Ada Palmer on Dwarkesh Patel: Why Petrarch’s Plan Backfired

1. 0:00 – 28:49

   How cosplaying Ancient Rome led to the Renaissance

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel0:00

      Today I'm chatting with Ada Palmer, who is a Renaissance historian, a novelist, a composer based at the University of Chicago. And today we're discussing your book, Inventing the Renaissance. Ada, thanks for coming on the podcast.

   2. APAda Palmer0:11

      Been looking forward.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel0:12

      First question. You've got in this period in the late fifteenth century, early sixteenth century in Italy, all these different republics, Venice, Florence, Genoa, um, and that seems unusual both for the time period and for the place.

   4. APAda Palmer0:30

      Yeah.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel0:30

      What gives?

   6. APAda Palmer0:31

      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, uh, you could no longer import and export goods at scale, you could no longer rely on central infrastructure. You had to support things yourself. Larger, wealthier towns were able to make this transition because they could support themselves from the local resources and the farms attached to them. So the larger, wealthier towns surrounded by good agricultural land were more successful at converting over to, okay, let's have a senate like the old Roman Senate. Let's have our top families form a council. They will rule. We'll set up a republic. A weaker town that can't support itself as well is much more prone to one wealthy family realizes that they can get goons and take over and declare themselves the monarch of the area. Or worse, this town cannot self-sustain. It doesn't have enough. People there can't get food. They are scared. They're afraid of being robbed by people who are desperate. But outside of town, there is a wealthy villa that belongs to a noble family, and they have bodyguards. "Hey, noble family, if I move next to your villa and work for you, will you protect me with your bodyguards?" So towns emptied out and villages, as in villa and its environs-

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel2:08

      Mm.

   8. APAda Palmer2:08

      -developed as a result, and a village was a monarchal structure in this sense, that was the migration of people out of a town into the protection zone of a local lordling, right? And then those villages grew to different scales, some of them cities, some not. So Italy had great agriculture and great agricultural land, so more of Italy's cities were able to sustain themselves as towns and be republics.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel2:39

      I feel like the big take of your book is they were trying to resuscitate Roman virtues. What were the things that-- what were the virtues that the Roman emperors had which allowed this, you know, the safety and good government-

   10. APAda Palmer2:54

       Stability.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel2:54

       -et cetera, to work? And, um, I don't understand the connection between reading Cicero and contemplating the virtues of a great emperor to dot, dot, dot science and technology.

   12. APAda Palmer3:07

       [laughing]

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel3:08

       Uh, maybe there isn't one, but d-do you think there is one, and what, what exactly is that connection?

