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Lex Fridman Podcast
#476 – Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire
04:39:58
Jack Weatherford is an anthropologist and historian specializing in Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep476-sc See below for timestamps, and to give feedback,
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- [00:00]
Lex Friedman
The following is a conversation with Jack Weatherford, anthropologist and historian specializing in Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. He has written a legendary book on this topic titled Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, and he has written many other books including Emperor of the Seas, Kublai Khan and the Making of China, Genghis Khan and the Quest for God, the Secret History of the Mongol Queensland, and other excellent books. I've gotten to know Jack More after this conversation and I cannot speak highly enough about him. He's a truly brilliant, thoughtful and kind soul. This was a huge honor and pleasure for me. And now a quick few second mention of a sponsor. Check them out in the description or@lexfriedman.com Sponsors it's the best way to support this podcast. We got Aleo Capital for investment, Zocdoc for finding a medical professional, Fin for AI customer service, Oracle for cloud computing, Shopify for Selling Stuff online, Masterclass for Learning and Element for your daily electrolytes. Choose Wisened my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. They're all here in one place. I do try to make them interesting by talking about some random things I'm reading or thinking about. But if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. And it is truly the best way to support this podcast. To get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfreeman.com contact all right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Aleo Capital, an investment platform leveraging AI and macroeconomic insights to help you invest. They're a new sponsor, a very interesting sponsor. The idea there when you're talking about macroeconomic decisions, is leveraging everything that's going on, not just in the United States, but globally, and understanding that deeply, and then leveraging AI tools to make decisions based on what is going on in the world. I personally am always wondering, trying to figure out exactly what to do with the ever quickening turmoil of the world. Whether that's from military conflicts, tariffs, the tearing and stretching of different ways, the fabric of our various nations and our global humanity. On a human level, of course, it hurts my heart. And that is the level at which I try to understand, explore ideas and have different guests that explore different perspectives on those ideas. But in terms of finances and how to invest, given that the ground underneath is constantly shifting, that's really challenging, I think. So I support what Aleo Capital are doing with their effort to understand and leverage the global macroeconomic system in order to help you invest. Download their app in the App Store, Google Play or text LEX to 511511 that's a L L I O capital. Text LEX to 511511 it's important to say that investing involves risk, including the potential loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee results. See Terms and Conditions. Text fees may apply. This episode is also brought to you by zocdoc, a new sponsor. It's a really interesting platform that connects people patients with top rated healthcare providers. I have to admit that I'm terrible at this thing of remembering to schedule doctor's appointments, of remembering to go to the doctor. So anything and everyone and whatever tools can help me get that done. I'm all for ZocDoc is definitely that. ZocDoc is the easiest way I found to be able to find a doctor online super quickly, the right doctor for your thing and book an appointment super quickly. Super easy. Nice interface, easy to do. There's no excuses. I'm also saying this out loud to myself because there really is no excuses. I need to go to the doctor more often. I don't have any particular maladies at the moment, but it's always good to go to the doctor when nothing is wrong versus when everything is wrong, which is oftentimes foolish folks like me approach the system. So Anyway, go to Zocdoc.com lex to find and book a top rated doctor today. That's Z O c d o c.com lex this episode is also brought to you by Fin, the number one AI agent for customer service. In head to head comparisons with competitors, Fin wins every time it's used and trusted by over 5,000 customer service leaders, including top AI companies like Anthropic and Synthesia. These guys are legit. Their whole system continuously improves based on the analysis, train, test, deploy, loop. So it gets better and better and better and better Based on your needs, based on your customer needs. Creating a system that gives a high rate of resolution, meaning when a customer comes with a problem, start talking to the agent and what percent of the time that is resolved automatically with the AI system and they achieve a 59% average resolution rate, which is very high and very impressive for the industry. Anyway, go to Fin AI Lex to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team. That's Fin AI Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Oracle, a legendary company providing a fully integrated stack of cloud applications and cloud platforming services. They got the oci, which is the Oracle Cloud infrastructure. It's a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and of course AI. How can we forget about artificial intelligence? But yeah, on many fronts actually Oracle is doing incredible work on providing tools for large companies to deploy AI at scale. On average it's 50% less money for compute, 70% less for storage and and 80% less for networking. Obviously, as AI and machine learning systems continue to need more and more processing power, making those systems efficient and accurate becomes super vital. Cut your cloud bill in half when you switch to oci. Offer is for new US customers with a minimal financial commitment. See if you qualify@oracle.com lex that's oracle.com lex this episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store. Obviously with the conversation with GHH 6 hours of which a long time we spent saying how incredible Tobi, the CEO of Shopify is and how incredible Shopify is at being one of the company, one of many companies that show that Ruby on Rails can scale. I don't think I've ever heard anybody celebrate a programming language as thoroughly and as beautifully and as convincingly as DHH does. So that was wonderful to just sit back and enjoy listening to a super technical person elucidate the full range of beauty that he discovered in the tools that he uses. Anyway, that's some of the tech behind Shopify, but the actual thing connecting customers with people that want to sell stuff at an incredibly large scale. They do this extremely well. So even I have a store lexfreedman.com store sign up for a $1 per month trial period@shopify.com lux that's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com lux to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Masterclass. I have loved Masterclass for a very long time. You can watch over 200 classes there from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. I'm going to talk to many directors on the podcast. I'm going to talk to many musicians on the podcast and one of the inspirations for that is Martin Scorsese on filmmaking. What a great masterclass. Another one is Carlos Santana on guitar. I really hope to publish more videos of me playing guitar. Some Hendrix, some Guns n Roses, and yes, Carlos Santana Europa. I think it's one of the most beautiful melodic solos ever created. So anyway, you get to explore the minds behind some of these beautiful creations with Masterclass. They do just all around really, really nice job at condensing the wisdom of these folks into one place. Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off every an annual membership@masterclass.com lexpod that's masterclass.com lexpod this episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. Whenever you see me sipping something on the podcast table in a mug that's usually water with some element in it, it tastes delicious. It brings me joy, makes me feel healthy, make sure I never get a headache if I'm doing all kinds of fasting or doing carnivore diet, all of that, making sure that the electrolytes are in check. Sodium, potassium, magnesium, and of course friends. Watermelon salt is still my favorite by far flavor and it's the only one I stick to. I know a bunch of people like different flavors, but for me I'm in a long term monogamous relationship with watermelon salt. Get a free 8 count sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it@drinkelement.com Lex this is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or@lexfreedman.com sponsors and consider subscribing, commenting and sharing the podcast with folks who might find it interesting. I promise to work extremely hard to always bring you nuanced long form conversations with a wide variety of interesting people from all walks of life. And now to dear friends, here's Jack Weatherford. Genghis Khan, born in approximately 1162, became the conqueror of the largest contiguous empire in history. But before that he was a boy named Temujin, who at nine years old, lost everything. His father, his tribe, living in poverty, abandoned to the harshness of the Mongolian steppe. From a boy with nothing to the conqueror of the world. So tell me about this boy, his childhood, and the Mongolian steppe from which he came.
- [11:15]
Jack Weatherford
From the story of Genghis Khan, like the story, I think, of all of us, it it doesn't begin at birth. That's the beginning of life. The story begins long before birth, and sometimes it can be many generations before, and sometimes only shortly before. But I think with Genghis Khan, a crucial thing is to understand how his parents met and then how he was conceived. And that is that one day a cart was coming across the Mongol territory and only women drove carts. Men rode horses. Women also rode horses, but women owned the houses which were called gers, the tents. They owned all the household equipment, and so they had to have carts for moving back and forth. And the fact that a cart was moving meant that some woman was moving from one place to another. And in fact, her husband was with her. She was a new bride. And her husband was on a horse close to her. So what happened was a man named Yasuke. Yasuke, the future father of Genghis Khan. Yasuke was up on a hill. He was hunting with his falcon. The words of the Secret History of the Mongols were very clear. And he looked down and he saw her, and he could barely glimpse her, but he knew she was young and she was a new bride. And he rode back to camp. He got his two brothers, and they came racing down. And they came. And first the husband of the woman looked around and he decided to flee. Not because he was a coward, but he figured he would probably pull the men after him, they would chase him. And they did. They chased him. He went far away. He circled around. He came back. He arrived back at the cart where his wife was. Her name was Erlun. And Erlun had time to think while he was riding around, being chased by the Mongols. And she decided that it's more important for him to live. And she told him when he came back, you must flee. If you stay here, they will kill you and they will take me. But if you flee, they will take me. But you will have the chance to find another wife. There are many women in the world. You find one and you call her Hulot, after my name. And you remember me when you're with her. It was a very dramatic moment. And he rode away. And he looked back and forth, and it said that the pigtails or the braids that were hanging down were whipping back and forth from his chest to his back. He was divided, obviously, in whether he should go or stay. But the three men were approaching again, and they were headed straight for the cart this time. And they came in and they took Erlun. She didn't say a word until her husband was over the ridge. And when he was over the ridge and she could no longer see him, she began to scream and wail. And one of the brothers said to her, it doesn't matter if you shake the waters out of the river and if you shake the mountains with your screaming, you will never see this man again. And he was right. That was the moment that Genghis Khan's mother and father met. That's the beginning of his story in this kidnapping. And it's going to reverberate. Every detail of it will come back again and again, not only throughout the story of the life of Genghis Han, but it's going to continue on with the feuds and the issues caused by it all the way into the future. And to some extent, in certain parts of the world, you could say it still exists.
- [15:06]
Lex Friedman
So the meeting is fundamentally sort of a mixture of heartbreak and dark criminal type of kidnapping.
- [15:16]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [15:17]
Lex Friedman
And from that is conceived this conqueror of the biggest contiguous empire in history.
- [15:24]
Jack Weatherford
What I was really interested in was how did this happen? Who was this person? As Wordsworth wrote in his poem, you know, the child is father of the man, and it's the childhood that created him. And it's that episode that was before he was born. But all the things that happened throughout his childhood made him into the man that he became. And so he was. Now, suddenly this unusual situation was created where a child is going to be born to a kidnapped woman who is being held by strange people, the Mongols. They were not her people. And he already had another wife, her husband. He had a wife named Tsogal. He had at that time already one son. Later he had another son with her. It was a very odd situation. And in fact, the father, Yasuke, wasn't even there when Temujin was born. He was off fighting the Tatars. And during this campaign against the Tatars, he killed two Tatars. One of them was named Temujin Uge, which is sort of person of iron is what it means from the Turkic, but today a part of also Mongolian language. So he came back, he had a baby, and he decided to name him Temujin, the person of iron, or Iron man, we might call him.
- [16:53]
Lex Friedman
After the man he killed.
- [16:54]
Jack Weatherford
After the man he killed. So his kidnapped mother, she's a second wife now, not a legal wife, but just a second kidnapped wife. And he's named for someone his father just killed. It was not an auspicious beginning, and in fact, just episode after episode in his childhood was inauspicious. The father and mother moved camp one time when he was quite young, and somehow they overlooked him and forgot him. He was left behind. So here's this young child, we don't know what age, but it could have been around four or five, I think he was left behind. And as it turned out, some other people, the Taichut, found him and then they kept him for a while, and eventually he was reunited with his father and mother. And it's very odd to me that I never have any inkling of a spark of relationship much between the father and the son. Because then when Timuttin is eight years old, his father decides to take him off to find a wife, which finding a wife in the Mongolian terms means you give the child to that family, or you give the boy to that family. And he will live with them and they will raise him up and they will train him the way they want before he can marry their daughter. And so he's taking him off at age 8. But he didn't take the other son from the other wife, Bekhtar. He was keeping him. There was something about Temujin having been lost once and found by the taitute and reunited with the family. Now his father takes him off at age 8. And he was going to take him to Erlun's family, but he never made it. He stopped with another family. It's sort of like the first family he came across. And in the words of the secret history, it said sort of like instant love, that there was fire in his eyes and fire in her eyes. And he saw this girl, Berta, who was about 9 years old, a little older, and he wanted to stay there with that family, according to the story. And so the father left him there with that family. But on the way home, the father decided he saw a drinking party and he decided to join them. They were Tatars. He hid his identity on the step. Everybody kind of figures out who everybody is. They figured out who he was and supposedly they poisoned him. He got on his horse and was able to ride back home. But within a few days he died. So now Temujin is off living with another family. And somebody comes from his family, a family, not a relative, but a close person named Mongluk comes to get him, take him back, and they make it through the winter. They make it through the winter. Mother heirloom. By now she has four sons and one daughter. I think the daughter had already been born, or the daughter was going to be born not too long after that. But they make it through the winter. The spring comes and of course the clan is going to move to a new camp. They go to spring camp from winter camp and they have a ceremony for the ancestors. And they started the ceremony, but they did not tell Erlun. And so she came and she was angry that she had been left out. The old women said, you are the one for whom we do not have to call. We will feed you if you come, but we do not have to take care of you. Letting her know that as a captive woman, she was not a real wife in their view. And that was really the signal that when they moved camp, they were not taking her with them. And they packed up and they took her animals. They took the animals, but at that moment she still had one horse. For a moment. And she jumped on the horse and she took the banner of her husband and she raced around the people. And the banner after death contains the soul of the person. Soult it's called. And so she raced around and they were a little bit nervous, and so they camped for one night and they waited until it was dark. Then they took off. And this time one of the friends of the family came running out to try to stop them, and they killed him. And Temujin cried. He was a little boy, 8 years old. There was nothing he could do. He was just a little boy. And now that family is left there on the step. Four children, four, possibly five already. Tsuchikal, the other woman with two children, they're all left there to die on this step. When the winter comes, they will surely all die.
- [22:03]
Lex Friedman
How do they make it through the winter?
- [22:05]
Jack Weatherford
Mother Earlonne, in the words of the Secret History, she pulled her hat down over her head, she took her black stick, and she ran up and down the banks of the river, digging out roots to feed the gullet of her brood. She fed them through the winter. She found food, digging up whatever she could, finding whatever she could, everything she could. And even at his young age, Temujin was already beginning to go out to collect things. He could get fish, he could do a few tasks to help feed the family. And it was an extremely awful struggle at this point, but she saved every one of the children.
- [22:52]
Lex Friedman
So Temujin's early years were marked by loneliness, abandonment and struggle.
- [23:01]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, even after this, he was kidnapped at one point by Tai Chiut people. He was kidnapped and we would say, I think the correct word re enslaved. They put him into a cank, a yoke, like an ox would wear. And so his two arms are in it and his head is in it, and he's trapped in this thing. And every night he would be taken to a different gear to be guarded by that family. And one night there was a little celebration. So most of the people are drinking, and he's left with a boy who's not very smart. And Temujin managed to take the cank, the wooden yoke that he's trapped in, and use it as a weapon by turning it around very quickly and hitting the boy in the head, knocking him out. That was one of the first lessons for the Mongols that anything that moves is a weapon. This is going to go on for generations. Very important for the Mongols. If it moves, it's a weapon. He did that. He raced off in the night and he jumped into the river to Hide. He's still got a kank on him. He's still trapped under there. The people are looking for him. They come out and they're up and down the river, and he's hiding underneath the water for the most part, trying to breathe as best he can, but it's dark, and it protects him a little bit. They give up, and they say, okay, we'll come back tomorrow. He can't possibly escape. But the next day, he knew one family that he thought he could go to, and he was right. He went to that family, and at great risk to themselves, they, in fact, were a captive family of the Taijiyud. And at great risk to themselves, they managed to saw off the cank and then burn it in their fire. And they gave him food to escape, and then he had to go find his family again. So this is the kind of life that this boy Temujin had.
- [25:07]
Lex Friedman
So he. Just to be clear, his. The neck is trapped and the hands are trapped.
- [25:12]
Jack Weatherford
We think that's how it is. We just have the word they don't say, the head and the hands. We know that his body is trapped in it, but from all evidence we have, it's the hands and the head.
- [25:25]
Lex Friedman
And he's running around deeply alone with this thing.
- [25:29]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, yes. And then he has to go out and find wherever his family is.
- [25:35]
Lex Friedman
So this, in part, was the foundation of his breaking with Mongol tradition that kinship is the most important thing above all else. Because here is his life story, where he's abandoned over and over and over.
- [25:49]
Jack Weatherford
While his father's own brothers see the men who kidnapped her. They had an obligation under Mongol law and custom to marry her. When her husband died, they did not. They should take care of her and her children because her children are the children of their brother. They count as the sons of the clan, or they should. But no, they had all deserted, all betrayed him. He learned very early on that you cannot trust family.
- [26:19]
Lex Friedman
You mentioned that Genghis Khan's childhood, Temujin, was marked by extreme tribal violence. Can you describe sort of the state of affairs in the step? How much violence is there? How much kidnapping is there?
- [26:37]
Jack Weatherford
The story of Temujin is not a unique story for that time now, as an isolated family of outcasts, of course he's not participating in the various feuds and the raids of the people around them, but they are constantly raiding in the winter and for women and for horses and for any kind of valuables that they can find. It's almost like their way of getting trade goods from China. That one group raids the other in order to find out whatever they have for textiles or for metal. Mongols produced nothing. They could produce felt to make their tents, but they were not craftsmen. And so they had to get these items from somewhere. And it was through raiding. And so even in the genealogy of Temujin, you see going back generation after generation of women having been kidnapped, children born who are not necessarily the father's child, and it's unclear who the father father was. And all of these issues go back for a long time later. Genghis Khan will realize, once he becomes Ching Ashan, he will realize that the true source of most of the feuding on the step is over women. And later he will outlaw the kidnapping of women and the sale of women, in part not only because of what had happened to his mother, but what happened to him next in his life.
- [28:05]
Lex Friedman
And this is one of the things you talk about this in some ways the love story with his wife was her kidnapping was the defining. If you could point to one place where Genghis Khan the Conqueror was created, it's that point, his wife being kidnapped. Can you, can you describe first of all his love for this woman and what that means and what the kidnapping.
- [28:32]
Jack Weatherford
Of her MEANT at age 16, Bertha, the girl he had met when he was eight years old and she was nine, she's now 17. And she and her mother come. It's hard to even imagine what it was like for this 16 year old boy who has suffered these indignities of life in every way that you can imagine. And suddenly here is the love of his life who's going to be living with him, making him happy. He has somebody who loves him. It's not just his mother running around getting food and trying to feed the five children. And plus the other wife and her two children. No, he has somebody who loves him. And it's all the excitement that you can imagine with the fire in the eyes and excitement. And then it only lasts a few months. And so there they are and there's a lady visiting them. We don't know exactly who she is, but just they called her Grandmother Kowakchin. Granny Cachin is there. Granny Qochan is sleeping, of course, on the floor of the ger, the tent. And early in the morning she feels the vibrations in the earth and she knows that horsemen are coming. She rouses the family and Mother Earlune is in charge. Mother Earlone is still in charge, even though Temujin is now married. She puts all of her children on a horse. She takes the baby Girl Temulin, in her own lap. She has one extra horse, but she won't take because she knows. She doesn't know who the men are. She has no idea. But they're coming. They're coming in the dark. They're coming for a woman. They know there's a girl there. This family of outcasts has acquired a wife, and they know that they're coming for that. And so she leaves Xochiko, the other wife, she leaves this old lady, Granny Kowakchin, who actually has her own cart, and she leaves Boersta. They pile into Granny's cart, and it's only an ox to pull it so they don't get too far before the attackers get there. But Mother Erlen is right. She's able to get her children off to the mountain, into Burkhan Khaldun, to the mountainside, away from them, because the men are so focused on this cart and finding out how many women are in there and who they are and all. So Mother Earlune saved her family, but at a cost. Suddenly, Temujin realizes he has obeyed his mother, but he's lost the most important thing in his life. And I do think this is the defining moment of his life. The story began back when his mother was kidnapped, but now the kidnapping of his wife, I think it's the defining. What will he do? What should he do? What can he do? Is he going to just resign himself to it? Is he going to go out, look for another wife? And he decides that life is not worth living without Bursta. He has found something good in this life. And if he has to die trying to get her back, he will die trying to get her back.
- [32:03]
Lex Friedman
And this is the early steps of the military genius born. Because in order to get her back requires an actual organization of troops.
- [32:14]
Jack Weatherford
He needs allies, allies. He goes to a man who ruled the Caryat people in central Mongolia, kind of toll river, about where the capital Ulaanbaatar is today. He goes there because that Vang Han is the name, or Thorgalhan. He goes there because Vanghan had been the lord over his father at one point, and his father had gone on raids for him. And so he went there and actually he took a gift. That's because Bushta's mother had brought a sable coat as a gift for Mother Earlon at that time of the marriage. So he took the coat and he took it and he gave it as a gift to Vang Han and asked for his help. And Vang Han said yes, and he said, I will send some Troops, but we need more. And you need to ask Jamukha. Jamukha, you need to ask him to come also. He said, I will send a message to him to get troops.
- [33:17]
Lex Friedman
You have to tell the story of Jammukha, because the story of Genghis Khan is one of people abandoning him, being disloyal. And here is a person who's not of his kin, but becomes his, in a way, brother, in a way, loyal. And as you've described, he's both the best thing to has happened to Genghis Khan and one of the biggest challenges in the later years to Genghis Khan. So who was Jamukha?
- [33:49]
Jack Weatherford
Sciamulka was a boy about the same age as Temujin. And his family had winter camp close to where Mother Earlune was living with her children. And so the two boys met during the wintertime. In fact, they both claimed descent from the same woman about four generations earlier, or five. It's a little unclear. She was an Orihankai woman who herself was kidnapped. And actually Jamalcha was the descendant of her from the fact that she was pregnant at the moment of kidnapping. And then Temujin is descended from her through the new kidnapper, Botanchar, his ancestor. So they're both through the, as the Mongols would say, from the same womb. They come from the same historic origin. However, their lives were similar and they'd both lost their fathers very early. But Jamuka also lost a mother. So he grew up in the household of his grandfather. He had no siblings, unlike Temuzin with whole household of siblings. He grew up with his grandfather, and his grandfather had several wives. So he grew up with a bunch of old women, which later he said he thought was an influence on his life. But the two boys meet, so they come from different backgrounds. And Jamukha is not as deprived by any means as the life of Temujin. But he has a certain emotional deprivation, I think, having not had mother, father, siblings. And he lives with these old, old people. The two boys meet, they become good friends playing on the ice. And so they're playing on the ice. And then very early on, I think when they're about 10 or 11 years old, they decide to make a pact. It's called Coming Anda. Anda is more than a friend. A friend is like Nukhr in the language. And there are several different types of friendship. But Anda is a friendship that's beyond a friendship. It's something for life. And they swore that they would be there forever to protect each other, to help each other in every moment. And they exchanged knuckle bones. So each one of them had the knuckle bone of a roebuck, a deer. Knuckle bones are used in these games that they play, but it's also used to forecast the future. You can roll them around and all. And it's very strange on the ice, I will say in the wintertime in Mongolia, it can be up to 50 degrees below zero. And it doesn't really matter at that point whether it's either in Celsius or Fahrenheit or what it is. But you slide something across the ice and it's just absolutely smooth like silk, and it goes on for a long way. And if you put your ear down to the ice, you hear this celestial sound that is unlike any sound on the earth. It's just like the angels are singing under the eyes. So once they've sworn this relationship of Anda, then a couple years later they swear it again. But this time they're slightly older boys and they have bows and arrows and so they exchange arrows with each other. In fact, the text is very specific that Jamukha took the horn, cut it off of a two year old calf and he whittled it down and then he drilled a hole into it in order to make a whistling arrow, which is used for several purposes among the Mongols. It's used for signals, for one thing, from one person to another. But also when you're hunting, if you want to move the animal in a certain direction, you send a whistling arrow in the opposite direction to make the animal move. So it had a lot of uses. So the boys had exchanged Roebuck knuckles. This time they exchanged. And so they had been close friends. And Vang Hanh said, okay, Jamukha should raise some troops and go with you. And he did. So the three set out some troops from Vang Han. He himself did not go. He was too old. But he sent some troops and then Jamuka and his troops, and then basically just Temujin and his family. He just had his brothers, that's all. They set off to find the Merkut people up the Seleng river, which flows into Siberia and on into Lake Baikal. They had to go through some extremely rough territory. And you see in this episode, though Jamukha is already a little bit fierce, without necessarily thinking it through carefully, he gives this long speech about all the things they're going to do to the Merkit people. We're going to jump to the Tono, the smoke hole in the top of the gear. We're going to jump in there and we're going to kill them all. We're going to kill the men and the women and the children. And we will destroy these people forever. He has an extremely militant rhetoric at least, and he's also rather critical of the other people. Vang Hanh's people came late and he gave them this long lecture about we are Mongols and if we give our word, our word is our promise forever. And rain or sleet or snow, it doesn't matter, we be there on time. And it. So he's dressing down his superiors. He's very aggressive, but he's very helpful. So these troops, they move in on the Merkit camp, they also come in at night. And so there's a small amount of warning because some men are out hunting sables, the Merkit men. And they race back to the camp and they tell the people. And the people are getting ready to get out as fast as possible. So Bershta has no idea who's coming. She doesn't want to be kidnapped again. It's just somebody. So she and the grandmother coaxin again and tso, they're loaded into a cart to go away. So Timotian comes in and there's a full moon that night, so they could see what they're doing. And he's really searching for her. He's not paying too much attention to the battle and he's calling for her. And she hears his voice, she knows who it is. She jumps off the cart and she runs to him and they reunited and he grabs her, embraces her. And then he said, this is the goal. This is why we are here. We don't need anything else. He was very clear about that.
