Okay, I'm back with Ada Palmer, who is a  science fiction author, composer, and historian  

at the University of Chicago. Today, I want to talk to you about Machiavelli. 

He writes The Prince. He dedicates it to Lorenzo  di Piero de' Medici and gives it to him in 1513. 

He says in the final chapter, "You're the only  person who can bring Italy from its current  

place of ruin and ravage." Why were things so bad? 

What is the historical context  in which he's writing The Prince? 

I'm going to give a two-part answer  to that, although of course with  

any granular history there can be many parts. The papacy is part of it, and then the city-state  

structure of Italy is another part of it. I'll start with the city-state structure. 

There's a principle in politics that when  there's long continuity of a government,  

and the government has been in power a long  time, that government has a lot of legitimacy. 

People believe in its institutions. People are used to it. 

Even if you complain about  it, it's the government. 

When you break that—when you overthrow the ruler,  when you dissolve the republic, when you put in a  

new thing—it doesn't have that same staying power. So it's very common when there's one regime change  

for there to then be five regime  changes, rapid fire, over and over. 

We see this with how many iterations the French  Republic goes through: the French Republic,  

and then restored monarchy, and  then republic, and then monarchy. 

When a long thing cracks—boom, boom,  boom, boom, boom—you get chaos. 

England's Wars of the Roses are similar. There was one stable dynasty for a long time. 

The moment that a king is overthrown, then  you have overthrow, overthrow, overthrow,  

overthrow for a long time, because  the thread of continuity was cut. 

In Machiavelli's lifetime,  that thread of continuity is  

cut for the majority of cities in Italy. And that guarantees, from his perspective,  

that there are going to be more, and more,  and more overthrows in those governments. 

When Machiavelli was born, there were  six or seven city-states in Italy that  

had had their governments uprooted recently. By the time he's writing The Prince, it's dozens,  

in fact, the majority of these places. So it's volatile. Almost no  

government has staying power. Almost every government is ripe  

for yet another replacement, yet another  replacement, yet another replacement. 

That's half the answer of why he perceives  there to be this urgency and this guarantee  

that there cannot be stability. The other half is the papacy. 

The papacy, of course, is a  long and evolving organism. 

The papacy is one of the oldest  institutions in the world now. 

It was one of the oldest institutions in the world  even then, even though this is 500 years ago. 

As we all know, when you have power centralized in  an authority, especially an executive, there can  

be changes in how that executive uses that power. Each one sets norms for the next one. 

Over the course of Machiavelli's lifetime  and just before, a bunch of consecutive  

popes expanded executive power, especially  in the military side, and launched more wars,  

or did more arbitrary overthrow of governments. You have a number of city-states that are directly  

ruled by the papacy, and in theory, the pope  can appoint anybody to be ruler of that city. 

Here is a pope. He has an illegitimate son. He wants his illegitimate son to be  

ruler of something, so he overthrows the  government of a city and puts in his son. 

The next pope does it to three cities. The next pope does it to five. 

Soon we have a precedent that every new pope  feels he has the authority to knock down every  

pawn upon the chessboard if he feels like it. Once that is the norm, even a fairly nice pope  

still inherits the idea that the pope is  going to overthrow and replace governments. 

This creates a unique instability within Italy  that no other part of Europe is subject to,  

because there is no predictability  to who's going to be pope next. 

It isn't hereditary. You can't plan for it. The next pope is elected. 

As is often the case with elections,  very frequently the next pope will be  

elected by a coalition of all the  people who hate the current pope. 

One of the things that electoral  politics does is that it tends to swing,  

in which those outside of power work hard  to get into power with the next regime. 

Let’s assume the average length of a  papacy is ten years in this period. 

So every ten years, you suddenly have a  completely unpredictable new monarch who's  

almost guaranteed to be one of the enemies  of the old monarch, and will therefore  

rip up and replace all of the things that  that monarch tried to do with new things. 

So Machiavelli, when he's writing the last  chapter of The Prince, is looking around  

and saying, "Okay, we have a perfect storm. Practically every polity in this region has  

just had the thread of legitimacy cut. Its institutions have no traditions. 

Its people have no investment  in its current rulers. 

These are all pawns that have been knocked  over before and barely stood up again. 

They're ready to fall." Meanwhile,  nothing will stop the turnover of popes. 

The only thing that could stop the turnover of  popes would be one person gaining enough power  

and ascendancy near this region, who has  staying power, who has sons and heredity,  

that he can do what Cesare Borgia tried to do:  have enough power near the papacy to strongly  

influence the next pope to create a kind  of stability that's otherwise impossible. 

So he wants the Medicis to not unify Italy,  but stabilize Italy at the very least. 

Exactly, by having conquered enough of a chunk  that the papacy fears them and must negotiate with  

them, as opposed to the papacy being surrounded  by small, weakened powers that will constantly be  

turned over and turned over and turned over. Right, and the pope now is a Medici, right? 

At that moment, yes. So it makes it even more plausible. 

Let's lay down a little more historical context. Before Machiavelli writes The Prince,  

he's a bureaucratic diplomat. He meets through his career a  

lot of these famous figures. I want to know what he makes,  

for example, of King Louis of France,  Maximilian of Germany, the Holy Roman Empire. 

I want to know what he made of Cesare Borgia. He spends a lot of The Prince, in fact,  

trying to veil how much more he cares  about Cesare Borgia than everyone else. 

It's so interesting. He tries to be balanced. He tries to talk about this example,  

and this example, and this example,  and Valentino, and this example. 

Sometimes he just can't. There's that  incredible, magical moment when he's  

discussing Valentino's fall. It’s the moment when he has  

amassed all this power, he's successfully  conquered almost everything within Italy. 

Suddenly both his father, the  Pope, and him fall ill at once. 

When Machiavelli describes this, he's saying,  "Everything Cesare Borgia did, he did right. 

He conquered this kingdom. He would've kept  it. The only reason he lost it was fortune." 

What Machiavelli should say is, "Valentino  had planned for every contingency at his  

father's death, except the possibility  that he would also be on death's door." 

But that's not what Machiavelli says. What Machiavelli says is, "He told  

me that he had planned." The first person breaks in. 

Our historian cannot veil himself anymore. He cares too much. "He told me", first person,  

that he had prepared for everything  in the event of his father's death,  

except the possibility that he himself  would also be incapacitated at the moment. 

It's such a magical moment where  the veil between the author and the  

reader breaks for just that moment. We realize that all of these others,  

he observed from a distance. But Machiavelli was in the room next to  

Valentino, at Valentino's side through this. He had the most incredible, life-changing,  

first-person view of this man so unique, and  charismatic, and terrifying, that when you read  

accounts of him, they range from "This was the  most incredible, charismatic leader I've ever  

met," to "This man was supernaturally charismatic  to the degree that he must be literally the  

Antichrist or an incarnation of the angel of death  on Earth, because I have no other explanation of  

how he could be so persuasive and charismatic." Machiavelli was in the room. 

And every so often you just feel that he's still  in the spell of this incredible figure at whose  

side he had the scariest job in the world. Machiavelli's job dealing with Cesare Borgia…  

It's very clear that the Borgia plan is to  conquer the Papal States in the middle of Italy. 

Tuscany, Florence's dominion, is  this little notch, like a puzzle  

piece out of the side of the Papal States. Anybody with a map looking at it is like,  

"You've got to conquer that. You just have to conquer this. 

You can't have a kingdom without it." There is no way to stop it. 

So what do you do? Machiavelli's advice to his polity is:  

this time we're not going to succeed in  persuading this conqueror to pass us by. 

We can't bribe him into doing  something else permanently. 

But we can buy time. We can absolutely and abjectly  

swear to do anything he wants. We can give him our forces,  

and we can give him our money. We can pay him and help him conquer  

the rest of it, and betray our allies. Betray Bologna. Florence had had a  

300-year alliance to defend Bologna. He said, "We have to break it. 

The whole world is broken right now. We have to break every promise and  

every hereditary alliance we had. We must be at the side of this man." 

The only possible survival mechanism is to  win from him through loyalty, through support,  

and through Machiavelli being at his ear  whispering forever, "Florence is loyal. 

Florence is loyal." By that, we buy the boon  of Polyphemus, the terrifying promise of the  

conqueror: "I like you, my guest. I'll eat you last."  

That's the republic's only hope. That's Machiavelli's job: to stand  

next to the scariest man who has lived in Europe  since Frederick Barbarossa and whisper constantly  

in his ear, "The Florentine Republic will support  you and will give your grace anything you ask. 

Just eat us last." Doesn't it contradict what he  

was saying in The Prince about how you should  never rise with the help of great powers, for  

even in success you have empowered somebody who  is stronger than you and at whose mercy you are? 

This is not Florence aiming to rise. This is not Florence expecting  

that it will gain anything by this. This is Florence knowing it will lose. 

Machiavelli's very open about the fact  that if Alexander had lived another year,  

Valentino would have finished his conquests, and  taken Florence at last, and it would've been over. 

But popes are mortal. Buying time  is sometimes the survival mechanism. 

So Machiavelli has this incredible firsthand  experience of being with Valentino through  

all of these decisions, being with him at  the massacre at Senigallia when rumor had  

reached Valentino that some of his people were  terrified of him and plotting to overthrow him. 

They were so scared of him, they decided  to abandon the plot, and he heard. 

He met with them and told them, "I forgive you. It's okay. You've renewed your loyalty to me. 

You've passed the test. I trust you. All  is well." He invites them to the banquet,  

and then massacres them all. The forgiveness is false. The  

betrayals are punished. There's this amazing  letter a couple of months afterward where  

Machiavelli's loved ones are writing from  Florence because they've received a letter  

from him after the massacre at Senigallia. They say, "Oh, thank God, you're alive. 

We had no idea. All we heard was  that he had massacred a large number  

of the people who were with him. We didn't know if you were alive." 

It took months in the chaos, the postal  system had completely broken down. 

It took months for them to get word  that Machiavelli was still alive. 

They didn't know whether he had  been caught up in the conspiracy. 

He easily could've been on a list  of names of people the conspirators  

intended to recruit, and been gone. So his wife and his loved ones back at home,  

his children, had to wait months to find  out whether he too had been slaughtered. 

It felt to them like a miracle that he hadn't. 

But it meant that he watched these incredible  deeds: you encounter them, you forgive them,  

you renew vows of amity—sacred vows taken in the  cathedral—and then you slaughter them at dinner,  

violating the laws of hospitality. Dante would say if you do that,  

you've committed such a grave sin  that you're not just regular damned. 

A devil comes up out of Hell and takes your  soul out of your body and inhabits you. 

You're actually already in Hell even  though your body is still alive on Earth,  

because that's how heinous a sin this is. And yet, it works, and all the rest of Valentino's  

men are more loyal to him afterward than ever  before, and won't even whisper to each other about  

dissatisfaction, because even the faintest  whiff of conspiracy might result in death. 

So why does Valentino's kingdom, for which he  did everything right, ultimately fall apart? 

Because he happens to eat the same thing  that gives him food poisoning as his father,  

and happens to be ill at the wrong moment. Also the puppet that he manages to get in power,  

Pius III, dies too fast, and then  he's outmaneuvered by Julius. 

If all those things hadn't gone wrong  in a row, the kingdom would've stood,  

and indeed, he would've conquered Florence. Machiavelli is constantly reminding us that, yes,  

we have all of these things we can try to do. We can remember it's better  

to be feared than loved. We can remember not to be hated. 

We have power over, at maximum,  half of what causes outcomes. 

The other half is always going to be fortune. We look at Machiavelli. We know he's the origin of  

utilitarian thought, and that he says we need  to evaluate people's deeds based on outcome. 

But he doesn't just say we need to  evaluate their deeds based on outcome. 

He says we need to evaluate their  deeds based on what the most probable  

outcome was before fortune intervened. So he says people look at Valentino  

Borgia and say, "But the Borgias fell. They were feared, and then they were hated,  

and then they fell, and then their enemies  took power and chiseled their coats of arms  

off of every surface in Rome, so that to this day  you're walking through Rome and you sit down at a  

pizzeria and there's a weird scar on the wall, and  that scar is where the Borgia bull is no more." 

People want to make the moral of that  be, "Don't do what the Borgias did. 

They fell." Machiavelli's like, "No, they  did not fall because of their choices. 

They fell because half of what happens  in the world is never in our control. 

You can do everything right,  and it's out of your control. 

