the climate and raise $20 million. So that's like the joke is that's VC today. And I know, I know a lot of VCs in the audience. I don't mean to insult your honor. And then VC in the 1600s is we outfitted an expedition to the silhouette and we took all the clothes. We destroyed the entire rulership, leading rulership class, and then we made 16,000% profits. And so, and this is thing we forget the entire age of discovery, except for a lot. Some of the initial stuff funded by governments was funded by VC capital. It was these merchants back in Europe underwriting the costs. And it was guys who just made the decision. European colonialism was white boys deciding to band together and just do stuff. And they didn't even tell the governments.

[Rudyard Lynch]

In most cases, right before when there was. There's just opportunity and people willing to seek it out. Before it came more organized into the subsidized colonial empires, there was still plenty of opportunity to make connections.

[Austin Padgett]

The thing with the Portuguese is I can't believe how rapidly they built their empire. And I. I'm shocked and I'm. I'm proud of the Portuguese. This is a tiny country. And the Portuguese had this ring of forts along the west coast of Africa. Gambia, Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Mozambique, in the east coast of Africa, Kenya, Somalia, Oman, Persia. I think they had one in Aden, in Yemen, they had several off the coast of India, like Goa and a few others. They had Sri Lanka, Singapore. Then they reached as far east as Macau in China. The Portuguese had Naga. They. I think they built Nagasaki in Japan. And so the Portuguese had this ring of forts stretching from Portugal itself out to Japan. And this is a tiny, relatively poor country. And they. They did it very quickly. And it was groups of something like 300 Portuguese guys who took over the wealthiest trading system in the world. And I am frequently in disbelief about how rapidly and how easily they did it. And because I just find it remarkable that just squads of tiny squads of Portuguese guys took over this Indian Ocean trade system. And the locals didn't really fight back. And the Portuguese were seen for being as being very brutal. And this is an element of the Age of Discovery that I don't want to sugarcoat. These guys were nasty. Where the Portuguese they were. They were really big on converting people to Catholicism. And interestingly, they made a new ethnic group in the Portuguese called the. In the Indian Ocean called the Last Scars that were this mixed race sailor ethnicity. Because in India everything has to become a caste. They were the sailor caste that mixed all of these ethnic groups from across the Indian Ocean.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Like Sinbad.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, although Sinbad was Arabic. He was a thousand years earlier. And mixed Indian Ocean ethnic group. And the. The Portuguese, they would just sail up to a place and you had a great point in an earlier podcast where the Europeans had this incredible ability where they had these ships and they'd have cannons on them. And the Europeans pioneered gun warfare. And this is a great example where guns started in China. They made it out across Eurasia. The English and the French were. Implemented them immediately. Radically improved the technology. So much so that when they reached Asia again, the Asians had to figure out how the Europeans improved their own technology and the Portuguese ability to have these caravels or these ships with. A huge innovation was having cannons with rolling guns with. With rolling wheels. Because if you have a cannon bolted onto a ship, the reverb of the cannon will knock the ship out. But once you have the rolling. The rolling cannon on wheels, there's the reverb. It just knocks back and forth. And what this meant is the Europeans had this market advantage where it's hard to understand if you're just an Asian guy used to fighting with bows and arrows. The Portuguese show up with these very advanced ships with 20 guns and they just knock your fleet out of the water. And the Europeans were. I read this book on the history of Asian warfare and also on the breakthrough of. So there's the History of Oriental Warfare by Rice. That's an interesting book. There's also the Military Revolution by Jeffrey Parker. And one of the things the Military Revolution talks about is it compares the Europeans fighting against the Indonesian militaries. And it's just embarrassing because the Europeans could consistently win, outnumbered 10 to 1 in Indonesia and that region of the world where the local armies were dependent off Basically mobs of guys who weren't trained with some elephants. And then the Portuguese use of guns and artillery and drill and more advanced military tactics. And that stuff meant that they had this enormous military advantage.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Right? And if you control the water, as you know from Age of Empires, then you basically control the whole game. And that's how the Vikings dominated England for so long. Because if you control the water and then it's pretty easy to build forts on the coast, which gives you a little bit of anchors and you can move, you know, your troops up and down at different locations much faster. So it's kind of a hack. If you can just control the water, get forts, you can have ridiculous success. And they were just totally untouchable in the water.

