Ada Palmer

The numbers of like 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 $600,000 per book.

And I'm like, and then separately, it's five months of scribe time.

And I'm like, how much are the scribes getting paid?

But if it's the paper, but then what changes with Gutenberg?

So then, but Gutenberg still needs paper, right?

Because the material is cheaper?

Oh, I see.

I could grab one if you want to see one.

You know, the handwriting is in some sense bad, but it's also like very well aligned in a way that's like... Yeah, tiny and precise.

Yeah.

But you can imagine the – That would actually be extremely interesting –

A collector's item of like random people's book of hours and what kinds of things they reported.

Um, my favorite example of this kind of, uh, distribution and diffusion being taking longer than you would think for a very fundamental technology.

Well, now this is my favorite example.

Now, my second favorite example is, um, oil.

So I interviewed Daniel Oregon who wrote this big book about the history of oil and, um, in the 1860s, uh, Drake strikes oil in Pennsylvania.

And, um, it's in the 1910s that cars invented internal combustion engine, uh,

is put into a thing which you sell millions of copies of.