#495 – Vikings, Ragnar, Berserkers, Valhalla & the Warriors of the Viking Age

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Lars Brownworth, a historian and author of many excellent history books, including The Sea Wolves, A History of the Vikings, and The Normans, From Raiders to Kings. He's also the host of two history podcast series, the first called 12 Byzantine Rulers, The History of the Byzantine Empire, is one of the first, if not the first ever history podcast launched over 20 years ago in June 2005 His second series, Norman Centuries, explores the remarkable rise of the Normans from Viking raiders to the rulers of kingdoms stretching from England to Sicily. In this conversation, we focused primarily on the Vikings, the seafaring Norse warriors and explorers who over a period of just 300 years, reshaped the medieval world and the trajectory of Western civilization as we know it. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Larridin for understanding how AI is used in your business, BetterHelp for mental health, Elements for electrolytes, Fin for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Replexity for curiosity driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, Larridin. It's a platform that helps organizations understand how AI is being used across their businesses, and it's helping said businesses figure out what the actual bottom line for productivity and performance is for the people that are using AI in the way that they're using AI. I would love to have this run in my own life because there's been a very significant transformation in how I interact with computers period, but also how I program, how I think about computers, how I think about programs, how I think about code, how I think about the integration of code into my own life. I think my productivity has increased significantly. I have many agents running on many machines in the cloud. I'm trying to figure out how to balance between productivity on multiple tasks and deep focus on understanding what it takes to take that programmatic task to a completion where it's actually working, where it's autonomous or semi-autonomous, and it's actually getting stuff done that is helpful to me. So if AI is part of your organization, now is the moment to organize it, to measure it, to maximize the productivity, head to larridin.com to book a demo and to start maximizing impact from AI. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P help. Boy, did I have an incredible conversation about psychiatry. I have been learning so much about the history of psychiatry and it is so fascinating. It is another way to think about the human mind, not studying what we know today, from neuroscience, from neurobiology, from psychology, from psychiatry, from biomedical sciences, bioengineering, from biology, all of that. No, looking at what we know through the lens of history, because that is one of the clearest ways to reveal just how tricky the human mind is and just how many times the scientific process, quote unquote, especially when politicized, let us astray. I think one of the things that people have figured out that talk therapy works and the different manifestations of it, and I think that's what BetterHelp does well. It makes that process accessible, easy, discrete, affordable, available everywhere. Check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. I'm drinking it right now. I've been running relatively long distance, sometimes walking, just putting in the miles, putting in the steps almost every single day, except when there's hard jiu-jitsu training sessions. So I'm training basically every day, just to escape the chaos of my own mind. And so for that, you have to get electrolytes ahead of time. You have to replenish the electrolytes after the training, after the difficult run, especially as it gets warmer and warmer. Anyway, Element makes me happy. They've been there all along for a long time. Sodium, potassium, magnesium, delicious watermelon salt flavor. I love it. Get a free eight count sample pack with any purchase. Try it at www.drinklmnt.com/lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Fin, the number one AI agent for customer service. This is the thing that's tricky to figure out, is when the AI systems have to interact, collaborate together with humans to figure out a difficult problem. In some sense, that's what programming is about, but with programming, I think there's a bit more room for rigor and formalization, less sort of squishy human stuff. Although I think people don't quite realize how much humanness is even in code. Anyway, that's programming. In customer service, there's more squishy stuff, so it's a trickier problem, it's a harder problem, but it's an important problem for every business, because understanding each individual customer's pain and figuring out, helping them figure out how to solve it, is a really, really, really important puzzle. 6,000 customer service leaders and top companies trust Fin, use Fin. Maybe you should consider them as well. Go to fin.ai.lex to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team. That's fin.ai.lex.