[Austin Padgett]

The Portuguese empire was deeply corrupt. The Portuguese had a great degree of vril. And there's a great book called Monsoon by Robert Kagan about it analyzes the history and the culture of the region that stretches between Zanzibar and Japan. And he talks a lot about the remnants of the Portuguese empire. And they made their heroic epic, the Luciads, about the Indian Ocean. And however the Portuguese hit the Iberian issue, where the Iberians had this incredible vitality in conquering stuff. And the way I see it is the Iberian people, they had something very strong. And then the problem with Latin Europe in general and the reason why, as an example, the French were seen as the men. So in the medieval period, the French were seen as the manliest and most courageous people in Europe. And the French were seen as so masculine that they would just constantly like cause issues for each other and everyone around, around the French. We can't handle the French because they're so aggressive all the time. You never mess with the French. And then what happened for the French and the Spanish and the Italians is that over the early modern period, for historic reasons, and watch the video in the 1600s is their governments grew so powerful as to strangle the population. Where their governments established inquisitions. They shut down capitalism with monopolies, they established complex regulatory systems, they built up these noble titles that they split the society up and entrenched the power of the nobility so that these originally very vital populations got domesticated. And that's what happened with both Iberian states, the Portuguese and the Spanish especially so because they were operating under a joint monarchy for an 80 year period. And so the Portuguese, after conquering this region, they became intensely corrupt. And you hear stories of the governor of Goa living in enormous wealth while the men on the ship starved to death and never got paid or you'd hear about the Portuguese would have one year. So the Portuguese and the Spanish only appointed governors from the capital. For example, in Spanish Mexico, the second you were born in Mexico, you were a second class citizen who could never have anything political power. And so they would send the peninsulares, the people from Europe out to the colonies. And this ended up retarding the development of those societies, especially Latin America. And the Portuguese would send guys out from Portugal. It would take them, they had a one year lease, it would take them nine months to get there. They'd rule for a few months where the next guy would show up. And it's like a comedy where no one was able to be governor of the Portuguese east for long enough to actually govern it. And then what happened is that the Dutch showed up with the express tragedy of wiping out the Portuguese Empire because the Dutch were Protestants and they were mostly successful. And do you have any other questions when we're still on the Indian Ocean theater?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Just a comment on how it's kind of underrated, like we don't think about the Portuguese a lot is if you go to Goa, if you go to Macau, you can see a lot of Portuguese architecture, huge influence, even the colors and very old districts built a long time ago. So it's kind of. You hear about Spanish Manila and things like that, but not a lot of people think about Portuguese Goa.

[Austin Padgett]

I was supposed to go on a trip to Goa, go to Goa three years ago and they had to cancel due to some life drama. I'm sad I didn't go. And another very interesting story is that when they reached China, the Chinese called the Europeans barbarians, which is also the Indians, the Muslims and the Chinese all called the Europeans barbarians. Although the Europeans had an enormous military and sociological and technological advantage over all those civilizations. And the one thing the Chinese found interesting about the Europeans was mechanics where the Chinese would, the Chinese emperor kept these Jesuits or a certain type of Catholic priest in, in Beijing. And the Jesuits helped reformulate the Chinese calendar and they would manage these clockwork exhibits for the Chinese emperor, where the Chinese emperor loved the European clockwork. And so he would purposely keep these Jesuits around just for the clockwork. And at the same time the Jesuits were trying to psyop the Chinese emperor to allow them to preach Christianity because China was a closed society and they had reached a threshold where the Jesuits had found a way to integrate Confucianism with Catholicism. And then the Jesuits had this falling out with Rome where they weren't allowed to continue to deal with the Pope. And that Makes me sad. I like the Jesuits a lot. They're one of my favorite Catholic organizations.

[Rudyard Lynch]

But I would. But that's a controversial statement. But that would be one of my favorite jobs, is trying to relate like an ideology or a worldview into another person's worldview, find the references where you can make the connections and explain it through their frame. Because I did that all the time talking to different people all throughout Asia about my ideas and relating it to their ideas. And it's really fun to see which ones you can find to make it fit within their worldview.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes. So I mean, that's a really interesting part of the age of exploration. Just the meshing of worldviews where you brought the entire world together for the first time. And I still don't think we're living through the implications of that. Where one of the things that really shocks me is I try to combine world philosophies, look at the underlying similarities between India, China, Islam, Europe and other world civilizations. I'm reading a lot of Mesoamerican Nowism in Mexico and it shocks me that very few people have tried to study the similarities across world civilizations and their worldviews. It seems like an obvious thing, but what we did instead is that we used modernity and science as this mechanism to just make shit up completely divorced from the world in history. Where modernity is a way for the west to maintain its egoism in a way that feels new and special while not actually listening and integrating other cultures. Truthfully.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, exactly. You have to be able to find the through line on subjectivism and objectivism to even be able to operate in that way. Yeah, because if there's no universal through line, then what are you actually relating to the in between views? And that's. You have to find the universal through line in order to build it out. And then, yeah, you can take the implications within their framing. So maybe it's not something that'd be traditionally taught within their framing, but it's consistent with it.