   14. APAda Palmer3:11

       Well, 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 lives through the Black Death and lives in a moment when Italy is wracked by civil war and, uh, foreign mercenary troops are raiding and pillaging, Italy is wracked by bandits. When Petrarch survives the Black Death after losing so many friends, he gets a letter. Uh, two of his friends are alive. Uh, he had given up that anyone he knew would survive, but two of his younger scholar friends are alive. They're going to come visit him. On the way, they were attacked by bandits, and one of them was killed, and the other was lost in the mountains and wounded, and he didn't know that his friend was alive for another year and a half, right? So the bandits are very real in this period. And Petrarch looks around him and says, "This is an age of ash and shadow. Uh, 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. Uh, they demand that Romeo get away with murder because he is their son, right? Uh, that is not service to the state. And as Petrarch reads about the ancient Roman Brutus, not the one who killed Caesar, but the ancestor to whom that one was trying to live up. Brutus, one of the first consuls of Rome, and he learned while in office that his sons were plotting to take over the state and make him king. So he executed his own sons for treason against the state. Can you imagine Lord Montague wanting to execute Romeo for treason against Verona? He would never do that. So when you're living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet and you read about these ancient Roman figures, as described in the lofty, lofty biographies of someone like Livy, you read them and you say, "Wow, if only our leaders would act like that." Well, how were they raised? Can we raise our leaders the same way? Can we make libraries filled with what young Cicero read and what young Brutus read? What did they read? Well, they read Plato, and they read Homer. So we need these things. Can we recreate the educational environment that produced them? And Petrarch suggests this. His students and successors embrace this idea and pour money into traveling across the Alps to look for manuscripts, traveling to Constantinople to purchase manuscripts from the wealthier east where books are common, uh, and bringing them back to assemble these libraries, and then raise tutors like Marsilio Ficino, who can know Greek and Latin and embo-- uh, 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 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, to the eyes of the period, and, um, uh, 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 gonna be a tyrant. Maybe he's gonna be a good prince, and he's gonna 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, even on the standards of merchant scum. We're 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 to us, even if, uh, we don't have it. So let me give, um, an example, right? So imagine that you are an ambassador from France, and you're on your way to Rome, uh, 'cause a new pope has just been elected. And whenever a new pope is elected, every country in Europe has to send a special ambassador whose job it is to deliver a long-winded oration that says, "I am the wealthy-- I'm, I'm the, uh, ambassador from a very wealthy country and a very powerful prince, and he's so glad you're the pope. Congratulations." Only you have to do that for, like, an hour. Um, and you have to give a gift to the pope, and it has to be very impressive, and you have to be a really important person. You're, like, the most important person who can leave your country without causing a political crisis. You might be the heir to the throne, for example. Um, and so you're on your way, or you might be a, 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. Ugh. There's nobody there worth talking to because it's just a pit of scum and villainy and, in fact, also fi-filth and depravity because, of course, Florence is the sodomy capital of Europe. And to Florentine is the verb for anal sex in several different European languages. And in the laws of France, you can be indicted for sodomy on the grounds that you have ever once in your life even visited Florence. That's considered evidence enough. So you're on your way to this matchlessly filthy dive of scum and villainy, and then you approach the city, and there are these statues, and they look like ancient statues, the kind that are so lifelike that it's as if they're about to breathe and move. You've never seen an intact new statue like that. That isn't something we know how to do. 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, or your servant knocks at the door, and the 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." Um, and he invites you in, and the instant you step inside, you're in a space like nothing you've ever seen before with white light streaming in through this airy, rounded windowed courtyard that feels more clean and outdoors than the outdoors did, uh, because something about the air is cool and fresh. It's like nothing you've-- 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 m- bronze statues that looks like it's about to come to life, except shining and new. It hasn't even turned green yet. And around the courtyard are busts of all the Roman emperors in order, and above them are portraits of this guy and the members of his family. And off in the corner are some men wearing robes that look kinda like the robes the ancients wear. And you say, "Who are those guys?" And he says, "Oh, they're Platonists. They're speaking ancient Greek." And you say, "I thought I didn't understand that language, but ancient Greek is lost. We don't have ancient Greek." And he says, "Yes, you know, the, we have lots of ancient Greek here." And he said-- A-and you say, "And also, we don't have the works of Plato. They're also lost." "Oh, we have lots of Plato here. Look, here's my grandson, Lorenzo. He's just written a poem in ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul. Would you like to hear him recite it?" And now there's a 10-year-old boy reciting a poem at you in ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul. And you're like, "Where am I? None of this is possible. None of this has existed for a thousand years." That's the moment that Cosimo de' Medici turns to you and said, "Would you like to make an alliance with Florence?" And you can say no. You can say, "No, my king is going to come over the Alps with his enormous army, and we're gonna descend upon this city, and we're gonna sack it, and everyone's gonna let us 'cause 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 this Guelph-Ghibelline feud, so all of its neighbors hate it, so they're just gonna let it burn. And we're gonna take the enormous piles of gold that are in your ba-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 bronzesmith and an architect and a Greek teacher and a Platonist, and we're gonna take all of these things, and we're going to do the French court like this. And then when the ambassador from Portugal comes, he's gonna 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, and burning whole areas, and the wealth is centralized, so the mercenaries are more numerous because people can, can produce more. You know, 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, and Valentino sets fire to half the world. Cesare, uh, sets fire to half the world, right? So that is the war Machiavelli watched. And 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, uh, and then he goes to a pub and gets drunk in the company of uncultured countrymen. Uh, and then he goes home, and he gets dressed in the court robes, the court finery that he would wear back when he was an ambassador to popes and kings. And attired thus, he then enters his library to hold commerce with the angels, right? He loves this the way Petrarch wanted him to love it. But he observes these wars, and he observes virtuous princes like Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, who does every single thing you're supposed to do virtuously, and he has all the Plato, and he has all the libraries, and he has all the art, and he gets betrayed and his city taken away from him and loses everything. Uh, 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, "What if the libraries are what we need, but we need to use them differently?" And he proposes what we would think of as political science. We observe historical examples. We say, "Okay, here are five examples of battles that happened next to rivers. We'll put those examples side by side and see what decisions the commanders made to try to figure out which one worked better." We use history as a casebook of examples of what worked and what didn't. And we imitate what worked, and we avoid doing what didn't. Instead of feeling that reading about good men will make us good, we read about wise choices, and we imitate those choices. This is one of the reasons Machiavelli is described by his contemporaries as a historian. And he says we need to use history and use the classics differently. He proposes that. He isn't very popular in his own day. It takes a long time for that to catch on. Many people for decades after him are still trying to use it sort of the absorb it osmotically way. But he's writing that in the early 1500s, so it's been a little over a century since this started. We have to remember how long this process is. Um, from Petrarch's first call to Machiavelli writing that is as long as from Yuri Gagarin's space flight back to Napoleon, uh, the childhood of Napoleon to the space race. That's Petrarch to Machiavelli. We think of it as one time period, but a lot changed. In that, they had a plan. They tried the plan. They brought the plan to its maximum. They raised all the princes in this new way. The wars happened. It clearly failed. Machiavelli then thinks about why it failed. We're still only halfway through Renaissance. Uh, Shakespeare's grandparents have barely been born. We have a lot more time to go. So what do we need? We need new ways of thinking about it. And we're reading the ancients, and we have bigger libraries. We're, 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. Uh, it also is important that they're inventing micro technologies of book production like footnotes and glossaries in the margin that explain the hard vocabulary, so that when Petrarch's, um, 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 class-classicists 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's, uh, discussions of 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, uh, 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 develop-- discovers that the heart is a pump.They're the generation that takes serio-seri-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 f- uh, 1560s, 1580s. A hundred and eighty years after, a hundred and sixty years after Lucretius comes back, uh, because it takes generations of work to build the libraries, to have the libraries, to use the libraries. So when we get to 1600, which is almost exactly two hundred years after this begins, a little bit more, we've had time to say, "Let's make the libraries, have the libraries, use the libraries, or realize we failed in how we used 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."

