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biography should not just be a collection of facts it's of real importance to enable the reader to see in his mind the places in which the book's facts are located if a reader can visualize them for himself then he may
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be able to understand things without the writer having to explain them seeing something for yourself always makes you understand it better it took me a long time to understand this that there are moments of what were for me Revelations
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of insights that suddenly helped me understand one of these moments had to do with his father and with the effect on lynon Johnson of a mistake his father made because he didn't understand the land you can't get very deep into Johnson's life without realizing that the central fact of his life was his relationship with his father his brother Sam once said to me the most important thing for lynon was not to be like Daddy his
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father's optimism his romantic idealistic streak kept him from looking at hard facts in the Hill Country that really cost him cost him among other things the love or at least the respect and admiration of his eldest son it was Sam Johnson's determination to buy the original Johnson Ranch the ranch's soil had worn out there wasn't going to be any way of making much money out of that land and his father didn't realize that
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his father overpaid for the ranch he paid so much that the ranch couldn't possibly earn back what he had had paid for it when lynon was 14 his father went broke and lost the ranch and a crucial element of lynon Johnson's youth is a consequence of that loss the insecurity that followed Lyndon had to live with the fear that the bank was going to take their house away he lived in a house in which his father broken by his financial
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failure was constantly ill and there was often no food his father became the laughing stock of the an object of ridicule Sam Johnson is a mighty smart man but he's got no sense in the speeches given at political barbecues as his son stood listening when Lyndon Johnson was 18 and 19 years old he worked for almost 2 years on a highway gang driving a Fresno a Fresno is a device that was used to level unpaved highways it is a big heavy
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slab of iron with the front Edge sharpened the driver of a Fresno puts a hand on each handle and as a team of mules pulls he pushes the sharp edge of the iron slab through the ground and because both of his hands are occupied
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he Loops the RS and ties them behind his back lynndon Johnson was in harness with mules for hours every day he lived with his father's mistake his father's one great mistake all of his youth now what's the relationship of this to
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lynon Johnson's political activities of all of his political activities one of the most remarkable was his ability to count votes this is incredible Caro is about to describe why and how lyndon's father's faults gave birth to lyndon's greatest Talent vote counting to be right in your count when you have to be right is a very rare ability most people tend to be much more optimistic in their counts than the situation deserves True
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Believers were always inclined to attribute more votes to their side than actually existed but lynon Johnson never had that problem his father had been the man of optimism great optimism Lyndon had seen firsthand when his father
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failed the cost of optimism of Wishful Thinking of hearing what one wants to hear of failing to look squarely at unpleasant facts because his father purchased the Johnson Ranch for a price higher than was justified by the hard
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financial facts Lyndon Johnson had felt firsthand the consequences of romance and sentiment of optimism false optimism for many people it's just an unfortunate personal characteristic for lynon Johnson it was the bite of the rains into his back as he shoved hour after hour under that merciless Hill Country Sun pushing the Fresno through the sunbaked soil of all the aspects of Lyndon Johnson that impressed people when he arrived in Washington vote
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counting came first over and over when I was interviewing in Washington someone would say to me he's the greatest vote counter who ever lived he tried to teach his staffers how to do it he would send them to talk to Senators to find out which way they were going to vote and report back to him and the report that got him flying into ferocious rages were reports that said something like I think he's going to vote this way Johnson
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would say snarl at him really what good is thinking to me I need to know it was the Hill Country and his father's failures that taught him how terrible could be the consequences of a single mistake scoop Jackson served under the presidencies of both John F Kennedy and lynon Johnson he was once asked what was the difference between Kennedy and Johnson and Jackson said well you know Kennedy was so if he needed a senator's vote he would
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have him down to the White House he could explain how badly he needed the vote but if the senator said that if he gave him this vote it would ruin him in his state it would ruin him with his constituency Kennedy would understand
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Lyndon Johnson wouldn't understand he would refuse to understand he would threaten you would cool you bribe you or Charm you he would do whatever he had to do but he would get that vote being Charming being friends wasn't What
