YouSaid · the spoken record

Ada Palmer

lines on the record: 134
first: 2026-03-06
most recent: 2026-03-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Inquisitors and by night are going home to write their own scientific treatises as they do these experiments. It's not what we expect.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the Inquisitors, not the library, the most extensive experimental laboratory. That's what I meant to say, yeah. Daniele Makulia is the scholar there. That's from his dissertation. Though I think it's been published now, but I don't know if it's actually out in English. It's out in Italian. And he works on the Inquisition in the immediate aftermath of Galileo, 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 these amazing people who by day are”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or the same way there was a moral panic about Dungeons and Dragons in the 90s, there's a moral panic about scary and dangerous books and pamphlets. So there's a movement to create state censorship for the first systematic time in England. And Milton writes this big treatise about why freedom of the press is important, the aeropagitica, beautifully written rhetorical piece that presents the importance of we must trust truth to rise purely to the top. We must let free voices move otherwise you're going to create a situation where people are writing for the censor first and for the public second it will sort of constrain people's thought in the way that we know chilling effects and fear do. It's a beautiful treatise. He fails, the censorship regime passes. Paradise Lost is published under this censorious regime. It goes through this censorship. The one line they tell him to change is about astrology. They're like, it's perfect.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, a Lutheran. Milton of Paradise lost fame wrote our first big defense of the free press. And this is in the moment in the early 1600s when England doesn't yet have systematic censorship law. It has ad hoc, hey, this book is bad, but it doesn't have systematic, you must submit all books to a censor. The way the Catholic world does by that point. The Catholic world developed it in order to fight Protestantism. There's a lot of support for creating censorship in England at the time because there's anxiety about papists plotting against our nice non-Catholic country trying to undermine it. There's a general feeling of anxiety, but also there's deliberate moral panic whipped up by politicians and power-seeking people who whip up a deliberate moral panic about books the same way in 1954. There was a moral panic about comic books.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think probably the number executed for atheism would be about 100. 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, which is theoretically contaminating Christianity with Jewish thought. And all of these other minutiae of oppression and segregation of populations, executions for paganism meaning practicing your indigenous religion in a colonized space, hundreds of thousands of executions for that, one for science.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“M and Machiavellia's not in all caps. He was not important enough from their position. The all caps authors are all minor Protestant theologians. They're all people who are like Calvin and Zwingli and Luther and Melancthan. They're all doing stuff that we would say does not matter. But A, era is always wrong about what ideals and what circulation and what changes are the really big ones and are always much, much more worried about, oh my God, the Prince of Spain, which princesses he going to marry? This is going to determine whether Spain is or isn't annexed by Germany. This is the most important thing that has ever happened the entire history of time. And people are like, we've discovered another continent. They're like, we don't care. We don't want to know who's going to marry Charles.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Familiar with Greenblatt's book The Swerve, which accredits a lot of change to the materialist science that this poem articulates. There's a much more complex story which you know is told in my book, which refers to Greenblatt's, and if anyone enjoyed the swerve, you would really enjoy. The more detailed zoom-in that inventing the Renaissance has. But we would say, guys, you should censor this. We literally have letters of inquisitors writing to each other saying, we don't need to bother censoring Lucretius. Only learned people can read it and they know perfectly well that the false stuff is false, so it'll just circulate and it's fine. What we need to worry about censoring is all of these fine-tune inutiae of Protestantism. So like 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 when I first read that, I was like, oh, I want to see all my favorite art heretics be in all caps. And I eagerly flipped it.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When that is banned by Rome, Paris is commanded. Paris loves this book. The king likes this book, the Queen likes this book. She's on record saying it was so cool being able to look up the technology that we used to make her silk pantyhose, right? She just loves it. Everybody loves it. France allows it to circulate despite its controversial content, but Rome says, no, you must ban this book. And so they agree they're going to have the ceremonial burning and they mark the encyclopedia up to the fire. And then they get some chance to treat us about the nature of the Trinity and burn those instead because they don't want to burn the encyclopedia. They love it. They want to burn this other thing. And this is always true. If we had a time machine for the Inquisition in the 1540s, we would say, like, guys, Machiavelli, he's really important. He's really revolutionary. You got to be looking at this. Or we would say Lucretius's de Varum Natura, which I did my dissertation on, and many people are.