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

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've got in this period in the late 15th century, early 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 has true all across Europe, right? And those individual cities could no longer get the centralized German government to overseas,

supply routes, keep the roads free of bandits, you could no longer import an 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 for my council. They will rule, we'll set up a republic, a weaker town that can't support itself as well, is much more prone to one wealthy family realizes that they can get goons and take over and declare themselves the monarch of the area.

Or worse, this town cannot self-sustain. It doesn't have enough.

People there can't get food.

They are scared, they're afraid of being robbed by people who are desperate. But outside of town there is a wealthy villa that belongs to a noble family and they have bodyguards. Hey, noble family, if I move next to your villa and work for you, will you protect me with your bodyguards?

So towns emptied out and villages as in villa and its environments developed as a result, and a village was a monarchal structure in this sense that was the migration of people out of a town into the protection zone of a local lordling. 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 virtues of the Roman emperors had which allowed this safety and good government that said to work? And I don't understand the connection between readings, cisteros 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 kind of thing?”

Well, as with many processes, the answers are multiple steps and it's complicated and some of the steps are realizing of the earlier steps didn't work. So Petroc 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 Petroc 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 real in this period. And Petroc 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 problems are 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 diving 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 Petroc reads about the ancient Roman Brutus, not the one who killed Caesar, but the ancestor to whom that one was trying to live up.

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 Petrox suggests this, his students and successors embraced this idea and poor money into”

traveling across the Alps to look for manuscripts, traveling to Constantinople to purchase manuscripts from the welfare east to where books are common and bringing them back to assemble these libraries and then raise tutors like Marcelio Focino who can no 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 seasers. The days of the seasers 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 than people will like and respect me. Or in the case of Florence with the Medici, we are merchants come 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 merchants come. We're extra scummy merchants come.

But if we can have Latin and Greek and 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. 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 long-winded oration

that says, "I am the wealthy, I'm the ambassador from a very wealthy country at a very powerful prince." And he's so glad you're the pope. Congratulations. Only after that for like an hour. And

“if you give a gift to the pope, 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 there to the throne, for example. So you're on your way or you might be a more minor ambassador, but you're at least minimum in the son of a count. And you're on your way to Rome. You're heading along the length of Italy. You're going to go through Florence. It's on the way. Well, there's nobody there worth talking to because it's just a pit of scum and villainy. And in fact, also fill-thin depravity because of course Florence is the Sodomy Capital of Europe. And to

Florenceine 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 to 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 or your servant knocks at the door.

to host your excellency. And you're like, "Gat's not your correct." And he invites you in.

“And the instead you step inside, you're in a space like nothing you've ever seen before with”

white lights streaming in through this air-y 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 weight weight. 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 efforts 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 ancient square. 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, so 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 ten-year-old boy reciting a poem that you an 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 Cosa and Abedici 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 no abilities. So it can't marry anybody. So it has no meaningful allies. And also it's the middle of this quilt, give a lead a few, 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 tree. Or you could say, "Yes, let's make

an alliance." Give me a bronze smith and an architect and a Greek teacher and a platenist, 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. And suddenly the

“condescending, nobleman is in awe of the merchant scum. That's what the art and the culture”

does as a propaganda stick tool. The next stage of it then is okay, we've raised these princes like this and they have Latin and they have the Greek and they can impress everybody. And then they fight a bigger nastier worse war than any of the earlier big nastier wars. And more deaths and more betrayals and bigger cannons knocking down cities and burning whole areas. And the wealth is

centralized. So the mercenaries are more numerous because people can produce more. The first

generations raised by this are supposed to be philosopher princes. And instead we get Cesare and La Crézea Borges. Both of whom had Latin and Greek and Cicero and Plato and they were kids. And then it grows up in Valentino, said, "Fire and a half the world of the Cesare," said, "Fire and a half the world." So that is the war Machiavelli watched. Machiavelli was raised at all of the Cesareau and Livi, right? He was raised on the Petrarchin 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 robes, the court finery that he would wear back when he was an ambassador to popes and kings. And a tired 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 we'd abolved them onto Feltro, 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 Cesareau

de Borgesa and joyous the second, make terrible choices and succeed. And he says, "Okay, well,

Cesareau's, but I still feel in my heart a deep power in the classics." So, he says,

"What if the libraries are what we need, what 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 why he velly 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 automatically way. But he's writing that in the early 1500s. So,

“it's been a little over a century since this started. We have to remember how long this process is.”

From Petrarch's first call to Machiavelli writing that is, as long as from Yuri Gagarin's

spaceflight 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 in the 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 ancients. We have bigger libraries. We have the printing press now. We're having libraries and 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 Faccino was young, you had to be a masterful Latinist to read these agents. You had to have enormous vocabulary. There are no glosses. There's nothing to help you. Only a tiny slice of expert classist could actually read this stuff. By a hundred years later, there are translations into the vernacular. There are footnotes that tell you the hard vocabulary. Any med student can read Lucretius's discussions on materialist.

