Foreign travelers and traders, including Scandinavians, would've been very familiar.

They've been wrecking Britain for so long.

They know where everything is, and actually now is the time to start going and cashing in on all that knowledge.

And in the centuries preceding the Viking Age, questing for treasure was already a part of a storytelling culture.

Treasure is guarded by dragons, can only be won by deep cunning, bravery, and any attempt to steal treasure will be met with the vengeance of a god.

Unlike Scandinavian treasure, the treasures held by the monks, that treasure is not guarded by dragons.

It's guarded by prematurely balding men dressed in monk's habits, not carrying swords, with no combat training at all.

How did you choose which ones to do? Because Doomsday, as we know, covers most of the country and there's a few entries missing.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, having done quite a lot of walking for writing in the past, I know that there are two sort of main factors.

One, I wanted to travel through landscapes on foot that I didn't know that well on foot.

I thought that was important.

So I really wanted to walk out of Lincolnshire into the fens across into Norfolk.

I just thought I really want to do that.

What was your favourite interaction with someone whilst walking the England of the Norman Conquest?

So let's talk about the timeline a little bit.

Of course, of course.

So I'll separate that out a little bit.

I'll talk about what's happening today, and I'll give you some historical context.

So the first thing that I'll say is recruiting happens earlier than almost any family actually expects.

And so if you're a high school senior or college freshman or something like that, and you think, oh, I've got a lot of time before recruiting starts, like...

Not really.

But is it more important to kind of build a broad foundation first or kind of dive into everything?

But I like it

poetically.

Okay, the early medieval, right? You can have the Dark Ages up to about 600.

Okay.

After that, it's no longer dark because we have Bede.

Right.

We have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Bede tells us about

Despite their plundering, Cuthbert's body survived, and with it, perhaps the greatest treasure, at least that we know of, that the Vikings never stole.

This extraordinary, exquisite little object, no more than two, two and a half inches across, is Cuthbert's personal possession.

His pectoral cross worn about his neck on a, on a chain.

And its remarkable survival to this day is due, part coincidence, part just good luck, I suppose, to the fact that it was wrapped beneath several layers of shroud, and it wasn't found until the 1830s when it was finally opened and the shroud was unwrapped.

And it is a remarkable, unique survival of seventh-century craftsmanship and of Cuthbert's own personal physical presence in the world.

Now we can only guess at exactly why the raids began when they did.

Vast amounts of treasure from the British Isles end up in Scandinavia.

Some of it's lost, some of it's hidden and then never recovered, some of it buried in graves.

But is there still hope to have a great investment banking career, a great private equity career if you didn't get started as a freshman? There, there must be, but, but you face different challenges, don't you?

you?Absolutely, and it's, a- a- it's always harder but never impossible is the way I describe it.

And so I'm, I'm one of those optimists who, like, I love to help students, and if there's someone who's really determined and they just have a weird profile, they're, you know, already graduated, low GPA, bad school, like I don't care, I love to help them.

If they're determined, you can usually find a way.

But it gets harder.

And so what I usually do when I'm working with, uh, juniors and seniors a- and, uh, people who've already graduated is I say, "There's, there's two options that you have left from here." The first is to re-recruit after the junior summer internship, and this is like a, a little-known cycle within investment banking and private equity recruiting where a lot of the jobs come from the internship, like 80% or 90%, but there's a little bit of liquidity in the hiring market after the junior summer internship where you get to play this fun game of musical chairs for two or three weeks where a couple [laughs] of the banks say, "Hey, we need to, like, hire someone else," or, "We didn't give return offers, and therefore we've gotta get a little bit." The second path that I, I help students with once they're already graduated or something like that is, uh, is the post-graduation lateral or MBA route.

And so if they lateral, it's basically like just get them the best finance job that they can and then, you know, build those relationships, try and network and hustle your way in and convince someone to take a shot on you at, like, a regional boutique bank, or go back and get an MBA, do the traditional MBA on cycle and recruiting.

Uh, g- g- g- 'cause we see the whole mix of this, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on what does effective networking feel like and look like.