Byrne Hobart: prediction

Transcript context

…I think a lot of people who are close to that tier and have some of the same personality types are in sales and corporate development and stuff like that where they're building a big network, they are constantly building out this giant levered balance sheet of favors. Favors owed to them, favors they owe to other people, and like all forms of leverage it does allow you to grow a lot faster but you occasionally get these big big blowups. So that's one place I would look. I think if you try to look at the more pure executive founder types then it gets harder to find someone who would have exactly that kind of personality. Part of what made LBJ’s methods work was that he was adjacent to a bunch of these really big institutions and he could siphon off some of the power that these institutions had and in some cases, make them more powerful. I'm about a third of the way through Master of the Senate right now so it's just getting to the point where he's making the senate more effective than it used to be and also making it an organization where it's less seniority based. You need to be attached to something much bigger than yourself for that particular skill set to work really well. That said, you could have a really big impact because it's another form of leverage. At that point the senate was 96 senators and if you're able to exert a lot more influence and be the equivalent to 40 senators for example, then you can get a whole lot done because it's the US senate. But if you have that same kind of skill set and you're the CEO of your company, well you're already incharge of the company. There's only so much extra force you can exert. So you see a figure with exactly that kind of personality trait in a case where there are big institutions that have slowed down somewhat. Another interesting point that is raised early in Master of the Senate is that the senate was getting old and if you look at these long-term charts of average age of politicians, we're definitely in a bull market for extremely, extremely old politicians in the U.S right now but we've gone through cycles before. One of the things that tends to cause a reset is war. Wars, among other things, cause a huge reset in social capital. The people who made mistakes in the early stages all get discredited and then the social bonds that people forge from actually fighting alongside one another and the prestige you get from being part of the winning side. That is very hard to replicate so you end up with much younger people in positions of a lot more power. In the 1930s, there just weren't a lot of organizations that were hiring heavily and looking for really ambitious young people who are going to shake things up but 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. 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.…

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