- [40:19]
Lex Friedman
And that was his first full on military engagement.
- [40:26]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, aside from the things. Yes, his first full on military engagement. Now, along the way, in addition to escaping all these horrors, he had killed his older half brother Bekhtar.
- [40:40]
Lex Friedman
And that too was a deeply formative experience. So what was that about? Can you explain in Mongol society the role of the, of the older brother and the power struggle there. And you know, not to moralize, but there's also, you know, the, the ethical foundation behind the murder, the killing of Bechter.
- [41:03]
Jack Weatherford
That's one of the things that's totally unknown outside of the secret history of the Mongols. None of the Persian chronicles, none of the Chinese chronicles, none of them knew about this until the secret history was deciphered and translated. But Bekter was the older child of Tsokl and Essence. The older brother has complete authority over the younger siblings in Mongolian society, they have to refer to him with a special pronoun all the time, ta. And he refers to them as chi. It's like a formality. And his word goes. He is the father in the absence of the father. But also it's quite common that if a man dies and his brothers, he has no brothers, or his brothers do not marry his widow, then if he has a son by another wife, she will become his wife. So it would have been common that Bechter eventually, when he passed through puberty, would then perhaps marry Mother Erleunt. Now, I don't know that that happened, but I think either it did, or Temujin was trying to prevent it because it was bad enough that he was the older brother, but he comes the older brother and a stepfather. I think Temujin just couldn't handle that. And he was already Bekter was ordering him around. So he would take things like a fish or bird that Temujin had caught. And that's perfectly acceptable in the Mongol hierarchy.
- [42:40]
Lex Friedman
So Temujin would catch a fish and Bektor would take the fish?
- [42:44]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. It's only recorded once, but perhaps happened several times.
- [42:48]
Lex Friedman
So that's an okay thing to do for an older brother, just take stuff?
- [42:52]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. He can do anything he wants, just about with his younger siblings. That's. Yeah. But Temujin is not going to stand for it. So mostly in the record, they kind of put the blame on this fish, which I'm not so sure that's really the blame. And the boys had actually taken the sewing needles from their mother. They were using them for fishing. And I think it's more complicated than that. But for whatever reason, he and his next brother, Hasser, decided to kill him. And they did.
- [43:27]
Lex Friedman
Why to you is it more complicated than that? It feels to me like stealing of a fish is like the final straw here. He's being abused over and over and over. And the fish is a symbol of that. And so here he takes matters into his own hands.
- [43:45]
Jack Weatherford
I think it is the symbol of that. And it can be the thing that pushes him over the edge. But it's all these other tensions of what's going on with the family because they shoot him with arrows, they kill him. But what happens afterwards is also interesting for the dynamics of what was going on before because we hear nothing from Tsoko. She and her younger son Belgatay, they stay with the family. They don't go away. But the one who is outraged is Mother Earlun, his mother. She screams and hollers at him in the longest kind of tirade you can imagine about. You will never have anybody in your life except your own ship Shadow. And you know, you are worse than everything that she could name. They could be worse than. She was outraged and went on and on and on about it. So she was obviously extremely distressed about it. Whereas Tsokal, the mother of the boy, she may have been distressed, I don't know, but nothing has shown up in the record. So he does have this episode of having killed off his brother. But I don't think it was a deeply meaningful. I think it was important, but I don't think it was emotionally deeply meaningful for Temujin. The brother was gone, the problem was solved. Mother is extremely ticked off at him. But.
- [45:09]
Lex Friedman
But it does show. In fact, it's interesting if it's not a big deal for him, it does show that he's willing to resort to murder to take care of a bad situation.
- [45:23]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, he is capable of doing anything that needs to be done to resolve what he sees as a problem. Bechter was a problem. He resolved it at a very young age. So he'd had that experience behind him. But now Bekter's younger brother Belgatai is on the raid with him and with Jamilka when they go to Captain Bursta back. So he has both loyalty and Belgatai stays loyal to him his entire life. His entire life. It was very interesting.
- [45:59]
Lex Friedman
So actually if we return to Bertha, is it normal to have such a love story across many years when you're separated and sort of having that kind of loyalty? Because those two way loyalty from Bursha to Temujin and Temujin to Bursta. And this is like before he was Genghis Khan.
- [46:20]
Jack Weatherford
I think as children he was too preoccupied with staying alive and trying to find fish and roots to eat and things like that to really be pining for her all the time. But for whatever reason she came and it could be that her family liked him in some way or that she remembered him, or that she had no other suitors because at 17 she should have been married actually. So I can't explain why, but it was certainly a strong love story after the fact, if not before. I mean, those two were loyal to each other throughout their lives. She was, I would say, the most important person to him.
- [47:04]
Lex Friedman
After that he went to literal war to get her back.
- [47:09]
Jack Weatherford
He risked everything. He was willing to die, he was willing to kill, he was willing to die in order to get her back. And he got her back. And now he's reestablished his relationship with Jamukha, and so they decide to stay together. And they all go off to the Horhonok Valley, and she is pregnant. This becomes a huge issue forever. It's one of those things that to this day, almost it's an issue in what happens. But as he says much later in life, when his own sons rebel against him and they call that first child a merkit bastard, he defends his wife viciously to his own sons. He says, you were not there. You do not know who loved who and who did not. You did not see the sky turning around. You did not see the stars falling. You did not see the earth turn over. You don't know what was happening. And if I say, he is my son, he is my son, who are you to say otherwise? You were not there. You come from the same warm womb. And if your mother could hear your words, her warm womb, womb would turn to cold stone. So he defended her forever. But he's off now. We go back to the beginning. She's pregnant there in the Hohenok Valley. And he and Camuk decide to renew their vows of being Anna to each other. So this time it's more serious. And it ceremony in front of the whole. We can't say tribe, it's not big enough yet for a tribe, but a whole clan that's there. And then Jamalka takes off a gold belt, which actually he had stolen from the market at some point. And where on earth they got a gold belt? I don't know. He took off a gold belt and he put it on Temujin. And then Timotchen gave him a mare who had never had a fold, had never given birth. And it was an unusual mare who had a little growth on the front of her head, which they called a horn. So it was an unusual gift, and it has meaning, but I don't know all the meanings behind it. You know, it's sort of odd to me, but the golden belt, you can kind of sort of think about it in different ways. But the gold, the belt, for the Mongol man is really the sign of manhood. And in fact, this belle de bus, a woman, was often then and even now called person without a belt, because that's how they were at that time. Today women wear belts, of course, but they still use the word buskwi busqui, with no belt. So it's a very important symbol of manhood. So he gave that Temujin. They celebrated. And then the words of the secret history, they slept apart under the same Blanket apart from the other group, and they were happy together. And then when the baby was born, Temujin named the baby, which means visitor. Some people say, well, it's because the child was really the market child. Other people say, no, it's because he was a visitor on the territory of Jammuk at that time. And other people can say, well, but Tamakha's ancestor who had been born from the kidnapped woman who was pregnant, that they had named that Jarigadai, which meant foreigner. So it's kind of like a parallel. The visitor, the foreigner. And so Jamukha's clan took the name from him. They were called Jadaran. And so there are all these things that sometimes we can't quite understand because we don't have the total mentality of that time and we're not there.
- [51:16]
Lex Friedman
But we should say that, I mean, it's a pretty powerful part of this love story is that the child is likely not his. And he accepted that child as his own and defended it as it becomes much more important later as his first child.
- [51:36]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, he defends this child through his entire life and. But not long after the birth, he and Jamaka break apart, or really it's Temujin breaks apart at the urging of Urshta, she said, he lords it over you too much, he orders you around too much. You need to be free, we need to break away. And she urged him and he loved his wife more than anything. I think that in a certain way, the most important other character in his life, adult life, would be the Anda relationship, which gets up being severely tested in the future years. But they run away through the night. They go all night long to escape from him. But he obviously loved Bertha the most and took the baby of course, with him as well.
- [52:32]
Lex Friedman
So here's this breaking point of the Anda. How did that relationship evolve?
- [52:37]
Jack Weatherford
The two of them never claimed to break it. They had just separated. And now we have the Bang Khan, the most powerful ruler on the steppe, who's ruling out of Central Mongolia of the Kariat people. And so Jamakha remains loyal to Hind, but at first so does Temujin. They're both loyal to him, but they're fighting in different kinds of campaigns. So for a while they're not fighting each other. But eventually some things happened that separate Temujin. Temujin was making all of these great victories for Wang Han and he even got the title Vang, which means from Chinese meaning prince or king Vang. Han received that from the Jin dynasty because of all of these conquests against the Tatar people. So Timur was rising up, and then he wanted his son to marry the daughter of Vang Han. And Vang Han said no. His own son, Singum told the father, no, no, no, no. We don't marry those little people. They're Mongols. They're not like us. You know, we are Kariot people. They we aren't going to marry them. And so then now war, you could say, breaks out or feud, really. It's more of a feud. And the has to flee far away into the east to a place called Baljuna. And he goes to Baljuna. And at this time, then Jamalka is going to fight on behalf of his lord Bahan. The two of them do not meet in combat, but now their forces are fighting each other.
- [54:26]
Lex Friedman
And they didn't see that. I mean, there's an obvious tension there. There's an obvious, if slight, breaking of loyalty, right?
- [54:35]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. It's hard to know what's going through their mind at that point. We only have it later on when the relationship is being resolved in unfortunate ways, that they claim that neither one of them ever truly broke it because they never harmed each other directly. And in fact, then Temujin eventually defeats Vang Khan. So he takes over central Mongolia. He's starting to really rise up now. And he has the title from his own people of Genghis Khan. They give him that at Black Heart Mountain by the blue lake. It's a very beautiful, special place. But he takes that title. That's not a title that anyone had ever held that we know of Chinggis Khan. It was a new title that he just thought up, or somebody thought up, or somebody thought it had auspicious meaning behind it. It's very close to the word tengis, which means the sea. It could have had something to do with that. Mongolians really, like, we might say puns of. They like words with multiple meanings, and that's very important to them. The more meanings a word has, the more power that word has. So if it has different meaning in different languages. So in Mongolian, it sounds like strong Qinis, but in Turkic. And there are many Turkic people, including the Merkit themselves, are mostly Turkic people. It sounds like the sea Thingis. Thingis.
- [56:06]
Lex Friedman
So it's exciting to them when there's this double meaning and the double meaning plays with each other and that excites.
- [56:13]
Jack Weatherford
Them, especially with names. I'm like today in Mongolia. Well, I've been there so long. I think the fad has passed now. But about 20 years ago, it was popular to Name, children, Michel, Girls. Because it's a French name, an American name, and it means smile in Mongolia. So it's the power of three great languages and three great civilizations. And so many names are like that. And so I think Chinggis, it doesn't have one meaning. I think it means powerful, it means the sea. I think it means many different things. But so he had become a khan and he was ruling over him. And so Jamuka now switched loyalties to the next kingdom over, called the Naiman people, who are farther west. And he becomes the protege, you could say, of the Naiman people. But when Genghis Khan attacks the Naiman, Jamukha deserts the Naiman. He tells them, these people have snouts of steel and they eat humans alive. And he was telling them all these horrible things about the Mongols, you know, and Ta Yang Han, the leader of the Naimans, he was rightfully scared about him, and he was left there. And he, in fact was very quickly also defeated. So Tamaka has not fought against Temuzin in this campaign. And he's off with some of his people, Jadaran clan people, he's off with them, and they see the turning of the tide, you know, and. But he now wants to become the Great Khan of the steppe. He has very few followers, but he takes the title Gurkhan, which is a very old, ancient, important title. But because Vanghan is gone, Thorgohan gone, that he could take this title and pretend to be the Great Khan of the steppe. And all but his own people turn against him and they capture him and they think they will take him to Chinggis Khan. It's not Chinggis Khan. They'll take him and they'll be rewarded perhaps for turning him in. And Chinggis Khan does reward them immediately. He kills them all because they have betrayed their leader, who is his Anda. It's a very strange encounter. And so supposedly Genghis Khan says to him, come back to me, save me, be beside me, protect me, be my shadow, be my safety guard in life. And supposedly Jamuqa says, but I did betray you when my people fought against you. And you will always know that. And you will never completely trust me. I will be like a louse underneath the collar of your tunic. I will be like a thorn in the lapel of your dell. He said, kill me without shedding my blood. Let me die. And if you do, take my remains up to a high place and bury me. And I will be the guard. I will be the protector for you and your people forever. So they obviously Temujin did not participate in the killing, but he ordered the killing. And he was either. It's not specified how he was killed without shedding the blood, but the Mongols had several ways because the most honorable way to die was without shedding blood. The blood contains part of the soul and if you lose it, you're losing your soul before you die. So they usually wrapped them up in felt carpets and then beat them to death or trampled them to death with horses, something like that. There are a couple other methods, but I think that's probably the method by which Jomulkel was killed. And so he was killed and then Temujin had, or Chinggis Khan had his remains taken up and buried in a high place. This is over near Tuva, which is today part of Russia, but until the 20th century was a part of Mongolia. The Tuvan people very, very close culturally to the Mongols.
- [60:53]
Lex Friedman
It seems that both of them under the under relationship had a deep value for loyalty. And so the way you know it's not worth living after you've been disloyal, which is the Jamaka perspective, right?
- [61:09]
Jack Weatherford
He had become very practical at this point and he understood that you needed complete, total loyalty and trust with everybody around you. And I think for this reason he was willing either say to accept the plea of Jamukha and when Genghis Hang was asking him to come back and to be his shadow and to be his safety guard. Again, maybe that was just a formality that he knew would be rejected, or maybe when Jamilka offered to be killed without shedding the blood, that was a formality that he thought would not be followed through.
- [61:54]
Lex Friedman
Nevertheless, to me, just reading your work and understanding this history, this relationship seems like a really, really important relationships that defines the nature of loyalty.
- [62:06]
Jack Weatherford
For Genghis, I would say in both negative and positive ways it was the most important relationship of his adulthood, aside from Bursa. But that relationship really did not seem to have many negative aspects. They sometimes disagreed on things, but small things. So she was by him and she was positive in every regard so far as we know from forever. Although she was not submissive, but she was always on his side. And Tamaka, it was just a little too hot headed for me, you know, I mean in my evaluation of Dinh, that these things like, oh, we're going to drop down on the market and we're going to come through the smoke hole, kill everybody and all. And he had a flair for the dramatic, even in a way giving the gold belt Temujin. But Jamaka also He explained himself at the end of life and he said, you know, we both lost our father, but I also lost my mother. And you had a strong mother to raise you. I did not. And he said, you had bershta. You have a very strong wife to help you. And my wife just used a word like prattler. Like she just sort of complains and prattles along. And we did not have a relationship. So I think something about that rings true, that there were some elements of that that were true. But Jammu Kha certainly didn't have the intelligence and the real genius for dealing with people, dealing with soldiers, especially in war, for warfare, that Temujin had.
- [63:51]
Lex Friedman
Yeah, there's. In that relationship, there's a contrast because Genghis Khan did not accumulate riches or accumulate power in a way that was for the sake of the riches or for the sake of the power. It was always very practical in what is the way to maximize the success of this operation.
- [64:13]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, yes. I often wonder what happened to the gold belt. It disappeared from the story, you know. And a gold belt doesn't just disappear, you know, what happened to that? It's so interesting because Tamuya was never interested in material goods. And when he has Genghis Khan as the ruler, he, in some ways, you could say, became the richest man in the world because he controlled the most wealth flowing through him. But he always dressed simply. He always lived in the tent. And he said, I eat what my soldiers eat. I dress the way my soldiers dress. I live the way my soldiers live. We are the same. So he had no interest in the wealth. And jamukh, he had sided before with Vang Han, which was very advantageous because they had more trade goods and wealthier people and all. But he just didn't have the temperament. I think that was going to be helpful for Genghis Khan's continued rise.
- [65:12]
Lex Friedman
That is one of the powerful things about the Genghis Khan stories. He came from nothing, from absolute nothing. And he didn't, from what I see and understand, become sort of corrupted by the riches or change. He fundamentally remained the same person who does not have value for material things.
- [65:31]
Jack Weatherford
He changed and matured in various ways over life, as we all do, or we hope we do. But he never became avaricious in any way. He was never greedy, he was never acquisitive. He kept the simple life. And part of the simple life for him meant that no one was allowed to write about him. No one was allowed to make his likeness. They couldn't paint a picture of him. They couldn't make a statue of him. No building could be built dedicated to him. No palace, no tomb, no temple of any sort, not even at the point of death at the simplest gravestone. Nothing. Nothing.
- [66:08]
Lex Friedman
It's fascinating that a kid like a boy that doesn't know the world would have the intelligence to understand how corrupting that is. Like the moment somebody builds a statue of you, it's like a slippery slope towards becoming. Not seeing the world clearly, not seeing, surrounding yourself with sycophants that don't tell you the right. The information, not being able to select the right people to lead the armies or to lead the territories that you conquer. So it's interesting that he had the foresight of don't record, don't worship. That's because that's a dangerous road to go down for a leader.
- [66:49]
Jack Weatherford
And it's very hard to explain how he stuck to that, how he got it. You're so easily corrupted by power and, and yet he maintained this very fierce attitude towards his relationship was with the people around him. His guard mostly, his private part of the army, you know, that went with him, the central part of the army. That was his relationship, his family. He had four wives. This was what was important to him. And in fact, no portrait was painted until 1278. Well, by then he already been dead for 51 years. And then no statue until the 21st century.
- [67:34]
Lex Friedman
Just incredible. But let's go to the document that you referenced several times, the Secret History.
- [67:42]
Jack Weatherford
The Secret History is a very unusual document and I happen to love it very much. But I said, you know, Genghis Khan allowed nothing to be written about him in his lifetime. People couldn't take notes. Even the army was. Genghis Khan ordered the invention of the Alphabet for the Mongol people. And it was adapted from the Uyghur people. And so to this day it's often called the Ucher Alphabet, the Uyghur Alphabet. So he had ordered that, and he'd ordered his children to learn to read and write. And some did. I think most did not, but some did. But one of the things he did with every campaign, even the one at the Merkid when he rescued Berta, was he always adopted one orphan. And that child became a full member of the Mongol nation. And his household, his mother Earlun, would raise the child. So she eventually had a whole household full of boys of different tribes, but they all became very high ranking members of the government. And one was the Tatar boy who turned out not to be so great as a soldier, but he could read and Write he was the best. And later, eventually he became the supreme judge appointed by Chingis Khan, of course. And so when Chinggis Khan died, he recognized it was important not just to write down the law. That's all Genghis Khan allowed to be written in blue books, only the law. Nothing about him or campaigns or military, anything. But Shige Huttuk was his name. Shige Huttuk realized that this was gonna be lost, that this is a great historic thing that has happened. So he compiled a work. Part of it, he, I don't know, other people contributed, helped him. But it's a little bit unclear. The Mongols, they don't specify that. They always tell you exactly where something happens. So we know exactly where it happened. In Mongolia, you can still go to that spot where he wrote it. That's very important to the Mongols. And we also know it's the year of the Mao. So it was 1228. Chinggis Khan had died in 27. So he wrote down, it begins with what we would say are the myths, although I'm not sure they're myths. But the origins of the myths, it begins with the marriage of gray blue wolf with a tawny deer. Then some people say, well, that's some kind of myth. It's totemic. And Mongols mostly, they look at me, I asked them about this. They said, well, what he was named Blue gray wolf, she was named Tawny deer. They married. You know, they're very practical about it, and they think they're real people. Maybe they were or not, I don't know. But. So this earlier history is just the genealogy as it should be, who knows? But it's also in there because like Bohden Char, they call him Boden Char the Fool, the ancestor of Temujin, he's cast out because he's just so the rest of the family doesn't want him. His father is undetermined who he was. He kidnaps the Uri Honghae woman. She has the child who becomes ancestor. So it's a confusing mess, but I tend to think it's probably accurate. He has a lot of good information. And by the time you get to the life of Temujin, the reason we know these intimate things is because that person, Sheikhi Huttuq, he was there sleeping in the same gear with the people. So we even see in there, he will record instances where Bersta sits up in bed and tells her husband, okay, you got to do this, you got to do that. You can't do this anymore. We can't think you know it's all recorded, right? So it's a very intimate document. And this is one reason that it was secret. It was only for the family. They were trying to uphold Genghis Khan's prohibition against putting out information about the family. So it was secret for a very long time. So much so that scholars began to think it didn't exist. And then in the 19th century, a Russian academic who was working in China at the time in Beijing, he discovered a manuscript which was very, very odd that people didn't think was anything because it's all Chinese characters, but it makes no sense in Chinese. But he recognized. But if you read it, pronounce makes sense in Mongolian. And so it was in this code that had been used to record the information in Chinese.
- [72:12]
Lex Friedman
So they were recording the sounds, the sounds.
- [72:15]
Jack Weatherford
Correct. They use Chinese characters to record sounds, which is always problematic in some little areas. You're not exactly sure what the name is or something like. But it was a very unusual document. And then once they found it, they realized that some of the Persian documents had incorporated part of that already. So that was very helpful to me because some of the Persians I trust very much and I like their work very much. And so it was helpful that it already existed. And all of it, some of it existed in Mongolian, other Mongolian sources that were written later. Some of it was just incorporated. So it seemed to be fairly genuine, but it wasn't 100% pure. It had little things had happened to it along the way. Some things had been stipped here and there and a few words changed. Like sometimes for Temujin, they call him Chinggis Khan. Well, he wasn't Han then. And sometimes they call him Han, which is like chief, and other times Han, which is emperor. Well, in Mongolia it's a big difference, you know. So there are little things like this that move around that you're not sure why, but it's a document that I have great faith in. It was not published in English until 1982, but Francis Woodman Cleaves at Harvard University translated it in the 50s. It was ready for publication and he was having trouble with the publisher, and so it didn't appear for nearly 30 years. It was supposed to be two volumes. The first volume is the translation. The second volume was going to be the. The notes. And the second volume was lost. To this day, it hasn't been found. I would love to see that. But anyway, now it's in all languages, just about in the world.