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel19:34

       Uh, okay. Th- th- uh, j- just to make sure I understood. So the, the chain of causation here is [lip smack] we gotta resuscitate the virtues of the R- Romans, therefore read what they read. Um, you, to do that, you need to build the libraries. Uh, you build the libraries, you resuscitate all those arts, basically, and then you just need to have people be literate, have people think about co-- uh, think about information in a new way to analyze it. And that analysis also lends itself not just to history of leaders, but also to the nature of the world. Um, whenever I hear a story about, well, this is why the scientific revolution happened, this is why the industrial revolution happened, I'm like, but there's so many stories, and it's just hard to figure out why this one over the other ones. There's like, you know, a, a dozen other stories you could tell.

   16. APAda Palmer20:24

       Right.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel20:24

       I had a previous guest, Joseph Henrich, who has this theory that the Catholic Church is breaking down these old kinship-based networks that the rest of the world has, and it's encouraging guilds, it's encouraging these kinds of, uh, centers where people can get, get together and discuss ideas.

   18. APAda Palmer20:40

       Mm.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel20:40

       I-- There's probably five, you know, twenty other stories you could tell.

   20. APAda Palmer20:43

       Yeah. Yeah.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel20:44

       Why this story?

   22. APAda Palmer20:45

       So two different reasons. Uh, one, I think it's useful to think about for new ideas to flourish and new ways of running the world to happen-

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel20:53

       Yeah

   24. APAda Palmer20:53

       ... 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.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel21:01

       Yeah.

   26. APAda Palmer21:01

       It takes a while to get enough books. [chuckles]

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel21:04

       Hmm.

   28. APAda Palmer21:04

       Right? You need to have enough books for a bunch of people to be reading and thinking. You also need to have networks of information moving this stuff back and forth-

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel21:11

       Right

   30. APAda Palmer21:12

       ... so that they can have discourses of ideas with each other. You can't publish a scientific journal until there are journals, right? You need to have, to have developed this ecosystem of information and knowledge. Um, people talk about it sometimes in terms of increasing literacy rates as if higher literacy makes there be more books, instead of the other way around.
2. 28:49 – 38:13

   How Florence's weird republic worked

   1. APAda Palmer28:49

      It's important, I think, here to zoom in a little bit on Florence's own government system and how and why it's weird in order to understand what rank Machiavelli actually holds in it.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel28:59

      Yeah.

   3. APAda Palmer28:59

      Uh, 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. Th- from among them are elected the consuls or, or s- uh, high senators or if there's a head of state, the head of state. And so you have a small slice of the population that are fully enfranchised members of the republic who rule over the commoner majority. That is how Venice works. That is how Genoa works. That is how Bologna and Siena for the most part work. That's how the Swiss Republic works. 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, uh, who are the military class, right? If you're a military leader in this period, you have to have noble blood. No soldier is gonna follow a commander who doesn't have noble blood. That would be weird. Uh, [chuckles] and, um, those threats to the independence of the republic almost always came from the nobility. And after one particular near miss in which the city was nearly taken over, they decided to get rid of the nobility of Florence, and they massacred most of them and cut their heads off and put them on pikes and burned their houses down and raked salt into the earth and had a party on their graves, the way you do in the period when you're getting rid of a class of people. There were a few noble families that they really liked who had not been part of negative stuff, who they instead allowed to officially renounce their nobility, and they renounced their nobility and changed their names and declared themselves commoners. And they set up a commoner republic. So what that meant was the Senate consisted of members of merchant guilds. A member of a merchant guild here means the owners of workshops, not the guy who sits at the loom weaving, but the guy who owns the warehouse full of looms where the workers are working, the head of the, uh, sculpture works, the head of the architectural firm, not the bricklayers who are actually laying the bricks. So we're talking about the economicBourgeoisie is an anachronistic word, but we're talking about the owners of the means of production, um, but who are themselves commoners. So they are very wealthy, but from the point of view of the diplomatic corps of any other society where all of the ruling people, and all of their envoys, and all of their ambassadors are noble-blooded, if you're an ambassador, you're automatically noble-blooded. Nobody's gonna take an ambassador seriously who isn't noble-blooded, right? Um, uh, from the perspective of every other polity in the world, the rulers of Florence are the rank of their valet, right? Uh, there is no nobility left in the city. In fact, Florence can't, uh, run its own armies or head its own police, uh, because you're not gonna surrender if you're told to surrender in the name of some guy who doesn't have a coat of arms, right? That would be weird. So they actually have to hire a nobleman to come to the city, uh, and be their chief of police to arrest people in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor. Uh, and one at a time, they'll invite a skilled military commander nobleman. He'll come to the city. He'll be podestà. He'll live in the, um, uh, palace, which is also the prison. He'll arrest people. He'll enforce the law. Uh, they will pay him handsomely at the end of the year, excor-escort him to the gates and then banish him from the city for life on pain of death so that he cannot return and make use of the power that he had in the city to try to take over. So they're very, very wary of any noble-nobleman. And they've set up a really weird republic, weird from the perspective of everyone around them, in which a bunch of merchants are trying to share power by being lotteried into the senate. And so you put names in a bag. You examine all of the merchant members of guilds. You choose which ones are, you know, fit to serve, meaning not ill and dying, not insane, not so deeply in debt that they could be manipulated by the people who, who they owe money to. Uh, their names go in a bag. You choose nine guys at random. They rule the city. Uh, they are put in a palace where they rule the city from that tower. They're actually locked in the tower for the duration of their time in office because if they left the tower, they could be bribed or kidnapped. And they ru-rule the city for two months or three months. Uh, and then at the end, they are thanked for their service and escorted out, and a, a different nine guys share power for the next three months. Uh, a power sharing that is designed to be tyrant-proof because you need consensus of like nine randomly selected guys to, um, uh, decide to do anything.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel33:48