But we have to evaluate what would have  happened, and therefore we should imitate them,  

because everything they did was right." I think one misconception of Machiavelli  

that I had, because I had not read  these books before, is that he says  

the means don't matter, the end matters. There's a virtue ethic sense in which maybe  

he doesn't think the means matter,  but he is way more concerned about  

the means than I would've naively thought. He thinks the means are incredibly important,  

because the means by which you  achieve power determine how stable  

and how fruitful that power will be. In the context of military conflicts,  

he says if you achieve some power with the  help of mercenaries or with the help of  

great powers—people who become stronger  than you as a result of you achieving  

power—that is a very precarious spot to be in. But speaking of Julius, he makes another point  

that if you achieve your power by lying,  by breaking oaths, by being unfaithful,  

that this is okay, because his view is that  people will forget that you are not faithful. 

They will just take you at your word  the next time they encounter you. 

It's actually a very interesting meditation on  by what means you can achieve power that will  

make that power stable versus not. The fact that he thinks breaking  

your word is totally fine… It's even subtler than that. 

Because if you are someone who  breaks your word and you break  

it this way, it'll bite you in the ass. If you break it these ways, it'll be okay. 

He also does analysis of figures like  Savonarola, who would make prophecies  

and promises, and then some of them  would happen and some of them wouldn't. 

He would then make new ones and  correct what he said yesterday. 

He handled his manipulation and untruths badly,  in Machiavelli's analysis, in a way that did turn  

people against him and make him lose power. Partly because Savonarola, as a religious  

demagogue, the core of his power was people  believing that he was divinely inspired and  

that he wouldn't make mistakes and wouldn't err. So his power base was fragile vis-à-vis untruth. 

For him, because of the specific shape  of his power and then the specific way he  

handled his contradictions, that did hurt him. Whereas if it's somebody like Cesare Borgia,  

who will make an alliance and work with that ally  for a while and then betray them—because meanwhile  

he was such an effective conqueror and he was  so scary and everyone was so afraid of him—even  

when he would betray an ally, his other allies  would say, "I’ve got to be more faithful to him  

so that the next person to be betrayed isn't me,  and try to work hard to be in the good graces of  

the prince so that I’m not next", as opposed  to turning on him, because he was so scary. 

Savonarola was not scary. Savonarola was  charismatic and persuasive and had one of these  

voices that made crowds thrill and women swoon. Decades later, when people asked Michelangelo what  

Savonarola had been like—when Savonarola  had been dead for decades—Michelangelo's  

answer was, "I still hear his voice." He had one of those charismatic presences. 

That wasn't enough when he started  flip-flopping on policy and truth. 

Whereas Valentino was so scary that he could  betray his top general and seize his lands and  

overthrow his city, and all of his other generals  would say, "Better step even further into line." 

So it's not just that lying is okay, it's that  lying is sometimes okay if you check these other  

boxes, and it's not if you don't. So this is even more reinforcement  

of how much he zooms in on the means. If you do A and B, you're okay,  

but if you do A and C, you're not. He’s looking at the minutiae of different  

ways you can wield power and different  reasons people can have to follow you. 

If you're a prince who's decided to invest  in being loved, you have to keep it up,  

or cultivate being feared alongside it. If you've invested heavily in being feared,  

there are things you can then  do that you can't do if you're  

a prince whose power depends on being loved. This actually gets to the famous quote in The  

Prince, "It is better to be feared than loved." What he's getting at there is, I think, that he's  

very cynical about people's nature. If people make you a promise,  

they'll just go back on it. If your power base depends on  

people's promises and loyalties, as soon as your  rule seems to be tattering, they'll go back on it. 

Whereas if your rule depends on people having the  expectation that if they break their oath to you,  

they'll be punished, that's much more stable. He basically thinks people will act as badly  

as they are allowed to, whether they're  the tyrant or the people or the nobles. 

This goes back to the thing in The Discourses. His whole justification of checks and balances is  

not dissimilar to the founders of the US and their  reason for wanting checks and balances and wanting  

to put different factions against each other. He's just cynical and thinks people will  

act as badly as you allow them to. On that topic, Machiavelli is the first  

person that we have ever in the European tradition  to suggest that it could be viable for there to  

be more than one political party in a state  at the same time, and that they would compete  

against each other and vent the society's tension  through competition and vie to try to dominate an  

election and then the next one. This is what we're used to,  

but this is innovative in Machiavelli. He talks about how competition within a city,  

if the parties are kind of stable—he's  observing Siena as one of the examples  

of this—can vent local tensions  and allow interior adjustments  

of who has power, and be stable. I'm going to come back to interior  

adjustments of who has power in a second. The standard attitude toward political parties  

is that if there are two political parties in a  polity, it will not be stable until one of those  

political parties is dead, and their heads have  been cut off and put on spikes, and their houses  

have been burned down and paved over. That has been Florence's solution  

to political parties before. Florence massacred its Ghibellines and killed  

all of them, and rubbed salt into the earth where  the houses used to be so nothing can grow there. 

Nothing still grows there. Then when the  Black Guelphs and the White Guelphs split  

into two sub-parties, they immediately  started slaughtering each other as well. 

The standard was that one party must wipe out  the other party for there to be stability. 

There are comparatively few examples,  although Florence's neighbor Siena is one,  

where political parties managed to not only  coexist side by side but be politically helpful. 

One element of governance, or of being  a good prince at the time, that I didn't  

appreciate but Machiavelli makes  a huge point of, is how formidable  

and reputable people consider you to be. That's relevant both for preventing others  

from invading you and for extracting  concessions from other people. 

In his diplomatic career, he is sent out to a  bunch of different foreign polities to basically  

determine, "Hey, is this a serious person?" So Maximilian is trying to extract a bribe  

from Florence to not invade  it on its way down to Italy. 

Florence says, "Go check  out if this guy's for real." 

He has to make some judgment about this person. It's useful to remember, Florence has  

paid these bribes a lot. Florence's tactic is: if  

someone is invading the area, can we bribe them? Because paying somebody to not attack you is a  

much more surefire thing than preparing  to actually fight against them. 

Your family's lands get trampled by soldiers. You suffer economically. So it's an  

old Florentine tactic. It's not a new thing that  

Maximilian is threatening to invade  Italy and trying to extract a bribe. 

Florence basically every year is like, "Okay, who  do we need to bribe this year to not invade us? 

Here's this year's bribing-a-king budget. To whom does it go? 

Is Maximilian a serious threat, or are we saving  this money in case there's a threat from somebody  

more serious like the King of Naples or the  King of France or Milan or the Venetians?" 

A couple weeks ago, Cursor saved a podcast. I was helping some friends record and  

we shot for several hours. Everything wrapped normally,  

but when I went to send the footage,  one of the video files was corrupted. 

I tried all the obvious fixes, but  I couldn't get anything to work. 

So I pointed Cursor at it. Cursor used this command line  

tool called Untrunc to recover the video. Untrunc is pretty easy to use, but it only  

works if you have a clean reference file from the  same camera that produced the corrupted footage. 

Cursor tracked down a viable reference  file without any prompting and it used  

the file's metadata to make sure  that it came from the same camera. 

Once Untrunc recovered the video, I asked  Cursor to fix the out-of-sync audio as well. 

It ran this complicated ffmpeg command  that I would have never come up with  

myself, and it just realigned everything. You should try using Cursor for your daily work. 

My whole team has been using it for  ordinary tasks associated with the podcast. 

Go to cursor.com/dwarkesh to get started. At this time, the pope is not just a spiritual  

leader but a temporal power. Very much so. 

He and his son are literally fighting  wars against other Catholics, but the  

other Catholics are fighting them back. What does it mean to be a Catholic  

who is fighting a war against the pope? Here is where geographic proximity is everything. 

If you're far from Rome—when you're  Denmark or Iceland, and the pope is  

all the way over there—the way you interact  with him is that occasionally an incredibly  

impressive papal legate will visit. There'll be vast pomp and circumstance,  

and the city will rename a street in honor of the  fact that somebody sent by the pope has visited. 

He has this great power to say yes or no to  petitions, and different countries have been  

trying to petition for specific things  for ages, and the pope's legate is here  

to interview the emperor, to judge whether  the queen can be queen or not, and it feels  

like a big deal, and the pope is very abstract. It's easy to have a lot of respect for that pope,  

because what do you see that pope do? You see that pope in pomp and circumstance. 

You see that pope make judgments  about fates of popes and kings. 

You see that pope put out papal bulls and edicts  that give theological answers to questions. 

You see that pope exercise judgment of  life or death over people at a distance. 

He's very abstract, and the difference  between one pope and the next pope is  

kind of small from your perspective. You don't see their policy differences. 

If you're in Italy, the pope is that asshole  who went to college with your brother and beat  

him up when they were at college, and then  was drunken and irresponsible at middle age,  

and you've been negotiating with him in  these other jobs, and you know this jerk. 

You know his family. You know the other  jerks who are also competitors for this. 

You're allied with him,  you're not allied with him. 

His ancestors are allies of  yours or not allies of yours. 

He's a specific dude. You're much more likely  to judge a pope based on, "He's that guy." 

This is not Pope Julius II. This is Giuliano della Rovere,  

and I judge him based on his uncle who put  him in power, and the actions of his friends,  

and the actions of the city he's from. You know all of his dirty laundry. 

You are subject to the fact that when he moves  into power, everyone who's related to him is  

going to get promoted within Italy, and everybody  who's not is going to get removed from Italy. 

So it's much easier for an  Italian to see this pope,  

and it's actually quite hard to see the papacy. 

That's how you have these fascinating  wars where even the cities that are  

hereditarily incredibly loyal to the papacy will  sometimes be fighting a war against the papacy. 

All Italy is divided into these two  factions, the Guelphs and Ghibellines. 

Theoretically, what these two factions mean  is that Guelph powers, Guelph families,  

Guelph cities believe the correct successor  to the Roman emperors is the pope. 

The pope is the emperor. He has the right to be the ruler of Italy,  

and indeed of everything that was once Rome's. He is the ultimate political and military power,  

and he is the rightful and only  rightful overlord of Italy. 

The Ghibellines believe that in 800 AD, when  Charlemagne conquered a bunch of stuff and  

made the empire that we now refer to as the Holy  Roman Empire, when the Pope crowned Charlemagne,  

he delegated the political and military  side of his authority to that emperor,  

and made himself the spiritual authority, but  the emperor the political and temporal authority. 

Therefore, the rightful ruler of Italy is  the emperor, the successors of Charlemagne. 

These are the two factions for which these  parties fought originally, 300 years ago. 

These days, what these factions actually  mean is, "Those jerks murdered Uncle Tybalt,  

and we will never forgive them." They are the team that is our  

enemy, and we are this team. They are that team, and we hate them. 

We want to crush them because  they want to crush us. 

This means that sometimes a pope will be elected  who's from a hereditarily Ghibelline family,  

and the pope will start promoting people  from the anti-papal faction, and the  

pro-papal faction will unite against the pope. It makes no rational sense until we remember  

that they are serving the pope abstractly. So you get multiple situations where there's  

a war between Rome and Florence over the fact  that Florence wants to defend papal authority in  

papal lands against the pope itself, because that  individual pope was from the anti-papal faction. 

Do they not believe that he is  the vicar of Christ on Earth? 

It makes sense in a normal political state  for you to think, "I believe in America,  

but I don't like the president," or something. But isn't the pope supposed to be…? 

Yes and no. Again, when you're far away, yes. When you're close up, you know too much of the  

dirty laundry of these people. So let me use a fun example:  

the most passive-aggressive letter ever written  in the entire history of time, in my opinion. 

There's a type of ceremony that happens  when a new pope is elected, which is the  

giving of oaths of obedience. A major ambassador from every  

polity in Christendom comes to Rome. They wait in line for a long time,  

and then they give a long-winded speech about  how great the monarch is that they're there to  

represent, and how vast his power is, blah, blah,  blah, and how pious he is, and how glad he is,  

Your Holiness, that you're the pope now. Congratulations on behalf of my wonderful king. 

And you're supposed to send the  highest-status possible person who can  

leave your polity without it falling down. You might send a younger son of the king. 

You might send a lord chancellor. In the case of Florence, you're going  

to send the most prominent citizen you can. So when Pope Sixtus was elected, it was  

Lorenzo de' Medici himself—not the dedicatee  of The Prince, the grandfather and namesake of  

the dedicatee of The Prince—who went to deliver  this oration of obedience, which means literally  

prostrating yourself in front of the pope,  literally kissing his feet, and giving this oath. 

Lorenzo did this for Pope Sixtus, with whom  he was negotiating to try desperately to get  

a cardinalship for his brother. Pope Sixtus instead organized the  

Pazzi conspiracy to try to butcher the  Medici family, killed Lorenzo's brother,  

killed a number of his allies as well, and  attempted to have a coup to take over Florence. 

Then the next pope was elected after Sixtus,  Pope Innocent, who was as everyone knew,  

a puppet of the same faction that Sixtus was from. So we go from this very dangerous pope who had  

tried to wipe out Lorenzo's family  to a puppet of the same faction. 

