Loading summary
Transcript252 lines
- [00:00]
Jacob Goldstein
Did you ever notice how you spend hours shopping online only to pause at checkout because you wonder if you trust it enough to hit buy now? Agentic Commerce is testing that moment more than ever. That's where PayPal comes in. With 25 years of checkouts, 400 million consumer accounts globally and the benefit of fraud protection. So no matter where a purchase starts, it ends with trust. Built for payments growth and agentic PayPal open built for all business. Visit PayPalOpen.com I love my phone, but not my carrier.
- [00:35]
Caller/Listener
What do I do?
- [00:36]
T-Mobile Representative
Well, there are 250 reasons to join T Mobile.
- [00:39]
Jacob Goldstein
Like what?
- [00:39]
T-Mobile Representative
You can keep your phone and your number and T Mobile helps pay it off up to $800 per line.
- [00:44]
Jacob Goldstein
So I wouldn't have to buy a new phone?
- [00:46]
T-Mobile Representative
Yep. Plus your plan price stays the same for 5 years on experience plans. Nice. Find your reason@t mobile.com
- [00:55]
Jacob Goldstein
via virtual prepaid guard card typically takes 15 days after rebate. Subm price guarantee on TalkText and 5G data exclusions like taxes and fees apply.
- [01:02]
Sponsor/Ad Narrator
Today's episode is brought to you by ChatGPT for business. As a listener of this podcast, you're looking for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions and turn scattered context into work they can use. ChatGPT for Business can help. ChatGPT for Business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions and access to work and codecs. In ChatGPT, this means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker. Join over 10 million business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact sales to learn more.
- [01:45]
Robert Smith
Pushkit. Too quick?
- [01:47]
Jacob Goldstein
No, it was perfect.
- [01:48]
Robert Smith
Pushkit.
- [01:48]
Jacob Goldstein
Stop. You got it. Crank up the siege engine because we're going back to the Middle Ages.
- [02:06]
Robert Smith
I will wear my leather corset.
- [02:08]
Jacob Goldstein
We're doing a biggie today. We are maybe the biggest one we've done yet. The printing press. The printing press. The printing press.
- [02:18]
Robert Smith
Yes.
- [02:19]
Jacob Goldstein
It is everything, including a business. I'm Jacob Goldstein.
- [02:23]
Robert Smith
I'm Robert Smith.
- [02:24]
Jacob Goldstein
And this is Business show about the history.
- [02:27]
Robert Smith
So why don't we go way back
- [02:28]
Jacob Goldstein
of business today on the show, the invention of the printing press, which is a surprisingly modern story. There is debt, there is equity, there is a court case, competition, international branch offices and the Protestant Reformation. Our show today begins with a man named Johannes Gensfleisch Zurladen.
- [02:53]
Robert Smith
Did not see that coming.
- [02:53]
Jacob Goldstein
I'm probably saying it wrong because I don't speak German. Johannes Gusfleisch of the House Of Laden was born around 1400 to relatively rich parents in a town called Mainz. It's in what's Germany today. At the time it was part of the Holy Roman Empire, which Voltaire said
- [03:11]
Robert Smith
of course was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.
- [03:14]
Jacob Goldstein
When Johannes is around 20 years old, his father dies and his mother comes into possession of a house called the Hof zum Gutenberg House of the Good Mountain. And Johannes becomes known as Johannes zum Gutenberg. I guess last names work differently back then.
- [03:34]
Robert Smith
There are many Johannes's and you're like, oh, the good mountain one.
- [03:37]
Jacob Goldstein
The one he's over at the Good Mountain house. So what do we know about Gutenberg? There's a famous engraving of him. If you've seen a picture of Gutenberg, it is from this engraving. He's got this long white beard, comes down to like two points on his chest.
- [03:53]
Robert Smith
Like ZZ Top?
- [03:54]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah, like ZZ Top style. He's wearing a fur trimmed hat. Gutenberg didn't look like this. The picture was made like 100 years after he died. There's no pictures of him as far as we know from his lifetime. And I love this, right? And as we'll see, there's all this myth, even as you get into the story, sort of embroidered about him. I mean, we don't know what he thought or felt, you know, as far as we know, there's no diary or trove of letters. But of course he printed books and a surprising number of the books still exist. And also conveniently for our purposes, he wound up in court a few times. And the paperwork, the court records actually still exist. And so a lot of what we know about Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press and how it was used comes from these basically lawsuits over
- [04:45]
Robert Smith
money, which is great for us business history.
- [04:49]
Jacob Goldstein
So here's the story we can put together at some point. We know Gutenberg became an affiliate of the master goldsmiths.
- [04:57]
Robert Smith
No, not an apprentice, but an affiliate.
- [04:59]
Jacob Goldstein
Exactly. So it's different. So the master goldsmiths are a guild which is, you know, the medieval version of a union. Guilds were a big deal. Maybe we should do a guild show.
- [05:07]
Robert Smith
Absolutely.
- [05:08]
Jacob Goldstein
He was not in the union. He like worked with gold is basically what that means in some way. So we know that he's into metal and we also know that he was an entrepreneur. And now here I am. This is like an anachronism, right? I'm sort of projecting backwards. There were not entrepreneurs in the modern sense. The word didn't exist. But yet I think you'll See, as we go through the story, he was a hustler. He was a guy who started businesses. His life is much more that way than I would have thought for someone who's living in, you know, the end of the Middle Ages, basically. But then again, like, he is the guy who was going to invent the thing that's going to create the modern world, so. So maybe it makes sense. So the first kind of hustle, the first business that he starts that, that we know of, is mirrors. Gutenberg gets into the mirror game and he finds this great, you know, 1400s kind of niche, which is he's going to sell special mirrors to religious pilgrims.
- [06:09]
Robert Smith
What made the mirrors special?
- [06:11]
Jacob Goldstein
They're special. They're like convex mirrors that are specially made for the pilgrims to take on their pilgrimage. And I'll explain why. I'll explain why. So what's going on is in 1439, there's going to be a pilgrimage to this German town to see these relics that are displayed just once every seven years. Like a piece of the gown that Mary wore the night Jesus was born, the loincloth that Jesus wore on the cross and is stained with blood, that kind of thing.
- [06:43]
Robert Smith
Yeah, this is like Woodstock for religious pilgrims.
