Dwarkesh Podcast
00:00:47 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:00:47] S0: So my first question is just this that I hinted in the introduction. How much do you see yourself represented in Johnson or in Moses? It's part of the reason you're able to write so compellingly about them that you share some of their qualities. [00:01:05] S1: Well, let me say first, I think I hope they are qualities that I don't share of all these cards. Among other things, they are so, I'll use the word ruthless, you know? You say they do they do anything to to win. That's part of their, greatness. You know, I remember when I started learning about Robert Moses, I went to the LaGuardia papers, which were in a... They were kept in the boat basin. They were stored by the municipal archives. Literally in the 79th Street Boat basin on the Hudson River, three levels down, there were this row of file cabinets, you know, against the wall. So I'm sitting there day after day going through these documents, and occasionally I'd come across a note that Robert Moses wrote, and I realized I'm following the same path he was. So it's actually. [00:02:12] S0: Well, obviously not all the qualities, but the quality I'm referring to here is that just like Johnson or just like Moses, you refuse to take no for an answer. If somebody says I won't give you an interview, you don't stop there. You refuse to leave a stone unturned. And so there is a relentlessness that you share with these subjects.
00:02:12 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:02:12] S0: Well, obviously not all the qualities, but the quality I'm referring to here is that just like Johnson or just like Moses, you refuse to take no for an answer. If somebody says I won't give you an interview, you don't stop there. You refuse to leave a stone unturned. And so there is a relentlessness that you share with these subjects. [00:02:36] S1: I'm gonna take that as a compliment. Yes. Well, feel there are certain people that you have to interview. And if they don't wanna give you an interview, you can't. I feel you can't say no. Like you say, Lyndon Johnson's first secretary, the one who rode in the car with him on the campaigns. I said, there's no other human being on earth who knows what Lyndon Johnson is doing all these hours driving back and forth across Texas. I don't know what I have to do, but I have to get them to tell me honestly about this thing or something. [00:03:20] S0: So this raises another question that I wanted to ask you, which is you're interviewing all these people and in many cases they know, they must know that it's not good for them to tell you what you want to know. Yes. And in many cases they tell you anyways. How do you get people to tell you things that they know they shouldn't tell you?
00:03:20 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:03:20] S0: So this raises another question that I wanted to ask you, which is you're interviewing all these people and in many cases they know, they must know that it's not good for them to tell you what you want to know. Yes. And in many cases they tell you anyways. How do you get people to tell you things that they know they shouldn't tell you? [00:03:45] S1: You ask terrific questions. Sometimes you're sitting there and you know this person doesn't wanna talk to you about what you wanna get out from, like, Connally on how Johnson used money to get political power. And I'm thinking, but I've been through the notes. Connally collected the money and gave it out at Johnson's instructions. So he's the only guy who can tell me how Johnson did this. You know, how he judged who to give money to. Sometimes Johnson would write on a request for money. If the guy asked for $1,500 Johnson would write, okay, 1,500. Sometimes he'd write 500. Sometimes he'd write no. But sometimes he'd write, no, never. And I asked Connally, what did that mean? And he said, this guy was never gonna get money from Lyndon Johnson. So then when you ask why he felt this way about this particular congressman, that's when the really fascinating stories emerge. [00:05:03] S0: Before we get more into Johnson, I wanna first start with Moses. Sure. So in the last decade or two, people have been complaining that it's become too hard and too difficult to build things. Yes. Especially for the government to build things. [00:05:21] S1: Yes.
00:05:21 · Robert Caro, Dwarkesh Patel
[00:05:21] S1: Yes. [00:05:21] S0: So if you look at the 2nd Avenue subway, they've been building it for around fifty years. Yes. They opened up a mile and a half. Yes. And it costs more than $4,000,000,000. And people have been saying, we were concerned. The Power Broker came out. It was an immensely influential book. And we were concerned about so much power being centralized and given... Delegated to one person so they could build. And we wanted to prevent that, and so we made environmental review and land use review and community boards and litigation. And people say, we've overcorrected. We've gone too far in the other direction. What do you think of that?
00:06:03 · Robert Caro
[00:06:03] S1: They also say, Robert, because of all these safeguards, Robert Moses could not operate in the same way today. But the fact is when Robert Moses started, there were also safeguards. People were also saying, you can't build anything. This was in the 1920s. The people were saying government can't build anything. There are too many blocks. Nothing's getting built. We need highways. It's the age of cars. Everyone's getting automobiles, but we have the same old roads and nobody can build them because the property owners don't want the roads built through their land. Robert Moses comes along and all of a sudden those things vanish because he... Despite all the safeguards and everything else, he just builds. So doing the power broker, it was just fascinating to me to see how he gets around everything. But it doesn't matter what it is. He's gonna build a beach at Jones Beach. He sees it one day. He says, this is the greatest beach I've ever seen. It's only 27 miles from New York City. If I can build a road out here, I will give the people of New York City this great beach. But it seems impossible to build that road because the property owners don't want the road going through their farms and property. But he basically says, I'm gonna build it. And to watch him do it, to overcome each obstacle, there's so many. And then all of a sudden it's open and you have Jones Beach and you have it accessible to New York. It's an act of political genius, and it's also an act of will that I'm gonna do it. That's fascinating to learn about.
00:08:07 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:08:07] S0: And so you think today, if there was a Mosesite figure, they would figure out a way to work around everything that's been set up? [00:08:14] S1: Well, the answer to that is when Moses was building, they were saying the same thing. Nobody's ever gonna build, we need roads for the automobiles, but they'd have to go through hundreds, dozens of farms, scores of property, no one's ever gonna be able to do it, but he comes along and doesn't. So today someone would come along and do it. [00:08:44] S0: This I think is a profound question for democracies which is how do we end up in a place which is not the extremes of 50s or 60s Moses but not also where we are now. So where I live in California, we've spent, I don't know, $15,000,000,000 over the last decade and we haven't gotten a single new line or single new mile of railway that those $15,000,000,000 have been spent to bill. Whereas a different system, you could say China today is like New York City in the forties and fifties, where they have a very Moses type attitude and they put up tens of thousands of miles of railways over the last ten, twenty years. But of course at the cost of similar amounts of displacements of people and recklessness. So how do we land in a good spot between either extreme?