Byrne Hobart: evaluation

Transcript context

…t the U.S government was. That's how LBJ got in and started on his path. The new deal created these big programs like the national youth administration and they needed people like Johnson to run them. When you look at an industry that is aging it's usually an industry that ambitious people stay away from. They recognize it's becoming more seniority focused and there's just less going on but then it becomes this huge opportunity when the aging stops because a bunch of people either retire or they get discredited and have to leave and suddenly the average age of the industry ratchets down and you can basically look at the set of opportunities that were missed over the previous decade because the industry was too risk averse and you get to take all of those opportunities at once so you have tons and tons of low-hanging fruit when that shift happens. So I think that's the other thing to look for. Look for cases where there's some institution or some part of the economy or society that has just been slowing down for a long time and is clearly getting to the limit of whatever its current operating model is and hasn't found a new model and there's someone young and disruptive who's just entering it. Maybe the place to look for the next LBJ is someone doing independent films and someone who looks at the top box office results and sees that everything is a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off and it's 50% marvel and says “This is disgusting. We have to destroy it and I'm going to build something completely different” Maybe that person is actually the kind of LBJ archetype. Now the other half of this question is the Caro archetype and part of what I found fun about this was that I felt like Caro was disgusted with himself when he realized how similar some of his methods were to LBJ’s. He's writing this story about this guy who's will do anything to make a friendship but it's really a fake friendship just to accomplish his goals and he's constantly doing doing the reading that other people aren't doing, and doing the work, and making the calls, and reiterating and reiterating and reiterating, just endless patience. And then you read about how Caro works and he does things like — moves to DC for a while, talks to everyone in DC and befriends people. Goes to texas, moves to the hill country and gets to know people. The book sort of has these hints of gonzo journalism where sometimes Caro will just go from — here's what happened in 1946 to here's what happened to me in the 70s while I was talking to this guy about what he did in 1946. And sometimes he will basically come out and say, “I waited until the person who paid this bribe had Alzheimer's and then I asked him if he remembered paying the bribe and he remembered that he did it and didn't remember he wasn't supposed to say it. So that's how I know.” There's this line that Caro keeps quoting from LBJ which I think was from LBJ's debate team coach days where his line was — “If you do everything you will win.” and Caro does everything. how I know.” There's this line that Caro keeps quoting from LBJ which I think was from LBJ's debate team coach days where his line was — “If you do everything you will win.” and Caro does everything. I think the population of Caros is smaller than the population of LBJ's because the people who have that skill set probably have ambitions other than writing two canonical works on two important people. Maybe a lot of those people are just doing things other than typing. Man, there's so many threads there that I'm tempted to spend the rest of the episode just digesting and talking about. There's so many interesting things about Caro's story and the impact he’s had. In circles like effective altruism there's been this focus in terms of thinking about impact, of trying to crunch the numbers, and there's no reasonable crunching into the numbers you could have come up with before The Power Broker was written to justify it. By the way, he tries to downplay his accomplishments as a journalist before he wrote The Power Broker but he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his journalism before he wrote the book. So he's a top level investigative journalist and then says — “Here's how I'm going to spend my talents. I'm going to spend eight years looking into and researching every conceivable person who has even potentially been in the same room as or been impacted by Robert Moses and I'm going to document all this. I'm going to write a book of like a million words or something.” He probably didn't think about it this way, right? But look at the result. That book probably changed how many of the most influential people who came up through politics think about politics. It probably changed how urban governance is done, how we think about accountability and transparency, for good or ill, depending on your perspective. That example alone really makes me suspect of the number crunching way of thinking about what to do and rather just be like, from Caro’s perspective, “I gotta understand how this guy accumulated this power.” He does it and it completely transforms how urban governance is done.…

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