- [06:47]
Jacob Goldstein
Yes, yes. And so the idea with these mirrors is, you know, when you get your moment before the holy relics, looking at them, you hold up the mirror, and the mirror can somehow capture the holy power that the relics have. And to be clear, he didn't invent this idea. This was a thing that people were doing.
- [07:08]
Robert Smith
Spread by mirror merchants, perhaps.
- [07:11]
Jacob Goldstein
Perhaps. But he's. He's going with it. He's going with it. And he actually gets a couple of investors who have equity in the project, essentially what we would call equity, starts making the mirrors, as far as we can tell. And then when your classic pieces of medieval bad news arrives, the plague on
- [07:29]
Robert Smith
the back of a rat.
- [07:30]
Jacob Goldstein
On the back of a flea, on the back of a rat.
- [07:34]
Robert Smith
It's like panics in the stories we tell in the 1800s and 1900s. You know, everything's going fine. And then the plague happens.
- [07:40]
Jacob Goldstein
The plague is the financial panic of the 1300, 1400s. Very good pilgrimage is delayed until 1440.
- [07:48]
Robert Smith
You must have been sad looking out over a hundred convex mirrors all staring back at him.
- [07:53]
Jacob Goldstein
One of Gutenberg's investors dies.
- [07:55]
Robert Smith
Oh, man.
- [07:56]
Jacob Goldstein
Could have been plague, could have been anything. 1430s, you could die of anything at any time. And the investor's family. The investor's family, the guy who has died, his family sues Gutenberg over whatever, over that guy's stake in the business.
- [08:12]
Robert Smith
Come on. Act of God.
- [08:13]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah. I don't know what the details are. I think Gutenberg wins. But there is this really interesting, just kind of enticing detail mystery in the lawsuit. And it's just a few words. And what we know from the lawsuit paperwork is that Gutenberg is afraid that his trade secrets are going to get out. Of course, there's no intellectual property as we know it in this era. You try and keep your secret. In particular, he says he is worried that visitors to the dead man's house are going to see. And this part is a direct quote, or at least direct quote, translated into English. Four pieces lying in the press.
- [08:52]
Robert Smith
The press, the press, the printing press.
- [08:55]
Jacob Goldstein
We don't know, we don't know, we don't know. But he tells somebody to take these pieces apart so nobody can tell what they are. Historians, of course, have been speculating for hundreds of years about these six words. Was he already working on the printing press? Unclear. We don't actually know what happened with the mirror business for that matter. Next piece of evidence, next time we have a clear view of what's going on with Gutenberg. It's actually 10 years later, 1450. So Gutenberg, I will say as a 50 something man, is 50ish at this point. He's not a kid.
- [09:25]
Robert Smith
Some might say he's washed up.
- [09:27]
Jacob Goldstein
Some might say he's at his peak. So it's 1450, Gutenberg is around 50 years old and he makes another deal. He enters into another business arrangement. This time it's with a guy named Johann Fust. And Fust agreed to lend Gutenberg 800 guilders at 6% interest collateralized by the Apparatus, they call it.
- [09:51]
Robert Smith
Ooh, the Apparatus.
- [09:52]
Jacob Goldstein
We're getting excited. Ooh, an apparatus. I like the sound of that. It's like he has a code name, Das Apparatus. Sorry to all our German speakers. So 800 Guilders is a lot of money. It's enough to buy 100 oxen or four houses. And these figures, by the way, come from a book called Gutenberg A Life in Books by Eric Marshall White, which is a good book, a really helpful book. It's relatively recent and it's really careful. It's a really careful biography of Gutenberg. So it was really helpful in kind of untangling the myth from what we know. So, okay, so they make this deal and two years later Fust makes another investment, agrees to put in 300 more guilders right away, up to 800 more overall. And here we know from the kind of documentary evidence that we'll get to that this is explicitly for the work of the books.
- [10:51]
Robert Smith
This is it.
- [10:51]
Jacob Goldstein
The work of the books. It's happening. And so there is. If we zoom out now, like, we're right in the documents, really, in the micro, if we zoom out to the macro for a sec. And it's interesting to think, why are they putting a lot of money into this?
- [11:05]
Robert Smith
We don't have the aha moment. The big surprise story where, you know, he was, I don't know, he left some type somewhere and his wife sat on it and she gets up and he sees the impression, yes, right.
- [11:19]
Jacob Goldstein
Or he falls in some ink and there happens to be a little coin on top of the ink, and it gets on his shirt and he thinks, ah, we do know this. We do know this. Demand for books was really high in Europe at this point for. For some interesting reasons and kind of varied social and economic reasons, so. And political, actually. So you have. Governments are becoming more of a thing. Right. It's not just kings occasionally going to war. You're having kind of bureaucrats, sort of modern governmental functions emerging. And for that you need people who are literate, who have gone to school and read books, learn how to read. So there is demand for books. You have the Renaissance getting going in Italy by this point, and all the rich guys in Italy want to build their libraries of books from classical antiquity. There's actually this little story that I love of a businessman in Florence, a guy named Vespasiano di Bistici.
- [12:20]
Robert Smith
One more time. I love it.
- [12:22]
Jacob Goldstein
Vespasiano di Bistici.
- [12:24]
Robert Smith
That's the name.
- [12:25]
Jacob Goldstein
Dabistici. I believe he started out as a paper merchant, but he winds up creating kind of like what, to me, seems like a book factory in the 1440s without a printing press. So what happens is Cosimo de Medici, you know, of the Florentine Medici, decides he needs his library, his personal library, and he goes to the Bestici. And Basici has like, 55 scribes writing for him, like, you know, copying out manuscripts for cosimo. And these 55 guys create something like 200 books in two years. So that's basically like, if you round it to 50, you know, it takes a guy six months to write a manuscript.
- [13:08]
Robert Smith
Huh.
- [13:09]
Jacob Goldstein
And of course, these are beautiful. Whatever. But, like, that's a lot of labor.
- [13:13]
Robert Smith
Yeah. And that's a lot of money for each book.
- [13:15]
Jacob Goldstein
And a lot of money for each book. Now there is something making books cheaper, and that is paper. Paper, I presume Cosimo's books would have been on parchment, which is what, you know, they had been using in Europe for a long time, and it was still the high class thing. And paper is profoundly cheaper than parchment. Parchment, of course, made from animal skins, costs a lot to grow an animal, to make the parchment. And paper has been around in Asia for quite a long time by this point, but it has recently come to Europe and has become sort of industrialized. Right. And the availability of paper is profound for the book business because when a scribe is writing a book on parchment, the parchment is a huge chunk of the cost, maybe most of the cost. But once you have paper, almost all of the cost of making the book is the cost of the labor, the cost of the scribe's time.
