Dwarkesh Patel

And it's a one-way conversation.

You're responding to them.

The future will respond to you.

But there is a great deal of intimacy.

I mean, Petrarch talks about his friend Cicero and being betrayed by his friend Cicero when he finds new works of Cicero that he hadn't read and some of Cicero's letters in which Cicero is not following his own stoic philosophical precepts and is

Being petty and yelling at people about real estate and getting all upset after his daughter's death and, you know, how people get kind of manic when there's been a death in the family and start quarreling about everything.

Cicero gets like that and Petrarch is heartbroken because to him it means even the wisest man in history could not conquer that urge to become irrational and petty in the face of grief.

If even Cicero became irrational and petty in the face of grief, does that mean humanity is doomed to forever be irrational and petty in the face of grief?

And he talks about Cicero breaking his heart and his foot because the book fell on his foot and broke it and he got a bad infection and he was bedridden for months.

I was just at a conference a week ago in which we confirmed that there's a Vatican document from like 1100 or maybe 1200, I forget the exact year, that recognizes the existence of Vinland, i.e.

Canada.

Where they got the information from the Vikings.

I understand.

But they thought it was just a little thing.

But yeah.

Um...

Yeah.

I mean, that's fun.

And when I teach my class on the 1490s, the students, many of whom are American, always have trouble wrapping their heads around the people thinking that the New World isn't a big deal.

A big part of it is that they find the Caribbean islands and they find the coast and they think this is small.