How did a few hundred Spanish soldiers topple two empires? – Si Sheppard

Okay, today I'm chatting with Professor and military historian Sy Shepherd. I want to talk to you about the conquest of the Aztec and the Inca empires because these are some of the most shocking events in human history, um, unparalleled among all the military and diplomatic achievements ever made. You have a few hundred conquistadors show up

to a new continent they know nothing about and within a matter of years they subjugate empires which have millions of inhabitants in them. In the process of doing so, they are often winning battles where they are outnumbered 100x to 1, 1000x to 1, and in many cases not even taking a single casualty. They're doing

this while upwards of 99% of their fighting forces are made up of the very natives that they're going to subjugate. And I wanted to have you on to talk about this episode. We're not going to focus on the we're mostly talking about history here, but people think of AI takeover as this crazy sci-fi scenario,

but this would not be the first time in history that an alien force with motivations that the natives don't understand is able to use diplomatic cunning and technological advantages to outmaneuver and then take over a much larger and well-established order. And so I wanted to have you on to understand what happened here. So first, I would

love to hear the story as of what did Cortez do? What did Pizarro do? How did these conquests actually go down? Okay. >> Thank you. It's a great place to be here and yes, we're talking about the birth of our modern world which played out between 600 to 500 years ago and created

the modern globalized community that we all participate in today. It began in the 15th century when Europe, backed up against the wall of the Atlantic, under immense pressure from external forces, and cut off from the core economic power bases of the East, the sources of the spice and silk that had driven the