Dwarkesh Podcast
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.
00:27:53 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:27:53] S0: As you say, you're writing not the history of one man, but of an era in America. And one of the most interesting things about the power broker is especially in the period in which he's able to accomplish so much so quickly. What's happening and you talk about this is the Great Depression. You know, he's hiring thousands of architects, tens of thousands of linemen for pennies on the dollar to do big public works for the city. And so I wonder how big a part of Moses's early achievements is just that the government, because of the Great Depression, could compete with the private sector for the top talent and for lots and lots of labor working 20 fourseven through the winter moving fast? [00:28:51] S1: Yeah, another good... Yes. And the answer to your question is that played a big role because like he needed architects for something. I don't remember what it is. It's in the power broker. And they lined up on 5th Avenue, thousands of out of work architects, you know, that he could hire for very low wages, you know, very low wages, but more than the wages they were available, you know, because they didn't have anything to do. He was able to hire so many people and hire and fire them in a ruthless way, you know, making the workmen work hard, you know, he could just fire them. It was the depression and they didn't have other jobs to go to. I think that was, he used that, yes.
00:28:51 · Robert Caro, Dwarkesh Patel
[00:28:51] S1: Yeah, another good... Yes. And the answer to your question is that played a big role because like he needed architects for something. I don't remember what it is. It's in the power broker. And they lined up on 5th Avenue, thousands of out of work architects, you know, that he could hire for very low wages, you know, very low wages, but more than the wages they were available, you know, because they didn't have anything to do. He was able to hire so many people and hire and fire them in a ruthless way, you know, making the workmen work hard, you know, he could just fire them. It was the depression and they didn't have other jobs to go to. I think that was, he used that, yes. [00:29:48] S0: So as somebody who has studied urban development so deeply, here is one thing I'm curious about. You look at the things that were built at the beginning of the last century or before the beginning of the last century, you know, Grand Central Station and all the beautiful architecture in New York versus the things that are built in the second half of the century. They look a lot less beautiful. [00:30:18] S1: Yeah. [00:30:19] S0: And the earlier, beautiful things were built by a much poorer country. [00:30:23] S1: Yeah. [00:30:24] S0: What what changed? Why were you able to build more beautiful Well, things
00:30:24 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:30:24] S0: What what changed? Why were you able to build more beautiful Well, things [00:30:27] S1: one thing that changed is you had all these out of work artisans who could, we'll just say, carve stonework on buildings. Like my apartment is on the 15th Floor of an apartment house. Across the street is a building that's 15 stories or 16 stories high. And you say, look at all the beautiful carving that's done in the stonework of that building up on the roof. I said, the only person who can see it is the people in my apartment and the people in the apartment next to them. Someone was willing to spend that money because the builders who built that could hire skilled people at such low wages that they could make them do the decorations to make a building beautiful up on floors that nobody's gonna see them because people came cheap.
00:31:35 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:31:35] S0: If you want your agents to do real work, they need to be able to use the tools that your company runs on. Things like email or Slack or Stripe. But giving them unfettered access is risky because they could send confidential information to a customer or refund a bunch of payments that they shouldn't have. Of course, you could just review every request manually, but that doesn't typically last. That's why my sponsor, WorkOS, built AirLock. It's a judgment layer that sits between your agents and your tools. Anytime that an agent wants to do something, it makes a request to AirLock, which evaluates it against your company's policies and decides whether to allow it, block it, or escalate it to a human. Whenever a request is allowed, AirLock takes the relevant action for the agent, hitting the necessary endpoints and passing along the response. That way your agents never see your API keys, and so they can't leave them or use them for unauthorized purposes. Since AirLock holds the keys to all your tools, it has to be rock solid. Fortunately, WorkOS has spent the better part part of the last decade building auth and permissions products, and they're battle tested. More than 3,000 companies rely on WorkOS, including OpenAI and Anthropic. AirLock is in early access. If you're interested, go to workos.com/airlock. I want to ask you about Johnson now. [00:32:53] S1: Okay. [00:32:55] S0: Master of the Senate, you make two points about how Johnson is effective, or at least this is the way I read it. One is that he is very persuasive if you're talking to him.
00:32:55 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:32:55] S0: Master of the Senate, you make two points about how Johnson is effective, or at least this is the way I read it. One is that he is very persuasive if you're talking to him. [00:33:07] S1: Yes. [00:33:08] S0: The other is he's put himself in a position of leverage such that he has things to promise you or things to threaten you with. So it's not that he's convinced you of anything, but you know that you need his favor if you want to be successful. Exactly. And of the two, I'm curious which was really the source of his power? His leverage or his persuasion? [00:33:34] S1: Behind his persuasion was the power. When you were talking to him, if he asked something of you, you knew he had the power behind him to give you or deny you things that you wanted. Say he was asking a senator something for a vote on a specific issue. The senator might not agree with him, might not wanna give him the vote, but he would know he wants committee as... A committee assignment. Johnson has the power to give him that or not. Or he would know he wants a a specific law, and Johnson has the power to get that law passed or not. So behind everything, when Johnson is talking to you and he puts his arm around you and he leans into you, it's not just the force of his personality that he's bringing to bear on you. Behind that personality, you know he has the power to do things to you or for you, that you better be aware of. [00:34:39] S0: Means of Ascent, the book about the election with Coke Stevenson, the nineteen forty eight senate election. [00:34:46] S1: Yes.