[Austin Padgett]

That's a great point. I love the term universal through line. I'm going to start using it. So now let's flip over to the Americas with Christopher Columbus. And Columbus is a figure where I admire him on a Nietzschean basis, where the sheer will to power that he had, where he was, he was the son of an. Of a minor artisan from northern Italy and he was obsessed with Marco Polo and he developed his dream of sailing west across the Atlantic and he was a navigator and he sailed to Iceland, where I'm sure both Iceland and Ireland had legends of lands to the west they had sailed to. So I think he had picked up on that. And he also was operating off mathematically incorrect models of the world, that the world was vastly smaller than it is. And so he went to Portugal first they said no, he went to Spain, they nearly said no. And then he was going to go to first England and then France. And then when he was riding out of Spain, the Spanish court finally changed their mind and outfitted his fleet and he sailed west across the Atlantic until he hit the Bahamas. And he thought that he was somewhere around the Philippines or Japan. And he was convinced until the day he died that he had reached Asia. And one of the things you find from history is just no one respects when cool things happen. Well, at the time, you'd be surprised. Columbus thought he had died a failure. And lots of people at the time didn't understand the importance of it. Same thing with Cortez. At the time of Cortez's conquest of Mexico. Lots of people played it off as unimportant at the time of Jesus Christ. He will play it off as unimportant at the time of Prophet. When the Prophet Muhammad first arose, people laughed at him because they said, your specific type of prophecy does not fit the pre established types of prophecy. And when Churchill, when Churchill, When World War II ended, the British immediately knocked out Churchill and they kicked him out of power. People do not respect when cool historic things happen at the time because people are normies. And so Columbus reached the New World and he went to the Bahamas, he went to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica, and he also went to the mainland around Venezuela and Colombia. And I think the left is correct about Columbus. He was such a brutal thug because his negotiation with the Spanish government was, when I sail west, you have to make me the governor of whatever land I discover out there. And they initially said no, and they finally agreed to it. But what happened was that when Columbus reached the New World world, the first thing he did was he was obsessed with gold. But that part of the region has no gold. And the local population was divided between the Taino peoples of Cuba and the Bahamas, who were peaceful and they were described as almost identic, where they were quite healthy, they lived naked, they weren't that violent. They seemed, they were very nice to the conquistadors and then the Caribs who were in the area around, like in the Caribbean as a term, in the Carib. And they were in the Lesser Antilles, around Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. And they were moving up from South. South America and they were in the process of genociding the Taino. The Caribs practiced its cannibalism. Caribism. They practiced cannibalism. They would strip off the skin of their opponents and then torture them to death and that stuff. And what Columbus did was that he made these work programs where if you didn't work yourself so you had to get gold. And if you didn't get gold, they'd cut off your hands and kill your children and you would give the local women as sex slaves to his men. But there wasn't any gold. So Columbus just went up genociding. The population of the Caribbean and the Spanish monarchy were way nicer than we give them credit. In a lot of ways. The Spanish monarchy was actually too protective of the Indians. Where later on the Spanish kept the Indians in this permanently infantile role where they could never actually attain maturity. And they gave them all of these nanny state protections. And that was in the Indians felt them as resentment for. But Isabella and Ferdinand, who keep in mind, were doing the Spanish Inquisition at the exact same time. They took Columbus out of power because they thought he was too brutal. And they stopped the Spanish from enslaving the natives, or at least they tempered it as much as possible. And so Columbus went to jail and he was dispossessed. And if 15th century Spain thinks you're too brutal, you might be too brutal. And I support. I don't really care whether or not Columbus stays a holiday. Never think about it. I think Columbus is a very admirable figure as a visionary, but as a man, man, he's terrible. Because discovering the New World, that's pretty cool. Like you can't get past how cool it is to just make up a new continent.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, it is what it is. I think getting all excited about it is almost boring at this point. And I was thinking about your. Another controversial topic. You mentioned the Jesuits and then I remember you mentioned vc and I know the Jesuits and Spain are the ones who. Who came up with the justification for charging interest within Christianity because they said it's not like usury because there's a risk to lending money and an opportunity cost and that that comes with an associated cost. So it's okay to charge interest. And I wonder if part of that development was connected to this. These VC colonial expeditions probably more largely set within the economic developments of the country. But it's an interesting connection to think that that intellectual change enabled some more capital organization around the ships.

[Austin Padgett]

Europe was motivated by Money. Europe had a social structure more dependent upon money than we do today. Now, it might seem hard to believe, but due to the weakness of European governments, capital attained an enormous importance because France and England and Spain and the whole Roman Empire, they were relatively weak governments, while the power of the market was greater than all of them. So any European government that stood against the market would destroy itself. And this is the thing that resulted in Europe's rise to greatness. Where McNeill has a wonderful book called the Pursuit of Power, where he analyzes the cross section between market economy, science and military competition. Competition where he says they're all interconnected. And so the Europeans really wanted gold because due to the power of the market, the European governments actually, they couldn't inflate their currencies that much unless it would destroy them. The Spanish did later based off the New World gold. But it was this system where the Europeans thought we want to control as much money as possible because our governments are weak enough that we need physical gold to buy stuff. And now governments just inflate money. Money is basically. Money's a joke now. We just haven't realized it yet. We're about five years from realizing that the money we carry is a joke. And so money was just a part of the culture and it established Europe's dynamism and its social mobility. But it also resulted in stuff like religious organizations being financial organization.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Right. And it all being connected. Everything was connected. The government, the ideology, the religion, the developing values, the market. It's. And that's why it's important to have a understanding of all those when you analyze history, otherwise you're literally guaranteed to get it wrong.