Lorenzo sent his son, instead  of himself, to give this oath. 

He had his son deliver the message, apologizing  to His Holiness that, "I could not come myself,  

but the last time this duty fell upon me,  I had a brother upon whom I could leave  

the burden of the state in my absence. Since now I have no brother,  

I cannot come in person." It's a very respectful letter, but  

it's also very overt about the fact that he does  not trust and will not again trust this faction. 

So they negotiate very carefully how to deal  with the fact that the popes have this great  

spiritual power, but sometimes the popes  are acting as horrifically selfish warlords. 

That's also something which has worsened  over time, and it's important for us  

to remember that the papacy becomes  gradually more corrupted over time. 

This is because with every generation, more  people leave donations of wealth to the Church. 

A widow who has no son and has property  decides to piously leave this to a monastery. 

The Church gets wealthier and wealthier. As the Church gets wealthier,  

with wealth comes power. More and more power is in the state. 

This makes a stronger and stronger incentive  for every ambitious family to send their  

second son into the Church. And this goes all the way down. 

We have personal letters of Machiavelli writing to  and from relatives of his, where they're debating  

the correct-sized bribe to offer to buy a  priesthood for his little brother, Totto. 

They don't want to offer too big a bribe,  because it would impoverish the family. 

They don't want to offer too small a bribe. They've heard that another family that's after  

this priesthood offered an extra big bribe. That's kind of not fair. 

How do they respond to being out-bribed? They just write about this as the  

most everyday, normal thing in the world. This is a wealthy merchant-prince-level family. 

They are in the top 5% of wealth and  power in Florence, but not in the top 1%. 

But for them, too, it's normal to talk  about paying a bribe to get a priesthood. 

That's just how it works. Every generation sees the  

Church get wealthier and have more power. Therefore the incentives to corrupt it  

are even greater. It even becomes  

a kind of prisoner's dilemma system. If you're the duke and you don't manipulate  

the papacy, if you don't bribe the pope, if you  don't work hard to get your brother to be bishop,  

and your enemies do, you're screwed. So you even see it as defensive:  

"I must manipulate the Church. It's the only way my people will be safe. 

If I don't manipulate the Church, my enemies may  manipulate the Church, and then there's danger." 

This happens all the way up to the scale of kings,  where popes can make your enemy the most powerful  

bishop in your kingdom or can deny you the right  to marry, because inevitably the person you want  

to marry is a cousin, and you're going to  need a special dispensation to marry them. 

The pope can prevent that and  mess with your marriage alliances. 

You need the pope very  desperately if you're a king. 

You also need the pope all the way down. That means bribes and other kinds of incentives  

make the papacy more corrupt with each generation. So the papacy is worse in everyone's lived  

experience than it used to  be even a few popes ago. 

You see every generation for 100  years say, "Popes are much worse  

now than popes used to be when I was young." Everybody says that. Dante says that in 1300. 

Machiavelli's grandparents’  generation is saying that in 1400. 

Machiavelli is saying that in 1500. In everybody's lived experience,  

the popes are getting more secular, more  military, and more corrupt over time. 

It's a gradual accumulation, and it  comes to a peak, as such things do,  

triggering the reformation, when it becomes so bad  that there has to be a massive move against it. 

Machiavelli, in an interesting way, anticipates  this, because Machiavelli says, "All institutions  

are gradually corrupted and need to be reformed  and returned to their foundations, or they will  

collapse under the weight of their corruption." He thinks that the papacy has been undergoing  

this, and that Christianity  has been undergoing this. 

And that, if not for the fact that St. Francis  of Assisi—and also to some extent St. Dominic a  

couple of centuries before his time—reformed the  Church and brought in a lot more popular support,  

Christianity would already have cracked  under the weight of its own corruption  

200 years before, and that it will need such  a restoration again—as any institution needs,  

as city governments need, as republics  need—as corruption accumulates over time. 

One big way in which our world is different from  500 years ago is the focus on patronage and it  

being the basis of political power. It was much more prominent, right? 

So that's something that would  be interesting to understand. 

It's not just that it was more prominent, but  that it was the fundamental glue of the society,  

as opposed to one of several glues of the society. Patronage, which was also familial and therefore  

entangled with nepotism, was so fundamental. For example, when Alessandro Farnese was  

elected Pope Paul III in the middle of the  1500s, he didn't corruptly make one of his  

kinsmen commander of the papal armies. He instead appointed a really competent,  

experienced general instead of his own  not very competent, illegitimate son. 

And there were riots in Rome. "Your  Holiness, the people demand more nepotism. 

You must appoint your illegitimate son  to command your armies, because your  

illegitimate son will never betray you, and we  will know we can trust the papal armies not to  

turn on Rome if the Pope's son is the commander. We don't know that about this other commander. 

He might turn against Your Holiness. There might be a rift between the Pope  

and the papal armies if he's not somebody who  rises and falls with you the way your son does. 

Therefore, by popular demand, the people want  more nepotism, because the system depends on it." 

That's how you see how the system depends on it. There are levels of trust that the patronage  

system creates, because it involves  multi-generational entanglement of families. 

If these families rise, they rise together. If they fall, they fall together. 

That creates levels of trust that can  sustain things like this world where the  

oath of a soldier is to his commander,  not to the polity that he serves. 

In modernity, we realize another solution to that. The oath of the soldier is not to the commander,  

but to the Constitution, or to  the country, or to the people. 

But in this period, the oath of the soldier is  to the commander, mostly because communications  

are so slow that the commander has to  be able to give speedy field commands. 

But it means you're creating an  army and handing it to a man. 

If you cannot trust that man, then the people will  be terrified that there could be a rift between  

Rome and its own armies, or between Rome and its  treasurer, or between Rome and its other allies. 

Patronage is the glue that makes  things work all the way down. 

All the way down to the level of, if you need a  defense attorney, that's done through patronage. 

The outcomes of trials are a  really great way to see patronage. 

We're all familiar with the fact  that law codes in the Middle Ages  

are really cruel: death for everything. Death for theft, death for adultery,  

death for homosexuality, death for  setting fire to the prince's beehive. 

Whatever it is, that's the sentence on the books. You look at the actual trial records and maybe  

one in 100 convictions for that crime  actually ends in a capital sentence. 

Almost all of the other ones end  in a fine or a public flogging,  

but not in the sentence that's on the books. We say, "Why and how is that happening?" 

Patronage is the answer. So say it's  the Middle Ages or the Renaissance,  

and you're a carpenter, and your teenage son  gets drunk and punches somebody in a brawl,  

breaks the guy's nose in a way that makes him die. He accidentally kills a guy in a drunken brawl  

and your son is now on trial for murder. You're a carpenter. You have worked for the  

rich family whose family carpenter you are. Let's say it's the Medici family. 

Whenever they need new pews for the  family church or new furniture or  

repairs for the family gates, they go to you. So you go to them and say, "My son is in danger. 

He's on trial. Please put in a good word." Your patron has the ability to influence  

the judges, and they will put in a good word  for you, and you will get a lighter sentence. 

This is an ancestor of having a character  witness to say, "So-and-so is such a good  

person, they should have the milder  punishment, not the more severe one." 

The norm is: you're accused of a severe crime,  you're put on trial for your life, your patron  

intervenes, and you get a lighter sentence. This is how justice is supposed to work. 

This is a very severe line that changes in  the 18th century with the Enlightenment. 

Because we now think of proportional justice:  the sentence for the crime should be this,  

and ideal justice is that everyone who is  guilty of the crime gets that sentence. 

That is fair. It doesn't matter who you know. It doesn't matter whether you're rich or poor. 

The sentence should be the same. This is the ideal of Enlightenment justice. 

The ideal of this period's justice, which  is much more shaped by Christianity,  

is that the purpose of the trial is the spiritual  interior correction of the soul of the sinner. 

Therefore the ideal outcome is  for them to fear for their life. 

They're before a terrifying judge who  is the earthly representation of God. 

They know that they're guilty, and they  deserve to be thrown into the pits of hell. 

But miraculously, they are given  grace, and they are pardoned. 

The process of being put on trial, fearing  for your life, begging to the patron,  

and then receiving mercy is supposed to be an  earthly preview of the process your soul will  

undergo when you are before divine judgment. Therefore it should make you come out  

the other end a good person. The goal of the justice system is  

the spiritual improvement of the sinner and  the hope that they will come out the other  

end better and more likely to go to heaven. Even when people are being sentenced to death,  

there are religious organizations who sit with  them overnight, having a final prayer group,  

and walk with them to the gallows, holding their  hand and holding a painting of the Virgin Mary  

in front of their face, so that to the very  last moment, the person who's about to be  

executed is thinking about heaven. The ideal outcome of the execution  

is that the soul goes to heaven. So the whole structure of the justice  

system expects the intervention of a patron, who  represents the intervention of a patron saint,  

persuading the judge, who  is God, to give you mercy. 

So when we see 100 trials end with 99 where the  person paid a small fine, and one where the person  

was executed, what that actually means  is that in 99, their patron stepped in. 

Somebody persuaded somebody who put in a  good word, and they got the light sentence. 

In one, that person had fallen  out of the patronage network. 

That person had angered  their boss, their protector. 

That's why it went all the way  to being a capital offense. 

Probably a lot of people listening  are familiar with Giordano Bruno,  

very famous as a martyr for science because  he was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition. 

Fewer people know that that was  not his first Inquisition trial. 

He was investigated a number  of times by the Inquisition  

for doing various radical forms of thought. The earlier trials had the usual outcome for  

that kind of trial. He had a patron,  

there were rich people that he worked with  or for, the university was hosting him. 

They put in a good word. He's fine. The Inquisition tells him,  

"Be good," and things continue as they are. That time, he had angered the  

person he worked for. He pissed off his patron. 

It's his patron who turns him into the  Inquisition and says, "This guy is a charlatan. 

He promised he could teach me  these things, and he can't. 

I don't trust him. He's no  good. Throw the book at him." 

The reason that trial goes all the way to a  capital sentence is that he doesn't have a patron. 

He's the 99th case that time. If he had had a patron protecting him, despite  

how radical his stuff was, he would've been okay. We see that in the trial of Giovanni Pico della  

Mirandola, who was candidly substantially  more radical than Giordano Bruno. 

But when Pico is on trial, Lorenzo de' Medici  and other powerful people really care about Pico,  

and they pull out all the stops. Lorenzo talks to his  

brother-in-law, who's an Orsini. The Orsini have enormous influence in Rome. 

They get permission for Pico to be let  go and sent home to Lorenzo to sort of  

live under house arrest, under Lorenzo's  promise that he'll be good from then on. 

Or you have Marsilio Ficino who is this radical  Platonist who publishes a book on how to project  

your soul outside of time and summon angels,  arguing for the existence of reincarnation, and is  

very clearly being extremely theologically weird. This is the man who wrote the best letter of  

recommendation ever written in the history  of time when he was recommending a young  

scholar for a job with the King of Hungary. He writes in the recommendation letter,  

"This young man is the reincarnation of St.  Thomas Aquinas, so you should give him a job." 

Now, that is a letter of recommendation. But you think, "The reincarnation  

of St. Thomas Aquinas, huh?" And the Inquisition comes knocking on  

Ficino's door and is like, "Hmm, reincarnation?" Ficino's like, "Oh, no. Help. Talk to  

Lorenzo." Lorenzo talks to his  brother-in-law, Cardinal Orsini. 

Cardinal Orsini shuts it down, and  Ficino is told, "Maybe lay off talking  

quite so overtly about the reincarnation." Ficino says, "Yes, of course, and I will only  

teach very pious people how to summon angels  and project their souls out of their bodies. 

I promise I won't teach it to anybody  who will use these powers irresponsibly." 

The Inquisition is like, "Okay," and goes home. Because patronage kicked in. Patronage is  

the glue that makes everything work. You can't even stay in a hotel or buy an  

apple—I'm not kidding—without a patron. You arrive at a city. 

Nobody knows you. You're a stranger. What you have  is a letter of recommendation from your patron  

who's friends with some important person there. You present that at the hotel. 

That's why they let you stay. Okay, I'm here with Ricson,  

who is an ML researcher at Jane Street. Ricson, I’m sure you saw that there were  

many viral memes on Twitter about  the hiring process at Jane Street. 

So I wanted to see for myself what is the  hiring process at Jane Street actually like. 

Yeah, so here's one of our  retired puzzle questions. 

Here you've got an image dataset, but half  of the images in it have been corrupted. 

