Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird — Ada Palmer

Summary

Renaissance historian Ada Palmer joins Dwarkesh Patel to discuss her book “Inventing the Renaissance” and the multi-generational intellectual project that connected Petrarch’s dream of reviving Roman virtues to the eventual birth of modern science. Palmer argues that the Renaissance was not a sudden rediscovery of ancient wisdom but rather a 200-year sequence of attempts, failures, and pivots: Petrarch believed that reading Cicero would produce virtuous leaders, his successors built libraries and raised “philosopher princes” who turned out to be just as brutal as their predecessors, and Machiavelli then proposed using history as a casebook of empirical examples rather than a source of moral osmosis. This iterative process eventually produced the Baconian scientific method and the idea that knowledge should be shared for the benefit of all humankind.

The conversation covers extraordinary ground on information revolutions, drawing direct parallels between the printing press and the digital revolution. Palmer explains why Gutenberg went bankrupt (he had 300 Bibles but only seven local customers who could legally read them), why his apprentices also went bankrupt, and how it took 40 years before printing was even economically sustainable. She argues that the printing press, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines were not separate revolutions but successive applications of one information technology, much as computers, the internet, smartphones, and AI are successive applications of the digital revolution.

Palmer also delivers a striking reframing of the Library of Alexandria, arguing that most ancient knowledge was not lost in its famous burning but rather during the period 400-600 AD when papyri were physically crumbling and monks could only afford to copy a fraction of existing texts onto expensive parchment. The conversation closes with her account of how the Inquisition accidentally invented peer review by building laboratories to verify the scientific claims in books they were sent to censor.

Highlights

”They’re cosplaying the Roman Republic”

“They’re cosplaying the Roman Republic. And wearing a Florentine toga while in office was something that you did to represent your fealty to Cicero and republican values.” — Ada Palmer, 39:23

yt-dlp --download-sections "*39:23-40:06" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAIhVfGbREA" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "cosplaying-roman-republic.mp4"

”Leonardo da Vinci was not a scientist”

“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.’ … Brunelleschi, who built Florence’s famous beautiful dome, deliberately burned all of his notes and schematics so that nobody else would be able to replicate his work. That is an inventor and it is an engineer, but … this is actually a saboteur of human progress.” — Ada Palmer, 1:10:25

yt-dlp --download-sections "*1:10:25-1:12:00" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAIhVfGbREA" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "leonardo-saboteur.mp4"

”Gutenberg printed 300 Bibles and sold seven”

“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. Congratulations, Mr. Gutenberg. You have 293 Bibles and you can’t sell them and you go bankrupt.” — Ada Palmer, 58:36

yt-dlp --download-sections "*58:36-1:00:53" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAIhVfGbREA" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "gutenberg-went-broke.mp4"

”Most ancient knowledge was lost when the papyri fell apart”

“Most of our knowledge from antiquity is not lost at the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It’s lost between 400 and 600 AD when the papyri are falling apart and here you are with a library of 1,000 books and you can only afford to make 100 new books. So you have to choose which 100 of these 1,000 do we save.” — Ada Palmer, 1:23:10

yt-dlp --download-sections "*1:23:10-1:24:20" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAIhVfGbREA" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "papyri-falling-apart.mp4"

”It is dangerous to be rich and not powerful”

“He bribes his way out. And he offers the equivalent of about $300,000 to the guard outside the cell and $700,000 to the captain of the guard just 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 and he would have happily paid them tens of millions of dollars to let him out of there.” — Ada Palmer, 48:08

yt-dlp --download-sections "*48:08-49:30" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAIhVfGbREA" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "dangerous-rich-not-powerful.mp4"

”The Inquisition accidentally invented peer review”

“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.” — Ada Palmer, 2:01:22

yt-dlp --download-sections "*2:01:22-2:02:14" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAIhVfGbREA" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "inquisition-peer-review.mp4"

Key Points

• Italian republics survived because of agriculture (0:33) - After Rome fell, wealthier Italian cities with good farmland could self-govern as republics, while poorer towns fell under feudal protection of local lords
• Petrarch’s dream of virtuous leaders (3:11) - Reading ancient Romans like Brutus who executed his own sons for treason inspired a project to recreate classical education and produce better rulers
• The Medici used classical culture as propaganda (7:23) - As “merchant scum” with no nobility, the Medici surrounded themselves with Greek scholars, Roman statues, and Platonic philosophers to flip the power dynamic with visiting nobles
• Florence massacred its nobles to protect the republic (30:14) - After a near-coup, Florence eliminated its nobility and created a unique commoner republic ruled by lottery-selected merchant guild leaders locked in a tower for two-month terms
• Consensus rule by nine random merchants (33:00) - Florence’s sortition system required consensus among nine randomly selected merchants, designed to be tyrant-proof
• Cosimo corrupted the lottery through plurality control (45:10) - As papal banker employing a third of the city, Cosimo statistically guaranteed a plurality on any random council would be loyal to him
• Machiavelli’s radical patriotism (51:46) - When exiled, Machiavelli refused lucrative positions at foreign courts and sat faithfully in the countryside, dedicating The Prince only to his homeland
• Gutenberg went bankrupt because distribution networks didn’t exist (58:36) - Mass-produced books in a world without distribution networks for mass commodities; Venice’s hub shipping system was what finally made printing viable
• Book fairs as the original distribution hack (1:00:53) - Printers brought 1,000 copies of one book to fairs like Frankfurt, traded with 200 other printers, and went home with five copies each of 200 books
• Print and digital revolutions are structurally parallel (1:01:19) - The printing press, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines were successive applications of one technology over 150 years, exactly like computers, internet, smartphones, and AI
• Florence had 90% male literacy in the 12th century (21:47) - Merchant culture required reading for letters and account books, but being literate and being book-literate were very different things
• Leonardo and Brunelleschi were saboteurs of progress (1:10:25) - Leonardo wrote in coded mirror writing and Brunelleschi burned his schematics; they wanted to be marveled at, not to advance collective knowledge
• Francis Bacon’s three insects (1:12:00) - The ant hoards knowledge, the spider spins theory from nothing, but the bee gathers from nature and produces something “sweet and useful for humankind”
• Ancient knowledge was lost when papyri crumbled, not at Alexandria (1:23:18) - Between 400-600 AD, monks had to choose which texts to copy onto expensive parchment; their subjective tastes biased what survived
• A medieval book cost as much as a house (1:24:00) - Without papyrus, Europeans wrote on processed animal skins; the great library of the University of Paris had only 600 books
• History has always moved fast (1:06:00) - The video game Civ teaches that ancient turns were 50 years and modern turns one year, but zooming into any historical decade reveals equally rapid change
• The Inquisition never caught printers (1:42:58) - Printers employed news writers who moved information fastest, so they always learned about Inquisition raids before the authorities could arrive
• Censors were always wrong about what mattered (1:52:00) - The Inquisition obsessed over minor Jansenist heresies while letting Voltaire and the Encyclopedie circulate; Machiavelli wasn’t even in ALL CAPS on the banned books list

