Dwarkesh Patel

gradually less and less, but substantially over the course of the 1600s.

You can even find things written on parchment in the 1700s and 1800s.

British Parliament still did its records on parchment up until 10 years ago, and the Vatican still does its official records on parchment now.

Yeah, the paper and the ink.

But a lot of it is scribe time.

Yeah, Gutenberg needs paper.

That's why he goes bankrupt, right?

So he borrows the equivalent of about $1.5 million worth of money to buy paper and then doesn't make back $1.5 million worth of material when printing it.

And this is what makes printing a risk, right?

Because you have to start buying the paper up front.

You need to buy it in a big lot so that it matches because people don't want the paper to suddenly be a different color with their book.

So you're investing a lot upfront and you're not getting anything back until you produce this slow print run, which is why printers start printing pamphlets because they can have one press that's slowly printing a valuable book that'll take six months to print.

Well, next to it, they have another press that's printing pamphlets where in two days,

They've printed a fashion report on what everyone was wearing at the royal wedding, which they can sell right away.

And it's much cheaper, but it means they have something they can sell two or three times a week.

So the pamphlet following the book as printing cheap news, printing scandal.

So why is it cheaper?

Oh, just because it's only five pages long.

So if we look at some examples of parchment and need the little guys.

I'll show you some of these one by one.