      Oh, it's not even a majority vote, it's consensus.

   5. APAda Palmer33:49

      It's consensus.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel33:50

      Okay. So and can I ask how-- Uh, the-- Previously you were describing kill the nobles, salt the earth. I'm almost thinking early communist, but then you say, "Well, no, it's the heads of the merchant, uh, guilds who are in charge."

   7. APAda Palmer34:06

      Right.

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel34:06

      And so I want to understand h-why merchants, entrepreneurs have notable status-

   9. APAda Palmer34:14

      Yeah

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel34:14

       ...in Florence. What is it about the culture that makes it so? And also, the Medici, the most powerful people, their, their job is usury, right? It's like-

   11. APAda Palmer34:21

       Well, I mean, it's important to remember, they were nobody when this set up.

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel34:24

       Right.

   13. APAda Palmer34:24

       They were, uh, they were a minor important family.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel34:27

       But, but the culture was getting started where somebody like that could be respected. So how does that happen?

   15. APAda Palmer34:31

       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.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel34:40

       Mm.

   17. APAda Palmer34:40

       And, you know, 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, uh, 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 gonna fund the hospitals, uh, whose job is it to take care of orphans, we think government or maybe the church. But in this period, if you're killed and you leave orphans behind, it is your employer whose duty it is to take care of them. Um, 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 survi-- 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 n-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," you turn to your landlord. Your landlord turns to his landlord. [laughs] Uh, they turn to one of these major families, and these major families are massive landowners that own dozens of, uh, 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 your, uh, corporation also supplies your social safety net and you see your representation there.

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel37:01

       Mm.

   19. APAda Palmer37:01

       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 they're still incredibly narrow oligarchic republics.So one thing when we read Machiavelli, he talks a lot about the popolo, right, which we translate as the people. And he talks about how important it is that the popolo are respected, and the popolo have a voice, and that the popolo are armed, and you show res-- the government shows respect for the people by allowing the people to be armed. And 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, and trusting the people." Popolo meant the top four percent economically of the population, the members of the mertin- merchant guilds. That's the popolo. He's talking about a narrow slice oligarchy being heard, a narrow slice oligarchy being respected. We didn't realize that in the nineteenth century when we were excitedly translating The Prince and reading it as quasi-democratic. Uh, we now have read more documents of the period and realize how people use these words.

3. 38:13 – 58:12

   How the Medicis took over Florence

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel38:13

      Okay, so Florence in this period goes through like five different forms of government. So it's this republic of nine dudes in a tower, as you were saying-

   2. APAda Palmer38:21

      Yeah

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel38:21

      ... before 1434, and then-

   4. APAda Palmer38:23

      Well, and then there's a gradual takeover, right? There's a gradual what we could call regulatory capture. But an interesting detail about Florence, even as the Medici take over, is that the Medici know the people of Florence are very deeply invested in this republic and very deeply invested in its institutions, and we have to therefore respect those institutions and proclaim respect for those institutions. So we're gonna 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, uh, if there was a mandatory outfit that, uh, people wore who worked in the republic, which there was, the, uh, garment thing over there in the corner is an underway, uh, 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. It looks very Renaissance." To them, it looked like a toga 'cause of the way it was draped. They thought of this as a toga. They're cosplaying the Roman Republic, uh, 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, uh, the first Duke Cosimo I, uh, would wear one to costume balls as if in his heart he longed to not have-- not dress like a duke, but to dress in a toga like a Republican.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel39:52

      It's actually doubly ironic because, um, when the Roman Republic turns into the Roman Empire, they still have the Senate, they still have all these old institutions-

   6. APAda Palmer40:01

      Right

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel40:02

      ... that even though it's no longer a republic-

   8. APAda Palmer40:03

      Yeah, the Roman Senate keeps meeting until 1200 AD.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel40:06

      Right. So it, uh, it's sort of doubly ironic that they are, they are doing the same thing-

   10. APAda Palmer40:10

       Yeah, they're doing the same thing

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel40:11

       ... but back in, in the 1500s.

