Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I am Orrin McIntyre. Before we get

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All right guys. So we are back to our series on Machiavelli. If you don't know, we have been

reading through Machiavelli's The Prince and

diving deep, giving different takes on how we can apply this classic work of political theory

to our current situation. There's a whole playlist of these in case you haven't been following

along, but I think each one stands on its own. Machiavelli is timeless,

and he writes in these really concise and powerful chapters. So I think that you can watch these

individually, or if you want to just basically get an audio book of the prints with my commentary,

once we're done with this series, you'll have that as well well so there's a playlist in the youtube uh feed if you

want to go ahead and click on that and you want to see the previous episodes in order but that said

we're going to go ahead and start today with chapter 20 are fortresses and other princely devices

advantageous or hurtful princes wanting to make their state secure have variously disarmed their subjects,

encouraged factions in their subject towns, fostered hostility amongst themselves,

set out to win over those whom they distrust at the start of their reign,

build fortresses, and destroy fortresses.

A final judgment on these things can only be made in the light of the particular facts regarding

each case, but I'll discuss the matter as comprehensively as the topic permits.

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