Mentions

People

• Petrarch (3:11) - Proposed reviving Roman virtues through classical education after surviving the Black Death
• Machiavelli (13:53) - Observed the failure of the Petrarchan project and proposed using history as a casebook of empirical examples
• Cosimo de’ Medici (11:46) - Rose from minor merchant family to control Florence through papal banking wealth and manipulating the sortition system
• Leonardo da Vinci (1:10:25) - Wrote in coded mirror writing to prevent anyone else from using his discoveries
• Brunelleschi (1:11:31) - Built Florence’s dome and deliberately burned all his notes and schematics
• Francis Bacon (1:12:00) - Proposed the scientific method using the simile of three insects; said science is the ultimate act of charity
• Gutenberg (58:12) - Invented movable type printing but went bankrupt because distribution networks didn’t exist
• Marsilio Ficino (6:00) - Tutor raised to know Greek and Latin to surround young princes with classical values
• Cesare Borgia (13:04) - Had full classical education but “set fire to half the world,” proving Petrarch’s educational theory wrong
• Galileo (1:15:00) - Published observations as part of the new Baconian model of shared scientific knowledge
• Giordano Bruno (1:57:19) - The only person executed by the Inquisition for science-related reasons out of only 12 total trials of scientists
• Martin Luther (1:42:04) - Hit the “sweet spot” when the pamphlet distribution network had just developed; 95 Theses reached London in 17 days
• Voltaire (1:52:00) - His works circulated freely while Inquisitors obsessed over minor Jansenist heresies
• John Milton (1:58:34) - Wrote the Areopagitica defending press freedom; Paradise Lost’s only censored line was about astrology, not Satan’s anti-monarchical rhetoric
• Joseph Henrich (19:36) - Previous Dwarkesh guest with theory about Catholic Church breaking down kinship networks
• Kepler (1:57:48) - Excommunicated for Lutheranism, not his laws of planetary motion; his mother was tried for witchcraft
• Daniel Yergin (1:39:00) - Previous Dwarkesh guest who wrote about the history of oil
• Isabella d’Este (1:30:00) - Specially ordered all her printed books on vellum rather than paper
• Guido Ruggiero (1:17:40) - Author of “The Renaissance in Italy” recommended by Palmer

Cities & Places

• Florence (0:13) - Unique commoner republic that killed its nobility and was ruled by lottery-selected merchants
• Venice (1:00:23) - The “airport hub of the Mediterranean” where Gutenberg’s apprentices finally made printing economically viable
• Library of Alexandria (1:23:02) - Not where most ancient knowledge was actually lost; the real loss was papyri crumbling 400-600 AD

Books & Works

• Inventing the Renaissance (0:00) - Ada Palmer’s book, the main subject of the conversation
• The Prince (51:46) - Machiavelli dedicated it only to Florence despite exile; circulated in very private circles
• De Rerum Natura (Lucretius) (18:00) - Materialist poem that only two dozen people could read when found but 30,000 could read by 1600
• The Swerve (Greenblatt) (1:54:00) - Palmer’s book provides a more detailed zoom-in on the story Greenblatt tells about Lucretius
• Areopagitica (Milton) (1:58:34) - First big defense of the free press; Milton failed and the censorship regime passed anyway
• The Gentleman’s Magazine (1:34:11) - First magazine, invented the word “magazine”; fact-checked contradictory newspaper reports
• The Encyclopedie (1:54:00) - Diderot and d’Holbach’s project of universal knowledge; banned by Rome but France loved it and burned Jansenist treatises instead

Concepts & Technologies

• Sortition (33:00) - Government by lottery, used in ancient Athens and Renaissance Florence
• Patronage system (36:00) - Employers provided safety nets including legal defense, orphan care, and disability support
• Papyrus vs. parchment (1:23:18) - Head of lettuce vs. leather jacket in cost; Europe lost access to papyrus after Rome’s fall
• Book fairs (1:00:53) - Distribution mechanism that made printing economically viable; Frankfurt Book Fair still exists
• Peer review (2:01:22) - Accidentally invented by the Inquisition when they built labs to verify scientific claims in books

Surprising Quotes

“Florence is the sodomy capital of Europe and to Florentine is the verb for anal sex in several different European languages. And in the laws of France you can be indicted for sodomy on the grounds that you have ever once in your life even visited Florence.” — Ada Palmer, 9:00

“He wrote in a letter later that they were the two most foolish men he’d ever met because he was Cosimo de’ Medici and he would have happily 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 hundred thousand.” — Ada Palmer, 48:08

“Technologically they were moving fast. We just don’t care about those technologies anymore.” — Ada Palmer, 1:06:30

“He would be horrified by democracy… But he would see the wonders we’ve created and especially the fact that we can treat the Black Death and he would weep for joy seeing that. He did not create a world that went as he wanted but he created a world that went well.” — Ada Palmer, 27:00

“The Roman Senate keeps meeting until 1200 AD.” — Ada Palmer, 40:00

Transcript

Dwarkesh Patel: 0:00 Today I’m chatting with Ada Palmer, who’s a Renaissance historian, a novelist, a composer, based at the University of Chicago, and today we’re discussing your book, Inventing the Renaissance. Ada, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Ada Palmer: 0:11 Been looking forward.

Dwarkesh Patel: 0:13 First question, you’ve got in this period in the late 15th century, early 16th century in Italy, all these different republics, Venice, Florence, Genoa, and that seems unusual both for the time period and for the place. Yeah, what gives?

Ada Palmer: 0:33 One of the big reasons that the Italian city republics are clustered in Italy is that when the Roman Empire dissolved in the West, individual cities then needed to self-govern. And this is true all across Europe, right? And those individual cities could no longer get the centralized Roman government to oversee supply routes, keep the roads free of bandits, you could no longer import and export goods at scale, you could no longer rely on central infrastructure, you had to support things yourself. Larger, wealthier towns were able to make this transition because they could support themselves from the local resources and the farms attached to them. So the larger, wealthier towns surrounded by good agricultural land were more successful at converting over to: okay, let’s have a senate like the old Roman Senate, let’s have our top families form a council, they will rule, we’ll set up a republic. A weaker town that can’t support itself as well is much more prone to one wealthy family realizes that they can get goons and take over and declare themselves the monarch of the area. Or worse, this town cannot self-sustain, it doesn’t have enough people there, can’t get food, they are scared, they’re afraid of being robbed by people who are desperate. But outside of town, there is a wealthy villa that belongs to a noble family and they have bodyguards. Hey noble family, if I move next to your villa and work for you, will you protect me with your bodyguards? So towns emptied out and villages, as in villa and its environs, developed as a result, and a village was a monarchal structure in this sense that was the migration of people out of a town into the protection zone of a local lordling, right? And then those villages grew to different scales, some of them cities, some not. So Italy had great agriculture and great agricultural land, so more of Italy’s cities were able to sustain themselves as towns and be republics.

