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

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.

Then looking forward.

First question. You got, in this period, in the late 15th century or at least 16th century,

in Italy, all these different republics, Venice, Florence, Genoa. And that seems unusual,

both through the time period and for the place. Yeah. What gives?

One of the big reasons that the Italian city republics are clustered in Italy,

is that when the Roman Empire dissolved in the West, individual cities then needed to

self-govern. And this is true all across Europe, right? And those individual cities could no longer

get the centralized Roman government to oversee supply routes, keep the roads free of bandits.

You could no longer import and export goods at scale. You could no longer rely on central

infrastructure. You had to support things yourself. Larger, wealthier towns were able to make

this transition because they could support themselves from the local resources and the farms attached

to them. So the larger, wealthier towns surrounded by good agricultural land were more successful

at converting over to, okay, let's have a Senate like the old Roman Senate. Let's have our top

families form a council. They will rule. We'll set up a republic. A weaker town that can't support

itself as well is much more prone to one wealthy family realizes that they can get goons and take

over and declare themselves the monarch of the area. Or worse, this town cannot self-sustained. 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 town's emptied out and villa jizz 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, 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. 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, etc.

to work? And I don't understand the connection between reading Cicero and contemplating the

virtues of a great emperor to dot, dot, dot, science and technology. Maybe there isn't one,

but do you think there is one? And what exactly is that connected? As with many processes,

the answers 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 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. So the bandits are very

in this period. And Petrarch looks around him and says, this is an age of ash and shadow.

What we need is to imitate the arts of the ancients. Let's try to figure out how the Romans did it.

And specifically, the problem is our leaders, our leaders are selfish. Our leaders care more about

their wealth and their family honor and their power than they do about the people.

This is where Romeo and Juliet is really helpful for us to understand, right?

Lord Montague and Lord Capulet as their goons are nifing each other in the street. They care

about defeating each other. Do they care about the good of Italy? Do they care about the good of

the city of Verona? No. Their feud is harming the city of Verona and they don't care.

They demand that Romeo get away with murder because he is their son, right? That is not

service to the state. And Petrarch reads about the ancient Roman Brutus, not the one who killed

Caesar but the ancestor to whom that one was trying to live up. Brutus, one of the first

consuls of Rome, and he learned while in office that his sons were plotting to take over the state

and make him king. So he executed his own sons for treason against the state. Can you imagine

Lord Montague wanting to execute Romeo for treason against Verona? He would never do that.

So when you're living in the plot of Romeo and Juliet and you read about these ancient Roman

figures as described in the lofty biographies of someone like Livy, you read them and you say,

wow, if only our leaders would act like that. Well, how were they raised? Can we raise our leaders

the same way? Can we make libraries filled with what young Cicero read and what young Brutus read?

What did they read? Well, they read Plato and they read Homer. So we need these things. Can we recreate

the educational environment that produced them? And Petrarch suggests this, his students and

successors embrace this idea and pour money into traveling across the Alps to look for manuscripts,

traveling to Constantinople to purchase manuscripts from the wealthier east to where books are common

and bringing them back to assemble these libraries and then raise tutors like Marcilio Fuccino,

who can know Greek and Latin and surround the young princes and princesses of Europe

with these values and 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 eyes of the period and cover themselves with the

trappings of antiquity and then people might look at them and say, oh, this guy is different from

what we've had. This guy is like the Caesars. The days of the Caesars were pretty good. Maybe we

want this guy. Maybe he's not going to be a tyrant. Maybe he's going to be a good prince and he's

going to make a golden age. 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 in

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 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 to us even if we don't have it. So let

me give an example, right? So imagine that you are an ambassador from France and you're on your

way to Rome because a new Pope has just been elected. And whenever a new Pope is elected, every

country in Europe has to send a special ambassador whose job it is to deliver a log-winded oration

that says, I am the ambassador from a very wealthy country and a very powerful prince.

And he's so glad you're the Pope. Congratulations. Only have to do that for like an hour.

And you have to give a gift to the Pope and it has to be very impressive and you have to be

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. And so you're on your

way or you might be a more minor ambassador, but you're at least minimum the son of account.

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 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 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. 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 lights streaming in through

this airy, rounded windowed courtyard that feels more clean and outdoors than the outdoors did.

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. 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 and new. It hasn't even

turned green yet. And around the courtyard are busts of all the Roman effort is 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 platenists. They're speaking ancient Greek. And you say, I thought I didn't understand

that language, but ancient Greek is lost. We don't have ancient Greek. And he says, yes, you know,

we have lots of ancient Greek here. And he said, and you say, and also we don't have the works of

Plato. There are also lots. 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 and 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 Kozo and the bed that she turns to

and said, would you like to make an alliance with Florence? And you can say no. Because I know,

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 this Guelph Gibley 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 can say, yes,

let's make an alliance. Give me a bronze Smith and an architect and a Greek teacher and a

Platonist. And we're going to take all of these things and we're going to do the French court

like this. And then when the ambassador from Portugal comes, he's going to feel like an uncultured

fool, just like I feel right now. The power dynamic just flipped upside down. Right. And suddenly,

the condescending noblemen is in awe of the merchant's comp. 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 nasty or 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 Barge, both the fume had Latin and Greek and Cicero and Plato and

they were kids. And then it grows up in Valentino, Sets Fire and a half the world of the Cesare,

Sets Fire and a half the world. Right. So that is the War Machiavelli watched.

Machiavelli was raised on all of the Cicero and Livy. He was raised on the Petrarchan project.

He has this famous beautiful letter that he wrote in exile where he's describing his day to his

friend and that most of the day is wasted and he mucks around hunting for larks and then he goes to a

pub and gets drunk in the company of uncultured countrymen. And then he goes home and he gets

dressed in the court ropes, 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 agents.

Right. He loves this the way Petrarch wanted him to love it. But he observes these wars and he

observes virtuous princes like Wittabaldo de Montefelter, 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 Chazareborja 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 happen 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 case

book 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 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 space flight back to Napoleon, the childhood of Napoleon to the space race. That's

Petrarch to Machiavelli. We think of it as one time period, but a lot changed. In that they had a

plan. They tried the plan. They brought the plan to its maximum. They raised all the princes in this

new way. The wars happened. It clearly failed. Machiavelli then thinks about why it failed. We're still

only halfway through Renaissance. Shakespeare's grandparents have barely been born. We have a lot more

time to go. So what do we need? We need new ways of thinking about it. And we're reading the

ancient. So 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. It also is important that they're inventing micro technologies

of book production like footnotes and glossaries in the margin that explain the hard vocabulary.

So that when Petrarch's successors like Fichino was young, you had to be a masterful

Latinist to read these agents. 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

can 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 discussions on 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 are 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 1560, 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. When we get to 1600, which is almost exactly 200 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 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 Mark

Yabelli said we should use history. Let's examine. Let's doubt. Let's rethink. Let's do stuff in

new ways. Okay, just to make sure I understood. So the chain of causation here is,

we got to resuscitate the virtues of the Romans, therefore read what they read.

To do that, you need to build the libraries. You build the libraries. You resuscitate all those

arts. Basically, and then you just need to have people be literate, have people think about

think about information in a new way to analyze it. And that analysis also lends itself not

just to history of leaders, but also to the nature of the world. Whenever I hear a story about,

well, this is why this scientific revolution happened. There's so many stories. And it just

hard to figure out why this one over the other ones. There's like, you know, a dozen other stories

of guitar. I had a previous guest, Joseph Henry, who has a theory that the Catholic Church is

breaking down these old kinship based networks that the rest of the world has. And it's encouraging

gills, it's encouraging these kinds of centers, people can get together and discuss ideas.

There's probably 20 other stories of guitar. Yeah. Yeah. Why this story? So two different reasons.

One, I think it's useful to think about for new ideas to flourish, a new ways of running the

world to happen. You need a fertile environment in the same way that for forest to grow, you need

enough topsoil, right? And it takes a while to get that topsoil. Yeah. It takes a while to get

enough books, right? You need to have enough books for a bunch of people to be reading and thinking.

You also need to have networks of information moving the stuff back and forth so they can have

discourses of ideas with each other. You can't publish a scientific journal until there are journals.

Right? You need to have developed this ecosystem of information and knowledge.

People talk about it sometimes in terms of increasing literacy rates as if higher literacy makes

there me more books instead of the other way around. And in fact, there's a lot of more literacy

than people imagine in even medieval Italy. Almost, Florence has a male literacy rate of 90%.

As of the 16th century? 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 also 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. If it's 1200 or 1500. But if it's 1600, there are definitely books in any medium-sized

town. And so literacy transforms into a kind of access to scientific intellectual, legal,

all sorts of different kinds of worlds of ideas. Now, the other person you quoted who's talking

about transformations in networks of power from being less family and clan centered to being

more guild centered. The guilds are major generators of ideas as well. The guilds can own libraries

by 1600. Where if you went to a guild hall, it will have a bunch of books about its own trade.

That would not have been true in 1100. So those changes are all real and they're all

intermixing and they're all parallel to each other. And you need all of these things together.