Information when Pogio 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 1560s, 1580s, 180 years, 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 case book of examples. The way Machiavelli said we should use history. Let's examine. Let's doubt. Let's rethink. Let's do stuff in new ways." Okay, just to make sure I understood. The chain of causation here is we've got to

“resuscitate the virtues of the Romans, therefore read what they read. To do that, you need to”

put the libraries. You've put the libraries, you've resuscitated all those arts. Basically,

and then you just need to have people be literate, have people 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

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

you could tell. I had a previous guest, Joseph Henryk, 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 we get to get together and discuss ideas. There's probably, you know, 20 other stories you could tell. Why this story? So two to the reasons, one I think it's useful to think about, for new ideas to flourish in

new ways of running the world to happen, you need a fertile environment, in the same way that for forests to grow, you need enough topsoil, right? And it takes a while to get that topsoil.

“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

stop back and forth so that they can have discourses of ideas with each other. You can't publish a scientific journal until there are journals, 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 their meat 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 mid-literacy rate of 90 percent. 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 lots of films, right? You can be literate and have

never read a book. Because there might be almost no books in the entire city in which you grew up,

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 center to being more, you know, 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 interesting. One of the focuses I have is, sometimes there are more steps to something than you think. And we tell the story of the Renaissance. And the Renaissance, they rediscovered these ancient

texts. And then we got science. And that's true. But it is an oversimplification and too wide a zoom. And if I said in the French Revolution Napoleon rose to power and spread nationalized warfare across Europe. And then we landed on the moon. I've skipped some steps. Right. And we know that

“had 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 dot, setting up a network of information exchange, or that leases of scientific revolution. I think the reason this feels important or salient is, right now, I think a lot of people will have this idea that I'm going to make AI go well by doing X thing. And maybe some of those things work. But at the same

time, sort of frustrating, but also a 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 uninterested change in history will go my way or according to my values or according to what I value. Right. And I think the go my way is opposed to go well is a really important distinction. Yeah. Because the, you know, Petrarch 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

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. They're a hedonists that are precurrients and stoics at all sorts of catac 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 layoff, 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 with 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 we prefer joy seeing that. He did not create a world that went as he wanted, but he created a world that went well. And we have many examples of that, right, trains and bicycles come in and we get feminism. Because it's easier for people, especially women to move freely and independently, they can organize, they can mobilize, we get suffragettes. Did the inventor of the train intend for there to be women's liberation? No. Did it go the way

he imagined? No. Did it go well? Yes. So last episode, James Street introduced a puzzle,

“where they backed over various LLMs and asked people to figure out what the secret trigger”

phrases were. Since then, they've received a bunch of submissions. Unfortunately, none of them have solved the problem. And so I asked James Street, look, we got to give people some kind of clue or something to get them on the right track. And James Street said, "We'd love to, but we can't." Because we don't know how to find the solution here. So you've got a puzzle in front of you, that some of the smartest people in the world aren't sure how to solve. And they're the ones who made it.

So it would be pretty insane if you could figure it out. Beyond the ragging rights, James Street is offering $50,000 to the top right-ups in attempts. Separately, James Street is currently accepting applications for their summer ML internships in New York, London, and Hong Kong. You'll be paired with mentors and you'll be contributing to real ML projects. So go to Jamestreet.com/thorkash

“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, except Florence, are modeled on ancient Rome. And the ancient Roman model was an oligarchic republic in which within the city there are certain

noble families, usually founding families who made the city in the first place who they are the

sanitarial families, hereditarily when they come of age, they automatically, the men of the family are in the senate, from among them are elected the consoles 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 in franchise members of the republic who rule over the commoner majority. That is how Venice works, that is how general works, that is how Blunyan, 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

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, it 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 have not been part of negative stuff who they instead allowed to officially renounce their nobility. And they renounce their nobility and change 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 bricklayers who are actually laying the bricks. So we're talking about the economic bourgeoisie, isn't that an agronistic 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, but he's going to take an ambassador seriously. Who isn't noble blooded right? From the perspective of every other polity of the world, the rulers of Florence are the rank of their valet. There is no nobility left in the city. In fact,

Florence can't run its own armies or headed 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 noblemen 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, noblemen. 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, escort him to the gates, and then banish him from the city for life on pain of death so that he cannot return and make use of the power that he had in the city to try to take over. So they're very, very wary of any noblemen. 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 literied 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 roll 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 and office. Because if they left the tower, they can be bricked 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 tiring because you need consensus of like a nine randomly selected guys to decide to do anything. Oh, it's not even a majority vote. It's consensus.