Dwarkesh Patel: 2:41 I feel like the big take of your book is they were trying to resuscitate Roman virtues. What were the things that — what were the virtues of the Roman emperors had which allowed this, you know, the safety and good government etc to work? And I don’t understand the connection between reading Cicero… So, from Petrarch sitting on a hill and contemplating the virtues of a great emperor to… science and technology. Maybe there isn’t one, but do you think there is one? And what exactly is that connection?

Ada Palmer: 3:11 Well, as with many processes, the answer’s multiple steps and it’s complicated, and some of the steps are realizing that earlier steps didn’t work. So, Petrarch, who lives through the Black Death, and lives in a moment when Italy is racked by civil war and foreign mercenary troops are raiding and pillaging, Italy is racked by bandits. When Petrarch survives the Black Death after losing so many friends, he gets a letter, two of his friends are alive. He had given up that anyone he knew would survive, but two of his younger scholar friends are alive, they’re going to come visit him. On the way they were attacked by bandits and one of them was killed, and the other was lost in the mountains and wounded, and he didn’t know that his friend was alive for another year and a half. Right, so the bandits are very real in this period. And Petrarch looks around him and says, ‘This is an age of ash and shadow. What we need is to imitate the arts of the ancients. Let’s try to figure out how the Romans did it. And specifically, the problem is our leaders. Our leaders are selfish. Our leaders care more about their wealth and their family honor and their power than they do about the people.’ This is where Romeo and Juliet is really helpful for us to understand, right? Lord Montague and Lord Capulet, as their goons are knifing each other in the street, they care about defeating each other. Do they care about the good of Italy? Do they care about the good of the city of Verona? No. Their feud is harming the city of Verona and they don’t care. They demand that Romeo get away with murder because he is their son, right? That is not service to the state. And Petrarch reads about the ancient Roman Brutus, not the one who killed Caesar, but the ancestor to whom that one was trying to live up. Brutus, one of the first consuls of Rome, and he learned while in office that his sons were plotting to take over the state and make him king. So he executed his own sons for treason against the state. Can you imagine Lord Montague wanting to execute Romeo for treason against Verona? He would never do that. So when you’re living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet and you read about these ancient Roman figures, as described in the lofty biographies of someone like Livy, you read them and you say, ‘Wow, if only our leaders would act like that.’ Well, how were they raised? Can we raise our leaders the same way? Can we make libraries filled with what young Cicero read and what young Brutus read? What did they read? Well, they read Plato and they read Homer. So we need these things. Can we recreate the educational environment that produced them? And Petrarch suggests this, his students and successors embrace this idea and pour money into traveling across the Alps for manuscripts, traveling to Constantinople to purchase manuscripts from the wealthier East where books are common, and bringing them back to assemble these libraries and then raise tutors like Marsilio Ficino, who can know Greek and Latin and surround the young princes and princesses of Europe with these values in the hopes that they will act like Brutus and not like Cicero.

Ada Palmer: 6:24 This is based on an assumption that education is very much like osmosis. That if you’re exposed to something, you’ll imitate it. And the uptake of this is strong, because Italy is also full of upstart rulers who just seized power five minutes ago by having a coup in their state and have no legitimacy and no right to be ruling what they’re ruling and are resented by their people. But they can dress up like a Roman emperor and they can have a parade with allegorical figures of the virtues next to them, and they can invest in an impressive palace that has a pediment on the front and looks like a Roman building to the eyes of the period, and cover themselves with the trappings of antiquity and then people might look at them and say, ‘Oh, this guy is different from what we’ve had. This guy is like the Caesars. The days of the Caesars were pretty good. Maybe we want this guy. Maybe he’s not going to be a tyrant. Maybe he’s going to be a good prince and he’s going to make a golden age.’

Ada Palmer: 7:23 And so the first dream is idealistic. Let’s make better rulers. The adoption is self-serving and propagandistic. Hey, I’m a tyrant, but I can seem like something better than just a tyrant if I make myself look like Julius Caesar, then people will like and respect me. Or in the case of Florence with the Medici, we are merchant scum and we are dirt compared to everybody around us. We’re not even one of the important families of Florence. We’re like three ranks down, even on the standards of merchant scum. We’re extra scummy merchants. But if we can have Latin and Greek and quote Cicero and seem like the ancients, people will take us seriously and respect us and talk to us even if we don’t have it.

Ada Palmer: 8:02 So let me give an example, right? So imagine that you are an ambassador from France and you’re on your way to Rome because a new pope has just been elected. And whenever a new pope is elected, every country in Europe has to send a special ambassador whose job it is to deliver a long-winded oration that says, I am the wealthy, I’m the ambassador from a very wealthy country and a very powerful prince and he’s so glad you’re the pope. Congratulations. Only you have to do that for like an hour and you have to give a gift to the pope and it has to be very impressive and you have to be a really important person.

Ada Palmer: 8:47 And so you’re on your way, and you’re heading along the length of Italy, you’re going to go through Florence, it’s on the way, ugh, there’s nobody there worth talking to because it’s just a pit of scum and filth and depravity. Because of course Florence is the sodomy capital of Europe and to Florentine is the verb for anal sex in several different European languages. And in the laws of France you can be indicted for sodomy on the grounds that you have ever once in your life even visited Florence. That’s considered evidence enough. 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 nude statue like that. That isn’t something we know how to do.

Ada Palmer: 9:46 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. And you come to the banker’s house and you knock at the door, your servant knocks at the door, and then the banker greets you humbly at the door and apologizes that his humble palace is not worthy to host your excellence and you’re like yeah, it’s not, you’re correct. And he invites you in and the instant you step inside you’re in a space like nothing you’ve ever seen before with white light streaming in through this airy rounded windowed courtyard that feels more clean and outdoor than the outdoors did. Because something about the air is cool and fresh, it’s like nothing — wait, wait, it is. It’s like the Roman ruins in the backyard of the castle where you grew up. But we don’t have the ability to do that anymore, all that’s lost.

Ada Palmer: 10:46 And in the middle of the square is another of these bronze statues that looks like it’s about to come to life except shining and new, it hasn’t even turned green yet. And around the courtyard are busts of all the Roman emperors in order. And above them are portraits of this guy and the members of his family. And off in the corridor are some men wearing robes that look kind of like the robes the ancients wear. And you say who are those guys? and he says oh, they’re Platonists, they’re speaking ancient Greek. And you say I thought I didn’t understand that language but ancient Greek is lost, we don’t have ancient Greek and he says yes, you know, we have lots of ancient Greek here and he said — and you say and also we don’t have the works of Plato, they’re also lost. Oh, we have lots of Plato here, look here’s my grandson Lorenzo, he’s just written a poem in ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul, would you like to hear him recite it?