   12. APAda Palmer40:13

       And it means that more rights are granted to the people of Florence than to other cities that fell to monarchies at similar points, uh, 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. Uh, there's a really cool building that I love, um, in Florence. It's... If you've been there, there's the famous bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, which has the little jeweler shops all along it. And when you get to the end of it, there's this funny, uh, 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 that goes from one end of the city to the other so that they could walk in safety without being assassinated, right? 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 gonna 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 Vecchio. Uh, but they get to this one point where there's an old tower, a very old tower, a five-hundred-year-old tower, and this belongs to, I think it's the Minelli family, who are descended from peers of Julius Caesar and can trace their genealogy all the way back to an old Roman gens. And when the duke says, "We want to top-- knock the top off your tower," they say, "No, this is our tower. This tower has been ours since before the Medici 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, uh, 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, uh, Duke Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara, uh, used to wander around Ferrara buck naked, uh, with a sword in one hand and his dick in the other to show off that nobody would ever possibly try to harm a Duke d'Este. And he and his siblings used to do things like if they liked a musician, kidnap them and lock them in a tower so that nobody else could hear them. Or if they wanted each other's 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.Uh, there wasn't a republic anymore. Uh, there was a duke. He took over. Those-- 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 loses, resistance wins.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel43:53

       Yeah. I, I, I think there's actually an interesting parallel to today where, not to be too on the nose, but like-

   14. APAda Palmer43:58

       Yeah. [laughs]

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel43:59

       [laughs] Sometimes people debate, like, what is the odds that America becomes a sort of a Putinist kind of country within a couple of decades? And I think the odds are actually quite low-

   16. APAda Palmer44:07

       Right

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel44:07

       ... just because even though constitutionally, or at least in precedent, the president is very powerful, the republic expectation is so strong that, that the amount of resistance at his face, even when you successfully do something-

   18. APAda Palmer44:18

       Right

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel44:19

       ... demotivates the next escalation.

   20. APAda Palmer44:21

       Yeah. The only thing that makes resistance weak in the US is when people feel as if partial victory is failure.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel44:28

       Hmm.

   22. APAda Palmer44:29

       Right?

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel44:29

       Right.

   24. APAda Palmer44:29

       And reme-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-

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel44:38

       Yeah

   26. APAda Palmer44:38

       ... 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-

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel44:46

       Yeah

   28. APAda Palmer44:46

       ... that tyranny would be so much weaker-

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel44:48

       Yeah

   30. APAda Palmer44:48

       ... because there was a lot of resistance, and traditions of resistance and structures would develop that would continue to exist.
4. 58:12 – 1:17:34

   Why it was so hard for Gutenberg to make any money off the printing press

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel58:12

      I, I wanna talk about the printing press. So one thing I didn't realize before reading your book is that not only does Gutenberg go bankrupt after making the most significant invention of a millennia, but his apprentices also go bankrupt.

   2. APAda Palmer58:24

      Yep.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel58:24

      Um, and this is at a time when people like Cosimo are willing to pay on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars per book.

   4. APAda Palmer58:32

      Yep.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel58:32

      And so the guy who invents a way to make this way cheaper, how, how is this possible?

   6. APAda Palmer58:36

      So the problem is printed books are a mass-produced commodity in a world that does not have distribution networks for mass-produced commodities, 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 pr- 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 nineteen seventies 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, right? In the same way, um, you're Gutenberg. You have figured out how to produce three hundred copies of a book for the cost of one copy of a book. You do so. You print your Bible. You have three hundred 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 two hundred and ninety-three Bibles, and you can't sell them, and you go bankrupt. There has to be a distribution mechanism for books to find their market 'cause there are certainly three hundred people in Europe that want this, but there are not three hundred people in one location where it's being produced. So Gutenberg goes bankrupt. The bank seizes his press. They try to go into the business. The bank goes bankrupt. This is so much overhead. Uh, you, you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the production cost of the books, and then you get nothing back. Um, Gutenberg's apprentices build presses. They go bankrupt. They flee their debts and flee the country and leave Germany, go to Venice. And Venice is the airport hub of the Mediterranean. Venice is where you change boats. And so if you're sailing from A to B, you go to Venice, you change boats, you get to the next place. The hub system has always worked well. So if you're printing in Venice, you print three hundred Bibles, you give ten Bibles to each of thirty ships captains going to thirty different cities. They can sell them. And the first economically sustainable circulation of print is enabled by the hub system. Then book fairs come into existence in which printers will spend all year printing a, 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 two hundred 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, right? We had the computer, the computer was exciting, and then we had the personal computer, and then we had the internet, and then we had the cell phone, and then we had social media, 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, right? And it's easy to think of each of these as differentTech 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-

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel1:02:06

      Mm

   8. APAda Palmer1:02:06

      ... 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 cell phones. And we get the Arab Spring, or rather we get the Reformation, [laughs] 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. So it's one information revolution having multiple successive revolutionary applications as it disseminates and eventually saturates, and it moves on a timescale quite similar to the timescale in 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'll be a new bang, or sometimes every decade there'll be a new, [gasps] 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. Uh, the Reformation happens. That wasn't possible even a decade earlier when it co- 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 applications 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.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:02

      Do you see a s- a, um, a, m- maybe other eras also have this, and, uh, I just haven't read the books about them, but from your book, I'm just like, oh, history just seems to be happening really, really fast and seems to speed up especially-

   10. APAda Palmer1:04:14

       Yep, yep

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:14

       ... religious and political history. So m- obviously the things happening in Italy, but even aside from that, Martin Luther, Reformation, and then just 20 years later-

   12. APAda Palmer1:04:23

       Yeah

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:24

       ... England splits off from, uh, from the Catholic Church, which is, like, unprecedented in two millennia.

