Dwarkesh Patel

You do so.

You print your Bible.

You have 300 Bibles.

You sell seven of them to the seven people in your small landlocked German town who are legally allowed to read the Bible in a period in which only priests are allowed to read the Bible.

Congratulations, Mr. Gutenberg.

You have 293 Bibles and you can't sell them and you go bankrupt.

There has to be a distribution mechanism for books to find their market because there are certainly 300 people in Europe that want this, but there are not 300 people in one location where it's being produced.

So Gutenberg goes bankrupt.

The bank seizes his press.

They try to go into the business.

The bank goes bankrupt.

This is so much overhead.

You spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the production cost of the books and then you get nothing back.

Gutenberg's apprentices build presses.

They go bankrupt.

They flee their debts and flee the country and leave Germany and go to Venice.

And Venice is the airport hub of the Mediterranean.

Venice is where you change boats.

And so if you're sailing from A to B, you go to Venice, you change boats, you get to the next place.

The hub system has always worked well.