So, and you can ask how the previous 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 job is user-y, 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 fan. 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 and 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 wool, which you're then exporting to Germany and France. You are a very interconnected business man. 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

going to fund the hospitals? Who's 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 a fair person got off. This is the system known as the patronage system. And it exists in ancient Rome. It exists in 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 on the person's nose

breaks and they die in the brawl and your son is suddenly in trouble. And you say, "Oh, no, I don't want my son to be executed." You turn to your landlord. Your landlord turns to his landlord. They turn to one of these major families. And these major families are massive landowners that own dozens of apartments within the city. Hundreds or thousands of people work for them. And so it makes sense to everyone to be represented that way. Like having a council of the CEOs of all of the organizations

that employees work for when 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 all

a garbage republics. So one thing when we read Machiava, he talks a lot about the papolo, right,

“which we translate as the people. And he talks about how important it is that the papolo are”

respected and the papolo have a voice and the papolo are armed and you show 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 U.S. where we're respecting and arming and trusting the people. Papolo meant the top 4% economically of the population, the members of the merchant guilds. That's the papolo. 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 a tower as you were saying before 1434.

Well, there's a gradual takeover, right? There's a gradual what we could call regular coutry capture. But an interesting detail about Florence even as the energy takeover is that the medicine, no, 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 they're 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 local Fiorentino. This was the garment you were mandated by law to wear if you held office in the Florentino Republic. To us, we look at, 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 Florentinoga, while in office, was something that you did to represent your fieldedist Cicero and Republican values. And the Duke's

made their men continue to wear these. In fact, the first Duke calls him O 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 turns into a 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, they are doing the same thing.

“Yeah. I think in the 1500s. And it means that more rights are granted to the people of Florence,”

then to other cities that felt on monarchies at similar points. Because the monarchs of Florence

run rough shot over them. There's a really cool building that I love in Florence. If you've been

there, there's the famous bridge, the Punta Vecchio, which has the little jewelers shops all along. When you get to the end of it, there's this funny over the head corridor, the Vassari corridor, as we call it, which was built by the Duke's 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 the Duke's 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 to the city to the other so that they could walk in safety without being assassinated. 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 after 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 blood so echo. But they get to this one point where there's an old tower, a burial 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 could trace their”

genealogy all the way back to an old Roman jense. And when the Duke says, "We want to knock the top of your tower," they say, "No, this is our tower. The 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 descent, there will be resistance. These are monarchs who know that they are weak and are therefore careful, and therefore more rights, like property rights, exist. Meanwhile, across the river in Farara, Duke Alfonso, to Estia, Farara, used to wander around Farara, Bucknaked, with a sword in one hand and is decking the other to show off that nobody would ever

possibly try to harm a Duke to Estia. And he and his siblings used to do things like, if you'd like to musician, kidnap them and lock them in a tower so that nobody else could hear them or if they wanted each other's musician, send goons to kidnap each other's musicians. They also used to recreationally murder each other's servants when the siblings were tipping with each other. That is what you do when you don't fear your people and when you feel confident in power, right?

And so they are much closer to tyrants than the Medici are ever able to be even after the

“republic falls. And that's what's so neat, right? Because the resistance failed if we're looking”

at it in black and white. The republic fell. There wasn't a republic anymore. There was a Duke, he took over the old system was gone. But because the republic fought so hard and because the people really believed in it, the people had a lot more rights and the tyrant was a lot less tyrannical because there had been that fight. It's a great example of how even when resistance 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'll debate like, what is the odds that America becomes a sort of a poodness kind of country within a couple of decades. And I think the odds are actually quite low, just because even though constitutionally or at least in precedent,

the president is very powerful. The republic expectation is so strong that the, my resistance

that is face, even when you successfully do something, demotivates the necessary solution. The only thing that makes resistance weak in the U.S. is when people feel as if partial victory is failure, right? And remembering moments like how Florence's resistance all the way to the end meant that there was more liberty for the next several centuries even under the tyrant. Yeah. It's 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 fact that”

demotivateshis 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 cosmo to bed, 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 premodern world, collecting taxes is very difficult and complicated system. It is generally done by the centralizing power that has

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-ha-ha. It's because if you are told, we want 10,000 florins worth of tax from

“this town. But you extract 15, you can keep the other five because the 10 is what you need to send”

to the central. So, the more you extract, the more you get paid. This delegate system in which there's a local tax collector and even a more local tax collector below him who might collect tax from particular village means that you depend a lot upon the person who's job it is to collect your taxes. So, when cosmo is people 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 cosmo cosmo is passing it on to the papacy after taking it 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 lot of 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 cosmo 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 or 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 sent 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 affect of the control of 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, cosmo has bad luck and the lottery draws a lot of people who dislike him. It doesn't draw any of his guys. And they immediately declare him a trader to the state and arrest him, a lock him in a tower and he bribes his way out. And he offers the equivalent of about three $300,000 to the guard outside the salons, $700,000 to the capital of the guard just smuggled him out of the tower. And he wrote in the letter later that they were the two most foolish

men he'd ever met because he was cosmo to Medici. And 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 if you 100,000. So he escapes and then the next election, by gum happened to elect entirely, people who just loved cosmo and they invited him back to the city and triumph and they declared him father of the father land 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 in government for the first time,

a government in which he himself is not in fact even fully in franchiseed. 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

important liberty that they felt they had being ruled by the 5% instead of being ruled by one

“dictator. And to us, that isn't a very big difference, right? They're still both not democracy.”