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what is the Inquisition worried about? It's worried about Jansenist treatises about the nature of the Trinity. And Jansenism is sort of like a Calvinist version of Catholicism, right? Do you want to have an incredibly terrifying authoritarian God who hates you and tells you that your soul is a worthless spider that deserves to be hurled into fire?”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're about to be betrayed, it does matter, but it also doesn't matter. And so, in the same way that any decade is concerned by its tumults and often fails to recognize the importance of what's around it, that's true of every decade. One fun game when I study the history of censorship, which I work a lot on, my next non-fiction book is going to be a book on the history of censorship. They're looking at They're always wrong from our perspective about what they should be worried about censoring, right? If we had a time machine and our goal was to go give them advice. So here we are in the French Enlightenment, Voltaire and Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade and La Matrix articulations of materialist atheism are flying around Europe.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which they thought that there was basically one country's worth of stuff south of the Sahara, Ethiopia, and nothing else. And then they're like, oh my God, there's a whole big thing that sticks out. They're also discovering that the heart is a pump. I mean, that's a bit later, but they're discovering all sorts of stuff at the same time. So the discovery of the New World, especially when they realize how big it is, becomes an intellectual challenge where they say, wait, does this mean all the maps we've had are wrong? Does this mean the ancients were wrong about geography? Does it mean the world is a lot bigger than we used to think the world is? Let's worry about that the same way we worry about revolutionizing our mathematics and figuring out that the sun doesn't go around the earth. These are things that our paradigm shifting. But on the other hand, does it matter whether the sun goes around the earth of the earth and the sun when the French are invading right now and we need to get the defenses going? And there's a giant civil war happening.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. But guys, we're having three wars at the same time. Oh my God. And then Martin Luther hits Europe like a ton of bricks when they still haven't even figured out that this is a continent and not an island, right? So in the same way that if you're in a country and it's having a tumult, you worry a lot about its tumult, even if a larger tumult is happening in a faraway country. It's hard to bring your mind out of your epic crisis to be like, hey, the other is they're inventing lots of new things and it falls into the sphere along the rest, right? They're discovering the existence of sub-Saharan Africa.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, the way I put it to my students is the news comes back. We've found something across the water to the west. It might be even as big as the Canary Islands. They've found something, but they don't realize they've found something, the scale of Europe and Africa. Actually, it's not as big as Europe and Africa, but they found something humongous. That's part of it. Another part of it is no matter how big and important something far away is, it's hard to bring your mind out of the petty scrubbles that are happening right around you, especially when they feel like life or death. If it's 1492, what is happening? France is about to invade Italy, Europe might be embroiled in the largest war exceeded 50 years. The papacy has just been taken over by Spain. Spain is suddenly trying to throw its weight around in Europe in a way that's unprecedented. The Ottomans have just invaded Italy and Hungary and might be coming again.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um, yeah, I mean, that's fun. And, you know, when I teach my class on the 1490s, the students, many of whom are American, always have trouble wrapping their heads around the people thinking that the New World isn't a big deal. A big part of it is that they find the Caribbean Islands and they find the coast and they think this is small.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although 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, I forget the exact year that recognizes the existence of Vinland, i.e. Canada, where they got the information from the Vikings. But they thought it was just a little thing. But yeah”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To forever be irrational and petty in the face of grief. And he talks about Cicero breaking his heart and his foot because the book fell on his foot and broke it and he got a bad infection and he was bedridden for months.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's a one way conversation. You're responding to them. The future will respond to you. But there is a great deal of intimacy. I mean, Petrarch talks about his friend Cicero and being betrayed by his friend Cicero when he finds new works of Cicero that he hadn't read and which Cicero's some of Cicero's letters in which Cicero is not following his own stoic philosophical precepts and is being petty and yelling at people about real estate and getting all upset after his daughter's death and how people get kind of manic when there's been a death in the family and start quarreling about everything Cicero gets like that and 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 if that if even Cicero became irrational and petty in the face of grief does that mean humanity is doing”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, and you really feel like you get to know the person intimately. You develop a personal relationship with the ancient author. You are participating in a conversation across the diaspora of time.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, prevent circulation. It could restrict it. It could make it harder. It could make it scary. But it couldn't prevent it.