Hey 👋🏼

I’m working on a big episode this week about J Robert Oppenheimer, the man who led the American project to invent the atomic bomb. In the meantime, I thought I’d offer a couple of thoughts about some research I did a while ago.

Unexpected Discovery

The podcast is called How to Take Over the World. So who actually has the best claim to having taken over the world? I think there is an answer that is obviously correct, and we know about it because of the man in the picture above, William Jones.

William was the son of a mathematician. He had a love of languages and learned Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew at an early age.

At 37 years old, he was appointed to be a judge in India, where he familiarized himself with Sanskrit, the legal language of India. (Sanskrit is roughly to India what Latin is to Europe.)

While studying Sanskrit, William began to notice some funny things. The word for mother was matr. The word for brother was brhatar. Birth was bhrtih. The list went on and on. Most words in Sanskrit did not have English cognates, but there were enough to suggest that there was definitely some sort of relationship.

William Jones was the first man to suggest the existence of an Indo-European language group (sort of), and therefore an Indo-European people.

He suggested that Sanskrit was brought to India by a group of invaders.

The Aryans

We now know these people as the Aryans or the Proto-Indo-Europeans for those who get squeamish about sounding too much like Nazis.

Starting in a small region in Ukraine or southern Russia, they quickly expanded and invaded almost all of Europe, the Indian subcontinent, parts of the Middle East and North Africa, and even small parts of East Asia and Subsaharan Africa.

Wherever they want, they took over, established social castes with themselves at the top, imposed their language, and in many cases replaced the existing population.

There has never been anything like it. I think these people have the

So How Did They Do It?

So how did this remote group of people literally take over the world? Initially, the thought was technological innovation. The main suspect was chariots.

Scholars have changed their thinking since then. They now tend to point to the Kóryos as the main reason for Proto-Indo-European expansion. What is a Koryos?

There was a practice in Indo-European societies that young landless men would be cast out from society at a certain age.

They were beyond the bounds of the law for that period of time and were expected to subsist by hunting and raiding neighboring tribes.

These Koryos encouraged the skills necessary to invade neighbors, and helped form bands of young men who could call on each other for such adventures.

So why do I bring all of this up? How can I turn this interesting historical fact into a banal business observation? Well, let me tell you, today is not the day I disappoint.

My biggest takeaway is this: The innovation that led to the greatest conquest in history was not technological, but cultural.

Culture is what drives incredible achievement and innovation. Whether that is scientific, technological, political, artistic, or any other type of achievement.

As Peter Thiel said: “Your company doesn’t have a culture. Your company is a culture.”

[By the way, if you want to learn more about the Proto-Indo-Europeans, I really enjoyed this book called The Ancient City]

Thanks for reading. Horatio Nelson Part 2 drops tomorrow. I hope you enjoy it.