Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…I’m a romantic, so I, when I read history, I usually end up rooting for the losers. I want Harold Godwinson to beat William the Conqueror. You know, I want Hector to beat Achilles. Never works, no matter how many times I read it. But I was always interested in the Normans because of the Norman conquest of England. And I have a twin brother, and he asked me, we were taking a walk and he asked me, “How did Europe…” Because I was reading about the Dark Ages at the time, the early Middle Ages. “And how did Europe, this kind of backwards place, become the dominant-“ “… force in the world?” And I started thinking about that, and my answer really is the Normans. The Normans, that’s the great change between Europe as a backwards, inward-looking place, and Europe as a kind of confident, outward-looking place. And that change happens under the Normans. I mean, the Normans, it’s not a coincidence that they lead the charge in the First Crusade. They create the state of England. If you look at England before the Vikings arrive, there are seven, it’s the Heptarchy, there are seven kingdoms in England, and the Vikings destroyed all but one. Only Wessex is preserved, and they’ve conquered about half of Wessex. And there’s a young king. What’s he gonna do? But that king is Alfred the Great, and he conquers the rest. And then his grandson, Athelstan, is the first man called King of England, king of all Angles. And then they do the same thing almost wherever they go. They help create modern France by ripping apart Charlemagne’s empire, which was unwieldy. It looked good on paper, but it was unwieldy. It was replaced by this leaner, meaner, compact thing. They figure out how to deal with the Vikings by essentially building fortified bridges, changes to their army, and so forth. The Vikings, I like to call it creative destruction. They, by destroying the things they destroyed, they cleared the ground for something stronger to grow. That’s brilliant. The creative destruction engine that created Europe was the Normans and the Vikings. And then you also, you have another book that talks about the Byzantine Empire, so you have the creative destruction that resulted in Europe, that Europe led to this Western, quote-unquote, civilization that we think of now. And the thing that protected Europe for centuries was the existence of the Byzantine Empire, the East Roman Empire, because of all the threats- … That came towards Europe. This strong, stable empire that is the Byzantine Empire protected the forces from everything that came from the east. They were a buffer. They were a buffer, giving Europe this kind of vital time to develop the way it needed to develop.…

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