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the printer skips town. The printer moves to the next town. And there is a cost to that, right? There's not no human cost to evading that. You've had to leave your home and friends behind and move to a new place, but they don't get you. And it's very easy to deny that the pamphlet came from you at all So the print industry proves very difficult to censor. And we're experiencing the same thing with social media, right? And everyone is like, censor the pornography on ex-social media channel. And they're like, we just can't. It's too fast. There's too much. Or censor the hate speech. We just can't. There's too fast and there's too much. There were too many pamphlets and they could crack down on one particular pamphlet. We have records of this as a brilliant analysis in Antimetin's book”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it will move the information faster than you can move. And even if that one printer had to skip town, he will set up shop somewhere else, a new person will take over his shop. The information will still move. So pamphlets become unpolicable. You can try to police them. You can partially police them. But keeping pamphlets from moving around, they're anonymous, they're quick, they're produced overnight, they move quickly, you just can't keep up with them.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Persecute printers. Is printers worked in the information distribution industry. They were the people who paid the newswriters 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. The Inquisition can't keep up. And when we look at censorship, there's an intersection of four factors as to whether censorship is possible. One of them is law. Is it legal for the censorship to happen? But another one is the technology. Is it actually possible to censor this thing? And you cannot censor whatever moves the information fastest.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the same way that we can, the government can pressure CNN. The government can't pressure random people on a social media network. You're not going to be able to keep up with that speed. And one of the funny problems that the Inquisition always had when trying to”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, Machiavelli, remember, is contemporary with Luther. It's just that he circulates his stuff very briefly and very privately. He doesn't want a pamphlet version of his ideas out there because he only wants Florence to have it. Luther hits the Sweet spot when the pamphlet distribution network had just developed. Hence, you know, when Savannah Rolla printed pamphlets, they only circulated around Florence and its neighbors, Siena, Pisa. It took months for them to get farther. 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 and get the news there and things are printed overnight and come out that way.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And inventors were trying to figure out ways to make books cheaper. They were making smaller books. They were using paper more. They were trying to do this. Paper surges before the Gutenberg Moval type printing press. 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 going to get the invention.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have the Industrial Revolution when you feel you need to. And that's the thing about Gutenberg as well, that a lot of people don't think about because people are like, Gutenberg was an inventor and invented a thing and then it had an impact. No. He 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.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they had coal in the days of Julius Caesar, but they didn't figure out its massive industrial utility until many, many, many, many, many, many, many years later.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Neat. I mean, I always think of there's a in Julia 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.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what kinds of things they were parted. Yeah. But just think about, again, think of a Leather Jacket, but how much more industrial effort went into making leather. Literally paper thin like this Huge amounts of industrial effort going into making the pages of such a book.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Book of ours. This is probably a French book of ours. A book of ours is a personal prayer book, Bible quotes, objects of meditation. So the book would be fat and small. This was the most common manuscript in the Middle Ages. And you would have It's sort of the smartphone of the period in which you make all your notes and information and write down people's names. You might have celebrities you meet sign your book of hours. So all sorts of neat things go into the margins as you use this as a way of organizing the day. But you can imagine”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tiny and precise But here is good parchment. That is hard to believe that it's animal skin. So these are pages from a book of ours from about fourteen eighty and individually hand calligraphed. You can see that one has a hole through it. And they wrote around the Because too valuable to not use that sheet, right? These are paper thin. And you can barely tell if you look carefully which side was the outside of the animal which was the inside because one side has pores, tiny little speckles of pores.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you can see the sort of plaid pattern of the papyrus because it is made of the two layers of strips. And there's a papyrus scroll. That's modern papyrus. The thing about papyrus is that in addition to being cheap, it's very brittle. It works better in a scroll than it is folded over because the folded edge cracks really easily. So if you try to make this into a codex book, it's going to be very fragile as a code. And then here you go. This is a real 17th century letter in absolutely indecipherable handwriting on parchment. You can even tell, because that's cheap parchment, which side was the outside of the animal and which side was the inside of the animal.