Dwarkesh Podcast
00:08:07 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:08:07] S0: And so you think today, if there was a Mosesite figure, they would figure out a way to work around everything that's been set up? [00:08:14] S1: Well, the answer to that is when Moses was building, they were saying the same thing. Nobody's ever gonna build, we need roads for the automobiles, but they'd have to go through hundreds, dozens of farms, scores of property, no one's ever gonna be able to do it, but he comes along and doesn't. So today someone would come along and do it. [00:08:44] S0: This I think is a profound question for democracies which is how do we end up in a place which is not the extremes of 50s or 60s Moses but not also where we are now. So where I live in California, we've spent, I don't know, $15,000,000,000 over the last decade and we haven't gotten a single new line or single new mile of railway that those $15,000,000,000 have been spent to bill. Whereas a different system, you could say China today is like New York City in the forties and fifties, where they have a very Moses type attitude and they put up tens of thousands of miles of railways over the last ten, twenty years. But of course at the cost of similar amounts of displacements of people and recklessness. So how do we land in a good spot between either extreme?
00:09:42 · Robert Caro
[00:09:42] S1: I'm not sure there is a good spot. What you just said is the situation. To build anything on a large scale, you're confronted with dozens or scores or perhaps hundreds of property owners who don't want it built there. So the question is how does anything get built? Then someone comes along and can do it. Now, when Moses, when Robert Moses started, it seemed impossible, impossible to build roads out into Long Island because the road would have to cross scores of properties. Most of which the people didn't want the roads coming and had the power to stop them then because he didn't have the power of eminent domain then. But Moses said, I'm going to build it. And he would find a way to overcome each difficulty. Now you say, what am I trying to say by that? Trying to say that every once in a while, comes along who sort of a a genius, if that's the right word, at getting big things built for the public. Decades may pass when there's no one like that. And you say everything's stalled, nothing nothing's gonna be... Nothing big is ever gonna be built again. And then someone suddenly comes along and all of a sudden, things get built. That's the nature of political genius. I happened to be writing about two guys, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, who in both cases say Johnson with civil rights and Moses with, public works, where people were saying you can't do this, they can't... But they but they did it.
00:11:45 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
[00:11:45] S0: Correct me if I'm putting words in your mouth, but if I may attempt an interpretation of what you said. Yes. It sounds like you think we need a little Moses today. [00:12:00] S1: Oh, a great insight. I sometimes wonder about just what you said. And the answer is, well, I certainly don't want someone who's ruthless and disregarding public opinion as a Robert Moses. But at the same time, you need someone who's gonna find a way to get things built. And he's gonna have to find a way despite the fact that so many people don't want it built. [00:12:42] S0: A lot of people who haven't read the book have this impression that you think everything Moses did was bad and that we need to make sure that we can never have a Moses again. Yes. And so it's interesting to hear you say that we need a little Moses again.
00:12:57 · Robert Caro
[00:12:57] S1: Well, when people say to me everything was bad, then he did. What I say is you didn't read the book because certainly the first parts of the book, well, hundreds of pages are about a young idealist who sees this great need for recreation, for beaches on Long Island, for the city people, and is going to get away to make them accessible to the... To people in the city. You say, and it's an act of genius and willpower the way he does it. And that's great. Now, does it become, does it evolve into where Moses listens to nobody and the only thing that matters is what he wants to get built? It does evolve into that. He does change. But the young Moses, the idealist, who before he's building is an expert in civil service, technicalities of civil service, and devotes all his energies to trying to reform the civil service and make it, that people get promoted on merit instead of political pull. And he worked so hard in that. You see a real idealism. And you see an idealism in his early works, you know, when you say, I wanna make these beaches accessible to New York. Now does that evolve into where I think there ought to be a highway here no matter what anybody says, and no matter how many thousands of people are in the way, like the crossroads of choice by Ali Victim? It does. He changes. That to me is the story of the... A big part of the story of the power broker, how this guy who's in the beginning, a young idealistic guy who wants to build, to make lives better for people, to give them access to the ocean beaches and all, changes into someone who just wants to build because he thinks something should be built no matter whatever anyone else says, and is gonna do it no matter how many thousands, hundreds, thousands people have to evict, no matter how bad an idea it is, like the Cross Bronx Expressway. People are telling him not to do that before he does it. The minute this road opens, it's the world's longest traffic jam. Not thousands, but tens of thousands of people were evicted, thrown out of their homes by him without any relocation provisions. So you say, in a way, it's a story of how do you give somebody power without the power in a way hardened, I don't want to use the word corrupting him, but hardening him to anyone who opposes him, to any opposition.
00:16:27 · Dwarkesh Patel, Robert Caro
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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.