- [74:03]
Lex Friedman
Can you clarify? So there's two volumes, the 19th century Chinese manuscript covers the first volume.
- [74:12]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. That was translated and then published by. By Harvard University. But the notes were just the notes from the scholar Francis Woodman Cleves. Those were his notes, not Mongolian notes. There are Chinese notes that went with it because the Chinese had trouble understanding a lot of things in it. And they also. They disapproved of some things. So they would try to put their own notes in the margins to kind of correct the story and explain away why the Mongols women would be often marrying their stepson. It just did not match with Confucian ethics, you know. So there's several things like that that they try to skip around. But. So it's interesting just to read the Ming Dynasty notes that are attached to it. But the document itself, it's just so important. And for me, it was the guiding document. I didn't want to be guided by anything else first. Everything else I would check to correlate and fill in blanks and give more information. But I went to Mongolia to travel around to those places because they are so exact in there and to feel it. And it's so important, I think, because history does not live in books. History does not live in archives or even libraries as much as I need them for my work. But history lives in the people. History lives in the memory of the people and the culture. And, for example, the episode with the kidnapping of Berchte. So I went to that place and I didn't know when it happened, what season it happened. It was very important for figuring out the births that came afterwards and other events that were being correlated. Very important to me. And so I'm just talking to the people who live in that valley, the nomads there. They said, oh, it's clear it was the winter. I said, oh, where did you read that? I said, no, Granny Caxton was on the ground and she could feel the vibrations. She said, look, this is summertime now. You're not going to feel any vibrations. The ground here is so soft. Suddenly, a whole important piece that I've been searching for just came together from some nomad sitting there next to his horse. And he was absolutely right. It could only happen in the winter. And that also correlates with the time that raiding was done. So it correlates with other historic factors. But then that gave me the time basis for figuring out a lot of other things. History lives in the people.
- [76:48]
Lex Friedman
Just to link on that point, you visited different places that were important to the story of Genghis Khan. What did it feel like? What are some memorable things about.
- [77:02]
Jack Weatherford
Just.
- [77:03]
Lex Friedman
The experience of standing there.
- [77:06]
Jack Weatherford
I really set out mostly to visit the cities he had conquered across Central Asia and all. And there was so little to learn. I mean, everything was kind of known of whatever the chroniclers had recorded, the archaeologists had found, whatever they had found, found. And I get there, and he hadn't spent much time there. He didn't identify with it. I wasn't feeling anything. But in Mongolia, I would go to these places and I would know if Genghis Han came back today, he would know exactly where he is. There's no road, there's no sign, there's no building, there's no power line going, nothing. And just to smell the air, to feel it, to see the animals and to see what kind of animals live here, what kind of plants are growing here. You begin to get a feeling for how he was thinking. And then you begin to see, ah, I know which direction they came from. The only direction they could come from was that way. You begin to see it. And his life starts to unfold in a very dramatic way that I have the text. But the text is like. It has no scenery, no props, nothing like that. The Mongols all understand their way of life. They don't need to explain anything. They know which way, the gear, faces with the sun. They know all these things. But for me, that's how I learned it. It was from being with the people. It was the most important thing. And this was starting in the 1990s. And the people at this time, they were amazed at I would come. The Soviet era had just ended, socialism was just ending, democracy was starting. And Chinggis Khan had been forbidden to them for almost the entire century. And every known descendant of Genghis Khan was killed in Mongolia following the Secret History that became the key to writing what I wrote. Take the history which is difficult to understand. You have to go over. And it didn't. I often never understand different parts or I change my mind and think it was yes, now it's no. But the secret history is a valuable document. And to me also it's the opening document of Mongolian written language. And I think it's very important. How do people begin their written language? And they begin it with the words dere thinges. From highest heaven came the destiny of the blue wolf who was married to the tawny deer, and their descendants who came from the great sea to live at the base of Mount Burhan Haldun.
- [79:52]
Lex Friedman
And then integrating the spiritual elements of nature, the mountains and the great sea, and this kind of just like a deep connection to nature that they have.
- [80:03]
Jack Weatherford
Mongolia is a world that, for the most part, is the same as when Genghis Khan was there. We cannot say that for hardly any other place in the world. I mean, certainly not for America, but just a few hundred years ago, it was entirely different. People, languages, everything. But you can't say it for London or Moscow or Istanbul, Constantinople. All of these things have changed so much. But Mongolia is still Mongolia. It's one of the largest countries in the world, in space, with the fewest number of people about today, 3.3 million. And they're spread out and they live in their environment in such an intimate way. This was important for learning about Genghis Khan, how he thought, how he hunted, how he strategized for war. You learn that from the people today because they are still there. They're still living.
- [80:59]
Lex Friedman
What's the open Mongolian steppe like? As we return to the feeling of Temujin and Genghis Khan, what's it like looking at this place that has not changed since his time?
- [81:11]
Jack Weatherford
The first thing I think about this steppe is that you can see forever in every direction. There's no building, nothing to stop your line of view. And it's like being in the ocean in many ways. So you have this extremely open space, and the wind is usually blowing through it, but it's extremely fresh. It's coming out of Siberia. It's coming out of the Arctic. It sweeps down across Mongolia. Cold is a dickens sometimes, but it's always fresh, always fresh. So you have the wind coming in, you have the smell of the wind. But also then there's grass. The smell of grass becomes very important now because of the particular location. From one year to another, one area may have grass one year, and then drought the next year. Another area has grass. So you don't always know if it's not grass, it's dust. You have dust going in. The dust doesn't smell so good. It doesn't feel so good. But that's just one more part of the country. The waters are mostly pure. Now, unfortunately, there has been pollution in this century from mining and several areas. But even when I was there, even today, when we go to someplace like the Salink river, where we talk about the merkat lift. So it's a place of pure waters. And that's how Mongolians define their world, is by the water. They don't. Genghis Khan does not give lands to his sons to rule. He gives waters and people to rule. They do not refer to the earth as land. They refer to the earth as Dalai. Ocean, the sea. And so water is very important. And to learn the rules about water, you don't camp by water. If you camp by water, your animals and you are going to be polluting it, messing it up. So they're back maybe in our modern terms, about a kilometer back. You take the animals to the river to drink, and then you take them away. You do not bathe in that river. You take the water away from the river and you bathe away from the river, so you do not pollute the river. The rules are very strict and very clear, and they're from the time of Genghis Khan about how to deal with. Well, also, it's dangerous to live close to the river because there are flash floods in the summertime. You could suddenly have it and it could wipe away if your camp is right there by the water. So the people, they live with nature in a way that I don't see anywhere else in the world. And even today, with the changes with the cell phone and with solar panels and they could get TV out in the middle of the steppe, still, they're living a similar life. The young people, of course, want to drive a motorbike, but they're still herding cows and yaks and camels. If it's on a motorbike, okay, they're still doing it the Mongol way.
- [84:17]
Lex Friedman
But then if we go to the time of Temujin, of Genghis Khan, another component is the horses. Can we talk about their relationship with the horse, thinking about this open step? From a young age, they've been. All Mongols are trained to master riding horses, as you write, while standing on the horse. So they learned how to ride while standing on the horse from a young age, while standing on the horse, they often jousted with one another to see who could knock the other off. When their legs grew long enough to reach the stirrups. They were also taught to shoot arrows and to lasso on horseback, making targets out of leather pouches that they would dangle from poles so that they would blow in the wind. The youngsters practiced hitting the targets from horseback at varying distances and speeds. The skills of such play proved invaluable to horsemanships later in life. Can you speak to the relationship of Genghis Khan and the Mongols to horses?
- [85:24]
Jack Weatherford
The Mongol and the horse are inseparable. I wrote one line in the book that the editor removed because that was insulting. I said, the Mongol and the horse, they live together. They know each other with every twitch of the muscle, and they smell the same. Well, I Was saying it just not to be insulting about anything, but they have that deep intimacy. And the horses do know their owner from the smell. This is very important. It's also important for Genghis Khan because they made the flags, what they call the soult, out of the horse hair from their own horses. And so in battle, they used it for a very practical purpose, and that is the horses would return to their source because they knew the smell of their flag. It was other members of their own herd. So the language itself, I have never, ever mastered all the words just for the colors of horses, much less for all the other things about it. I can remember Mongolians being out there in the countryside. They say, oh, I want to learn English. I say, okay, yeah, that's nice. I'm. You teach me some words in Mongolia. I teach you the words. Okay, say, what color is that horse? I say, brown. They would say brown. I'd say, yes. Okay. What color is that horse? Brown. But you said this color was brown. What color is this? Yeah, so. Well, I mean, it's just amazing. I mean, they have words based on sort of how smooth the coloring is and the. The variation in the texture and all the different. Today, in English, sometimes you can put them together, we say, like, yellow, brown or brown, brown or black, you know. But the words for horses by, of course, by sex. And then they have three, because they have geldings. And so they're very important, too, and by age and by whether or not they've reproduced. In the case of the females, all these things are important parts of the horse and the horse. A few years ago, a presidential candidate ran under the slogan, raised in the dust of many fast horses. It just resonates with the Mongolian spirit. And the dust itself is important. The Mongolians, they will wipe the sweat and the dust off the horse and wipe it onto their own forehead, which is the most sacred part of the body, where the soul resides. This is how intimate a relationship is with the horses. And they're hard on them in some ways. They train them very well. They ride them very hard. But the horses are also trained for that. They use a very small crop. It's a little bit like a stick with a slight whip at the end, and they hit the rump of the horse. Never anything else. They're horrified at western people who use metal spurs and metal to harm the horse in the stomach and to harm the head of a horse. They say it's a capital crime. I mean, I don't know anyone who's ever executed for it. But you never, ever harm a horse's head. So horses are important in every way, even religiously important, with the making of the fermented horse's milk that the mother goes out every morning and she throws some to each of the four directions to start the day. And they used it for every kind of thing. Well, you know, some things puzzled me that in my watching, I remember one day being with a very nice family. It happened to be on a gelding day when they were out there. Gelding. The would be stallions who don't get to be stallions. But one of the. This family, they had a bunch of boys and only think about one or two girls, like four or five boys. And one boy was maybe 11 years old. He fell from the horse. You could see it not so far away. He fell from the horse and he didn't get up. No one moved. In fact, they all kind of turned attention away. And I thought, what am I supposed to say? This boy fell down. Somebody go get him? No. And then the boy was trying to hobble back. He still had the reins to his horse, but he couldn't remount. And he was trying to hobble back. So his little brother went out to help him, come in, and they came into the ger and they sat down. The mother just turned her back. And I'm thinking, how on earth can you do this? This is a child. This is your child, you know. But two weeks later, by chance, another boy who is practicing for naadam, the annual races, like this boy had been doing. He was off in an area right close to the forested mountain area. And the horse bolted, took off through the woods. He was knocked off by a tree. And then the horse went deeper into the woods. The boy followed him. The boy became lost. The boy was 12 years old. He was lost for two weeks. And he lived. I would have died in 48 hours. He lived, he said. Well, he slept in the daytime when it was warm. He walked at night when it was cold. Even though this was the summertime, the nights can be quite cold, especially on a mountain. And he sang loudly all night long to keep the wolves away. And he knew what to eat. And then he walked until he found water moving. And then he would follow that water down to the next. He lived. And I realized the boy falls from the horse. His mother's not going to be there. She knows that. And it's probably hard for her, too, to see her boy suffer. But she knows.
- [91:02]
Lex Friedman
Just a small tangent. There's a wrestler named Kerry Collett, and he Tells the story about mental toughness, that the first time he saw truly mentally tough people was when he visited Mongolia for a wrestling tournament. And he remembered that they were taking showers in ice cold water. And you know, all the other wrestlers, they would take the shower and when the water hits them, you could see a little grimace. With the Mongols, there was just nothing. It was emotionless. Sort of like ice cold water or any other kind of hardship.
- [91:41]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, it.
- [91:42]
Lex Friedman
You build a hardness to that. And I suppose that falling from the horse is just an example of that. There's a mental hardness and mental toughness.
- [91:52]
Jack Weatherford
You have to be able to take care of yourself. And with the weather, for example, often in that time and still today, some people, if they can have the privacy to do it, the men will strip naked in the first heavy snow and roll around in the snow in order to prepare for the coming winter. And the valley where I live, a lot of wrestlers come there to train in the summertime for the competition. And the water's very cold coming down from the mountain. And every day when there's a break, they go down, they take again. They do not get in the water, never. But they take the water and they pour the cold water over themselves. And yes, that's refreshing to them. Refreshing.
- [92:37]
Lex Friedman
Well then getting back to the horses. The value they had for the horses and the horse riding skill they developed throughout their life created one of the most unstoppable military forces in history. So if we just talk about the mounted archery that they've employed in war, the Mongols were able to do targeted shooting accurately at 200 meters or more while riding fast, you know, up to speeds of 60 kilometers an hour, I read. So there's a lot to say. Like, you know, you have to time and just watching some of the videos, just incredible how stable you could be on top of a horse. And I guess you're supposed to be shooting at a moment of the gallop when all four of the feet of the horse are off the ground. And so you have to time all of that. You have to position your body to maintain balance. And then there's the skill of the actual holding and shooting the bow accurately. And there's obviously the technology of the bow, the composite bow, the recurve bow. They've also, I read, used crossbows later, they've adapted the technology. And there's a particular kind of thumb draw that you use for shooting with the composite bow that works for a horse because the thing is bouncing up and down.
- [93:56]
Jack Weatherford
Right.
- [93:56]
Lex Friedman
So you have to like not drop the arrow it's just incredible to be able to shoot while the horse is going 60 kilometers an hour. Anyway, can you speak to this kind of exceptional excellence that the Genghis Khan and the Mongols had for riding horses and engaging in war off of the horse, The Mongol.
- [94:20]
Jack Weatherford
The horse and the bow were a perfect combination, and it was the most lethal weapon known to the world before the modern era. It was incredible. The synchronization and the timing of the movements and also the years of skill, the fact that from absolute birth the Mongols would be on a horse and by three years old, they would probably be riding alone on the horse. Now, when I first went to mongolia in the 1990s, at that time, all jockeys on horses for races had to be under 6 years old. That was the age limit. The cutoff was six years old at that time. And so you had some as three years old racing out there. It's absolutely incredible. And of course, at that age, they can't even have a saddle because it can't even be used. So they're just. All they're doing is staying on the horse. The horse has been trained to do what it has to do, and they just stay on it. But by staying on it, they learn the horse. They become one. And not just one horse with one rider, but one rider with several horses. Usually five is the number that you should have for you when you go off to battle. And this ability didn't shoot. You have to defend your animals. There are wolves around, fox, other things, and in some areas there were even tigers and other animals that would come in and you had to be able to shoot to defend it against other people who might be raiding you. So they became excellent archers. They had composite bows that were very powerful, much more powerful than those of most sedentary people. Now, I say all that because it's very important, but those are all sort of nomadic traits of the great steppe anyway. I mean, in an earlier version, you had the Huns who came out of Mongolia, and hun is just the Mongolian word for human. Hun to this day, that's what they say for a human being. So they came out of Mongolia, and all the early Turkic groups came out of Mongolia and they had similar skills. So you have this perfect weapon, but also you have to have perfect strategy and how to coordinate it and organize it and use it. And this is where the genius that I cannot explain at all, but the genius of Genghis Khan came in. Other people, I think, had been very good in earlier times. A number of Turkic leaders and Also. Or even Attila the Hun, who, of course, was actually born in the West. But they were charismatic leaders and very dramatic leaders. And it wasn't that they were so excellent in their strategy. They were very good in warfare, and that's what carried them through. Genghis Khan's army was extremely good in warfare, but small. He never got probably above 100,000 at the most. 110,000. That is small. When you're going against China, that has millions just in the army, not to count in the country, and you're going against Russia, and you're going against the Middle east and Persia and Afghanistan and these areas, your whole army has to be as finely tuned as each rider, each bow, and each horse. That's the weapon, what the army becomes the super weapon of Genghis Khan. How he organized it and how he used it and the strategies that he put together.
- [97:53]
Lex Friedman
Yeah. When you have a small army, just think about that, a small army that conquered the world.
- [98:01]
Jack Weatherford
It would fit in a stadium today in America.
- [98:07]
Lex Friedman
So there's extreme efficient coordination of units. Mostly cavalry. Right.
- [98:13]
Jack Weatherford
All cavalry.
- [98:14]
Lex Friedman
It's all cavalry.
- [98:15]
Jack Weatherford
He had no infantry and he had no baggage train. He had no backup commissary early on, no engineer corps later. One was added much later, but no, all cavalry.
- [98:29]
Lex Friedman
And so there's light cavalry and heavy cavalry and breaking down units using the decimal system, 10, 100, a thousand. So there's a kind of hierarchy where you delegate authority, but to the degree there's commands, they must be followed strictly.
- [98:52]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [98:52]
Lex Friedman
So for, like, extremely efficient, accurate, precise deployment of these troops on the battlefield and the dynamic movement of the troops, including all the interesting tactics that were utilized, you have to have really good communication and coordination. And for that, orders must be followed.
- [99:12]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [99:13]
Lex Friedman
Is there something to speak to that? Like, how do you tune this kind of system to where everybody is working.
- [99:19]
Jack Weatherford
Together so Well, I think the first point is the extreme loyalty of the people whom Genghis Khan chose. His kinsmen, as we said, had deserted him. His anda was a questionable relationship. But all the others that he found were just common people, herders or hunters. Very common. And they were loyal to him and never, ever revolted against him, never betrayed him. So he had extreme loyalty. And then, as you mentioned, he organized his decimal system. So the smallest unit of the army was the ARAFD, the squad of 10 men. They were put together, and then the head of that squad, he had total control over it. And. But the men knew that they were going to protect each other, and they had to Come back with every member or everybody. You don't leave anybody behind. So this was extremely important. So if you submit to the orders of the man in charge, you know that he's risking his own life for you also. And you know that your brother on the left and on the right is risking his life for you. The army was. They were organized with five horses each man. They had their bow and they had a lot of arrows, as many as they could have. But they also retrieved arrows at the end of their battle and they also would retrieve the enemy arrows. This was a great advantage, by the way, when they hit Russia, because the Russians could not use Mongolian arrows. They could knock them in their bow, but the Mongols could use Russian arrows. But so all these little things, but it's not even just the Aaron also they had to carry needle and thread. Every soldier had to be able to sew. And sometimes that could be a torn garment, it could be a piece of skin or a wound that somebody has. It was a very odd thing when you think about the army of Genghis Khan. And they're carrying everything themselves. They don't have any pack train behind them. And that one of the things they have to carry is needle in through thread in order to sew up things.
- [101:24]
Lex Friedman
So complete self reliance in that regard.
- [101:27]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. They also carried dried dairy products arult, it's called where they dry curd. And they can keep it for a couple of years even. But you dry it and then when you need it, you can put it in a flask of water. You ride all day, it joggles up and down, boom, boom, boom, and turns into kind of thick protein. It's said that the Mongols could easily go three to five days without ever building a fire. They had enough food there with. So all these little things at the lowest level were important as well. At the highest level of his loyalty, of his men to him. And it went all the way down. Loyalty was extremely important. And he organized the army into left wing, right wing, or east and west Mongols. The word for left is east, the word for right is west. So those two wings. And then in the middle was the golf, the center, this moving center, that was his bodyguard and his unit in the middle. Then usually they would have a vanguard and a rear guard. Sometimes the vanguard would go out as much as two years in advance to clear the land, run the people away, scare them, make them go away, so that the grass is left there for the army when it moves through. And they never march the way other armies do in a line of one following the other, that would always go in long lines, spread out in wings so that each horse is on its own path, you can say, but all parallel together. So they had very precise ways of doing things. And this, I think, was the secret with him. And he used the best people, but he also. He was willing to train them as much as possible. He never punished them for what happened. So Shiki Huttuk, for example, the supreme judge, he was in command one time of a group in a battle in Afghanistan, and he lost the battle, which is very, very unusual for Mongols. So Genghis Khan went out with him, said, okay, let's go to the battlefield together and look it over, and you explain to me what you did, and then we will talk about it. So he was very thoughtful in the way that he was training the people around him. And they knew they weren't going to be punished. It's not like these countries where the general comes back and gets executed because he lost. No. Genghis Khan knows every general is going to try 100%, and if they retreat, fine. They're saving Mongol lives. They know what to do. He respects that. So all these things like that fit together. But I think a part of it that was important for him. So he had this base from steppe warfare already, the horse, the archery, and how that all fit together. But he was very quick to embrace any kind of other technology that he saw. I think that sedentary armies, like sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in their ways. This is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster, we're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger, but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think. And when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209, after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids. And I really think they were raids, not wars at first. So he went into Tangut territory of what's now northwestern China in the upper reaches of the Yellow River. So he went there, and of course, the cities have walls around them. This is a man who's never encountered a wall in his life. Well, he did, but they were made out of felt. The walls around his tent are, you know, felt walls.
- [105:12]
Lex Friedman
Yeah. Just imagine what it's like for the first time in your life seeing a wall.
- [105:18]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [105:18]
Lex Friedman
When. When you come from the Mongolian steppe where there is no. There's very few even natural wall like things.
- [105:26]
Jack Weatherford
Well, they have, like, the wall cliffs in some places. They're familiar with that. And they can climb them, but they don't have people at the top shooting down the mountain. But on the. So he looked, but he looked at everything around him and he saw, okay, they have this river and they have all these channels and they're always moving water around. And like we said, for a Mongol, anything that moves is a potential weapon. Anything that doesn't move is a target. You've got moving water, you've got a standing non moving wall. So he said, okay, the men are going to dig channel and they're going to bring down the wall of the Tongue City. Well, they did it. And they didn't know exactly what they were doing. And the embankments weren't high enough and too much water came in from the Yellow river and actually flooded out the Mongol camp. But okay, it happened. We learned that lesson, so we're going to improve it. And that became a strategy that actually worked for the Mongols for the next 50 years, all the way to Baghdad. They were able to use it when they conquered Baghdad in 1258. So this is this ability to see things and to try them, and if they fail to try them in a different way, but a better way. We all think we learn from our mistakes. We all, yeah, yeah, I learned from that. And what do we do? We repeat the mistake. I think it's just a part of human nature. Well, it didn't work the first eight times, but I'm going to do it one more time. I think it's going to work. I know I'm going to win the lottery this time because I got the right. That's how we think. But he had that real ability to, first of all, to be humble before these other things. He didn't know about technology, understand that he didn't understand, but he could understand it in his own way, and he did over and over. The Mongols were excellent at putting together new things in new ways and using them against their enemies.
- [107:26]
Lex Friedman
So rapid, extreme, continued innovation. So you couple that with a.
- [107:34]
Jack Weatherford
I.
- [107:34]
Lex Friedman
Mean, you have to say a revolutionary idea that promotion should be based on merit. That idea combined with the innovative approach to the military, it just feeds on itself because the people who are learning from their mistakes and constantly improving are the ones that get promoted in the positions of power and then they inspire everybody else to do the same. And so just if every action is judged based on, on the excellence of that action, then over time, repeated iteration in war creates a more and more powerful army.