They've been scrambled in a consistent way. Like, if the pixel on the top right got  

swapped with the pixel in the middle,  the same swap happened for all of the  

images in the second half of the dataset. A super naive thing would just be training  

a classifier on corrupted versus uncorrupted  images.Yeah, you could have a learned model of  

how the image looks and then optimize for that. How about this—what if you just recognize sharp  

gradients in color or something? I think this is getting to one  

pretty practical solution. It's interesting that a problem  

like this that is so concise to describe can  have so many different plausible solutions. 

I think we're not actually looking for the  interviewee to get the canonical solution. 

It's more about discussing all the ML  possibilities and seeing if people can  

predict the failure mode of whatever  idea they think is most promising. 

Yeah, but what is the solution? It turns out a surprisingly effective solution is— 

For the viewers: you can leave  your solutions in the comments. 

And if this is the kind of puzzle you  enjoy, go to janestreet.com/dwarkesh  

to check out their open ML positions. To tie together a couple of threads you were  

talking about, The Prince is painting a  picture of regimes being incredibly unstable. 

You have to worry about foreign powers. You have to worry about rival  

factions within your own country. You have to worry about mercenaries. 

You have to worry about lots of different things. So any given regime is very unstable. 

So what had to happen for  things to get more stable? 

We're talking about a couple of the ways  in which people owed their loyalties not  

to the regime, but to others within  the regime, which created instability. 

In Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli talks about  how one of the reasons the Roman Empire's fall was  

instigated is that these generals were months away  on the frontier fighting these wars because the  

empire was so big, they had to amass for periods  of years—or in some cases, for Caesar of course,  

decades—the command of so many men who have  for decades just been listening to this guy  

tell them what to do, who to fight next. This is the person they're loyal to. 

As opposed to, say, if the consuls could  be giving dictates every single day,  

then the loyalty could be to the regime in Rome. Same with patronage, if there's not a system  

of deterministic justice like we  have in the modern world today. 

A lot of The Prince and Discourses on Livy  is dedicated to: how do you make sure that  

a family is not pissed off that their  son got killed and it wasn't avenged? 

If you just have a reliable criminal  justice system, that problem goes away. 

It’s the same with the welfare state  and getting rid of the patronage system. 

If you don't have to rely on this  family, then this disintermediates them,  

and the state can have your loyalty. So it's interesting to connect all these  

threads together—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. Yeah. One thing that everyone is surprised by  

is that when Cesare Borgia—Valentino is much  more what he's called in the period—conquers  

these cities in Central Italy, he goes  in, and he massacres the ruling family. 

He works hard to kill every member of  them that he can so that there isn't  

a potential rival claimant to come displace him. He implements neutral justice, because he and  

his cronies have no side in that city. They aren't connected with one group  

of families against another. When they implement justice,  

they do so neutrally because they aren't  interested in the local backstory of factions. 

As a result, to everyone's surprise, he  moves into a city, he massacres the rulers,  

he implements an authoritarian regime, and he's  incredibly popular and beloved by the people. 

Everyone says, "Why are they liking this man? He is a cruel, murdering tyrant." 

The answer is, for the first time in generations,  they have something close to fair justice. 

Meaning, it used to be that there was one faction  in power and another faction out of power. 

In our scenario where a carpenter's son gets  drunk and kills someone in a drunken brawl,  

if that carpenter's son is the carpenter of the  power that's in power, then there will be no  

justice and no consequences for this murder. It’ll be maybe the smallest of fines. 

If that carpenter works for the families that  are out of power, then throw the book at him. 

His son will be executed for that death. There will be no fair justice. 

The outcome of the sentence will  be entirely who's in power and  

out of power, not the fairness of the case. But when both of those ruling families have  

been wiped out, and an outside power is here,  and a homicide takes place, the neutral judge  

hears this neutrally and gives the same answer  regardless of whose family's carpenter that is. 

The people who have lived in generations  of "justice for some and injustice for  

others," suddenly having equitable  justice, are delighted by this and  

find that wrongs are finally being punished. The people that they've resented and hated for  

so long who are in power are finally being  punished for the crimes that they commit. 

This makes Valentino's conquering and violent  regime incredibly popular with the everyday people  

of these cities, who are therefore willing to sign  up for his armies and help defend his conquests  

and keep them in power and man his fortresses. So Machiavelli and others are startled by this. 

They had expected that if a conqueror moves in  and massacres the rulers of a city, everyone  

in the city will hate and fear that conqueror. But if the conqueror is feared and not hated,  

because he wiped them out but then was  fair toward the people, then it works. 

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

He would've massacred maybe the ruling regime  at the time, the republic, but I don't know what  

Machiavelli is especially concerned about. Would the cultural treasures of Florence  

and everything have survived? The cultural treasures of Florence  

would potentially have been okay. There's two answers to that. 

One of them is that Machiavelli is very adamant  that if you live such that there is somebody who  

can have you summarily executed—he can walk by  you in the street and point at you and say, "Him,  

kill him," and it happens—then you are not free. In his vocabulary in the text, if you live in a  

state where there is an arbitrary power who  can have you put to death, you are a slave. 

If instead you live in a system where there  must be a trial, and there must be a process,  

and this must be examined and public, if  there is a system, then you have liberty. 

That system may be unfair. It may be biased. It may be,  

in Machiavelli's case, the very  system that tortured and exiled him. 

But there was a system. He considers that difference  

to be enormously important. So if Valentino conquers Florence,  

it's not going to be that system anymore. There will be a man who can walk down the  

street and point at a Florentine citizen  and say, "Kill him," and they will kill him. 

Will that tyrant be fair? Maybe. Will that tyrant exercise this power well? 

Perhaps. Will his successor  be worse or better than him? 

We don't know. We can't predict.  It's a monarchy. It's vulnerable  

to good successors and bad successors. But the people of Florence are not free if  

there exists a man who can say, "Execute him." That meant a lot to Machiavelli, and it meant  

a lot to the Florentine people. It's kind of hard for us to see how  

few liberties and how little franchise  they had and yet how much they cared. 

Florentines are constantly willing to go into  the street and risk their lives flying the  

banner that says "Libertas" across it: liberty. The banner LIBERTAS is the coat of arms of the  

Signoria, the Senate, which is selected from the  1% super mega elite, tiny minority of the city  

that is eligible to be in government. They aren't rioting to defend their  

right to participate in the republic. They're rioting to defend their boss's  

boss's right to be in the republic. Yet they care so deeply about it,  

and they consider it fundamentally  different from the situation in which  

there is a man who can walk down the street  and point at you and say, "Him, kill him." 

That tradition of liberty means a lot and  would be gone even if the most beneficent  

tyrant in the world took the city. So that's half of the answer. 

Can I ask about that real quick? When Lorenzo de' Piero di Medici  

takes over, is he not that guy? That's the second half of the answer. 

There is a huge difference between when the  conqueror is from your city, loves your city,  

and wants to take care of your city, and  when the conqueror is from the outside. 

When the Medici take over Florence, they want  Florence, and they want Florence to be Florence. 

They want all of its beauty and all of its  treasures to still exist and be theirs. 

They would never consider razing  important parts of it to the ground. 

They would never consider  threatening the Florentines with,  

"We will destroy your city walls," or, "We  will destroy your cathedral if you rebel." 

Any outsider would. So Florence looks more  like Florence under a Medici duke than Milan  

looks like Republican Milan under a Visconti  or Sforza duke, or than Ferrara, which has no  

remnants of its republic, does under the dukes  d'Este, who can do anything they want, including  

murderously gouging each other's eyes out and  the city will never take one step against them. 

So Machiavelli is aware that if Florence has  to fall, falling to the Medici is gentlest. 

It’s most volatile perhaps, because they aren't  going to be feared as much as an outside conqueror  

would be feared, but certainly gentlest. You preserve some important rights when  

you're conquered from inside that you  don't when you're conquered from outside. 

Obviously, we remember this period for  producing all these great cultural artifacts,  

all these amazing buildings, all this art. 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 de' Medici spends what would be today,  

because of the expense of building  libraries and buying books, $30 million  

to build a library to educate his grandsons. 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 razed,  at least the ruling faction of it will get killed? 

Half of that answer is finance  is incredibly profitable. 

If you're the banking center, the amount  of money that is flowing in is staggering. 

Big Wool, the big industry for  Florence, is also incredibly wealthy. 

In the same way that Henry Ford becomes  incredibly rich, in a period when a suit  

of clothing is something you save up for  like buying a car, and everybody needs one,  

you can get very rich that way. So, there's lots of money. 

But, do you remember how it's often said  that the biggest impact per dollar for US  

defense spending is the Fulbright Program? Because diplomacy is cheaper than war. 

Sending a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young graduate  student out to a country to enthuse about its  

culture and make connections and make everyone  feel positive does a lot more to avoid conflict,  

and also get help in conflict, than the same  amount of spending on the actual army does. 

Dollar for dollar, diplomacy is cheaper than war. They're using the art to do diplomacy. 

So in one sense, if you're not doing the  art, you would have to spend more on the war. 

It's not that the art is being  made from a surplus of the war. 

It's, "Oh, no, we can't afford enough  armies to actually defend us against France. 

Even if we spent every penny we have on  armies, it would not defend us against France. 

But we sure can spend it on painting fleur-de-lis  all over our seat of government and creating  

beautiful, expensive gifts for the King of  France, so that when the King of France comes,  

he will feel like we are friends and we  are giving him all of this cultural output. 

If we fought him, we would lose. But if we play the culture victory  

game, that's cheaper, and we can try to win." 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 nothing, not even descended from  the Caesars, and they're producing all this stuff. 

When one goes to visit Florence now, the interest  is in part because these are historical artifacts,  

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. Right. They're high-tech then. They're like when  

we look at an incredibly impressive  skyscraper that's taller and more  

precarious and amazing than any past skyscraper. I think that is an underrated aspect of what  

it must have been like to be a foreign  power evaluating Florence at the time. 

Yeah. We have to remind ourselves that these  are high-tech achievements as well as historic  

achievements. Also that this  

is a period in which backwards is forwards. That is to say, this is not a period that,  

like us, thinks of the future  as where potential is, and that  

humanity might get better and better over time. The potential of humanity is recapturing Rome. 

Backwards is forwards. If we can get more  and more like that, that'll be better. 

That's what we aspire to. They do debate: can we surpass the Romans? 

Can we make things even better than the Romans? But it's an "if," it's a debate. 

It's not a "definitely, of course". For us, it's "definitely, of course." 

We're moving forward. We're trying to  build bigger and more impressive things. 

Even people who are cynical about  progress will say, "Yeah, we will be  

more powerful in the future. We'll be able to do more. 

We may use it to stab ourselves in the foot,  but we will be more powerful in the future." 

For them, it's very much: will we ever  be as powerful as the Romans were? 

We don't know. We can debate it. We hope so. We  aspire to it. Will there be another Pax Romana? 

Will there be another universal peace someday? Will we ever achieve that again? 

So when we look at something like Florence's  cathedral or Florence's neoclassical buildings,  

we look at it and we know  they're imitating the past. 

So we don't think of it as  cutting-edge technology. 

But for them, cutting-edge  technology is imitating the past. 

We talked about last time how both Machiavelli  and the other umanisti, 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 shouldn’t fight us? 

You look at actual Roman history,  and it's incredibly fucked up. 

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… 

Part of it is they're zooming  in on different emperors. 

When we want to make an HBO drama,  we don't make it about the boring,  

competent emperors who just do a really good job. Our society might be better off if we did. 

But the dramatic emperors where  there's lots of stabbing and lots  

of orgies make for good television. Everybody curates their history.  

Often when you're writing the history of  your own culture, you pick the heroes. 

You look at a middle school history textbook, it's  going to celebrate the heroes of that country. 

If it's trying hard to be unbiased,  it will also acknowledge the faults,  

but the heroes are going to be in there. When they are trying to create a handbook  

of what was, what stands out for them  is what's different from their present. 

Their present has plenty of tyrants. Their present has plenty of orgies. 

Their present has plenty of massacres. Their present does not have 70 years of peace. 

So that's what stands out as different. I think for us, some of the orgies and  

massacres stand out more because we don't  have as many orgies and massacres now,  

or at least not publicly that we know about. When we do expose that our leaders have been  

involved in scandalous orgies,  we get very upset about it. 

But to them, they read about all of this,  and they read about the successes and the  

stability from Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus  Aurelius, and they say, "That is alien to us. 

That we haven't had in so long. That is what we want to have again." 

So much so that when Gibbon is writing  The History of the Decline and Fall of  

the Roman Empire, in multiple volumes, in  the late 18th century he says that there's  

never been a better time for humanity than  during the era of the five good emperors. 

Yeah and to the degree that medieval Europe  can't cope with the idea that these good  

emperors were also pagans and are therefore  in hell… It’s where you get this gorgeous  

legend that Pope Gregory the Great summoned the  ghost of Trajan and baptized his ghost so that  

he could go to heaven, even though Trajan is a  during-the-persecution-of-the-Christians emperor. 