[Austin Padgett]

It's also funny that the Europeans of that time constantly abused themselves over. We care too much about money, we're too financially motivated. But it was legitimately one of their best traits because it kept Europe constantly dynamic.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Well, that was the backlash against the Renaissance was the guy, the priest, whatever his name was, who was against the bankers and the whole money system attached to it. And he was totally against consumerism and he only wore simple clothes. And they were all really self indulgent and moralistic. And their victory was just them destroying Vienna and then getting executed a couple deck or a little bit later.

[Austin Padgett]

This was this guy in 14th century Florence. Right. I'm forgetting his.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes, he launched a Giovanni or something. Or maybe that was.

[Austin Padgett]

It's not. Is it Savonarola?

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yes. Yeah, that's something. Yeah, that and he. He pretty much led to the downfall of the Medicis. Thank you Will Durant, as well as the city. Thanks, buddy.

[Austin Padgett]

Thank you. Will Durant. I only know about this from you. There's, like, a whole tier of authors that I only know about from Will Durant. So I read it. Will Durant's one of my favorite authors. He's one of the best historians in history. I try to maintain a degree of gratitude for Will Durant's existence, but he's been dead for my entire life.

[Rudyard Lynch]

But Florence, not Venice. Yeah.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it was Florence. And so Spanish established Caribbean empire. And interesting thing is that Cortez was this minor Spanish nobleman in. He was this minor Spanish nobleman from the poorest region of Spain, Extremadura. And he was, interestingly, a man of honor. And that's the history of Mexico, which talks about that. That was interesting. He was seen as more moral than the average conquistador for the era. And he was also a notary. And so he was trying to hack the Spanish legal system to find these loopholes. And he got a slight amount of legal permission from the governor of Cuba to sail to Mexico to take out Mexico. Then the governor of Cuba reneged his permission. Cortez still did it. Cortez reached Mexico and he found this huge empire of over 10 million people, or Mexico had 20 million people at the time called the Aztecs. And I'm not going to get too much in the conquest of the Aztec Empire because it belongs both in the Spanish empire video and in a future Mexican or Mesoamerican video. But this was a civilization that they knew nothing about at all, and they stumbled upon it where the Aztecs cap. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was bigger than any city in Europe except Constantinople. And the Spanish were just in complete awe of it. And the Aztecs built up this huge, relatively advanced empire, but it was still an empire stuck in the Stone Age and one which practiced human sacrifice, which killed millions of people. It is one of the most brutal empires in history. I've been reading up a lot in the Aztecs lately due to my interest in Mexico, due to being here. And I went in with a certain understanding of that. I would dislike the Aztecs. And the more I read about them, the less sympathetic I am to them. There's just layer upon layer of brutality stacked. And part of this is that Cortez, with a group of less than 1,000 men, is that he triggered so many of the Aztec subject states who the Aztecs would forcibly wage war against. And they did this to get human sacrifice. So the way they got human sacrifice is Subject states. So imagine if America had these false simulated wars with Canada, where in these false simulated wars of Canada that Canada is not allowed to say no to, called the Flower Wars. We take Canadians and then sacrifice them to the Sun God and.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, yeah, no, it's really interesting because they basically within their model and their ecosystem, they became the dominant player. There was no empire to empire conflict with the Aztecs. They were just totally dominant. So then you can't. And then they were also, you know, a stall divided society. So they get population increases which creates a pressure where normally often you get a response where they send them off to war or they fight a war, but because they're already dominant there's no war to do it. So it's like this dystopian bloodletting process that's very manufactured because they have no other major power to fight.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it's one of those things where you look at the process of human history and you think, you twisted fuck. And I think that's what people are going to think of this era of history. They'll look at wokeness and the population collapse and they'll be like, did you really have to do this history? This did. This is, this is just dystopian and weird. And that's how I feel at the Aztecs. And the Spanish conquered the Aztec empire and pretty quickly, it's pretty impressive. And they established a new Spain. And then the Spanish sailed on the west coast, South America, starting in Mexico and they reached Peru, another civilization that the Spanish didn't know about beforehand. And they found the Inca empire which had 11 million people and it was the biggest empire in the New World, stretching from Ecuador down to Chile. And the Inca had also formed within the last century where a lot of these New World empires were younger than we think. The Aztec empire is younger than Oxford University and the Inca empire is younger than I think the conquest of Constantinople. And they did the exact same thing where interestingly they used the exact same strategies to take out the Aztec and the Inca emperors, where they visited them or the Spanish forces. And for the Inca it's even more impressive where Pizarro had three or four hundred guys, even less than Cortes had. And Pizarro was much more of a thug than Cortes was. And they captured the emperor, used the emperor to order the subjects around, they then forced the subjects to give them gold. And then they triggered a revolt among the conquered subject peoples of the empire, used their troops against the former empire and then conquered them. Building an empire out of the former imperial apparatus of the old empire.

