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

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“Another is it's so subdivided because those rich cities are still mostly independent, whereas a centralized crown in England is more able to pass legislation to facilitate a massive transformation. No city really wants to be the one where the giant industrialization is happening. It's awful for the city. Note that the industrialization of the industrial revolution was mostly outside of the wealthier centers of England in the second tier towns. They grow massively into huge industrial areas like Lancaster. So those are a plural bunch of reasons.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One reason that industrialization doesn't kindle in Italy. Italy is agricultural land and finance world. It doesn't feel like it needs new industry. Another factor is mining and so on. This land is more valuable as a farm than it is as a mine. You don't want to rip it up.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you need an industrial revolution? You're already economically on top through the power of agriculture. It makes sense for it to have been a sort of industrial backwater area that what was England producing crappy quality wool. England was so aware that it couldn't process wool into high quality without masses of olive oil, which it couldn't produce, that England just exported its crude wool to Florence in order to have Florence with its olive oil reserves produce the fine quality. Think about how a wool suit isn't itchy, but a wool blanket often is. That wool suit isn't itchy because lots of olive oil went into the process of producing it, at least at pre-modern tech levels. So do you want England to produce your itchy wool that people will only pay a small amount for, or do you want to export it? It makes sense for it to have been somewhere industrially ambitious that wasn't already economically on top to have done 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
“So part of it. But another is we cannot underestimate how much richer per square meter Italy is than everywhere else. Italy is the breadbasket and it's also the center of big oil, which is to say big olive oil, which is both fuel oil for light and industrial oil for production as well as cooking and eating oil. And the other major, major industry of the period, which is big wool. If you're already the center of big finance, big wool, and big oil.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An enormous increases in population. Would we have anyway, even if it hadn't been systematized? Probably a bit later, and we would have a slightly flatter hockey stick. But we would still have hockey sticked, right? In the same way that when you put mice on an island without mice, they breed and they breed and they breed and they breed and they hockey stick. Humans would also have hockey sticked. But would we have hobby sticked later? Would we have hockey sticked with more pain, right? When mice hockey stick, they also starve to death and eat each other. We haven't done that yet. Go us. Was that science? Probably. And so there are a lot of factors to it. So is it true that everything accelerated after 1650, in one sense, yes? In another sense, it's a continuation of a curve that was already curving.”
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 so, what we would say is there was always anthropogenic progress. In 1630, they realize there is anthropogenic progress. They think there hasn't been. They think they're beginning. And that history up until this point has been stagnant, but now it's going to suddenly be full of invention as for the first time there will be deliberate anthropogenic progress. Really, we would say there always was and that it's accelerating. At this point, we realize it and articulate and describe it. But you've probably seen lots of graphs of history with the hockey stick graph structure, right, where it's sort of flat for a long time and then they'll put that zoop after the invention of the scientific method. And it depends on what we're graphing, whether that swoop kind of is appropriate. And it also depends on how much you zoom in or zoom out. Because it's true, we do 150 years after Bacon get to inventions that result.”
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 have magnification and they can see worlds of complex patterns on the wing of a flea and it sounds like the whole world is suddenly coming into view and we're at the beginning of progress. Now if we zoom out we would say there'd been progress the whole time people had always been inventing things agriculture in France was better in 1300 than it was in 100 plows got better seed got better cabbages were bred to be bigger people worked out better pots there were always artisanal inventors and in fact that's a lot of what Bacon is observing he worked in the patent office as a young man and he would see a carpenter come in to patent”
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 if we make academies of sciences, we can make sure that every human generation lives in a better condition than the past. We will have better agriculture, fewer famines, we will have refrigeration, we will have chicken in winter, we will have all of these things that we aspire to. If we collaborate each generation's experience will be better than the last. He says that to be a scientist is the ultimate act of charity because there is no greater act of charity than to give a gift to every human who will ever live after you. So that is the rhetoric of what you would feel was happening if you're alive in the 1620s and 1630s. And Galileo is publishing his observations and Descartes is publishing his systems and they've just discovered to the heart is a pump and that they were totally wrong about the four humors theory and that the blood circulates and they're trying to figure out what it does.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just spun out of the body of the spider himself, the theorist theorizing from his own mind. And the third kind, says Bacon, is the honeybee, who gathering from among the fruits of nature, processes what he gathers through the organ of his own being to produce something which is sweet and useful for humankind. And that is the scientist, who gathers from nature to produce something sweet and useful for humankind, and with this rhetorical call and with Francis Bacon's portrait on the title page, the English Academy of Sciences is founded and starts publishing, and the standard switches over from you are not a great achiever because you built the dome, you are a great achiever because you worked out how it can be done and you shared that sweet and useful thing with all of humankind. Bacon says, if we do”
