Dwarkesh Patel

When the plurality on a random council all have a plan and it's your plan, you effectively control the city.

And so in that way, the Medici effectively control this lotteried system because they've guaranteed that the plurality in a situation that doesn't have a majority will always be them.

But of course, there's a chance to that.

And in 1432, 1430 and 1432, Cosimo has bad luck.

And the lottery draws a lot of people who dislike him and doesn't draw any of his guys.

And they immediately declare him a traitor to the state and arrest him and lock him in a tower.

And he bribes his way out.

And he offers the equivalent of about $300,000 to the guard outside the cell and $700,000 to the captain of the guard to smuggle him out of the tower.

And he wrote in a letter later that they were the two most foolish men he'd ever met because he was Cosimo de Medici.

He would happily have paid them tens of millions of dollars to let him out of there.

But they weren't ambitious enough to think to ask for more than a few hundred thousand dollars.

So he escapes.

And then the next election, by gum, happened to elect entirely people who just loved Cosimo.

And they invited him back to the city in triumph and they declared him father of the fatherland.

And they arrested and persecuted all of his enemies who turned out to be guilty of tax evasion and all sorts of other things.

And that was the moment that his grip tightened and he's like, I'm going to stop this.

simply controlling a plurality and I'm going to start bribing the people who actually run the elections.

And his famous quote about this is, it is dangerous to be rich and not powerful.

And that you need the power to defend yourself in a situation like King of the Mountain, where when you're on top, everyone will try to knock you down.

This is the system into which Machiavelli is born.