We would say they're both not liberty in the sense that we want liberty. But it's an inch more liberty than monarchy. And even that small amount of liberty, people loved it. People were willing to fight for it. People were willing to go to the streets and wave their banners and say liberitas for the republic. And because they were invested in it, I'm Machiavelli observes, they sustained it. But eventually, one particular meta-chea, I'm not saying names because they

all of the same names over and over and it's really confusing. So it's easier without names. One

particular meta-chea comes to power quite a 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 or organized to resist

them, but his name was found on a list of potential people that an anti-medicine resistance of it 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, will 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 played 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 Bruce, be our contact in Bruce, 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 in exile is part 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, whatever one expects is the Machiavelli will break that promise and leave, because he's a well-known statesman at a scholar and a playwright at 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 Francesca Felilpho did when he was kicked out of Florence for opposing the Medici. There are lots of places that it's expected, and exiled Florentine intellectual will go where he will have the ear of power, and he will be able to 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 and rot. And if he had wanted to go be an intellectual powerbroker, the correct move is to run off to Rome. 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." And 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. You know, his other works is Comic Play, which was a big hit,

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 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 up in claw a mercury debit card and I said a few hundred dollar limit and I asked to plan a day for me.

And here's what happened. What? You're flying with sea-plane inventors out of mill valley,

third even if flight over the bay, Alcatraz Golden Gate Bridge, the whole thing,

“takes off on lands on the water. I showed up from my day-not-saturated day,”

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 bulkkeeping. I doubt this is the use case that mercury had in mind when they made the car system, but the control that 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/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.

“So, one thing I didn't realize before reading your book is that not only does Gutenberg”

go bankrupt after making the most significant invention of a millennia, but his apprentice is also going bankrupt. And this is at a time when people like Cosmo are willing to pay on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars per book. And so the guy who immense a way to make this

way cheaper, how is this possible? So, 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 artistically produced. When you have a mass-produced product, you need a distribution mechanism before you can sell it. The great example is technically ebooks existed the first time anyone typed a book on a computer, right, meaning certainly in the 1970s there was such a thing

as an ebook, but there was no market for ebooks. Until the Kindle came out of May there be a commodity way to buy and sell ebooks, then the ebook industry came into existence. So ebook as commodity is several decades younger than ebook technically existing, right? In the same way, your 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 landlocked German town or legally allowed to read the Bible in a period of which only preslawed or read the Bible. Congratulations Mr. Gutenberg. You have two hundred and ninety three Bibles and you can't sell them and you go bankrupt. There has to be a distribution mechanism for books to find their market 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 ceases 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. You go to Venice. And Venice is the airport hub of the Mediterranean. Venice is where you change boats. And so if you're sailing from A to B,

you go to Venice. You change boats. You get to the next place. The hub system has always worked well.

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 books 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 Frankford book fair, which still exists today, developed as

the distribution mechanism. So there's a slow growth in a slow saturation. And that's really

“cool because one of the things I think people think is unique about our present information revolution”

is that we're living in this sequence of successive information revolutions. We had the computer. The computer was exciting. And then we had the personal computer. And then we had the internet. And we had the cell phone. And then we had social media. And now we have different social media. Networks coming in successfully causing crises one after the other. And then we have LOMs and other applications of machine learning and Gen AI. And it's easy to think of each of these as

different tech revolutions. This is 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 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 1510s, 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 and exactly the same way that the Arab spring is enabled by cell phones. Then we get the newspaper, which 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 movement, it gets 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 Europe, I'm just like, oh history just seems to be happening really, really fast. And seems to us, it's better, 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 from the Catholic Church, which is like, I'm president of the family. Yeah, and then it has a bunch of tumultes that flapflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflopflop oversee.

Every decade feels different. Yeah, you know, you're here you are in 15-06 being nostalgic for how the world was completely different in 40-90. Right. 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. And is there's a beard of trace that back to the printing press or its offshoots or is it just

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

we're trying to move over large chunks of time quickly. And so we pretend that it moved slowly. We have this lie that there were long periods of stagnation. But you can zoom in anywhere. And you're going to find every decade feels different. And people in the 13-20s are nostalgic for people in the 13-0 odds. Right. And it's always felt like history was moving very quickly and things rose and things fell. It's the lies we tell ourselves in history books written in the 19th century that are trying to

group all of these things together, make modernity special. They could fuse this about this. So like I'm working on a paper right now about the video game Civ. Civ is the number one teacher of history

technology play video games. Civ is the number one teacher of history. Barnon since 1991. And what

“is Civ tell you? Civ tells you that in antiquity a turn is 50 years. And then in the middle ages”

a turn is 25 years. And then once you get into industrial revolution a turn is 10 years and then five years and a modernity a turn is just one year. Because in one year as much happens now it 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 in 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. Technology 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. The invention of chairs with back, the initiative 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's 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. There was a major industrial leap forward in the fake gemstone industry. And then people who are making picture frames, you realize 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. Yeah. But then there's 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. And if they stood in relation to the Roman Empire as we stand to them, we would obviously notice that hey, the world is so much there's like so much progress in them. So, yeah, clearly seems like the pace was, I mean, 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 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. How did 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 underline nature and from that”

workout technologies that are good and useful for human kind. 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. What I mean by that is that to be a

scientist is to publish your results and share them with the 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 or particle physicists discover something, the next goal is to share

