Dwarkesh Patel
speaker
18,929 appearances
61 recordings
3 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 6d ago
Dwarkesh Patel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 26 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
expensive, you know, building libraries and buying books will be today $30 million to build a library to educate his grandsons.
So how is there all the surplus available for education and arts and so forth, in a period where everybody's fighting everybody, and if you lose a war, your city will get, if not raised, at least the ruling faction will get killed?
Yeah.
We talked about this last time, the experience of what it must have been like for a French diplomat to arrive at Florence and look at these people he considered to be, I don't know, nothings who are not even descended from the Caesars and so forth.
And they're producing all this stuff.
When one goes to visit Florence now...
The interest is in part because these are historical artifacts, right?
Because somebody made them 500 years ago.
But if you're seeing them at the time, this would be something either you thought only the Romans could have done that we can't do anymore or something that even the Romans couldn't have done.
I think that is a sort of underrated aspect of what it must have been like to be a foreign power evaluating Florence at the time.
Yeah.
We talked about last time how both Machiavelli and the other humanista, in the different ways they understood virtue, were trying to emulate the virtues that made Rome originally great.
How much are they going off of just these random myths that Livy or whoever would write down about something that supposedly happened where Brutus killed his own sons?
Or who was that guy who put his hand in a fire to show that the Roman people will be loyal and you should fight us?
Yeah.
And how much is it, you know, you look at actual Roman history and it's like incredibly fucked up, right?
We were just talking before we started recording about the life of Claudius and the period of the emperors and so forth.
And surely this must have been known to them that actually.
So much so that when Gibbon is writing the history of the fall and decline of the Roman Empire in multiple volumes, but in the late 18th century...
In the late 18th century, he says that there's never been a better time for humanity than during the... The Pax Romana.
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