Evidence receipt / preference
Published · transcript-backedAda Palmer: preference
6 Mar 2026 Dwarkesh Podcast Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer
“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 within their book.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Ada Palmer
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- preference
- Recorded
- 6 Mar 2026
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
Transcript context
…But Gutenberg still needs paper, right? Yeah, Gutenberg needs paper. That’s why he goes bankrupt. He borrows the equivalent of about $1.5 million to buy paper, and then doesn’t make back $1.5 million worth of material when printing it. This is what makes printing a risk. 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 within their book. You’re investing a lot up front, and you’re not getting anything back until you produce this slow print run, which is why printers start printing pamphlets. They can have one press that’s slowly printing a valuable book that will take six months to print. 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. It’s much cheaper, but it means they have something they can sell two or three times a week. So you have the pamphlet following the book, printing cheap news, printing scandal rags. Why is it cheaper? Because the material is cheaper?…
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