Ada Palmer: 11:46 And now there’s a 10 year old boy reciting a poem at you in ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul and you’re like where am I? None of this is possible, none of this has existed for a thousand years. And that’s the moment that Cosimo de’ Medici turns to you and said would you like to make an alliance with Florence? And you can say no. You can say no, my king is going to come over the Alps with his enormous army and we’re going to descend upon this city and we’re going to sack it and everyone’s going to let us because it has no friends because it doesn’t have any nobility so it can’t marry anybody so it has no meaningful allies. Or you can say yes, let’s make an alliance, give me a bronze smith and an architect and a Greek teacher and a Platonist and we’re going to take all of these things and we’re going to do the French court like this. And then when the ambassador from Portugal comes, he’s going to feel like an uncultured fool just like I feel right now.

Ada Palmer: 12:54 The power dynamic just flipped upside down, right? And suddenly the condescending nobleman is in awe of the merchant scum. That’s what the art and the culture does as a propagandistic tool.

Ada Palmer: 13:04 The next stage of it then is, okay, we’ve raised these princes like this and they have the Latin and they have the Greek and they can impress everybody and then they fight a bigger, nastier, worse war than any of the earlier big nasty wars with more deaths and more betrayals and bigger cannons knocking down cities. The first generations raised by this are supposed to be philosopher princes and instead we get Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, both of whom had Latin and Greek and Cicero and Plato and they were kids and then it grows up and Cesare sets fire to half the world, right?

Ada Palmer: 13:53 So that is the war Machiavelli watched. And Machiavelli was raised on all of this Cicero and Livy, right? He was raised on the Petrarchan project. He has this famous beautiful letter that he wrote in exile where he’s describing his day to his friend and that most of the day is wasted and he mucks around hunting for larks and then he goes to a pub and gets drunk in the company of uncultured countrymen. And then he goes home and he gets dressed in the court robes, the court finery that he would wear back when he was an ambassador to popes and kings. And attired thus, he then enters his library to hold commerce with the ancients. Right? He loves this the way Petrarch wanted him to love it. But he observes these wars and he observes virtuous princes like Guidobaldo da Montefeltro who does every single thing you’re supposed to do virtuously and he has all the Plato and he has the libraries and he has all the art and he gets betrayed and his city taken away from him and loses everything.

Ada Palmer: 15:06 And he says, okay, well, clearly Petrarch was wrong that just reading the Cicero would make successful rulers like the Caesars. But I still feel in my heart a deep power in the classics. So, he says, what if the libraries are what we need, but we need to use them differently? And he proposes what we would think of as political science. We observe historical examples. We say, okay, here are five examples of battles that happened next to rivers. We’ll put those examples side by side and see what decisions the commanders made to try to figure out which one worked better. We use history as a casebook of examples of what worked and what didn’t. And we imitate what worked and we avoid doing what didn’t, instead of feeling that reading about good men will make us good. We read about wise choices and we imitate those choices.

Ada Palmer: 15:57 This is one of the reasons Machiavelli is described by his contemporaries as a historian. And he says we need to use history and use the classics differently. He proposes that. He isn’t very popular in his own day. It takes a long time for that to catch on. Many people for decades after him are still trying to use it sort of the absorb-it-osmotically way. But he’s writing that in the early 1500s, so it’s been a little over a century since this started. We have to remember how long this process is.

Ada Palmer: 16:37 From Petrarch’s first call to Machiavelli writing that is as long as from Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight back to Napoleon. The childhood of Napoleon to the Space Race. That’s Petrarch to Machiavelli. We think of it as one time period, but a lot changed in that. They had a plan, they tried the plan, they brought the plan to its maximum, they raised all the princes in this new way, the wars happened, it clearly failed. Machiavelli then thinks about why it failed. We’re still only halfway through Renaissance. Shakespeare’s grandparents have barely been born. We have a lot more time to go.

Ada Palmer: 17:04 So, what do we need? We need new ways of thinking about it. And we’re reading the ancients and we have bigger libraries, we have the printing press now, we’re having libraries in smaller towns, more and more people can read, it’s easier and easier to get an education, more people are starting to learn about science. It also is important that they’re inventing micro-technologies of book production, like footnotes and glossaries in the margin that explain the hard vocabulary. So that when Petrarch’s successors, like Ficino was young, you had to be a masterful Latinist to read these ancients. You had to have an enormous vocabulary. There were no dictionaries, there are no glosses, there’s nothing to help you. Only a tiny slice of expert classes could actually read this stuff.

Ada Palmer: 17:53 By a hundred years later, there are translations into the vernacular, there are footnotes that tell you the hard vocabulary. Any med student can read Lucretius’ De rerum natura. When Poggio found it, there were two dozen people in the world who could read it. 100 years later, 30,000 people can read it in the 30 printed editions that are printed before 1600. When all different kinds of people read it — med students, law students, people in different countries, people in different places — they ask new questions. They wonder whether they can test the hypotheses. They do test the hypotheses. They’re the generation that discovers that the heart is a pump. They’re the generation that take seriously the question maybe there are atoms and maybe that’s how diseases work and maybe we can develop the germ theory of disease. That’s the 1560s, 1580s. 180 years, 160 years after Lucretius comes back because it takes generations of work to build the libraries, to have the libraries, to use the libraries. So when we get to 1600, which is almost exactly 200 years after this began, we’ve had time to say: let’s make the libraries, have the libraries, use the libraries, realize we failed in how we use the libraries, use the libraries differently. And that’s the generation of Francis Bacon and Galileo who say, ‘Hey, let’s use the information differently. Let’s use nature as a casebook of examples the way Machiavelli said we should use history as examples. Let’s examine, let’s doubt, let’s rethink, let’s do stuff in new ways.’

Dwarkesh Patel: 19:36 Okay, just to make sure I understood. So the chain of causation here is: we gotta resuscitate the virtues of the Romans, therefore read what they read. To do that you need to build the libraries. You build the libraries, you resuscitate all those arts. And then you just need to have people be literate, have people think about information in a new way to analyze it. And that analysis also lends itself not just to history of leaders but also to the nature of the world. Whenever I hear a story about this is why the scientific revolution happened — I’m like, but there’s so many stories. I had a previous guest Joseph Henrich who has this theory that the Catholic church is breaking down these old kinship-based networks. I mean there’s probably 20 other stories you could tell. Why this story?

Ada Palmer: 20:46 Yeah. So, two different reasons. One, I think it’s useful to think about: for new ideas to flourish and new ways of running the world to happen, you need a fertile environment in the same way that for a forest to grow you need enough topsoil. It takes a while to get enough books. Right? You need to have enough books for a bunch of people to be reading and thinking. You also need to have networks of information moving the stuff back and forth so that they can have discourses of ideas with each other. You can’t publish a scientific journal until there are journals. Right? You need to have developed this ecosystem of information and knowledge. People talk about it sometimes in terms of increasing literacy rates as if higher literacy makes there be more books instead of the other way around. And in fact, there’s a lot of more literacy than people imagine in even medieval Italy. Almost Florence has a male literacy rate of 90 percent.