[Rudyard Lynch]

It's a pretty bad sign when people can figure out that they can reliably just stoke a counter revolution to overthrow you within your own people. Both of these systems were completely ripe for disruption, which makes me think, and I don't know if you mentioned this in the other video, but it's just like the Bronze Age systems encountering the sea people. Yes, they were ripe for that disruption. The whole population was like, all right, it is go time. Screw these guys. They got us locked down.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And it's weird timing with the Aztecs and the Incas, you know, kind of consolidating their empire right before the Spanish showed up. It's like, we've been trying this for thousands of years. We finally got it and now. Oh, what? No, let us enjoy it. But it reminds me of the point I was going to make the other video, which is like, you know, we're talking about these clash of these civilizations and Europe and Africa. It would be like, you know, having some advanced civilization visit Europe 3,000 years ago and what would happen, et cetera. And you look at the timeframes of the different stage of human development and you have like the Neolithic and then the Middle Ages and then the like very short modern ages. And the Neolithic and hunter gatherer period are just, they're just so long. They're like up to hundreds of thousands hundred thousand years long. And then you get like a smaller 3,000 window and then like 400 year or 2,000 year window. And if you're 10% slower on the 100,000 year period, then that's going to overlap the entire new stages of next stages of development. And sometimes you need things to shake up dynamics that keep you trapped in a stabilizing effect. So it's the way people think about it I think is much too linear. Or maybe like a video game.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

When just like we're looking at these very small differences in timing from a human evolution standpoint and attributing basically everything to them.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, modernity. I just think progress is a terrible idea. I think progress does exist, but exists due to certain incentive structures certain societies have. And to take progress for granted as just this force of life is just silly and it's very dangerous, especially so that progress has to go exponentially faster. And it's this whole attitude where if you want to accomplish something, you have to actually work for it. And we've removed the idea that you have to work or do anything to get stuff, which is just one of the most decadent concepts possible. It's equivalent to ancient priest classes where they think if they make the magic rain dance for the gods, the gods will bestow wealth upon them. Where that's what our priest class has done. They've made these ceremonial rain dances like diversity and equity. Then the gods of progress bestow blessings upon us.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Interesting. Yeah, well, they're having a really hard time with the progressive view of history because that's such a locked in model for the blue pill era. Yeah, it's going to be hard for people to leave that frame. A lot of them are going to be delusional in their inability to leave it. They're going to be thinking that there's still a chance for a long time.

[Austin Padgett]

So one of the things I have learned, and you know that my backstory, and this is something the world must learn, is that life will keep kicking you in the face until you learn its lessons. There's this idea that life is consensual and life is not consensual. You are just fed plot lines by life. You can choose to win or lose. And if you lose, you suffer. So you should better win. And if you lose, bad things will happen to you. So please learn your lessons and don't suffer. And there's this idea that we can default back onto comfortable stability and you just can't. You have to win. And this comfortable stability is built upon the, our, our ancestors being enormous chads, but that doesn't last forever.

[Rudyard Lynch]

And yeah, comfortable stability either gets into like a Indian caste system, 4000 years tyranny, forget freedom mode, or it result in a calamity and collapse of the system. Like the success of it is the worst thing you could possibly hope for.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, you're right. And the thing as well is that we're so delusional that we can't keep this. And one of the things I think about is I am very much an advocate for the weekend for my employees. I tell them you will never have to work on the weekend for your entire life. I think it's more morally wrong to make your employees work on the weekend because most wages, the only time they ever live is the weekend. If you take away the weekend from them, they're just not going to have a life. They don't have time to date, they don't have time to have hobbies, they don't have time to see their kids. And this was more tolerable in a pre industrial society where your community and your family is your work. But when I was a kid, the weekends were sacred and now I keep on seeing people working even on Sunday, Saturdays and Sundays. And what my thinking is, you idiots, this is the natural extension of immigration, globalization, de industrialization, automation. We have literally done everything we can to lower the value of labor. And when that happens, people are going to lose the weekend. And that's nothing that they think of. They took this wealth in this free time for granted. And then they don't do the things that maintain the value of labor. And then the value of American labor goes down. And this is something where I mostly blame the upper classes who tried to screw over the American working classes. But at the same time, we as a society grew so complacent that we have to take responsibility for this as a culture, that we just grew that complacent. And with all of these Age of Discovery, there's a very science science fiction overtone to it where the way it must have felt for the people involved is like an alien invasion novel. And that's because the alien invasion novel stems from the Age of discovery, where H.G. wells, one of my favorite authors when I was a teenager who was the popularizer of the alien invasion novel, he got his idea from the British destroying Tasmania, which was the most primitive population in the world, this tiny island off the coast of Australia. And he said, what if what we did to the Tasmanians happens to us? So that's the origin of the War of the Worlds idea. And one of the themes I keep reading in the histories of Mesoamerica in these indigenous civilizations is the sheer intellectual shattering of their previous philosophic worldview was as big as the 90% death rates from disease, as from the conquest, as from the insurfment that your entire worldview was just shattered overnight and everything you loved and believed in was gone overnight. That causes more psychological damage per se. That's equivalent to the physical damage. And it's hard to overstate, first of all how it felt for the Europeans to find these new lands, and then secondarily for the natives to see the new things that happened. Because in the Americas it was a complete shift, shattering. While the great irony is that in Asia they didn't process it as a real event, even though it was the the most important event of their recent history.

