Dwarkesh Patel

There's too much.

There are too many pamphlets and they could crack down on one particular pamphlet shop.

We have records of this.

There's a brilliant analysis in Anton Matitsyn's book, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment.

Brilliant book, brilliant scholar.

He has a great description from the notes of a raid on a clandestine bookshop.

This wasn't the printer.

This was the underground bookshop that was selling illegal books.

And they're raided and it has all the details of how angry the people were about different things that the shop had.

So there was censorship and there were crackdowns, but it was a censorship that could not –

actually prevent circulation.

It could restrict it.

It could make it harder.

It could make it scary, but it couldn't prevent it.

Cosimo de' Medici's father owned, I think it was 12 books.

Yeah.

Well, and you really...

feel like you get to know the person intimately.

You develop a personal relationship with the ancient author.

You are participating in a conversation across the diaspora of time.