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.
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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.