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mattered to Johnson What mattered to him was winning because he knew what losing could be what its consequences could be hundreds of writers journalists and authors of books all agree that lynon Johnson was ruthless I tried to explain why he was ruthless and a large part of that explanation is the place he came from that was an excerpt that gave me chill the first time I read it it's from the book I'm going to talk to you about
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today which is working by Robert a Caro and right on the front cover it says Caro is one of the great reporters of our time and probably the greatest biographer I've had this book for a while I was going to wait until I finish
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going through all of uh Caro's books so far I've read the power broker the path to power means of ascent and I just started Master of the Senate and so originally I figured okay finish the last two books then read this one and
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make a podcast on this one that changed though there is a documentary that just came out it's called Turn every page and the documentary is about the 50-year relationship uh that Carol has had with his editor and in that documentary you see Caro's approach to his work and so when I went I have this like bookshelf where I have I don't know probably a hundred I lost count like maybe a 100 unread books and so I go every week when
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I I don't have a schedule for like what I'm going to do next I just go and look at the books that I have and ask like what am I most excited to learn about right now and that's I just basically that's how I pick the next book that I
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want to make a podcast on and so when I go the when I went to the Shelf after watching that documentary this book jumped out it's like okay no I I can't wait any longer I have to do this so I'm going to jump right into the
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introduction he's just going to tell us what this book is about and why he is doing it so he says here's a book very unlike the others that I've written very much shorter for one thing but its intention is to share some experiences that I've had while doing the others that's not the only thing that's in the book he continues and here also a few things I discovered about myself along the way about what I wanted to do with
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my life and my books which are my life he italicized which are my life that comes to the very first note in the book when I got to we're like a paragraph a couple paragraphs into the book the way he's talking here reminds me of a story I learned in a biography of Steve Jobs I never forgotten Steve Jobs 30 years old he just got kicked out of apple this is before he founds next before he founds Pixar and he's walking around I think
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Paris uh with his girlfriend and you know he's got the equivalent of about like $200 million at that point never has to work again in his life if he doesn't have to and he's just had this burning desire to achieve something and
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he said something that was fascinating that I never forgot and he says I am a reflection of what I do and I think that's exactly what Caro is telling us right here that this book is about what he wanted to do with his life and his
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books which are one in the same to him which are my life it's about what it was like to sit listening to Robert Moses who was old but still Mighty to be in a room with him alone with him and hear him talk about his dreams the dreams that had become reality and the dreams that hadn't yet it's about what it was like to realize as Robert Moses talked that compared with him I knew nothing nothing at all that there was a whole
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level of political power not what I had learned from textbooks and lectures in college and not even what I had learned as a political reporter but a level of which I had hardly ever conceived I had learned there was a whole level of ruthlessness too of which I also hadn't conceived and he's a very young man when these conversations are happening and I guess this is where I want to pause this so he has technically dedicated his
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entire life to writing uh two biographies one of them is multiple Parts a biography of Robert Moses a biography of lynen Johnson that is not how he views his work just as writing biographies of people that accomplish a
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lot uh biographies of Great Men he wants to understand how power Works he wants to understand and to be able to explain to others how the world actually works so this is the first me time he mentions it he mentions it multiple times that
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there is a whole the world Works Powers uh acred and also utilized very differently from what he was taught in college what he learned in textbooks and what he learned in lectures remember that part because we're going to revisit
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multiple times the book also offers a few glimpses into why I work the way that I do into why for example it takes me so long to produce my books usually there's about an 8 to 10 year Gap uh between each book and I think now we're
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waiting on the the last volume and it's already been over 10 years I think we're at a year 11 since he last published his book he's still working on it I think he's 86 maybe 87 years old so it says for example why it takes me so long to produce my books I am constantly being asked why it takes me so long and when I say that I'm actually a very fast writer people can barely conceal their disbelief and amusement and then he
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brings up a very important time in his life where he transitions from newspaper reporter to working on his very first first book and when I went back and reread all my notes in this section the note I wrote down after understanding I'd already finished the book and went back I realized it was at this point in the book that I realized what this is this is a book for those that truly that truly want to be great at what they do