But one of the focuses I have is sometimes there are more steps to something than you think,

right? And we tell the story of the Renaissance. And the Renaissance, they rediscover these ancient

texts. And then we got science. And that's true. But it's an oversimplification and too wide a zoom.

And if I said in the French Revolution Napoleon rose to power and spread nationalized warfare

across Europe, and then we landed on the moon, I've skipped some steps, right? And we know that

about modernity. But we don't remember that about earlier periods. Yeah. I mean, obviously all the

stories are all somewhat true. But to the extent that this is a part of the story, the idea that

you're building up libraries of classics and dot, dot, dot, setting up a network of information

exchange that leads us to scientific revolution. I think the reason this feels important or salient

is right now, I think a lot of people have the idea that I'm going to make AI go well by doing

X thing. And maybe some of those things work. But it's at the same time sort of frustrating,

but also funny and interesting that historically, nobody has a good track record of being able to say,

I will do this thing so that this huge unanticipated change in history will go my way or according

to my values or according to what I value. Right. And I think the go go my way as opposed to go

well is a really important distinction. Yeah. Because the, you know, petrach wanted a world with

these values. Yeah. 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.

You know, he was sure that when we found the ancients fundamentally, all of their philosophy would

agree with Christianity. That the group of ancients were wise. Therefore, they will be correct.

And you know, Plato will 90% agree with Christianity. It just needs like 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 it,

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. There are heatedists that Epicureans and Stoics and all sorts of Catholic things,

much more plural than he anticipated. And it makes a world that in turn has giant wars, which he

would not like, and a crisis, and Machiavelli's critique of the ancients, and then the new science

and the new philosophy, it eventually got a layout. None of which resembles what Petrarch imagined if

he had specifically described the future he was trying to make. 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 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 suffer jets. 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.

So last episode, Jane Street introduced a puzzle where they backdoored various LLMs and asked

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look, we got to give people some kind of clue or some kind of hint, something to get them on the

right track. And Jane Street said, we'd love to, but we can't because we don't know how to find

the solution either. So you've got to follow in front of you that some of the smartest people in the

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will be contributing to real ML projects. So go to JaneStreet.com slash twerkash to check out the puzzle

and the internship. 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 accept Florence. Our 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, herediterally 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

general works, that is how Blonya and Sienna 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 are 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, it doesn't have noble blood, that would be

weird. And those threats to the independence of the republic almost always came from the nobility.

And after one particular near miss in which the city was nearly taken over, they decided to

get rid of the nobility of Florence and they massacred most of them and cut their heads off and

put them on pikes and burned their houses down and raked sold 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 to adopt in 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 sculpture works,

the head of the architectural firm, not the brick layers who are actually laying the bricks.

So we're talking about the economic bourgeoisie as an anachronistic word, but we're talking about

the owners of the means of production. But who argued themselves commoners? So they are very wealthy,

but from the point of view of the diplomatic core 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 going to take an ambassador seriously, who isn't noble

blooded, right? From the perspective of every other polity in the world, the rulers of Florence

are the rank of their valet, right? There is no nobility left in the city. In fact, Florence can't

run its own armies or head its own police because you're not going to surrender if you're told

to surrender in the name of some guy who doesn't have a coat of arms, right? That would be weird.

So they actually have to hire a nobleman to come to the city and be their chief of police to arrest

people in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor. And one at a time, they'll invite a skilled military

commander nobleman. He'll come to the city. He'll be put a star. He'll live in the palace, which is

also the prison. He'll arrest people who enforce the law. They will pay him handsily at the end of

the year, escorted 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 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 lotteryed into the Senate. And so you put names in a bag, you examine all of the merchant

members of guilds, you choose which ones are fit to serve, meaning not ill and dying, not insane,

not so deeply in debt that they could be manipulated by the people who they owe money to. Their names

go in a bag, you choose nine guys at random. They rule the city. They are put in a palace where they

rule the city from that tower. They're actually locked in the tower for the duration of their time

in office because if they left the tower, they can be bright or kidnapped. And they rule the city

for two months or three months. And then at the end, they are thanked for their service and

escorted out and a different nine guys share power for the next three months. A power sharing

that is designed to be tyrant proof because you need consensus of like a nine randomly selected

guys to decide to do anything. Oh, it's not even a majority vote is consensus. It's consensus.

Okay. So and can I ask how, the previous you you describing killed the nobles,

salt the earth. I'm almost sinking early communists. But then you say, well, no, it's the heads of

the merchant guilds who are in charge. And so I want to understand why merchants entrepreneurs

have notable status in forums. What is it about the culture that makes it so? And also the

Medici, the most powerful people, their their job is usually right? It's like, well, I mean,

it's important to remember they were nobody when this set up. Right. They were they were a minor

important family. But the culture is getting started where somebody like that could be respected.

So how does that happen? 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 you know,

if you are a major merchant in Florence, you're importing an exporting wall to and from all across

Europe. You have employees all across Europe. You're buying mass bulk wall from England,

importing it to Florence to use olive oil that you've bought from Naples to process into high

quality wall, 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 cloud. 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 of 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 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 exists 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 bar room brawl and punches

somebody out and the person knows 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. They turn to one of these major families and these major families

are massive land owners that own dozens of apartments within the city, hundreds or thousands of

people work for them. And so it makes sense to everyone to be represented that way,

like having a council of the CEOs of all of the organizations that employees work for when your

corporation also supplies your social safety net and you see your representation there.

It's also a world that's used to thinking in terms of hierarchy and very unused to thinking

about real democracy and that really doesn't have any confidence in what we would recognize as

democracy. We talk about these republics and we're very excited by the fact that they give more

power to the people than a monarchy does, but they're still incredibly narrow oligarchic republics.

So one thing when we read Machival, 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 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

trusting the people. Popolo meant the top 4% economically of the population, the members of the

merchant, merchant girls, 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 19th century when we

were excitedly translating the prints and reading it as quasi-democratic. We now have read more

documents of the period and realize how people use these words. Okay, so Florence in this period

goes through like five different forms of government. So it's this republic of 90s and

towers you're saying before 1434. 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 takeover is that the Medici know the people of Florence are very deeply invested in this

republic and very deeply invested in its institutions. And we have to therefore respect those

institutions and proclaim respect for those institutions. So we're going to sustain people in the

named offices that there used to be. And we're going to continue to let the guilds be important

and have important offices. And we're going to continue to if there was a mandatory outfit

that people wore who worked in the republic, which there was. The garment thing over there in

the corner is an underway, a luchofiorentino. 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 because of the way it was draped.

They thought of this as a toga. They're cosplaying the Roman Republic. And wearing a Florentine

toga while in office was something that you did to represent your fealty to Cicero and republican

values. And the dukes made their men continue to wear these. In fact, the first Duke Cosimo the first

would wear one to costume balls as if in his heart he longed to not have not dressed like a duke

but to dress in a toga like a republican. It's actually doubly ironic because when

the Roman Republic turned into the Roman Empire, they still have the senate. They still have all

these old institutions that even though it's no longer a republic. Yeah, the Roman senate keeps

meeting until 1280. Right. So it's sort of doubly ironic that they are doing the same thing.

Yeah, they're doing the same thing. In the 1500s. And it means that more rights are granted to the

people of Florence than to other cities that felt on monarchies at similar points. Because the

monarchs of Florence know they have to be careful and they have to respect rights to a certain

amount and they can't run roughshod over them. There's a really cool building that I love

in Florence. If you've been there, there's the famous bridge, the Pontovecchio, which has the

little jewelers shops all along. And when you get to the end of it, there's this funny

over-the-head corridor, the Visari 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 you is building it, it's going across the roofs and sometimes

blasting off the second stories of different people's houses. And most people, when his grace,

the duke says, I'm going to blast the top story of 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 plots of Eq, but they get to this one point where there's an old tower, a very old

tower, a 500 year old tower. And this belongs to, I think it's the Manelli family, who are descended

from peers of Julius Caesar and can trace their genealogy all the way back to an old Roman

gents. And when the duke says, we want to knock the top off your tower, they say, no, this is our

tower. This tower has been ours since before the 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 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're weak and are therefore careful, and therefore more rights,

like property rights exist. Meanwhile, across the river in Farara, Duke Alfonso to Estee of Farara,

used to wander around Farara Bucknake with a sword in one hand and is dicking the other to show off

that nobody would ever possibly try to harm a Duke to Estee. And he and his siblings used to do

things like, if you really liked a musician, kidnapped them and locked them into towers 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 air people and when you feel

confident in power, right? And so they are much closer to tyrants than the Medici are ever able to

be even after the republic falls. And that's what's so neat, right? Because the resistance failed

if we're looking at it in black and white. The republic fell. There wasn't a republic anymore.

