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

About this episode

The episode explores the complexities of Renaissance history, focusing on the printing revolution and its social impacts through a conversation with historian Ada Palmer.

Renaissance history is so much wilder and weirder than you would have expected. Very fun chatting with Ada Palmer (historian, novelist, and composer based at the University of Chicago). Some especially fascinating things I learned from the conversation and her excellent book, Inventing the Renaissance : Not only did Gutenberg go bankrupt in the 1450s (after inventing the printing press), but so did the bank that foreclosed on him, and so did his apprentices. This is because paper was still very expensive, and so you had to make this big upfront CAPEX decision to print a batch of 300 copies of a book - say the Bible. But he’s in a small landlocked German town where only priests are allowed to read the Bible - so he sells maybe 7 copies. It’s only when this technology ends up in Venice, where you can hand 10 copies to each of 30 ship captains going to 30 different cities, that it starts taking off. Speaking of which, the printing revolution wasn’t just one single discrete event, just as the computer revolution has been this whole century of going from mainframes -> personal computers -> phones -> social media, each with different and accelerating social impact. Books came first…

People in this episode

Host: Dwarkesh Patel

Guest: Ada Palmer

Topics covered

• Renaissance history
• printing revolution
• technology impact
• historical events
• book publishing
• pamphlets

Keywords

• Renaissance
• Gutenberg
• printing press
• pamphlets
• historian
• Ada Palmer
• Florence
• technology
• history

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of Chicago

Books & works: Inventing the Renaissance

Places: Florence, Wittenberg, Venice, London

More episodes of Dwarkesh Podcast

• Alex Imas and Phil Trammell – What remains scarce after AGI? · June 4, 2026 · 1h 16m
• Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up · May 22, 2026 · 1h 21m
• Eric Jang – Building AlphaGo from scratch · May 15, 2026 · 2h 37m
• David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution · May 8, 2026 · 2h 13m
• Reiner Pope – The math behind how LLMs are trained and served · April 29, 2026 · 2h 14m
• Jensen Huang – TPU competition, why we should sell chips to China, & Nvidia’s supply chain moat · April 15, 2026 · 1h 43m