Dwarkesh Podcast
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.
00:34:46 · Robert Caro, Dwarkesh Patel
[00:34:46] S1: Yes. [00:34:47] S0: That is my favorite book perhaps ever. And you paint such a compelling portrait of this person, Coke Stevenson, know, governor of Texas. They called him Mr. Texas. [00:35:00] S1: Yes. [00:35:01] S0: As you were writing his profile and writing this book, did part of you wish that he had won the Senate election? [00:35:09] S1: You couldn't help, I'm not, you couldn't help feel, well, I'll answer you directly. The answer is yes. I think Coke Stevenson, although he was an idealist, he knew how to get things done. When he was governor of Texas, he really accomplished things. Okay? I think if he went to the Senate, he would have been a great senator and accomplished things. So you wish that he had won. You feel the tragedy that he lost because of the way he lost, you know? The things about Coke Stevenson, he really didn't realize someone could do all the things to him. And in the election that Lyndon Johnson did, he didn't come to grips with that. [00:36:08] S0: Suppose that Kennedy wins in '60 but Johnson refuses the vice presidency so he's still a majority leader. How different do you think the bills that Kennedy would pass under Johnson as majority leader would be from the laws that Johnson as president was eventually able to pass? That is to say the things that happened in '64 and '63 and '65, would they have just happened earlier?
00:36:38 · Robert Caro
[00:36:38] S1: No, because Kennedy did not have the overriding desire to change America. We see no, John Kennedy was utterly charming. He was a good president. He was good in foreign policy where Johnson certainly was not. But what he did not have was this vision, this desire to change America that Lyndon Johnson had. Lyndon Johnson comes back from his year teaching the poor kids in Cotulla determined to change the education system to help poor people more, to do all these other things to help poor poor people. That determination is something that's really unique. It's what made him domestically such a great president that we have all these civil rights laws, these anti poverty laws that we wouldn't have had without Lyndon Johnson. His presidency ends in tragedy because of foreign policy, because of Vietnam. But he has this ideal, this desire to get things done to help people in America that's almost unique. You say, see, he's determined to do this, you know? He's gonna find a way to do it. You watch him doing it. Then you say, he was doing it. When he... His attention turns to Vietnam and everything falls apart. And he makes it, his presidency is ruined. The things he started out to do domestically don't get done in the way he would've done them. But he starts out in... After the election with the education laws, with the anti poverty bills to change the country, and he's on his way to doing it. That's the great tragedy of Johnson and Vietnam.
00:39:03 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:39:03] S0: If I can ask about that, and it's okay if you don't wanna talk about this because it's in the next book, but if you're willing to talk about it, fundamentally, why did Johnson keep escalating even when [00:39:20] S1: Oh, you know, in the answer to your question is, I'm still trying to figure that out right now. So I'm not gonna That's fine. Because that's quite a mystery, [00:39:31] S0: you Yeah. One of the things that's true of both Johnson and Moses is this inexhaustible energy, you know, working sixteen hours a day, sometimes even more than that. And I wonder how much you think that is the fact that they had a different constitution, that they were just had different reserves of energy, or do you think it was just their will was so strong? [00:39:58] S1: I think it's just their will. I mean, a lot of people have their energy. You know, when you see Robert Moses sleeping very little, showing that he'd do anything to get his way, to get things done, Being tired of something doesn't even seem to figure into the equation. Sometimes I'm looking at it, you know, I can't remember one off the top of my head, and you'll say, he's making this call and Johnson's making this call at two and 03:00 in the morning. He's up making these calls to get his way. I... In fact, there's a funny anecdote. One senator, Johnson calls him at 5AM to ask him for his vote on something. And the Senator says, Oh, Lyndon, I was just lying here waiting for your call. [00:40:57] S0: There will. I wanna ask you a little bit about writing biography now. [00:41:04] S1: Okay.
00:41:04 · Robert Caro, Dwarkesh Patel
[00:41:04] S1: Okay. [00:41:06] S0: One question I have is you spend five years, ten years writing a single book. And through that process maybe your editor and your wife are the only people who have seen the manuscript. So how do you make sure you're on the right track? Because you know, you had to wait so long from when you start to when you get public feedback. How do you make sure that everything's gonna hang together and you're pursuing the message the way you want to?