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 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. Bruno Leski 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 cans and he piles it up into a great big pile when 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 founded and starts publishing and the standards which is over from you are not a greater

cheaper because you built the dome or a greater cheaper 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

generations 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 as happening if you're alive in the 1620s and 1630s and Galileo is publishing his observations and they card is publishing his systems and they've just discovered the heart is a pump and that they were totally wrong about

the four humers 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 100 plows got better seed got better cabbages were bred to be bigger people worked at better pots there were always

“in our teasinal inventors and if i think that's a lot of what bacon is observing he worked in the”

patent office as a young man and he would see a carpenter come in to patent i have invented a better chisel i've invented a thing that goes like this i'm going to come patent it and he would realize that it was workers and a workman and handicraftman who were inventing the really useful tools

progress in 1630 they realize there is anthropogenic progress they think there hasn't been they

“think they're beginning and that history up until this point has been stagnant but now it's going”

to suddenly both 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 and at this point we

realize it and articulate and describe it but you've probably seen lots of graphs of history with the hockey stick graph structure right where it's sort of flat for a long time and then 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 inventors the results in an

arm is increases in population would we have anyway even if it hadn't been systematized probably a bit later and we would have a slightly flat or hockey stick but we would still have hockey stick

right in the same way that when you put mice on an island without mice they breed and they breed

and they breed and they breed and they hockey stick humans would also have hockey stick but would we have hockey stick later would we have hockey stick with more pain right when mice hockey stick they also starve to death and eat each other we haven't done that yet go us uh was that science probably and so there are a lot of factors to it so is it true that everything accelerated after 1650 in one or 1621 sense yes in another sense it's a continuation of a curve that was already

“curving so I think you might have answered a question I was about to ask which is the the book”

you recommend on your website the Renaissance and Italy I forgot to name it the author we don't reject it oh yes good old Ruggiero 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 when mills is advanced you know gears for watches and so he asks why didn't Italy have the necessary evolution

and I wonder if you understand by the answer you just gave or it's part of it but another is we cannot understand how much richer per square meter Italy is then everywhere else Italy is the breadbasket and it's also the center of big oil which is to say big olive oil which is both fuel oil for light and industrial oil for production as well as cooking and eating oil and the other major major

“industry of the period which is big wool if you're already the center of big finance big”

wool and big oil yeah do you need an industrial revolution you're already economically on top through the power of agriculture it makes sense for it to have been a sort of industrial backwater area that what was England producing crappy quality wool England was so aware that it couldn't process wool into high quality without masses of olive oil which it couldn't produce that England just exported its crude wool to Florence in order to have Florence with its olive oil reserves

produce the fine quality think about how a wool suit isn't itchy but a wool blanket often is that wool suit isn't itchy because lots of olive oil into the process producing at least a pre-modern tech levels so do you want England to use your itchy wool that people will only play pay a small amount for or do you want to export it it makes sense for it to have been somewhere into 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 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 welfare

centers of England in the second tier towns right they grow massively into huge industrial areas like

Lancaster so those are a plural bunch of reasons that I would have also thought that the competitiveness between different battalion city states would have made it so that like hey if they get the industrial if they get you know better textile machines and whatever before you it's kind

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 artisinal fabrics this bet there was another interesting thing

from the book which was the first printed books there was like not as you just mentioned there's

there's not this market of commodity things are 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 way right so the first printed fonts look like handwritten script and often have a blank space to illuminate it so that it looks just as fancy as the printed as the as a manuscript existing benchmarks tend to seriously overspecify problems

take something like web arena tasks it often spell out every single step for example I will arrive at the Pittsburgh airport soon provide the nearest hide hotel in the vicinity and

“then giving the minimal driving distance to the supermarket but real users don't talk like that they'll”

say I'm landing in Pittsburgh where do I get groceries where should I stay if we want agents to

generalize they can't rely on spoon fed instructions they have to handle under specified prompts and infer missing constraints from the environment label box built the data set specifically for this it's full of ambiguous real world scenarios who with incomplete prompts realistic world states and clear evaluation criteria these scenarios reward correct understanding not just instruction following for example a user tells a home agent I'm going to bed can you turn off all the lights

a naive agent turns off all the lights in the house a stronger agent checks the user's calendar notices that there's a game night in the living room and only turns off the bedroom lights that distinction is what today's benchmark's mess and this reading of context and inferring intent