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 here I'm going to use Francis Bacon's gorgeous simile of the three insects. So there are three types of knowledge wielders, says Bacon. First, there is the ant, who is the encyclopedist, who gathers information from all around the world, and he learns everything he can that he piles it up into a great big pile, and he makes an anthill and he sits on top. And if he has the biggest anthill, the biggest pile of knowledge, then he's proud of having made it. But all he does is assemble it and have it, possess it. A beautiful library, nothing comes from it. The second type is the system weaver, the spider who spins a laborate website of beautiful intricate logical theory in which you admire them and you can get entranced. They're almost hypnotic. But there's nothing real in 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
“At by the future exactly the way he and his peers marveled at the works of the ancients. And they look at something like the Colosseum or the Pantheon in Rome with its enormous dome, and they say, oh, how did they do it if only we could work that out, we could make one, and then make sure no one else could. 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 in the sense of a community of scientists, this is not a servant of human progress. This is actually a saboteur of human progress, if anything, who deliberately makes progress and then tries to cut it off at that point so that no one else can be his peer. So that is what you did as a learned inventor in the 1400s and in the 1500s. But as you get to 1600, the suggestion is different.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Provoke and shock my students with the fun claim. Leonardo da Vinci was not a scientist. What I mean by that is that to be a scientist is to publish your results and share them with a community of other scientists so that they can test them, so that the whole human civilization progresses a little bit. And when my friends who are chemists or my friends who are particle physicists discover something, the next goal is to share that discovery with everyone so everyone's knowledge advances. What does Leonardo do? He writes everything he discovers down in coded mirror writing so that nobody but him can possibly use it. And he refuses to share even with his students and assistants the secrets of what he's doing because Leonardo does not want to contribute to human progress. Leonardo wants to make unique masterpieces so that hundreds of years later people will see them and marvel and say, how did he do it? No one else has ever been able to replicate that method so that he would be marvelous.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intentional anthropogenic progress. So I'll zoom in on the arguments made in 1600, then I'll zoom out and unpack them. But in 1600, the idea is history up until now has been sort of unsystematic and people have discovered things kind of at random, but we can create a method in which we observe the world and use inductive reasoning to figure things out from those observations to create systematic descriptions of the secret motions that underlie nature. And from that workout technologies that are good and useful for humankind. If, as we make our observations of nature, we publish them and share them with each other, we can create a community of scientists that will share all of these discoveries with each other and with the world and therefore benefit it. This is where when I'm doing this in the classroom, I deliberately”
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, I mean, it's hard to figure out when are we lying and when are we right where we say the pace picked up? And one thing that makes the pace pick up in modern day is simply the population grew and grew and grew in is now much, much larger, right? And the majority of people who ever lived in the entire history of since humans have been humans and not hominids have lived in the last 200 years because the population became massive. How did the population become massive? Our agriculture and our hygiene enabled it. Had our agriculture and our hygiene improve, half of that is continuing to, on the artisanal level, to invent new things in the same way that the artists invented better colors, agricultural workers invented better technologies and agriculture was constantly improving. And the other, though, you're correct that with the arrival of the systematic scientific method in just after 1600, there is a deliberate societal desire to create”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like gemstones. How did that happen when you compare them to paintings from just 100 years earlier where somehow the colors are flatter? I'm not talking about the anatomy being more realistic. That's separate, but the colors are flatter. And the answer is there was a sequence of revolutionary adaptations and had to process oil and how to process colors and how to mix them together. And then those were used to create fake gemstones. And there was a major industrial leap forward in the fake gemstone industry. And then people who are making picture frames realize they could use the same techniques from the fake gemstones to make fake gold by painting yellow over the surface of tinfoil. And then those were used by artists who were like, wait, I want to make things that look like they glow like fake gemstones so that there were 11 major technical revolutions over the course of 120 years that led to those colors changing.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were constantly inventing all sorts of things. We just take them for granted, right? The invention of chairs with backs, the invention of scissors, the invention of improved metallurgy so that steel could do things steel couldn't do before. There was always technological change happening. I'm in the middle of written an amazing book about when you look at the paintings of Raphael and the few paintings we have by Michelangelo, the colors look like they're really glowing.”