But they just love him so much,  they can't handle the idea that  

he would be in hell despite being a great Caesar. So in the medieval world, it is canon that Emperor  

Trajan was posthumously baptized so that he could  go to heaven, because he's such a good emperor. 

Dante centers him in Paradiso  as the ideal Christian ruler. 

But he wasn't Christian. He  was persecuting the Christians. 

But medieval and Renaissance Europe are very good  at having their cake and eating it too—in terms  

of getting to pick and choose the best parts  of the pagan world and the best parts of the  

Christian world when constructing their imagined  antiquity—to have both and celebrate both at once. 

Here's something I'm confused about. Machiavelli makes a point of pointing  

out Cesare Borgia's betrayals  because of how remarkable they are. 

For example… Ramiro d’Orco? 

Yes. Slaying the very deputy that he had tasked  with being harsh—and as a result bringing peace to  

a region—for that harshness that he had delegated. Or inviting, as a gesture of goodwill, some people  

who are going to do a revolution against him,  and then killing them all at the banquet. 

But should we take the fact that  he's making a special point—"hey,  

take this kind of betrayal or this kind of deed as  something you should consider doing"—as evidence  

that this was actually rare at the time? Maybe another way to ask the question is,  

to the extent that they are all Christians  at the time, surely they really did believe  

they're going to go to hell if they betray  people or lie or break their oaths, right? 

So just as you were saying a second ago about how  capital punishment was actually less prominent  

at the time than we in retrospect think it to be,  are these kinds of crazy political intrigues less  

common than these stories make them out to be? Two halves to that answer, and I'll do the  

second one first, the second one  being about the religious one. 

They all believe in this religion that says,  "If you do this, you're going to go to hell,"  

and then they all do this. That's something that this  

period really wrestles with. Everybody is sinning and breaking  

their rules all the time: killing for honor,  committing usury, lending money at interest. 

They're all sinning all the time. They're all doing these things  

that are against the rules all the time. People in the period do bring that up and say,  

"Hey, this is not okay." This is one of the big  

focuses of Dante's Commedia. Dante in it says, "Look, when you do  

these things, you will go to hell for them". He fills his hell with Florentines. 

There's that wonderful line where he meets  yet another group of Florentines, and he says,  

"Congratulations, Florence, a city famous in  hell," because he considers his Florentine  

peers to be particularly hypocritical. As he goes through, we see Florentines  

especially in the sections for usury and for  sodomy, but also heretics and unbelievers. 

All through he's encountering his countrymen,  including people he himself loves and respects. 

Because Dante is making this painful point of,  "Guys, it says that if we do this, we go to hell. 

I'm going to make a book  where that's literally true." 

One of the chapters of Inferno that hits  extra hard in his period and in ours is  

Canto V, where he's encountering the  lustful, and we see Paolo and Francesca. 

Paolo and Francesca is a story that was an  incredibly popular love story at the time. 

There was a young, beautiful noblewoman  who had an older, horrible husband. 

While he was away, there was also this wonderful,  handsome, young nobleman who visited her,  

and they read the romantic stories about  King Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot. 

One thing led to another, and  they committed adultery together. 

Then her husband came home and  found them and murdered them both. 

Everyone loves this story. It  is the ubiquitous love story. 

It's their cultural equivalent to  Romeo and Juliet, a touchstone story. 

People sing songs about it. Everyone knows this exciting love tragedy. 

And he puts them in hell because  they were guilty of adultery. 

It's really shocking to everyone who  has celebrated this love story. "No,  

if this is true, and this is our religion,  then this is where they would be." 

Dante is very stern and very strict  and very unusual, and starts a lot of  

discussion of this question. "We're  breaking these rules all the time. 

Should we just take this  more seriously than we have?" 

He says, "Repent, or you will all  go to hell, my fellow citizens." 

So they're worried about that. But another part of it is that Christianity  

as practiced then has much less of a  focus on purity than the Christianity  

that especially America is used to, and also  the Protestant-dominated parts of Europe. 

There was a big change in Christianity that  comes in the course of the Reformation,  

primarily from Calvin, Calvinism, and then  Puritanism, which has a greater focus on  

trying to live an unspotted and pure life. It’s the idea of, "we're going to create  

a community of people who are all going  to stick to the rules and live by them. 

And if you are a sinner and have broken these  rules, you should be expelled from this community. 

You are impure, you are stained." That is not the way  

Christianity thinks in this period. The assumption is everybody sins all the time. 

There is no such thing as purity. Everybody sins every five minutes. 

Everybody is envious. Everybody is lustful.  Everybody is slothful. Everybody will make  

these mistakes, and then you repent of them,  and you feel sorry, and you do penance,  

and you make spiritual progress, and you  are forgiven, and then you sin again. 

Everybody sins. St. Francis of Assisi sins. He had a big focus on himself as a sinner  

and was constantly self-flagellating despite  being, in many ways, the most virtuous man in  

all of Europe, but stressing his own sin. So one saint who's super popular in the  

Renaissance who is not very popular today is St.  Julian the Hospitaller, patron saint of murderers. 

He is the patron saint of murderers because  his legend is an Oedipus-like legend. 

When he was born, he was cursed by a witch that  when he grew up, he would slay his parents. 

He runs far away hoping that he will never  encounter his parents and so not meet them. 

But eventually he feels homesick and comes home,  and is tricked by the devil into slaughtering his  

parents, and he slaughters his parents. He spends the rest of his life trying  

to make up for it, going on pilgrimage, and  then dedicating his life to running pilgrim  

hostels to help others be pilgrims. He is the patron saint for people who  

have committed murder and feel really sorry  and need to live with it and repent of it. 

That's not the attitude we have  toward murderers right now. 

Our cultural attitude toward murderers  is, "That person is a murderer. 

They should be shunned. They should be locked in  a box without the key, or they should be executed. 

They should be removed from society. There is no turning back from homicide." 

But the Renaissance's idea is sometimes  you have to commit homicide, and then  

what's important is that you feel sorry. You need to have a patron saint whose  

job it is to be a spiritual mentor  for you, he too committed homicide. 

He committed a worse homicide than you  did, because he killed his parents. 

If he went on a spiritual journey to  recover from being a murderer, so can you. 

There are dozens and dozens and dozens of icons  of St. Julian all over Renaissance Florence. 

Everywhere you go and you see one, you're like,  "That was commissioned by somebody who committed  

a homicide and is trying to live with it." This is a society that really thinks about  

sin as something you do, and  then you pay for it afterward. 

And people like Dante and Savonarola come  to people and say, "No, this is not okay. 

You are perverting these things. No, you cannot put your family's coat  

of arms all over the inside of a church, turning  the church into an advertisement for your banking  

business when it should be a place of God. That's inappropriate, and no,  

God will not forgive you for it." And society says, "Yeah, well, but  

God forgives maybe anything if we repent a lot." So it's a complicated, sophisticated hypocrisy  

that builds up a lot of apparatus to  let the society's actions be at odds  

with its religious precepts to that degree. We're going to need dozens and eventually  

hundreds of gigawatts of new AI datacenters. The only way to achieve this at scale is to turn  

the datacenter build-out into an industrial  process — basically manufacturing modular  

components that you can literally slide  into position wherever there's power. 

Crusoe is furthest along at making this happen. Crusoe has a 350,000 square foot factory in  

Colorado where they assemble their  Spark units: modular AI datacenters  

with everything already pre-built. High-density racks, power, cooling,  

fire suppression, you name it. Crusoe actually manufactures  

a lot of these components in-house. This allows them to sidestep long lead  

times on components like switchgear  and power distribution centers. 

All of this, of course, would be moot  if Crusoe still had to wait years to  

connect each module to the grid. But they don't. Crusoe has a ton of experience connecting their  

datacenters to alternative energy sources. For example, Crusoe has a site in Nevada  

powered by Redwood Materials that runs  completely on solar and used EV batteries. 

They're actually in the process of expanding  it, adding in a couple dozen more Spark  

units from their Colorado facility. So if you want AI capacity that's not  

fully dependent on grid availability or strained  supply chains, you should reach out to Crusoe. 

Go to crusoe.ai/dwarkesh to learn more. I couldn't get enough of Ada or of Machiavelli,  

and so there are a few more  questions I wanted to ask you. 

Thanks for hopping on again. Oh, my treat. 

We didn't talk last time about the  fact that Machiavelli was exiled. 

He's writing these books in exile. We were talking about his diplomatic  

career, so maybe you can give a bit of  context around how he ends up in exile,  

and what his plan is once he's there. Here we have to start with the fact that everybody  

who's anybody in the intellectual  tradition lives in exile for a while. 

Dante does. Voltaire does. Rousseau does. Thomas  Hobbes does. Machiavelli does. More importantly,  

exile is a very common thing in Florence and  doesn’t have the permanence that one expects. 

In Florence, exile means the people who are in  charge of the regime distrust you right now. 

They want you out of the city,  but they're testing your loyalty. 

They're testing whether you will stay true to  them, and you're told not, "Get out of the city,"  

like a Roman exile, but, "Go to a specific place. Go to London. Go to Bruges. Go here. Stay there,  

and we will send you instructions." You're expected to act as a kind  

of unofficial official emissary for the  government of Florence while in your exile. 

You'll be asked to do diplomatic  missions after a while. 

They'll say, "Go talk to this person on our  behalf," or, "Go deliver this trusted letter." 

If you're good and you behave, then  after some years of service to the  

republic, you'll be recalled. So it's a provisional exile. 

They pick a specific place to send you, and if you  go and are good and do what they say, then after  

a while, they consider bringing you home. If you don't–if you leave and you don't  

stay where they said, if you run off to  work for someone else—then you're not  

allowed back in Florence anymore. You're an exile at this point. 

Machiavelli's exile is unusual  because they really don't trust him. 

So they don't send him to Bruges or London or  Barcelona or the Germanies or any number of other  

places where he actually has political contacts. They send him to a middle-of-nowhere hamlet in  

the countryside outside of Florence  in Tuscany, where there is nobody  

important and there is nothing to do. This isn't a "go wait for instructions." 

This is a "go rot and we're testing whether  you will faithfully stay and do basically  

nothing and be forbidden to talk to  important people, be in isolation." 

When that exile is given, everybody expects  that Machiavelli's response will be, "Okay. 

They're not giving me even a second chance. I'm going to run off and work for somebody else." 

Because there are a jillion people in Europe  who would love to employ a skillful classicist  

historian with military and diplomatic capacities  who has political contacts in Rome and in  

France and has visited the court of the emperor. He could have worked for any number of cardinals. 

He could have gotten a very prestigious  diplomatic job in any of a dozen courts. 

A Florentine historian especially is something  that you absolutely want to hire to write a  

flattering history of your own family. For even a century before this, kings  

as far away as England had been trying to hire  Florentine historians to come write about them. 

So he could easily do this, and this  is what is expected, and he doesn't. 

Machiavelli says, "No. I'm going to stay, and I'm  going to rot, and I'm going to write The Prince,  

which is my job application begging  the new regime to bring me back and  

let me work for them and demonstrating my  loyalty, and I'm going to send it to them  

and only them, them and my immediate friends. I'm not going to share it with anybody else." 

Because Machiavelli is a patriot, and he will  not serve any cause that is not his country. 

No matter whether the pay at a royal court  somewhere would be three times what he would  

ever get at home, that doesn't matter to him. No matter whether this is the regime that  

just arrested, tortured, and exiled  him despite him not having plotted  

against them, he wants to work for that. Because Machiavelli fundamentally is possibly one  

of the most patriotic patriots in Earth's history. He will faithfully sit in the countryside and rot  

while begging to work for the people who  ordered his torture, so long as they will  

recall him so that he can serve his country. And this connects to the question we always ask  

about the target audience of The Prince, because  his other work—his discourses, his histories, his  

comedic play—those were for public circulation. Those increased his fame. Those made important  

arguments. His history of Florence joined other  important histories of Florence circulating,  

influencing the way people thought about politics. Not The Prince. The Prince is  

secret and proprietary, the secret  sauce of how to maintain power. 

He will not let any other power have that. It's like a nuclear scientist with diplomatic  

secrets who is faithful to his country  and will not sell out and let those  

secrets fall into other hands. Machiavelli knows that he has the  

beginnings of a new world of political science. He will only share that with the government of  

his country because he wants it to protect his  country, and he will not serve any other cause. 

This is why it's so weirdly ironic to me that  the reputation—the word "Machiavellian"—means  

"self-serving", when Machiavelli himself  is one of the most selfless men I've ever  

read about in the history of the Earth. He will give up and sacrifice career,  

diplomacy, fame, friends, the opportunity to  even be in a city and have a nice day, to rot  

in the countryside to be faithful to his country. He would rather serve nothing and no one than give  

an hour of his time to advancing  anything that is not Florence. 