“and acting appropriately is what label boxes data enables across domains they can get your scenarios”

tailor made by their massive network of subject matter experts to learn more visit labelbox.com slash poor cash when they want to ask you back to the printing press so not only does printing a cheaper but around this time paper itself also gets cheaper so like not just reading but writing it's cheaper yes and do you as historians just see a market change in the spirit in the amount of records that are taken and as a result are understanding of what it is you gemount rests on whether you have a cheap

re-cheap writing surface and here rather than looking first at the renders on let's look at what we think

of as follow-room there's one of the biggest things that happens there is that western and northern Europe lose access to papyrus right so papyrus is the cheap writing surface of antiquity it is a easy plant based writing surface you take this tall thin water read you that is fibrous like asparagus you slice it into ribbons you set them out in the sun a bunch of them parallel to each other sitting on a stone like noodles you put a second row of noodles perpendicular to that on top and then

they dry in the sun and they're naturally sticky they stick to each other they produce a sheet practically no labor has gone into this you've sliced evenly now boom papyrus is a very inexpensive writing surface and this is what enables room to have a bureaucracy and to have libraries in any mid-size city will have a library people can send letters back and forth there can be enormous tax records sometimes when Egypt and Rome or at war Egypt will really be like no we are angry you

will stop exporting papyrus no papyrus room and then rooms in for structural 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 air you 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

at an airport selling down brown novels has more than 600 books this is nothing and at the same time

is that right in the Middle East saltons have libraries of over a thousand books or five thousand books there are libraries in sub-zaharan 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 all other records and what changes around the same house you're 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 how antiquity is not lost at the burning of the library of Alexandria

it's lost between four hundred and six hundred and eighty when the papyrus are falling apart

and here you are with a library of a thousand books and you can only afford to make one hundred

“new books so you have to choose which hundred of these thousand do we save 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 a distorted what survived because most of the copying out was done by monks and when you have a thousand books and you can only save a hundred of them and you're a monk you like what do I say I know say no Agusty I love say no Agusty this is why we have

more surviving work by St. Agusty and then the entirety of all pagan classical land because the subjective tastes of the people in power at the moment the papyrus were falling apart ended up being an unintentional moment of censorship that bias to what survives from antiquity so paper technology hits Europe in eight hundred AD so we're talking about a four hundred 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 ahead of lettuce this is somewhere in between like buying was in between a leather jacket and this feels like a weird question this is somewhere in between like getting yourself a dozen frozen prepackaged meals right which are complex and have many ingredients that a lot of industry wanted to producing the actual packaging etc more so than ahead of

“lettuce so it's 10 times as expensive but it's still intent as much as the leather jacket so”

paper comes in people are very wary of paper papers clearly not as strong as parchment parchment is really tough stuff people start using paper for rough drafts letters sketchbooks when when you're doing the sketch before doing a painting you might do that on paper 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 there requires you know industry and

production but it is a tenth as expensive as leather so paper disseminates slowly through Europe and

again this is one of these there was always technological change 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 essay the sister is a valid essay the sister of the duke who worked around buck naked to show off that he could his sister specially ordered all of her books we 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 who 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 pangled printed books but you're still not trusting paper even though papers 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

so um this is a digression but the 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 getting paid but if it's if it's the paper but then what what is your Gutenberg is like paper and the ink and um but a lot of it is scribe time so then but Gutenberg's

“on his paper right yeah Gutenberg needs paper that's why he goes bankrupt right so he he”

borrows the equivalent of about one point five million dollars worth of money to buy paper and

then doesn't make back one point five billion 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 send them to 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 slowly printing a valuable book that will 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 following the book as printing cheap new is printing

scandal to raise the cheaper because the material is cheaper 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 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 like that it's cheap it's a femoral you print a thousand of them you sell a bunch around the town you sell bunch to newswriters who are going to and from other cities right who will buy them and bring them to next town so if you 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 meet my favorite ever title

of a pamphlet was the scandalous tale of a doctor from Padua and how he seduced his maid murdered his wife murdered the maid cut out her heart and ate it and how he was justly punished by God that was the title of the pamphlet these things circulated around some of the more 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 had the problem of oh no news papers contradict each other we don't know it's true we have to fact check stuff oh that one has a great

“full doubt 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 um 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 news paper is invented to cope with the pamphlet because you don't know whether to trust the scandal is tale of the doctor from pagua at how we murdered his wife is he real we don't know but if somebody publishes a newspaper that's seriously 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

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 has 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 indesciverable handwriting in print in print 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 anyways like 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 and they wrote around the hole because too valuable to not use that sheet right these are paper thin and you can barely tell if you look carefully which side was the outside of the animal which was the inside because one side has pores tiny little speckles of pores so book of hours is probably a French book of hours so book of hours is a personal prayer book bible quotes objects of meditation

so the book will 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 right down addresses friends right notes in it you collect your you use it almost like a day planner it's sort of the smartphone of the period in which you make make all your notes and

and information right down people's names you might have celebrities you meet senior 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 um a collector's item of like random people is book of hours and what kinds of things are reported yeah but just think about again think of a lot of their 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 um 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 um oil so in every day we were going to wrote this book about the history of oil and um in 1860s