   14. APAda Palmer1:04:29

       Yeah, and then it has a bunch of tumults that flop, flop, flop, flop, flop-

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:32

       Right

   16. APAda Palmer1:04:32

       ... so that every decade feels different. Yeah, and, you know, you're, here you are in 1506 being nostalgic for how the world was completely different in 1490.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:41

       Right.

   18. APAda Palmer1:04:41

       And you're like, that's pretty fast.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:43

       Yeah.

   20. APAda Palmer1:04:43

       And here we are in 2026 often feeling nostalgic for how things were in the year 2000, right?

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:48

       Right. And so is it fair to trace that back to the printing press or its offshoots, or is it just invented?

   22. APAda Palmer1:04:54

       So it's more that history has always moved fast.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:57

       Hmm.

   24. APAda Palmer1:04:57

       But when we teach it in high school, we're trying to move over large chunks of time quickly-

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:02

       Interesting

   26. APAda Palmer1:05:02

       ... and so we pretend that it moved slowly, and we have this lie that there were long periods of stagnation. But you can zoom in anywhere, and you're gonna find every decade feels different. And people in the 1320s are nostalgic for people in the 1300s, 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 confuse us about this. So, like, I'm working on a paper right now about the video game Civ, right? Civ is the number one teacher of history in the world, right? And it has shipped 70 million copies, and 65% of people on Earth, uh, who have technology play video games, right?

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel1:05:48

       Yeah.

   28. APAda Palmer1:05:48

       Uh, Civ is the number one teacher of history, bar none, since 1991. And what does Civ tell you? Civ 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, and in modernity, a turn is just one year because in one year as much happens now as happened in 50 years in antiquity. And that lie is also what our textbooks tell us. But it doesn't matter where we zoom in. Any time 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.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel1:06:25

       Right. I, I, I guess the difference is that technologically we know that they weren't moving as fast.

   30. APAda Palmer1:06:30

       Technologically they were moving fast. We just don't care about those technologies anymore.
5. 1:17:34 – 1:23:02

   Why the industrial revolution didn't happen in Italy

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel1:17:34

      the book you recommend on your website, The Renaissance in Italy, I for- keep forgetting the name of the author. [laughs]

   2. APAda Palmer1:17:38

      Guido Ruggiero. Yes.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel1:17:39

      Um-

   4. APAda Palmer1:17:39

      Guido Ruggiero.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel1:17:41

      I- in some part, he has this question, which is, look, in Italy, as you mentioned, in Venice, they've really scaled the printing press. As a result, you have the metalworking for fine typesetting, um, separately for, um, milling technology, for water mills, windmills as advanced-

   6. APAda Palmer1:17:59

      Mm.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel1:17:59

      Um, you know, gears for watches. And so he asks, why didn't Italy, uh, have the Industrial Revolution? Um, and I, I wonder if, uh, did you stand by the answer you just gave or is it a different reason?

   8. APAda Palmer1:18:13

      So part of it, but another is we cannot underst- underestimate how much richer per square meter [chuckles]

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:19

      Hmm.

   10. APAda Palmer1:18:19

       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, uh, which is both fuel oil for light and industrial oil for production, as well as cooking and eating oil, um, 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-

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:41

       Yeah

   12. APAda Palmer1:18:41

       ... 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. Uh, 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, uh, the fine quality. Think about how a wool suit isn't itchy, but a wool blanket often is. That wool suit isn't itchy 'cause 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 play, pay a small amount for, or do you wanna export it? Uh, it makes sense for it to have been somewhere ind-industrially ambitious that wasn't already economically on top to have done it. So that's one reason that industrialization doesn't kindle in Italy. Italy is agricultural land and, and finance world. It doesn't feel like it needs new industry. Another factor is, you know, mining and so on. This land is more valuable as a farm than it is in a mi-- as a mine.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:52

       Mm-hmm.

   14. APAda Palmer1:19:52

       You don't wanna rip it up.

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:53

       Interesting.

   16. APAda Palmer1:19:54

       Right? 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. Uh, no city really wants to be the one where the giant industrialization is happening. It's awful for the city. Um, note that the industrialization of the Industrial Revolution was mostly outside of the wealthier centers of England in the second-tier towns, right? They grow massively into huge industrial areas like Lancaster. So, uh, those are a, a plural bunch of reasons.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:32

       But I would have also thought that the competitiveness between different Italian c-Uh, city states would have made it so that like, hey, if they get a, the industrial, if they get, you know, better textile machines and whatever before you, it's kind of a disaster because they're right there.

   18. APAda Palmer1:20:46

       Yeah. I mean, it's pretty clear this is not gonna 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-

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:58

       Mm.

