Dwarkesh Patel

They stick to each other.

They produce a sheet.

Practically no labor has gone into this.

You've sliced.

You've laid out.

Boom.

Papyrus is a very inexpensive writing service, and this is what enables Rome to have a bureaucracy and to have libraries in any mid-sized city will have a library.

People can send letters back and forth.

There can be enormous tax records.

Sometimes when Egypt and Rome are at war, Egypt will really be like,

No, we are angry you will stop exporting papyrus.

No, papyrus for Rome.

And then Rome's infrastructure will fall apart overnight because you can't do anything if you can't write stuff down.

Papyrus is a warm weather plant.

It is killed by frost.

You cannot grow it north of the frost line.

So France, Spain, even most of Italy, you can only grow papyrus down in the very tip and down in Sicily, right?

without papyrus, what you're writing on is a dead sheep.

And if you think of the price of a head of lettuce and the price of a leather jacket, you're understanding the difference between a sheet of papyrus and writing on a dead sheep.

So every page of a medieval book is