Drake strikes oil in Pennsylvania and um 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 carousene which is just for lighting and the actual gas is just thrown away and uh and in fact when the light bulb is invented people are wondering whether standard oil is going to go bankrupt

because the main use case is got away neat I mean I always think of there's a

injurious Caesar's description of Roman of Britain when the Romans first get to print he says the people of Britain 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 I think it was make that a satire he's talking about coal 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 years later yeah yeah

there is a interesting question of why the Romans didn't have the gas for revolution because they had these huge silver mines in Spain and so are but no coal 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 good work was an inventor and invented a thing and then a hand impact no he was living in the middle of a library building boomer 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

Gutenberg mobile 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 morn Luther comes up at the exact right time because if you've got some in rural in the 1490s and he's this another prophet type I guess he's the modern analog something like commanding Iran you know sets out through a credit government but two early and 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 alternate world where

well let me 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 that we're had just developed hence you know when Savannah Rolla printed pamphlets they

“only circulated around Florence and its neighbors see in a piece uh it took months for them to”

get farther his movement was quickly crushed when Luther makes the 95 PCs public they're in print in London in 17 days after he releases them in Vittemberg because the pamphlet runners go boom boom and get the news there and things are printed overnight and and come out that path but it seems that you're hinting that within the next two decades there's a new censorship procedure yeah the censorship regime uh response and the the the censorship regime is very effective

at shaping what is printed in books but can never keep up with pamphlets 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 acquisition always had when trying to um uh pursuit printers is printers

“worked in the information distribution industry they had they were the people who paid the news”

writers whose job it is to move as fast as humanly possible between cities which meant that

news always reached them first so if a printer was ever convicted by the acquisition they would find

out before the inquisition can possibly get there to arrest them and so the inquisition never succeeded at arresting printers they've always skipped town by the time the inquisition gets there because if you employ the news writers you find out first what's going on the inquisition can't keep up and when we look at censorship you know there's an intersection of four factors as to whether censorship is possible one of them is law is it legal for the censorship to happen but another one

is the technology is it actually possible to censor this thing and you cannot censor whatever moves the information fastest because it will move the information faster than you can move and even if that one printer had to skip town he will set up shop somewhere else a new person will take over his shop the information will still move so pamphlets become unpoliceable you can try to police them you can partially police them but keeping pamphlets from moving around there anonymous they're quick

they're produced overnight they move quickly you just can't keep up with them I guess when they just punished print shops for publishing things which they you just hey take a guess what we'll like and if we if you don't like it we'll punish it we just kind of how yeah so you skipped down and then there's like yeah the printer kept skips down the printer moves to the next town and there is a cost to that right there's no not no human cost to evade it 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 printing 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 ex social media channel they're like we just can't it's too fast they're too much or censor the hate speech we just can 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 anti-matizans 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 read on a clandestine book shop this wasn't the printer this was the underground book shop that was selling illegal books and they're rated and it has all the details of you know how angry the people are about different things that the the 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 sheep you've got people

ever read a book again and again through your life and cause cause about a better

“she's father owned I think it was twelve books and I want to understand that the”

intellectual significance of rereading the exact same book again and again like maybe the reason petrochalov 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 that did you're reading in the equivalent of the Bible yeah when you you really feel like you get to know the

person intimately you develop a personal relationship with the age and 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 when Petroch talks about his friend Cicero and being betrayed by his friend Cicero when he finds new works of Cicero

“that he hadn't read and which Cicero is some of Cicero's letters and which Cicero is not following”

his own stoic philosophical precepts and is being petty 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 Petroch is heartbroken because to him it means even the wisest man in history could not conquer that urge to become irrational and petty in the face of grief if that if even Cicero became irrational

and petty in the face of grief does that mean humanity is 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 broken he got a bad infection and he was bedridden for months totally different topic but around this time not around the time of attraction I know we're jumping around a lot but in the 1492 Columbus comes to the new world they discovered the new world

what is the what is the reception of this time? I was just at a conference week ago in which we confirmed there's a Vatican document from like 1100 or maybe 1200 I forgot these act year that recognizes the existence of Vinland i.e. Canada where they got the information from the Vikings but they thought it was just a little thing but yeah with the rediscovering the new world and 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've discovered the new world um yeah I mean that's fun and you know when I teach my class on the 1490s the students many of whom are america

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 right the way I put it to my students is the news comes back we've found something across the water to the west it might be even as big as the canary islands right they they found something but they don't realize they've found something the scale of european african actually it's not as big as european african but you know that they found something humongous that's part

“of it another part of it is no better how big and important something far away is it's hard to”

bring your mind out of the petty scobbles that are happening 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 Europe won't be embroiled in the largest war it's ceded 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 unappreciated the Ottomans have just invaded Italy and Hungary and might be coming again also over there there's

a new thing okay great well 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 it's tumult even if a larger tumult is happening in a faraway country it's hard to bring

your mind out of Europe at crisis to be like hey the others 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 um 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