Dwarkesh Patel: 21:45 As of the 16th century?

Ada Palmer: 21:47 As of the 12th century. Because everybody’s in the merchant world. So you have to be able to send letters. You have to be able to read account books. You have to be able to calculate your tab at a restaurant. But of those people, how many read a book? Very few. They’ve read letters, they’ve read tallies, they’ve read indexes, they’ve made notes. The difference between being literate and being book literate is different, right? In the same way that some people watch television, don’t watch very many films, other people watch lots of films. You can be literate and have never read a book because there might be almost no books in the entire city in which you grew up if it’s 1200 or 1500. But if it’s 1600, there are definitely books in any medium-sized town. And so literacy transforms into a kind of access to scientific, intellectual, legal, all sorts of different kinds of worlds of ideas. Now, the other person you quoted who’s talking about transformations in networks of power from being less family and clan centered to being more guild centered, the guilds are major generators of ideas as well. The guilds can own libraries by 1600 where if you went to a guild hall it will have a bunch of books about its own trade. That would not have been true in 1100. So those changes are all real and they’re all intermixing and they’re all parallel to each other and you need all of these things together. But one of the focuses I have is sometimes there are more steps to something than you think, right? And we tell this story of the Renaissance of in the Renaissance they rediscovered these ancient texts and then we got science and that’s true, but it’s an oversimplification and too wide a zoom. And if I said in the French Revolution Napoleon rose to power and spread nationalized warfare across Europe and then we landed on the moon, I’ve skipped some steps, right?

Dwarkesh Patel: 24:00 I mean, obviously all the stories are all somewhat true. But, to the extent that this is a part of the story, the idea that you’re building up libraries of classics and setting up a network of information exchange that leads to the scientific revolution. I think the reason this feels important or salient is, right now I think a lot of people have this idea that I’m going to make AI go well by doing X thing. And maybe some of those things work, but it’s frustrating but also interesting that historically, nobody has a good track record of being able to say, I will do this thing so that this huge unanticipated change in history will go my way or according to my values.

Ada Palmer: 24:44 Right. And I think the go my way as opposed to go well is a really important distinction. Because Petrarch wanted a world with these values. And in which he thought, for example, that this would be a triumph for Christianity. He was sure that when we found the ancients fundamentally all of their philosophy would agree with Christianity. And when he says go find these ancients, he’s just guessing what’s going to be in these books. But he says if we find them, they will uphold good values and everyone believes him. And then they go find them and they squabble with each other, and there are hedonists and Epicureans and all sorts of chaotic things much more plural than he anticipated. And it makes a world that in turn has giant wars which he would not like, and a crisis, and Machiavelli’s critique of the ancients, and then the new science and the new philosophy and eventually Galileo, none of which resembles what Petrarch imagined if he had specifically described the future he was trying to make.

Ada Palmer: 25:41 But, then we get to the propagators of Bacon’s scientific method, meaning Voltaire and Montesquieu, who are also big campaigners for inoculation against smallpox, and the first major disease eradications start to begin under that immediate influence. And the science that gets us to the germ theory of disease, which gets us to modern hygiene, which gets us to vaccines, which gets us to penicillin and the treatment for the Black Death. 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.

Ada Palmer: 27:00 But he would see the wonders we’ve created and especially the fact that we can treat the Black Death and he would weep for joy seeing that. He did not create a world that went as he wanted but he created a world that went well. And we have many examples of that, right? Trains and bicycles come in and we get feminism because it’s easier for people, especially women to move freely and independently, they can organize, they can mobilize, we get suffragettes. Did the inventor of the train intend for there to be women’s liberation? No. Did it go the way he imagined? No. Did it go well? Yes.

Ada Palmer: 28:49 It’s important I think here to zoom in a little bit on Florence’s own government system and how and why it’s weird in order to understand what rank Machiavelli actually holds in it.

Ada Palmer: 29:01 So, all of these republics, except Florence, are modeled on ancient Rome. And the ancient Roman model was an oligarchic republic in which within the city there are certain noble families, usually founding families who made the city in the first place, who they are the senatorial families hereditarily when they come of age they automatically the men of the family are in the senate. From among them are elected the consuls or high senators or if there’s a head of state, the head of state. And so you have a small slice of the population that are fully enfranchised members of the republic who rule over the commoner majority. That is how Venice works, that is how Genoa works, that is how Bologna and Siena for the most part work, that’s how the Swiss Republic works, it’s how all of these republics work. Florence was like that for quite a while, but when republics fell, they usually fell to noble families who are the foremost, the strongest, who are the military class.

Ada Palmer: 30:14 And those threats to the independence of the republic almost always came from the nobility. And after one particular near miss, in which the city was nearly taken over, they decided to get rid of the nobility of Florence. And they massacred most of them and cut their heads off and put them on pikes and burned their houses down and raked salt into the earth and had a party on their graves, the way you do in the period when you’re getting rid of a class of people. There were a few noble families that they really liked who had not been part of negative stuff, who they instead allowed to officially renounce their nobility. And they renounced their nobility and changed their names and declared themselves commoners. And they set up a commoner republic.

Ada Palmer: 30:54 So what that meant was the senate consisted of members of merchant guilds. A member of a merchant guild here means the owners of workshops, not the guy who sits at the loom weaving, but the guy who owns the warehouse full of looms where the workers are working, the head of the sculpture works, the head of the architectural firm, not the bricklayers who are actually laying the brick. So we’re talking about the economic bourgeoisie is an anachronistic word, but we’re talking about the owners of the means of production, but who are themselves commoners. From the perspective of every other polity in the world, the rulers of Florence are the rank of their valet, right? There is no nobility left in the city.

Ada Palmer: 32:12 In fact, Florence can’t run its own armies or head its own police because you’re not going to surrender if you’re told to surrender in the name of some guy who doesn’t have a coat of arms. So they actually have to hire a nobleman to come to the city and be their chief of police, to arrest people in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor. And one at a time, they’ll invite a skilled military commander nobleman, he’ll come to the city, he’ll be podesta, he’ll live in the palace which is also the prison, he’ll arrest people, he’ll enforce the law. They will pay him handsomely at the end of the year, escort him to the gates and then banish him from the city for life on pain of death so that he cannot return and make use of the power that he had in the city to try to take over.

Ada Palmer: 32:44 So they’re very, very wary of any nobleman. And they’ve set up a really weird republic, weird from the perspective of everyone around them, in which a bunch of merchants are trying to share power by being lotteried into the senate. And so you put names in a bag, you examine all of the merchant members of guilds, you choose which ones are fit to serve, meaning not ill and dying, not insane, not so deeply in debt that they could be manipulated by the people who they owe money to. Their names go in a bag, you choose nine guys at random, they rule the city, they are put in a palace where they rule the city from that tower. They’re actually locked in the tower for the duration of their time in office because if they left the tower, they could be bribed or kidnapped. And they rule the city for two months or three months. And then at the end, they are thanked for their service and escorted out, and another nine guys share power for the next three months. A power-sharing that is designed to be tyrant-proof because you need consensus of like nine randomly selected guys to decide to do anything.

