Snapshot · Dwarkesh Podcast
Machiavelli did not circulate The Prince broadly; he treated it like classified state intelligence, sharing it only with Florence's rulers and his closest scholarly circle.
Where this was said
At 1:21:40 · chapter starts 1:16:57
Machiavelli hand-copied Lucretius from memory. The Renaissance treated antiquity as the only credible source. Original ideas were disguised as Livy or Plato commentary — the Discourses were Machiavelli's prestige vehicle. [1] — Ada Palmer "In the Renaissance, original ideas were out of fashion. If you wanted people to take your thought seriously, you dressed it up as Livy or P…" 1:36:40
Every foreign court in Europe would have paid to hire Machiavelli. He turned them all down and chose to rot in a countryside hamlet, writing The Prince not for fame or publication but as a loyalty demonstration to the men who had tortured and exiled him. He wanted only one job: serving Florence.
Despite being tortured and exiled, Machiavelli refused lucrative positions at foreign courts and chose to remain in rural exile, writing The Prince as a loyalty demonstration to Florence.
'Machiavellian' means calculating and self-serving. Machiavelli gave up wealth, social life, career, and freedom to serve the government that tortured him — refusing to let his political secrets benefit any other state. He is possibly the least Machiavellian person in history.
The Prince was first published in 1532, after Machiavelli's death, by relatives seeking family fame; it was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by 1559.
The Prince drifted in obscurity until Hobbes's Leviathan hit European thought 'like a truck full of bricks.' Philosophers trying to refute Hobbes went back to Machiavelli as the ancestral monster. Then in the 19th century, newly republican governments needed a political framework without God — and Machiavelli was the only major theorist who didn't plug religion in.
Hobbes's Leviathan sparked a 40-year effort by European philosophers to refute it, which led scholars back to Machiavelli as the intellectual ancestor of Hobbesian thought.
Joel de la Garza noted that the CISO role is a relatively recent invention, with Steve Katz widely credited as the first-ever CISO.
Superficial adoption of electricity gave factories only 6% efficiency gains; fully redesigning factories around it delivered a 3x productivity improvement that powered 20th-century US growth.
Harold Ramis recounted that during Caddyshack filming, storms kept the cast cooped up in a Florida hotel for days, during which they partied and did drugs all day and night.
In the 1820s, China accounted for 25% of global economic output, making it the world's largest economic machine — a historical precedent for its current AI superpower ambitions.
66 Americans held hostage at the US Embassy in Iran were released after 444 days, within hours of Reagan's inauguration.
In the first round of the secret arms deal, 508 TOW missiles were transferred from Israel to Iran in exchange for hostage releases.
America secretly transferred 2,000 missiles and missile parts to Iran across 8 separate shipments over just over a year.
Despite all the missile sales, only 3 of the 7 American hostages held by Lebanese terrorists were ultimately released.
The CIA supply plane that blew open the scandal was flying at only 2,500 feet in broad daylight when it was shot down on October 5, 1986.
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