Dwarkesh Patel

speaker

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 · last 12 months

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

Appearances

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

If your power base depends on people's promises and loyalties, as soon as your rule seems tattering, they'll go back on it.

Whereas if your rule depends on people just having expectation that if they break their oath to you, they'll be punished, that's much more stable.

But his cynicism about, he basically thinks people will act as badly as they are allowed to.

I mean, yeah, his whole justification on checks and balances is not dissimilar to the founders of the US and their reason for wanting checks and balances and wanting to put different factions against each other.

He's just kind of cynical and thinks people will just act as badly as you allow them to.

One element of governance or of being a good prince at the time, I didn't appreciate it, Machiavelli makes a huge point of, is how formidable and reputable people consider you to be.

And so that's relevant both from...

preventing others from invading you or from extracting concessions from other people.

So in his diplomatic career, he is sent out to a bunch of different foreign polities to basically be like, hey, is this a serious person?

So Maximilian is trying to extract a bribe from Florence, basically to not invade Florence on its way down to Italy.

And Florence says, go check out if this guy's real.

And he has to make some judgment about this person.

A couple of weeks ago, Cursor saved a podcast.

I was helping some friends record and we shot for several hours.

Everything wrapped normally, but when I went to send the footage, one of the video files was corrupted.

I tried all the obvious fixes, but I couldn't get anything to work.

So I pointed Cursor at it.

Cursor uses command line tool called untrunk to recover the video.

Untrunk is pretty easy to use, but it only works if you have a clean reference file from the same camera that produced the corrupted footage.

Cursor tracked down a viable reference file without any prompting, and it used the file's metadata to make sure that it came from the same camera.

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