Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
evaluation 7observation 3belief 3prediction 3commitment 2uncertainty 2
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
20 published records
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I’ve only read, obviously, the translation, so I don’t know what it’s like in the original Italian.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Will his successor be worse or better than him? We don’t know. We can’t predict.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“I think that is an underrated aspect of what it must have been like to be a foreign power evaluating Florence at the time.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“Even people who are cynical about progress will say, “Yeah, we will be more powerful in the future.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“” 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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“” 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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“This actually gets to the famous quote in The Prince, “It is better to be feared than loved.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast
“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.”
- Publisher
- Dwarkesh Podcast