   20. APAda Palmer1:20:58

       -in the fourteen hundreds, and they didn't want to. They wanted to make luxuriant artisanal fabrics.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:05

       Th-this, by the way, was a, another interesting thing from the book, which was, um, uh, the first printed books, they-- there was like not, as you just mentioned, there's, there's not this market of, uh, commodity, uh, things that are produced cheaply that like the average person is gonna be like, "Oh, if I can get this for ten ninety-nine, I'll go buy it."

   22. APAda Palmer1:21:24

       Right.

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:24

       And so they're trying to make this thing look like it was produced by artisanal luxury grade.

   24. APAda Palmer1:21:28

       Right. So the first printed fonts look like handwritten scripts-

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:31

       Exactly

   26. APAda Palmer1:21:31

       ...and often have a blank space to illuminate it-

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:34

       Right

   28. APAda Palmer1:21:34

       ...so that it looks just as fancy as the printed, uh, as the, as manuscripts.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:39

       Existing benchmarks tend to seriously overspecify prompts. Take something like Web Arena. Tasks often spell out every single step. For example, I will arrive at the Pittsburgh Airport soon, provide the nearest Hyatt hotel in the vicinity, and then give me the minimal driving distance to the supermarket. But real users don't talk like that. They'll say, "I'm landing in Pittsburgh. Where do I get groceries? Where should I stay?" If we want agents to generalize, they can't rely on spoon-fed instructions. They have to handle underspecified prompts and infer missing constraints from the environment. Labelbox built a data set specifically for this. It's full of ambiguous real-world scenarios with incomplete prompts, realistic world states, and clear evaluation criteria. These scenarios reward correct understanding, not just instruction following. For example, a user tells a home agent, "I'm going to bed. Can you turn off all the lights?" A naive agent turns off all the lights in the house. A stronger agent checks the user's calendar, notices that there's a game night in the living room, and only turns off the bedroom lights. That distinction is what today's benchmarks miss. And this reading of context and inferring intent and acting appropriately is what Labelbox's data enables across domains. They can get you scenarios tailor-made by their massive network of subject matter experts. To learn more, visit labelbox.com/dwarkesh. One thing I wanted to ask you, back to the printing press.

6. 1:23:02 – 1:41:21

   The Library of Alexandria isn’t where most ancient books were lost

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel1:23:02

      So not only does printing get cheaper, but around this time paper itself also gets cheaper. So like not just reading, but writing gets cheaper.

   2. APAda Palmer1:23:07

      Yes. Yes.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel1:23:07

      And do you as historians just see a market change in this period in the-

   4. APAda Palmer1:23:12

      Yeah

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel1:23:12

      ...amount of records that are taken, and as a result, our understanding or what do we see?

   6. APAda Palmer1:23:15

      Yeah, I mean, a huge amount rests on whether you have a cheap re-- cheap writing surface. And here rather than looking, uh, 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 a easy plant-based writing surface. You take this tall, thin water reed, you, 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 are naturally sticky. They stick to each other, they produce a sheet. Practically no labor has gone into this. You've sliced, you've laid now, boom. Papyrus is a very inexpensive writing surface, and this is what enables Rome to have a bureaucracy and to have libraries in any mid-sized city will have a library. People can send letters back and forth. There can be enormous tax records. Uh, sometimes when Egypt and Rome are at war, Egypt will be like, "No, we are angry. We'll stop exporting papyrus." No papyrus to Rome, and then Rome's infrastructure will fall apart overnight, uh, because you can't do anything if you can't write stuff down. Uh, papyrus is a warm weather plant. It is killed by frost. You cannot grow it north of the frost plane. So France, Spain, even most of Italy, you can only grow papyrus down in the very tip and down in Sicily, right? Um, 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, leather jacket. And a medieval book on parchment count-- 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.

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:30

      Interesting.

   8. APAda Palmer1:25:30

      Right? 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 six hundred books. There's definitely more than six hundred books in this room.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:52

      [chuckles]

   10. APAda Palmer1:25:52

       Right? Every kiosk at an airport selling Dan Brown novels has more than six hundred 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 five thousand 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 a leather jacket.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel1:26:23

       And so what changes around this time? How, how is Europe able to get the, the paper?

   12. APAda Palmer1:26:27

       So, well, so still zooming in on fall of Rome.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel1:26:30

       Yeah.

   14. APAda Palmer1:26:30

       Uh, 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.

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel1:26:40

       Ah.

   16. APAda Palmer1:26:40

       It's lost between four hundred and six hundred AD when the papyri are falling apartAnd here you are with a library of a thousand books, and you can only afford to make one hundred 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.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel1:27:08

       Interesting.

   18. APAda Palmer1:27:08

       We lost when the papyri were falling apart. And this is also what distorted what survived because most of the copying out was done by monks, and when you have a thousand books and you can only save a hundred of them and you're a monk, you're like, "What do I save? I know, Saint Augustine. I love Saint Augustine." This is why we have more surviving work by Saint Augustine than the entirety of all pagan classical Latin because the subjective tastes of the people in power at the moment the papyri were falling apart-

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel1:27:35

       Right

   20. APAda Palmer1:27:35

       ... ended up being an unintentional moment of censorship that biased what survives from antiquity. So 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, uh, 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. Uh, 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, um... What's in between a leather jacket and j- j- j-

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel1:28:37

       Th- this feels like a weird-

   22. APAda Palmer1:28:38

       This is s-

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel1:28:38

       [laughs] A trick question.