- [14:09]
Robert Smith
This is a classic business situation, right? You have a high demand for a product and the demand is going up. The thing that you use to make the products, the input, the expensive input, is getting cheaper with paper. And so what you are left with is a bottleneck, a low productivity, part of the process, and that is the scribes. And so we could talk about, oh, was it an insight? Did Gutenberg see something that no one else saw, really? There were economic pressures. Somebody was going to do this because it's obvious when you have a bottleneck, a very expensive bottleneck in the process, you should try to automate that.
- [14:47]
Jacob Goldstein
And there was printing in the world. Woodblock printing had been used for hundreds of years in Asia, and it was in use in Europe somewhat. You know, obviously you carve sort of a single page's worth of, typically an image, sometimes some words, into a wood block. But of course it's static, Right. You got your block, you can print one page, but that's it.
- [15:08]
Robert Smith
We've all done this with potatoes when we were kids.
- [15:10]
Jacob Goldstein
Yes, it's that movable type, which is, you know, as we know what he's going to invent is way more dynamic, way better.
- [15:16]
Caller/Listener
And.
- [15:16]
Jacob Goldstein
And by this time, by the mid-1400s, movable type had been invented also in Asia. In Korea, they had even used metal types. But both in China and Korea at the time, they used pictograms. Each word was its own character.
- [15:32]
Robert Smith
So you'd need thousands of these little things in order to. To have a book.
- [15:37]
Jacob Goldstein
To have a book. Right. Much less practical than when you have an Alphabet and you can do whatever, your uppercase and your lowercase and dozens, the order of magnitude is dozens, and you can print anything. And so there is this question, was Gutenberg copying an Asian press? It doesn't seem like it. There's no evidence that he knew that people in Europe knew in any kind of real way about these presses in Asia. It seems like when Gutenberg is doing this work around 1450, he's working from first principles. And we know he had done some kind of work related to goldsmithing. His dad was affiliated with the mint, so maybe he knew something about the way coins were made. We know he's like a hustler, you know, he's entrepreneurial. And it seems like Gutenberg on his own, invented or invented for Europe the movable type printing press, arguably the most important invention ever to come out of Europe up there.
- [16:36]
Robert Smith
I mean, what, the croissant?
- [16:37]
Jacob Goldstein
The croissant. The steam engine.
- [16:39]
Robert Smith
Oh, the steam engine, of course.
- [16:40]
Jacob Goldstein
Internal combustion.
- [16:41]
Robert Smith
Yeah.
- [16:42]
Jacob Goldstein
Huge.
- [16:42]
Robert Smith
Yeah.
- [16:42]
Jacob Goldstein
So there were a few other biggies, but one of the biggies. Fondue. But certainly one of the biggies. The earliest image we have of a press is not of Gutenberg's press in particular, but it's not that long after. It's from about 50 years later. It's this form of picture that was popular at the time called a dance macabre. You have pictures of people in everyday life and then you have death kind of dancing through, I guess, to remind you that everybody's gonna die. Maybe they're taking away these people to memento mori. Yeah, memento mori. And so in this image, you can see like a Gutenbergish press. Are you looking at it?
- [17:21]
Robert Smith
Yeah. There are these kind of skeleton looking dudes. Yeah, that's death.
- [17:25]
Jacob Goldstein
Those are death.
- [17:26]
Robert Smith
Yeah, I got that. And one of them has hand on the person who's picking out the type, who's putting the type together.
- [17:31]
Jacob Goldstein
Right. They call that guy the compositor. Right. So for each page, he arranges the letters. And the letters are backwards.
- [17:36]
T-Mobile Representative
Right.
- [17:36]
Jacob Goldstein
You arrange it all backwards.
- [17:37]
Robert Smith
And there's a guy who's doing the actual press, which looks like one of those things where you pull the lever and it goes down. Like maybe you'd use just squeeze olive oil or something.
- [17:45]
Caller/Listener
Yes.
- [17:46]
Jacob Goldstein
They had used presses like this in Europe for a long time.
- [17:48]
Robert Smith
Yeah. And there's another skeleton dude, like touching that. Man. That's amazing.
- [17:52]
Jacob Goldstein
And that's basically it. Right. The press is actually simple in its way.
- [17:57]
T-Mobile Representative
Right.
- [17:57]
Jacob Goldstein
He's putting together these different things, but it's not that complicated. And that raises this question in my mind. Right. Which is we've talked before about simultaneous invention. It seems like all the big inventions that we've talked about, it is really not ultimately like one guy figuring it out, you know, well, Edison, we talked about it early on in the Edison and the movies story. Lots of people were trying to figure out movies, photography was out there. It was clear somebody was going to
- [18:28]
Robert Smith
figure out movies or telephone.
- [18:29]
Jacob Goldstein
Famously, like literally people racing to the patent office to get the first patent. I mean, even calculus. Calculus, right. Leibniz and Newton.
- [18:40]
Robert Smith
And the reason, of course, for simultaneous invention is what we talked about a little bit earlier. There is the need. Technology has come up to a certain point and people are using that as a launching pad for something else. And so it is natural when people are trying to solve the same problem, they know about the same information out there in the world, they're going to come up with a new solution.
- [18:58]
Jacob Goldstein
And yet that doesn't happen in this case. Right. Like there is demand for books, there is paper, and nobody else in Europe does this. Like that seems pretty clear. And so I was thinking, why is this too much plague always a good answer for this era? I have an idea. And my idea is, you know, if you think about these other periods, we've talked about the 1800s, certainly the 1900s, even the 1700s, everybody's reading what everybody else is doing. There are journals and books and, you know, in the 1800s, there's a magazine printing all the new patents that Thomas Edison is reading to keep up on things. What you need for these things is a printing press. You need a printing press to know what everybody else is working on. And so the reason maybe I'm making this up, that Gutenberg is the only one to invent it, is it hasn't been invented yet. So not everybody knows everything all the time the way we do. Once you have a printing press, I
- [19:55]
Robert Smith
think that's a great idea because what would it take to spread this? You'd have to write letters to people. But even then, not everybody knew how to write.
- [20:03]
Jacob Goldstein
Letters do become a thing. Right. And science letters are a big deal. But the journal, you know, the printed journal is a much more powerful tool than letters. It's a thought.