- [108:14]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, yes. And they were able to do that for three generations to create an army that was Ever expanding, ever changing its tactics and its technology, and they got worse at it over time. But Genghis Khan was the one who innovated it. He was the best with it, and he used it throughout his lifetime. And he was getting better over his lifetime with using foreign information, foreign technology, foreign ideas. He just had a genius for that.
- [108:49]
Lex Friedman
If we can go back to the horses you mentioned, every soldier had five horses. The reason for that is the horses get tired.
- [108:56]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [108:57]
Lex Friedman
And so you can cover a lot of ground in a single day.
- [109:00]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. Usually the way the rotation of the horses would. The horse would usually ride for one day and then rest for the next four to five days, and then another horse would be riding the next day. One way to measure it is that later, at the time of the death of the word went from Mongolia to Hungary in six weeks.
- [109:22]
Lex Friedman
Mongolia to Hungary in six weeks. So let's just imagine this army that's able to move at such high speeds, does not need to follow roads because it's used to riding in the open step.
- [109:34]
Jack Weatherford
Yeah.
- [109:35]
Lex Friedman
So you can do all kinds of dynamic movements in encircling a place. And then also one of the other famous things is the feigned retreat that was used continuously. Can you explain how that worked?
- [109:49]
Jack Weatherford
The Mongols did not fight for honor the way we often think of brave soldiers, Achilles and the Iliad and things like that. They fought for victory. That was the one thing. So to retreat to save lives and all, there's no shame in that. So the Mongols would often retreat. And Genghis Khan, basically, he himself never fought a battle that he thought he could lose, and he won every battle he fought. That wasn't true for every general under him, as we said, for Shige Hutuk, for example, but he won every battle because there was no shame in retreating and in not fighting, not engaging the enemy. However, that also becomes a tactic and that they would send in a small group of soldiers to attack. And the Mongols were able to fire, of course, going forward on the horse. They were able to then act like they were defeated and turn. But they could still fire backwards, which was the Parthian shot, which is unusual in the world. Not totally unique, but unusual to fire backwards. But the Mongols also could lean down and fire under the neck of the horse. So they're protected. They had many different ways. So they're firing coming, they're firing going. But usually the soldiers who were against them would break ranks to chase them. They want to go, they want to get their weapons, they want to kill the Mongols. And if they didn't immediately break ranks, the Mongols would often start throwing things out, like loot from someplace and valuables around. And the soldiers usually couldn't resist it. So they'd come chasing out after the Mongols, sort of pell mell going in every different direction. And then they would get to a certain point and from behind the two hills, the Mongol army would come and slaughter them over and over. This tactic worked. It's like the one with the water. I'm thinking the people. How can they not know this is what the Mongols are doing? How can they not know that?
- [111:53]
Lex Friedman
Human nature. There is something that when the forces are retreating, you want to follow them.
- [111:58]
Jack Weatherford
You want to follow them.
- [111:59]
Lex Friedman
You can't help it.
- [112:00]
Jack Weatherford
Yeah, yeah.
- [112:01]
Lex Friedman
I don't know what that is. That's maybe the animalistic. But take that. With the ability at high speeds for the Mongols to encircle and attack the flanks.
- [112:12]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. Which.
- [112:15]
Lex Friedman
There has been many great military historians who have written about the great military forces throughout history. And one of the things you write about and in general is the. The Mongols don't get get written about almost at all and don't get credit for the military tactics and the military genius exhibited through the different strategies. This kind of idea of the feigned retreat and then attacking the flanks that's been, if not invented and perfected by Genghis.
- [112:52]
Jack Weatherford
He really was a military genius. But there were other things too. They didn't like roads, you know, they just didn't like the roads. So they would often be coming from some direction that nobody ever came from, and the people would be unprepared for that. The most famous example is probably in Bukhara. This is a beautiful, wonderful old city, a great place in the world to this day. And they came across the desert. Well, nobody had ever attacked across the desert. So people see dust coming. They think, well, caravan. They don't even know what's going on.
- [113:26]
Lex Friedman
They.
- [113:26]
Jack Weatherford
But it was the direction that was a surprise element in that particular case. So he was able to think in ways that the other people were not thinking it and to be able to surprise them.
- [113:37]
Lex Friedman
What do you think it again felt like to have this Mongol armada? The horses, the ground must shake. When you have that many horses. What do you think it feels like to be in a town when Genghis Khan is approaching?
- [113:54]
Jack Weatherford
I think the terror was one of the greatest weapons that he had, that he cultivated this reputation of ferocity. Not only did he win battles, but he didn't allow people to write about him, as we said. But he encouraged refugees. And when he conquered a city, he always made sure there were plenty of refugees to go to the next city because it's going to weaken them, it's going to weaken their food supply and they're going to terrorize the people with tales of, of the millions of people that the Mongols killed with their steel chiseled teeth and eating children and all kinds of horrible tales. Genghis Khan encouraged it. You know, this is propaganda. It's terrorism of a mental sort to weaken the enemy. And so when you hear, or even if you know they're coming, you see the dust, you hear the kind of roar that comes with all those horses and the trembling of the earth, it must have been truly terrifying.
- [114:51]
Lex Friedman
So the psychological warfare was a part of the whole process. But as I understand, there was always an offer for the towns and the territories being attacked, for them to surrender peacefully without the loss of life. And the alternative would be the near complete loss of life. Can you speak to that?
- [115:14]
Jack Weatherford
Chikhzan had a precise system. Exactly. He sent in envoys first to explain to the people a little bit about the Mongols. Already much was known, but to explain to them that if they surrendered, all the lives would be spared and they could continue in their professions. It's just that now the rulers would be the Mongols. They would have to pay the taxes and usually it would be the same taxes they'd paid before, but now they would go to the Mongols. That was kind of the general system. And because you only have 100,000 soldiers, you can't leave a detachment there. So you're going to leave the local people in charge to run their country or their city and their area the way they have done in the past. He was absolutely faithful to that. In one episode in the north of Persia, modern Iran, his son in law, Tokhtar, he violated that and was stealing and looting from the people who had surrendered. Genghis Khan called him in and he stripped him of his rank. And he said, the next city you go first as a common soldier. And of course he was killed in the next battle. I don't know the name of the daughter, unfortunately, I've tried to figure that out. But anyway, it was a close relative to him. And he was killed in the next, violating this law. So that was the law. So then if the city fought and the Mongols won, they did not kill everyone. What they did was they killed all the leaders. They felt like the elite had not served them well and they used to kill the army because they couldn't incorporate the army into their own. The army had Failed. But the one thing that they valued were all the artisans, everybody who had a skill. And that skill could be making a pot, it could be hammering out a metal plate. It can be weaving carpets, it can be translating, or just reading and writing. Every person with a skill was spared. So the killing of the people who were defeated wasn't so severe. What was truly severe was if you surrendered, and many of them did, and then they knew they would not be harmed. So they're not harmed. The Mongols. Go on. The Mongols are hundreds of miles away and all. Forget about the Mongols. Genghis Khan said word that we're supposed to send so many cows or sheep to help. Forget about the Mongols. They're far away. It's a rem. No, he stopped. He returned, he conquered the city, and he killed everyone. That's the way it worked.
- [117:46]
Lex Friedman
So the most drastic slaughter happens when there's an agreement and betrayal.
- [117:53]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. And as it turned out, I would say it was more the Middle east, or what we call around Iran and Afghanistan, we. Where these were the worst cases. And I would say only in Afghanistan did sometimes the emotion of the slaughter take over in an unfortunate way. But he had a grandson whom he loved very much. And that grandson traveled with him and he had the happy childhood that Temujin had not had. And I think Genghis Han just loved that about him. But in Afghanistan, he was sent off to conquer the valley of Bamiyan, where the great Buddhas are. Actually, he was sent to Bamiyan, and as it says in the Persian history, you know, the thumb of fate fired the arrow that shot him down. He was killed. And for Genghis Khan, he had never lost a family member, not one. None of his sons, none of his grandsons. In battle, he had not lost them. And now to lose the most valuable grandson you have, the one that's your pride and joy in so many ways. And so he called the father his own son to him and did not tell him. He did not announce it to the public. And the son came, and the son didn't know why he was being summoned. And Chingizhan said, you have to tell me that you will not cry or moan when I tell you this. But your son is no more. And the father was. No one was allowed to moan. No one was allowed to cry. No one was allowed to do anything. You just. He said, make them cry. You know, he came down on the people of Afghanistan so harshly. And it went on for weeks and weeks, the killing in Afghanistan. And then it just kind of wore itself out. He recognized that he had allowed his emotions to overcome practicality and the slaughtering of these people should stop. And so he did. But that's the only time I know of that he really kind of lost control of his own emotions. And it's something we can all understand, but his response was truly extreme, of we will not cry, we will not mourn. They will cry, they will mourn.
- [120:36]
Lex Friedman
So that goes against the cold, rational way he approached war, which is peace is offered and then betrayal is punished.
- [120:50]
Jack Weatherford
I should add, he did not slaughter the people in the peaceful towns. What happened was the killing of what people thought was the heir, and he well may have been, of Genghis Khan. The killing of him revitalized a lot of people's hopes, and a lot of cities revolted. The ones who did not revolt were not killed. But the cities who revolted, he killed them all. There was a mass slaughter.
- [121:13]
Lex Friedman
There are estimates that Genghis Khan and his Mongol Empire were responsible for an estimated 40 million deaths, approximately 10% of the world's population. So to put this number in the perspective of the modern day, that would be equivalent to killing about 800 million people in today's population. So how should we think about the brutality of numbers like these?
- [121:39]
Jack Weatherford
The number itself is difficult to deal with. Millions of people were killed. For every family that lost someone, it's a total loss. It doesn't matter what the number is. It's a tremendous loss. And there was tremendous loss of life, as in every war. I don't think we should judge him any differently than other conquerors in history and other countries today that fight wars, including our own country. Whatever we are willing to permit our country to do, we should be able to understand why Genghis Khan or the Mongols did it. You look today in the world, people are killing children, women, civilians, every day. Every day. And it's always in the name of something, in the name of peace or in the name of God or in the name of our nation. There are always reasons for the killing. And the United States has certainly involved with that. Supplying the weapons for bombing people invading Afghanistan, invading. Fighting in Iraq, fighting in Syria. The United States is very involved in that. And it's always, oh, but we're defending democracy. And, yeah, we brought a hell of a lot of democracy to Afghanistan. We killed a lot of people. You can even look back to World War II, our great moment of democracy and bringing freedom and democracy to Germany. We dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those were not military targets. We were not doing anything strategic against the country, other than terrorizing the country by killing women and children. That's America. That's us. My father fought in that war. In fact, he fought in all. He fought in Vietnam, he fought in that war, and he fought in Korea. And he was a good American. I mean, there was nothing wrong with it. And I'm not. I don't even condemn America. But I'm saying, how can we condemn one set of people for doing it and then excuse it in ourselves? But we tend to do that. We especially barbarian people, people from steppe, for example, we tend to demonize them. Or any enemy we have, we tend to demonize them.
- [124:02]
Lex Friedman
You said a lot of interesting things there. So one is just the very nature of war, that war is hell, that sometimes things like dropping the atomic bomb, which is an act of essentially terror, in the same style as Genghis Khan in an attempt to prevent further war.
- [124:28]
Jack Weatherford
It's a justification. People are always fighting for peace, always fighting for peace. World War I was to make the world safer. Democracy and peace. And then World War II. But what happened? We went to war in Korea, we went to war in Vietnam, we bombed Cambodia, we bombed Laos, we bombed Afghanistan, we bombed Syria, we bombed Iraq. We're always fighting for. You know, and I'm not a pacifist. I am not. I grew up surrounded with soldiers. And I am not a pacifist, but I try to be a realist that all nations kill. It happens everywhere.
- [125:05]
Lex Friedman
So can we universally, also then, in the way you're passionately criticizing wars of the 20th century, can we also criticize Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great and the wars fought by Caesar and others in the Roman Empire, that they're essentially wars of conquest. And in some human way, we're not necessary or we're not defensive. They're just part of this human drive to expand, to explore and to accumulate power. Maybe this is a good place to also talk about somebody I respect a lot. Dan Carlin of Hardcore History Podcast, he did an amazing theories on Genghis Khan and the Mongols called Wrath of the Khans. I recommend people go listen to it. So he had a lot of interesting ideas there. One of them, he presented the idea of historical arsonists. So referring to figures who cause immense destruction, but also paved the way for new developments and progress, basically making this complicated case that destruction often in history paves the way for progress. So what do you think about this idea, creative destruction?
- [126:16]
Jack Weatherford
It certainly works in some aspects of life, even with ourselves. For example, if we can creatively destroy some of our habits and build new ones. It sometimes works. Or we can destroy relationships that we're in in order to create new ones. That can work. When you start applying it to world history, it does become a little bit more difficult. I certainly think that these episodes create great changes. You can see great changes that happened because of the Mongol Empire. Now, whether or not that's a good reason for the Mongol Empire having happened, it seems like a bit of a stretch for me. You know, the Mongols helped to unify many countries. You can think Korea had been three basically kingdoms, push them together. Everything that you see in China today was a part of the Mongol empire. They put together North China, South China, Tibet, Manchuria, and it was a little bit larger under the Mongols. Even Russia, with so many little kingdoms and duchies and dukedoms, and the center had been into Ukraine and Kiev. And they shifted the focus out of Ukraine and more towards into what we call Russia now. And they begin the process of the unification. It had a great impact on the country. So in a way, it's a new creation. Yes, it does arrive out of the destruction, but also I think we need to look where does the destruction come from? And it often comes because the powers around them have been so debilitated and so corrupted and so decayed of their own lack of moral fiber that it was easy to conquer them. Case of Kublai Khan finally conquered all of China. He was conquering a decayed dynasty. When the Mongols conquered Baghdad and overthrew the caliph, they were conquering a very decayed institution. No one likes war, and I certainly don't like war, but I'm not 100% against it. I think that there are times that people are going to do it for their own protection, if nothing else of their family. And it's justified in that sense to themselves. It may not be justified in a world sense, but I just make the case for being tolerant of what the Mongols did. If we can tolerate what the Americans did, and I am American, true and true, there's no question about that. But we overlook all of our things that we did. Now it's interesting, for example, in Afghanistan, we were there for some 20 years. We had made the Taliban stronger before when they were fighting against the Russians. And then we kicked them out, and then they kicked us out. But some of the Taliban leaders are from the Jadran clan. The descended from Jammuk family from his clan. This is what I mean when I say that the ramifications from that time are still with us. And we don't even see It. And when Saddam Hussein went on television for the last time in Iraq to plead with his people, he said, the Mongols, meaning Americans. The Mongols have returned. The Mongols have returned. And he said, the Americans are just the new. And I can see it. I don't accept it, but I can see how people think. If we can be honest with ourselves and strip away our own lies about ourselves, then perhaps we will be more ethical in our dealings with other people.
- [129:56]
Lex Friedman
And there's effects that you could talk about. I mean, the unification of China, Mongols or otherwise, is a very important step in the history of China that permeates to today. And then there's a lot of stuff that we'll talk about. The ideas of religious freedom, the postal network, the trade routes, all of this. There's a lot of progressive consequences of the Mongol conquest in the Mongol Empire. We'll talk about that. But let's linger on the. On the heavier topic for a little bit longer. Like we were talking about Dan Carlin. He was critical of your work a little bit, showing it respect, but also a little bit critical as being a bit too. Emphasizing and focusing a lot on the positive impacts, correctly and accurately, but not giving enough airtime or describing the brutality of the killing. The hell that is war. So can you understand his criticism?
- [131:01]
Jack Weatherford
Guilty. I'm guilty. Steel Mana Carl is a very smart man. I respect him very much, and I like him tremendously. And he's right. But that is not what I want to stress. It's not that I want to deny the. The killing. It's not that I want to deny the warfare, but that's pretty much the same everywhere in the world. And how much do we need to say about how the wall was broken down, how this unit was defeated and all? No, it's what comes afterwards. You know, just as the story of our life begins far earlier than we are born, the story of our life goes on for a long time afterwards. If you have a nation of 1 million people and you are ruling over hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, China, Russia, the Middle east, you do not do that through warfare. You conquer them initially through warfare, but you do not rule them through warfare. You've got to be offering something that they want, something that they like. And all the things you. You've mentioned from the trading system, the postal system, the religious freedom, the rights of women, the rights of minorities, these were things that people responded to. And so the world benefited tremendously from the life of Genghis Khan. But all we want to talk about, and I Don't deny it. Is the conquest part okay, that's 20 years. If it went on for another 150 years. There's more to the story than just conquest.
- [132:39]
Lex Friedman
And there is a point that you correctly identify, and you've also written about Native Americans and so on, that history does seem to be written by the non barbarians. But in reality, history is not divided in this kind of way. And the barbarians are not these crude, brutal, plain, simple people. That there is a sophisticated, deep culture within them as well. All the different kinds of peoples that came from the steppe.
- [133:09]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. I guess if there's one thing that I try to do in my career of writing, it is to get us to recognize the importance of tribal people in the history of the world. We tend to have two categories for them. They are barbarians who kill people and eat one another, or they are victims and we should feel sorry for them and nostalgic about everything about them and maybe wear some of their beads or some of their clothing to show how much we sympathize with their suffering. That's the two roles for tribal people. But I'm trying to show them in a different light that they conquered, yes, they were conquerors, but they also created great things in the history of the world. And that the Mongol Empire was really the first modern empire in the way that I'm putting together that story. And Genghis Khan was the. The genius behind that who created this idea that there could be one world in which there would be one set of supreme law, but all people could follow their own law. You could have any religion you wanted, but ultimately you had to obey kind of the great ethics of the sky. And there were things like that about his vision that I think very few people in history had a vision. And I look around the world today, and in my lifetime, since the time of Roosevelt's death, I look around, I don't see much vision. I see lots of slogans, lots of talks, policy papers, oh, my God, we can produce it. Where's the vision? It's always, we're going to have peace and we're going to have a better life, and you know, vote for me or vote for my party. And we're really for the people and we're. What the heck are they talking about? There is no vision there. So what is this country? What should this country be? What is this world? How should we. No. No vision.
- [135:05]
Lex Friedman
Well, those figures, I mean, they're rare through history. The legendary figures that come along that have vision but are able to capture the public imagination and Heart and mind with the vision, but also have the skill to execute and implement it. And all of those things combined and have the mental fortitude not to be corrupted by success along the way. All of those things, that's very rare in history. And when they come along they change the direction of history. If we could linger on some of these world defining ideas, religious freedom is, it's just surprising and incredible that Genghis Khan was able to enforce, inspire the value of religious freedom throughout all of these disparate lands for whom religion was a very powerful force. So can you speak to that?
- [136:05]
Jack Weatherford
Some empires in history and some rulers have been tolerant of various groups. I mean Rome to some extent was reasonably tolerant of different sects and religions. Not of the Christians, but of reasonably. But what happened with Genghis Khan, the first campaign he had outside of Mongolia was for the Uyghur people who lived in western China. They at that time were being ruled by actually we had mentioned before, the Naiman King, Ta Yang Han. His son Gutsluk had fled. No good, worthless. Well son, but Gutsluk had fled into what is today the area around Kyrgyzstan and they ruled over the Uyghur people. He had been a Christian, the Naiman had been a Christian tribe. But he converted to Buddhism while his subjects were Muslim and he outlawed the Muslim religion and he made all kinds of things happen. So the Uyghurs sent a delegation to Genghis Khan at this time. They knew that the emperors of China were too weak to protect them. So they sent delegation to Genghis Khan and asked him to come and save them from him. And he did. He sent down a detachment. He didn't actually go himself. He sent a detachment down there. They drove Gutsluk from power. Gutsluk fled down towards Pakistan in that direction. They caught up with him, they killed him. That's what the Mongols did. And then Genghis Khan made the first law that he ever made for people outside of Mongolia. So up to this point it's been tribal law. And he saw, as we had mentioned before, that for the tribes were mostly fighting over women. So you outlaw the kidnapping of women, you outlaw the sale of women and you cut down on a lot of the feuding. But he saw that civilized, quote unquote, people fought a lot over religion. They weren't fighting over women, they were fighting over religion. And so he made the law. Now this was very interesting. We talk about religious freedom. Religious freedom comes in many forms. One form is to allow institutions to do what they want. So we're going to allow the Mormons and the Catholics and the Jews and the Muslims each to do what they want in the organized churches that they have. His law was not that it presumed that it allowed that. But he said, every person has the right to choose their religion. No one can stop them, no one can force them. The idea that it was individual choice, no one in history had ever thought of that, that it belonged to the person.
- [138:42]
Lex Friedman
I mean, that's a really, really powerful statement.
- [138:44]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [138:45]
Lex Friedman
That alone. I mean, that's why you talk about Thomas Jefferson being deeply inspired by Genghis Khan. Religious freedom, yes. Of the individual. But it's like such a powerful illustration, manifestation of just individual freedom, period. If you in the. In the world, in history are allowed to practice any religion you want, that's a. I mean, that is like one of the biggest way to say that the individual is fundamentally free in this society.
- [139:22]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. It was a great source of power for him also. You know, I don't say that he did this because of some ideological reason, just like he didn't outlaw the kidnapping of women for ideological reasons. He didn't come to it through studying ideas of moral right. He came to it through practical experience of life. His mother was kidnapped, his wife was kidnapped. He knew that that was a crime against every ethics that you can think of and every form of morality. That's why he did it. Not for ideological reasons, but practical reasons. It hurt people. It hurt people. It was the same with religion. He gave this right to everybody because it was going to be their own personal right to keep them from being hurt. And then that gave him tremendous support from minorities of many types. And so they flocked to him. Minorities after that. This was a minority effort of the Muslim Uighurst to come to him. Many people flocked to him for the same reason, for that kind of religious freedom.
- [140:21]
Lex Friedman
So that religious freedom and also the other things you mentioned, they create a stable society and that allows him, with a small army, to administer a large empire.
- [140:33]
Jack Weatherford
And also, I will say on a more practical political sort of way of thinking, he recognized the power of having a balance of power of like Shiite and Sunni, that both are going to be allowed equal rights. One is not dominant over the other. And Christians and Jews, they all have. Well, that keeps the society from fragmenting against him or uniting against him. And it's a kind of fragmentation that he's taken advantage of. I don't think that was his main reason, but I do think he was quite aware of that, that you give every religion the right unfortunately, the only religion he didn't recognize as a religion was Confucianism. He said, what do they do? You know, the Taoists can do magic on the earth and they can give people magic formulas and to cure or they have all this kind of stuff going on. Well, what do the Confucianists do? So the people could be Confucianists. That was okay. But he didn't expend all the tax free rights. See, that was another thing. He dropped all taxes on religious institutions, all types. But since the Confucianists were not necessarily classified. But then of course, eventually that was abused so much because the religions were. Then get everybody to donate property, you can still use it, you can still farm your land, but it's ours. And now you don't have to pay taxes on it. You just give us some money, you know, got abused. But it started off as a good idea.
- [142:08]
Lex Friedman
And genuinely, as I understand, maybe you can correct me, of course there's the practical aspect of those policies. But he himself was just curious about the different religions as well as I understand. So he never chose any religion except the one from which he came, I guess. I mean, can you describe what he believed spiritually himself?