[Rudyard Lynch]

How is that in Asia they didn't process it as a real event?

[Austin Padgett]

So the Indians, Chinese Muslims saw the Europeans as barbarians, they saw them as pirates. The Chinese used the same word for pirate as for Westerner. And so the Europeans showed up with this advanced technology from the other side of the world. And the Asians just shrugged. Even though this would end up becoming for them. Yeah, exactly. It's similar to how, you know, how our current foreign policy is based around what countries support homosexuality. So with us, no, literally with USAID will destroy a moderate conservative government who are been our allies for decades in like Georgia or in Turkey or in Southeast Asia, whatever, because they're not homosexual enough.

[Rudyard Lynch]

They want to destroy nationalistic forces which get in the way of globalist.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes, not even globalism. It's literally. Do they support trans and homosexuals? It's not sometimes not even feminism.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Well, I mean government.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes. And then what happens is that there is that they just grow to hate us and those groups suffer more. And I see it as comparable, just the complete myopia of a pre established elite. And with. With the. I want to fill out the rest of the New World. So there was an. There's. Balboa discovered the first route from the Atlantic to the Pacific where there was this realization in the early 1500s that the new World was a different continent. And this actually had enormous philosophic implications upon European thought. Because the previous idea was that the ancients, the ancient wise thinkers of the past like Aristotle and Plato or Christianity contained all the world's wisdom. And the fact there was this huge. These two huge continents to the west that the ancients didn't know about destroyed a lot of this faith and ancient wisdom, which opened up the room for modern science. And with the discovery of the New World, Balboa crossed from the Atlantic to the Pacific at the smallest point in Panama. And he was the first European to see the Pacific from that side. And then in South America, one of Pizarro's buddies, he crossed the Andes to try to find El Dorado. And then he sailed down the Amazon in the early 1500s and there's this great movie by Werner Herzog called Aguirre, Wrath of God, which I love because the movies that this group of Spanish explorers and this movie was one of the hardest movies to film. You should watch it. It was complete production hell because they actually filmed it in the Amazon. And it follows how this group of Spaniards go crazy and they all die going down the Amazon. But the impressive thing is that this group of Spaniards actually made it to the end of the Amazon and they went back around to reach Mexico again, which is one of the most insanely impressive things I've ever heard.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Because they made it through multiple biomes and impossible territories.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Again speaking to the newfound ability to move around the map like never before.

[Austin Padgett]

As the rapper Pitbull said, I got the world in the palm of my hand. Wherever I touch it, that's where I land. Pitbull is a descendant of the Conquistadors. He understands their spirit.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Right, right. That makes sense. But it's crazy to think of, you know, you make a couple innovations and you think it out and you're like, we could technically go anywhere. We got like four months, we go five months that we just need this kind of pit stop. Like we're basically. We could live out here, we could live in the woods all the time. We don't even have to go home, you know, like that kind of level.

[Austin Padgett]

The interesting thing is that the Amazon had advanced societies with millions of people at the time, and the Spanish wrote about them. And then when they came back 20 years later, the new world experienced 90% fatality rate to disease. And this is horrible, where 90% of the new World's population died because they weren't part of Europe's disease pool. And there was also something similar where when the Spanish were discovering the American south, they. They had their own expeditions to find basically Northern El Dorado. And they went as far north as Kansas and Tennessee, and they started in Florida and La Florida, a land of the flowers in Spanish, where they thought that Florida had the fountain of youth, or this wonderful fountain that when you drank it, you would be able to attain, you would be able to be young again. And that did not happen, obviously. It's funny to think about Florida, a place I've been, and to think that there was once a time when it was this savage land for the fountain of youth, youth that conquistadors would traipse through. And the conquistadors saw these large societies in the American south who were actually able to fight off the Spanish conquistadors in the first time because they had armies of thousands of men. And when the Spanish went up the Mississippi, again, completely empty due to disease, and this leads me to a point I nearly forgot to say, but we have a significant amount of evidence that the English and the Portuguese knew about America before Columbus discovered them. Where European powers before Columbus, they were very secretive about their navigational information because they saw it as national security. And so every major country in Western Europe had discoveries and they had navigational charts which they didn't share with other countries. And due to that, if they knew about the rest of the world and didn't tell people, that would be completely in character. And we have stories of sailors from Bristol, off the west coast of England, doing fishing off the coast of Newfoundland right after Columbus within one or two years. And the English sent out their own explorer, Henry Hudson, who reached the Newfoundland in the northeastern US a few years after Columbus, like 1497. And the Basque fishermen of the north of Spain, we have a very significant amount of evidence that they also knew about America before Columbus. And the Portuguese reached Brazil within four years of Columbus. And interesting, all these European countries, the second Columbus called their bluff and called the shit test. There's a continent out west. These other European countries almost instantaneously tried to claim that they. They almost instantaneously also happened to reach America.