- [20:13]
Robert Smith
In any case.
- [20:14]
Jacob Goldstein
In any case, Gutenberg now has his press. What does he print first?
- [20:19]
Robert Smith
The Bible.
- [20:19]
Jacob Goldstein
Not the Bible.
- [20:20]
Robert Smith
Okay.
- [20:21]
Jacob Goldstein
Too expensive, maybe.
- [20:22]
Sponsor/Ad Narrator
Right.
- [20:22]
Jacob Goldstein
It's long. The Bible is long. And it doesn't start there.
- [20:26]
Robert Smith
Right. You don't start with the word of God.
- [20:28]
Jacob Goldstein
It's a slow nightmare. Also, you know. Yes, and yes. And also high stakes. You want to get it right. Yeah. So he starts with things that are simpler, cheaper, shorter. A German poem, a grammar textbook for Latin. And then this is a. My favorite sort of pre Bible printing work that Gutenberg does comes around 1453. So not that long into this project when there is actually this world historical event that's going to be good news for Gutenberg's printing business. And that is the Sultan Mehmed II captures Constantinople. Big news, big news in the religious world. Byzantine emperor is decapitated.
- [21:10]
Robert Smith
Oh.
- [21:11]
Jacob Goldstein
And now the Catholic church needs money to fight the Sultan. How does the church raise money in 1453?
- [21:18]
Robert Smith
Indulgences.
- [21:19]
Jacob Goldstein
Indulgences. They sell indulgences. And you know, you know this from whatever, from school, right?
- [21:25]
Robert Smith
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [21:26]
Jacob Goldstein
If you give money to the church, they will remove the punishment that you owe for your sins.
- [21:32]
Robert Smith
They would also allow you to get your relatives out of purgatory if they had died.
- [21:36]
T-Mobile Representative
Uh huh.
- [21:37]
Jacob Goldstein
That makes sense. That's maybe a little extra, I guess,
- [21:39]
Robert Smith
cost a little extra, but sure.
- [21:40]
Jacob Goldstein
What I didn't realize until I was working on this show is indulgences were physical things. There was an indulgence which was basically like a nice receipt. A nice receipt often written out on vellum, A fancy, like a very high grade parchment made from, from calfskin. And this fact that the receipt part of the indulgence thing becomes important when the Sultan captures Constantinople because the church suddenly needs to sell lots of indulgences. But they have a labor problem. It's the problem we were talking about before. Right. There's just not enough scribes to write out all the indulgences that you need to sell right now.
- [22:23]
Robert Smith
Plus so much sin. The demand was huge.
- [22:26]
Jacob Goldstein
The demand is huge. Who among us? And now here comes Johannes Gutenberg with a solution to your problem. You know, your grace, how many do you need? I'll just crank them out for you.
- [22:40]
Robert Smith
This was also a solution to Gutenberg's problem because he had just enlisted the richest customer on planet Earth, or one of them at least.
- [22:49]
Jacob Goldstein
Yes, the Catholic Church. Yes, definitely a good customer to have. And you know, on indulgence, I believe it's a single page, right? So you said it once and you know the printing business, you want to make as many copies and sell as many copies of each thing as you can.
- [23:03]
Robert Smith
So it's generic. They don't have the different ones for the different sins.
- [23:07]
Jacob Goldstein
I guess over time there are different ones, but the basic thing is that there's a blank for the name of the buyer. There's a blank for the name of the buyer. And so he cranks out all these indulgences. White, the guy who wrote that book that I mentioned, says they go out by the wagon load. The money, I guess, was supposed to go to defend Cyprus, the island of Cyprus, but apparently none of it, or almost none of it ever got to Cyprus. Got siphoned off along the way. But whatever, that's not Gutenberg's problem. Surely he got paid.
- [23:40]
Robert Smith
Let's do the biggie. Let's do the Bible.
- [23:42]
Jacob Goldstein
We'll do it after the break.
- [23:44]
Robert Smith
Okay,
- [23:57]
Sponsor/Ad Narrator
Quick one before you jump back in. You're listening for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions, and turn scattered context into work they can use ChatGPT for business can help ChatGPT for business gives teams a shared workspace with admin, controls, permissions and access to work and codecs. In ChatGPT, this means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker. Join over 10 million business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact Sales to learn more.
- [24:33]
Caller/Listener
This message is a paid partnership with Apple Card there's something interesting about how seamlessly certain tools fit into daily life. Apple Card is one of those things it can be applied for right in the Wallet app on iPhone and approval can happen in minutes, so it's ready to use immediately with Apple Pay. I'm so glad the days of finding my wallet, fishing out the credit card, using it, but putting it back in my wallet. Or oops, maybe I use cash. Where's the atm? Enough. The first time I used Apple Pay on my phone with my Apple Card, I was like, this is the future. There's no going back. With Apple Card purchases earn daily cash up to 3% with no points to track and no waiting for rewards. It's simply daily cash back that I earn on every purchase. There's even an option to open a high yield savings account through Apple Card and while I haven't done it yet, if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. Because Apple Card lives in the Wallet app, it's always accessible on iPhone and can be used with Apple Pay at over 85% of merchants in the US and the security of Face ID and Touch ID prevents unauthorized purchases, whether using iPhone or Apple Watch to explore it yourself, you can apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone, subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings in Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch Member FDIC terms and more@applecard.com running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money, and momentum. A good hire, they can help grow your business. But finding great talent isn't easy, especially when you don't have the time or resources to sift through piles of resumes to find the right fit. That's why LinkedIn built Hiring Pro, your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you. So instead of sorting through applications, you spend your time talking to candidates who are actually a good fit. You know what? This makes me think of my beloved Boston Celtics. Three years ago, they chose a new coach, Joe Missoula, who was like the third or fourth assistant off the bench. Never had any NBA coaching experience. Everyone was expecting him to fail. And you know what? Turns out he was one of the best coaches in the game. And without him, there's no way the team would have made the playoffs this year, let alone be contenders for the finals. Sometimes the right hire makes all the difference. With Hiring Pro, you can hire with confidence, knowing you're getting the best talent for your business. In fact, Those hiring with LinkedIn are 24% less likely to need to reopen a role within 12 months compared to the leading competitor. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free@LinkedIn.com Pushkin terms and conditions apply.
- [27:48]
Jacob Goldstein
Robert we're back from the break, and it is October of 1454. We're in Frankfurt at a diet, a
- [27:56]
Robert Smith
religious meeting of some sort.
