Ada Palmer

What?

You're flying with Seaflight Adventures out of Mill Valley?

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

I showed up to my date on Saturday, half expecting the booking not to exist, but thankfully everything was sorted.

Open Claw had successfully made the reservation, used its card to pay for the full thing, and even emailed the receipt to Mercury for proper bookkeeping.

I doubt this is the use case that Mercury had in mind when they made their card system, but the control that they gave me over spend limits and permissions is what made this experiment work.

I just never worried about the agent going rogue and bankrupting me.

This flexibility is why I use Mercury for both my business and personal banking.

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

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

Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank.

Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA, members FDIC.

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 apprentices also go bankrupt.

Yep.

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

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

Do you see, maybe other eras also have this, and I just haven't read the books about them, but from your book, I'm just like, oh, history just seems to be happening really, really fast and seems to have sped up, especially religious and political history.

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

Yeah.