Dwarkesh Patel

And we're going to take the enormous piles of gold that are in your basements

and go home rich, and all of this will be gone like a dream.

Or you could say, yes, let's make an alliance.

Give me a bronze smith and an architect and a Greek teacher and a Platonist, and we're going to take all of these things and we're going to do the French court like this.

And then when the ambassador from Portugal comes...

He's going to feel like an uncultured fool, just like I feel right now.

The power dynamic just flipped upside down.

right?

And suddenly the condescending nobleman is in awe of the merchant scum.

That's what the art and the culture does as a propagandistic tool.

The next stage of it then is, okay, we've raised these princes like this and they have the Latin and they have the Greek and they can impress everybody.

And then they fight a bigger, nastier, worse war than any of the earlier big, nasty wars with more deaths and more betrayals and bigger cannons knocking down cities and

and burning whole areas and the wealth is centralized so the mercenaries are more numerous because people can produce more.

You know, the first generations raised by this are supposed to be philosopher princes and instead we get Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, both of whom had Latin and Greek and Cicero and Plato when they were kids.

And then it grows up and Valentino sets fire to half the world.

Cesare sets fire to half the world, right?

So that is the war Machiavelli watched.

Machiavelli was raised on all of the Cicero and Livy, right?

He was raised on the Petrarchan project.

He has this famous, beautiful letter that he wrote in exile where he's describing his day to his friend and that most of the day is wasted and he mucks around hunting for larks.