Dwarkesh Patel

But Europe has paper for 400 years before the earliest state document ever written on paper, to give you a sense of how people are wary of it.

And it disseminates slowly.

And it's still expensive.

It requires industry and production.

But it is a tenth as expensive as leather.

So paper disseminates slowly through Europe.

And again, this is one of these – there was always technological change.

And all technological change are gradual.

So paper comes in in 800.

It's sort of being trusted by 1200.

When printing begins, they're printing on paper, but they even print on vellum.

If you're a really rich person, you would be like, please print two copies on vellum for me.

So dukes like the dukes d'Este, the sister, Isabella d'Este, the sister of the duke who walked around buck naked to show off that he could.

His sister specially ordered all of her books to be printed on vellum.

even when the rest of the print run was on paper.

These are the very books that are being produced in Venice by the apprentices of Gutenberg who ran away, those guys.

So at that moment in the 1490s, if you're really rich, you might be invested in those new tangled printed books, but you're still not trusting paper, even though paper has been there for, at that point, 600 years.

So again, gradual adoption of technologies, right?

And gradual trust in paper.

And they're still using parchment for things...