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 does Civ tell you? Siv tells you that in antiquity, a turn is 50 years. And then in the Middle Ages, a turn is 25 years. And then once you get into industrial revolution, a turn is 10 years and then five years into 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 it doesn't matter where we zoom in. 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.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're just independent. It's more that history has always moved fast. But when we teach it in high school, we're trying to move over large chunks of time quickly. And so we pretend that it moved slowly. We have this lie that there were long periods of stagnation. But you can zoom in anywhere and you're going to find every decade feels different and people in the 1320s are nostalgic for people in the 1300 aughts, right? And it's always felt like history was moving very quickly and things rose and things fell. It's the lies we tell ourselves in history books written in the 19th century that are trying to group all of these things together and make modernity special that confused us about this. So I'm working on a paper right now about the video game sieve, right? Civ is the number one teacher of history in the world and it has shipped 70 million copies and 65% of people on earth who have technology play video games. Civ is the number one teacher of history, bar none since 1991.”
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 mate has a bunch of tumults that flap, flop, flop, flop, flop, so that every decade feels different. Here you are in 1506 being nostalgic for how the world was completely different in 1490. And you're like, that's pretty fast. And here we are in 2026 often feeling nostalgic for how things were in the year 2000, right?”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As that one technology finds new forms and disseminates more deeply and keeps having consequences over decades. But it's not multiple separate revolutions. It's one ongoing information revolution.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's one information revolution having multiple successive revolutionary applications as it disseminates and eventually saturates. And it moves on a time scale quite similar to the timescale which the digital one is happening as well so that print keeps hitting Europe with successive revolutions for 150 years. And every couple decades there will be a new bang or sometimes every decade there'll be a new suddenly it's possible to get a printed pamphlet from Wittenberg to London in 17 days. Oh my God, we can coordinate our resistance movement against the Catholics. Boom. The Reformation happens. That wasn't possible even a decade earlier when it quote took months to get a pamphlet from one end of Europe to the other. So it's best to think of these very much in parallel, the print revolution and the digital revolution as one big technological change in information that then has successive”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Phones and we get the Arab Spring, or rather 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 that follows like social media.”
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 now we have different social media networks coming in successively causing crises one after the other. And then we have LLMs and other applications of machine learning and gen AI. It's easy to think of each of these as different tech revolutions as if we've just had 10 tech revolutions in a row. But really they are all deeper penetration of one tech revolution, the computer revolution, the development of the computer. These are all applications of computers. And so in the same way the printing press comes in in 1450 and it isn't done shaping the world instantly. The printing press comes in in 1450. It takes 40 years to even be economically sustainable. It's not until the 1490s that printers are making money. And then in the 15 teens, it's time for pamphlets. And pamphlet distribution. And now there's news. And news is suddenly done by print. And that's a revolution on the same scale as the difference between computers and self.”
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 Venice is the airport hub of the Mediterranean. Venice is where you change boats. They can sell them. And the first economically sustainable circulation of print is enabled by the hub system. Then book fares 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 and then they sell them in bookshops. So things like the Frankfurt Book Fair, which still exists today, developed as the distribution mechanism. So there's a slow growth and a slow saturation. 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. The computer was exciting. And then we had the personal computer. And then we had the internet. And we had the cell phone. And then we had social media.”
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 do so, you print your Bible, you have 300 Bibles, you sell seven of them to the seven people in your small landlocked German town who are legally allowed to read the Bible in a period in which only priests are allowed to read the Bible. Congratulations, Mr. Gutenberg. You have 293 Bibles and you can't sell them and you go bankrupt. There has to be a distribution mechanism for books to find their market because there are certainly 300 people in Europe that want this, but there are not 300 people in one location where it's being produced. So Gutenberg goes bankrupts. The bank seizes his press. They try to go into the business. The bank goes bankrupt. This is so much overhead. You spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the production cost of the books and then you get nothing back. Gutenberg's apprentices build presses. They go bankrupt. They flee their debts and flee the country and leave Germany go to Venice.”
