Episode
Why Leonardo was a saboteur, Gutenberg went broke, and Florence was weird – Ada Palmer
Dwarkesh Podcast · Mar 6, 2026 · 2 h 02 min
Renaissance history is so much wilder and weirder than you would have expected. Very fun chatting with Ada Palmer (historian, novelist, and composer based at the University of Chicago). Some especially fascinating things I learned from the conversation and her excellent book, Inventing the Renaissance : Not only did Gutenberg go bankrupt in the 1450s (after inventing the printing press), but so…