- [27:57]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah, a meeting of the Catholic.
- [27:58]
Robert Smith
Not a conclave, but a diet.
- [28:00]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah, it's not as big as a conclave, I guess. And we're with an Italian bishop named Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. Piccolomini sees something that blows his mind. He sees some preliminary pages from a printed Bible from what's going to be the Gutenberg Bible. And we know this because he wrote a letter to a cardinal about it. He describes a miraculous man who he encountered, who I hope was Gutenberg, but it could have been somebody who worked with Gutenberg.
- [28:34]
Sponsor/Ad Narrator
We don't know.
- [28:35]
Jacob Goldstein
And he describes for the cardinal what the pages of this Bible were like. Give it to us.
- [28:41]
Robert Smith
He said they were exceedingly clean and correct in their script and without error, which your grace could read effortlessly even without glasses.
- [28:50]
Jacob Goldstein
That means something.
- [28:50]
Robert Smith
I know. I appreciate that large print. I learned from numerous witnesses that 158 copies had been completed, although some others say the number is 108. I shall try, if possible, to buy a copy on your behalf and have it brought here. But I fear it will not be possible, both because of the distance and because they Say that ready buyers had all been found even before the volumes had been finished. It's a hit.
- [29:14]
Jacob Goldstein
It's a hit. That seems promising, right? It is wild to think of a guy seeing what's gonna be the Gutenberg Bible. Do I remember that you went to see one at the New York Public Library?
- [29:24]
Robert Smith
Yeah, for planet money I went to. It was on display in. They have a special display case for these kind of things. There's also one at the Morgan Library. I should say. J.P. morgan bought one. No big surprise. And I recall it was much larger than I thought it was going to be. It was probably the largest Bible I'd ever seen. It looked like one of those giant dictionaries that you have to put on a stand. And the other thing I remember about it is that the margins were very wide. It was these columns, these two columns and. And the print was that old fashioned, sort of gothic.
- [30:00]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah, Germany, very German looking.
- [30:03]
Robert Smith
Yeah, it was very orderly, I will say, with these large margins, these very straight columns and this very dense writing.
- [30:13]
Jacob Goldstein
Was there color in the part that you looked at?
- [30:15]
Robert Smith
Yeah, there were some color that clearly someone had filled in or painted. Right, right.
- [30:20]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah. They actually left blank where there would be a big colored first letter at the start of a chapter or a paragraph or something. They actually didn't print that on the. Left it to be hand inscribed.
- [30:32]
Robert Smith
I wonder if the scribes were afraid of the printing press and then saw that in fact they could do their favorite part. You know, it's no fun to print every little letter, but to make the giant G with the flowers and the colors, they must have loved that. And now they could do 180 of them.
- [30:48]
Jacob Goldstein
Maybe, maybe Gutenberg was like, no, no, I'm not gonna automate your work out of existence. I'm just gonna take away the drudgery and leave you to do the creative fun part.
- [30:55]
Robert Smith
It's a compliment familiar. Yeah.
- [30:57]
Jacob Goldstein
So you've described the book very well. It's remarkable how many still exist. There are, I believe, 21 complete copies still in existence, which is a very large percentage given how long ago it was and how much has happened in Europe since then.
- [31:11]
Robert Smith
It shows you how valuable they were,
- [31:13]
Jacob Goldstein
how valuable they were, and how special they must have seemed even then.
- [31:16]
Sponsor/Ad Narrator
Right.
- [31:16]
Jacob Goldstein
One fun business detail about the printing of the book itself. It's referred to typically as the 42 line Gutenberg Bible because there are 42 lines per page. And as you say, it seems quite spacious and like not crammed in the first few pages. They were actually doing 40 lines a page. And so presumably they must have figured out, like, oh, we could do two more lines per page. And that means less paper, less parchment.
- [31:45]
Robert Smith
That's just profit right there. By the time you get to Revelations, it's tiny, tiny, tiny writing.
- [31:50]
Jacob Goldstein
No, it isn't. So he's cranking them out. Gutenberg is making the Gutenberg Bible. And there's this great detail. So some of the Bibles were printed on parchment, some on paper. And there's a belief, a kind of a theory based, I believe, on the different watermarks on the different pieces of paper, which I love, like scholarly work like this. A belief that at some point Gutenberg might have had six different presses going. Just kind of a factory, right? He's becoming a publisher, a printer. And then it feels sudden, looking back, but we don't know, something goes wrong. There's a big problem that's gonna happen right now, and that is this Johann Fust, the guy who put up the money to get the project going. The investor decides he wants his money back. We don't know why there was a fight.
- [32:36]
Caller/Listener
Maybe.
- [32:36]
Jacob Goldstein
Maybe Fust needs the money for something else. But we know that they wound up in court on Thursday, November 6, 1455. I love court documents as a reporter. I've always loved them. I covered cops in courts in Bozeman, Montana, 20, many years ago when I started out.
- [32:58]
Robert Smith
It's amazing because we wouldn't know anything about this really.
- [33:02]
Jacob Goldstein
And there is this one document that describes this whole thing in detail, written by one Ulrich Helmesberger, cleric of the diocese of Bamberg, notary public and lay judge of the holy seed at Mainz, but by imperial authority who wrote out this beautiful, detailed document that explains a lot about the first printing press in Europe. The document is called the Helmusberger Notarial Instrument. Notarial Instrument is one beautiful longword in German. And it lays this out kind of as a story. And it starts with Fust's version. It's like a. He said, he said. So Fust tells the story like this. He says, I loaned Gutenberg 800 guilders at 6% interest. And by the way, I borrowed that money from somebody else at interest.
- [33:52]
Robert Smith
Oh, good job, Fust.
- [33:53]
Jacob Goldstein
Fust, right? He's like private credit, right? He's like, I don't know, Apollo or something in the market today. And then Fust says, Gutenberg came back to me later and said, actually, I need another 800 guilders. So I loaned him 800 more.
- [34:08]
Robert Smith
Which, remember, is a lot of money at the time.
