Dwarkesh Patel
Hosts the Dwarkesh Podcast, a long-form interview show on AI progress, timelines, and the people building frontier models, along with economists and historians.
“A lot of the Prince and the Discourses on Livy is dedicated to: how do you make sure some family isn't pissed off that their son got killed and it wasn't avenged? If we just have a reliable criminal justice system, that problem goes away. Same with the welfare state and getting rid of the patronage system — if you don't have to rely on this family, the state can have your loyalty. It's interesting to connect all these threads together: communication time, an impartial justice system, an impartial welfare state as being what's required for a regime to have enough legitimacy and, as a result, enough stability. To have modern nation states.”
Dwarkesh Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · June 2026
His own synthesis of several threads from the conversation, offered rather than asked. The setup is Machiavelli's Rome, where generals months away on the frontier commanded the same men for decades and collected their loyalty personally. The argument is that institutions we think of as welfare or justice policy were first of all solutions to the problem of divided loyalty.
Transcript
turns out like a surprisingly effective solution is
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Okay, so to tie a couple of threads we were talking about together. The prince is painting a picture of just regime is incredibly unstable. You had to worry about foreign powers. You had to worry about rival factions within your own country. You had to worry about mercenaries. You had to worry about lots of different things. And so any given regime is very unstable. And so what had to happen for things to get more stable, basically. And 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. So in Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli talks about the Roman Empire. One of the reasons that its fall was instigated is that these generals who were months away in the frontier fighting these wars because the empire was so big had to amass for the periods of years or in some cases for Caesar, of course, decades, the command of so many men who have for decades just basically been listening to this guy tell them what to do, who to fight next. This is the person who 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. And same with patronage, if there's not a system of both deterministic justice that we have in the modern world today. So a lot of the prince is dedicated in discourses on Livy on, well, how do you make sure that some family is not…
Yeah. One thing that everyone is surprised by is that when Valentino Borgia is that when Cesare Borgia, Valentino is much more what he's called in the period, when Cesare Borgia conquers these cities in central Italy, and he goes in and he massacres the ruling family and he works hard to kill every…
why would it have been so bad if Valentino took over Florence and he had survived? And he would have massacred maybe the ruling regime at the time, the Republic. But I don't know what Machiavelli is especially concerned about, but like the cultural treasures of Florence and everything. I
know it. So again, in the discourse, isn't that? I think the cultural treasures of Florence would potentially have been okay. There's two answers to that. One of them is Machiavelli is very adamant that if you live such that there is somebody who can have you summarily executed, he can walk by you…
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