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and for no one else this will make sense in a minute when I left news day to write a book on Robert Moses a change occurred I found myself remembering what Professor Blackmer had said to me years before I had taken his creative writing
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course at Princeton we had to write a short story every two weeks and I was always doing mine at the very last minute at that final meeting with professor professor Blackmer and after first saying something generous
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about my writing he added but you're never going to achieve what you want to Mr Caro if you don't stop thinking with your fingers thinking with your fingers every so often do you get the feeling that someone has seen right through you I knew he had seen right through me no real thought just writing because writing was so easy to me that type of writing later on writing becomes very difficult to him I determined to do
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something to slow myself down to not write until I had thought things through and the only way I could think to describe this is like there's like a deliberate inefficiency to the way that he works that is there's I find Echoes
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of this in my own work where it's just like I'm not trying to do this the he's not trying to do things as fast as possible in fact when he describes his work Flow To You it clearly tells you and I that he sees Great Value in
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slowing down and actually spending more time with your work than trying to get it done as efficiently and as fast and like Outsource everything this is something that sings to me I determined to do something to slow myself down to not write until I had thought things through that was why I resolved to write my first drafts in long hand slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper before I started doing later
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draft on the typewriter his professor says you're never going to accomplish what you actually want to do cuz he understood that Robert wanted to be great if you never stopped thinking with your fingers so what does he do he finds
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a way to slow himself down to spend more time thinking through what he's actually working on to spend more time with his actual work and then this is the first mention of something that appears throughout the entire book his favorite
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thing is not writing his favorite thing is researching and going through notes and sitting by himself or with his wife in some cases and just spending all day reading with hopes of trying to figure out how the world actually works and once once he goes down this line the reason they take so long is because he has to turn every page we'll get to that very important that becomes his life motto I'll tell you a few minutes how uh
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who taught him that but I can't overstate how important this part is because he's going to repeat this throughout this entire book this is just who I am I have to do it like this I can't do anything less it's the research
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that takes the time the research and whatever it is in myself that makes the research take so long so very much longer than I had planned it just seems to be part of me looking back on my life I can see that it's not really something
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that I've had much choice about in fact that it was not something about which really I had any choice at all he speaks about this part of himself like it's an extremely powerful force it's in conflict with other forces because right now he doesn't have to worry about this but back when he was starting out this was a giant concern and early in his career this force was in conflict with deadlines and the fact that him and his
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wife were flat broke there were deadlines and publisher delivery dates and money to live on while I was doing the research but the hard truth was that for me neither of these constraints could stand before the force of this
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other thing he stays on the scene for a while so a few pages later he's talking about one of the most difficult chapters in the power broker to write this is about this neighborhood East traymont that was just absolutely destroyed
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because Robert Moses wanted to put an expressway through it and really this is the main theme of the book that I have no choice this is my nature I have to turn every page and so he says I try to write the power broker without
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dramatizing this human cost I would start outlining the next chapters to go forward without the East Tremont chapter and it was as if something in me would Rebel and I would sit there for hours fiddling with the outline knowing it was
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no good knowing that if I went forward the book behind me wouldn't be the book it should be and my heart just wouldn't be in the writing anymore but looking back now I have to accept the fact that in deciding to research and write that chapter indeed in doing the books as a whole the way I have done them taking so long to do them there was really no choice involved that I really didn't have one and so there's two things about
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this that struck me while I was uh reading this book cuz he's describing what he was doing in his very first book right that's the power broker in his second book the path to power which is the first of the ly Johnson series he's doing the same thing just cannot move on until he feels he's done all the research and that he's turned every possible page that he could have and one was the awareness that he has this that