[Rudyard Lynch]

That makes sense, too, because if they're already stretched for resources and there's a lot of area to compete off of, you can create a prisoner's dilemma where nobody wants to open up the new area because it's going to cause more stress in terms of figuring out how to spread out your resources and manage it all. Just another layer of competition. It's like now you both have to worry about this expanded territory. And right after that, the Portuguese and Spanish did decide to kind of split off in different directions. So maybe that was a real kind of factor in preventing anyone from jumping on it first, because they knew it would start another race.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, it's like the scramble for Africa, which was also a prisoner's dilemma. And the Spanish and the Portuguese, after this, established the treaty of Tordesilla, which is one of the ballsiest moves in history. Like, I'm in awe of it. Where the treaty of Tordesilla was, the Spanish and the Portuguese saying, we are going to divide the entire world between us. And they said, everything west of this line in the Atlantic is Spanish. Everything east of its Portuguese, because they're both Catholic. And the Pope presided over this. And interestingly, the Portuguese colonized Brazil because Brazil juts out far enough into the Atlantic that it's on their side of the Treaty of Tordesilla. And the Spanish and the Portuguese both respected the treaty. No one else did. Even the French, a fellow Catholic country, built their own colonies. And then the Protestants in the north of Europe, of course, didn't respect the pope, but it's kind of indicative of the gall of the Europeans to just divide up the world. And then furthermore, you'll hear stories later on about the French reaching the mouth of the Mississippi and then declaring the entire Mississippi basin part of France, even though it was part of the. It was part of. Of native territory where the French never populated their empire. For the most part, it was only the Americans in the 1800s. And so we've done the Americas, we've done Asia. Now let's do the circumnavigation of the world. Where Magellan wanted to reach Asia through sailing around the bottom of South America. And there's an interesting fact I'll throw in here, where we have a map from the Turkish empire in the mid-1500s that shows a coastline stretching from South America through Antarctica. And the crazy thing is that this map, the Piri Reyes map, is that it shows incredibly accurate maps of what Antarctica looks like under ice, and we have no idea why.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, that is a weird one. I've seen speculation that it's, like, really, really old cultural memory or shapes being drawn from a time when there was no ice. Like, you get to, like, the craziest explanations to make it make sense, because it was weirdly consistent.

[Austin Padgett]

Yeah, my mom thought. My mom was in, like, a lot of stuff like this, and she thought that it was due to ancient civilizations in that area. I don't know. I don't have a good explanation. It could just be random. And Magellan wanted to sail around the bottom of South America to reach the Orient and then go around the world. And so you'll hear interesting stuff where he was in complete awe of the Buenos Aires basin. He just saw the Rio de la Plata flow out. And he said, I can't believe a river this big exists. And then the Spanish were in awe of the Patagonians, who were the native population of south of the bottom of South America, who were the tallest people in the world. And the Europeans would get Patagonians, the tallest people in the world. Then pygmies from Central Africa, and they put them in zoos together, where they have the tallest people next to the shortest people to do the diversity of humanity in a zoo.

[Rudyard Lynch]

I didn't know the tallest people in the world were from Patagonia. Has that changed?

[Austin Padgett]

They're extinct now.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Right. Ouch. Well, maybe that's where Alex Pereira came from, because I've been trying to explain him for a while.

[Austin Padgett]

Who's that?

[Rudyard Lynch]

He's a UFC fighter, one of the bigger guys. Not heavyweight, but he's from the Amazon. He's from the Amazon, and he's like a giant Herculean. He's big and also athletic.

[Austin Padgett]

You texted me, like, a photo of him two hours ago.

[Rudyard Lynch]

He's the most physically domineering guy and is. Yeah, in many ways.

[Austin Padgett]

So the Amazon's, like, 3,000 miles from Patagonia? Yeah, you might have big. South America is.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, I'm reaching for straws much like.