Dwarkesh Patel: 33:48 Or is that even majority vote, it’s consensus?

Ada Palmer: 33:50 It’s consensus.

Dwarkesh Patel: 33:51 So, previously you were describing, kill the nobles, salt the earth, I’m almost thinking early communist. But then you say, well no, it’s the heads of the merchant guilds who are in charge. And so I want to understand how merchants, entrepreneurs, have notable status in Florence, what is it about the culture that makes it so? And also the Medici, the most powerful people, their job is usury, right?

Ada Palmer: 34:22 So, an important part of it is when you have a merchant capital, everybody works for somebody who works for somebody who works for the boss. And if you are a major merchant in Florence, you’re importing and exporting wool to and from all across Europe. You have employees all across Europe. A huge portion of the safety net is your employer. Are you in trouble with the law? Your employer will supply your defense attorney. This is the system known as the patronage system, and it exists in ancient Rome, it saturates the medieval and the Renaissance worlds, in which everyone is in a very interconnected hierarchy.

Ada Palmer: 36:55 It’s also a world that’s used to thinking in terms of hierarchy and very unused to thinking about real democracy. We talk about these republics and we’re very excited by the fact that they give more power to the people than a monarchy does, but they’re still incredibly narrow oligarchic republics. So when we read Machiavelli, he talks a lot about the popolo, which we translate as “the people.” And he talks about how important it is that the popolo are respected and the popolo have a voice and that the popolo are armed. And we read this and we’re like, “Yeah, this feels really familiar.” Popolo meant the top four percent economically of the population, the members of the merchant guilds. He’s talking about a narrow-slice oligarchy being heard.

Ada Palmer: 38:19 And then there’s a gradual takeover, right? There’s a gradual what we could call regulatory capture. But an interesting detail about Florence even as the Medici take over is that the Medici know the people of Florence are very deeply invested in this republic and very deeply invested in its institutions and we have to therefore respect those institutions and proclaim respect for those institutions.

Ada Palmer: 39:23 They’re cosplaying the Roman Republic. And wearing a Florentine toga while in office was something that you did to represent your fealty to Cicero and republican values. And the Dukes made their men continue to wear these. In fact, the first Duke, Cosimo I, would wear one to costume balls, as if in his heart he longed to not dress like a Duke, but to dress in a toga like a Republican.

Dwarkesh Patel: 39:52 It’s actually doubly ironic because when the Roman Republic turns into the Roman Empire, they still have the Senate, they still have all these old institutions, even though it’s no longer a Republic.

Ada Palmer: 40:00 Yeah, the Roman Senate keeps meeting until 1200 AD. And it means that more rights are granted to the people of Florence than to other cities that fell to monarchies at similar points. Because the monarchs of Florence know they have to be careful and they have to respect rights to a certain amount.

Ada Palmer: 40:49 And because they’re so terrified of being assassinated by their own people, they built this overhead walkway that goes from one end of the city to the other, the Vasari corridor, so that they could walk in safety without being assassinated. This is a sign of a weak Duke. Meanwhile, across the river in Ferrara, Duke Alfonso d’Este used to wander around Ferrara buck naked with a sword in one hand and his dick in the other to show off that nobody would ever possibly try to harm a Duke d’Este. That is what you do when you don’t fear your people and when you feel confident in power.

Ada Palmer: 42:00 And so they are much closer to tyrants than the Medici are ever able to be even after the Republic falls. It’s a great example of how even when resistance loses, resistance wins.

Dwarkesh Patel: 43:04 Yeah, I think there’s actually an interesting parallel to today where sometimes you’ll debate what are the odds that America becomes a sort of a Putinist kind of country within a couple of decades? And I think the odds are actually quite low just because even though constitutionally the president is very powerful, the republican expectation is so strong that the amount of resistance that is faced even when you successfully do something demotivates the next escalation.

Ada Palmer: 43:21 The only thing that makes resistance weak in the US is when people feel as if partial victory is failure. And remembering moments like how Florence’s resistance all the way to the end meant that there was more liberty for the next several centuries even under the tyrant is what we need to remind ourselves that actually partial victory is an important thing.

Dwarkesh Patel: 45:00 Could you discuss the fact that the Medicis are the bankers for the papacy? What does that mean? Why is it necessary? And how they’re able to make money off of that from the interest on the float?

Ada Palmer: 45:10 So, when Cosimo de’ Medici swings the contract as banker for the Pope, it’s important to remember that when you can’t wire transfer money, collecting taxes is a very difficult and complicated system and is generally done by the centralizing power that has the right to tax, delegating somebody local who knows. So when Cosimo is papal banker, he is the person who is collecting and channeling the money from every church in Christendom. All of that wealth that’s supposed to flow back to the papacy is actually flowing to Cosimo. Cosimo is passing it on to the papacy after taking a cut. So, that is a lot of money moving quickly. He rises in prominence from a banker to somebody who has enough money to effectively take over his state via manipulating the “guys out of a bag” system. If you’re a giant bigwig in the city and you employ a third of the people in the city, and nine guys at random are chosen out of a bag, three of them are going to be your guys just statistically. And so if you tell all your guys, “I want this policy,” when the plurality on a random council all have a plan and it’s your plan, you effectively control the city.

Ada Palmer: 48:08 But of course there’s a chance to that. And in 1430 and 1432, Cosimo has bad luck and the lottery draws a lot of people who dislike him. And they immediately declare him a traitor to the state and arrest him and lock him in a tower. And he bribes his way out. And he offers the equivalent of about $300,000 to the guard outside the cell and $700,000 to the captain of the guard just 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 and he would have happily 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 hundred thousand. So he escapes and his famous quote about this is “it is dangerous to be rich and not powerful.”

Ada Palmer: 49:28 This is the system into which Machiavelli is born, in which his family has worked for the Medici family for generations. One of the fascinating things about the degree of his patriotism: You weren’t allowed to serve in government office fully if your family was deep in debt. And his grandfather had a lot of unpaid tax debt. So he worked his whole life for a government of which he was not even quite a full citizen. Even that small amount of liberty — people loved it, people were willing to fight for it, people were willing to go to the street for it.

Ada Palmer: 51:46 He was part of the regime that ruled while the Medici were in exile. When they returned, they viewed him as an enemy. He is arrested, tortured, exiled. And in exile, writes The Prince, but dedicates it to the very family that exiled him because they now control Florence and he will only work for Florence. He doesn’t want his manual of statecraft to be in the hands of anybody but his homeland.