There was a Duke. He took over 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. Yeah, I think there's actually an interesting

parallel to today where not to be too on the nose, but like sometimes you will 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. Right. Just because even though constitutionally

or at least in precedent, the president is very powerful. The republic expectation is so strong

that the amount of resistance that is faced, even when you successfully do something,

demotivates the necessary solution. The only thing that makes resistance weak in the US is when

people feel as if partial victory is failure. And remembering moments like how Florence's

resistance all the way to the end meant that there was more liberty for the next several centuries

even under the tyrant is what we need to remind ourselves that actually partial victory is an

important thing. And even if the worst were to happen and there were to be tyranny, that tyranny

would be so much weaker because there was a lot of resistance. And traditions of resistance

and structures would develop that would continue to exist. Yeah. I think you should discuss the

I think you should discuss the fact that the mediches are the bankers for the papacy. What does

that mean? Why is that necessary? And how they're able to make money off of that from the interest on

the float? So when Cosmode mentioned she swings the contract as banker for the Pope, it's important

to remember that when you can't wire transfer money, you know, in the pre-modern world collecting

taxes is very difficult and complicated system. It is generally done by the centralizing power that

has the right to tax, delegating somebody local who knows. So if you're in a town, there'll be a

local tax collector. It's his job to go around to everybody and collect taxes and then send a

portion of those taxes home to the central power and keep a remainder to pay himself.

The central power will say we expect X amount of taxes from this area. And when you hear about wicked

tax collectors, wah-haha, it's because if you are told we want 10,000 florins worth of tax from

this town, but you extract 15, you can keep the other five because the 10 is what you need to send

to the central. So the more you extract, the more you get paid. This delegate system in which there's

a local tax collector and even a more local tax collector below him who might collect tax from

in particular village means that you depend a lot upon the person whose job it is to collect your

taxes. So when Cosimo is paper banker, he is the person who is collecting and channeling the money

from every church in Christendom when everybody puts a coin into a collection box or pilgrims come

and put money. All of the wealth that's supposed to flow back to the papacy is actually flowing to

Cosimo. Cosimo is passing it on to the papacy after taking a cut. So that is a lot of money moving

quickly. It is also a lot of ability to make contracts and contacts. We all know how important

networking is. And he rises in prominence from A banker to somebody who has enough money to

effectively take over his state via manipulating the guys out of a bag system. And so to discuss that

again briefly, if you have a system where you lottery people, sortition is the technical term for

it. This is a very old form of government eighth and ancient Athens uses it. It actually works

really well. But like any institution, it is corruptible. And in the same way that you can corrupt

voting by bribing people or manipulating the machines or manipulating voters, you can also

corrupt sortition by bribing the people who pull names out of the bag or by the simpler mechanism

which Cosimo uses first of if you're a giant big way in the city and you employ a third of the

people in the city and a third of the people in the city are on your payroll. And nine guys at random

are chosen out of a bag. Three of them are going to be your guys just statistically. And so if you

tell all your guys, I want this policy, this policy and this policy. And if you have questions

send for me and I'll tell you what to do when the plurality on a random council all have a plan

and it's your plan, you effectively control the city. And so in that way, the Medici effectively

control this lottery system because they've guaranteed that the plurality in a situation that

doesn't have a majority will always be them. But of course, there's a chance to that. And in 15,

sorry, in 1432, 1430 and 1432, Cosimo has bad luck. And the lottery draws a lot of people

who dislike him and doesn't draw any of his guys. And they immediately declare him a traitor

into the state and arrest him and lock him in a tower. And he bribes his way out. And he offers

the equivalent of about $300,000 to the guard outside the cell and $700,000 to the

captain of the guard just smuggle him out of the tower. And he wrote in a letter later that they

were the two most foolish men he'd ever met because he was Cosimo to Medici. He would happily have

paid them tens of millions of dollars to let him out of there. But they weren't ambitious enough

to think to ask for more than a few hundred thousand. So he escapes. And then the next election

by gum happened to elect entirely people who just loved Cosimo. And they invited him back to

the city and triumph. And they declared him father of the fatherland. And they arrested and

persecuted all of his enemies who turned out to be guilty of tax evasion and all sorts of other

things. And that was the moment that his grip tightened. And he's like, I'm going to stop

simply controlling a plurality. And I'm going to start bribing the people who actually run the elections.

And his famous quote about this is, it is dangerous to be rich and not powerful.

And that you need the power to defend yourself in a situation like King of the Mountain,

where when you're on top, everyone will try to knock you down. Yeah. This is the system into which

Machiavelli is born, in which his family has worked for the Medici family for generations.

He grows up expecting to work for the Medici family. But the problem with heredity is that

sometimes you get a weak link. And in the moment that Machiavelli is in his early 20s coming of age

about to work in government for the first time, a government in which he himself is not in fact

even fully enfranchised. That's one of the fascinating things about the degree of his patriotism.

You weren't allowed to serve in government office fully, the elected lottery offices,

if your family was deep in debt. And his grand father had a lot of unpaid tax debt. So he worked

his whole life for a government of which he was not even quite a full citizen, which is, again,

deep love of your country. But also shows even people who could not be in office deeply loved and

cared about this republic. And that important liberty that they felt they had being ruled by

the five percent instead of being ruled by one dictator. And to us, that isn't a very big

difference, right? There's still both not democracy. We would say they're both not liberty in the

sense that we want liberty. But it's an inch more liberty than monarchy. And even that small

amount of liberty, people loved it, people were willing to fight for it, people were willing to

go to the streets and wave their banners and say, liberate us for the republic. And because

they were investing in it, I'm Machiavelli Observes, they sustained it. But eventually, one particular

Medici, I'm not saying names because they all have the same names over and over. And it's really

confusing. So it's easier without names. One particular Medici comes to power quite young and

weak. He's basically 20 when he's suddenly in charge of a very particular and precarious

republic. And right then, the French are invading Italy. And he's scared. And he botches the

diplomacy with France and falls into disrepute. And the city takes the opportunity to kick him out.

The subsequent regimes, which are an independent republic, again, are the ones for

which Machiavelli works. He was part of the regime that ruled while they were in exile. When they

returned, they viewed him as an enemy. He didn't actively organize to resist them. But his name

was found on a list of potential people that an anti-medicine resistance movement had intended

to recruit. He is arrested, tortured, exiled. And in exile writes the Prince. But dedicates it to

the very family that exiled him because they now control Florence. And he will only work for Florence.

He doesn't want his manual of, here are the great secrets of statecraft to be in the hands of anybody,

but his homeland so that it will defend his homeland. When Florence exiles you, they tell you,

go to ex place and wait. And if you're good, we'll invite you back. And Florence has been doing

this for ages because Florence actually used it. This is the core of its diplomatic core, right?

When you have no nobility, you can't have ambassadors in the full on noble ambassador sense.

There's nobody in the city of sufficient rank to go talk to the kings who are, you know, and have

play chess with the sultan and all of these things that you have to do to be a proper ambassador.

So what Florence did instead is that they would exile people and say, okay, we're exiling you. You

go to Bruges. Be our contact in Bruges. You go to London. Be our contact in London. Be good.

Send us letters informing us what's going on. When we have diplomatic needs to talk to the king,

we're going to send letters to you and you're going to forward them. And if you're good, you get

to come back. So being an exile is sort of being on probation, but also being entrusted with state

stuff. That's not quite what they did with Machiavelli. With Machiavelli, they banished him to

a hamlet in the middle of the Tuscan countryside near nothing important and said, go sit in the

country and rot. And if you're good, we'll invite you back. What they expect, what everyone expects,

is that Machiavelli will break that promise and leave. Because he's a well-known

statesman at a scholar and a playwright and a historian. And there are dozens of cardinals in Rome

and other cities that would love to employ him. Kings of England love employing

Florentines to work for them as secretaries. Kings of Naples love employing Florentines to work

for them as secretaries. He might go get a job tutoring the daughters of the Duke of Milan,

the way Francesco Fillelefo did when he was kicked out of Florence for opposing the Medici. There are

lots of places that it's expected. An exiled Florentine intellectual will go where he will have the

ear of power and he will be able to exert influence. He will be a mover and shaker at the court of

Milan or the court of Naples or the court of England. Instead, when they say to Machiavelli,

sit in the country and rot, this is a test, he passes the test and sits in the country faithfully in

rots. And if he had wanted to go be an intellectual power broker, the correct move is to run off to

Rome, right? And say, I will give up the chance to go home the way Dante did, but I will be a

Florentine and exile and I will write important things and I will live at the house of wealthy men

who will support me and take me in and give me the ear of power and I will exert my influence in

that way. He does not do that. He stays in the country and he rots and he continues writing letters

home saying, I will serve you or nothing. Bring me home to serve my country. That is a weird thing to

do, right? And not normal for the many other Florentine intellectuals who experience similar

similar banishments in the same period. How do we know that he wasn't just trying to get back into

power? I mean, the answer is you read his personal letters and you read the way he talks about

love of his country and you read the way he talks to his friends. You read the letters he wrote when

he discusses writing the prints and you read the comments he exchanges with the other friends that

he shared it with. His other works, his comic play, which was a big hit, his history of Florence,

which was well known at the time, those he published and circulated. The prints he kept in very close

private circles circulating it only with trusted intimate friends and then the copy that he sends in

to Florence. And yes, it's a job application. Please bring me back. I will work for you. I will be

loyal. I support my city more than any particular iteration of my city. I support my country more than

any particular regime or group that might be in power. Whatever is in power in my city, I will

be faithful to it. You see him expressing that in lots of different ways. And when in the prints,

he says you can do and should do all of these different ruthless things to keep power,

we have to remember that the end justifies the means when the end is the survival of your country.

