QUESTION HISTORY

“The accumulation of knowledge was controlled by the state, not only because it was a unitary state, but also because it had chosen a very meritocratic procedure for selecting public administrators, the bureaucracy, which is a good thing. But the meritocracy took the form of a centralized exam. The state tested you on your knowledge of classical Confucian doctrine. So the knowledge that was diffused and accumulated in China was not useful scientific knowledge. It was really produced in order to pass this exam.”

“Because the resistance failed if we're looking at it in black and white. The republic fell. There wasn't a republic anymore. There was a duke. He took over. The old system was gone. But because the republic fought so hard and because the people really believed in it, the people had a lot more rights. And the tyrant was a lot less tyrannical because there had been that fight. It's a great example of how even when resistance loses, resistance wins.”

“Wilson is drinking a lot. So Bernard on whose diaries from 1975 often describe him drinking four or five glasses of brandy or whiskey at lunch, especially when he's got to go, you know, to the commons and argue with Margaret Thatcher.”

“And this is particularly true under Xi Jinping. I think before the emergence of Xi Jinping as a leader, China was not as hierarchical, not as closed. The choice of leadership was really meritocratic, also at the very top level. Now the system has become much more personalized. There will be a succession problem when Xi Jinping has to give up, and for age-related reasons, his control over China. And in a system where control remains so personalized, the possibility of mistakes becomes higher, and the visibility of radical innovation, of course, is diminished.”

“You're Gutenberg. You have figured out how to produce 300 copies of a book for the cost of one copy of a book. You do so. You print your Bible. You have 300 Bibles. You sell seven of them to the seven people in your small landlocked German town who are legally allowed to read the Bible in a period in which only priests are allowed to read the Bible. Congratulations, mister Gutenberg. You have 293 bibles, and you can't sell them, and you go bankrupt.”

“So you're on your way to this matchlessly filthy dive of scum and villainy. And then you approach the city, and there are these statues. And they look like ancient statues, the kind that are so lifelike that it's as if they're about to breathe and move. You've never seen an intact new statue like that. That isn't something we know how to do. And you ride through the city a bit, and it's a large impressive city. And you get to the cathedral. It has this massive dome, way bigger than anything you've ever seen except for old Roman ruins.”

“Then we get to, the propagators of Bacon's scientific method, meaning Voltaire and Montesquieu, who are also big campaigners for inoculation against smallpox. Pamphlets are much faster, much harder to censor. When Luther makes the 95 theses public, they're in print in London in seventeen days after he releases them in Wittenberg because the pamphlet runners go voom, voom, voom, and get the news there, and things are printed overnight, and come out that fast.”

“Because they saw themselves as guarantors of truth and of accuracy and information. And so they decided after Galileo that they had a duty to verify the truth of the books that they were sent to censor, And that if people were going to be doing mechanical experiments, they needed to repeat the mechanical experiments to see whether they were true. So they effectively the inquisition invented peer review, which is to say they invented a second laboratory trying to recreate the results of the first. And they're these amazing people who by day are inquisitors and by night are going home to write their own scientific treatises as they do these experiments.”

“Wage labor was the dominant form of production in agriculture in England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. If you think about an entrepreneur who pays wages and who decides on how and on what to invest, clearly he has strong incentives to invest in labor-saving innovations, because if he can enact these labor-saving innovations, he can substitute workers with machine and produce at a lower cost. In China, instead, the production was organized not through farms, but often through within extended families. Because if I introduce a machine that replaces workers, I still have to take care of the survival of these family members that are employed as workers.”

“Well, I'll quote Henry Kissinger. We have an Oval Office transcript from January 1975. Henry Kissinger is talking to Gerald Ford, president Ford. He says, Britain is a tragedy. It has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing until North Sea oil comes in. That Britain has become such a scrounger is a disgrace.”

“Whatever they're looking at, They're always wrong from our perspective about what they should be worried about. Right? If we had a time machine and our goal is to, like, go give them advice. So here we are in the French enlightenment. Voltaire and Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade and La Mettrie's articulations of materialist atheism are flying around Europe. And what is the inquisition worried about? It's worried about Jansenist treatises about the nature of the trinity.”

“I would I would tell you what happened. She decides to write a biography about Paul. She names it Paul Robeson, comma, Negro. It's written in the third person to make it seem more scholarly. And on the surface, it reads like a loving tribute to his life and accomplishments. But if you read between the lines, she's calling him lazy. She says that she has to constantly chase after him to get him to rehearse and be a professional. She says that he is barely interested in Pauley. She calls him a massive flirt who is not cheating on her, but if he did cheat on her, he would never leave her.”

