Dwarkesh Podcast
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?
00:41:38 · Robert Caro
[00:41:38] S1: Part of your question is how do you be sure you're on the right track? The answer to that is you're not, okay? But how do you try to stay on the right track? I do have a device for that. Before I start a book, I learned this the hard way with The Power Broker, because I didn't do it with The Power Broker. Before I start a book, I think through what I want the book to be, the whole book. People say, you mean you think it through to the end? Well, the answer is yes. And then you say, well, what is this book about? And I said at that desk sometimes for a long time before I start right when I'm thinking about the book, just asking myself in one way or another, what is this book about? You gotta get it down to one sentence. You say, well, you can't get it down to one sentence. Then you say, yeah, but Bob, you learned you better get it down to one sentence. Or three years from now, you're gonna be writing and you're gonna be saying, what am I trying to do? So before I start a book, I try to get it down to, I send a sentence or at most a paragraph and say, really, what is this book about? And I try to make everything hang together around that point.
00:43:09 · Dwarkesh Patel, Anish
[00:43:09] S0: Back in August, my sponsor, Jane Street, released the design files for a mystery chip and challenged my audience to figure out its true purpose. The challenge is over, and Jane Street has released a blog post highlighting some of their favorite submissions. They also revealed the ASIC's purpose. I won't spoil it here, but if you're curious, I've linked to it in the show notes. Anish, who helped design the puzzle, walked me through some of the best write ups. [00:43:33] S2: I think my favorite submission was probably this insane visualization made by Chetan Vandriel and Lyndon Post who started by showing in three d how a chip is made from standard cells, how all of the metal layers fit together to actually comprise the logic of the chip, and then showed each component of our puzzle design, what it does, and how they reverse engineered it before then showing how it all fits back together into the puzzle. [00:43:58] S0: Don't worry if you missed this challenge. There's a new one live right now. [00:44:02] S2: So the goal with this new challenge is we want people to design a hardware protocol emulator chip that can be used to analyze and emulate different communication protocols. And as a bonus, we're going to pay to fabricate our favorite submissions and you'll actually get your chip back mounted on a board ready for you to test in real life.
00:44:02 · Anish, Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:44:02] S2: So the goal with this new challenge is we want people to design a hardware protocol emulator chip that can be used to analyze and emulate different communication protocols. And as a bonus, we're going to pay to fabricate our favorite submissions and you'll actually get your chip back mounted on a board ready for you to test in real life. [00:44:19] S0: The competition is open till January 18. Go to janestreet.com/dwarkesh to get started. A lot of your books you've written before we had digital archives at the Internet and all the resources that made available. How much of a difference have those resources made? [00:44:42] S1: Well, they're making a big difference right now. The book I'm doing now, I'm writing about Vietnam. Let's say I wanna do a battle, wanna write in detail. Well, this just happened. I wanna write about, I picked a battle that I wanted to do in detail. It's called the battle of the Ia Drang Valley. Nobody's written about it in detail. But I could go to my computer and I could look up where are the oral histories from soldiers who fought in that battle, and you just, what colleges are the oral histories at, what documents are available in a way you couldn't do it before. [00:45:31] S0: And do you, so do you think it would've made a big difference when you were writing the earlier volumes?
00:45:31 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:45:31] S0: And do you, so do you think it would've made a big difference when you were writing the earlier volumes? [00:45:36] S1: No. No, well, it would've might've made things faster, but it wouldn't, just the way I am, I would look at the documents anyway. Things would go faster now, but I think about what you just asked. I was thinking about it the other day, and it's difficult for me to explain it, but I don't think it would have gone any faster. I can't quite tell you why, but certainly you could find the documents faster, but finding them is a small thing compared to reading them. You know? [00:46:21] S0: A question just occurs to me, and I'm curious to get your answer. If if we were able to time travel back to '75, and I could tell Robert Caro then that this new three volumes on Lyndon Johnson he's about to embark on will take more than forty years. How do you think 40 year old Robert Caro would have reacted to that? Would he would he have been happy? Would he have been afraid?