- [142:34]
Jack Weatherford
It's interesting. You know, we said after the death of Sirimon, his grandson in Bamiyan and the slaughter that followed, that he went through a new phase in which he summoned religious scholars of all sorts, famous Chung Cheng from China, whom I despise. But anyway, he came with all of his magic formulas for things. And then a bunch of various Muslim leaders came. So Genghis Han was exploring all these different religions and not just in a simple way. He had organized public lectures from these people and public debates, not antagonistic debates, but discussions among groups of people who hated each other and would never discuss anything. And suddenly this powerful man summons him and he has to say, okay, well explain your religion and explain yours. And even sometimes you can't just explain it in terms of your own scripture. What do you say to the people who believe it? So he was exploring, but no, he never changed at all. He was an animist, we would say. That's not the only term we know to use. Early in life he worshiped that mountain where he took refuge several times. Burhan Khaldun. Burhan Khaldun was the great refuge of his life. He would go to the top, he would pray, he would take off his hat, he would take off his belt, he would stand there before the sky and pray to also. Later on this became rather dramatic. He would sometimes go away to pray. Should we invade these people? And so all of the subjects are waiting to hear what's God going to tell Genghis Khan when he goes up the mountain. So there are episodes like that. But he was very sincere. But I think what happened, the Mongols have so many spirits in the water, the mountains, everything around them. And you have to know them personally and pray to them and know what they like and don't like. And should you sing to them or should you offer some milk products or what do you do? You have to know them well. You get away from Mongolia. And this was a problem in China. They didn't know the spirits. This caused great consternation for the Mongols. You've got a land here and the spirits don't like us. They're hostile lands. We don't even know who they are. We don't know these spirits in China. It took a long time. And so gradually Genghis Khan, he kind of moved from just the spirit of the mountain that he worshiped, which remained his main focus of worship his whole life. He removed that to the sky. That was the one universal spirit. It was everywhere in the world. The sky was the same for every people. And so for the Mongolians, in their language, the word for sky and the word for heaven and the word for God and the word for weather are all the same. Tenger, tenger or munchuch tinger, in the case of the eternal sky, when they're talking about it in religious terms, the eternal blue sky. So he became more universalistic in this animist vision of the world. And so then the sky could embrace all religions, all religions. And all people were trying to attain the same form of enlightenment. Well, enlightenment is too specific a word, but the same form of moral life and guidance from the sky. He felt that each person knew morality. Each person could communicate a no morality within themselves. They didn't have to just be taught it by somebody from a book. And in fact, as one of his grandson Meng Khan said, you know, you people talking to all the others, to the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Taoists, said, you people have your scriptures and you don't live by them. We have our spirits and our shamans and our drums, and we live by them. And I think it's true.
- [146:31]
Lex Friedman
It's just throughout this conversation, it's just blowing my mind that the kid from the Mongol steppe, they lost everything, right? Lost, just had the hardest of lives. Is, is now, yes, a military genius, but also this kind of sage type character to understand the value of religious freedom. I mean, there is a cynical way to see all these things, because he. He did awfully a lot of things that look like he's a feminist.
- [147:04]
Jack Weatherford
Yeah.
- [147:05]
Lex Friedman
And you're saying, well, the cynical way to see that is what he saw. The value of promoting women in positions of power because they create a more stable society and, you know, there's less power struggles, all that. But the reality is there's a lot of things that look awfully progressive about the things he's implemented, and they stayed.
- [147:25]
Jack Weatherford
I'm not trying to say it in modern terms. You know, when you have 1 million people, you've got to use every one. And the men are fighting. And so he left women to administer a lot of things inside the country. The economy in particular. And then in some of the ancillary Turkic kingdoms around the Mongols, such as the Ongut, the Harlech and different Mongols, and the Uyghur even were administered by his daughters primarily, and then his wives were in charge of administering the land of Mongolia itself and handling the economy. So he was using the women, but in a very practical way. But it wasn't necessarily in our ideological way. I think it's the same with the environment. I'm not trying to say he was environmentalist in our modern way, but he passed very strict laws about the use of water and also about not using water, that you couldn't move water into an area to irrigate it. That was violating the earth and violating the water. So they think, a lot of the historians, they think the Mongols are so stupid, they let the irrigation system be destroyed. No, it takes more work to destroy an irrigation system than it does to create it. They destroyed those systems out of a policy, and that was, this is going to return to pasture land. This lasted. Kublai Khan was the one who changed that, actually, and then started allowing for more irrigation and the movement of water and things. But. But Genghis Khan, we can't use these modern terms of like a human rights crusader or that. I'm trying to say he's the democrat, the modern sense, or environmentalist or a feminist. But all of this was a part of it. Another part was the protection of envoys. He said, every envoy, every ambassador, every messenger is protected from arrest, from torture, and from killing. And if you kill one of ours, we will wipe you out. And in 1240, that was the destruction of Kiev. This is after Genghis Khan already, you know, this is Ogudei Khan, his son, the happy Drunkude. Han's army had come There under Subedai, the greatest general in the history of the world. I would say Subadai, a person who's not Washingis Khan. For the military part, he was the greatest strategist for all, organizing everything together. But the military part was Subedai. So Subadai had been there, and they sent in an ambassador who happened to be a woman. Now, some of the Western sources say a daughter of Chinggis Khan. I have no evidence of that, and I don't quite believe it. But maybe she was kin to him or something. Some say she was a daughter of Genghis Khan. Others say she was a witch. The people of Kiev decided she was a witch and killed her. Okay, that's it. That's it. Kiev was destroyed for killing a Mongol envoy.
- [150:20]
Lex Friedman
The envoy is a method of communication in diplomacy.
- [150:25]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [150:25]
Lex Friedman
And so if you destroy that method of communication or disrespected in any way.
- [150:30]
Jack Weatherford
Exactly.
- [150:31]
Lex Friedman
And that sends a signal to everybody else, you send an envoy, you respect it.
- [150:37]
Jack Weatherford
That's why these plans. I say that the making of the modern world. Most of the ideas have. We accept the idea. We don't do the practice. All of us accept today diplomatic freedom. Diplomats are killed around the world yearly. We accept the idea of female equality and emancipation of everybody. But in fact, they're enslaved in many parts of the world today. We accept the idea of religious freedom. Oh, but not those people. That's not. Theirs isn't good. Their religion isn't right. But our religion, we will tolerate them. But they got to be more like, no, we only say these things. But the world still hasn't achieved some. And he did achieve these within his empire in his time. He achieved those.
- [151:22]
Lex Friedman
So one of the things we've mentioned, but I think is really, really fascinating and maybe an immeasurable impact that Genghis Khan had is on trade. And, you know, you could say a lot of stuff, but basically establishing a unified trade network that spanned I don't know how many thousands of kilometers. And there's a lot of interesting things that were done to enable that trade. One is providing safety and security of not just the envoys, like we mentioned, for communication in the military context, but for the merchants. Can you speak to the. What Genghis Khan did for the trade network connected to the Silk Road as an example.
- [152:08]
Jack Weatherford
Nomads in general are interested in trade. And throughout most of history, they have been the traders who carried the goods from one city to another or one oasis to another. And so the Mongols were also extremely interested and extremely dependent. They could create Very little in their home country. They couldn't grow hardly anything. And they didn't have the technological skills for most of the crafts. So they're very dependent on trade. Well, they raised the status of merchants very high. This was particularly a problem in the Chinese world. It wasn't so much in the Christian or the Muslim world, but certainly in the Chinese world, where merchants were considered extremely low. And all of a sudden, he raises them up above scholars. They're going to have certain rights. For example, they get to be taxed one time. Whatever the national tax is, that's it. They're not taxed every time they stop in some new town. And he created a set of what we would call rest houses or recuperation centers where they could get fresh horses, they could get food, they could deposit their money and get paper receipts that could be used anywhere in the empire. They were guaranteed protection. If they had to pass through an area where it might be dangerous, then a small group, a squad of men and horses would go with them. So trade was extremely important. And then the Mongols, they also, they supported trade in a very odd way. And that is the merchants would come in and they would ask for an outrageous price for some goods, you know, much more than they should get, waiting for the Mongols to bargain them down. And the Mongols would say, I'll give you much more than that. And his grandson or his son, Okude Khan was once asked, why do you do that? You got to stop doing that. This was a Muslim financial advisor he had called in. He told him, well, you've got to stop paying more than people ask. And then Okaday said, where's the money going to go? It's still in my empire. It's going to come back eventually, you know. And so they had a much different attitude. With great respect, and I think a symbol of that is in the time of Kublai Khan when we see that his uncle and father went to China and came back from China. And then on the second trip, Marco Polo went with him to China and back. They were safe the whole way. Their goods were safe. They came back with tremendous amount of wealth. They were never harassed. They. And the mere fact that they could cross. It took two years, but the mere fact that they could cross the whole continent safely and come back, that was unprecedented. We really don't have any well documented case of anybody, say, from China visiting Europe or Europe visiting China before the Mongols, but since Genghis Khan, there's never been a year without contact between east and West. It was permanent. Once he Created it, it was permanent.
- [155:08]
Lex Friedman
I don't think it's possible to measure the positive impact of that because it wasn't just trade of goods. It was also exchange, explicit or implicit along the way. Exchange of ideas, whether that's exchange of technologies, exchange of like philosophical ideas, scientific ideas, technical mathematical ideas. All of this spread throughout and constantly circulating. Maybe. Can you speak to that aspect of it?
- [155:40]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, it was an exchange of ideas on every level. Ideas, technology, ideologies, beliefs, scientific information. Everything was being exchanged, even agricultural goods of new crops for new areas. But Genghis Khan, he had a part of his genius organization was knowing what skill people had that would contribute towards his empire. For example, the Muslims were very good with arithmetic. In fact, he conquered the little empire of Khorezm, from which we get the word algorithm, because there was a mathematician there who invented algorithms. And so Khorezm belonged. He conquered it very quickly, very easily, no problem, but it belonged to him. But the Muslims were using the 0. The Mongols were absolutely impressed with that. The Chinese less so. They're very suspicious about the zero. But the Mongols were very impressed because herders, numbers are important to them for keeping up with their animals. In fact, the Mongols have a simple system. They reduce all animals to the number of horses. You can ask somebody how many animals you can have and they can say, well, 100 horses. And it doesn't mean they have 100 horses. It's going to be like five cows count as four horses, five sheep or five goats count as one horse. Four camels count as five horses. So they reduce it all down like that. The Mongols take a census of everything. And that's one of the first things Genghis Khan did. And that was one of the demands he made of every place he went is a complete census of your people. And every house had to post outside how many people, how many animals, what did they do, the occupations, all this information. So they needed good mathematics for this. The Muslims provided it. So they took the Muslims to China, these Middle Eastern scholars and all. Unfortunately, they were rather ruthless sometimes when it came to implementing the tax policies. But they became the financial advisors to him. Other groups of people had other roles like that. And he was moving them around constantly. And so you had a combination. As I said, he himself had that genius for combining new bits of technology, but it created a new kind of cultural spirit in which other people were also combining technology at other levels and being encouraged. It was no longer heresy or the devil's work to bring in this thing. So we had the spread of printing, for example, we had the partial spread of something such as print money. For example, we had almanacs being created now through printing that combine different calendars and different information that was coming along. But one simple but lethal form of technology was that, for example, Chinese had gunpowder mostly. It was used for fireworks, religious things. And then sometimes in warfare was used for kind of primitive hand grenade or primitive bomb that could be thrown with the trebuchet. And this is in the time of Kubla Khan, more the grandson. But so they had that. The Middle Eastern, the Muslims and the Byzantines especially, they had naphtha, what we call Greek fire, flamethrowers that could set things on fire. You know, the Europeans did not excel very much in technology. They were behind in almost everything. But they could cast bells for churches. Okay, let's take that bell and we're going to turn it on its side, and we're going to use some principles of the flamethrower, and we're going to use the gunpowder from China, and you've got a cannon. So the Mongols, even early on, by the time they got to the siege of Baghdad, but not, I think, in the lifetime of Genghis Khan, but soon thereafter, and his sons and grandsons, they were using some very primitive forms of cannon and even some, like, firing rods. We can't even call it anything like a rifle, but it could fire a very small ballistic device. So this combination of metallurgy, gunpowder, flamethrowers, you put it all together and you come up with something incredibly different.
- [160:10]
Lex Friedman
So if we jump around a little bit, sort of on the topic of a cannon, what are some technological developments that Genghis Khan and his son and Kuba Kai were using? So how much gunpowder were they using in general? What was their approach to the siege warfare, for example? What are some different ideas there?
- [160:33]
Jack Weatherford
If we switch to the grandson, Kublai Khan, he, first of all, he changed a lot of the strategies. They were no longer working. The Mongol system worked perfectly on the grassland. But by the time you get to Hungary, the grassland starts to give out. By the time you get to Poland, it's so many farms. It's hard for horses to get through the farms, and they don't want to go on the roads. By the time you get to the Indus river, it's too hot, too humid, the bows are beginning to wilt, the horses are exhausted. It's not working. So to conquer South China, Kublai Khan had to come up with new things. One thing, the South Chinese had built a great wall. It was called the Great Wall of the Sea. This is before the wall that we know as a Great Wall, which is really the Ming Wall Wall of the Ming Dynasty was built, but the Great Wall of the Sea, and they used it as a defensive navy. They had the largest navy in the world. It was defensive, and it was literally defensive. And it came time for warfare. They would chain the ships together across the mouth of a harbor to protect the city. And so it became a wall.
- [161:41]
Lex Friedman
So actually, if we rewind Kublai Khan, who was he, and what was the state of China at that time? That kind of sets up this idea of ships and siege warfare.
- [161:54]
Jack Weatherford
In 1215, Genghis Han conquered the city we now know as Beijing. It was the capital of the Jin dynasty of northern China. And at that time, southern China was ruled by the Song dynasty, or usually called the Southern Song. He had already conquered the Shishia kingdom of the Tangut people. And so most of northern China was under the control of the mongols from about 1215. And then he conquered Middle. Later, his descendants conquered Middle. And then Kublai Khan was the one to take on the south. But Kublai Khan was born that year in 1215, about three months after the capture of Beijing. And he was nobody. He was the second son of the fourth son of Chinggis Khan. Well, he's got lots of cousins out there who've been riding around. They're conquering Russia, and they've already burned down Kiev, and they've conquered different places in the world. They're real Mongols. That's their whole life. And he's born, and he doesn't meet Genghis Khan until he's about 7 years old, because Genghis Khan was away on conquest in Central Asia. And Genghis Khan came back and he met him and he said, oh, he doesn't look like a Mongol. He looks like his mother's people. His mother was Sorakhtani, who was actually a part of the royal family of the Merkit people, whom he had conquered sometime earlier. And it looks like his mother's people, who was a little bit more tawny. Mongols tend to be very white with very bright red cheeks and have a certain very round face and so on. So he looked different. And for whatever reason, his mother, I think she recognized the difference and treated him differently. Her oldest son was called Munch, later Munch Han Munch. And she wanted him to become. Even though her husband was drunk, who died out on campaign drunk, and she took over Northern China, and she began to put it together, and she Wanted her son to become the Great Han, the Emperor of Mongol Empire. And this wasn't in line. This wasn't going to happen because he's the fourth son out of three. Others are way in line, way ahead of her. But she caused the revolution. She made it happen. She put her son in Mohan. In 1251, he became Great Han. He only lived till 1259. He died of something. It could have been cholera or. They're different stories. I don't know the truth of it, but he died on campaign in China trying to conquer southern China. Well, up to this point, Kublai Khan had not been distinguishing himself. His mother was. She was a Christian woman, but she had a Buddhist nurse for him and she had Chinese scholars come in to tutor him. She had a very good education for him. And I think that she planned that he was going to be a great administrator under his older brother and he was going to administer the lands in China. And so he was learning all this stuff for it. But the older brother, he insisted on sending him out on campaign. Oh, but he was overweight, he was fat, he had gout, he needed to go rest. There was always some excuse. And the brother was assigning people. Orihangdai, who was the son of Subadai, the great general, he assigned him to teach him warfare. He wasn't great on the battlefield, he really was not. But he was very smart and at first a little bit lazy, like talking about the religion, sitting around, go hunting. As long as he had many with him to do the shooting and then to prepare the food and all. And his territory in northern China was just being run in the dirt by these administrators the Mongols had brought in. They were just overtaxing the people, cheating the people, doing everything wrong. And his mother basically just pulled his chain and she said, go to your land. This is your land. You have to administer this land. You go there, you live there, you take charge. And everybody was terrified of the mother. And so he ran off to China and he started administering his land and he started learning how to do it. Well, when his brother died in 1259, he was down on the Yellow River, Yangtze river, on a campaign that he was sent by his brother. He was having no success at all, but he thought, okay, the brother's dead, I should finish the campaign. Meanwhile, his youngest brother, Arikbokh Arikhbok was another hothead Mongol. Like their father Tolus, he was rather hot headed and he was back in Mongolia and his tolerance for religions. He had to oversee the debate. One time between The Taoists and the Buddhists, because the Mongols thought the Taoists were overtaxing everybody, the Buddhists. So he had to oversee it. He got mad and he picked up a statue of the Buddha and beat the Taoists representative to death. So he just wasn't good for moderating debates, you know. So he was going to be the new Great Khan. So he was declared the Great Khan in Mongolia. But this was a turning life for Kublai Khan, who had never achieved much of anything other than talking to people. So his wife Chabi sent him some coded messages, basically telling him, forget about Southern China. It's going to always be there. You can conquer that some other time. Right now, your brother is taking over the empire. You should be the new emperor. You are the next son after Mung Khan. And somehow she invigorated him and he came back. And even though he didn't have all the military strategy, he had northern China, the resources were immense. He could cut off Mongolia. Mongolia was very dependent on northern China for food. All the Mongols supported Arikbok, all the ones in Central Asia, all of them were supporting Arikbuk. And so he went to get food from them. And then they didn't want to give up their food. Yeah, we want to support you for Great Han, but we're not giving up our food. So he was basically kind of starved into submission in 1262. And then he was taken prisoner into China. And then he mysteriously passed away in 1264, while a legal case was being brought against him for trial. But he never made it to trial. He was gone. So Kublai Khan had not really distinguished himself very much, but he didn't have the genius of his grandfather. I won't say that. But he was smart and clever. He understood more about China than most Mongols did. And he understood more about Mongols than most Chinese did. So the great thing left that Genghis Khan said on his deathbed, finish conquering China. You know, that was the great objective. So Kublai was going to fulfill this. And they didn't know how. The great wall of ships was protecting the Southern Song. This huge Yangtze river was so wide, the ocean on the side, all of these things were protecting them. So he had one of his very smart generals named aju, who was a real Mongol, but he was also able to think an innovative way. He was the grandson of Subedai, and he went with his father, Orihang Kadai, on the conquest of the Red river of northern Vietnam against the Dai Viet people. They went down the River. They were trying to surround the Chinese territory. They were going to hit them from the north, from the west, and from the south. So they went down the Red river to conquer the Da Viet. The Da Viet moved their army up on the other side by boat. And then they had a whole core of elephants. So they had the Mongols on one side of the river, on the forces on the other side. Orihangadaya was a smart man. Not a genius, but smart. And he already knew from campaigns in Burma that the only way to route the elephants was with flaming arrows to defeat. That was it. But he recognized that they came up on boats. Mongols didn't like boats. It just. They crossed the river on a goatskin. They wanted to do something organic. A boat was like a cart. A cart belonged to a woman. It was a floating cart. I am not going over on a floating cart. I'm going to ride a goatskin across the river. So he assigned one detachment. You have to burn the boats so the Da Viet cannot escape when we route the elephants. Well, the war battle, I mean, got started. The elephants are running wild. All kinds of chaos is going on. The group that's sent to burn the boat, they're Mongols. They want to go to war. Why burn a bunch of women's carts? It's just not, you know, floating. So they go and join the battle. They leave the boats. Well, the Mongols won the battle, but the Da' Viet forces got on the boats and sailed back to what's now Hanoi. And then they evacuated the city, took all the food, everything out of the city, and they disappeared into the delta. The Mongols arrived. They conquered, quote, unquote, Hanoi, the capital city. And they had nothing. They had nothing. They won every battle. They lost the war. They retreated. AJU was the son of Hankadiah, and he saw all this happen, and he recognized the importance of water and boats. And so he knew, and he spent his time studying the Yangtze river and every little river around it. And the cities. The crucial thing he saw was, was the cities are heavily, heavily fortified on the land side because invasion comes from the land, and they expect this little line of boats to protect them underwater. And so their city walls are weak, the defenses are weak on that side. That's where we have to attack. So how? They sent off to the Ilkhanate, to Persia, where Chinggis Khan, his uncle, was now dead and his cousins were ruling there, or his nephews, we would say a cousin's nephew. So they sent over engineers to build special kind of trebuchet, catapult, and they had to play around with it to adapt it for a boat because they were usually made for stable ground, but they adapted it for the boat and for throwing heavy things and also for some incendiary bombs. They developed it. They attacked the first city, it fell. They attacked the next, it fell. They had something that was working. They worked their way down the Yangtze river, destroying city after city with this navy. And then the army would move in after the navy had broken down.
- [172:51]
Lex Friedman
So this is a catapult on a ship.
- [172:54]
Jack Weatherford
Catapult on a ship. But it's. Yeah, we call it trebuchet for this type of catapult.
- [172:58]
Lex Friedman
So this is an engineering solution for peoples who are deeply uncomfortable with boats.
- [173:06]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [173:06]
Lex Friedman
And they've accepted it.
- [173:08]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. Now it's a great weapon. It's like it's no longer a woman's cart. It's a bow and arrow. It is a giant bow and arrow.
- [173:17]
Lex Friedman
Yeah. It's fascinating. So they hit them hard on the walls on the weak side, where there's no army protection.
- [173:24]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. And they conquer their way down to Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song. They've been in power for a long time, since 970. And now we're already into the 1270s. That's a long time. They are dissipated. They've been had child emperor. They've had imbeciles ruling all kinds of things going on. And at this point, we have a child in command. But Kublai makes a very strange move. He says, okay, let's invade Japan now. What? We're fighting against the Song dynasty, and most people ascribe it to all kinds of things, but actually, I think there was a great logic to it. One was he had abolished his grandfather's policy of defeat and destroy until they are no more. That was the phrase that was used for their enemies. And he had replaced it with a kind of mercy policy. Try to incorporate them into your army if possible, but be merciful. He did not want to destroy, and he was not. He had a lot of defectors coming in. And because the Mongols prized people with skills, a lot of very clever people with shipbuilding and engineers. And these people were flocking to the Mongols, whereas the scholars were all hanging out in Guangzhou doing calligraphy and poetry and having contests over who could sing or paint or. I don't know what scholars do. But they were being scholars. Yes, but they're actually. I think there's a very, very good reason for invading Japan. Several. The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur. They needed it for Gunpowder in South Tong. They lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out. They got it from Japan. It was a great source, but I think there were other reasons. If they could trade, they could also perhaps flee to Japan, and they didn't want that to happen. And then there's this idea of, you know, like, kill the chicken to scare the monkey. It's like, okay, we'll go do this, and then maybe they'll just surrender down there if they see us conquer Japan. Well, it was a total failure. You've got a bunch of ships that are mainly grade on the river and ride along the coast, and you're crossing some treacherous water there. And the Mongols basically just did not know what they were doing. Okay, you can arrive with the trebuchet and you can throw grenades at the beach. It's not really going to do a lot of damage. It might scare a few horses, but you're not destroying cities. And the Japanese cities were more in. They weren't there on the beach waiting for Mongols to come invade. So he failed in that invasion.
