Sarah Paine

I don't think, since they both have nuclear weapons, I don't think that kind of play is probably the play to make.

But as long as Putin's desperate for whatever, for ordinance and other things, Putin's getting himself into a grand old corner.

Well, there are whole books on the subject that I haven't read that look into this, but I would flip it around and go, well, the Industrial Revolution starts in Europe.

That's the unusual thing.

So the question isn't why China didn't, but why Europe did.

And I have some guesses, but there are very thoughtful books on this subject.

You can go find them and have fun reading them.

But if you look at Europe, it's a peninsula, and then it's got the Mediterranean there.

And so the Europeans, and they've got quite a very good river system, the Danube and the Rhine and the Ruhr, all these different rivers.

And so they have always been...

a lot of trade going on.

No one's ever been able to make a big empire in Europe stick.

The Romans did quite well for quite a bit of time.

Napoleon tries, not so good.

Nazis, not so good at all.

I guess the French tried on and off and it didn't succeed.

You have all of these competing countries.

I think a lot of that was essential to the industrial revolution of having

uh you're focusing on commerce and you've got a lot of uh competing places you don't have one big empire that can just sit there be fat dumb and happy that you have to innovate in order to survive against all these other little states

It's a tremendous innovation.