Lex Fridman: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, that’s right. ‘Cause not only do you get paid very, you’re compensated very well obviously for defending the emperor, particularly if you do a good job, but you also have opportunities ’cause the emperor sends you, “Let’s go attack, you know, this tribe,” and you get to keep whatever you take. So there’s tremendous amounts of war profiteering you can accomplish. And the other great river system, the Volga, that brings you to the great enemy of the Byzantines, the Abbasid Caliphate. And they had a lot of trading links with the north. So you get things like fur and amber, lots of slaves from the Islamic world going up. You even have in a Swedish coin hoard, there’s a Buddha that’s been found. I mean… it’s Sweden. Yeah. So these networks of trade, just how incredible are they with geography, right? You can transform your understanding of land from the geography of the land to the geography of the river networks, because the way they raid and then invade and then conquer England is through the rivers. It’s an incredibly different way of seeing the world. Yeah. And if you look at the kingdoms the Vikings created, I’m thinking particularly of like Eric Blood-Axe in, you know, in York, he’s controlling parts of Ireland, parts of Scotland, Wales, England. Like there’s no… That doesn’t make sense unless you’re a Viking. You know, he’s… That also added tremendously to the terror that the Vikings brought, because I mean you should probably be a little careful with absolute statements here, but I can’t think of a major European city that’s not on a river. Which meant now with the Vikings, ’cause they could travel up, you know, rivers, the shallow rivers and then carry their boats whenever, everything was on the table now, even hundreds of miles inland is on the table.…

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