You're making the point that he is advocating a  viciousness and a realism and a cynicism, but in  

service of protecting Florence, not in service  of a generic prince of any generic principality. 

Exactly, and he doesn't let copies of it  circulate to anybody but the rulers of  

Florence and his immediate scholarly,  social, intimate circle of friends,  

people that he's known for decades who are scholar  peers who have discussed his ideas with him. 

That's the audience of The  Prince during his lifetime. 

Does he expect that at some point  it will be more widely distributed? 

Is he writing in a way that suggests that? It is a literary masterpiece as well. 

I've only read, obviously, the translation, so I  don't know what it's like in the original Italian. 

But somebody putting in that much literary  effort into something that is just supposed  

to be a very pragmatic manual for a  particular person seems a bit weird. 

We have to remember this is a moment of transition  from the manuscript to the print period,  

and also therefore an important moment of  transition in what makes a written work  

important and how that written work is important  to the career of someone who's written it. 

It's a normal thing in Machiavelli's youth for a  major important scholar like, say, Pontano, one of  

the greatest scholars of the previous generation,  to be hired to write a handbook of princes that  

will exist in just one copy or three or four  copies that are written for a specific prince. 

For example, you have King Alfonso of Naples,  the Spanish king who conquered Naples,  

Alfonso the Magnanimous, made famous for  his vast patronage of arts and letters and  

for carefully cultivated personal anecdotes. There’s a moment when he was in the middle of  

fighting a war and a messenger rushed into  his room, sweaty and covered with things,  

to interrupt the king's morning time with  his scholar friends discussing Plato. 

The king turned angrily on the  messenger and said, "Get out. 

This is a place for men in togas, not for  men in armor," and refused to listen to  

the urgent message until he'd finished his  hour of scholarly contemplation of the soul. 

As a result of which, he lost that  battle but actually won the war. 

His reputation cultivated by  anecdotes like that make him beloved. 

He will pay a salary five times what  the Republic of Florence will pay to  

hire somebody like Machiavelli. What does he hire them to do? 

He has a lot of children, princes and  princesses, and he commissions a scholar  

to write a unique bespoke handbook of how to  rule and use power for each of his children. 

These exist in manuscript only in one copy or  three copies, and the addressee is the Duchess  

of Ferrara, who is a daughter of King Alfonso. That book is never intended to circulate. 

It's intended to be private  guidance for her and for her to  

perhaps pass on to her sons and daughters. Meanwhile, the author's fame is magnified  

by being told the special bespoke handbook of  princes cultivated secretly for this important  

princess was written by so and so. That's so cool, and letters circulate  

and let you know that it's happening. In the same way that a scientist might  

become famous because we know he's developing cool  proprietary technology that only his government  

has, but we know that it's happening, we have to  think of these books as proprietary technology. 

In that sense, it's not an unusual thing  to write a book with an audience of one,  

or an audience of one and her immediate circle. This is also one of the moments where the handbook  

of princes also means for women. The title of that book for the  

princess who becomes Duchess of Ferrara  addresses her as a prince, because prince  

is a gender-neutral word at this point. It's lexically masculine in terms of ending,  

the same way a table is feminine,  but prince is used for men and women. 

Even Queen Elizabeth is Prince  Elizabeth at this period of her life. 

That is so fascinating. We have trouble wrapping our heads around  

the idea of writing a book for an audience of one. It's just not what a book is to us. 

The funny thing is, I think we are entering a  new era where that might be once again possible. 

It already is somewhat true, where  at least half of the words I read on  

a given day are generated specifically  for me and nobody else, because of AI. 

Obviously, AI is not capable of writing  something which I think would be a literary  

masterpiece that everybody would want to  read if they had access to it just yet. 

But eventually it will be. So it's interesting to consider  

that as this knowledge progresses, it would bring  us back to this era of bespoke scholars dedicated  

to a particular prince. It's important to  

remember that that never went away. Two halves of that. One, for ages it's  

been true that half of the words we read every day  are bespoke only for us, because they're email. 

They're letters. They're the correspondence  back and forth which has the audience of one,  

the addressee, and that's the majority of  what all of us read and write in our lives. 

It's also always been the case that in the  halls of power, there are book-long things  

with an audience of one or an audience of five. There are historians and other scholars and  

scientists whose job is to provide that  100-page report on the history of Syria,  

to be given to a committee of Congress, where  these nine senators or these nine congresspeople  

need the background on what's happening so that  they can understand a current events thing. 

There are historian friends of mine who work  for the Department of Defense Intelligence,  

who produce these book-length research projects  with an audience of five or an audience of eight  

or an audience of a couple dozen, because  it is the bespoke proprietary knowledge  

needed by the government at that moment. Sometimes it's technological knowledge,  

but just as often it's going to be historical  knowledge of, "Here are the important rivers  

where military things are likely to happen," says  the historian who knows the history of this stuff. 

That actually brings up the question of  how many such tracts through history,  

which are of the quality of The Prince—as original  at their time as The Prince is and as wonderfully  

crafted and so on—have been lost to history? Maybe one way to answer this question or  

think about it is to talk about how The  Prince itself went into mass publishing. 

At some point in 1532, the Medici pope allows  for its publishing, and then 27 years later,  

it is censored by that same papacy. So how does this book that Machiavelli  

himself did not want out in wide  circulation end up in wide circulation  

and then stop ending up in wide circulation  and then end up in wide circulation again? 

It goes in and out and in and out,  like a lot of important works. 

I'll give the zoomed out answer and then  the zoomed in answer to that question. 

It is often the case that a work which contains  radically unusual ideas will drift along being  

not particularly zoomed in on by society and not  widely read, until it hits a moment that the new  

questions being asked in that century or that  decade are answered by something in that text. 

Then suddenly everyone will start reading it. A different example of this, probably well  

known to the audience, because everyone  here is a cool, smart, learned person,  

is Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, De rerum  natura, which is our best capsule of ancient  

atomism and the atoms and vacuum theory of matter. It's written around the BC/AD turn, and drifts  

along being not very important for ages, until the  1600s when we're getting the first ideas of germ  

theory of disease, very interested in new science. Suddenly it gets 30 print editions and is all over  

the place and influences science, and is  even more influential in the 19th century  

when we're interested in atoms and cells. So a book can exist for literally 2,000  

years or close to it, and then suddenly  answer the questions of that decade. 

In that sense, The Prince will drift along  and be not very important for a while. 

Why is it first published? It's first published when Machiavelli's  

still surviving relatives want fame for the family  and fame for their beloved now dead kinsman. 

Here is a work of his that  hasn't been published yet. 

They ask for permission because  this can spread his fame. 

It's also dedicated to members of the Medici  family, so the Medici are like, "Yeah,  

we get fame for publishing this thing too." They don't think as seriously about the  

power of its contents as its author did. And so it's one more book that can spread  

the fame both of the Machiavelli  family and of the Medici family,  

and it goes around, and people are like, "Oh,  that's actually full of fairly scandalous ideas. 

Hmm." That’s how it then ends up on  the index as book censorship kicks  

up as a result of the printing press. Mini thesis: every time there's a new  

information technology, there's a subsequent wave  of censorship to try to censor the new technology,  

and a bajillion books get banned all at once. Machiavelli's is not a particularly prominent  

example among this. The index of banned books  

that contains his work carefully differentiates  between the dangerous books by arch-heretics  

and the slightly dangerous books by meh  people, and arch-heretics are in all caps. 

I remember when I was first reading through  one of these indexes, I was so excited to  

flip through and find Machiavelli, and there  he was, not in all caps, and I was so angry. 

I was like, "What's wrong with that? He should be in all caps." 

But all the all caps people are Luther,  Calvin, Zwingli, a bajillion Protestant  

theologians you've never heard of. All-caps arch-heretic status is  

reserved for Protestantism in this period. Machiavelli doesn't catch on until later. 

So he's censored in a wave of censoring  everything, when there's a big censorious wave,  

and then it diminishes and goes up and down. The second zoomed-in half of that: if we say  

Lucretius becomes exciting when people want  to know about the germ theory of disease,  

when does Machiavelli become exciting? Machiavelli becomes exciting first in  

the aftermath of the publication of Hobbes's  Leviathan, because Hobbes's Leviathan hits  

European thought like a truck full of bricks. It has this incredibly persuasive,  

gorgeous reasoning that lands you on a  terrifying vision of what humanity is and  

a terrifying vision of what God is that people  find very scary, but also incredibly persuasive. 

It's no exaggeration to say that in the aftermath  of publishing Leviathan, there's a 40-year period  

where the sole goal of Western European philosophy  is coming up with a good way to refute Hobbes. 

At that moment, they say, "Okay, Hobbes is  using a lot of logics about politics and  

about history that sound like Machiavelli." He's doing these utilitarian consequentialist  

analyses of "if we do this, there's that result". He's analyzing the origins of government  

as if there's no divinity setting it up. He has this man in a state of nature inventing  

government instead of God from on high telling  Adam, "Here is how you should organize the world." 

So they say, "Okay, Hobbes is the monster. Hobbes is Leviathan the great, or the beast  

of Malmesbury," as newspapers  call him during his lifetime. 

How do we refute the monster? Let's look at the daddy monster  

that spawned the baby monster. If we can read Machiavelli and  

find holes in Machiavelli, maybe  we can use those to refute Hobbes. 

So Machiavelli is suddenly useful not to people  who sympathize with him, but to people who see  

him as an enemy and want to use him to try  to defeat what to them is the greater enemy. 

So he surges in popularity at that point. A different surge happens in the 19th century,  

and it's not until the 19th century that  Machiavelli's Prince becomes a major global  

staple that you would put in a great book series. In the 19th century, in the aftermath of the  

Enlightenment and the Enlightenment's  revolutions—the American Republic,  

the French Republic, the transformations and  democratic movements that are happening in  

lots of other governments—people want new ways to  think about politics, and they want to think about  

politics in separation of church and state. If you want to think about separation  

of church and state, which is a new  Enlightenment-era value, what do you need? 

You need an apparatus for thinking  about politics and ethics that  

doesn't depend on God being part of it. The vast majority of political treatises  

available to humanity at that point have some  sort of entanglement of religion with politics  

at their root, but Machiavelli doesn't. Machiavelli is this early foundational  

"what if we think about government in  a box without plugging into religion? 

What if we just think about government operating  by itself and its earthly consequences?" 

It's incredibly useful in the 19th  century for developing a statecraft  

for separation of church and state. It's also useful for Italian  

nationalism to celebrate and claim, "Hey,  we invented separation of church and state. 

Here's Machiavelli, the first modern man. He's our bid at ‘Italian culture invented  

modernity’ via Machiavelli." At the same time, England is  

saying Francis Bacon is the first modern man  because he invented the scientific method. 

At the same time, France is saying  René Descartes was the first modern  

man because he invented logical reasoning  and modern principles of logical deduction. 

There's a competition in the  19th century, a nationalist one,  

of different countries that want to claim  their cool thinker as the first modern man. 

Machiavelli becomes one of Italy's big  bids for the first modern man because he  

came up with separation of church and state. It’s a phrase that Machiavelli would not have  

recognized if you said it to him, but he would  have thought about it for a long time, decided it  

was cool, and then written letters about it. Can I try out a counter-thesis just so you  

can dispel my confusion? One reason why Machiavelli  

might have gained a special significance in  the 19th century is that now that you have  

these republics in the world, there's a question  of how you make sure that they are maintained. 

That is really the question that at least the  first third of the Discourses is obsessed with. 

But one of the ways it says that you do  this is by having a religion that people  

take into very strong consideration. I think he says at some point early in  

the Discourses that more significant than  Romulus in the founding of Rome was Numa,  

or whoever it was who was the prophet who gave the  Roman gods and the Roman religion some legitimacy. 

Then it is this legitimacy and the fear  of offending virtues, because you believe  

in some god that will punish you, that motivates  people to act in a way that defends the republic. 

He gives the example of Scipio  after the battle in which Hannibal  

absolutely destroys the Roman armies. The people are about to flee Rome  

as a result because they think Hannibal's coming. Scipio himself, with his sword, goes down and  

says, "Swear to our gods that you  will stay and defend our homeland." 

Just having them give the oath in that  moment is enough to convince them,  

"Hannibal can't be worse than the gods, so I  have to stay here and defend our republic." 

It seems like he thinks that religion is super  important to the legitimacy of the state. 

Agreed. He's thinking about it in a way  parallel to the way late 18th-century,  

19th-century figures are also thinking about it. We have to separate the institution of religion  

from the psychological effect  of religion on the populace. 

The useful example here is Thomas Paine. We all know Thomas Paine's "Common Sense". 

