Evidence receipt / uncertainty
Published · transcript-backedJack Weatherford: uncertainty
1 Aug 2025 Lex Fridman Podcast #476 – Jack Weatherford: Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire
“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.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Jack Weatherford
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- uncertainty
- Recorded
- 1 Aug 2025
- Publisher
- Lex Fridman Podcast
Transcript context
…And how do they communicate? Are they using the postal service? You have to literally deliver the letters? Over time, those groups started intermarrying, 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. And we should maybe briefly mentioned Marco Polo that you’ve talked about. So he’s this now famous explorer that traversed the continent, the Silk Road, and then stayed with Kublai Khan for a while. And I guess is one of the primary documenters of everything that’s been going on. Is there something else interesting to say about Marco Polo and about his interaction with Kublai Khan?…
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