Dwarkesh Podcast
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?
00:46:54 · Robert Caro
[00:46:54] S1: He asked terrific questions. Well, you know, the realization came to me when I was thinking about Johnson. You know, the power, I'll give you a long answer, but this is the accurate answer. I had to cut so much out of the power broker. And I cut out so much stuff that shouldn't have been cut out that I didn't know. Like I gave Bob Gottlieb, my editor, a manuscript that it was 1,050,000 words long. And the most they could fit in, and he really worked at this into one volume, because I was determined that it will only be one volume, was 700 pages, or about 700,000 words instead of 1,050,000 words. It was meant we had to cut 350,000 words. And he has said, I cut a lot of the best stuff I ever read. And I felt a lot of the stuff that I cut out, it's tragic that no one knows it. To this day, people ask me about things. I said, oh, I wrote them. Then they said, well, no one ever read it. But the way I am, I don't know that I would have changed anything because as I'm writing the book, I'm saying, oh, this is too long. This is gonna be too long. I'm gonna have to cut so much. But I don't seem to have the ability not to write the stuff that I think should be written, even though I know so much of it is gonna have to be cut.
00:48:54 · Dwarkesh Patel
[00:48:54] S0: Well, speaking of which, you have in the other room here cabinets and cabinets of notes on interviews, notes as you're working, things which have never been published before. Eventually, historians, other historians will be able to study those notes and those documents that you have compiled over your career. Yes. What is it that you hope they do with it? What is what is it that you hope... What kind of scholarship do you hope?