Dwarkesh Patel

For example, this is a pamphlet.

naked pages, short text, hand-stitched together.

It would take two or four days to print a pamphlet like that.

It's cheap.

It's ephemeral.

You print 1,000 of them.

You sell a bunch around the town.

You sell a bunch to news writers who are going to and from other cities, right, who will buy them and bring them to the next town.

So if you've printed news in Milan...

People who are going to Florence will want to buy your news to go there.

And it might be, you know, a report of a siege.

It might be here's what the people were wearing at the royal wedding.

It might be my favorite ever title of a pamphlet was The Scandalous Tale of a Doctor from Padua and How He Seduced His Maid, Murdered His Wife, Murdered the Maid, Cut Out Her Heart and Ate It, and How He Was Justly Punished by God.

That was the title of the pamphlet.

Yeah.

these things circulated around.

Some of them were nonsense.

Some of them were real news.

Most of them were combinations.

But you can sell something like this cheaply in a couple of days.