- [176:11]
Lex Friedman
So we should say that this is the time of the samurai, right, in Japan. So there was never a real test of like.
- [176:21]
Jack Weatherford
No, there was some fighting, and the samurai learn some very valuable things. The samurai had such a ritualized way of writing. It's like the knights of Europe coming out with armor that had to be lifted up on a crane onto a horse. And I mean, it was just craziness, craziness. The samurai almost at that point, you ride out in front of your enemy and you recite the story of your genealogy. Oh, what? You know, Mongols, they have no use for that. They're there to fight, they're there to win. But on the other hand, this was unknown territory to them. And the weather did turn against them. But I don't want to give too much credit to the weather. I really think that the Japanese defeated them. The Mongols weren't well prepared. Their ships were not very good. They were defeated in the first invasion.
- [177:09]
Lex Friedman
Could they get off the ships onto the beach?
- [177:11]
Jack Weatherford
Oh, they did. They had some skirmishes or small battles on land.
- [177:15]
Lex Friedman
Yes, they did, but they didn't successfully complete them. So they couldn't do their usual Mongol thing.
- [177:22]
Jack Weatherford
Right. Well, see, they don't have enough horses for one thing. And there were many tactical things that they had done incorrectly. It's the first time anybody had ever tried to have such a massive invasion.
- [177:34]
Lex Friedman
Yeah. So they're just learning the basics of what it means to have a navy.
- [177:39]
Jack Weatherford
So he has failed to conquer and he's thinking like a Mongol, that you rule those waters and lands. But he ruled the ocean. He stopped the trade, he stopped the supply. He cut off the possibility of the Song dynasty fleeing to Japan. He won in a certain way. He lost, but he had won. His objective of cutting off southern China also. It gave him navy some experience with the ocean. And now they were ready to move out into the ocean around southern China. So they were closing in. Then AJU was in command. But actually the head command was a man named Bayan, who was a Mongol who had been raised more in Central Asia. He was perhaps born close to the Fergana Valley, in that area. We're not exactly sure where he was born, but he grew up over there. And then he eventually was living in what's now Iran. But he came and he took over command of the army. He was very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, intelligent. AJU should have been in command, but Bayan recognized that, and he and AJU worked together very well. AJU knew how to fight the war. Bayan was able to negotiate things back with the capital city and handle things. So Bayan is in command. And so the generals are deserting the south. Song right and left. The artisans are all coming up to join the Mongol scapat. The generals are loading up the boats with all the jewels and they grab a couple of brothers to the little five year old emperor and they put them on a boat and they're fleeing. They even deserted their own families. The generals were corrupt cowards who fled. The person left in charge was the Dowager Empress, an old lady. She had no children. Xie was her name. The Dowager Empress Xie. They said she was missing an eye. She was ugly. They called her Ugly Xie. That's what they called her at that time. She was in charge and she offered the Mongols everything. I'll give you everything. Please let the Empress stay, okay? Even if you demote him to just being a king, please let him stay. Bayan said, no, total surrender, total surrender. So she decided to surrender. She said, yes, we will surrender the capital. So Bayan came in with a small group of soldiers. They looked around and she invited him to come to the palace to surrender. And he said, no, I didn't win this war in the palace. My soldiers won this war in the field. You have to come with the Emperor in front of my soldiers to surrender. But he did not harm her, he respected her. And there was no looting of the city. Now later, they take everything in a very systematic way. They take the archives and all this kind of stuff. Away. But there was no wholesale looting and killing of people, nothing like that. So they've taken the capital and she comes out, she surrenders, she bows on the ground towards Beijing and then she takes the child emperor and they slowly make their way. She was a little bit sick. It took her a longer time to Beijing. And they surrender again in a public ceremony, bowing to the Kublai Khan, he gives each of them a palace. He gives them a new title. He's trying to show the world this is the new face of Mongols. We don't kill off the old people anymore who are ruling. We're going to give them a palace, treat them nicely and all. But the navy that had fled did not defend the city. Those cowardly generals, they made the new little boy, seven year old brother, half brother to Emperor Gong was his name. They made him the emperor. Well, they're just floating around on the ocean, losing all support from city after city. The Muslims who were controlling the trade and controlling many of the ships of that area, they were Chinese Muslims, but they were still Muslims. They switched sides to the Mongols because of the religious freedom thing and because they were merchants and their status would be raised. So the Muslims were switching over. The fleet was kind of a fleet lost without a country. Out there they had some loyal supporters. Some places they dropped the emperor in the ocean.
- [182:26]
Lex Friedman
What do you mean?
- [182:26]
Jack Weatherford
How do you drop the emperor into ocean? They accidentally spilled him into ocean and then they fished him out, but he died. So fortunately they had one more seven year old half brother. So on Lantau island, exactly where the Hong Kong airport is today, the new, well, it's not so new anymore, but I still think it was the new airport on Lantau Island. So they went there and they had a big coronation ceremony and all. But the people there were not supportive enough. It certainly wasn't Hong Kong then anyway, the delta of the Pearl River. So they sailed out farther south to another island and then they took it over. And of course the first thing they did was, well, we have to build a palace. What? The Mongols are chasing you and you're going to stop and build a palace.
- [183:14]
Lex Friedman
So these are like the remains of the Chinese?
- [183:16]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, the generals and the generals, army and the navy.
- [183:19]
Lex Friedman
And there was a real competence issue.
- [183:21]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [183:23]
Lex Friedman
Okay, so they're going to build, we're.
- [183:25]
Jack Weatherford
Going to protect it with a great wall of the sea. They chained together the boats across the entrance to the harbor and they put the palace boat, so called, in the middle. The generals didn't trust their own soldiers enough. So they made all of them leave the island and go to the boats to fight the Mongols. So the Mongols arrived and over and over and over they asked them to surrender, you won't be harmed, all this kind of stuff. But the Mongols now took over the land so they had the water all around them and they had the land. And once the fighting started they could just shoot down from the highland right onto the ships. And they've cut the ships off from the fresh supply of wood and water so they can't boil rice, they have to try to eat rice and drink seawater. They're all sick as dogs out there. And the leaders refused to surrender. The little boy is there, seven year old Emperor Bing was his name, with his pet parrot. That's the only thing he had left in life was his pet parrot. And then the Mongols, they're offered every opportunity. But the prime minister, so called coward that he is, although he's treated as a hero today in China and throughout their history, the coward that he was, he said we will not disgrace the country by letting them capture the emperor. So first he threw his own wife and children into the water to drown. And then he took the emperor and held him, the seven year old. He was seven years and one month. He had just turned seven years old and jumped into the water with this child. A child murderer. He's a child murderer to do that. Somehow in the whole ruckus, the cage came undone with the parrot and the parrot fell in the water too. So the seven year old boy and the parrot died in the water. That was the end of one of the greatest dynasties in the history of the world, the Song dynasty. They were intellectually great, they were artistically great, they were technologically great. They were just one of the greatest moments of world history. And it ends with this coward killing a child and his pet parrot in order to save the honor that was betrayed by this woman. The men lost the war. The men lost the war. Who's to blame? An old one eyed ugly lady. Empress Shiye.
- [186:01]
Lex Friedman
Well, the bigger picture there is probably is, is become the institutions became corrupt and stale and the, the army weakened and the pol, the politician, the politician class probably has, have, have lost their skill and competence at ruling and all that kind of stuff.
- [186:19]
Jack Weatherford
And all that is true. And the, and the Chinese summarize that with losing the mandate of heaven, right?
- [186:24]
Lex Friedman
I mean everybody has their perspective. Maybe if the way you told the story has a very kind of objective sort of way of revealing the absurdity and the cowardice of it. But you know there's probably the Chinese perspective that they tell the story in some kind, like maintained honor to the last, to the last moment.
- [186:49]
Jack Weatherford
Very often most scholars depict Empress Xiao as the traitor to the country. And I say, no, that boy lived on for another 45 years. And so she did not betray the country. She protected her emperor that she was supposed to protect. It was the man who killed the child emperor, who killed Yong Bing.
- [187:13]
Lex Friedman
So what was the lasting impact of Kublai Khan unifying China?
- [187:19]
Jack Weatherford
Well, yes, first of all, he had unified China in the largest sense of the word, with Korea, Tibet, Manchuria, Mongolia, part of Central Asia. He had unified it, but he did so at the expense of his empire. They didn't recognize him as the great emperor. And there was great opposition from the Golden Horde of Russia and also from the central region, which is called the Chagatayid, those descendants of Sagade, the second son, the Chagatai Empire, and then from the Ilkhanate of Persia.
- [187:52]
Lex Friedman
These are the different sort of fracturing.
- [187:54]
Jack Weatherford
Of the Mongol, the sons of Genghis Khan.
- [187:56]
Lex Friedman
Yeah.
- [187:57]
Jack Weatherford
And only the Ilkhanate was still loyal to him. But they're so far away. Yeah, but now he has a navy.
- [188:04]
Lex Friedman
But this is. I mean, even the four pieces, the whole thing is gigantic, and even the pieces are gigantic. So, I mean, it's very hard to keep an empire of this size together.
- [188:16]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, but he had China. It was unified under him. And then he sent out the first expedition to sail directly to Persia. There had been trade all throughout thousands of years, but it was usually port to port, you know, different merchants trading goods. No, he organized a great fleet to send a queen or princess to become a queen in the Ilkhanate to marry the Il Khan of Persia. It's Persia and Azerbaijan and Armenia and Iraq and part of Syria, all of that area. So he organized this. And it so happened that Marco Polo was ready to go home because they knew Kublai Khan was about to die. In fact, he only had about one year left to live. And they wanted to get their riches out before they didn't know what's going to happen. This is a new dynasty. They've been in total control of China for one generation, and they didn't know what was going to happen. And also just before that, there had been a bad sign because Kublai Khan had tried to invade Japan a second time, and he had failed a second time. And the second time, I think, again, he had a practical purpose, and that was he had this whole huge Song army that now he's the new Enlightened Mongol who doesn't slaughter. So he's got. What is he going to do? They're not reliable. They're not safe. So he sends a bunch of them up into the Amur river of what's now the Russian Far east, or we call Siberian English, but the Russian Far east, the Amur River. He sent expeditions up into Tibet, exploring options up there, but there wasn't enough room or enough agricultural area for a huge military colony. But most of his ships were loaded with former prisoners of the war from the Song dynasty, and they were not armed. They had hoes and implements for farming. He wanted to create, obviously, an agricultural, military, agricultural farm in Japan to help feed northern China because it was very important, just as they were doing with the Amur river. But it was more complicated. So again, they lost. They didn't have it. And part of the reason is that the expedition was massive. And they organized it in the Mongol principles of left wing, right wing. This didn't work at sea because the left wing is from Korea. There's Korean ships built up there. The right wing is from southern China, mostly with ships built down there. They're not the same. They have a head, but there's no center point. Point. Genghis Khan always had the Gol. They called it G O L, the Gol, the center, or Q O l actually. But anyway, he had the center in command. No, he sent the two without a clear. And they were arguing with each other, not cooperating, not helping each other, sabotaging each other. They get there and once again they have the same problems, even though they've come with lots of grenades. This time, again, the grenades are exploding the. They're scaring the horses. You know, it's impressive. And a lot of silk screens are made later showing these impressive battles and all. But they lost. And again, a typhoon happened to be the final. The final destruction of the navy. But I think it's Japan had defeated the Mongols. I would say Japanese deserve credit for that victory. And then the sinking of the ships was more caused by the typhoon. But already the Japanese had developed good strategies while the Mongols had been away. They knew how the Mongols fought, and they knew that at night they could fire flaming arrows at the ships, set them on fire, and they were doing great damage. So again, Kublai Khan lost the invasion of Japan, but the soldiers were gone, they drowned. He didn't kill them off. It wasn't his deliberate plan, but the problem was solved. It's one of those ironies of history that it's hard to quite understand. So this had happened. But then Kublai Khan was coming to the near the end of life. And Marco Polo and those wanted to get out, they're ready to go. And Kublai Khan allowed them to sail on this expedition with Hochstin was her name, the Princess Hochchin, to go to Hormuz. And so they went. And that began a whole system of trade, back and forth, back and forth. Kublai Khan died soon after that. His grandson, who's not so well respected in history because he's often called a drunk, but his name was Timur, Timur el Jetu. But he was a drunk when he was young. But his grandfather had him caned a couple times in public, and he cured him of drinking. And actually he was not a drunk later on. And he was first he knew reassemble the Mongol Empire. He did. The Golden Horde declared loyalty to him, recognized him as Great Han, as emperor of the whole empire, the Chagataid of Central Asia, they declared loyalty to him. The Ilkhanate was already loyal to him. They all declared loyalty. He had reassembled the empire and he had the greatest navy in the world. And he sent out envoys to every place they had attacked or traded with to say, that era is over. We're no longer attacking anybody. We're changing from conquest to commerce. We want to trade with you. Come to China, bring your goods, we're going to trade with you. He instituted. It was short, unfortunately, it didn't last forever. I wish it could have. But it was a great era of the exchange of all kinds of things going back and forth all the way, actually, all the way to Africa. Because from Hormuz they had connection to Somaliland and some people say Kenya already at that time, I'm not sure, but very wide, very wide.
- [194:34]
Lex Friedman
So technically, he ruled over the largest size the Mongol Empire ever had.
- [194:42]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, but although actually the Golden Horde of Russia, they were quite independent by now, and he let them be independent, but they were loyal to him. And they were still exchanging back and forth all kinds of things. So there were Ossetian soldiers in China. They had a whole contingent of Ossetian soldiers there and from Russia, from the Caucasus areas of Russia.
- [195:08]
Lex Friedman
And how do they communicate? Are they using, like the postal service? Like you have to. Like you have to literally deliver the letters.
- [195:15]
Jack Weatherford
Over time, those groups started intermarrying with. They were allowed to intermarry. The Chinese were not. But they were intermarrying with Mongols and they were switching to Mongolian language slowly at first. I don't know, it's not clear. But again, Kublai Khan, thinking in this internationalist way, said, okay, we need a new Alphabet for the world. Everybody in the world writes with one Alphabet. Chinese, Mongolian, Russian, Arabic, everything. It didn't work. But he tried it for a while and some inscriptions are still there to this day.
- [195:52]
Lex Friedman
And we should maybe briefly mention Marco Polo that you've talked about. So he is this now famous explorer that traversed the continent, the Silk Road, and then stayed with Kublai Khan for a while. And I guess one is one of the primary documenters of everything that's been going on. Is there something else interesting to say about. About Marco Polo and about his interaction with Glubacan?
- [196:21]
Jack Weatherford
I like Marco Polo. I use his work a lot. I find him very reliable. In the areas where he's not reliable, you can kind of tell because he didn't. He wasn't there. But the places he was, he reported a lot of stuff. And so I'm very much indebted to him for a lot of things, because with something like this, the Princess Hochten and also another fighting princess from Central Asia named Hutulung, he wrote about that. But I also needed other sources. So I found, if I could find Chinese sources or Arab sources or something else, or Persian to support it, then I really felt a lot of confidence with him over time. But pieces were romanticized and you have to always discount it, but it's very good. However, I believe the best work written about Marco Polo, aside from his own book, which was actually written by Rustichello dictated in prison in Genoa. You know, in the 20th century, Eugene O' Neill wrote a play that became a comedy on Broadway called Marco Millions that was both a play on what he was called El Milioni the Millionaire, because he had talked about cities of millions of people and about money in the millions and things that people in Europe just couldn't believe could happen. He then published his whole play as a book to show people what he really meant. And it was an ironic look at capitalism because this is 20th century already versus the idea of a philosopher king, which he saw in Kublai Khan. And so Marco Polo becomes a symbol of capitalism, not at its worst, but at its most basic. And that is like the princess in this story. This is not in real life, but this is in the play written by Eugene o'. Neill. But I think it captures a lot. The Princess Hochtent says Marco is an excellent judge of quantity, and there were things like that. And then in the play Bayan the Great General, he talks with Kublai Khan and he said, look, these people are dangerous from the West. We should go conquer them now while we can. Kublai Khan tells Bayan again in the play, this is fiction. But he tells Bayan, they are not worth conquering, and if we conquer them, we will become like them. And he said, marco Polo has been in our land. He has seen everything. He has learned nothing. He has seen everything. He understands nothing. For me, this was such an important moment in the history of the world. Symbolically, with Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the coming together of two worlds. It could have gone a different way. It could have gone a different way. And I am. It's not that I'm anti capitalist, I'm pro capitalist, but the way so many things worked out, it was a misstep in history. Maybe we took the wrong step at that moment and we could have learned more from cooperation.
- [199:43]
Lex Friedman
They didn't quite integrate successfully.
- [199:45]
Jack Weatherford
No, but today we've returned to that. I think the east and the west are confronting each other again on more equal terms. For a long time, the west was so dominant and the east was so downtrodden by colonialism and other things and internal rot and other things. But today there's not necessarily equality, but there's more of a balance, and which way will we go?
- [200:14]
Lex Friedman
And again, there's a lot of room and a lot of energy for division, for misunderstanding versus integration. Like the east is demonized in the West. And one of the great regrets I have that I hope to alleviate is just how little I, like, understand China in the East. It is just sort of not. Not just from kind of economics, politics, you know, reading a few books, but like the way you've understood and felt the Mongolian step, like understand the Chinese people in that way. Because it does feel like from that understanding there could be integration of ideas.
- [201:05]
Jack Weatherford
You know, My work is often classified as Chinese history, which I think is ironic, because for me, it's always a Mongol in history. But for the last book I wrote, which dealt a lot more with China because it was about Kublai Khan. Then in that book, I deliberately did not go to China. I'd been there numerous times before. I deliberately did not. I'm an outsider. I do not speak Chinese. I'm not a Chinese scholar. I never even had a course in Chinese art or calligraphy or anything. And I wanted to be very clear. Mine is an outside perspective. But I think it's possible as an outsider, to still have respect for that culture, even if I disagree that they Appoint this one as a hero and that one as the villain. I disagree. And they'll say, oh, I'm wrong. I don't understand their history. And they're probably right. That's quite possible. But there's an outside view that is different and tries to be respectful of what happens in that part of the world, just as I'm respectful towards Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire. I respect China very much. I'm an American. I love the ideals of my country. I love so many aspects of our culture. And there are many aspects I don't, of course, because it's impossible to love everything, even about the members of your own family. And I do hope that through understanding one another or just making the effort to understand, even if we understand wrongly and we're incorrect in it, just to make the effort to understand will help us a lot. And the west has had a long couple of centuries of extreme arrogance that they are there to teach the world. And I'm sometimes dismayed. I meet these young people all over the world who have come to help. They're an ngo and they're going to teach the people how to take care of the environment. They're going to teach the women how to exercise their rights. They're going to bring in micro financing to help liberate people. We are arrogant beyond words, and we need to be a little bit more humble and try to put ourselves on an equal basis with some of these people. Not a superior basis.
- [203:30]
Lex Friedman
Beautifully put. How did the Mongol Empire come to an end? How did it fall?
- [203:40]
Jack Weatherford
Despite the fact that Timur Aljetuhan had united the empire, at least symbolically, all of it, and they had the trade going on. The Mongols never adapted well to China, and they began having problems in different areas. So in some areas of the world, they became more like the local people. So in Central Asia, they became Muslim and they got more absorbed into that world and broke away from the Mongol examples from before. Russia lingered on longer under Mongol domination, but it got weaker and weaker over time. And it was based around the Volga river, but they weakened to the point that they just became a tributary people minority within a Russian empire. But the Mongols had left kind of the framework for empire for Russia. That's something the Russians don't want to hear any more than they want to hear me criticized or the end of the Song dynasty. But it is true that even yam. Yam is the word that was used for this postal system, and that's the ministries today and in Russia. And there are many, many Other things in Russia, even Malchik. Malchin is a herder. Mal is an animal, and Chin is a person, a person who takes care of animals. You know, it's all kinds of influences in Russia that some people want to deny. But there's always a great powerful strand of research and scholarship in Russia that supports this understanding of the Mongols. And I depend on them tremendously. It's not just Gomel. Yov is one of the famous ones, but he was a little bit too romantic with his ideas and all. But I depend upon a lot of the research done by Russian scholars and by early German scholars in the 19th century under sponsorship of the Tsar. So I depend on that work. So you had a great influence there, but it was weakening. So bit by bit, 1368, the Mongols had become so weak within China that they were overthrown, but they weren't absorbed into China. The Mongols have been there since 1215-1368. They packed up, went back to Mongolia. It was just another seasonal migration. You know, it was just amazing. And they said, okay, we're still the Yuan dynasty. We're not giving you the seals. We're not acknowledging the Ming. And they never did throughout the whole of the Ming. In fact, they went down one time and captured the Ming emperor, took him back to Mongolia, and then they tried to ransom him, and the Chinese said, no, we're going to appoint another emperor. So the Mongols decided, okay, the worst thing we can do to the Chinese is give them back the old emperor. So you had two emperors back. Okay, let them work it out. And the empire just weakened from internal reasons for the Mongols, but some external things from nature. And I think that was the great plague. You know, everything in history, everything that's good comes with something underneath it that's bad. And everything that's bad seems to have something underneath that's sometimes works out good in a way. But this great system that united, it's called the yam, or to that it united everything. People could move back and forth quickly, then it could also take the plague out of southern China into all parts of the world. And I do think that's what happened. And the plague destroyed the Mongol system. And if all of these people are ruled by Mongols because they're benefiting so much from this system, and now the system collapses. Yeah, you don't need the empire anymore. So it just fell apart. After 1368, the empire just fell apart. And most of them stayed in Persia and Iran and Afghanistan. The Hazara people are still descended from the army there. And Then in Russia, some of them stayed. But then finally, in the time of Catherine the Great, a lot of them returned. They had been there for hundreds of years, and then they returned to mongolia in the 1700s, and so many Mongols came home. They were still Mongols, despite hundreds of years of exposure to other cultures. They came back to their tent and squatting around the fire and drinking fermented milk and eating dried curds.
- [208:23]
Lex Friedman
It's interesting that the Mongolian spirit is so strong that it persists through centuries. And they just return right back on the horse, riding in the open step.
- [208:38]
Jack Weatherford
Yeah, well, it was actually very difficult because they were a little bit lazy and they weren't so good with doing the task. And so it became difficult, actually, to support. Support so many people coming home and eating up all the animals. The Mongols in China had been used to just eating. They hadn't been producing much for 150 years.
- [209:01]
Lex Friedman
So just to return to Genghis Khan, we talked about Dan Carlin, and Dan Carlin said that Genghis Khan's army was the greatest military force in history. And many other historians agree that before rifles came into popular use, Genghis Khan would basically beat every single army, including Napoleon. And you mentioned the samurai, the whole formal setup. Same with Napoleon. There's a whole, you know, like, you know, several hours to set up the chess pieces on the military board. I mean, you can just imagine what Genghis Khan and the dynamism, the speed of everything, what that would do to Napoleon. So I guess the question is, do you agree with that notion that Genghis Khan's army is the greatest military force in history?
- [209:59]
Jack Weatherford
Short answer is yes, absolutely. No other power in the history of the world has conquered Russia and China and Persia and Central Asia and Turkey and Korea. No power in the world has done that. Not Alexander, not the Romans. Nobody will ever do it again. Nobody's going to conquer China and Russia again and rule both countries. It's just not going to happen.
- [210:30]
Lex Friedman
What lessons can you take from that's applicable to modern warfare?