“Wilson's other aids, genuinely contemplated murdering her. So Wilson's doctor, Lord Stone, went to Haines and Donoghue and said, look, I can dispose of her, and I will sign the death certificate nobody will ever know.”

“Paul is in Moscow. He's entertaining in his hotel room, and some uninvited guests arrive. Then Esi, who's back in London, gets a call telling her that Paul is in the hospital. She rushes to Paul's side and is told that at some point during or after this party, Paul went into his bathroom and slit his wrists. He says that he finds compelling evidence that the CIA and British intelligence may have conspired to administer LSD and mind control and chemical interrogation research program known as MK Ultra.”

“Chinese society became organized in clans, in large lineages, which performed the same functions as the European corporation, but they were different in that the same organization produced sustained cooperation in many domains. So, you had a single clan that settled disputes, organized the religious ceremonies to honor your ancestors. It provided this settlement of disputes, it facilitated trade, and provided a variety of public goods. Whereas in Europe, you had a plethora of different corporations, once one for each purpose.”

“Petrarch thought he would make a world which shared his values. Instead, he made a world that doesn't share his values, but that is capable of curing a disease he never imagined would be curable. And if you showed him this future, it would be scary. It would be weird to him because it does not embrace his values. Our values are different. He would be horrified by democracy. He did not create a world that went as he wanted, but he created a world that went well.”

“After his death, you see a re-emergence of clans, a re-emergence of ancestor worship. And in fact, clans were instrumental in helping China to grow in an environment of weak property rights protection. Nevertheless, despite the weaker property rights, after the death of Mao, China was able to function as a market system and in part as a capitalist system, because it exploited the clan structure, the re-emerging clans that involved the often local politicians to make sure that the new enterprises would not be abused by local politicians. In Europe, we are used to think of politically run enterprises as inefficient. In China, the enterprises that somehow could be linked to local politicians were actually doing better than others.”

“But that's the thing. Right? You say we forgot. We didn't forget. We never knew. The information like, his life had been redacted. And and I think and this is the thing that I I think about all the time, is that if you can't beat me at any of the things, right, if I am objectively better at at all of the things, my my intellectual capacity, my athletic capacity, my my creative capacity, my fervor and spirit. The only thing left to to get me is is to make it so that I never existed. Right? It's to turn me into a ghost.”

“I love this. So she doesn't wear it at the press conference, but she wears it later at a photo call by Churchill Statue. And she wears this tremendous jumper. So there's nine women in jumpers or t shirts with European flags on. And then there's Margaret Thatcher in a jumper with all the flags of the European countries. And it's just such a laughable image.”

“Paul lands a job at a law firm where he's subjected to all kinds of racism, all kinds of indignities. They hate that. So Esi is like, Paul, you know what you should do? You should quit being a lawyer and you should become a full time actor. Paul is like, what are you even talking about? She's like, no. No. No. I think you're a generational talent. I see something here. And so she stays on him for years until he does it.”

“And my favorite survey one of my favorite surveys ever done, I think was done by the Daily Mirror. And it said to people, would you like to see these European customs in our country? Would you like to see more pavement cafes? No. Won by 23%. Would you like to see more shops open on Sundays? No. Won by 35%. Would you ever like to have coffee and a roll for breakfast? No. Won by 45.”

“I served you faithfully for thirty two years and Mandy, twenty years. At $25 a month for me, $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add this, the interest for the time of our wages have been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor visits for me, pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. If you fail to pay us for our faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future.”

“So the legal system in Europe emerged very much bottom up. The new state in force emerge when they're still very weak, in an environment in which corporations already existed, and conventions and norms had already emerged, as part of these private arrangements. And so the legal system in Europe codify and systematize a system of civil rules that had already emerged the spontaneously within European society. And so that explains why the principle of the rule of law emerges so naturally in Europe, because the rule of law does not arrive in a vacuum, but emerges in a society that has already a tradition that has to be respected.”

“We add to this perspective of a unitary state versus a fragmented society by arguing in our book that a key difference between Europe and China is also the internal organization of society. In China, these local arrangements were mostly within clan-like structure, dynastic organizations defined by patrilineal descent. Whereas in Europe, because of the role of the church, dynastic ties had been weakened and the cooperation took the form of associations between unrelated individuals who got together for a purpose, like monasteries or in universities or eventually in self-governing towns.”