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he really doesn't have a choice but two that he also accepts it he doesn't fight against it he's just willing to spend to do so much more work and to spend so much more time than any other biographer than most other biographers and you see this acceptance because he's saying you know I'm not going to skip out on this very important part of the story I have to tell their story and he says and in order to accomplish that then the the
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book took a couple of years longer to write so what for him it's not even a choice of course I'm going to turn every page of course I'm going to tell the complete story to the best of my ability and then and only then will the book actually be ready and then he wraps up the introduction with talking about like what is this book it's like half Memoir like kind of short stories what's going on here and he says so if this book is
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not a full-fledged Memoir what is it it's a book about my work and how I do it why am I publishing this book now why don't I just include this material in the longer fulllength Memoir that I'm hoping to write why am I publishing
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these random Recollections towards a memoir while I'm still working on the last volume of the Johnson biography when I haven't finished it while I'm still at the age of 83 several years away from finishing it the answer is I'm
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afraid quite obvious I am quite aware that I may never get to write the Memoir although I have so many thoughts about writing so many anecdotes it's about research that I would like to preserve for anyone interested enough to read
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them I decided that just in case obviously saying just in case he's not going to live long enough if his books take seven 8 10 years it's highly likely that that Memoir never comes so he says I decided that just in case I'd put some
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of these thoughts down on paper now I want to go to the last job he has before writing the power broker and he becomes a news reporter an investigative reporter at Newsday and it is at news day where he's going to get this life motto this turn every page life motto but I took notes on the turn every page documentary and if you think about how I started the podcast that's that excerpt that I read to start the podcast about
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the relationship about how lynon Johnson's greatest Talent sprang from the tumultuous relationship he had with his father it hits you in the face that the same applies to Robert Caro this is unbelievable and so these are just some of the notes I don't think these are direct quotes from the documentary but I'm just typing these and jotting these down as I'm watching this and I watch this twice and what I realized about a
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young Robert was that he fell in love with books when he was young young he had a rotten childhood his favorite place was the library he would go to the library check out a book take it and read it in Central Park so he didn't
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have to go home why didn't he want to go home his mother dies of breast cancer I keep I keep like pounding on the book I don't know if you can hear that his mother dies of bre cancer I think she gets sick when he was five she finally
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passes away when he was 11 and for the rest of his life he never wanted to come home when he came home his father yelled and his father screamed but the point is that the source the source of both Johnson's and Caro's greatest talents came from the dysfunctional relationship that they both had with their fathers okay so I'm going to stop pounding on the book and I'm going to read from the book this is when he get he winds up
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getting an offer this is uh 1959 Newsday had a managing editor edor named Alan hathway this guy becomes very very important uh to Robert's life he had a deep prejudice against graduates of prestigious University so Robert had
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graduated from Princeton the people on Newsday hired me as a joke on him while he was on vacation he was so angry that I was there that during my first few weeks on the job he would refuse to acknowledge my presence and so after a
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few weeks on the job Robert gets put on a job everybody else is busy they're at like this this uh like company picnic and so no one they get a call they're saying hey should come down to the the government offices the FAA offices there's some research you should do down here there's a story down here and only because no one else is available the news day sent Robert and this is where he falls he just this is where he finds
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what he wants to do in life and he says I will never forget that night it was the first time I had ever gone through files and somehow in a strange way sitting there gr going through them I felt I was at home there are certain
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moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself I loved going through those files making them yield up their secrets to me I worked all night but I didn't notice the passing of time when I finished and left
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the building on Sunday the sun was coming up and that was a surprise I went back to the office and before driving home I wrote a memo on what I had found early Monday morning my day off the phone rang and it was Allan's secretary Allan wanted to see me right away I got in the car and I drove to news day that morning sure every mile of the way that I was about to be fired I entered his office he motioned for me to sit down
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and went on reading finally he raised his head I didn't know someone from Princeton could do digging like this he said from now on you do investigative work I responded but I don't know anything about investigative reporting