Thomas Paine does a lot of thinking about  the foundation of the institutions of the US. 

Thomas Paine is a deist and a radical. He has lots of treatises about how the  

most destructive force in the  world is institutional religion. 

Whether it's Catholicism or the Church  of England, these institutions are giant,  

centuries-old or millennia-old conspiracies  to control your mind and steal your money,  

and are incredibly pernicious to everything. However, he says, religion is vital to  

citizenship because it is what makes people  be good and is what makes people fear laws  

and want to obey the laws. So, says Thomas Paine,  

every country must have religion, and  religious education must be mandatory  

in schools, but it doesn't matter which religion. Thomas Paine advocated mandatory religion in total  

indifference to what religion it is, with the  idea that fearing God and posthumous punishment  

is necessary to make a citizen, in a  practical sense, willing to obey law. 

Notice how that is Paine thinking in a  utilitarian way about the psychological  

effects of religion being there. It's very different from the  

older view that the state and a state  religion are entangled with each other. 

The state promotes this state religion  because it believes it to be true,  

and we're going to have a Christian nationalist or  Catholic nationalist or Roman paganism nationalist  

religion that advances X against others. So Machiavelli is absolutely thinking about the  

psychological effects of a religion on the people. He has that wonderful analysis in the Discourses  

of the utility of Roman religion. He talks in one really striking and  

memorable passage about how Roman religion says  that your ghost depends on being remembered. 

This is out of the Homeric tradition. Your ghost only retains its identity to the  

degree you are still remembered on Earth. If on Earth your name is forgotten,  

your ghost forgets its name. This is not a "your ghost is  

okay forever," like in Christianity. It is a "your ghost depends on being  

honored by your descendants on Earth." When you are forgotten, your soul becomes  

an empty, mindless, wandering shade. Therefore, you have an incredibly strong  

incentive to be remembered by doing great deeds,  especially sacrificing yourself for your country,  

because then your name will be honored  for as long as your country lasts. 

Machiavelli says this is one of the big  motivators that makes people sacrifice  

themselves for the state in ancient Rome, because  then they're guaranteeing their good afterlife. 

While Christianity, he points out, says all  that matters for a good afterlife is being  

pious and then ideally being martyred. You have no incentive to sacrifice  

yourself for your state. The safety of your afterlife  

is guaranteed by your interiority. This is going to encourage a citizen  

to sit in a box and be a monk, not to sign  up for the military and defend his country. 

So, says Machiavelli, Roman religion  was much better for patriotism and  

political stability than Christianity. But he says at the end of the chapter,  

"Christianity has the advantage of  being true," period, end of chapter. 

You'd say, "Hello, Machiavelli, we know  that you had the mandatory subscript there." 

So think about Thomas Paine  and Machiavelli in parallel. 

They're thinking about the utility  of religion for forming a citizen,  

but they're not thinking about "this religion  is true, we are doing God's work, we need  

to craft our state to match the values of our  religion," which is what a theocrat would argue. 

What you have is separation  of church and state with the  

expectation that religiosity will be there. It will affect the people, it will affect the  

citizenry and their behavior. You need to think about it. 

You need to decide whether to cultivate it, but  you need to think about it in the same neutral  

way you think about cultivating literacy  skills or math skills in your citizenry. 

What skills do we want our citizenry to  have for them to be well-informed citizens? 

What do we need? We need religion  and we need good newspapers so that  

people are up on the news and can vote prudently. You are evaluating those things side by side from  

a utilitarian standpoint instead of "this religion  is true, it is the obligation of our government  

to advance it, and our government expects to  receive divine blessings if we advance the  

correct religion, and divine curses if we don't." It’s a radically different way of thinking about  

religion, while still recognizing it as a powerful  factor affecting the psychology of the populace. 

That makes sense. Last episode we were  talking about the psychological impact  

on scholarship of having books be so  expensive and having to meditate on  

the same copies that are available in one library. Maybe Machiavelli's 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. 

As a result—correct this story for me—his dad  has to do months of drudge work indexing Livy  

in order to get a copy of Livy. In the infancy of printing,  

books are scarce and few. For example, one of my favorite  

manuscripts ever that I've worked with is  a copy of Lucretius in Machiavelli's hand. 

He copied out the entire poem. This is in the Vatican library. 

But what's really neat is he copied  the text from a printed copy. 

But as he copied it, he integrated  into it corrections and improvements of  

errors in that one, taken from a manuscript copy,  so that what he produced was better than either  

the printed version or the manuscript version. And then he made his marginal comments as he went. 

But notice this is somebody who, even  though print copies of this book exist,  

is so much in the manuscript world that he's happy  to spend months probably copying out and making  

his own custom improved version of this text that  he can then work from, even though inevitably new  

print copies will come out in a few years that may  have the very corrections that he's working with. 

But he isn't going to wait for that, and  he's not sure, so he makes his version. 

So he's from this moment when  print and manuscript are parallel  

technologies being used at the same time. The very people who are buying the first  

printed books are also producing  manuscripts imitating those printed  

books and influenced by those printed books. 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—has on his intellectual development. We have this mode of scholarship at the time. 

Why does he spend two decades  writing Discourses on Livy? 

Unlike us—where we can go through an audiobook a  week or read our Kindle at night— he's presumably  

just reading this book again and again and  again, and is trying to connect it to the events  

he's seeing in his own life on his 10th reread. So that I feel is very interesting psychologically  

in understanding how scholarship and  intellectual thought must have been  

different at that time as compared to now. Machiavelli can easily access other books  

by visiting friends, by asking to go to  the library of his Medici patrons when  

he's working for the Medici, of his Soderini  patrons when he's working for the Soderini. 

But that's different from having it at home and  being able to have it at your bedside and look at  

it at all hours and have this intimacy with it,  and it's your father's copy and it's your copy. 

There’s another part of that though, and this  is weird for modern people to understand. 

In the Renaissance, there is so  much enthusiasm for antiquity. 

Antiquity is the cutting-edge thing. Antiquity is where it's at. 

Antiquity is how we're going to end the chaos of  the previous world and have this new world where  

we're basing everything on ancient Rome. There's going to be peace. 

There's going to be a golden age. It's all coming from and imitating antiquity. 

Therefore, if your book is a comment on an  ancient, it is going to be way more popular  

and sell way better, and people will care more and  think more of you than if your ideas are original. 

Nobody wants original ideas.  Original ideas are out of vogue. 

Original ideas are dead. All ideas  need to be from the ancients. 

So a Renaissance scholar will bend over backwards  to pretend that his beautiful original ideas are  

actually Livy or are actually Plato, or to  couch them as a commentary on these things. 

That's going to have a way bigger  audience and be more popular and  

taken more seriously than if it's original. So there are points where Giordano Bruno,  

in his commentaries on Aristotle, claims that  Aristotle says things absolutely Aristotle does  

not, the opposite of what Aristotle says. But if he claims it's Aristotle,  

people will take it more seriously. The most extreme version of this is  

the brilliant and fascinating figure of Annius of  Viterbo, who Tony Grafton has a great book about. 

Annius of Viterbo had this radical  vision of how he wanted to rethink  

history and faked ancient texts. He made them up. He faked archaeological  

digs. He would secretly bury artifacts  and then dig them up to great drama. 

And he forged antiquities to create this book  that advanced his visionary original idea of  

ancient history, because if he pretended he  got it from antiquity, people would take it  

more seriously than if it was an original book. So Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy are his big  

bid to have a popular, important, prestigious  thing, because discourses on Livy are a bigger  

deal and more important and more interesting  to everybody, and more likely to sell and get  

attention, than a Florentine history or a  treatise of original thought on princes. 

Who wants that? That's a very niche  kind of thing. "Discourses on Livy,  

oh, exciting, we have to have this." This goes on for the next century. 

For example, huge amounts of radical political  thought, including, believe it or not,  

commentaries on Machiavelli, happen in the  footnotes in editions of Seneca and Livy. 

The text of Seneca will be a small square in  the middle of the page, and then there'll be  

these masses of footnotes and commentary. Huge original moments of political thought  

for the entirety of the 1600s are going on  in wars, in footnotes, in editions of Seneca. 

But it's not original thought. It's all about Seneca, because  

that was what was in vogue then. The vogue of scholarly stuff  

shifts fast and is very interesting. This is one of the weird reasons that Renaissance  

philosophy and Renaissance innovative thought—with  the exception of a couple of oddball works like  

The Prince—gets pushed out of the history of  philosophy, especially in the 19th century. 

Because when you get to the 19th century, the  vogue is that everything has to be original. 

The philosopher's ideas should be born like  Athena, fully formed from the head of Zeus. 

The ideal philosopher lives in a cabin by the  raging sea, contemplating in the wilderness. 

What they want is original treatises. If you look at a 19th-century historian of  

philosophy, they'll say, "in the Renaissance,  there was almost no original thought." 

There was Machiavelli's Prince, and there  was maybe a little bit of Giovanni Pico  

della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of  Man. (We have since proved it's not an oration  

and it's not about the dignity of man.) These  things are the few lights in the darkness, and  

everything else in Renaissance philosophy is... Here's a quote from a philosophy department person  

who actually said this to me: "The Renaissance  is 200 years of people being wrong about Plato." 

A lot of people look at it, and you pick up  Ficino, and he's like, "Plato said these things." 

You're like, "No, Plato totally  did not say those things at all. 

That's absolute gibberish.  No, Plato didn't say that. 

What are you saying, Ficino?" If you think Ficino is what he  

says he is, a commentary on Plato, then  indeed the Renaissance is 200 years of  

people being wrong about Plato, being wrong  about Livy, being wrong about Aristotle. 

But if you realize that their style  guide requires original thought to be  

presented in the form of a commentary on an  ancient, what it is is 200 years of original  

thought using the ancients as the trellis  up which the rose climbs in order to bloom. 

When you restore that and recognize that  in order to get at the real Renaissance,  

you need to not read the goofy outlier  works like Machiavelli's Prince, which  

present themselves as original—which is a weird  thing to do—but read the commentaries on Livy. 

That's where the original stuff is hidden,  by pretending and claiming and sometimes  

sincerely convincing themselves that this is the  secret coded true meaning of the ancient thing. 

Like Ficino, the translator of Plato, definitely  genuinely believes that all of the incredibly  

original cosmology and magic that he's figured  out is secretly coded in Plato, and he's wrong. 

It's not. It's so adorable that  he really, really believes it is. 

But what it is is an incredibly original  vision of the universe that he got from  

reading Plato and thinking hard about  it and combining it with other things. 

So he presents it as commentary on Plato,  commentary on Dionysius the Areopagite. 

That's core to why this is a discourse  on Livy, because a discourse on Livy is  

what a scholar is supposed to be doing. All the other things Machiavelli does are  

second-tier weird things for a scholar to  be doing on the side of discourses on Livy. 

So adult Machiavelli is now seeing some  of his work start to get mass-produced. 

What is his reaction to this? At first excitement, but also horror, because  

Machiavelli is facing this fascinating moment in  the history of being an author when printing has  

come into being, but there isn't copyright yet. In the manuscript period,  

there's no such thing as copyright. If you find out that someone has made a  

copy of your book, you say, "Oh, thank God. There's another copy of my book." 

That reduces the chances of it being  completely destroyed in a fire. 

Making one copy of a book is six  months of incredibly difficult labor. 

You're just grateful every  time a text is reproduced. 

But when it comes to printing,  then you have this experience,  

which Machiavelli is one of the first men ever  to have, of finding out that a local printer  

is printing a work of his without ever having  asked him, without ever having talked to him. 

He looks at it, and it's full  of typos and minor errors. 

He's panicking in these letters and saying, "Oh,  no, everyone's going to think I'm a bad scholar. 

There are all these little mistakes  in the text, and they aren't me. 

They're the compositor having made typos when  setting it up, and no one will know that. 

They'll blame me, and it'll destroy my reputation. What do I do? There's nothing I can do because  

there's no legal process and no legal recourse. Printing has just come into being." 

It's neat seeing him and friends  writing to each other about, "What  

can I do about the fact that this printer  has printed my book without asking me?" 

There is no law. There is no apparatus. There  is no anything. His friends are like, "Well,  

write letters to everybody who matters  and tell them that the typos aren't you. 

That's all I can suggest," because they don't  have the idea of authorial copyright yet. 

It's going to come in the next couple decades. 

The weird thing is how this  gets entangled with censorship. 

Copyright and censorship are born  together in Machiavelli's world,  

counterintuitively, from the Inquisition. When the Inquisition begins book censorship  

after 1515, which is during Machiavelli's  lifetime, the policy that the Catholic  

Church promulgates is: before you may print  any text, you must take it to an authority  

licensed by the church to do this—meaning an  inquisitor or a bishop—and they must read it  

and give permission for it to be printed. This is so that they can make  

sure there isn't heresy in it. So all books are effectively born pre-banned  

until you get permission for them to be printed. In return for this, you get a monopoly license,  

and only the printer that took the  book through the process can print it. 

