Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…I didn’t know that. Seriously? Is there? Your biography is the part of the canon. So in the person of Napoleon, I think startup founders see the best aspects of themselves resemblance. You have somebody who is a young upstart, just stupendously energetic and competent, much more efficient than the bureaucracies and old systems around him, a reformer, tremendously intellectually curious, an autodidact. You can just go down the list. What is your reaction? I love that. That’s exactly what he was, yes, absolutely. He was totally fascinated by every new thing. He flung himself into ideas for balloons and submarines and anything that could be useful for agricultural development. He was fascinated by trying to build bridges faster and better and cheaper. He was a real go-getter when it came to giving prizes for new chemical components and so on. This was somebody who created the legend, not just for soldiers, but very much for inventors and entrepreneurs and people like that, who he felt were going to help France outstrip Britain, essentially, which had a head start on France in the Industrial Revolution. So there was a very strong sort of nationalist reasoning behind his embrace of science. But he was made a fellow of the French Academy on the basis of his genuine interest, not just because he was the First Consul of France. He used to attend all their meetings. And this was an extraordinary thing. If there was going to be a meeting on, I don’t know, electricity, sitting in the front, there would be the First Consul taking notes. So I can understand why young tech entrepreneurs might like Napoleon, and I’m thrilled that my book might be helping with that.…

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