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and then Allan's going to say something that changes Robert Caro's life Allan looked at me just remember he said turn every page never assume anything turn every goddamn page and turn every page is not only the name of the documentary
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it becomes his life motto and he talks about you know being very young and talented and smart and just thinking he knows everything and then he this his first interaction with Robert Moses and seeing P like he sees real power up front up close and he realizes I know nothing I know nothing about how the world actually works a few years into my tenure at news day I had won a couple of journalistic awards but when you're when
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you're young and you win something you think you know everything I thought I was really something I thought I knew everything about politics and how politics and political power worked and so he's doing a story the fact that
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Robert Moses wants to build a bridge across Long Island and so that's what Robert wants to happen he has an unbelievable amount of power this time so Robert Carol is up there everybody in ALB says no we're not going to do this
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he's like okay well there's no story here I'll drive back home and a few weeks went by and nothing changed until Robert mosus wanted them to change a couple weeks later a friend called me and said Bob I think you better come
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back up here meaning to Albany and I said something like oh I don't think that's necessary I think I took care of that bridge he said Bob Robert Moses was up here yesterday and I think you better come back so I drove back up and I'll
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never forget this when I went back to the same officials who had assured me that they were firmly against the bridge they were now firmly for it I remember I drove home that night all the way down from Albany to our house on Long Island it was 163 Mi I kept thinking everything you've been doing is so that piece of negative selft talk this is not the first time this is something he also uh another trait that Robert Caro shares
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with lynon Johnson that that I'll talk about later this fact that they have these this almost like hypercritical selft talk of themselves in their head everything you've been doing is Robert Moses had enough power to turn around a whole state government in one day and he's had that power for more than 40 years and you Bob car who are supposed to be writing about political power and explaining it you have no idea where he
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got this power and then he brings up a great point that you need time in your life to slow down and actually think cuz he's like well I'm a newspaper reporter at this time I have I'm hopping from one deadline to
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the next deadline to the next deadline I have this idea and this thought in the back of my head but I have no time to actually digest what that actually means how can one person flip an entire state government one unelected person ACR such
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power to do so and me and no one else understands how he got this power or how powerful he was and so he says I didn't do much with the S at the time I love being a reporter but you're always running from one story to another and it
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wasn't until I became a Neiman Jour journalism fellow at at Harvard that I finally had time to think I was already 29 years old so what the nean fellowship is they invite some journalists uh you're able to spend a year at Harvard
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and you're SP the point is you're supposed to learn more about the areas that you're covering so you're taking college classes you know to talk about political power politics urban planning all the things that he's writing about in New York City right uh so I was taking courses on urban planning one of the courses were taught by two professors who had written a well-regarded textbook on highways including an analysis in great detail of
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Highway locations why highways get built where they get built and they're naming stuff like oh it's about uh you know it's as simple as like this mathematical equations about population density traffic patterns elevation of grades a very like academic way of looking academic into my opinion very naive way of looking at the world and this is where Robert Caro snaps he's sitting there listening to the professors who
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literally wrote The Textbook from which he's learning and he's like this is no that's not why highways get built where they get built they get built there because Robert Moses wants them there for the first time I had a chance to think about what I had been doing and what I wanted to do with my life and I guess I came to feel that if I could find out where Robert Moses got his power this power that no one understood this power that nobody else
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was even thinking about if I could explain it I would be adding something to the knowledge people ought to have not the kind of knowledge you learn in a textbook but the raw naked realities of power how it really works
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and that's just incredible incredible writing like you feel like you're in the CL like when you're reading this you feel you're really there with Robert and so that's the point where he's like okay I'm going to write a book on this he
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goes and he gets a small uh very tiny contract and he gets a $2,500 advance and he's like okay I'm going to start writing this book which turns into the power broker I think it's going to take him about seven years but this is another what what uh what he has in in common with a lot of entrepreneurs that you and I study is the fact that they talk about like if they knew how hard at the very beginning or even before they