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tale of the Doctor from Padua and how he murdered his wife. Is he real? We don't know. But if somebody publishes a newspaper that serially prints news every week, they have a reputation. They have to be respectable. You're not going to subscribe to them if you catch them printing nonsense. The serial nature of a newspaper was a form of accountability that made people willing to trust it over time. So the newspaper is a way of fact-checking the pamphlet. The pamphlet is a way of making money while you're printing your longer book. I will also let you have a look at papyrus.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very exciting. So You're laundry lint if you don't bleach it remains the color that it on average was. In the 18th century, they have newspapers. The newspapers are reporting news. The newspapers don't quite say the same thing as each other. And so then the problem is how do we know who to trust? So the gentleman's magazine was developed and every week they would publish a roundup of that week's news saying what each newspaper said about it and where they contradicted each other and 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 of how do we reconcile what happens with newspapers. Many iterations of the inventive printing press, then they invent the pamphlet, then they invent the newspaper, then they invent the magazine to cope with the newspaper. The newspaper is invented to cope with a pamphlet because you don't know whether to trust the scandal.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of them were real news, most of them were combinations, but you can sell something like this cheaply in a couple of days. And often they would have a cheap blue cover. You have seen this color before. This is the color of laundry lint. Because fundamentally, laundry lint is what paper is. You take rags of old clothes, you put them in water, you beat them until they become a pulp. You skim it out with a sieve. Laundry lint is what rag paper is. And if you don't bleach it, it's this sort of generic blue-gray color, which is the average color that human beings wear. That's a copy of The Gentleman's Magazine. Another example of technology taking a leap forward in the 18th century. When they invented the newspaper, they immediately had the problem of, oh no, newspapers contradict each other. We don't know what's true. We have to fact-check stuff. Oh, that one has a great foldout. I think there's a procession or something. So instead of photographs, we have this fancy, here is what everyone was wearing at the state funeral.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if we look at some examples of parchment and need the little guys. Show you some of these one by one. For example, this is a pamphlet, Naked Pages, Short Text, hand stitched together. It would take two or four days to print a pamphlet like that. It's cheap, it's ephemeral, you print a thousand of them, you sell a bunch around the town, you sell a bunch to news writers who are going to and from other cities, who will buy them and bring them to the next town. So if you've printed news in Milan, people who are going to Florence will want to buy your news to go there. And it might be a report of a siege. It might be, here's what the people were wearing at the royal wedding. It might be my favorite ever title of a pamphlet was The Scandalous Tale of a Doctor from Padua and how he seduced his maid, murdered his wife, murdered the maid, cut out her heart, and ate it, and how he was justly punished by God. That was the title of the pamphlet. These things circulated around. Some of them were nonsense.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Gutenberg newspaper, that's why he goes bankrupt, right? So he borrows the equivalent of about 1.5 million dollars worth of money to buy paper and then doesn't make back $1.5 million worth of material when printing it. And this is what makes printing a risk, right? Because you have to start buying the paper up front. You need to buy it in a big lot so that it matches because people don't want the paper to suddenly be a different color halfway through their book. So you're investing a lot up front and you're not getting anything back until you produce this slow print run, 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. And it's much cheaper, but it means they have something they can sell two or three times a week. So the pamphlet following the book.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“who ran away those guys so at that moment in the 1490s if you're really rich you might be invested in this new pangled printed books but you're still not trusting paper even though paper's been there So again, gradual adoption of technologies and gradual trust in paper. And they're still using parchment for things gradually less and less, but substantially over the course of the 1600s, you can even find things written on parchment in the 1700s and 1800s. British Parliament still did its records on parchment up until 10 years ago, and the Vatican still does its official records on Parchment now.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give you a sense of how people are wary of it and it disseminates slowly, and it's still expensive. It requires industry and production, but it is a tenth as expensive as leather. Paper disseminates slowly through Europe. And again, this is one of these, there was always technological change. And all technological change are gradual. So paper comes in in 800. It's sort of being trusted by 1200. When printing begins, they're printing on paper, but they even print on vellum. If you're a really rich person, you would be like, please print two copies on vellum for me. So dukes like the dukes de este, the sister Isabella de Este, the sister of the Duke who walked around Buck Naked to show off that he could. His sister specially ordered all of her books to be printed on vellum. Even when the rest of the print run was on paper, these are the very books that are being produced in Venice by the apprentices of Google.