- [210:36]
Jack Weatherford
Oh, I think there's a very good lesson. And the Mongols took Iraq, they took Baghdad, they held it. The Americans, we followed the exact opposite strategy of the Mongols. Mongol strategy is, first you take the countryside. They're country people. They think in terms of countryside. You take the countryside, you occupy the countryside, and you cut off the city. It cannot live without the countryside. And that's how they did it. Every time they would come in, as I say, in some cases, two years in advance to clear people out. So they would have room for their horses and have pasture for their horses and all. And you take the small towns and then the small cities, and then the last one is the big city. Americans, they said, no, we're going to take Baghdad, we're going to bomb Baghdad. We're going to have this shock and awe. We're going to go in, we conquer the country from Baghdad. So they go in, they get trapped in their little tiny green zone. They never conquer Iraq. The strongest army in the world. You know, this is something that worked in Europe, World War II. Yes, we bombed the cities and we took the city because that was a city, the center of production for the modern era. But the countryside is the place that produces the food. The Mongols were very aware of that. And supplies the water. You cut off the water from the city, you cut off the food for the city. What's the city going to do? They're going to surrender. The Americans were applying something that worked in Western Europe to conquer Germany. It did not work to conquer Iraq or Vietnam or even Northern Korea or Cambodia or Laos or Syria or God knows, it worked only in Grenada. I think that's the only in my lifetime. That's the only successful war. We had lasted a couple of hours. We went in, conquered the little tiny island. Otherwise we've been chased out of every country. We've lost it. Tail between our legs. We dropped more bombs on Cambodia than we dropped on Germany. That's hard to believe. Hard to believe. We dropped more bombs on Cambodia than on Germany. We did nothing because Germany, you destroy the cities, the people surrender. Dresden's gone. Frankfurt, Wurzburg, Berlin. In Cambodia, you can bomb the countryside forever. You can kill the people. And they did. You can use chemical warfare. And they did. And you could still go into the eastern part of Cambodia and you could go to large areas where you don't hear birds singing because of the chemical warfare in America of American bombs. So we still do it, but we don't want to admit it and we don't want to go in to win. In World War II, the Americans did have unconditional surrender. Well, I mean, you could support the war, not support the war. We did it right, we did it wrong. These are all issues that people can argue. But we had a clear policy. We go into Afghanistan, we're fighting terror, we're going to bring democracy, we're going to free the women. What I mean, it's absolute sheer insanity, the things that we did. And we kill people. Not only did we use chemical warfare and kill a lot of people in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. We killed American soldiers. We killed American soldiers and my father was one. He died from Agent Orange disease. Oh, but that doesn't count. He didn't die on the battlefield and we didn't mean to kill him. It doesn't count. Modern warfare is brutal and we just paper over it sometimes, you know, can.
- [214:28]
Lex Friedman
You explain Agent Orange?
- [214:29]
Jack Weatherford
It was designed to kill all vegetation. This is going to be a humane way. We're going to kill all the vegetation in the jungle and that way they can stop moving the army through the jungle and they can stop the supplies from coming. That was the American strategy. Yeah. Henry Kissinger, Nobel Prize winner, he is now resting in hell is exactly where he belongs for what he did to Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The bombing was just absolutely horrendous. So Agent Orange comes in, they defoliated, which means they wiped out the crops. So people are starving, literally, in the case of Cambodia, starving to death. The animals are being killed and deformed children are being born to this day. And American soldiers died by the thousands. Not immediately, not on the battlefield, not right there. They go home, they have the disease, they linger. They take the whole family down with them in an emotional trauma of becoming slowly paralyzed and dying. We did that to our own people. So, yeah, warfare, I don't think we're any more humane with it, any better today than in the past. It's just we can hide parts of it more easily and deny it more easily. If you're killed by a Mongol, it's very clear you're killed by a Mongol, you're killed by friendly fire in America and war, it's a different matter.
- [215:59]
Lex Friedman
It seems that what people mean when they say that war is hell, that in some deep sense everybody loses, no matter the narrative you put on top of it.
- [216:11]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, yes, I'm not a pacifist again, but I think war is acceptable in some situations. But the more controlled it is, the better. My effort is not to do away with all the things that happened under Genghis Khan with the brutality and all like that, but it's to measure it against what goes on today in the world today. And we have different images. There are two images of Genghis Khan. One is our image. He's a barbarian on a horseback killing people and raping women all the time. The other image is the Mongolian image. And when they finally built an official statue of him in this century for the 800th anniversary of his founding of Mongolia, they had to think about how to present him to the world and to Themselves. And they chose the Lincoln Memorial as the model. He was the late great log river of the Mongol nation. And so he's seated there in front of the Mongolian Parliament. There's another statue that's better known, but it was a private enterprise that created him on horseback, but not with a weapon. But he's on horseback out in the countryside. But the official one from the government is Genghis Khan, seated like Abraham Lincoln. And they issued stamps to show that he is the great law giver.
- [217:39]
Lex Friedman
And the truth is somewhere in between.
- [217:44]
Jack Weatherford
Well, or depending on where you are and how you want to see it, you know.
- [217:48]
Lex Friedman
Yeah.
- [217:49]
Jack Weatherford
There are many things that happened that were terrible and horrible. And for people who lose a war, it's going to always be terrible and horrible.
- [217:57]
Lex Friedman
Yeah. Let's return back to Genghis Khan's life and the end of it. How and where did he die?
- [218:07]
Jack Weatherford
After conquering the Hoarezm empire in Central Asia, Genghis Khan returned. And then they had a great, what they called Naadam, a great celebration that went on for a whole summer, just about. And they had so much wealth to destroy. Tribute to everybody. And everybody is being given all kinds of things, you know, for what they have done, including the people who helped saved him. When he was in the Kank, in the ox yoke, they were rewarded with. Everybody was rewarded. It was a great time. But the first place he had attacked outside was the Tangut nation, and they had sworn allegiance to him. And then when he went off to the Middle east, they refused to send troops. He didn't forget that he's going back to the Tangut nation and he's going to conquer them again. As he was crossing the Gobi, which takes a while and you're crossing the Gobi, he was distracted a little bit by hunting the Hulan, which is the wild. We say the wild ass, or I usually say wild horse. It sounds a little better. But the hulon, to say hulon of the Gobi, he was off hunting hulon. He fell from his horse and he injured his leg very badly. And he seemed to decline from that point. And it took some number of months before August of 1227. He was very much near the end of life. You can read online the exact date, and it's all very specific. But the truth is we don't know exactly which day he died in that time because one of his wives was running the camp and they were keeping it secret until the defeat of the Tangut was completed. And the Tangut offered all kinds of things for the Mongols to go away again the second time. And Genghis Khan had told his family, no, accept nothing. And then when they surrender, you kill the royal family, kill them all. So that the idea they were Buddhist people, the Tanguts were Buddhist. And the idea was usually you can be reborn into your own family. But he said, no, you kill off the whole family so they can't be reborn. So he died there.
- [220:24]
Lex Friedman
How was his successor chosen?
- [220:27]
Jack Weatherford
Oh, the succession issue was always difficult. He did not have the right to appoint a successor. That was not the Mongol way he could nominate somebody. So before he set off for the Middle Eastern campaign, one of his wives said to him, you know, even the biggest tree falls. You've got to make a plan and talk to your sons about the future. So he did. He called the sons together. So this is Zutch, the oldest boy who was born while the father was allied with his Anda Jamuk. And he was named Visitor Zuch. And then the next one was Chagadai and the next one was. And the next one was Tola, the father of Kublai Khan. But he was still alive at this point. So all four of them came. So Genghis Khan explained to them he wanted to talk about the succession and to get some consensus from them about the succession. And so he said the Mongols always call on people to speak by order of age. They also serve tea or food, anything by order of age. It's always done that way from then till now. So he called first on Tzuc and he said, what do you say, Tzuc? Genghis Khan favored Tzuch. This is the one who was questionable paternity, but he always favored him. You know, the youngest Tullah was too hot headed. Ogude was a heavy drinker. Tsagati was very rigid about the law of the Mongols and all, you know, but he thought, he seemed to favor Tsutch as a more reasonable, good warrior, but reasonable person. But he called on Zutch, my son, speak Tzagade, the second one who believes in Mongol law. Supposedly he jumped up and he said, this is when he accused his father of all kinds. He said, how can you call on this Mongol, this Merkit bastard, if you call on him first, that means you want him to be the Great Khan. He should not be the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. This is his Mongol Empire, on and on. You know, you can imagine kind of scene. Well, Genghis Khan is the greatest ruler in the world. He's sitting there being lectured by his second son. And this is when he gave that impassioned speech to his. Now in actually the way the Secret History makes it look like it was his assistant speaker who said it. Because very often the great power doesn't say the words directly. They let somebody else say them for them. They have a spokesperson. But anyway, I think it was his words and I think he said them on that day. That's what I think of this business of you do not know you are not there. You know, the stars were moving in the sky, the head was. Heaven was turning around, the earth was turning over. You did not know who loved whom. You did not know who your mother loved. You do not know what your mother did. And if I say he is my son, who are you to say he is not my son?
- [223:32]
Lex Friedman
By the way, pretty, just really high integrity, really respectable. To do that, to have that respect and honor his wife in this way and his son in this way, it's really powerful.
- [223:49]
Jack Weatherford
I believe that. I don't know if she was alive at this point or not. We do not have the death recorded. Mongols are not good at recording death. They don't. They usually just say somebody finished their age or they have some euphemism for it. But he made that impassioned speech and Sagade had to submit. And he said, yes, you are our father and we accept what you say. But a deer shot with words cannot be loaded on a horse. A deer shot with words cannot be eaten. So Genghis Khan knew. So he said to the boys, the boys, I mean, these are middle aged men, they're not boys. But he said to the men, what do you want to do? What do you want to do? And he said, I don't favor Tsakade because of his attitude and the situation. And Taloa is still hot headed. And he actually ended up being drunk and dying early. So. But the other guys, they said, well, a good day. They chose him because he was the most generous and the bon vivant and he was for every party and drinking every time. And yeah, one time, Chickie Hutuk, the great judge who wrote the Secret history, Shoggi Huttuk, was sleeping in a cart one time, for whatever reason, I don't know what I think he also had passed out drunk perhaps, but a good day, came out drunk and grabbed him up and pulled him back into the party. And good, he was a party guy. And so he was chosen as the next great Han of the Mongol Empire. But fortunately there was sort of a plan B and that Genghis Khan had set up very powerful women, his daughters but also he had chosen wives for each of his son. Very, very capable wives. And for a good day he had a wife. It wasn't even his first wife. The first wife would usually be somebody closer by a certain clan or something. But he had a very intelligent woman named Dorjin. And then she was more or less ruling in his last few years. And then after he died, she ruled empire in her own name. She was the ruler of the greatest empire in world ever ruled by a woman.
- [226:16]
Lex Friedman
It's incredible. The genius of Genghis to set it up that way.
- [226:20]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [226:21]
Lex Friedman
And to not, you know, there's probably very widespread discrimination of women at that time. And to have not care about any of that and just making the right decision for like what will keep the empire together.
- [226:38]
Jack Weatherford
And Thorisjid was actually, there was peace. He stopped all campaigns. There was peace during her time. And the women such as Dorisin and others were extremely into economics and trade and running these. They had these private corporations called Ortok. She was running her Ortok and everything. So she became much more interested in the economics of the trade and running the empire. And it was the time of peace. And she recognized that peace was better for trade. It was better. And so it was a peaceful time. But like all of us, you know, we have our weak points. And she favored a worthless son to become the successor. And none of the sons actually were great but good. They had favored another. But anyway, she favored Quiiuk, her son. And so she arranged to have him made the great emperor while she was still alive. And she had a. Her primary minister was also a wife woman named Fatima from the Middle East. And unfortunately Guyuk organized a purge of her court and killed off a lot of these people who had been supporting her. And a lot of them were Muslims. And he killed off a lot. And then he was going to march against the Golden Horde because they weren't supporting him. So he set off and he died. He was only in office for 18 months and he was gone. And then his wife took over Oklahomish. Unfortunately, she was not capable as her mother in law, Dorizen Oklahomish was a bit greedy and she didn't start any new wars, but she just kind of messed up things and she didn't rule for too long. And this is why Kublai Khan's mother Sorakhtani was able to have a revolution. She united with the Golden Horde. She was on one end on China. She had northern China, the Golden Horde had Russia. The two of them united against the center and they overthrew Ogil Hamish, and she put her son, Mong Khan in, who was succeeded by Hublei Khan.
- [228:46]
Lex Friedman
And we should say probably that this whole succession by kin probably goes against the initial spirit of what Genghis Khan stood for.
- [228:56]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, yes. In the end, he was a father, and he favored his sons, even knowing they were not so capable. And he had lost a grandson that he loved. But he organized it, though, as what we call today almost a corporation. All lands belong to everybody in the family. Everybody. So Kublai Khan, that's why he had soldiers that were Christian soldiers, Ossetian soldiers and Kipchak soldiers. He had 10,000 of each come in. And then they owned. The Russians, would own silk factories in China. The Ilkhanate would own silk factories and jade mines in China. The people in China, the Mongols, they would own villages in Persia and in Iraq. So he organized it all. Everything was owned by the entire clan. It didn't last too long like that because of the divisions that developed. So the Great Khan was primarily in charge of conquering and expanding the land, so they had more lands to own. That was going to be the job. And Kublai Khan fulfilled it. Monk Han, to some extent fulfilled it. A good day. Did Greek.
- [230:15]
Lex Friedman
Did not his family ruling the land, all the different territories.
- [230:22]
Jack Weatherford
Yeah. And they weakened with every generation. Yeah, every generation.
- [230:27]
Lex Friedman
But that reminds me of a very popular idea about Genghis Khan articulated in the 2003 paper titled the Genetic Legacy of the Mongols. So that paper has a finding that estimates that 0.5% of the world's male population is descendant, direct descendants of Genghis Khan. I've heard you kind of be a little bit skeptical of this paper, but I actually really like its findings. I talked to a good friend of mine, Manolis Kellis, who's a biologist, computational biologist and geneticist, and he likes the paper as well. I find it really convincing. But I think your skepticism has to do with, not necessarily with the paper's contents, but more the implication that it speaks to the thing that maybe the people who think of Genghis Khan as a brutal barbarian assume that the reason is 0.5% of the population is because of some institutionalized mass rape conducted by Genghis Khan. But to me, and we actually spoke about this, you can't get those kinds of numbers with rape. If you want for the empire to propagate the gene, if you were a person that wanted to propagate the genes, you would make sure that all the lands you conquer are stable, flourishing, and Happy. And so actually this is much better explained in the paper indicates this is better explained by. It was of high value, like social status value, to be associated with the lineage of Genghis Khan. And so that means that for many generations, people loved the great Khan, the Genghis Khan. And so in that sense, given how vast the land was, all the transformational effects it has on, on trade, on culture and so on, it makes total sense. And in fact, the 0.5%, just so people understand, is just male descendants. The way it works, that means if this paper is at all correct in its estimate, that the number of people descendant, not direct male descendants, but the way trees work is like, there's women on each step. So the number of descendants could be much larger than that. So I think that's pretty interesting. And I think there's singular figures like this in history, but none like Genghis.
- [233:14]
Jack Weatherford
It's interesting, it's fun. Where did they get the DNA from Genghis Khan?
- [233:19]
Lex Friedman
Oh, yes. So one of the criticism you have.
- [233:21]
Jack Weatherford
Is like, well, they don't have one shred of scientific. They're supposed to be scientific. No. They found that the bunch of people are connected. Yes. And then they. No, no, no, no.
- [233:32]
Lex Friedman
To one person. To one person, yes.
- [233:34]
Jack Weatherford
But they choose Genghis Khan. Right, but who has evidence that it was from him? No evidence.
- [233:39]
Lex Friedman
It's from that time. It's one person.
- [233:42]
Jack Weatherford
But from that time or 200 years before.
- [233:45]
Lex Friedman
It could be 200 years before.
- [233:46]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, yes. See, I mean, actually, I would like for it to be true in a certain way. I would. And I do think there is a truth there. I think that by attaching it to the name of Genghis Khan, they've done a disservice to themselves. But it gets a lot of publicity and a lot more funding and it's exciting and so on, but I think it's to that Mongol experience. But Genghis Khan's descendants were almost everyone categorized and recorded. I mean, he's the largest conqueror in the world. You do not have just children popping up all over the place. He had four wives all the time. He had children with two of them. Just not a lot of descendants. We know mostly who they are for many generations. His brother Haser had many more children than he did. Many more. And they caused a lot of problems later on for the empire too, by rivaling the power. So it could be that one of these other people, Boden Char de Fool, could have been the origin of this. It could have been back well before Genghis Khan. I just don't believe. And in Mongolia today we have nobody who claims descent from Genghis Khan.
- [234:58]
Lex Friedman
Well, claims is a different thing than biology, right?
- [235:01]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [235:02]
Lex Friedman
So the reason I say this is this methodology is pretty solid.
- [235:08]
Jack Weatherford
Oh, he's. I believe that they found some connection of people.
- [235:12]
Lex Friedman
Yeah. But it's.
- [235:13]
Jack Weatherford
They have no evidence that it's really connected to Genghis Khan. I think it may be tangentially connected to him.
- [235:20]
Lex Friedman
Yeah, but it's somebody from the Mongolia region.
- [235:23]
Jack Weatherford
Yeah, I think that's quite possible. But we've already had the Hans come through. We've had all the Turks. Every one of the Turkic nations is descended from Mongolia. They all came out of Mongolia.
- [235:36]
Lex Friedman
You're. I mean, you're right. You're right.
- [235:38]
Jack Weatherford
On the other hand, I wish they could get some proof. I mean, I wish it could be true. I just can't believe it the way it is. We have no DNA. Nobody knows where he went.
- [235:51]
Lex Friedman
They don't. So they don't know where he's buried.
- [235:54]
Jack Weatherford
Okay. Genghis Khan said, let my body go, let my nation live. And he chose to be buried in an unmarked grave. And the Mongols believe very strongly it should always be that way. Most of the Khans who followed him were also buried in a similar way. The Chinese emperors, you know, are buried in very elaborate tombs. But not the Yuan dynasty. No. And so Kublai Khan was buried back with his grandfather in an anonymous grave. And not everyone like Goyg died when he was on campaign towards Russia. He was. Died out there. I mean, he was buried out there. I think his. I think his father, Good Day. Was also buried out there. That was more their homeland, but many of them were buried with him. And it's known and not known at the same time. You know, it's officially. You should not know it. You cannot know. Should never be disturbed. He should never be disturbed. We're not going to have a tour group coming in.
- [237:04]
Lex Friedman
But you're saying like the people of Mongolia, they have a sense, they believe.
- [237:09]
Jack Weatherford
He'S in a certain place. Yes. They believe they know where the place is. But it's sacred. You can do nothing, nothing. Just leave it as it is. That's no roads, no buildings, no killing of animals, no chopping of trees. Nothing can be done. It's a holy land dedicated to him and his family.
- [237:33]
Lex Friedman
It's pretty amazing. Unmarked grave.
- [237:36]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [237:38]
Lex Friedman
For the greatest conqueror in the history of humanity. For good and for bad, the most impactful. One of the most impactful humans in history.
- [237:48]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. I Believe in this thing about let my nation live, let my body be elimination. And I say to people what they asked me, well, what did he look like? And I said, well, the portrait was painted 50 years later by somebody who never saw him. And actually, if you look at the portrait of Kublai Khan and Genghis Khan, they look alike, except one's old and one's younger. And I think that's because Kubla was trying to establish. He wanted to establish his legitimacy as a real Mongol, that they looked alike, but his grandfather said he didn't. And then Okodehan and Mong Khan looked different. They looked different. So there was nothing. But I say, if you want to see the face of Genghis Khan, walk in any gear in Mongolia. The first challenge you see, that's the face of Genghis Khan. It's his nation. He created that nation. That's his face.
- [238:33]
Lex Friedman
Does that make you sad that there is no, you know, from his time capturing of his image, that he really made himself sort of disappear into the land? Does that make you sad?
- [238:51]
Jack Weatherford
No, not at all. No. Because he's everywhere. You know, when you have these clans that are still operating in Afghanistan and the Russians are still using the YAM system, there are many aspects of him that are out there in the world. And I think I find personally inspiration the same way that Thomas Jefferson did. He found so much inspiration in the life of Genghis Khan and the books of Genghis Khan that you can still read. He gave copy. He bought so many copies and gave to the Library of Congress, to the Library of Virginia, the University of Virginia, and to his granddaughter. These ideas live on, and we still have not fulfilled them. We do not have religious freedom. We do not have the protections for women. We do not have the protections for envoys and ambassadors. The ideas live on. And the rulers do not live as the common people to eat the same food, wear the same clothes, sleep in the same. Not a bed in his case, but sleep in the same situation and simple home.
- [240:01]
Lex Friedman
No, I have tremendous respect for leaders that live just as the people who they lead.
- [240:12]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, it's.
- [240:13]
Lex Friedman
Yeah, mostly not done, but when it is, I have just infinite respect for that. That is the way. What lessons can you. Can we learn from Genghis Khan that apply to the modern world? You've already said religious freedom, some of these ideas.
- [240:30]
Jack Weatherford
Well, I think those. His policy ideas, I think are important. We can still learn from that about protection of diplomats, not buying and selling women, not kidnapping women, and having religious freedom of individuals. But Also he had interesting things. He had tax free status for all religions, all physicians and all teachers. They didn't pay taxes in his empire. As a former teacher, I embraced that idea out of pure greed and self interest. But it's not to me the idea of saving the money. It's the idea of focusing on that as something important for the society. He didn't say tax free for any other category of people, as I recall, just for those. And he's highlighting the health of the people, the education of the people and the spirit of the people, their spiritual. That's very important. That's a profound approach to life. And so these are policies, and I'm not advocating so much to policies, but I think some of the general principles of being willing to learn from our mistakes, admit your mistake to yourself, correct it and go on with your life. All of us say it's important, but we don't do it for the most part. We don't learn from our failures as much as we think. The other idea of promoting people on ability, I think that's certainly an idea that is very valuable. Not in the simple way of meritocracy that we've done it with. Oh, if you pass the exam with this score, you get this or that. But really evaluating people and their ability, I think it's a very good thing. Not the only thing, but I think it's very important. And even though he failed in the end in his own life and he turned power over to his sons and his family, it's a principle that he lived by most of his life. And we can learn from that principle. The other thing I think is just his global feel for the world, his global understanding. Here was a man who had had no education, any formal sense, and he had this sense that the world should be united, we should have things that unite all people. Everybody should have their own law. But there should be a higher law of heaven that governs people. You know, and this later was translated, everybody should have their own language, but they all write the same Alphabet. By Kublai Khan. It didn't work. Or his idea. He tried to impose the use of paper currency in Iran. The Persian Ilkhanate, Chinese paper money. It didn't work. The people there weren't used to it. But all this international spirit of their empire, I think that we need. Today we talk about, oh, globalization. We're all connected, is just incredible. And we're more provincial than ever. We are just so provincial. And sometimes we use all this technology to help preserve our provincialism. And we can't think in global terms. We can't think about the world. It's just amazing to me how narrow minded we are.
- [243:47]
Lex Friedman
I also saw the Mongol proverb of if you're afraid, don't do it. If you do it, don't be afraid. That you especially celebrate. I mean, there is something to that. In many ways, Genghis Khan is a representation of a. Of a person like of a self made man. That person from nothing.
- [244:14]
Jack Weatherford
Yes.
- [244:16]
Lex Friedman
Willed an entire empire into existence.