It's not the end in general justifies the means. But Machiavelli feels very strongly

that regime changes bring civil violence, civil violence, Shed's blood. And he has seen the streets

of his city run with blood before. He thinks that even life under a tyrant is better than life

in a civil war, which is usually not life at all. The massacre of the people that is likely

and external conquest that is likely as a result of another regime change. So he says, don't

push for a regime change, even if the regime is tyrannical. More people will survive by sticking

with the tyrant than by changing the regime. Okay, so a few weeks ago, I gave open claw a Mercury

debit card and I said a few hundred dollar limit. And I asked to plan a date for me. And here's what

happened. What? You're flying with seafloor and adventures out of Mill Valley. Thirty even a flight

over the bay, Alcatraz Golden Gate Bridge, the whole thing, takes off and lands on the water.

I showed up to my date on Saturday, half expecting the booking not to exist. But thankfully,

everything was sorted. Open claw has successfully made the reservation, used its card to pay for the

full thing, and it even emailed a receipt to Mercury for a proper bookkeeping. I doubt this is the

use case that Mercury had in mind when they made the card system. But the control that they gave

me over spend limits and permissions is what made this experiment work. I just never worried about

the agent going rogue and bankrupting me. This flexibility is why I use Mercury for both my business

and personal banking. If you're already a business user, personal accounts are free and well worth

using. Check out the show notes for specific terms and conditions and head to mercury.com slash

personal to learn more. Mercury is a Fintech company, not an FDIC in short bank. Banking services

provided through choice financial group and column NA members FGIC. I want to talk about the

printing press. 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 apprentice is

also go bankrupt. This is at a time when people like Cosimo are willing to pay on the order of

hundreds of thousands of dollars per book. The guy who invents away to make this way cheaper,

how is this possible? The problem is printed books are a mass-produced commodity in a world that does

not have distribution networks for mass-produced commodities. Mass production is incredibly rare in

this period. Coins are mass-produced, but that's really about it. Almost everything is artisanally

produced. When you have a mass-produced product, you need a distribution mechanism before you can

sell it. The great example is technically e-books existed. The first time anyone typed a book on a

computer, meaning certainly in the 1970s there was such a thing as an e-book, but there was no market

for e-books. Until the Kindle came out and made there be a commodity way to buy and sell e-books,

then the e-book industry came into existence. So e-book as commodity is several decades younger

than e-book technically existing. In the same way, you're Gutenberg. You have figured out how to

produce 300 copies of a book for the cost of one copy of a book. You do so. You print your

Bible. You have 300 Bibles. You sell seven of them to the seven people in your small land,

Lockderm and Town, or legally allowed to read the Bible in a period which only priests are allowed

to read the Bible. Congratulations, Mr. Gutenberg. You have 293 Bibles, and you can't sell them,

and you go bankrupt. There has to be a distribution mechanism for books to find their market,

because there are certainly 300 people in Europe that want this, but there are not 300 people in

one location where it's being produced. So Gutenberg goes bankrupt, the bank seizes his press,

they try to go into the business. The bank goes bankrupt. This is so much overhead.

You spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the production cost of the books, and then you get

nothing back. Gutenberg's apprentices build presses. They go bankrupt. They flee their debts and

flee the country and leave Germany, go to Venice. Venice is the airport hub of the Mediterranean.

Venice is where you change boats. 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 300 Bibles, you give 10 Bibles to each of 30 ships captains going to 30 different

cities. They can sell them. And the first economically sustainable circulation of print is enabled by

the hub system. Then book fairs come into existence in which printers will spend all year printing a

book. They go with a thousand copies of their book to a book fair where there are a thousand other

printers. They all trade and then they go home to their town with five copies each of 200 books

instead of a thousand copies of one book 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 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 different

tech revolutions as if we've just had 10 tech revolutions in a row. But really they are all

deeper penetration of one tech revolution, the computer revolution, the development of the

computer. These are all applications of computers. And so in the same way, the printing press comes

in in 1450 and it isn't done shaping the world instantly. The printing press comes in in

1450. It takes 40 years to even be economically sustainable. It's not until the 1490s that printers

are making money. And then in the 15 teens, it's time for pamphlets and pamphlet distribution.

And now there's news and news is suddenly done by print. And that's a revolution on the same

scale as the difference between computers and cell phones. And we get the Arab Spring or rather,

we get the Reformation, which is enabled by pamphlets in exactly the same way that the Arab Spring

is enabled by cell phones. Then we get the newspaper, another new application of the same technology

that follows like social media. So it's one information revolution having multiple

successive revolutionary applications as it disseminates and eventually saturates. And it moves

on a time scale quite similar to the time scale, 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 suddenly,

it's possible to get a printed pamphlet from Vittenberg to London in 17 days. Oh my God,

we can coordinate our resistance moving against the Catholics. Boom. The Reformation happens.

That wasn't possible even a decade earlier when it 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. Do you see us maybe other eras also have this

and I just haven't read the books about them. But from your book, I'm just like, oh history

seems to be happening really, really fast and seems to be sped up, especially religious and

political history. So obviously, the things happening in Italy, but even aside from that,

Martin Luther Reformation. And then just 20 years later, England splits off from the Catholic

Church, which is like unprecedented. And then it has a bunch of tummolds that flop, flop,

flop, flop, flop, so that every decade feels different. Yeah. And you know, here you are in

1506 being nostalgic for how the world was completely different in 1490. And you're like,

that's pretty fast. And here we are in 2026, often feeling nostalgic for how things were in the

year 2000, right? Right. And is it fair to trace that back to the printing press or it's offshoots

or is it just invented? It's more that history has always moved fast. But when we teach it in high

score, trying to move over large chunks of time quickly. And so we pretend that it moved slowly.

We have this lie that there were long periods of stagnation, but you can zoom in anywhere.

And you're going to find every decade feels different. And people in the 1320s are nostalgic for

people in the 130 odds, right? And it's always felt like history was moving very quickly in 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. They could

fuse us about this. So like I'm working on a paper right now about the video game, Siv,

right? Siv is the number one teacher of history in the world, right? And it has shipped 70 million

copies and 65% of people on earth who have technology play video games, right? Siv has done

number one teacher of history, bar none since 1991. And what does Siv tell you? Siv tells you that

in antiquity a turn is 50 years. And then in the middle ages a turn is 25 years. And then once you

get into industrial revolution, a turn is 10 years and then five years and a modernity a turn is

just one year. Because in one year as much happens now, it's happened in 50 years in antiquity.

And that lie is also what our textbooks tell us, but it doesn't matter where we zoom in. Anytime I

go to a talk where any historian is zooming in on any decade in any time and place, it always

feels like it's moving as fast as our present is moving. Right. I guess the difference is that

technologically we know that they were moving as fast. Technologically they were moving fast. We

just don't care about those technologies anymore. That's interesting. They were constantly inventing

like all sorts of things. We just take them for granted, right? The invention of chairs with

backs, the attention of scissors, the invention of improved metallurgy so that steel could do

things, steel couldn't do before. There was always technological change happening. I'm in the middle

of reading an amazing book about, when you look at the paintings of Raphael and the few paintings

we have by Michelangelo, the colors look like they're really glowing. It's like gemstones.

How did that happen when you compare them to paintings from just a hundred years earlier,

where somehow the colors are flatter. I'm not talking about the anatomy being more realistic,

that separate, but the colors are flatter. And the answer is there was a sequence of revolutionary

adaptations and how to process oil and how to process colors and how to mix them together.

And then those were used to create fake gemstones. And there was a major industrial leap forward in

the fake gemstone industry. And then people who were making picture frames realized they could use

the same techniques from the fake gemstones to make fake gold by painting yellow over the surface

of tin foil. And then those were used by artists who were like, wait, I want to make things that

look like they glow like fake gemstones, so that there were 11 major technical revolutions over

the course of 120 years that led to those colors changing. So obviously progress has been happening

in individual fields over time. But this macroscopic view, there's a reason that people,

this is a big part of your book, but living in the 14th century would say, look, the best time to be

alive was when the Romans were around. And since then, it's just been the dark ages. Yeah.

And if the student relation to the Roman Empire as we stand to them, we would obviously notice that

hey, the world is like so much, there's like, it's been so much progress since then. So

it clearly seems like the pace was. Yeah, I mean, it's it's hard to figure out like when we,

when are we lying and when are we right where we say the pace picked up? And one thing that makes

the pace pick up in modern day is simply the population grew and grew and grew and is now much,

much larger. And the majority of people who ever lived in the entire history of since humans have

been humans and not hominids have lived in the last 200 years because the population became massive.