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, the problem is printed books are a mass produced commodity in a world that does not have distribution networks for mass-produced commodities, right? Mass production is incredibly rare in this period. Coins are mass-produced, but that's really about it. Almost everything is artisanally produced. When you have a mass-produced product, you need a distribution mechanism before you can sell it. The great example is technically e-books existed the first time anyone typed a book on a computer, right? Meaning certainly in the 1970s there was such a thing as an e-book. But there was no market for e-books until the Kindle came out and made there be a commodity way to buy and sell e-books. Then the e-book industry came into existence. So e-book as commodity is several decades younger than e-book technically existing. In the same way, you're Gutenberg, you have figured out how to produce 300 copies of a book for the cost of one copy of 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
“Prince, he says you can do and should do all of these different ruthless things to keep power. We have to remember that the end justifies the means when the end is the survival of your country. It's not the end in general justifies the means. But Machiavelli feels very strongly that regime changes bring civil violence. Civil violence sheds blood. And he has seen the streets of his city run with blood before. He thinks that even life under a tyrant is better than life in a civil war which is usually not life at all, the massacre of the people that is likely and external conquest that is likely as a result of another regime change. So he says don't push for a regime change even if the regime is tyrannical more people will survive by sticking with the tyrant than by changing the regime.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the answer is you read his personal letters and you read the way he talks about love of his country and you read the way he talks to his friends. You read the letters he wrote when he discusses writing the prince. And you read the comments he exchanges with the other friends that he shared it with. His other works, his comic play, which was a big hit, his history of Florence, which was well known at the time, those he published and circulated, the prints he kept in very close private circles circulating it only with trusted intimate friends and then the copy that he sends in to Florence. And yes, it's a job application. Please bring me back. I will work for you. I will be loyal. I support my city more than any particular iteration of my city. I support my country more than any particular regime or group that might be in power, whatever is in power in my city, I will be faithful to it. You see him expressing that in lots of different ways. And when in the”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exert influence, he will be a mover and shaker at the court of Milan or the Court of Naples or the Court of England. Instead, when they say to Machiavelli, sit in the country and rat, this is a test, he passes the test and sits in the country faithfully and rots. And if he had wanted to go be an intellectual power broker, the correct move is to run off to Rome, right? and say, I will give up the chance to go home the way Dante did, but I will be a Florentine in exile and I will write important things and I will live at the house of wealthy men who will support me and take me in and give me the ear of power and I will exert my influence in that way. He does not do that. He stays in the country and he rots and he continues writing letters home saying I will serve you or nothing. Bring me home to serve my country. That is a weird thing to do and not normal for the many other Florentine intellectuals who experience similar banishments in the same period.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's not quite what they did with Machiavelli. With Machiavelli, they banished him to A Hamlet in the middle of the Tuscan countryside near Nothing Important, and said, go sit in the country and rot. And if you're good, we'll invite you back. What they expect, what everyone expects, is that Machiavelli will break that promise and leave because he's a well-known statesman and a scholar and a playwright and a historian. And there are dozens of cardinals in Rome and other cities that would love to employ him. Kings of England love employing Florentines to work for them as secretaries. Kings of Naples love employing Florentines to work for them as secretaries. He might go get a job tutoring the daughters of the Duke of Milan the way Francesco Falefo did when he was kicked out of Florence for opposing the Medici. There are lots of places that it's expected and exiled Florentine intellectual will go where he will have the ear of power and he will be able 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
“When Florence exiles you, they tell you go to X Place and wait, and if you're good, we'll invite you back. And Florence has been doing this for ages because Florence actually used this as the core of its diplomatic core, right? When you have no nobility, you can't have ambassadors in the full-on noble ambassador sense. There's nobody in the city of sufficient rank to go talk to the kings who are, you know, and have play chess with the Sultan and all of these things that you have to do to be a proper ambassador. So what Florence did instead is that they would exile people and say, So, being in exile is sort of being on probation, but also being entrusted with state stuff.”
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 kick him out. The subsequent regimes, which are an independent republic again, are the ones for which Machiavelli works. He was part of the regime that ruled while they were in exile. When they returned, they viewed him as an enemy. He didn't actively organize to resist them, but his name was found on a list of potential people that an anti-Medician resistance movement had intended to recruit. He is arrested, tortured, exiled. 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 here are the great secrets of statecraft to be in the hands of anybody but his homeland so that it will defend his homeland.”
