Ada Palmer

And until then, oil is just used for the kerosene, which is just for lighting.

And the actual gas is just thrown away.

And in fact, when the light bulb was invented, people are wondering whether Standard Oil is going to go bankrupt because the main use case has gotten away.

Oh, I thought it was satire.

Hilarious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There is this interesting question of why the Romans didn't have the Industrial Revolution because they had these huge silver mines in Spain and elsewhere, but no coal.

One thing you say in passing in the book is Martin Luther comes up at the exact right time because if you've got Savonarola in the 1490s and he's another prophet type, I guess the modern analog is something like Khomeini in Iran, sets out the bureaucratic government, but too early.

And Machiavelli, you say, is too late because the censorship is already in place.

What is the censorship that is in place by the time of Machiavelli?

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

I guess couldn't they just...

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

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

Interesting.

Okay.

So before books become cheap, you've got people who are, unless you're fantastically wealthy, you're reading the same couple of books if you've ever read a book again and again through your life.

And I want to understand the intellectual significance of rereading the exact same book again and again.

Like maybe the reason Petrarch loves 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.