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.
“One misconception of Machiavelli that I had — because I hadn't read these books before — is that he says the means don't matter, only the end. But he's way more concerned about means than I would have 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.”
Dwarkesh Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · June 2026
Context
Said to Ada Palmer partway through a conversation about The Prince and the Discourses on Livy. The correction is that Machiavelli's interest in means is instrumental rather than moral — cruelty and broken promises are costly because of what they do to your position later. Palmer's answer is that it's subtler still.
Transcript
Doesn't it contradict what he was saying in the prints about never rise with the help of great powers? For even in success, you have empowered somebody who's stronger than you and whose mercy you're at.
…fall because of their choices. They fell because half of what happens in the world is never in our control. And 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, um, is that he says the means don't matter, the end matters. And there's a virtue ethic sense in which maybe he doesn't think the means matter, but like he is way more concerned about the means than I would have nightly 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. Right. 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 will 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. And so it's actually a very interesting meditation on by what means can you achieve power that will make that power stable versus not. And the…
more like it's even subtler than that. Because it's if you are someone who breaks your word and you break it this way, it'll bite you in the ass. And if you break it these ways, it'll be okay. Because he also does analysis of figures like Savannah Rola, who would make prophecies and promises, and…
And this actually gets so the famous quote in the prince: it is better to be feared than loved. What he's getting at there is I think he's just like very cynical about people's nature. And if people make you a promise, they'll just go back on it. If your power base depends on people's promises and…
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 sort of vent the society's tensions through…
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