How did the population become massive? Our agriculture and our hygiene enabled it had our agriculture

and our hygiene improve. Half of that is continuing to on the artisanal level to invent new things in

the same way that the artists invented better colors. Agricultural workers invented better

technologies and agriculture was constantly improving. And the other though, you're correct that with

the arrival of the systematic scientific method in just after 1600. There is a deliberate

societal desire to create intentional anthropogenic progress. So I'll zoom in on the arguments made in

1600. Then I'll zoom out and unpack them. But in 1600, the idea is history up until now has been

sort of unsystematic and people have discovered things kind of at random. But we can create a method

in which we observe the world and use inductive reasoning to figure things out from those

observations to create systematic descriptions of the secret motions that underlying nature. And from

that workout technologies that are good and useful for humankind. If as we make our observations of

nature, we publish them and share them with each other, we can create a community of scientists

that will share all of these discoveries with each other and with the world and therefore benefit it.

This is where when I'm doing this in the classroom, I deliberately provoke and shock my students with

the fun claim. Leonardo da Vinci was not a scientist. And what I mean by that is that to be a

scientist is to publish your results and share them with a community of other scientists so that they

can test them so that the whole human civilization progresses a little bit. And when my friends who are

chemists or my friends who are particle physicists discover something, the next goal is to share that

discovery with everyone so everyone's knowledge advances. What does Leonardo do? He writes everything he

discovers down encoded mirror writing so that nobody but him can possibly use it. And he refuses to

share even with his students and assistants the secrets of what he's doing because Leonardo does not

want to contribute to human progress. Leonardo wants to make unique masterpieces so that hundreds of

years later people will see them in marvel and say, how did he do it? No one else has ever been able to

replicate that method so that he would be marveled at by the future exactly the way he and his peers

marveled at the works of the ancients. And they will look at something like the Colosseum or the

Pentheon in Rome with its enormous dome. And they say, oh, how did they do it? If only we could work

that we could work make one and then make sure no one else could Brunellesky who built Florence's

famous beautiful dome deliberately burned all of his notes and schematics so that nobody else would

be able to replicate his work. That is an inventor and it is an engineer. But in the sense of a

community of scientists, this is not a servant of human progress. This is actually a saboteur of

human progress if anything who deliberately makes progress and then tries to cut it off at that point

so that no one else can be his peer. So that is what you did as a learned inventor in the 1400s

and in the 1500s. But as you get to 1600, the suggestion is different. And here I'm going to use

Francis Bacon's gorgeous simile of the three insects. So there are three types of knowledge

wielders, says Bacon. First, there is the ant, who is the encyclopedist, who gathers information

from all around the world. And he learns everything he can. And he piles it up into a great big pile

and he makes an ant hill and he sits on top. And if he has the biggest ant hill, the biggest pile

of knowledge, then he's proud of having made it. But all he does is assemble it and have it,

possess it. A beautiful library, nothing comes from it. The second type is the system weaver,

the spider who spins elaborate webs of beautiful intricate logical theory in which you admire

them. And you can get entranced and ensnared in them easily because they're so beautiful,

they're almost hypnotic. But there's nothing real in them. They're all just spun out of the body

of the spider himself, the theorist theorizing from his own mind. And the third kind, says Bacon,

is the honeybee, who gathering from among the fruits of nature, processes what he gathers through

the organ of his own being to produce something which is sweet and useful for humankind. And that

is the scientist, who gathers from nature to produce something sweet and useful for humankind. And with

this rhetorical call, and with Francis Bacon's portrait on the title page, the English Academy

of Sciences is founded and starts publishing, and the standards which is over from, you are not a

great achiever because you built the dome, you're a great achiever because you worked out how it can

be done, and you shared that sweet and useful thing with all of humankind. Bacon says, if we do this,

if we make academies of sciences, we can make sure that every human generation lives in a better

condition than the past. We'll have better agriculture, fewer famines, we will have refrigeration,

we'll have chicken and winter, we will have all of these things that we aspire to. If we collaborate,

each generation's experience will be better than the last. He says that to be a scientist is the

ultimate act of charity, because there is no greater act of charity than to give a gift to every

human who will ever live after you. So that is the rhetoric of what you would feel was happening,

if you're alive, in the 1620s and 1630s. And Galileo is publishing his observations, and Descartes

publishing his systems, and they've just discovered that the heart is a pump, and that they were

totally wrong about the Four Humors theory and that the blood circulates and they're trying to

figure out what it does, and they have magnification and they can see worlds of complex patterns on

the wing of a flea, and it sounds like the whole world is suddenly coming into view, and we're at

the beginning of progress. Now if we zoom out, we would say there'd been progress the whole time.

People had always been inventing things. Agriculture in France was better in 1300 than it was in

1000. Plows got better, seed got better, cabbages were bred to be bigger, people worked out better

pots. There were always artisanal inventors. And if I, that's a lot of what Bacon is observing,

he worked in the patent office as a young man, and he would see a carpenter come into patent.

I have invented a better chisel. I have invented a thing that goes like this. I get a

competent, and he would realize that it was workers and workmen and handicraftsmen who were

inventing the really useful tools. He wanted to make this systematic. And so what we would say is

there was always anthropogenic progress. In 1630, they realize there is anthropogenic

progress. They think there hasn't been, they think they're beginning, and the history up until

this point has been stagnant, but now it's going to suddenly be full of invention. As for the first

time, there will be deliberate anthropogenic progress. Really, we would say there always was,

and that it's accelerating at this point, we realize it, and articulate and describe it.

But you've probably seen lots of graphs of history with the hockey stick graph structure,

where it's sort of flat for a long time, and then roops up, and they'll put that droop after

the invention of the scientific method. And it depends on what we're graphing, whether that

droop kind of is appropriate, and also depends on how much you zoom in or zoom out. Because it's

true, we do 150 years after Bacon, get to inventions that result in enormous increases in population.

Would we have anyway, even if it hadn't been systematized? Probably a bit later, and we would have

a slightly flatter hockey stick, but we would still have hockey sticked. In the same way that when

you put mice on an island without mice, they breed, and they breed, and they breed, and they breed,

and they hockey stick. Humans would also have hockey sticked, but would we have hockey sticked later?

Would we have hockey sticked with more pain? When mice hockey stick, they also starve to death

and eat each other. We haven't done that yet. Go us. Was that science? Probably.

And so there are a lot of factors to it. So is it true that everything accelerated after

1650, or 1621, since yes? In another sense, it's a continuation of a curve that was already

curving. I think you might have answered a question I was about to ask, which is the book you

recommend on your website, the Renaissance in Italy. I keep forgetting the name of the author.

Guido Rugiero, yes. Guido Rugiero. 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 metal working for fine type setting, separately for milling technology, for water

mills, wind mills as advanced, gears for watches. And so he asks, why didn't Italy have the

industrial road revolution? And I wonder if you stand by the answer you just gave or

another is we cannot underestimate how much richer per square meter Italy is than everywhere else.

Italy is the bread basket. And it's also the center of big oil, which is to say big olive oil.

Which is both fuel oil for light and industrial oil for production, as well as cooking and eating oil.

And the other major, major industry of the period, which is big wool. If you're already the center

of big finance, big wall, and big oil, 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 was England producing crappy quality wool.

England was so aware that it couldn't process wool into high quality without masses of olive oil,

which it couldn't produce. That England just exported its crude wool to Florence in order to have

Florence with its olive oil reserves produce the fine quality. Think about how a wool suit isn't itchy,

but a wool blanket often is. That wool suit isn't itchy because lots of olive oil into the process

producing at least the pre-modern tech levels. So do you want England to reduce your itchy wool

that people will only pay a small amount for or do you want to export it? It makes sense for it to

have been somewhere industrially ambitious that wasn't already economically on top to have done it.

So that's one reason that industrialization doesn't kindle in Italy. Italy is agricultural land

and finance world. It doesn't feel like it needs new industry. Another factor is mining and so on.

This land is more valuable as a farm than it is in a mine. You don't want to rip it up.

Interesting. Another is it's so subdivided because those rich cities are still mostly independent,

whereas a centralized crown in England is more able to pass legislation to facilitate a massive

transformation. No city really wants to be the one where the giant industrialization is happening.

It's awful for the city. Note that the industrialization of the industrial revolution was mostly

outside of the wealthier centers of England in the second tier towns. They grow massively into

huge industrial areas like Lancaster. So those are a plural bunch of reasons.

I would have also thought that the competitiveness between different battalion

city states would have made it so that if they get it the industrial, if they get better textile

machines and whatever before you, it's kind of a disaster because they're right there.

I mean, it's pretty clear. This is not going to sound plausible to anybody, but it's true.

We've been looking at some documents recently, which pretty much confirmed that they did figure out

how to make industrial looms in the 1400s and they didn't want to. They wanted to make

luxuriant artisanal fabrics. This by the way was another interesting thing from the book,

which was the first printed books. There was like not, as you just mentioned, there's not this

market of commodity things were produced cheaply that like the average person is going to be like,

oh, if I can get this for 1099, I'll go buy it. And so they're trying to make this thing look like

it was produced by artisanal luxury phrase. Right. So the first printed fonts look like

handwritten scripts and often have a blank space to illuminate it so that it looks just as fancy as

the printed as the as a manuscripts. Existing benchmarks tend to seriously overspecify problems.

