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

“And you leave orphans behind, it is your employer whose duty it is to take care of them. If you are injured and can no longer work, it is your employer who will support you for the rest of your life while you are disabled and find you work that you can do with that disability. A huge portion of the safety net is your employer. Are you in trouble with the law? Your employer will supply your defense attorney. And your employer will supply the persuasive note to the judge that they would very much appreciate if their person got off. This is the system known as the patronage system, and it existed in ancient Rome, it exists and saturates the medieval and the Renaissance worlds, in which everyone is in a very interconnected hierarchy. So if you're a brewer and your son gets in a barroom brawl and punches somebody out and the person's nose breaks and they die in the brawl and your son is suddenly in trouble and you say, oh no, I don't want my son to be executed.”
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, 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. You're buying mass bulk wool from England, importing it to Florence to use olive oil that you've bought from Naples to process into high quality wool, which you're then exporting to Germany and France. You are a very interconnected businessman. You have a lot of contacts. You have a lot of clout. And the employees who work for you look to you for their safety net as well as their political representation. So we're very accustomed in the modern period to thinking of government as being our big safety net. And if we wonder who is going to fund the hospitals, whose job is it to take care of orphans, we think government, or maybe the church. But in this period, if you're killed,”
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 is how Bologna and Siena, for the most part, work. That's how the Swiss Republic works. That'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 were the military class, right? If you're a military leader in this period, you have to have noble blood. No soldier is going to follow a commander who doesn't have noble blood. That would be weird. 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.”
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 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. 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.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Functional system. He really thought in oligarchic terms, 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.”
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 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 again 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. He believed that only a tiny elite has the capacity to rule. He would really wrestle for a long time if we had time traveling petrarch to wrap his head around democracy as 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
“Thing is 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 at eventually Galileo, none of which resembles what Petrarch imagined if he had specifically described the future he was trying to make.”
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 what I value, right? And I think the go my way as opposed to go well is a really important distinction. Because the Petrarch wanted a world with these values. And in what he thought, for example, that this would be a triumph for Christianity and what we would call Catholicism, though there's only one Christianity from his point of view at the time that he's happening, except for the East, which is different. He was sure that when we found the ancients fundamentally all of their philosophy would agree with Christianity, that the ancients were wise, therefore they will be correct, and Plato will 90% agree with Christianity. It just needs a little shaker of the Trinity on top to be Christianity. And when he says, go find these ancients, he, of course, is in a world that doesn't have the ancients yet, right? The world doesn't have the ancients yet, so 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. They're OHIDists and Epicureans and Stoics and all sorts of categories.”
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 of the focuses I have is Sometimes there are more steps to something than you think. And we tell this story of the Renaissance of. And the Renaissance, they rediscover these ancient texts, and then we got science. And that's true. But it is 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. And we know that about modernity, but we don't remember that about earlier periods”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If it's twelve hundred or fifteen hundred, but if it's 1,600, 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 lives.”
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 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 have 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, right? 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.”
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 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%.”
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, 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 forests to grow, you need enough topsoil, right? And it takes a while to get that topsoil. It takes a while to get enough books. 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. 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 their me more books. Instead of the other way around.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is almost exactly 200 years after this begins, a little bit more. 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. Let's examine, let's doubt, let's rethink, let's do stuff in new ways.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Materialist information. When Poggio found it, there were two dozen people in the world who could read it. A hundred years later, 30,000 people can read it in the 30 print 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 takes 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 after, 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”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We need new ways of thinking about it, and we're reading the ancients, so 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 microtechnologies of book production like footnotes and glossaries in the margin that explain the hard vocabulary so that when petrarchs successors like Ficino was young, you had to be a masterful Latinist to read these ancients. You had to have an enormous vocabulary, there are no dictionaries, there are no glosses, there's nothing to help you, only a tiny slice of expert classes could actually read this stuff. 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' discussions of material.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Osmodically 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. From Petrarch's first call to Machiavelli writing that is as long as from Yuri Gagarin's spaceflight backed to Napoleon, the childhood of Napoleon to the space race. That's Petrarch 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. Makule 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. So what do we need?”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 happen next to rivers. We'll put those examples side by side and see what decisions the commander has 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. 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.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feltr who does every single thing you're supposed to do virtuously and he has all the Plato and he has all the libraries and he has all the art and he gets betrayed and his city taken away from him and loses everything and he watches terrible people like Cesare Borgia and Julius II make terrible choices and succeed 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”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sets fire to half the world, right? So that is the war Machiavelli watched. Machiavelli was raised on all of the 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 courtroy 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. He loves this the way Petruc wanted him to love it, but he observes these wars and he observes virtuous princes like Guido Baldo de Mato.”
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's going to feel like an uncultured fool just like I feel right now. 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. 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 and burning whole areas and the wealth is centralized so the mercenaries are more numerous because people can produce more. 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 when they were kids and then it grows up in Valentino sets fire and a half the world of 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 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. And also it's in the middle of the school of Ghibli to feud so all of its neighbors hate it. So they're just going to let it burn. And we're going to take the enormous piles of gold that are in your basements and go home rich. And all of this will be gone like a dream. Or you could say yes. Let's make an alliance. Give me a bronze 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.”
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 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 us. 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? And now there's a 10-year-old boy reciting a poem that 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. That's the moment that Cosu and Abedici turns to you and said Would you like to make an alliance with Florence?”
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 feels more clean and outdoors 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 and in the middle of the square is another one of these bronze statues that looks like it's about to come to life except shining anew 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 often the quarter 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”
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 ride through the city a bit, and it's a large, impressive city, and you get to the cathedral and 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 banker greets you humbly at the door and apologizes that his humble palace is not worthy to host your excellency 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.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worth talking to because it's just a pit of scum and villainy. And in fact, also 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 a scum and villainy. And then you approach the city. And there are these statues and they look like ancient statues, the kind that are so lifelike that it's as if they're about to breathe and move. You've never seen an intact new statue like that. That isn't something we know how to do.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even on the standards of merchant scum or extra scummy merchant scum. 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 And so you're on your way, or there might be a more minor ambassador, but you're at least minimum the son of a count. And you're on your way to Rome, you're heading along the length of Italy, you're going to go through Florence. It's on the way. There's nobody there.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 getting me a tyrant. Maybe he's going to be a good prince and he's going to make a golden age. 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.”
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 pour money into traveling across the Alps to look 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 Marcilio 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. 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.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consoles of Rome, and he learned while in office at 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 Rona? 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.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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”
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 with many processes, the answer is there are multiple steps and it's complicated, and some of the steps are realizing that the earlier steps didn't work. So Petrarch, who lived 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 that drug looks around him and says, this is an age of ash and shadow.”
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 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 monarchical structure in this sense that was the migration of people out of a town into the protection zone of a local lordling. And then those villages grew to different scales, some of them cities, some not. Italy had great agriculture and great”
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 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.”
2026-03-06 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source