Dwarkesh Patel

It's not the end in general justifies the means.

But Machiavelli feels very strongly that regime changes bring civil violence.

Civil violence sheds 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.

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 artisanally produced.

When you have a mass-produced product, you need a distribution mechanism before you can sell it.

The great example is technically e-books existed the first time anyone typed a book on a computer, right?

Meaning certainly in the 1970s there was such a thing as an e-book.

But there was no market for e-books until the Kindle came out and made there be a commodity way to buy and sell e-books.

Then the e-book industry came into existence.

So e-book as commodity is several decades younger than e-book technically existing, right?

In the same way, you're Gutenberg.

You have figured out how to produce 300 copies of a book for the cost of one copy of a book.