Dwarkesh Patel

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18,929 appearances 61 recordings 3 series first heard Feb 2024 last heard 5d ago

Dwarkesh Patel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 26 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.

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Dwarkesh Podcast · Ada Palmer – Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time · 16 Jun 2026 podcast

And the Pope now is a Medici, right?

So it makes it even more plausible.

Let's lay down a little more historical context.

So before Machiavelli writes The Prince, he's a sort of bureaucratic diplomat, and he meets, through his career, a lot of these famous figures.

I want to know what he makes, for example, of King Louis of France, of Maximilian of Germany, the Holy Roman Empire.

I want to know what he made of Cesare Borgia.

Doesn't it contradict what you were saying in The Prince about never rise with the help of great powers for even in success, you have empowered somebody who is stronger than you and whose mercy you're at?

I think one misconception of Machiavelli that I had, because I had not read these books before, is that he says the means don't matter, the end matters.

And there's a virtue ethic sense in which maybe he doesn't think the means matter, but he is way more concerned about the means than I would have thought.

He thinks the means are incredibly important because the means by which you achieve power determine how stable

and how fruitful that power will be.

In the context of military conflicts, he says, if you achieve some power with the help of mercenaries or with the help of great powers, people who become stronger than you as a result of you achieving power, that is a very precarious spot to be in.

But speaking of Julius, he makes another point that if you achieve your power by lying, by breaking oaths, by being unfaithful, that this is okay because

his view is that people will forget that you are not faithful.

They will just take you at your word the next time they encounter you.

And so it's actually a very interesting meditation on by what means can you achieve power that will make that power stable versus not.

And the fact that he thinks breaking your word is totally fine.

And this actually gets, so the famous quote in The Prince, it is better to be feared than loved.

What he's getting at there is I think he's just like very cynical about people's nature.

And if people make you a promise, they'll just go back on it.

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