Dwarkesh Patel

speaker

19,288 appearances 62 recordings 3 series first heard Feb 2024 last heard 17 Sep

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 — 27 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

If there's not a system of

both deterministic justice that we have in the modern world today.

So a lot of the prints is dedicated and discourses on Livy on, well, how do you make sure that some family is not pissed off that their son got killed and there wasn't avenged or whatever.

And if we just have a reliable criminal justice system, that problem goes away.

And same with the welfare state and getting rid of the patronage system.

Basically, if you don't have to rely on this family, then this intermediates them and the state can have your loyalty.

So it's interesting to connect all these threats together of communication time, impartial justice system, impartial welfare state.

as being what is required for the regime to have enough legitimacy and then as a result, enough stability to have modern nation states.

So why would it have been so bad if Valentino took over Florence and he had survived and

He would have massacred maybe the ruling regime at the time, the Republic.

But I don't know what Machiavelli is especially concerned about, but like the cultural treasures of Florence and everything.

Can I ask about that?

Sure.

So when Lorenzo de Piero de Medici takes over, is he not that guy?

Obviously, we remember this period of producing all these great cultural artifacts, all these amazing buildings, all this art.

Yeah.

And then we're talking about the precariousness of the prince, the constant wars, how they're literally fighting all the time.

How is there this surplus that is available for all these different projects?

You write in your book about how the older Lorenzo da Vinci spends what would be today because of the...

expensive, you know, building libraries and buying books will be today $30 million to build a library to educate his grandsons.

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