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 uh 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 in the sun when the French are invading right

now and we usually 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 tumults and often fails to recognize the importance of what's around it that's true of every decade one fun game when I study the history of censorship which I work a lot on my next nonfiction book is going to be able gone the history of censorship and whatever

they're looking at they're always wrong from our perspective about what they should be worried about

censoring right if we had a time machine in our goal is to like go give them advice so here we are in the French enlightenment, Voltaire and Russo and the Marquis de Sarde and Lama Thuis articulations of materialist atheism are flying around Europe and what is the composition 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 and defyre 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 and they are so much more worried about janssonism than they are about Voltaire that very chapter in metisins book I mentioned where they are rating the clandestine book shop

and they are like Voltaire fine the band in cyclopidi which is going to revolutionize all thought in Europe fine letters of ddero you know were so fine fine janssonist treatises about the nature of

“the Trinity throw the 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 cyclopidi is banned by Rome France likes the encyclopidi right this is ddero and dollbox big project of universal education to print in encyclopidi that will collect all world knowledge they articulated as should a new dark age come upon humankind and even one copy of the encyclopidiists 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 state craft 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 is on record saying it was so cool being able to look up the technology that we used to make her silk panty hoes 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 mark they march the encyclopidi up to the fire and then they get some chance to destroy some of the nature of the treaty had burned those instead because they don't want to

burn the encyclopidi 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 we would say like guys mark you velly he's really important he's really revolutionary you got to be looking at this or we would say lucreestice as davar amnatura which I did my dissertation on and many people are familiar with greenblots book the swerve which credits a lot of change to the materialist science that this poem articulates there's a much more complex story which you know is told in my book uh which refers to

two greenblots and if anyone enjoyed the swerve you would really enjoy uh the more detailed zoom in

“that that um inventing the renders on s 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 a sense or elicrecious uh only learned people can read it and they know perfectly well of the false stuff as false so it'll just circulate and it's fine what we need to worry about censoring is all of these fine tomb and uciae of Protestantism so like the 1545 edition of the index of band books uh says it is introduction we shall put the names of archeratics in all

caps and when i first read that i was like oh i want to see all my favorite archeratics be in all

from their position the all caps authors are all minor Protestant theologians they're all people who are like Calvin and sphingly and Luther and the lengthen they're all doing stuff that we would

say does not matter uh but a era is always wrong about what ideas and what circulation of

what changes are the really big ones and are always much much more worried about oh my god the prince of spain which princess is he can marry this is gonna determine whether spain is or isn't annexed by Germany this is the most important thing that has ever happened the entire state of time and people are like we've discovered another continent that like we don't care we don't want to know who's gonna marry Charles that that's a very profound observation um i i i i i was really

just gonna learn from your book that of all the thousands of people killed in during the inquisition one guy was executed for science really yeah and even he had these ideas of reincarnation

“that were so i think probably the number x hit for ethians would be about a hundred okay um there are”

12 total trials of scientists about science right Galileo is one turn on a Bruno is one turn on a Bruno is the only one executed of those 12 tiles only three were convicted and hundreds of thousands of trials for due dayizing which is theoretically contaminating Christianity with Jewish thought and 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 the theory of platonic objects anyway so learning more about it he um at some point while he's going through block it brought his data and coming with a lost planetary motion he is the imperial

mathematician for the Habsburg emperor which basically means that he's doing astronomy and uh

oh sorry astrology for the astrology for a general's what will we will we win the battle or whatever yeah and then he gets excommunicated not for the lost planetary motion but because he's a Lutheran that's right for the Lutheran as a um 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 yeah 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 lot has ad hoc hey this book is bad

“but it doesn't have systematic you must submit all books to a sensor the way the Catholic world”

does by that point the Catholic world developed it in order to fight Protestantism um 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 um there's a general feeling of anxiety but also there's deliberate moral panic right whipped up by politicians and um 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 and the 90s right um the tomorrow 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 erropogetica beautifully written rhetorical piece that presents the importance of”

you know we must trust truth uh 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 sensor first and for the public second it will sort of constrain people thought in the way that we know chilling effects and fear do it's a beautiful treatise uh he fails the censorship regime passes uh paradise lost is published under the census 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 uh and also having Satan's spout rhetoric uh for roaches anti um a narcole rhetoric copied from revolutionary pamphlets that are circulating in the british colonies so that he's actually will lead parading for a public and anti-monarchal uh rhetoric very 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 uh astrology is gonna confuse people souls and you're like

guys you're speaking it's a time traveler you're so wrong about what your sensory so they always

are you're one sentence which I couldn't trace down um which I found very interesting where you said in the late 17th century the most extensive library in all of Europe is the one in the Vatican

interested yeah uh Daniele McCoolia 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 at an English it's out”

in Italian uh 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 had the acquisition invented peer review

“which is to say they invented a second laboratory trying to recreate the results of the first”

and there these amazing people who by day are inquisitors and by lighter going home to write

their own scientific truises as they do these experiments it's not what we expect interesting

um but history is never what we expect yeah since I get a good place to close

- Thank you very much. - Thank you.