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One thing I wanted to ask you, back to the printing press. So not only does printing

it cheaper, but around this time, paper itself also gets cheaper. So like not just reading,

but writing gets cheaper. Yes. And do you as historians just see a market change in this period

in the amount of records that are taken and as a result, our understanding? A huge amount rests on

whether you have a cheap, cheap writing surface. And here rather than looking first at the

Renaissance, let's look at what we think of as fall of Rome. Because one of the biggest things

that happens there is that Western and Northern Europe lose access to papyrus.

So papyrus is the cheap writing surface of antiquity. It is an easy plant-based writing surface.

You take this tall thin water read that is fibrous like asparagus. You slice it into ribbons.

You set them out in the sun. A bunch of them parallel to each other sitting on a stone like noodles.

You put a second row of noodles perpendicular to that on top. And then they dry in the sun,

and they're naturally sticky. They stick to each other. They produce a sheet. Practically no

labor has gone into this. You've sliced. You've laid out 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. Sometimes when Egypt and Rome or at war, Egypt will be like, no, we're angry. You will

stop exporting papyrus. No, papyrus Rome. And then Rome's infrastructural fall apart overnight.

Because you can't do anything if you can't write stuff down. Papyrus is a warm weather plant.

It is killed by frost. You cannot grow it north of the frostway. So France, Spain, even most

of Italy, you can only grow papyrus down in the very tip and down in Sicily, right? Without papyrus,

what you're writing on is a dead sheep. And if you think of the price of a head of lettuce

and the price of a leather jacket, you're understanding the difference between a sheet of papyrus

and writing on a dead sheep. So every page of a medieval book is as expensive as that much of a

leather jacket and a medieval book on parchment 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, 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 600 books. There's definitely more than six

of our books in this room, right? Every kiosk at an airport selling Dan Brown novels has more than

600 books. This is nothing. And at the same time as that, right? In the Middle East,

Sultans have libraries of over a thousand books or 5,000 books. There are libraries in

Sub-Saharan Africa with thousands of books. There are libraries in China with thousands of books

because they in China have cheap paper and rice paper, the Middle East test papyrus.

Europe and only Europe is writing on a leather jacket. And so what changes around the

same? How is Europe able to get the paper? So well, so still zooming in on fall of Rome. Yeah.

Rome had lots and lots of books on papyrus. They start falling apart because papyrus is brittle.

Most of our knowledge or antiquity is not lost at the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

It's lost between 400 and 600 and 80 when the papyrus are falling apart.

And here you are with a library of a thousand books and you can only afford to make 100 new books.

So you have to choose which hundred of these thousand do we save? Is there literally

is not enough industry on your continent to make enough leather to copy down all this text?

You have to pick. And so the majority of what we lost from antiquity we lost then. We lost

when the papyrus 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

100 of them and you're a monk, you're like, what do I save? I know St. Augustine. I love St. Augustine.

This is why we have more surviving work by St. Augustine than the entirety of all pagan

classical lat. Because the subjective tastes of the people in power at the moment the papyrus

were falling apart ended up being an unintentional momentous censorship that bias towards

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 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. 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 was in between a leather jacket. This feels like a weird. This is a

interesting question. This is somewhere in between like getting yourself a dozen frozen

pre-packaged meals. Right. Right. Which are complex and have many ingredients that a lot of

industry went into producing the actual packaging, etc. More so than a head of lettuce. So it's

10 times expensive but it's still a tent as much as the leather jacket. So paper comes in. People

are very wary of paper. Paper is clearly not as strong as parchment is a really tough stuff.

People start using paper for rough drafts, letters, sketchbooks. When you're doing the sketch

before doing a painting you might do that on paper. But Europe has paper for 400 years before

the earliest state document ever written on paper to give you a sense of how people are wary of it

and it disseminates slowly. And it's still expensive. It requires you know industry and

production but it is a tent as expensive as leather. So paper disseminates slowly through Europe and

again this is one of these there was always technological change and all technological change

are gradual. So paper comes in in 800. It's sort of being trusted by 1200. When printing begins

there printing on paper but they even print on vellum. If you're a really rich person you would be

like please print you know two copies on vellum for me. So dukes like the dukes to estay the

sister Isabella to estay the sister of the duke who walked around Bucknaked to show off that

he could. His sister specially ordered all of her books to be printed on vellum. Even when the

rest of the print run was on paper. These are the very books that are being produced in Venice by

the apprentices of Gutenberg who ran away those guys. So at that moment in the 1490s if you're

really rich you might be invested in this new tangled printed books but you're still not

trusting paper even though paper has been there for at that point 600 years. So again gradual

adoption of technologies right and gradual trust in paper and they're still using parchment for

things gradually less and less but substantially over the course of the 1600s. You can even find

things written on parchment in the 1700s and 1800s. British Parliament still did its records

on parchment up until 10 years ago and the Vatican still does its official records on parchment now.

Interesting. So this is a digression but the numbers of like how how expensive a book is didn't

make sense to me just based on how much scribe time it took right where you say like it's

600 thousand dollars per book and I'm like and then separately it's five months of scribe time

and I'm like how much of the scribe's getting paid but if it's if it's the paper but then what

is the Gutenberg is the paper and the ink and but a lot of it is scribe time. So then but Gutenberg

still needs paper right yeah Gutenberg needs paper that's why he goes bankrupt right so he he

borrows the equivalent of about 1.5 million dollars worth of money to buy paper and then doesn't

make back 1.5 million dollars worth of material when printing it and this is what makes printing

a risk right because you have to start buying the paper up front you need to buy it in a big lot

so that it matches because people don't want the paper to suddenly be different color with their

book so you're investing a lot up front and you're not getting anything back until you produce

this slow print run which is why printers start printing pamphlets because they can have one press

that's slowly printing a valuable book that'll take six months to print well next to it they have

another press that's printing pamphlets were in two days they've printed a fashion report on whatever

one was wearing at the royal wedding which they can sell right away and it's much cheaper but it

means they have something they can sell two or three times a week so the pamphlet's following the

book as printing cheap new printing scandal just because it's only five pages long okay so you

got it right I could grab one if you want to see so if we look at some examples of parchment

and oh need the little guys I'll show you some of these one by one for example this is a pamphlet

naked pages short text hand stitch together it would take two or four days to print a pamphlet

it's cheap it's ephemeral you print a thousand of them you sell a bunch around the town you sell

bunch to news writers who are going to and from other cities right who will buy them and bring them

to next town so if you've printed news in Milan people who are going to Florence will want to buy

your news to go there and it might be you know a report of a siege it might be here's what the

people were wearing at the royal wedding it might be my favorite ever title of a pamphlet was

the scandalous tale a doctor from Padua and how he seduced his maid murdered his wife murdered the

maid cut out her heart and ate it and how he was justly punished by God that was the title of the

pamphlet these things circulated around some of them were nonsense some of them were real news most

of them were were combinations but you can sell something like this cheaply in a couple of days

and often they would have a cheap blue cover you have seen this color before this is the color of

laundry lint because fundamentally laundry lint is what paper is you take rags of old clothes you put

them in water you beat them until they become a pulp you skim it out with a sieve laundry lint is

what rag paper is and if you don't bleach it it's this sort of generic blue gray color which is

the average color that human beings wear that's a copy of the gentleman's magazine another example

of technology taking a leap forward in the 18th century when they invented the newspaper they

immediately have the problem of oh no newspapers contradict each other we don't know what's true

we have to fact check stuff oh that one has a great fold out I think there's a procession or

something so instead of photographs we have this fancy here is whatever it was where I get the

state funeral very exciting so your laundry lint if you don't bleach it you know remains the

color that it on average was in the 18th century they have newspapers the newspapers are reporting

news the newspapers don't quite say the same thing as each other and so then the problem is

how do we know who to trust so the gentleman's magazine was developed in every week they would

publish a roundup of that week's news saying what each newspaper said about it and where they

contradicted each other and analyzing who's right and wrong it was the fact checking this is the

first magazine it invented the word magazine being used in this context and it was an intellectual

response to the fake news problem of how do we reconcile what happens with newspapers so many

iterations of you know they invent the printing press then they invent the pamphlet then they

invent the newspaper then they invent the magazine to cope with the newspaper the newspaper is

invented to cope with the pamphlet because you don't know whether to trust the scandalous tale

of the doctor from Padua how he murdered his wife is he real we don't know but if somebody

publishes a newspaper that serially prints news every week they have a reputation they have to

be respectable you're not going to subscribe to them if you catch them printing nonsense so the

the serial nature of a newspaper was a formal accountability that made people willing to trust

it over time so the newspaper is a way of fact checking the pamphlet the pamphlet is a way of

making money while you're printing your longer book I will also let you have a look at papyrus

so you can see the sort of plaid pattern of the papyrus because it is made of the two layers of