[Austin Padgett]

The Spanish will soon be reaching for straws to eat. Where they sailed around the bottom of South America and then they sailed across the Pacific and they picked the exact wrong axis where they sailed across the point where the Pacific is the largest, straight from the bottom of South America to the Philippines. And so this shows how brutal these discoveries were where the Magellan and his exploration, they were literally eating rats and leather and they were eating sawdust by the end because they were starving to death. And I want this to be a reminder of how insane these guys were that they would sail across the world oftentimes. I think these. These voyages had a 30% death rate. And if you hit places like Nigeria, it's going to jump to 80% due to disease. And that doesn't even include war. And you wonder the sheer balls these guys had to do this. And. And so he and his expedition sailed across the Pacific. They finally reached the Philippines, and there Magellan died. He was killed by local Filipino war. And through that he had his. His group got new leadership and they claimed the Philippines as Spanish. With the Spanish later returned to conquer the Philippines. And then they kept sailing through the Indian Ocean until they reached Europe again. And a majority of men died with Magellan being the first man to circumnavigate the world. But I want to repeat this. It's pretty impressive that within a little bit more than 50 years after Columbus, they had sailed the long way around the world.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yep. This is a perfect example of just going for it, because it wasn't like they just sailed directly around the world in the shortest path possible. They had a bunch of random missions on this trip that sent them bouncing around all sorts of different places. And at one point, the split. The fleet split off from each other. And one side was like, all right, you go that way and you go that way. As in back to Spain, different ways around the entire world. They're like, all right, like, someone will make it.

[Austin Padgett]

That's insane. And yes, if these guys can sail down the Amazon fighting native tribes, dealing with local diseases, and having to, like, fight crocodiles and jaguars and that stuff. Random listener. You can ask your crush out. You can do things in your life. You can make your side hustle. You cannot be a pussy. It is within your choice.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yep, exactly. There's. The opportunities are. Are endless and so many, you'll never be able to take advantage of them. And we're trained to not see any at all.

[Austin Padgett]

Exactly. We. We are Nietzsche's last man. And we are trained into weakness. And we don't have to be weak because these guys are genetically identical to you.

[Rudyard Lynch]

You literally have to teach this stuff.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Behavior.

[Austin Padgett]

And so I'm gonna finish this story. There's a few other places in the world that had to be that were discovered. For example, the. The Pacific. And a few of the areas like New Zealand and Hawaii were only discovered in the mid 18th century by Captain Cook. The Russians were doing their own thing where they hit China in the Pacific coast by the late 1600s. And the Europeans knew about Africa, but for disease reasons, they weren't able to find the interior until the late 1800s. But I'm going to stop the story with Sir Francis Drake, who was the second man to sail around the world. And I'm using him as a capstone example for how far the Europeans went. And also, Sir Francis Drake was the start of the British Empire, which is the topic for the next two videos. Victorian Britain and the British Empire. And so he was a pirate and an adventurer where England had this pirate leadership who wanted to go to the New World to fight against the Spanish. And he wanted to take Spanish gold, see if the Spanish were telling the truth about their colonies, because the Spanish were somewhat secretive. And to see if the English could sail around the world, starting in Plymouth, he went to the Caribbean. He raided the Spanish treasure fleets as pirates there. He then went around the bottom of South America. And then he and his army saw Antarctica, where they saw the ice and they actually had to stop and live off penguin meat for a month because that was the only meat. And they would eat like five penguins a day for each of them. They just butchered hundreds of penguins to feed them and then sailed across the Pacific. He then reached the Orient. He bought a lot of spices there. And then he and his crew only barely made it back to England. But it showed that you could sail around the world again. And this brings our globalized world together. Where the world that we have today. And we have zero gratitude for this. The world where you can fly to the other side of the world in less than a day was made by these guys who nearly died and who did the absolutely insane thing.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Yeah, it's insane. Sometimes people complain about different areas having a lot of tourists or being developed versus the things you could see back then. But the reality is almost nobody saw anything back then. And our ability to even experience different soil types once in your life is something to cherish.

[Austin Padgett]

Yes.

[Rudyard Lynch]

Something very unique.

[Austin Padgett]

And I'm also going to say I should have thrown this in earlier, where there was a huge transfer in stuff around the world where so many of the things that we consume in Western culture are from the new world. Whether the potato, the tomato, chocolate, tobacco and syphilis made it to Europe, and European goods and animals and foods made it the new world. And most of the things you know of are European or Eurasian. Between horses, cows, pigs, domesticated animals, most diseases we have like malaria or the common cold and so many other things, there's this huge globalized transfer of stuff around the world that completely remade the world so much to a point where we are now. We are now in a time period where there are horses in Australia, which is just crazy. And so I am going to end on this. Thank you so much. Austin, do you want to cover the British Empire next or Victorian Britain?

[Rudyard Lynch]

I think Victorian Britain sounds pretty fun.

[Austin Padgett]

Okay. Peace man.

[Rudyard Lynch]

This is the explorer noble vibe. Okay, see ya.

[Austin Padgett]

Bye.

[Whatifalth]

History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ 102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube, forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.