- [34:10]
Jacob Goldstein
Yes, yes. And now Fust Is saying, I want repayment of that 1600 plus interest, which comes to over 2000 guilders. And as you pointed out, like 800 guilders was four houses. So 2000 is a lot of houses. We don't know why he's demanding the repayment, but it's happening. Gutenberg doesn't show up at the hearing. Weirdly, I don't know why, but he wasn't there. But he sends a statement which somebody reads on his behalf. And Gutenberg disputes a lot of what Foos says, unsurprisingly in court, I guess he says, okay, yes, that first 800 guilders, that was a loan. But even though the contract might say in the fine print that it's 6% interest, we actually agreed that I wasn't going to pay interest on that. Not his strongest argument. Not his strongest argument. Get it in writing. Gutenberg, come on. The second part is more interesting. He says the part of the money Fust put up after that, the other 800, that wasn't a loan. That was investment as a partner to share in the profit or loss of the business. In other words, Gutenberg is saying in our language today, he wouldn't have said it this way, that first 800 was debt, but the second 800 was equity. That's the he said. He said. Then, kind of third beat of the document, there is a sworn affidavit from Fust. Remember who was there in the room. In this part, Fust actually seems to back off his original claim a little. You know, we don't know what was said in the room, but it seems like in the course of the hearing, maybe he reduced his claim. Because in this affidavit he basically says, okay, Gutenberg should go back through his accounts, figure out how much of the money that I gave him actually went into this printing business, and he should pay me back with interest for whatever part of the money did not go into the printing business. If he took my money and spent it on something else, come on, he's got to pay me back with interest for that. So, Robert, actually we have it in Foose words, translated into English, give it to.
- [36:07]
Robert Smith
Oh, nice. On the borrowed money, which he, Gutenberg, received and did not use for our common undertaking, I demand from him the interest due under the terms of the verdict.
- [36:17]
Jacob Goldstein
And the court basically seems to agree with this, which I have to say seems reasonable, right? It does seem like a very common sense thing. And the court sends Gutenberg back to produce evidence on what he actually spent on the project. I guess they're Saying, like, show us your books. And if in fact you took his money.
- [36:33]
Robert Smith
Books existed.
- [36:34]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah, the ledgers. Yes, books existed. The codex is the book. And it is a useful technology, but it's been around for a long time at this point. Otherwise you got to use a scroll. Much less convenient. Let me tell you from experience. It's a little bar mitzvah joke.
- [36:48]
Robert Smith
I see.
- [36:48]
Jacob Goldstein
So. So the court says, Gutenberg, go back, look at your records. Pay him with interest for whatever you didn't put into the project. And that's the end of what we know from this document. It ends there. Which is interesting, given the myth that has arisen around this part of the story. The myth is basically the evil financier Fust drove the noble and brilliant inventor Gutenberg into bankruptcy. Everybody will say they made him go bankrupt.
- [37:17]
Robert Smith
Yeah, Just like people talk about private equity and private credit today.
- [37:20]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah, Fair. Fair. And, yeah, maybe for similar reasons.
- [37:24]
T-Mobile Representative
Right.
- [37:24]
Jacob Goldstein
Like, it's a classic villain. Financiers are classic villains. Now, there is no evidence that Gutenberg went bankrupt. And in fact, he kept printing things after this. My favorite is he printed a wall calendar for doctors. Why do doctors need a wall calendar? I'll tell you. In the 14, whatever, I think it was 60s or so mid-1400s. It tells you, based on astrology, when is the best time to do your bloodletting for the year?
- [37:53]
Robert Smith
There were bad days and good days,
- [37:55]
Jacob Goldstein
bad days and good days to drain the blood of your patients. To help them. I'm doing it to help them. Of course. He prints some more indulgences. Always good business. He may have printed this giant Latin dictionary. He definitely didn't print anything, as far as we know, and as beautiful as the Bible, maybe because he didn't have access to capital anymore, but he was. It was, you know, he was still in the game.
- [38:17]
Robert Smith
But it is a little sad, right? I mean, right away, the man who invents the most amazing invention in Europe at the time is reduced to, you know, basically running a Kinkos in Harrisburg. Right. He's doing calendars, he's doing flyers, this sort of thing.
- [38:35]
Jacob Goldstein
Buy one, get one free.
- [38:37]
Robert Smith
It doesn't seem as miraculous. It just seems like a little business he has.
- [38:42]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah, in a way, as a story, you want him to either have wild success or crushing failure. Not personally, not as a human being, but just for narrative purposes. The middle is unsatisfying. One thing that is true is Fust the lender. I'm not going to call him a banker, but the lender, the financier seems to have surpassed Gutenberg in the printing business.
- [39:08]
Robert Smith
Well, he's gotten some of the money back and he's gonna invest it in something else.
- [39:12]
Jacob Goldstein
Well, and furthermore, and we know this again from, like, really careful scholarship, I guess we know that he got some of the types, some of the metal letters that had been in Gutenberg's shop. Because I guess, you know, you can match the books that he printed with what Gutenberg had printed before.
- [39:26]
Robert Smith
And some of the letters are Gutenberg's letters. Because they were sort of unique at the time.
- [39:30]
Jacob Goldstein
Yes, because they were sort of unique at the time. That's right. And you know, maybe remember that loan was. The original loan was collateralized by the apparatus. Right. So maybe these letters are him collecting on the debt. We don't know. But that seems totally plausible to me. He also hires a guy from Gutenberg shop, this really talented guy. No non competes then, which is good. It's good for the proliferation of technology.
- [39:55]
Robert Smith
I suspect the employee walked out with a few letters in his pocket.
- [39:59]
Jacob Goldstein
Right, Right. Is that. Is that an exclamation mark in your pocket? Are you a tiny bit happy to see me? I don't know. If they had the exclamation mark, then actually go with the joke. It's a good joke. So this worker's name was Peter Schaeffer, I believe it was pronounced, and Fust. And Schaeffer did great. And maybe Fust was a better businessman than Gutenberg. No idea. Don't know. They started out with this beautiful psalter, a book of psalms. And they actually printed it in multiple colors, which must have required. You got to put the same page through multiple times and get the alignment right. Elegant technical work. And as a business move, they do a really clever thing that Gutenberg didn't do. They put their names in the book, just like publishers do today, although at greater length. Robert, read to us what they put in that book.
- [40:47]
Robert Smith
The present book of the Psalms has been fashioned by the artful invention of printing by means of letter forms made without the driving of the pen. And in praise of God. It has been brought faithfully and industriously to completion by Johann Fust, citizen of Mainz, and Peter Schaeffer of Guernsheim in the year of the Lord 14:57. It's early branding. They put their name on it.
- [41:10]
Jacob Goldstein
They put their name on it.
- [41:11]
Robert Smith
People are like, you know what I need? I need a Fust. We gotta get Fust to do our next book.
