Dwarkesh Patel
speaker
18,929 appearances
61 recordings
3 series
first heard Feb 2024
last heard 11 Sep
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
And then it is this legitimacy and the fear of offending virtues or whatever because you believe in some god that will punish you that motivates people to act in a way that defends a republic.
He gives the example of Scipio after the battle in which Hannibal absolutely destroys the Roman armies and the people are about to flee Rome.
As a result, because they think the Hannibal's coming and Scipio himself with his sword goes down and says, swear to our gods that you will stay and defend our homeland.
And just having them give the oath in that moment is enough to convince them.
Well, Hannibal can't be worse than the gods.
So I have to stay here and defend our republic.
Yeah, it seems like he thinks the religion is super important to the legitimacy of the state.
That makes sense.
So last episode we were talking about the psychological impact on scholarship of having –
books be so expensive and having then to meditate on the same copies that are available in one library.
And maybe Machiavelli is maybe the strongest example of this, where maybe through his life, we're seeing the impact of the printing press diffusing and making printing cheaper.
But early on in his life, it's still not been that long since Gutenberg came up with the first printing press.
And as a result, he has, correct this story for me, but his dad has to do like months of drudge work indexing Livy in order to get a copy of Livy.
I want to think about the impact that having this copy of Livy, which presumably is one of the very few books that young Machiavelli had access to, influences his intellectual development.
And basically, yeah, we have this mode of scholarship at the time where...
you know why does he spend like two decades writing discourses on levy well presumably unlike us where we can listen to go through an audiobook a week or something or have our kindle at night that we're reading and so forth he's just like reading this book again and again and again and is trying to connect it to the events he's seeing in his own life yeah um on his like 10th reread that i feel is very interesting psychologically and understanding how scholarship and intellectual thought must have been different at that time
Okay, so adult Machiavelli is now seeing some of his work start to get mass produced.
What is his reaction to this?
Fascinating.
And what was the Inquisition's incentive to enforce the author's prerogative on the text?
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