Ada Palmer: 52:25 When Florence exiles you, they tell you go to X place and wait. And Florence used this as the core of its diplomatic corps. When you have no nobility, you can’t have ambassadors in the full-on noble ambassador sense. So what Florence did instead is that they would exile people and say, ‘You go to Bruges. Be our contact in Bruges.’ So being in exile is sort of being on probation, but also being entrusted with state stuff. With Machiavelli, they banished him to a hamlet in the middle of the Tuscan countryside and said, ‘go sit in the country and rot.’ What everyone expects is that Machiavelli will leave and go get a job tutoring the daughters of the Duke of Milan. Instead, he stays and rots and continues writing letters home saying, I will serve you or nothing.

Dwarkesh Patel: 58:12 I want to talk about the printing press. So one thing I didn’t realize before reading your book is that not only does Gutenberg go bankrupt after making the most significant invention of a millennium, but his apprentices also go bankrupt.

Ada Palmer: 58:36 So, the problem is printed books are a mass-produced commodity in a world that does not have distribution networks for mass-produced commodities. The great example is technically ebooks existed the first time anyone typed a book on a computer, but there was no market for ebooks until the Kindle came out. So 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 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. Congratulations, Mr. Gutenberg. You have 293 Bibles and you can’t sell them and you go bankrupt.

Ada Palmer: 1:00:00 So Gutenberg goes bankrupt, the bank seizes his press, they try to go into the business, the bank goes bankrupt. Gutenberg’s apprentices build presses, they go bankrupt, they flee their debts and go to Venice. And Venice is the airport hub of the Mediterranean. If you’re printing in Venice, you print 300 Bibles, you give 10 Bibles to each of 30 ships’ captains going to 30 different cities. They can sell them. And the first economically sustainable circulation of print is enabled by the hub system.

Ada Palmer: 1:00:53 Then book fairs come into existence in which printers will spend all year printing a book, they go with a thousand copies of their book to a book fair where there are a thousand other printers. They all trade and then they go home to their town with five copies each of 200 books instead of a thousand copies of one book. So things like the Frankfurt Book Fair, which still exists today, developed as the distribution mechanism.

Ada Palmer: 1:01:19 And that’s really cool because one of the things I think people think is unique about our present information revolution is that we’re living in this sequence of successive information revolutions. We had the computer, then the personal computer, then the internet, then the cell phone, then social media, then LLMs. And it’s easy to think of each of these as different tech revolutions. But really they are all deeper penetration of one tech revolution, the computer revolution. And in the same way, the printing press comes in in 1450 and it takes 40 years to even be economically sustainable. Then in the 1510s, it’s time for pamphlets and pamphlet distribution. And now there’s news, and we get the Reformation, which is enabled by pamphlets in exactly the same way that the Arab Spring is enabled by cell phones. Then we get the newspaper, another new application of the same technology. So it’s one information revolution having multiple successive revolutionary applications as people find new things to do with it.

Ada Palmer: 1:06:00 Civ is the number one teacher of history in the world. And what does Civ tell you? In antiquity a turn is 50 years, and then in the Middle Ages a turn is 25 years, and in modernity, a turn is just one year. Because in one year as much happens now as happened in 50 years in antiquity. And that lie is also what our textbooks tell us, but anytime I go to a talk where any historian is zooming in on any decade in any time and place, it always feels like it’s moving as fast as our present is moving.

Dwarkesh Patel: 1:06:25 I guess the difference is that technologically we know that they weren’t moving as fast.

Ada Palmer: 1:06:30 Technologically they were moving fast. We just don’t care about those technologies anymore. They were constantly inventing all sorts of things. We just take them for granted. The invention of chairs with backs, the invention of scissors, improved metallurgy. There was a sequence of revolutionary adaptations in how to process oil and how to process colors and how to mix them together, and then those were used to create fake gemstones, and 11 major technical revolutions over the course of 120 years led to those colors changing in Renaissance paintings.

Dwarkesh Patel: 1:17:42 In the book Guido Ruggiero has this question: in Italy, they’ve really scaled the printing press, they have metalworking for fine typesetting, milling technology, gears for watches. So he asks, why didn’t Italy have the Industrial Revolution?

Ada Palmer: 1:18:13 So part of it is Italy is the breadbasket, and it’s also the center of big oil, which is to say big olive oil, and the other major industry, big wool. If you’re already the center of big finance, big wool, and big oil, do you need an Industrial Revolution? You’re already economically on top through the power of agriculture. Another factor is it’s so subdivided because those rich cities are still mostly independent. No city really wants to be the one where the giant industrialization is happening. It’s awful for the city. The industrialization of the Industrial Revolution was mostly outside of the wealthier centers of England, in the second-tier towns.

Ada Palmer: 1:20:49 It’s pretty clear we’ve been looking at some documents recently which pretty much confirm that they did figure out how to make industrial looms in the 1400s and they wanted to make luxuriant artisanal fabrics instead.

Ada Palmer: 1:23:18 One of the biggest things that happens at the fall of Rome is that Western and Northern Europe lose access to papyrus. Papyrus is the cheap writing surface of antiquity. Practically no labor has gone into this. But papyrus is a warm weather plant. It is killed by frost. You cannot grow it north of the frost line. Without papyrus, what you’re writing on is a dead sheep. And if you think of the price of a head of lettuce and the price of a leather jacket, you’re understanding the difference between a sheet of papyrus and writing on a dead sheep. So every page of a medieval book is as expensive as that much of a leather jacket. And a medieval book on parchment hand-written costs as much as a house.

Ada Palmer: 1:26:30 Rome had lots and lots of books on papyrus. They start falling apart because papyrus is brittle. Most of our knowledge from antiquity is not lost at the burning of the Library of Alexandria. It’s lost between 400 and 600 AD when the papyri are falling apart and here you are with a library of 1,000 books and you can only afford to make 100 new books. So you have to choose which 100 of these 1,000 do we save, because there literally is not enough industry on your continent to make enough leather to copy down all this text. You have to pick. And so the majority of what we lost from antiquity we lost then. And this is also what distorted what survived because most of the copying out was done by monks, and their subjective tastes ended up being an unintentional moment of censorship that biased what survives from antiquity.

Ada Palmer: 1:27:00 Paper technology hits Europe in 800 AD, so we’re talking about a four-hundred-year famine of a cheap writing surface. Paper is nowhere near as cheap as papyrus because you need to gather rags from used clothing, immerse them in water and beat them violently using a mill. If parchment we think of as a leather jacket and papyrus as buying a head of lettuce, paper is somewhere in between like getting yourself a dozen frozen prepackaged meals. So it’s ten times as expensive as papyrus, but it’s still a tenth as much as the leather jacket.

Ada Palmer: 1:30:00 So paper comes in, people are very wary of paper. Paper’s clearly not as strong as parchment. People start using paper for rough drafts, letters, sketchbooks. But Europe has paper for four hundred years before the earliest state document ever written on paper.

Dwarkesh Patel: 1:30:55 The numbers of like how expensive a book is didn’t make sense to me just based on how much scribe time it took. But if it’s the paper… but then what changes with Gutenberg? Because Gutenberg still needs paper, right?