strips and there's a papyrus scroll that's modern papyrus the thing about papyrus is that in

addition to being cheap it's very brittle it works better in a scroll than it is folded over because

the folded edge cracks really easily so if you try to make this into a codex book it's going to be

very fragile as a codex book and then here you go this is a real 17th century letter in

absolutely indescribable handwriting from in part on parchment you can even tell because that's

cheap parchment which side was the outside of the animal and which side was the inside of the animal

you know the handwriting is in some sense bad but it's also like very well aligned in a way this

tiny and precise yeah but here is good parchment that is hard to believe that it's animal skin

so these are pages from a book of hours from about 1480 and individually hand calligraph you

can see that one has a hole through it yeah and they wrote around the hole

because too valuable to not use that sheet right these are paper within and you can barely tell

if you look carefully which side was the outside of the animal which was the inside because one

side has pores tiny little speckles of pores so book of hours this is probably a French book of

hours so book of hours is a personal prayer book Bible quotes objects of meditation so the book

would be fat and small this was the most common manuscript in the middle ages and you would have

you would carry it around in your pocket you'd pull it out different times of day for a personal

prayer but it also has big margins so that you can take notes in it write down addresses friends write

notes in it you collect your you use it almost like a day planner right it's sort of the smartphone

of the period in which you make make all your notes and an information to write down people's names

you might have celebrities you meet sign your book of hours so all sorts of neat things go into

the margins as you use this as a way of organizing the day but you can imagine that would be actually

be extremely interesting collectors item of like random people's book of hours and more kinds of

things they reported yeah but just think about again think of a leather jacket but how much more

industrial effort went into making leather right literally paper thin like this yeah huge amounts

of industrial effort going into making the pages of such a book my favorite example of this kind of

distribution and diffusion being taking longer than you would think for a very fundamental

of technology well now this is my favorite example now my second favorite example is oil so I

interview Daniel Oregon who wrote this big book about the history of oil and in 1860s Drake strikes

oil in Pennsylvania and it's in the 1910s that cars invented internal combustion engine is put

into a thing which you sell millions of copies of and until then oil is just used for the kerosene

which is just for lighting and the actual gas is just thrown away and and in fact when the

libel was invented people are wondering whether standard oil is going to go bankrupt because the

main use case has gotten away I mean I always think of there's a in Julius Caesar's description

of Roman of Britain when the Romans first get to Britain he says the people are written are so

poor they don't they can't afford to burn wood so they burn rocks and we know he's talking about

coal oh he's talking about coal hilarious and they had coal in the days of Julius Caesar but they

didn't figure out its massive industrial utility until many many many many many many many years later

yeah yeah there is this interesting question of why the Romans didn't have the natural revolution

because they had these huge solar reminds in Spain yeah but no you have the industrial revolution

when you feel you need to and that's a thing about Gutenberg as well that a lot of people don't

think about because people are like Gutenberg was an inventor an invented a thing and then a

hand impact no he was living in the middle of a library building boom which there was a huge

demand for books that spiked he invented the invention in response to that cultural change it

isn't by chance that we got the printing press in 1450 there was a huge boom of library building

starting in the 1410s and inventors were trying to figure out ways to make books cheaper

they were making smaller books they were using paper more they were trying to do this paper surges

before the Gutenberg moveable type printing press so Gutenberg isn't a random genius out of nowhere

it's at this point it was the moment that people needed more books we were gonna get the image

one thing you say in passing in the book is Marn Luther comes up at the exact right time

because if you've got some enrola in the 1490s and he's this another prophet type I guess he's

the modern analog is something like Chomanian Iran you know sets out your credit government

but too early in Machiavelli you say it's 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 well I mean Machiavelli remembers is contemporary with Luther it's just that he

circulates his stuff very briefly and very privately he doesn't want a pamphlet version of his

ideas out there because he only wants Florence to have it yeah Luther hits the sweet spot when

the pamphlet distribution network had just developed yeah hence you know when Savannah Rola

printed pamphlets they only circulated around Florence and its neighbors Sienna Pisa it took

months for them to get farther his movement was quickly crushed when Luther makes the 95 DC's public

they're in print in London in 17 days after he releases them in Vittenburg because the pamphlet

runners go boom boom boom and get the news there and things are printed overnight and and come out

that but it seems that you're hinting that within the next two decades there's a new censorship

censorship regime response and the the censorship regime is very effective at shaping what

is printed in books but can never keep up with pamphlets interesting 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 you're not going to be able to keep up with that speed and one of the funny

problems that the inquisition always had when trying to uh persecute printers is printers worked

in the information distribution industry they had they were the people who paid the news writers

who 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 this 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 unpolisable 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 I guess couldn't they

just punish print shops for publishing things which they we just hey take a guess what we'll like

and if we if you don't like it we'll punish you which is kind of how censorship in China works for

example so you skipped town and there is a yeah the printer kept skip town the printer moves to

the next town and there is a cost to that right there's there's no not no human cost to evade

now you've you've had to leave your home and friends behind and move to a new place but they don't

get you and it's very easy to deny that the pamphlet came from you at all so the print

industry proves very difficult to censor and we're experiencing the same thing with social media

right never one is like censor the pornography on x social media channel they're like we just can't

it's too fast there's too much or censor the hate speech we just can't there's too fast there's

too much there were too many pamphlets and they could crack down on one particular pamphlet shop

we have records of this was a brilliant analysis in antimatizen's book the specter of skepticism

in the age of enlightenment brilliant book brilliant scholar he's a great description of from the

notes of a raid on a clandestine bookshop this wasn't the printer this was the underground bookshop

they were selling illegal books and they're rated and it has all the details of you know how

angry the people were about different things that the those shop had so there was censorship and

there were crackdowns but it was a censorship that could not actually prevent circulation it could

restrict it it could make it harder it could make it scary but it couldn't prevent it interesting okay

so before books become cheap you've got people who are unless you're fantastically wealthy you're

reading the same couple of books if you've ever read a book again and again through your life and

cause a mode of Medici's father owned I think it was 12 books and I want to understand that the

intellectual significance of rereading the exact same book again and again like maybe the reason

petroclaw of Cicero so much is like imagine reading the same book like 20 times and like

hitting the same joke again and just meditating on every single I don't know there's got to be

a difference in intellectual culture as a result of taking these things at least rooting in the

equivalent of the Bible yeah well and you you really feel like you get to know the person

intimately you develop a personal relationship with the ancient author you are participating in a

conversation across the diaspora of time yeah and it's a one-way conversation you're responding to

them the future will respond to you but there is a great deal of intimacy I mean petroc talks about

his friend Cicero and being betrayed by his friend Cicero and he finds new works of Cicero that he

hadn't read and which Cicero's some of Cicero's letters in which Cicero is not following his own

stoic philosophical precepts and is being petty and and and yelling at people about real estate and

getting all upset after his daughter's death and you know how people get kind of manic when there's

been a death in the family and start quarreling about everything Cicero gets like that and petroc

his heart broken because to him it means even the wisest man in history could not conquer that

to become irrational and petty in the face of grief if that if even Cicero became irrational and

petty in the face of grief does that mean humanity is doomed to forever be irrational

and petty in the face of grief and he talks about Cicero breaking his heart and his foot because

the book fell on his foot and he got a bad infection and he was bedridden for months

um um totally different topic but um around this time okay not around the time of

petracker I know we're jumping around a lot but in the 1492 Columbus comes to the new world

they discovered the new world yeah what is the what is the reception of this news although I was

just at a conference week ago in which we confirmed that there's a Vatican document from like 1100

or maybe 1200 I forgot the exact year that recognizes the existence of Vinland i.e. Canada

where they got the information from the Vikings I just say um but they thought it was just a little

thing but yeah they're rediscovering the new world and um it does is it is it I mean today it would

be the equivalent of we just found there's aliens or why why wasn't it more to the extent it wasn't

why wasn't it considered a more significant like this is the main thing happening right now we

discovered the new world um yeah I mean that's fun and uh you know when I teach my class on the

1490s the students many of whom are American always have trouble wrapping their heads around the

people thinking that the new world isn't a big deal a big part of it is that they find the Caribbean

islands and they find the coast and they think this is small yeah right the way I put it to my

students is uh the news comes back we've found something across the water to the west it might be

even as big as the Canary Islands right they they found something but they don't realize they've

found something the scale of Europe and Africa actually it's not as big as Europe and Africa but

you know that they found something humongous um that's part of it another part of it is no

matter how big and important something far away is it's hard to bring your mind out of the petty

squabbles that are happening all right around you especially when they feel like life or death

right so if if it's 1492 what is happening France is about to invade Italy uh Europe might be

embroiled in the largest war it's seeded 50 years the papacy has just been taken over by Spain Spain

is suddenly trying to throw its weight around in Europe in a way that's unprecedented the