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is somewhere in between getting yourself a dozen frozen prepackaged meals, which are complex and have many ingredients that a lot of industry went into producing the actual packaging, et cetera, more so than a head of flettis. So it's 10 times as expensive, but it's still a tenth as much as the leather jacket. So paper comes in. People are very wary of paper. Paper is clearly not as strong as parchment. Parchment is really tough stuff. People start using paper for rough drafts, letters, sketchbooks when you're doing the sketch before doing a painting. You might do that on paper. But Europe has paper for 400 years before the earliest state document ever written on paper.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you lift up the slurry, and then it locks together into a sheet of paper, so it's not as cheap as just growing papyrus, and it's much more labor. You have to build a paper mill. So if parchment we think of as like a leather jacket and papyrus we think of as like buying a head of lettuce, this is somewhere in between like buying what's in between a leather jacket.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the subjective tastes of the people in power at the moment the papyri were falling apart ended up being an unintentional moment of censorship that biased what survives from antiquity. Paper technology hits Europe in 800 AD. So we're talking about a 400-year famine of a cheap writing surface. Paper is nowhere near as cheap as papyrus because you need to gather rags from used clothing. You then immerse them in water and you beat them violently using a mill for a very long time until they become a pulp. You then scoop that pulp up on a screen and the fibers lock together. It's a sort of a slurry that looks like grits.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when you have a thousand books and you can only save 100 of them, and you're a monk, you're like, what do I save? I know St. Augustine. I love St. Augustine. This is why we have more surviving work by St. Augustine than the entirety of all pagan classical Latin.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, still zooming in on Fall of Rome 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 a thousand books, and you can only afford to make 100 new books. So you have to choose which hundred 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. You have to pick. And so the majority of what we lost from antiquity, we lost then. We lost when the papyri were falling apart. And this is also a distorted what survived because most of the copying out was done by monks.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is an enormous expense. And so to have a library is to be not just rich but mega rich. So only the wealthiest cities contain anybody who has a library. The great library of the University of Paris, the library from Europe's perspective has 600 books. Definitely more than 600 books in this room Right, every kiosk at an airport selling Dan Brown novels has more than 600 books. This is nothing. And at the same time as that, right, in the Middle East, sultans have libraries of over a thousand books or 5,000 books. There are libraries in sub-Saharan Africa with thousands of books. There are libraries in China with thousands of books because they in China have cheap paper and rice paper, the Middle East has papyrus. Europe and only Europe is writing on all other jackets.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So France, Spain, even most of Italy, you can only grow papyrus down in the very tip and down in Sicily. 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 handwritten costs as much as a house so that a small pocket copy of a book costs as much as a studio condo and a big illuminated fancy Bible, you're spending on that what you would spend on a villa in the countryside.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And have libraries in any mid size city will have a library. People can send letters back and forth. There can be enormous tax records. Sometimes when Egypt and Rome are at war, Egypt will really be like, no, we are angry. You will stop exporting papyrus. No, papyrus to Rome. And then Rome's infrastructure will fall apart overnight because you can't do anything if you can't write stuff down. Papyrus is a warm weather plant. It is killed by frost. You cannot grow it north of the frost line.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A huge amount rests on whether you have a cheap sheep writing surface. And here, rather than looking first at the Renaissance, let's look at what we think of as Fall of Rome. Because one of the biggest things that happens there is that Western and Northern Europe lose access to papyrus, right? So papyrus is the cheap writing surface of antiquity. It is an easy plant-based writing surface. You take this tall, thin water reed that is fibrous like asparagus. You slice it into ribbons. You set them out in the sun. A bunch of them parallel to each other sitting on a stone like noodles. You put a second row of noodles perpendicular to that on top, and then they dry in the sun, and they're naturally sticky. They stick to each other, they produce a sheet. Practically no labor has gone into this. You've sliced, you've lay out, boom. Papyrus is a very inexpensive writing surface, and this is what enables Rome to have a bureau.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, so the first printed fonts look like handwritten scripts and often have a blank space to illuminate it so that it looks just as fancy as the manuscripts.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right there. I mean, it's pretty clear this is not going to sound plausible to anybody, but it's true. 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 didn't want to. They wanted to make luxuriant artisanal fabrics.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source