   24. APAda Palmer1:28:40

       This is, this is somewhere in between, like, getting yourself a dozen frozen prepackaged meals.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel1:28:45

       Right.

   26. APAda Palmer1:28:45

       Right? Which are complex and have many ingredients, and a lot of industry went into producing the actual packaging, et cetera, more so than a head of lettuce.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel1:28:52

       Yeah.

   28. APAda Palmer1:28:53

       So it's 10 times as expensive, but it's still a tenth as much as the leather jacket. So, um, paper comes in. People are very wary of paper. Paper is clearly not as strong as papyr- as, as parchment. Parchment is really tough stuff. Uh, people start using paper for rough drafts, letters, sketchbooks. When, when you're doing the sketch before doing a painting, you might do that on paper. Uh, but Europe has paper for 400 years before the earliest state document ever written on paper-

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel1:29:24

       Hmm

   30. APAda Palmer1:29:24

       ... to give you a sense of how people are wary of it, and it disseminates slowly. Um, and it's still expensive. It requires, you know, industry and, and production, but it is a tenth as expensive as leather. So paper disseminates slowly through Europe, and again, this is one of these there was always technological change.
7. 1:41:21 – 2:02:19

   The Inquisition accidentally invented peer review

   1. DPDwarkesh Patel1:41:21

      One thing you say in passing in the book is Martin Luther comes up at the exact right time because if you've got Savonarola in the 1490s, and he's this, another prophet type.

   2. APAda Palmer1:41:33

      Mm-hmm.

   3. DPDwarkesh Patel1:41:33

      I guess he's the modern analog of somebody like Khomeini in Iran, you know, sets a theocratic government, but too early. And Machiavelli, you say, is too late because of the censorship is already in place. And what is the censorship that is in place by the time of Machiavelli? What is the alternative world where-

   4. APAda Palmer1:41:48

      Well, I mean, Machiavelli, remember, is, is contemporary with Luther.

   5. DPDwarkesh Patel1:41:52

      Yeah.

   6. APAda Palmer1:41:52

      Um, it's just that he circulates his stuff very briefly and very privately. He doesn't want a pamphlet version of his ideas-

   7. DPDwarkesh Patel1:42:01

      Yeah

   8. APAda Palmer1:42:01

      ... out there because he only wants Florence to have it.

   9. DPDwarkesh Patel1:42:03

      Yeah.

   10. APAda Palmer1:42:04

       Um, uh, Luther hits the sweet spot when the pamphlet distribution network had just developed.

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel1:42:12

       Yeah.

   12. APAda Palmer1:42:12

       Hence, you know, when Savonarola 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 Ninety-five Theses public, they're in print in London in seventeen days after he releases them in Wittenberg because the pamphlet runners go foom, foom, foom, and get the news there, and things are printed overnight, uh, and, and come out that fast.

   13. DPDwarkesh Patel1:42:39

       But it seems that you're hinting that within the next two decades, there's a new censorship regime across Europe.

   14. APAda Palmer1:42:44

       Yeah, new censorship regime, uh, responds. And the, the, the censorship regime is very effective at shaping what is printed in books-

   15. DPDwarkesh Patel1:42:52

       Hmm

   16. APAda Palmer1:42:52

       ... but can never keep up with pamphlets.

   17. DPDwarkesh Patel1:42:54

       Interesting.

   18. APAda Palmer1:42:55

       In the same way that we can, you know, the government can pressure CNN, the government can't pressure random people on a social media network.

   19. DPDwarkesh Patel1:43:04

       Yeah.

   20. APAda Palmer1:43:04

       You're not gonna be able to keep up with that speed. And one of the funny problems that the Inquisition always had when trying to, um, uh, persecute printers is printers worked in the information distribution industry. They had, they were the people who paid the news writers whose job it is to move as fast as humanly possible between cities, which meant that news always reached them first. So if a printer was ever convicted by the Inquisition, they would find out before the Inquisition could possibly get there to arrest them. And so the Inquisition never succeeded at arresting printers. They've always skipped town by the time the Inquisition gets there because if you employ the news writers, you find out first what's going on. The Inquisition can't keep up. And when we look at censorship, you know, 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 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 unpoliceable. 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.

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel1:44:33

       I, I guess couldn't they just punish print shops for publishing things which they-

   22. APAda Palmer1:44:37

       Yeah

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel1:44:37

       ... you just, "Hey, take it. That's what we will like."

   24. APAda Palmer1:44:39

       Yeah. And they did. And they did.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel1:44:39

       "And if we, if you don't like it, we'll punish you," which is kind of how-

   26. APAda Palmer1:44:42

       Yeah. Yeah

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel1:44:42

       ... censorship in China works, for example.

   28. APAda Palmer1:44:43

       So you, so you skip town.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel1:44:44

       But you, you, the printer?

   30. APAda Palmer1:44:44

       And, and there is a c- yeah, the printer kip- skips town.

Episode duration: 2:02:19