- [244:19]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. And everything against him that you can think of your own family deserting you, your father dying at an early age, all these things like that. But as Jamilka said, he had a good mother and he had a good wife. And there were many crucial points at which it was either his mother or his wife who made the deciding point. His wife Bushta was the one who caused the first break with Jamaka to go away later on, when the shamans had become too powerful and they had humiliated his younger brother. She was the one who said he had to clamp down on the shamans who were exercising too much power and she guided him a lot.
- [245:12]
Lex Friedman
It cannot be understated how important critical women are in the story of the Mongol Empire. It's fascinating.
- [245:21]
Jack Weatherford
Sometimes we could say they're not behind the scenes because they're always out front in the Mongol court. They always sat up front. They were always out front. And this, this horrified the Chinese, who are very good. Confucius. It horrified the Muslims, it horrified the Christians. They didn't know what to. They said the women even drink in public. Okay, yeah, they drink in public. You know, they do what? So sometimes it was like that. But other times, as with Durjin, she's actually the ruler or the case of his daughters, such as Al Qaibek who ruled over a part of northern China called the Angut people, and the other daughters who ruled over different. They ruled in their own names. And he's very. This is something about the secret history that upset me. I get to chapter, all the sections are numbered. I get to chapter or number or section 215 and there's only half a sentence left. In 2:14, he's just awarded a girl he calls his daughter. So she's probably a clan daughter, but she lives with his mother at this point. His youngest son, Talo is only 4 years old. Atatar comes and mother Earlung gives him food because you food. Everybody he realizes is the mother of Chinggis Khan and that's the child of Chinggis Khan. He grabs him up and kidnaps him and runs out, and he's holding the child in one hand, and he's pulling out a knife with another hand. Al Thani raced out, and she grabbed his arm and held it down. And two men, Jeb and Jin, they were back behind the gear, slaughtering an ox with an axe. Because you have to do it in the shade behind the ger. You don't do it in the light. And so they were back there doing that. So they raced out with ax and they killed the man. And so then Genghis Khanu is rewarding everybody for all their great deeds. And Jelem and Jeb, they wanted to be rewarded for saving the life of Telomeres. He said, no, you killed the Tatar. Al Thani saved his life because she held a hand that had the knife until you got there to kill him. She saved it, and now we reward her. So he's finished that story in 2:14. We get to 215. He says, now, let us reward our daughters. It's actually only a phrase. I said, it's a complete sense, but it's not quite complete. The rest is gone, cut out. It's missing. And I was just so. And I looked at all these different translations of how to different language, and most often they translated as, and now let us marry our daughters. Oh, no. Oh, no. He was very clear in his wedding speeches to his daughters. I give these people to you to rule. You have three husbands, you have your honor, you have your nation, and you have the man that I give to you. But the man I give to you goes in the army with me and brings his soldiers to stay here and rule the people.
- [248:31]
Lex Friedman
Brilliant.
- [248:32]
Jack Weatherford
The Chinese, when they arrived in the court of Al Thani, they didn't know what to think. There she is ruling this area of the ongood people. And they said, well, she can read and write, and she's a supreme judge, and she doesn't allow any death sentence without her permission. But they didn't say which languages she could read and write. That has really puzzled me a lot.
- [248:53]
Lex Friedman
So you're saying the secret history as we have gotten access to has been edited to remove the significance of women, even though they're still there in that case.
- [249:07]
Jack Weatherford
I mean, other cases with his mother, they did not and all. But I think in that case, because what happened is most of these women had few offsprings because their husband was gone to war. And Al Thani, of course, she married several times, sometimes the sons of the last one, you know, but they were going off to war, and they weren't reproducing very only one Tsetaken, who was ruling in Siberia. She was the one who had a whole bunch of daughters. They wouldn't be going off to war. And so they actually spread out through the empire and had a lot of power later. But what happened was the area for Al Aqaybec, for example, was then taken over by Kublai Khan. And then the areas, all the Turkic areas, one by one, were taken over by their nephews as they died out. Not in their own lifetime. They didn't kill the women off, but as they died out, the men took it over. And so then they just wanted to kind of erase it. It's like, no Northern China, even though it was ruled by Sorakhtani, it always was Mongol. She was ruling because her husband was Mongol and her sons were Mongol. Therefore they had the right to rule it. So they cut out the women for those reasons. I think anytime it threatened the power of a particular man, then there are other little things that are added in there. Sometimes you can find a phrase, and.
- [250:31]
Lex Friedman
It'S like, this does not fit.
- [250:33]
Jack Weatherford
The phrase was not in the original.
- [250:35]
Lex Friedman
Yeah. In studying human history, what have you learned about human nature and just the trajectory of humanity throughout the past several millennia?
- [250:47]
Jack Weatherford
I tend to have a certain love for individuals and persons, but not a love for people in general and especially not for institutions. I tend to have a great suspicion about almost everything and mistrust in institutions over and over. And I think that's my own prejudice. And then I find reasons to support that. And Genghis Khan was very good at destroying a lot of institutions or bringing them to heel within his empire. So then I like that, and I stress that, and I see those things. I think that's one thing, but other things that I learned from the Mongol people in general, not just about their history and all, but how it's possible to live for thousands of years in a place that, for many people, is not the most beautiful in the world. It's austere. You have a band of mountains with some trees, and then big band of step, and then a big band of sand, gravel desert, the Gobi. And for many people, it's not appealing. It's just open. There's too much space. It's like, we need to build something over here. Boy, you could have a condo right there. We could have a building. We could sell them off and buy. You know, they haven't given in to that. They really value their country. They protect their country. Even now, only 1% is privately owned. They keep it down. And in the Mongolian records, farm and city count as one category. Cause it's settled people. It doesn't matter. You settle on a farm, you settle in a city. Settled people, one category. And they lived there in this land that Genghis Khan would return to and love. If he returned to the capital city, he would not know where he was. He would have no idea. And all the people would just say, oh, be Mongolhon. I'm Mongolia. Yeah, I'm Mongol. I have the hat, I have the belt buckle. I have the dell that's all embroidered, you know. Yeah, I'm Mongol. And Qingzhou say, where's your horse? Oh, keep it in the countryside, you know. But he wouldn't recognize the city. But it's still his country. His people, they worship him in a literal sense, not the way we would worship God asking for favors, but in the sense of worshiping him with praise. They have so many songs to praise him. And about half of the hip hop in the country is in praise of Genghis Khan. You know, it's something we can't understand, because when we pray, we're usually saying, you know, oh, thank you, God, for this and that and the other, and you're so wonderful, and I love you. So would you please give me and would you please do this? And would you please stop this pain in my knee? We're asking for things all over the place, but Singh is Han. No, no. No one ever asks for anything. They just honor him. They just praise him and honor him.
- [253:47]
Lex Friedman
If I wanted to visit Mongolia, what would you recommend? What's the right way?
- [253:53]
Jack Weatherford
Well, start with my home. Let's start there. You come over there. It's a nice valley. I have a nice valley there. I think almost any direction you go outside of the city is going to be interesting. It kind of depends a little bit on your purpose. Most people go south to the Gobi, and they do a loop to the Gobi and around to Karakorom. Hakhor in the old capital, from Ogudeihan, but it was abandoned by Kublai Khan. And then they circle back to the city, and they may stop off to see what we call Prezewalski, the wild horse. But they talk qach takhi to see the takhi. Or they may go up to Hovskull Lake, a big, beautiful lake, somewhat like Baikal, but much smaller. So that's a beautiful trip if you want to see the more Turkic area where they hunt with eagles. The far west is where the Kazakh people live, and the Mountains are absolutely incredibly beautiful. Most mountains in Mongolia are gentle, beautiful, but gentle. The farther west you go, the more dramatic they become, the more pointed and peaked and snow covered. Then if you go to the eastern Mongolia, it tends to be very flat. There are massive, massive flocks of cranes that come in every year, millions and millions of cranes. There are also tundra swans that come in and golden ducks and all kinds of beautiful birds out there. So each area has something special if you want, particularly the history of Genghis Khan. The Mongolians love him, they worship him, but they don't do too much to capitalize on his home area, the Hinti. You can go to the Hinti. There are areas you cannot go to. Large, large areas, it's forbidden, but you can go. But they don't capitalize like, this is the place. No, they go there themselves out of respect. But the only one place, they've built this statue of him, which is the largest equestrian statue in the world. But it's the place where they say he found his whip, which is when he was coming back from being at the camp of asking or Torgle Khan or Vang Khan to support him. And he's coming back to his family, and on the way he supposedly found a whip there, which is just a small stick with a couple of strands of rawhide at the end of it that's used. But for the Mongolians, it's a symbolic thing because obviously it's used for a horse. But for the Mongols, your destiny yourself is your himor, your wind horse that lives inside of you, your wind horse that guides you and gives you opportunities. But it's up to you to ride that wind horse. It's up to you to use the wind horse, not to just go wild with the wind horse. And so I think it's at that crucial moment he's on his way back home to go with Jamilka and the other soldiers to the market to rescue Birsta. And so symbolically, he found a whip there. But I think it means that he found the way to control his destiny, his fate. That's very important, very important.
- [257:25]
Lex Friedman
And that he did. That was the beginning of everything.
- [257:28]
Jack Weatherford
Yes. And it's symbolized in that statue. Some people think that he's holding this stick, that it's a baton or something like that. But no, it's that what they call the whip or tussur.
- [257:40]
Lex Friedman
We've talked a lot about the past. If we look out into the future, what gives you hope for human civilization, for us humans?
- [257:50]
Jack Weatherford
Well, almost every day I'M totally dissatisfied with everything on earth. You know, it's just that kind of old man. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What are they talking about? My grandchildren are talking to me. I don't understand a word they say. What are they? What and who are they talking about? I never heard of this. You know, it's kind of like that. And who's running for office? Oh, my God. Oh, my God. You know, it's everything like that. But then almost every day I meet somebody, just one person, you know, who gives you some kind of hope. You just see somebody doing something nice or they do something nice for you. And I do find in Asia that happens a lot, you know, that people just do nice things for old people every day. And so then my dissatisfaction with all the big things in the world and the way my grandchildren talk and the way young people are. And then I see something like that. And often it's something with the young people, something that the young people do. And in an Asia, they're always bringing me things. They bring me dried curds, they bring me strawberries that they picked in the forest in the summer, or they bring the pine nuts that they found, or they bring me the milk in various forms. Or yogurt. Oh, yeah, everybody thinks you got to eat the yogurt. This is from my grandmother. And all the other yogurt in the world is not good. But my grandmother, she knows how to make the best yogurt ever. And so over and over and over, I find, despite my all intentions, to be in a bad mood. Somebody spoils it with these little nice acts that are really very touching. Very touching.
- [259:48]
Lex Friedman
Yeah. And it reminds you that there's that little flame of goodness that burns in everybody. I believe that that, on the whole, will keep humanity flourishing and keep evolving and changing towards something better with every generation.
- [260:06]
Jack Weatherford
Yes, the people in Mongolia take such good care of me all the time. All the time. And I think my wife had Ms. I've talked about this before sometimes. She had Ms. And slowly declined for many years, becoming paralyzed, not able to speak, not able to control her movements or anything. And we lived half the year still in Mongolia. Part of it was because the climate and the altitude were better for her situation. It was very helpful for her. But also the people. There was a poor country, the sidewalks are broken, everything's not working. But I would go out with her in a wheelchair alone. And I knew that every bump, some arm would pick her up and pick up the wheelchair and lift her over that and not make me do it. We could go to the opera. And you had to go up this magnificent set of Soviet stairs to get to the opera. You know, we would go, and I had no worries. I knew two guys would come from one side, two guys from the other side. They would carry on. And they do not say, excuse me, may I help you? They do not wait for you to say thank you. Nothing. They just do it and they walk away. They have such respect. Singers would come there all the time to sing, to warm up the house for my wife. And even dancers would come sometimes to dance or play the horsehead fiddle. Morinhur. To play that, to warm up the house for her, to see how they treated a totally disabled person. And if I was feeding my wife and anybody saw it, they would come and immediately take over and start feeding her in their place. Children would come up to her. In America, they're often afraid they see somebody in a wheelchair. You know, they just kind of look. They don't know what to do. But over there, the children would always come to her. Always. They were very kind. You just learn something about the people and living there in a country where you. Out in the countryside, you come to a ger. You never ask for permission to go in. You certainly don't knock on the door frame. That's. No, that's hugely offensive. And you ask. It's like insulting the people. Like what? You're not good, hospitable people. I have to ask you for something. No. You walk in and you sit down and they fix food for you. It's an incredible thing. And these are the things that give me hope. It's no institution in the world. Not the big things and not the pop culture and not all the platitudes. Oh, my God, save us from the platitudes of modern life, you know.
- [262:48]
Lex Friedman
Yeah, it's true.
- [262:51]
Jack Weatherford
It's the family that will fix tea for you and two in the morning, because there was a flash flood and you got stuck and now you're cold and wet and they build a fire and take care of you. Or you just show up and you make camp somewhere. If you have your own tent. And I swear, within one hour, some child is going to be there with water and milk. You think, where did you come from? But the mother sent them over. Oh, there's somebody over there in the forest. They believe that they're obligated to take care of one another. Anybody in your area, you take care of them. And things like that. Individuals do give me hope. People, one by one, or a few at a Time. Even though I'm lost in the modern world.
- [263:37]
Lex Friedman
Well, I'm glad you find your way. You mentioned that your wife is no longer with us. What's a favorite memory you have with her?
- [263:52]
Jack Weatherford
Well, I could tell you a favorite picture is a lake we used to go to called Oginur in the middle. And somebody, a very nice friend, took a picture of us towards the end. We're just sitting there watching the sunset over the lake that we've been to many, many times in life. And, you know, she's holding. She. We're holding hands. She's in the chair, paralyzed. And we're just sitting there staring off in the distance, you know, that's one of my favorites. But with my wife, I was just blessed with a good wife. That was exciting. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever met in my whole life. She was smart. She would talk to people about anything. She talked about jazz or physics or art. I mean, my life is so small and narrow. But my wife, she's the one who gave me a life. The truth is a very odd people don't believe sometimes. I failed English in college. I barely got in college. Nobody in my family. I'd grown up with my grandparents, mostly countryside, and they had third grade education. My father had seventh grade and I went to live with him after the grandparents died and my mother. There was no big education there in the family, but I somehow got to college. My father told me to go. He didn't want me to go to the war in Vietnam. So he volunteered to go because there was the rule that they. They couldn't send two people from one family against their will. That was mainly designed to protect brothers. But he could go as the father, and then I could go to college, you know. So I got to college and I can't say, oh, I was drinking and having a party and. Not serious, no, I was trying like hell to pass that course. I failed English. I failed it. And this was just a huge shame to me. In fact, after one year, I was put on probation to be kicked out of the school.
- [265:49]
Lex Friedman
School.
- [265:49]
Jack Weatherford
My grades were so low overall, you know, and then. So it took me a long time to confess this to my wife after we met. You know, I met her. I briefly had known her in high school, but just not well or anything. But anyway, we met later and I told her, and she just looked at me. She said, what does a professor know? It's just a professor. You can write anything you want. And she had the power to make me believe everything she said. I Don't care what she said. I would believe it. And I would say, yeah, that's right. That's just a professor. Yeah. And she inspired me, but she also. She supported me all the way through graduate school. She was taking some courses of her own, and she was doing graduate work, but she inspired me. But she told me, I said, I want to write for more people than just for other scholars. I've done this dissertation, a PhD and it's just dry as the so Gobi Desert. And I didn't know what to do. And she said, just tell the story to me. But I can't see you while you tell it. You're on the radio and I'm listening in my car, driving somewhere. Just tell the story to me. And to this day, almost every word I write is always, just tell the story to her the way that she would like it. And I always read the books to her, even she couldn't comprehend too much, you know, but she just loved hearing the book because it was mine. And, you know, in the last years of her life, I gave up the teaching and we went back to our original home in South Carolina. And I said, okay, we're just going to live here and watch the ocean and do things like that and just be. Be worthless teenagers. And my wife used to have episodes of clarity. I have no idea what caused. I mean, it might be two hours, it might be seven or eight hours. And we would talk a lot. And so one time she said to me, she said, this disease is going to take my life, but it's taking your life. She said, you gave up teaching and you gave up writing. She said, how do you expect me to die in peace if I know that you gave up everything to this disease? She said, you should write. And so every single day, we sat together by the water. I mean, by the window. I moved it into the dining room overlooking the water. We sat there at the desk, and she sat in her wheelchair next to me. Sometimes we would play a little soft music in the background a little bit. And for the most part, she couldn't talk. But she liked to just sit there beside me, working. And she knew that she was the inspiration. She knew she was the battery that kept me going. You know, how on earth I ever had a wife like that? I don't know.
- [269:06]
Lex Friedman
That's beautiful, Jack. That's really beautiful.
- [269:09]
Jack Weatherford
You know, I just hit the jackpot with her. And I see so many people that get by, and they even like each other or they're friends or something, but in my life, There was one person. I love my children. I still do. I love my grandchildren, even though I don't understand them. But there's one person in my life, and that was my wife for 44 years. And her funeral was on our anniversary. That's just the way life works out, you know? But I was very lucky. Very lucky.
- [269:47]
Lex Friedman
If the two of you lived and met a few centuries ago, I might be reading a history book about you conquering.
- [269:56]
Jack Weatherford
No, no, no.
- [269:57]
Lex Friedman
And if she said, you know, you should do this, maybe you would.
- [270:02]
Jack Weatherford
If she said it, I probably would have believed it.
- [270:05]
Lex Friedman
Exactly. Exactly.
- [270:06]
Jack Weatherford
She was too busy enjoying the world. And, you know, in her final, I could not ask her questions, and I would not say, oh, you remember that? No, I never would say that because I knew she could remember. But when she was being restless or something in the night or. I used to cite scenes from our life and just give the scene without saying, do you remember? But the last night, I certainly didn't know that she was going. But it was a rough night. And we went back to the first night that we had in Moscow. We came in December, in the winter, and the snow was so beautiful and white and the yellow lights shining on it. And then the most beautiful night, we went to the Bolshoi. And she had this elegant blue wool coat from her grandmother from the 1920s with a huge. It's so ironic. It was a blue wolf, but it's gray blue, like the Mongol heads. Gray blue collar, this huge collar. She just looked like a movie star from the 20s or something. And we went to see Maya Plisetskaya, and it was one of the most beautiful nights. But her last night, I told her that story again, you know, of all the details. I'd gone through it many times, but her coat from her grandmother, whom she loved very much, and the snow and the yellow lights. And we arrived at night because, of course, the flight was late, and then the next night, going to the Bolshoi and all those beautiful things from Russia. So that was it. She was an inspiration. I have many, many nights or many days of great memories, you know.
- [272:02]
Lex Friedman
You're gonna make me cry, Jack.
- [272:03]
Jack Weatherford
Oh, no.
- [272:04]
Lex Friedman
That was beautiful. You're a beautiful human being. It's. It's really an honor to talk to you. This was such a fascinating journey through human history about one of the most impactful humans in human history.
- [272:18]
Jack Weatherford
Well, I thank you very much. And the amount of research. When I realized how much research you had done, I felt like, you're going to know things I don't know and you're going to trick me and pull something out and I'm going to be shamed in front of the whole world.
- [272:32]
Lex Friedman
There's only one piece of research left is me going to Mongolia and riding there on the step. That would be. That would be incredible.
- [272:40]
Jack Weatherford
So come, come.
- [272:42]
Lex Friedman
I will. Thank you so much for talking today, Jack.
- [272:45]
Jack Weatherford
Thank you.
- [272:47]
Lex Friedman
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jack Weatherford. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now let me answer some questions and try to articulate some things I've been thinking about. If you would like to submit questions, including in audio and video form, go to lexfriedman.com ama or if you want to contact me for other reasons, go to lexfreedman.com contact and now allow me to make a few comments on the ever evolving moral landscape of human civilization throughout our 10,000 year history. I was listening to Dan Carlin's excellent eye opening five and a half hour episode of Hardcore History. Titled Human Resources. It covered the topic of slavery, the Atlantic slave trade to be exact. One of the lessons I took from this episode is that the long arc of history is full of atrocities as we modern day humans understand them with the wisdom of time and moral progress. But during each period of history, as Dan documents, it was difficult for the majority of people to see just where the line between good and evil is. We humans, after all, forever like to weave a story in which we are the good guys. Listening to Dan discuss, and later myself reading first hand accounts of slaves, of torture, of rape, of separation of families, is incomprehensibly heartbreaking. By the way, on this topic, firsthand accounts of slavery can be read in Slave A Folk History of Slavery in the United States. From interviews with former slaves, I can recommend the book that I've been reading, which is Voices from A Hundred Authentic Slave Narratives. It all seems deeply and obviously wrong by today's standards, but slavery was seen as normal through most of human history. Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote All Men Are Created Equal, which I think is one of the most powerful lines in all of human history. He himself was a slave owner, making him a fascinating case study of contradictions. In fact, there's evidence that Thomas Jefferson drew from Genghis Khan's ideas about the importance of religious freedom, pulling as he did foundational ideas of human freedom from the jaws of deep history. And Dan in his episode, documents these contradictions and complexities quite well. The full range of human psychology involved, including how violations of basic human rights breed generational hatred. This, I think, is an important lesson to understand. The consequences of our moral failings can reverberate through decades, even centuries. And that is perhaps one of the values of studying history. It is laden with atrocities, but it also contains people who, while flawed, dare to rise in some way above the moral decrepitude of the day to try to build a foundation of a slightly better future world. As MLK Jr put it, the arc of moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. And now, please allow me to say a few words about Gaza, Israel, in Palestine. I'm not sure I'm eloquent enough or know quite the right words to express what I'm feeling, but let me try. I think what is happening in Gaza is an atrocity, and I think that the Israeli government is directly responsible for it. And to the degree the US government is assisting the Israeli government in this, which I believe it currently is, it needs to stop immediately. For me, as an American, it makes me sick to know that my government has any role in this atrocity. This needs to stop. Yes, there's geopolitical and military complexity, nuance and historical context that I'm told by some so called experts that one must understand. And perhaps they are smarter than me. But like mentioned before, unlike the moral complexity of deep history that I've often spoken about, from the Roman Empire to the Atlantic slave trade, this is the 21st century, this is today. In this, the 21st century, I see things quite simply and clearly. To me, the death of a child is a tragedy. It doesn't matter what their skin color is, what their religion is, or what plot of land they call home. In my view, they are all equal and the death of each child is a tragedy. Hamas did a definitively evil act on October 7, brutally murdering over 1,000 civilians. But now the acts of war conducted by the Israeli government have led to the death of over 60,000 people in Gaza, likely over 80,000 people, of which at least 17,000 are children. 17,000. I'm not smart enough to know the path to peace and flourishing of all the peoples in the region. But I do know that what has been happening in Gaza cannot be the way suffering at this kind of scale breeds generational hate that leads to more evil in the world, not less, to more destruction, to more suffering. This has to stop. Two years ago, I spoke with many Palestinians in the west bank on camera and off. There's a video of it up if you want to hear their voices for yourselves. It was a deeply moving experience for me and I'm grateful for it. In the future, I hope to find a way to talk to people in Gaza. I still think it's valuable to talk to leaders, historians, soldiers, activists from all perspectives. But the most powerful and moving conversations for me, on mic and off, have always been with everyday people. This always felt like where the truth is the deeper truth of life, of pain, fear, of hope. And I still have hope. I believe we humans are good at the core and I know we'll find our way. Thank you for listening. I love you all.