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 to us, that isn't a very big difference, right? They're still both not democracy. We would say they're both not liberty in the sense that we want liberty. But it's an inch more liberty than monarchy. And even that small amount of liberty, people loved it, people were willing to fight for it. People were willing to go to the streets and wave their banners and say, libertas for the republic. And because they were invested in it, Machiavelli observes, they sustained it. But eventually one particular Medici, I'm not saying names because they all have the same names over and over. And it's really confusing, so it's easier without names. One particular Medici comes to power quite young and weak. He's basically 20 when he's suddenly in charge of a very particular and precarious republic. And right then the French are invading Italy and he's scared and he botches the diplomacy with France and falls into disrepute and the city takes the opportunity.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The problem with heredity is that sometimes you get a weak link. And in the moment that Machiavelli is in his early 20s coming of age about to work in government for the first time, a government in which he himself is not in fact even fully enfranchised. That's one of the fascinating things about the degree of his patriotism. You weren't allowed to serve in government office, the elected lottery offices, 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, which is, again, deep love of your country, but also shows even people who could not be in office deeply loved and cared about this republic. And that important liberty that they felt they had being ruled by the 5% instead of being ruled by one dictator.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Famous quote about this is it is dangerous to be rich and not powerful. And that you need the power to defend yourself in a situation like King of the Mountain, where when you're on top, everyone will try to knock you down. This is the system into which Machiavelli is born, in which his family has worked for the Bedici family for generations. He grows up expecting to work for the Medici family.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 capture of the guard to smuggle him out of the tower. And he wrote in a letter later that they were the two most foolish men he'd ever met because he was Cozumo de Medici would happily have paid them tens of millions of dollars to let him out of there. They weren't ambitious enough to think to ask for more than a few hundred thousand. So he escapes. And then the next election by gum happened to elect entirely people who just loved Cosimo and they invited him back to the city in triumph and they declared him father of the fatherland and they arrested and persecuted all of his enemies who turned out to be guilty of tax evasion and all sorts of other things and that was the moment that his grip tightened and he's like I'm gonna stop simply controlling a plurality and I'm gonna start bribing the people who actually run the elections and his”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But of course, there's a chance to that. And in 15, sorry, in 1432, 1430 and 1432, Cosimo has bad luck and the lottery draws a lot of people who dislike him and doesn't draw any of his guys. And they immediately declare him a traitor to the state and arrest him and lock him in a tower.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the people in the city are on your payroll. 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, this policy, and this policy. And if you have questions, send for me and I'll tell you what to do. When the plurality on a random council all have a plan and it's your plan, you effectively control the city. And so in that way, the Medici effectively control this lottery system because they've guaranteed that the plurality in a situation that doesn't have a majority will always be 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
“Moving quickly. It is also a lot of ability to make contracts and contacts. We all know how important networking is. And 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. And so to discuss that again briefly, if you have a system where you lottery people, sortition is the technical term for it. This is a very old form of government. Ancient Athens uses it. It actually works really well. But like any institution, it is corruptible. And in the same way that you can corrupt voting by bribing people or manipulating the machines or manipulating voters, you can also corrupt sortition by bribing the people who pull names out of the bag or by the simpler mechanism which Cosimo uses first of if you're a giant big wig in the city and you employ a third of the people in the city and a”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The central power will say, We expect X amount of taxes from this area. And when you hear about wicked tax collectors, wa ha ha, it's because if you are told we want 10,000 florins worth of tax from this town, but you extract 15, you can keep the other five because the 10 is what you need to send to the central. So the more you extract, the more you get paid. This delegate system in which there's a local tax collector and even a more local tax collector below him who might collect tax from a particular village means that you depend a lot upon the person whose job it is to collect your taxes. So when Cosimo is papal banker, he is the person who is collecting and channeling the money from every church in Christendom when everybody puts a coin into a collection box or pilgrims come and put money. All of the wealth that's supposed to flow back to the papacy is actually flowing to Cosimo. Cosmo is passing it on to the papacy after taking a cut. So that is a lot of money.”
