Dwarkesh Patel: recommendation

Transcript context

…aphy and there's this bit towards the end of the first volume where LBJ is put in charge of this fundraising organization for Democrats in Congress and when you read about it he sounds like a traitor. He sounds like someone who was just born to be slinging currency derivatives because he is constantly on the phone, constantly picking up rumors, constantly sending money here and there and everywhere else. He's always sending money overnight and then sending someone a telegram the day before saying “You're going to get a package from Lyndon Baines Johnson and you're welcome.” He's doing this thing where he's constantly relentlessly optimizing every little tiny detail of some very complicated process which clearly requires enormous working memory and requires a very strong poker face. He has to be able to differentiate between someone who is begging for money because they're pulling at 49% and with a little bit more money for newspaper ads they get to 50.1% versus someone who just wants the money or is just constantly freaking out by their nature. So it requires a lot of the same character traits but the 1930s were just not a great time to go to Wall Street. Maybe if LBJ had been born at a slightly different time that's just what he would have done and he would have been a very successful private equity executive or something but sometimes these general skills can translate into a lot of different areas and they get honed into very specific skills through deliberate practice in those areas if you have that combination of natural tendency and some level of motivation, which in LBJ's case, his dad was also a politician so he had this example of — this is part of the life script, you can do it. But his dad was broke after a while and so he also had this example of what not to do and ended up making good money for himself, in addition to his political career. I'm glad you brought up the biography, I'm reading it right now as well. In the last episode, we go deep into the other biography by Robert Caro, The Power Broker, and talk about why it might be inaccurate in certain respects. But what it is accurate in and what Caro has a genius in is talking about the personalities of these great men, the people who have really shaped their cities or their countries for decades and centuries. There's many places where if you understand the economics of an issue he's talking about there's a lot to be left to Caro’s explanation but the actual breakdown of the personalities is just so fascinating and worth reading Caro for. Being a politician is about building a network, building know-how, building this sort of inarticulable knowledge from an early age. It might be the case that in those situations just having connections and having parental involvement gets you far but if it's like becoming a programmer sure, you'll have done data structures by the time you're 16 but eventually you'll get to the point where everybody knows the basics and now you actually how to do interesting and cool things in computer science and now your 95th percentile of spatial reasoning IQ is not going to get you that far. Let me ask you about the Caro biography because you had a really interesting comment in your review of the book that I've been wanting to talk to you about. You said — “It's worth speculating on how many LBJ-level figures exist today, perhaps in domains outside of politics, and how many Caro-level biographers there are who could do them justice.” Do you have some idea of who these figures are? Or if not that, at least what areas you'd expect them to be in? 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.…

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