Ada Palmer: 1:31:20 Yeah, Gutenberg needs paper, that’s why he goes bankrupt. So he borrows the equivalent of about $1.5 million worth of money to buy paper, and then doesn’t make back $1.5 million worth of material when printing it. Which is why printers start printing pamphlets. Because they can have one press that’s slowly printing a valuable book that’ll take six months to print, while next to it they have another press that’s printing pamphlets where in two days they’ve printed a fashion report on what everyone was wearing at the royal wedding, which they can sell right away.

Ada Palmer: 1:34:17 In the 18th century, they have newspapers. The newspapers don’t quite say the same thing as each other. So The Gentleman’s Magazine was developed, and every week they would publish a roundup of that week’s news, analyzing who’s right and wrong. It was the fact-checking. This was the first magazine, it invented the word magazine being used in this context. And it was an intellectual response to the fake news problem.

Ada Palmer: 1:39:46 In Julius Caesar’s description of Britain when the Romans first get to Britain, he says the people of Britain are so poor they can’t afford to burn wood so they burn rocks. And we know he’s talking about coal. And they had coal in the days of Julius Caesar but they didn’t figure out its massive industrial utility until many many years later.

Ada Palmer: 1:40:31 A lot of people don’t think about this: Gutenberg was living in the middle of a library building boom in which there was a huge demand for books that spiked. He invented the invention in response to that cultural change. It isn’t by chance that we got the printing press in 1450. There was a huge boom of library building starting in the 1410s. So Gutenberg isn’t a random genius out of nowhere. It’s at this point it was the moment that people needed more books. We were gonna get the invention.

Ada Palmer: 1:42:04 Luther hits the sweet spot when the pamphlet distribution network had just developed. When Savonarola printed pamphlets, they only circulated around Florence and its neighbors. His movement was quickly crushed. When Luther makes the 95 Theses public, they’re in print in London in 17 days after he releases them in Wittenberg because the pamphlet runners go vroom vroom vroom.

Ada Palmer: 1:42:52 New censorship regime responds, and the censorship regime is very effective at shaping what is printed in books but can never keep up with pamphlets. In the same way that we can, the government can pressure CNN, the government can’t pressure random people on a social media network.

Ada Palmer: 1:42:58 One of the funny problems that the Inquisition always had when trying to persecute printers is printers worked in the information distribution industry. They were the people who paid the news writers whose job it is to move as fast as humanly possible between cities. Which meant that news always reached them first. So if a printer was ever convicted by the Inquisition, they would find out before the Inquisition could possibly get there to arrest them. And so the Inquisition never succeeded at arresting printers, they’ve always skipped town by the time the Inquisition gets there because if you employ the news writers, you find out first what’s going on.

Dwarkesh Patel: 1:45:59 Before books become cheap, you’ve got people who are, unless you’re fantastically wealthy, you’re reading the same couple of books again and again through your life.

Ada Palmer: 1:46:06 Cosimo de’ Medici’s father owned, I think it was 12 books.

Dwarkesh Patel: 1:46:10 Maybe the reason Petrarch loved Cicero so much is imagine reading the same book 20 times and meditating on every single passage.

Ada Palmer: 1:46:21 Yeah, you really feel like you get to know the person intimately. You develop a personal relationship with the ancient author. And Petrarch talks about his friend Cicero and being betrayed by his friend Cicero when he finds new works of Cicero in which Cicero is being petty and yelling at people about real estate. Petrarch is heartbroken because to him it means even the wisest man in history could not conquer that urge to become irrational and petty in the face of grief.

Dwarkesh Patel: 1:48:11 In 1492, Columbus comes to the new world. What is the reception of this news?

Ada Palmer: 1:48:19 I was just at a conference a week ago at which we confirmed that there’s a Vatican document from like 1100 or maybe 1200 that recognizes the existence of Vinland, ie Canada, where they got the information from the Vikings. A big part of why it wasn’t a bigger deal is that they find the Caribbean islands and they think this is small. The news comes back, we’ve found something across the water to the west. It might be even as big as the Canary Islands. And no matter how big and important something far away is, it’s hard to bring your mind out of the petty squabbles that are happening right around you. France is about to invade Italy, Europe’s about to be embroiled in the largest war it’s seen in 50 years, the Ottomans have just invaded Italy and Hungary. Also over there there’s a new thing. Okay, great, we’ll worry about that when we’re not having three wars at the same time.

Ada Palmer: 1:51:54 One fun game when I study history of censorship: whatever they’re looking at, they’re always wrong from our perspective about what they should be worried about censoring. Here we are in the French Enlightenment, Voltaire and Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade are flying around Europe. And what is the Inquisition worried about? It’s worried about Jansenist treatises about the nature of the Trinity. They are so much more worried about Jansenism than they are about Voltaire. When the Encyclopedie is banned by Rome, France likes the Encyclopedie. The king likes it, the queen likes it. She’s on record saying it was so cool being able to look up the technology that we used to make her silk pantyhose. When they agree to have the ceremonial burning, they march the Encyclopedie up to the fire, and then they get some Jansenist treatises about the nature of the Trinity and burn those instead because they don’t want to burn the Encyclopedie.

Ada Palmer: 1:54:00 The 1545 edition of the Index of Banned Books says in its introduction ‘We shall put the names of arch-heretics in ALL CAPS.’ And I eagerly flipped to M and Machiavelli is not in all caps. He was not important enough from their position. The ALL CAPS authors are all minor Protestant theologians. An era is always wrong about what ideas are the really big ones.

Dwarkesh Patel: 1:57:00 It was really interesting to learn from your book that of all the thousands of people killed during the Inquisition, one guy was actually executed for science related stuff.

Ada Palmer: 1:57:10 I think probably the number executed for atheism would be about a hundred. There are 12 total trials of scientists about science. Galileo is one, Giordano Bruno is one. Giordano Bruno is the only one executed. Of those 12 trials only three were convicted. And hundreds of thousands of trials for judaizing, hundreds of thousands of executions for paganism. One for science.

Ada Palmer: 1:58:34 Milton of Paradise Lost fame wrote our first big defense of the free press, the Areopagitica. He fails, the censorship regime passes. Paradise Lost is published under this censorious regime. The one line they tell him to change is about astrology. They’re like, ‘It’s perfectly fine having Satan be your charismatic protagonist and God be kind of a jackass and also having Satan spout ferocious anti-monarchical rhetoric. That’s fine. But this one line about a comet causing a thing to happen, no. Astrology is going to confuse people’s souls.’ They’re so wrong about what they’re censoring. But they always are.

Dwarkesh Patel: 2:00:57 You said in the book that in the late 17th century, the most extensive experimental laboratory in all of Europe is the one in the Vatican run by the inquisitor.

Ada Palmer: 2:01:22 They saw themselves as guarantors of truth and of accuracy in 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.

Ada Palmer: 2:02:14 But history is never what we expect.

Dwarkesh Patel: 2:02:16 Seems like a good place to close. Ada, thank you very much.

Ada Palmer: 2:02:18 Thank you.