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 when Cosimota Medchi swings the contract as banker for the Pope, it's important to remember that when you can't wire transfer money, in the pre-modern world, collecting taxes is very difficult and complicated system and is generally done by the centralizing power that has the right to tax, delegating somebody local”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Yeah. Is what we need to remind ourselves that actually partial victory is an important thing. And even if the worst were to happen and there were to be tyranny, that tyranny would be so much weaker because there was a lot of resistance and traditions of resistance and structures would develop that would continue to exist.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody else could hear them. Or if they wanted each other as musician, send goons to kidnap each other's musicians. They also used to recreationally murder each other's servants when the siblings were tiffing with each other. That is what you do when you don't fear your people and when you feel confident in power, right? And so they are much closer to tyrants than the Medici are ever able to be even after the republic falls. And that's what's so neat, right? Because the resistance failed if we're looking at it in black and white. The republic fell. There wasn't a republic anymore. There was a duke. He took over the old system was gone. But because the republic fought so hard and because the people really believed in it, the people had a lot more rights. And the tyrant was a lot less tyrannical because there had been that fight. It's a great example of how even when resistance”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She existed as a named family, you may not knock the top off. And the Duke does not knock the top off and the corridor goes around in this awkward square, around that tower, because he knows that if he violates something as traditional and core to the civilization, as the property rights of somebody who has owned something for a long time, there will be rebellion, there will be civil war, there will be dissent, there will be resistance. These are monarchs who know that they are weak and are therefore careful and therefore more rights like property rights exist. Meanwhile across the river in Ferrara, Duke Alfonso de Este of Ferrara 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 de Este. And he and his siblings used to do things like if they liked a musician, kidnap them and lock them in a tower.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That goes from one end of the city to the other so that they can walk in safety without being assassinated. This is a sign of a weak duke. But also, when he was building it, it's going across the roofs and sometimes blasting off the second stories of different people's houses. And most people, when his grace the Duke says, I'm going to blast the top story off your house would say, yes, your grace, please continue, because there are literally severed heads of people who resisted still rotting on spikes in front of the Palazzo Ecchio. But they get to this one point where there's an old tower, a very old tower, a 500-year-old tower. And this belongs to, I think it's the Minelli family, who are descended from peers of Julius Caesar and could trace their genealogy all the way back to an old Roman gents. And when the Duke says, we want to knock the top off your tower, they say, no, this is our tower. This tower has been ours since before the”
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 1500s. And it means that more rights are granted to the people of Florence than to other cities that felt on 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 and they can't run roughshod over them. There's a really cool building that I love in Florence. If you've been there, there's the famous bridge, the Pontavecchio, which has the little jeweler shops all along it. And when you get to the end of it, there's this funny over-the-head corridor, the Vasari corridor, as we call it, which was built by the Dukes of Florence to connect the old city palace where the Senate used to meet where they had to have their seat of power to their new palace across the river, which was much bigger, where they could have grand balls and things that dukes need to have. And because they're so terrified of being assassinated by their own people, they built this overhead walkway.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It looks very Renaissance. To them, it looked like a toga because of the way it was draped. They thought of this as a toga. Their 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.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before 1434. 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. So we're going to sustain people in the named offices that there used to be, and we're going to continue to let the guilds be important and have important offices. And we're going to continue to, if there was a mandatory outfit that people wore who worked in the republic, which there was, the garment thing over there in the corner is an underway Luco Fiorentino. This was the garment you were mandated by law to wear if you held office in the Florentine Republic. To us, we look at it and we're like, it's a long red robe.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the government shows respect for the people by allowing the people to be armed. We read this and we're like, yeah, this feels really familiar. This feels like documents of the founding of the US where we're respecting and arming and trusting the people. Popolo meant the top 4% economically of the population, the members of the merchant guilds. That's the Popolo. He's talking about a narrow slice oligarchy being heard, a narrow slice oligarchy being respected. We now have read more documents of the period and realize how people use these words.”
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 turn to your landlord. Your landlord turns to his landlord. They turn to one of these major families. And these major families are massive landowners that own dozens of apartments within the city, hundreds or thousands of people work for them. And so it makes sense to everyone to be represented that way, like having a council of the CEOs of all of the organizations that employees work for when you're a corporation also supplies your social safety net and you see your representation there. It's also a world that's used to thinking in terms of hierarchy and very unused to thinking about real democracy and that really doesn't have any confidence in what we would recognize as 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 there are still incredibly narrow oligarchic republics. One thing when we read Machiavelli, he talks a lot about the popolo, which we try 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