Dwarkesh Podcast
00:16:27 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:16:27] S0: Coding agents work best when they get fast, detailed feedback. My sponsor, Antithesis, gives your agents some of the richest feedback there is by running every change they make through thousands of hostile simulations. This usually isn't feasible. Simulation testing is hard. It normally requires rebuilding your software around a fake networking clock among other things. So most teams don't bother. Even if they do, getting enough coverage typically takes hours. So they run these simulations overnight, by which point all the day's changes are jumbled together and it's harder for the agents to tell which PR broke something. Antithesis solves both problems. It runs your software inside a fully deterministic simulated computer so you don't have to rebuild anything yourself. And it explores fast enough that you can test every PR. On a recent project, it packed fifteen hours of simulation testing into each fifteen minute run. That speed comes from both parallelism and branching. Because it's deterministic, whenever Antithesis finds an interesting state, it can save that exact moment and branch off hundreds of different futures. It never wastes time replaying events, hoping to stumble across that state again. And it doesn't just explore randomly. Antithesis systematically injects faults and tweaks your system in the ways most likely to break. So every minute in Antithesis is one of the unluckiest hours your software will ever experience. Learn more at antithesis.com/dwarkesh. [00:17:54] S1: You're [00:17:58] S0: writing the book. You start writing it in '66, '67?
00:17:58 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:17:58] S0: writing the book. You start writing it in '66, '67? [00:18:02] S1: Yes. [00:18:03] S0: You're writing it while Moses is losing power. His career is not over yet. [00:18:10] S1: Yes. [00:18:11] S0: And so the story changes Yes. While you're writing it. Yes. And I don't know if you've talked about that, but presumably the conclusion changes because Yes. You don't know whether he's gonna lose that power or [00:18:21] S1: not No, when when I watch, oh, that's a great question. And I watched that happen. And I'm a young, whenever I was young, and whatever my age was, I didn't really know what I was doing. And I watched him lose power and I learned enough about him to know how fair this was going to be. If I could think a moment, there's a moment that this happened. Yeah. His office was still up at the Triborough Bridge Authority. When he was in power, I interviewed him in that office several times. You felt his power, you felt outside, there were all these people waiting for his decisions, sitting around waiting for his decisions. As soon as I finished, the secretary would come in with a list of telephone calls of people who had called, asking for, you know, wanting something from him while I was talking to him, right? By the time I finished, I remember I realized I had one long interview with him. Maybe it was my last one. And I realized there had been no calls. The secretary had nothing to tell him. So whatever you thought of Moses, you felt the poignance of someone losing power. Yeah. [00:20:03] S0: That's fascinating. That's what I was wondering about.
00:20:03 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:20:03] S0: That's fascinating. That's what I was wondering about. [00:20:06] S1: Yeah. You couldn't help feeling sales for him, no matter, even though you knew what he had done, you couldn't help feeling, oh, this is, in a way, tragic that no one's calling and asking him for a favor anymore. Yeah. [00:20:30] S0: Did he realize that was happening? [00:20:32] S1: I don't think he really... I don't think... In a way, I'm sure he did. But by that time, he was so... Remember, he was so insulated. He was so, whatever his age was, he was up in the eighties. He was deaf, you know? He still had in his office at the Triborough headquarters on Randall's Island, were all these Moses men who were loyal to him and treated him with the same deference they always had. He knew he wasn't getting his projects done, but he felt, I know he felt he was just gonna keep pushing like he always did, and he was gonna win again. So the answer to the question is no, I don't think he didn't ever realize that. [00:21:24] S0: That's fascinating. [00:21:25] S1: Yeah. [00:21:27] S0: In, I think, '62, as you say, he tries to pull a trick on Nelson Rockefeller that he had pulled on countless previous mayors and governors, which is to threaten to resign if he didn't get his way. Yes. And Rockefeller says, I regretfully accept, and nothing happens. And that made me wonder as I was reading it, could all those previous governors and mayors who were getting threatened have done the same thing?
00:22:00 · Robert Caro
[00:22:00] S1: Great, great question. Yeah, the answer is yes. Well, you say, could they have done the same thing? So the easy, the first part, the answer is yes, they had the power to fire him. He wasn't an elected official, but couldn't, there wasn't really a possibility. The answer to the question at the bottom is no, they couldn't because he was simply too popular. You know, you could fire Robert Moses, you know, that's like firing some idol, person who was the idol of New York. But in addition, he had, with his genius, he had created in all his different posts, a chairman of the State Power Authority, chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority, Parks Commissioner, Long Island Parks Commissioner, Jones Beach Commissioner. He had created such an interlocking, you couldn't fire him from everything because the terms ended in different ways, and in some you didn't have the power to fire him from, that he had really made it impossible, well, almost impossible, because at the end, if you wanted to do it, Rockefeller did it. But by that time, cracks had appeared in the armor. I think for decades, the answer to your question is you couldn't do it. But then as he got older, cracks appeared in the armor and you could, if you wanted to brave criticism in all the newspapers and public criticism and everything else, you probably could have done. Good question.
00:24:01 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:24:01] S0: Which leads into the next question I want to ask you. So you interviewed him seven times and the seventh time you mentioned your awareness of a donation that was made to his commission by a millionaire whose golf course was spared by the new route for his parkway. And after that, he didn't talk to you again. If you had gotten an eighth interview with Robert Moses, what is the one question you would most want to ask him? [00:24:35] S1: Oh god, what a great great question. Well, you know, off the top of my head, I think if I only had one question to ask him, I think I'd ask him, did you realize you were changing? That's a great question you asked. But that's the answer I'll give for now. That's something I always wanted, would like to have asked him, you know? [00:25:20] S0: Do you think he realized that he was changing?
00:25:24 · Robert Caro
[00:25:24] S1: No. I think he felt from the beginning that he had this vision for building roads here and their parks here. That was the best thing to do, And it was going to get done and it should get done no matter how many hardships he had to inflict on people, no matter how many thousands he had to evict, no matter what he had to do, he was going to get the roads built. And you see this increasing ruthlessness, this other ruthlessness of him. If someone stood in his way, he was gonna find a way to remove that person as an obstacle. I mean, I'll give you an example of that if you want. There's a politician in the Bronx named Henry Epstein. Henry Epstein is opposing the Cross Bronx Expressway. He's saying to Robert Moses, you're putting it right through a neighborhood where you have to evict tens of thousands of people. You can just move it two blocks to the south, and you only have to evict a couple of 100 people. Moses sets out to destroy Epstein and basically does by making it known he's having an affair. If he can find a weakness in somebody, that he has a mistress, that he's taking money or something, he'll use it. He'll use whatever he has to, to get things done. He learns that in my opinion, by failing to get things done when he's very young. He has things that he wants to get done and they don't get done. And the awareness comes on him and we can see it in the book or in my learning about him. I try to show how he learns that he has to find weaknesses in people. He has to use it. If he has a weakness, he's going to use it. He's going to get things done. There's a hardening and increased ruthlessness where the only thing that matters is to get the thing done. Anyone who stands in his way, if Moses has to destroy him, he'll destroy him.