- [41:16]
Jacob Goldstein
These guys do great. This book does great. Their business does great. They expand to Paris, which is home of a big university, big book town. They're printing broadsheets, of course, they're printing indulgences and they print Bibles. And their Bibles are clearly modeled on the Gutenberg Bible because the words are the same. And you might say, of course the words are the same, but in the era of the manuscript, right? Something as long as a Bible manuscript, meaning people are literally writing out every book by hand. Something as long as a Bible, there's always going to be a few little errors, omissions. You leave out one word, you whatever, change an and to a but and print changes that. Right? Print. Once you set the press, every book that comes out of that edition is the same. And that is actually a new thing in the world.
- [42:03]
Robert Smith
I mean, it becomes more like the unerring word of God. Even though I know Gutenberg put it together, it has that feel that this is more than the work of man. This is something eternal.
- [42:15]
Jacob Goldstein
I like that. I believe that. So Fust and Schaeffer are growing and printing itself is growing. People who worked with Gutenberg and with Fuss and Schaeffer go to other towns, set up their shops and you just see this rapid spread across Europe of printing presses in other German cities, but also in Rome and Venice and Paris and Basel and small towns. It's just happening fast. So there is the end of the Gutenberg story of Gutenberg the man. We know that in 1465, when he's around 65 years old, the Archbishop of Mainz gives him this basically this high status lifetime pension. And we have the formal announcement that proclaimed it.
- [42:59]
Robert Smith
Read us a little of that from the Archbishop. We will clothe him every year always like our noble men, and give him our court dress also. We grant him 20 bushels of grain and two large barrels of wine for the use of his house, free of duty upon its arrival in Mainz every year, as long as he lives, on condition that he will not sell it or give it away, as has been promised in good faith by Johann Gutenberg himself. Tax free wine.
- [43:26]
Jacob Goldstein
Tax free wine. That is the happy ending, I guess, that we were looking for in a way.
- [43:31]
Caller/Listener
Right.
- [43:31]
Robert Smith
Well, that and you know, schoolchildren don't learn about the fust printing press.
- [43:36]
Caller/Listener
Right.
- [43:36]
Robert Smith
Gutenberg's name, even if he didn't put it on the book itself, is famous. He is one of the greatest inventors of all time.
- [43:44]
Jacob Goldstein
We got one last idea I want to talk about before the end of the show, which is really, I think, the first moment when you see the printing press transform society. We'll talk about that in just a minute.
- [44:08]
Sponsor/Ad Narrator
Quick one before you jump back in, you're listening for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions, and turn scattered context into work they can use. ChatGPT for Business can help ChatGPT for Business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions, and access to work and codecs. In ChatGPT, this means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker. Join over 10 million business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact sales to learn more.
- [44:43]
Caller/Listener
Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money and momentum. A good hire? They can help grow your business. But finding great talent isn't easy, especially when you don't have the time or resources to sift through piles of resumes to find the right fit. That's why LinkedIn built Hiring Pro, your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you. So instead of sorting through applications, you spend your time talking to candidates who are actually a good fit. You know what? This makes me think of my beloved Boston Celtics. Three years ago they chose a new coach, Joe Mazzulla, who was like the third or fourth assistant off the bench. Never had any NBA coaching experience. Everyone was expecting him to fail. And you know what? Turns out he was one of the best coaches in the game. And without him, there's no way the team would have made the playoffs this year, let alone be contenders for the Finals. Sometimes the right hire makes all the difference. With Hiring Pro, you can hire with confidence, knowing you're getting the best talent for your business. In fact, Those hiring with LinkedIn are 24% less likely to need to reopen a role within 12 months compared to the leading competitor. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire get started by posting your job for free@LinkedIn.com Pushkin terms and conditions apply. We spend hours researching products online and deciding what to buy. But there's a split second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit the Buy now button? The way we discover and compare things is evolving, happening faster, and influenced by new forms of intelligent advice. But the underlying trust question doesn't go away. If anything, it's more important than ever. That's where PayPal comes in. For more than 25 years, they've been a trusted way to Pay. And now PayPal can make the agentic era of commerce work for merchants, letting them maintain control of their brand, their Customer relationships. So even as the way we shop changes, the moment that matters most still feels familiar and deeply dependable. Built for payments, growth and agentic. PayPal open. Built for all business. Visit paypalopen.com to get started. Purchase and seller protections on eligible transactions. Only terms apply. See paypal.com risk management for details.
- [47:26]
Jacob Goldstein
Robert? This last idea, we're doing this kind of epilogue to the show. It's about indulgences. Indulgences, of course, were one of the first things Gutenberg printed, one of the first things Fust and Schaeffer printed. And it's really remarkable. When you look at the spread of printing across Europe, you see this boom in the indulgence business because, like, remember, the church was constrained before by the actual labor of the scribes to write out each receipt for each indulgence. But by 1500, you see a bishop in Sicily paying a publisher to print 130,000 indulgences.
- [48:08]
Robert Smith
Do we know if sin went up? Did people, like, cheat on their spouses more? Because there were just, like, piles of indulgences.
- [48:14]
Jacob Goldstein
I like that. Or if the price went down, right? I don't know. You know, in a competitive market, the price went down, but there was a monopoly around the same time, you see in your Barcelona, a monastery commissions more than 200,000 indulgences.
- [48:27]
Robert Smith
The line is around the block.
- [48:28]
Jacob Goldstein
I actually don't know if there was a monopoly. Maybe different, like local, you know, archbishops were competing. Good question. Don't know. So the printing press itself is enabling this explosion in indulgences, but a backlash
- [48:41]
Robert Smith
is building, a backlash of people who want reform, who want to protest.
- [48:48]
Jacob Goldstein
In 1517, Martin Luther. Yes, Martin Luther, that Martin Luther professor priest in the German town of Wittenberg, because it's Wittenberg in German. He decides that the indulgence thing has gone too far. Like it is.
- [49:04]
Robert Smith
He sees it everywhere. It's all over the place.
- [49:06]
Jacob Goldstein
Yeah, it's too much. And he writes this kind of academic argument in Latin, basically, against indulgences. You know, famously his 95 theses, which get posted on the church door and just posted.
- [49:22]
Robert Smith
He hammered them.
- [49:23]
Jacob Goldstein
Well, that's the myth again. That's the myth, yes. I was actually reading about that. I guess, like, the church door was like the bulletin board, and everybody posted everything there. But whatever.