Ottomans have just invaded Italy and Hungary and might be coming again also over there there's a

new thing okay great we'll worry about that when we're not having three wars at the same time but

guys we're having three wars at the same time oh my god and then Martin Luther hits

hits Europe like a ton of bricks when they still haven't even figured out that this is a continent

and not an island right so in the same way that if you're in a country and it's having a tumult you

worry a lot about its tumult even if a larger tumult is happening in a far away country

it's hard to bring your mind out of Europe at crisis to be like hey this is your thing

the other is they're inventing lots of new things and it falls into the sphere along the rest right

they're discovering the existence of sub-Saharan Africa which they thought that there was basically

one country's worth of stuff south of the Sahara Ethiopia and nothing else and then they're like oh my

god there's a whole big thing that sticks out they're also discovering that the heart is a pump

I mean that's a bit later but they're discovering all sorts of stuff at the same time so the

discovery of the new world especially when they realize how big it is becomes a intellectual

challenge where they say wait does this mean all the maps we've had are wrong does this mean

the ancients were wrong about geography does mean the world is a lot bigger than we used to think

the world is let's worry about that the same way we worry about revolutionizing our mathematics

and figuring out that the sun doesn't go around the earth these are things that are paradigm

shifting but on the other hand does it matter whether the sun goes around the earth of the earth

and the sun when the friends are invading right now and we get the defenses going and there's a

giant civil war happening and we're about to be betrayed it does matter but it also doesn't matter

and so in the same way that any decade is concerned by its tumult and often fails to recognize

the importance of what's around it that's true of every decade one fun game when I study the

history of censorship which I work a lot on my next nonfiction book is going to be a book on

the history of censorship and whatever they're looking at

they're always wrong from our perspective at what they should be worried about censoring right if

we had a time machine and our goal is to like go give them advice so here we are in the French

enlightenment Voltaire and Rousseau and Marquis de Saad and Lamatrice articulations of materialist

atheism are flying around Europe and what is the Inquisition worried about it's worried about

Janssonist treatises about the nature of the Trinity and Janssonism is sort of like a

Calvinist version of Catholicism right do you want to have an incredibly terrifying authoritarian

god who hates you and tells you that your soul is a worthless spider that deserves to be hurled

into fire but also have to obey the arbitrary pope in Rome then Janssonism is for you

has all the grimness of Calvinism and all of the authoritarian centrality of the Roman Catholics

and this was a heresy that was abroad in the life and they are so much more worried about Janssonism

than they are about Voltaire that very chapter in Matisseon's book I mentioned where they are

raiding the clandestine bookshop and they're like Voltaire fine the band in cyclopadie which is

going to revolutionize all thought in Europe fine letters of Diderot you know we're so fine

Janssonist treatises about the nature of the Trinity throw them look at these guys this is the worst

thing they really are obsessed with this incredibly petty minor heresy to the degree that when

the encyclopathy is banned by Rome France likes the encyclopathy right this is Diderot and Dolebox

big project of universal education to print an encyclopedia that will collect all world knowledge

they are articulated as should a new dark age come upon humankind and even one copy of the encyclopedia

survive it will be sufficient to reconstruct all human progress right that's the goal of this thing

and it's advancing incredibly radical ideas about biology about statecraft about reforming the law

to be rational instead of traditional all sorts of stuff um when that is banned by Rome

Paris is commanded you know Paris loves this book the king likes this book the queen likes this book

she's on record saying it was so cool being able to look up the technology that we used to make

her silk pantyhose right she just loves it everybody loves it uh France allows it to circulate

despite its controversial content but Rome says no you must ban this book and so they they agree

they're going to have the ceremonial burning and they march the march the encyclopedia up to the

fire and then they get some chance to discuss about the nature of the treaty had burned those instead

because they don't want to burn the encyclopedia they love it they want to burn this other thing

and this is always true if we had a time machine for the inquisition in um the 1540s would we

would say like guys Machiavelli he's really important he's really revolutionary you got to be

looking at this or we would say Lucretius's Dayvara Mnotura which I did my dissertation on and many

people are familiar with greenblots book the swerve which credits a lot of change to the material

of science that this poem articulates there's a much more complex story which you know is told in

my book which refers to greenblots and if anyone enjoyed the swerve you would really enjoy

the more detailed zoom in that that um inventing the Renaissance has but uh you know we would say

guys you should censor this we literally have letters of inquisitors writing to each other saying we

don't need to bother are censoring Lucretius only learned people can read it and they know perfectly

well that the false stuff is false so it'll just circulate and it's fine what we need to worry about

censoring is all of these fine-tum minutiae of Protestantism so like the 1545 edition of the index

of band books uh says in its introduction we shall put the names of arch heretics in all caps

and when I first read that I was like oh I want to see all my favorite arch heretics be in all

caps and I eagerly flip to M and Machiavelli is not in all caps he was not important enough from

their position the all caps authors are all minor Protestant theologians they're all people who are

like Calvin and Spingely and Luther and the lengthen they're all doing stuff that we would say does

not matter um but a error is always wrong about what ideals and what circulation and what changes

are the really big ones and are always much much more worried about oh my god the prince of

Spain which princesses he could have married this is going to determine whether Spain is or isn't

annexed by Germany this is the most important thing that has ever happened the entirety of time

and people are like we've discovered another continent and they're like we don't care we don't

want to know who's gonna marry Charles that's a very profound observation um I it was really

just gonna learn from your book that of all the thousands of people killed it during the inquisition

one guy was executed for science really yeah and even he had these ideas on a reincarnation that were

so I think probably the number execute for atheism would be about a hundred okay um there are 12

total trials of scientists about science right Galileo is one Jordana Bruno is one Jordana Bruno is

the only one executed of those 12 tiles only three were convicted and hundreds of thousands of trials

for judeizing which is theoretically contaminating Christianity with Jewish thought and all of these

other minutiae of oppression and segregation of populations executions for paganism meaning

practicing your indigenous religion in a colonized space hundreds of thousands of executions for

that one for science um I recently got interested in uh the story of Kepler just because the way

he discovers a lost planetary motion is so whimsical with the theory of platonic optics anyway so

learning more about it he um at some point while he's going through brach he's data and coming

with a loss of planetary motion he is the imperial mathematician for the Habsburg emperor which basically

means that he's doing astronomy and oh sorry astrology for the astrology for generals what will we

will we win the battle or whatever yeah and then he gets excommunicated not for the laws of planetary

motion but because he's a Lutheran that's right for the Lutheranism and in fact his mother is

tried for witchcraft again yeah has nothing to do with the science just because she's also a Lutheran

Milton of paradise lost fame wrote our first big defense of the free press and this is in the moment

in the early 1600s when England doesn't yet have systematic censorship law it has ad hoc

hey this book is bad but it doesn't have systematic you must submit all books to a censor the way

the Catholic world does by that point the Catholic world developed it in order to fight Protestantism

and there's there's a lot of support for creating censorship in England at the time because

there's anxiety about papists plotting against our nice non-Catholic country trying to undermine it

there's a general general feeling of anxiety but also there's deliberate moral panic right whipped

up by politicians and power-seeking people who whip up a deliberate moral panic about books

the same way in 1954 there was a moral panic about comic books or the same way there was a moral

panic about Dungeons and Dragons in the 90s right there's a moral panic about scary and dangerous

books and pamphlets and so there's a movement to create state censorship for the first systematic

systematic time in England and Milton writes this big treatise about why freedom of the press is

important the Eropogitica beautifully written rhetorical piece that presents the importance of

you know we must trust truth to rise purely to the top we must let free voices move otherwise

you're gonna create a situation where people are writing for the censor first and for the public

second it will sort of constrain people's thought in the way that we know chilling effects and fear

do it's a beautiful treatise he fails the censorship regime passes a paradise lost is published

under this censorious regime it goes through this censorship the one line they tell him to change

is about astrology they're like it's perfectly fine having Satan be your charismatic protagonist and

God be kind of a jackass and and also having Satan spout rhetoric ferocious anti-monarchal rhetoric

copied from revolutionary pamphlets that are circulating in the British colonies so that he's

actually liberating republican anti-monarchal rhetoric varied dangerous stuff in the treatise

that's fine but this one line about a comet causing a thing to happen no no no no no no

astrology is going to confuse people's souls and you're like guys you're speaking as a time

traveler you're so wrong about what you're censoring so they always are you once sentenced which I

couldn't trace down which I've found very interesting where you said in the late 17th century the

most extensive a library in all of Europe is the one in the Vatican run by the inquisitors not the library

the most extensive experimental laboratory that's what I meant to say yeah daniela maculia is the scholar

there that's from his dissertation okay though I think it's been published now but I don't know if

it's actually out in English it's out in Italian and he works on the Inquisition in the

immediate aftermath of Galileo because they saw themselves as guarantors of truth and of accuracy

and information and so they decided after Galileo that they had a duty to verify the truth of the

books that they were sent to censor and that if people were going to be doing mechanical experiments

they needed to repeat the mechanical experiments to see whether they were true so they effectively

the inquisition invented peer review which is to say they invented a second laboratory trying to

recreate the results of the first and there are these amazing people who by day are inquisitors and

by day they're going home to write their own scientific treatises as they do these experiments it's

not what we expect interesting but history is never what we expect yeah seems like a good place to

and I thank you very much thank you