“Most of our knowledge from antiquity is not lost at the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It's lost between four hundred and six hundred AD when the papyri are falling apart. And here you are with a library of a thousand books, and you can only afford to make 100 new books. So you have to choose which 100 of these thousand do we save because there literally is not enough industry on your continent to make enough leather to copy down all this text.”

“The way history is being reshaped in this moment, it's about power. It's about how The United States is changing. I think I've read the phrase sliding towards authoritarianism countless times this year. But it's not a slide, is it? It's more like steps. Steps we the people are taking. Not just politicians, all of us. We're changing too. Taking steps so small you can miss them.”

“They have a war chest of 1 and a half million pounds, which is the biggest war chest that any side had ever had in a British electoral campaign. And it's 10 times as much as the no campaign had. So, I mean, they are able to absolutely obliterate the leave campaign.”

“My favourite by far is this former washing machine factory in Merseyside, which had been occupied by its own workers when it went bust. Ben wanted to give them £4,000,000 of public money. And his own consultants working for the Department of Industry told him this was absolutely insane. Don't do it. And when he brought it up in cabinet, some of the other ministers literally laugh in his face when he tells them his plan. They say to him, well, what would the factory make? He says it would make car radiators and orange juice.”

“I remember the first time I noticed that I didn't want to see a black person in the films because of the way they were gonna show up, which was Gone with the Wind. I just remember feeling really ashamed of, like, that's what I would have been. I was going to these movies as a form of escapism. And then whenever black people showed up in the movies, they were always serving. They were always poor. They were always versions of myself that maybe I feared.”

“Both of them were basically born out of weakness and desperation and not enthusiasm. British governments did not try to join Europe because they loved Europe. They were trying to join Europe basically because they'd run out of other options, and this was the last card in the deck.”

“Now Paul, at this point, is so wildly famous. I saw this quote that said that he was as well known during his lifetime as Abraham Lincoln. He was an athlete, an actor, a singer. It's like he would have sung the national anthem at the beginning of the Super Bowl, played in the football game, and then performed the halftime show. He was also a lawyer and spoke a bunch of languages, including Russian, Greek, Swahili, and French.”

“What does Leonardo do? He writes everything he discovers down in coded mirror writing, so that nobody but him can possibly use it. And he refuses to share even with his students and assistants the secrets of what he's doing, because Leonardo does not want to contribute to human progress. Leonardo wants to make unique masterpieces so that hundreds of years later, people will see them and marvel and say, how did he do it? No one else has ever been able to replicate that method.”

“In 1975, the population of Britain fell for the first time since records began, and then it fell again in 1976 and again in 1977, basically, because so many people are getting out to New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Canada, whatever.”

“For centuries, Russia's labor system of choice was serfdom. Everyone always points out that it's not slavery. Peasants were just legally bound to the land they were born onto. And they had to work that land and couldn't leave or change jobs or travel or marry without the landlord's permission. Russian czars kept this up until around the time of America's civil war. Then they freed the serfs, who were not slaves, but left them with no resources and forced them to live under Jim Crow esque restrictions. Black people around the world began to identify with Russian serfs.”

“The standard in 1975, to say that it's above that of 2016, is to massively undersell it. The media ecosystem changes. I think the people going into politics aren't as good, and the media demands different things, which makes it impossible for them to communicate at the same length or with the same depth or complexity. And we as consumers, our attention spans are shorter.”

“And he bribes his way out, and he offers the equivalent of about 3, $300,000 to the guard outside the cell and $700,000 to the captain of the guard to smuggle him out of the tower. And he wrote in a letter later that they were the two most foolish men he'd ever met because he was Cosimo de Medici. He would happily have paid them tens of millions of dollars to let him out of there. But they weren't ambitious enough to think to ask for more than a few 100,000.”

“In the second half of the first millennium, the church in Europe took a deliberate decision to dismantle tribal traditions and reduce the importance of extended families and facilitate the emergence of nuclear families. The Church did this in part for ideological cultural reasons, to emphasize the importance of universalistic values and being fair and good towards everybody, not just towards your friends and relatives. Perhaps in part also for material reasons, having smaller families made it more likely that if there was no heir, the Church would appropriate the inheritance of the rich families. They did so by emphasizing, discouraging second-cousin marriage, by accepting celibacy, by discouraging adoptions.”