- [49:31]
Robert Smith
It just sounds better.
- [49:32]
Jacob Goldstein
It does. So his 95 theses, 95 propositions, are largely an argument against indulgences. And so I've grabbed a few here for you to read. Give me a couple.
- [49:41]
Robert Smith
All right. We'll skip over some and go to number 32. Those who believe that they can be certain of their salvation because they have indulgence letters will be eternally damned together with their teachers.
- [49:52]
Jacob Goldstein
Serious.
- [49:53]
Robert Smith
Okay, let's go to 36. Any truly repentant Christian has a right to full remission of penalty and guilt, even without indulgence letters. Save your money, bro.
- [50:05]
Jacob Goldstein
It's coming right at him.
- [50:06]
Robert Smith
Yeah.
- [50:07]
Jacob Goldstein
So, yeah. So this, of course, famously, right, is the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. And it's happening. Like, you could argue. It has been argued. It is happening partly because the invention of the printing press led to this proliferation of indulgences. And if you didn't know what was going to happen next, you might think this would be bad for business for the printers. But no, because first of all, the 95 theses are suddenly reprinted everywhere. Everybody loves a Liszt. This is a very interesting idea. It's very much of the moment.
- [50:39]
Robert Smith
Number 36 will shock you.
- [50:42]
Jacob Goldstein
And really, interestingly, in the next few years after this, Luther starts writing a lot. Not just in Latin for this kind of academic and religious audience or priestly audience, but he's writing also in German for a much more popular audience. And in fact, the public goes wild for his work. And it becomes almost like. Like news. Like, he writes these short sermons that are just a few pages long, and he'll take them to the printer and they'll be out on the streets in a few days. Like, it's very dynamic, and it's enabled by the printing press when he's getting going. There's just one printer in Wittenberg. It's a small town. And it's amazing the way Luther keeps complaining about the printer to his friends. At one point he writes, you would not believe how I regret and how I am disgusted by his work. Writers love complaining about their publishers.
- [51:34]
Robert Smith
Too sloppy. He's not promoting.
- [51:36]
Jacob Goldstein
It's too sloppy. It's too sloppy. He wasn't complaining. Nobody's complaining about the marketing department yet. So he actually invites another printer to come and set up shop in town. And soon, because Luther is this kind of proto bestselling author. There is this little industry of print shops in this small town so they can just get Luther's stuff out fast.
- [51:57]
Robert Smith
This is like the invention of the media. There's a whole ecosystem developing. People want the newest stuff now. You know, it's a clear line from here all the way to TikTok.
- [52:07]
Jacob Goldstein
So there is now this print industry, this. This media industry. You could say, if you want to be a little anachronistic, in, in Wittenberg. And over the course of, of Luther's lifetime, it just proliferates like he translates the Bible into German, which is of course a big deal historically. In his lifetime, these local printers print over 100,000 copies of this German translation of the Bible. And in his lifetime, you know, more broadly, in the German speaking world, printing is proliferating. And something like 6 or 7 million evangelical pamphlets are printed in German throughout the region.
- [52:45]
Robert Smith
It's amazing because it's not just a product. Gutenberg didn't invent something that just fulfilled one need. It created a million needs. The moment the printing press is there, you don't just want to print one thing, the Bible. You want to print arguments about the Bible and arguments back and competing views of this.
- [53:05]
Jacob Goldstein
And it changes the dynamics of like, well, now you can have more indulgences. Now one random priest can have an audience of millions in a way that, that is almost unimaginable without the printing press.
- [53:17]
Robert Smith
And if you didn't know how to read, you would have incentive to learn how to read in order to read these things, which creates more demand.
- [53:24]
Jacob Goldstein
Yes. So maybe one idea to land on is like, new technology is a new tool. And what nobody ever knows is how are people gonna use that tool?
- [53:34]
Robert Smith
These guys, Gutenberg thought they were just making a cheaper, more efficient way to make Bibles. They didn't know what else you could print beyond this. And then it goes beyond religion. It changes politics, war, philosophy, science, everything.
- [53:49]
Jacob Goldstein
I want to say as we roll into the credits today, I want to say thank you to the listener who wrote to us to say that whenever he tells his friends about our show, they say, that doesn't sound like you,
- [54:02]
Robert Smith
but it is a nice thought to tell your friends about the show. And we encourage all of our listeners to at least bring someone along.
- [54:09]
Jacob Goldstein
Truly, I am very grateful to anyone who recommends the show to a friend. If you write to us and tell us that you told a friend, I will personally write back to you and thank you for whatever that's worth. We're at BusinessHistoryUshkin FM. Our show today was produced by Gabriel Hunter. Chang was engineered by Sarah Bruguer. Our video editor is Matt Nielsen. Our showrunner and editor is Ryan Dilley. I'm Jacob Goldstein.
- [54:35]
Robert Smith
And I'm Robert Smith. This is business history. Thanks for listening.
- [54:41]
Jacob Goldstein
I love my phone, but not my carrier.
- [54:43]
Caller/Listener
What do I do?
- [54:44]
T-Mobile Representative
Well, there are 250 reasons to join T Mobile.
- [54:47]
Caller/Listener
Like what?
- [54:48]
T-Mobile Representative
You can keep your phone and your number, and T Mobile helps pay it off. Up to $800 per line so I
- [54:53]
Jacob Goldstein
wouldn't have to buy a new phone?
- [54:54]
T-Mobile Representative
Yep. Plus your plan price stays the same for 5 years on experience plans. Nice. Find your reason@t mobile.com
- [55:03]
Jacob Goldstein
via virtual prepaid guard card typically takes 15 days after rebate submission price guarantee on TalkText and 5G data exclusions like taxes and fees
- [55:09]
Sponsor/Ad Narrator
apply before you sign off. You Tuned in for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions, and turn scattered context into work they can use. ChatGPT for Business can help ChatGPT for Business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions and access to work and codecs. In ChatGPT, this means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker. Join over 10 million business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact Sales to learn more.
- [55:44]
Jacob Goldstein
Did you ever notice how you spend hours shopping online only to pause at checkout because you wonder if you trust it enough to hit buy? Now Agentic Commerce is testing that moment more than ever. That's where PayPal comes in, with 25 years of checkouts, 400 million consumer accounts globally, and the benefit of fraud protection. So no matter where a purchase starts, it ends with trust. Built for payments growth and agentic PayPal open built for all business. Visit PayPalOpen.com.