You may now use the actual Inquisition record  of you having gone through censorship as the  

document to prove that you and only  you have the right to print the book. 

Therefore you can sue people for plagiarizing  it or printing an unauthorized edition. 

So the very first version of  copyright is the Inquisition. 

Places outside the Catholic world  then, like England, look at this. 

There's actually popular demand in England  for censorship, when they say, "Hey,  

we need what the Inquisition does,  because the Inquisition is so cool. 

They let printers have a monopoly on printing a  book, and they let authors deny print permission. 

We need something like that." The very first version of what  

is not yet copyright passed in England—which  is of course the ancestor of what applies in  

all Commonwealth nations and in the US—was  originally an imitation of the Inquisition. 

It was: you need a license before you can print  your thing, and then in return you get a monopoly. 

Later, when there was a freedom of the press  push—and by later, I mean this is happening  

over the course of the first half of the 1600s,  so about a century after Machiavelli's death,  

it takes a century for all this to get ironed  out—the first version of copyright law is them  

basically saying, "Okay, we're going to keep  the copyright half of censorship while getting  

rid of the censorship half of censorship, or  changing the censorship half of censorship." 

But it's all born out of the  Inquisition having met this  

weird demand that you feel in Machiavelli,  where he's like, "They printed my book. 

They did a bad job. There's nothing I can do. 

Help. Authorities, give me some  way to do something about this." 

So that's where you can feel Machiavelli as one  of the first generation that needs copyright,  

which will then be born in the aftermath. Fascinating. And what was the Inquisition's  

incentive to enforce the  author's prerogative on the text? 

Partly the Inquisition does it because  that encourages authors to come to them. 

It makes people much more willing  to collaborate with their process. 

But also, think of an individual Inquisitor as  an individual person who lives in a place and  

needs to have relationships in that  place, and needs to have an income,  

and who is not usually getting enough  to live on from the Inquisition itself. 

If you're working for the Inquisition,  you're an officer of the Inquisition,  

you're probably a Dominican monk. You get some support from the monastery,  

but you have reason to want money,  and you have family, they want money. 

You're as pragmatic and self-serving  as any other average human. 

So the fact that people want to have this  positive relationship with you, they might gift  

you some bottles of wine in return for you being  extra generous in your reading of their text. 

They also have to negotiate with authorities. The Inquisition wants us to think of it as very  

centralized and very monopolar—the Inquisition,  the Vatican, it controls everything—which is  

completely untrue and is propagandistic. The Inquisition is overseen by a whole  

bunch of isolated guys who are in isolated  towns, and it takes weeks or months to  

even communicate with the Vatican. They're making their own decisions. 

For the most part, they don't have  their own large amount of funding. 

They don't have their own officers to jail people. They don't have their own jails. 

They don't have their own  authority to arrest directly. 

They get all of those from the local government. They collaborate with the local government,  

which means if the local government likes  them and is pleased by them, and is like,  

"Ooh, the Inquisition, I can use this to scapegoat  my enemies," then the local government will drown  

the Inquisition in funding and give them all the  guards and all the incentives they could want. 

So when we hear about the infamous Spanish  Inquisition, which everyone was expecting  

me to mention, the Spanish Inquisition is  infamous because Ferdinand and Isabella of  

Spain really want to scapegoat the Jewish and  Muslim populations that they're anxious about. 

So they throw money at their Inquisition  and really cultivate and make it big. 

That's coming from them.  It's not coming from Rome. 

Meanwhile, if you're in somewhere like Florence,  where the duke—if it's early Medician ducal  

Florence, right when this is happening—is a  Medici, he's in deep with the weird Ficinian  

Platonic soul projection magic people. He's an intellectual radical  

descended from intellectual radicals. His court is full of intellectual radicals. 

Here you are, the Inquisitor, and you're  like, "Your Grace, can I arrest this guy?" 

He's like, "No, that guy works for me. You can't touch him." You can only arrest as  

many people as the duke will give you funding for,  or the local republic will give you funding for. 

So you need to please the local  government if you're the Inquisitor. 

We have letters of Inquisitors complaining,  "This is a really liberal duke. 

He's protecting all of these heretics  around him, and there's nothing I can  

do about it because I depend on the local  authority for my ability to do stuff." 

So this is a really bizarre comparison, but  think of the Inquisition operating kind of  

like Doctors Without Borders. It's not the government. It's  

an international organization that's  set up to try to achieve a goal that  

it believes is beneficial in different places. But it's only as strong as, or as weak as, the  

government's willingness to collaborate with it. If the government collaborates with it, it can  

be enormously powerful in an area and do a lot. If the government is hostile to it and starves  

it of resources and doesn't let its people in  and insists on pushing it out, then you can get  

bubbles where the Inquisition is nearly impotent. Every time they want to arrest someone, they have  

to go to the duke's agents, and if the duke's  agents keep saying no, they can't do anything. 

What this really creates is bubbles of privileged  access, where if you're in with the government,  

you can be as heretical as you like,  and the Inquisition can't touch you. 

This is also a lot of how  homosexuality operates at the time. 

If you are in the protection of a powerful  person, they can prevent the Inquisition or  

other officers of the church from getting at you. They just won't do it, and they're more powerful  

than those agents are, so they can't touch you. Machiavelli was, I would say, very definitely  

solidly bisexual, in that this is a man who  recreationally had boyfriends and girlfriends  

throughout his life that he writes to. We have homoerotic poetry. We have  

heterosexual poetry. He's definitely  very excited by both sexes. 

He has a lot of gay friends. He and his gay friends are writing back and  

forth about how at this particular moment in Rome,  one of the agents in charge of Rome's enforcement  

is really cracking down on homosexuality. Therefore all of their gay scholar and  

artist friends are rushing to get jobs  working for cardinals, because if you  

work for a cardinal, nobody can touch you. Almost all of their friends have succeeded  

in getting jobs working for  cardinals, except for one. 

So he has resorted to hiring two female  prostitutes to hang out with him all the  

time and make him seem straight, by having him  hang out with sexy courtesans, to defend himself  

against charges of homosexuality. Heresy and homosexuality operate  

very similarly in this period. They're both forbidden by the same  

things and policed by the same structures. So if you work for the cardinal or you work  

for the duke, you can be doing very radical  magic, radical philosophy, radical politics,  

radical sexuality, and nobody in authority  can touch you because authority's trumped by  

a higher authority that is protecting you. This is part of the patronage system. 

How does that come back to the copyright? The way that comes back to copyright stuff  

is that the Inquisition needs to please local  authorities in order to get to operate at all. 

So the Inquisition will therefore try to figure  out things that will please local authorities. 

If a book is being presented for publication  that has a recommendation letter at the  

beginning written by an important political  figure, the Inquisition will push it through. 

When printing presses and authors say, "Hey,  can we have this be a monopoly license?",  

figures like Machiavelli realize we could  ask for, "Hey, you're giving us permission. 

Can you deny everyone else permission?" The Inquisition immediately realized, this is  

a great way to get publishers on our side, to get  authors on our side, and to get their bosses on  

our side, because we are protecting the book that  is important to the duke because it's dedicated to  

the duke, or it's dedicated to his grandfather. The Medici give permission to print The Prince  

partly because it's dedicated to a member  of the family, and it celebrates their fame. 

They want to be able to control its  quality and make sure that it's published  

in good quality and that it always has  that dedicatory letter at the front. 

They have an incentive to control what  we would now think of as copyright. 

The Inquisition, wanting to please them,  has an incentive to give them that control. 

To close off, do you have some sense of how  to think about why Machiavelli's remembered  

so differently from not only what  he wrote, but why he was writing? 

Sometimes in the history of thought, there are  authors who become separated from their work. 

You have a parallel where there is the actual  content of what the person did and said,  

and separately there is the idea of this person. In the case of Machiavelli, we have Machiavelli  

the patriot, Machiavelli who did all this work,  and separately we have "Machiavellian" — "the  

murderous Machiavel", as Shakespeare calls him. Old Nick, which is a nickname for the devil but  

became popular because of Niccolò Machiavelli. Old Nick, literally a synonym for the devil. 

He splits, so that the idea of  Machiavelli—the Machiavellian  

villainous figure that Shakespeare's Richard  III invokes as someone he's modeling himself  

on—is useful to people as a character, as an idea. It’s the idea of the scheming politician who is  

probably atheistic, definitely self-serving, and  who wants nothing but to advance himself in power. 

Of course that isn't the real  Machiavelli if you read the work. 

The real Machiavelli is not  about advancing yourself. 

It's not a manual for getting ahead. It shouldn't be shelved next to How to Win Friends  

and Influence People, because it's a manual not  of how to gain power, but of how to keep power. 

If you have a government and want it to be  stable and protect the people's lives, do this. 

But the idea of the murderous Machiavelli  is very exciting, and this happens at  

other times to other intellectual figures. It happens to Thomas Hobbes in the phase that  

Thomas Hobbes is the Beast of Malmesbury,  and the idea of Thomas Hobbes separates. 

It happens fascinatingly to Spinoza, an important  radical Jewish thinker of the later 17th century. 

Spinoza is a neat one, because when you actually  read Spinoza, he's really warm and sweet. 

Like Machiavelli, he’s passionate  and cares about people, and in his  

case is an incredibly pious theist. He's a monist. He believes the entire  

universe is the body of God. You are a part of God. 

The table is part of God. The camera is part of God. 

Everything is God. Isn't that great? But a fact  about Spinoza—and I know this feels tangential,  

but it's not—was that he was the first  person in ages and ages to be targeted  

with the Jewish equivalent of excommunication,  the ceremonial, "Your radicalism is too radical. 

We are expelling you from the community of Jews." It was such a rare ceremony that the Jews of his  

region actually had to send somebody traveling all  around Europe to find a Jew who knew the ceremony,  

because it was so incredibly rarely done. The fact of that spread around, and people  

had the idea that Spinoza must be even more  weird and heretical than any heretic if even  

the Jews would expel him. The idea of Spinoza the  

arch-heretic becomes a character. Everyone talks about Spinoza the arch-heretic,  

and then you read him and it's nothing like it. But sometimes the character is useful. 

The thought experiment figure of Machiavelli  the villain is useful for our philosophy. 

We like to talk about, "what is a  Machiavellian self-serving politician?" 

What would they do? This has a separate life from  Machiavelli's real ideas, to the degree that all  

the way through the 16th century, there's these  amazing discussions of Machiavellianism in Spain. 

They're talking about the Jews as Machiavellian  and Machiavelli as the prince of the Jews. 

You're like, "Machiavelli  was in no way a Jew at all." 

But what they mean by Machiavellian and by  Jewish is somehow the political thought that  

is undermining our good Catholic Spain. So Jewish and Machiavellian can  

become synonyms, mad as that is for us. Because for them, both of these are labels for  

the sinister underground of thought, and now we're  talking about the sinister underground of thought. 

The idea of Machiavelli as the villain  is itself enchanting and interesting. 

As we look at when Machiavelli is invoked in  the modern day—when The Prince sits on the shelf  

and it feels like something exciting to buy and to  read and to think of as a manual of getting ahead,  

when having it on your shelf makes it feel  like you're participating in the idea of  

strategic advancement and rationalism—that's  much more Machiavelli the character, Old Nick,  

than it is the Niccolò Machiavelli who faithfully  sat in exile, willing to give up wealth, fame,  

society, the ability to visit his wife,  anything, in order to serve his country. 

To me, I think even more fascinating than looking  at either Old Nick, the fictitious Machiavellian  

villain, or Machiavelli the patriot, is  to look at how did we double-image this? 

What is the fascinating tendency of  our society to take something real,  

powerful, exciting, intimate, and then say,  

"But we can also make the character,"  and the character is itself interesting. 

So if you take away a main message from this  with Machiavelli, it's that Machiavelli,  

the character of thought experiment, is  an important backbone of our society. 

We use him as we think about politics. Machiavelli, the actual innovator,  

is a different backbone of our society  and how we think about politics. 

If Machiavelli can be two such different  things, Old Nick and Machiavelli the patriot,  

so many other things we encounter in life  have actually been teased apart by our  

social utility and made into multiple things  which are useful to us in different contexts. 

If you have The Prince on your shelf, read  it and remember it was written by somebody  

who was willing to give up anything  to serve his country, and you'll see  

a very different Machiavelli come through. I think that's an excellent place to close. 

Ada, thanks so much for hopping on. This was a pleasure, as always. 

I hope it won't be the last time. I hope so, too.