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they started their company if they knew how hard it was going to be they would have never done it and so he he had no idea it was going to take you know seven more than seven years to finish uh when I first began uh writing the power
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broker we didn't have any savings to speak of and we had a small son I heard about something called The Carnegie Fellowship which took one working journalist at a time and paid him his weekly salary for a year while he wrote
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a book and so he tells his wife they're going to be paying me for a whole year and I have this outline I'll be done in 9 months at the end of the year we were completely out of money and for the next four years money was a problem and so he is broke and struggling for many years he says there came a time when we really totally ran out of money I just didn't have any place to turn my editor took me out to dinner and I said can I please
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have the other half of my Advance there are sentences that are said to you in your life that are chiseled into your memory and his reply was one oh no Bob I guess you didn't understand we like the book but not many people are going to read a book on Robert Moses and you have to be prepared for a very small printing so I want to pause there because after this dinner he has one of the worst nights in his of his entire life but
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here's another example of people telling you trying to tell you how successful you will be in your life which is complete and utter the power broker was published in 1974 it is it's on it's like 47th printing it is on the
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top list of the hund best non-fiction books over and over and over again walk into any bookstore in your city and you will find a copy this guy is supposed to be on Robert's side and he's destroying his dreams right in front of him Robert
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is broke he's married he's got a small child to take care of and this guy's like oh don't worry about it no one's going to read a book on Robert Moses millions of people have read a book on Robert Moses my hands are sweaty I get
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so mad at this uh that was the worst night we really we were really at the end of our rope I didn't know what to say to Ena this is his wife I didn't know how to face her I knew I was going to have to go back to work and uh and it
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was going to be very hard for me to finish the book by this time I felt I had learned some things uh some things about power it was important for people to know but they were never going to know them if I didn't finish the book soon after luckily things changed and this is what changed my editor left his publishing house so that was the guy I took him out to dinner and there was an out clause in my contract saying that I
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could leave if he left so he does something that's very very smart here he he gets a a new agent and then really this this really clicked for me let me let me read this whole thing too I mean it's really he what what changes in his
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life is that he finds the right partners and that changes everything so this editor oh no one's going to read a book on Robert Moses yeah I don't want to I'm gonna stop myself from saying what I was gonna say in case there's
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kids listening um okay so let me go to this he needed an agent he winds up uh this is Lyn nesbet comes his agent and then Richard gotle I think or Bob gotle sorry not Richard Robert gotle uh Bob gotle and Linn nbit come into his life and they're actually in the documentary and this is I don't even know what 40 years later 1971 so 50 over 50 years later they're still all all these people are still working together so he signs
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with Lin nebit and she's again this is how the right Partners how he finds the right partners and that changes everything he's talking to Lynn and she goes why do you look so worried and he says I didn't know I looked worried but of course I was I told her I'm worried that I won't have enough money to finish the book imagine put yourself in his shoes where he's at in his life right now he believes in what he's doing he has to
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support his wife he has to support his uh his his his son they've already sold their house they've their savings is gone they're living in a shitty apartment in the Bronx you can see he's so worried that you could see it on his face when he's sitting there quietly and the reason this is so important because from our vantage point we know that he didn't quit he goes on to write the power broker goes on to write some of the best biographies alind
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Johnson the best biography l Johnson ever written there something he's still working on 50 years later imagine if he would have quit if he couldn't take that pain Excellence is the capacity to take pain there's another yet another example of how true that Maxim is I didn't know I looked worried but of course I I was I told her I'm worried that I won't have enough money to finish the book my editor had left me feeling that few
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people would read a book on Robert Moses and therefore no publisher would give me the money I needed to finish it she asked me how much money I was talking about I told her I needed enough money so I could spend two more years on the
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book I don't remember the exact amount I specified but I know it was not large and all of a sudden there were other sentences that I'll never forget she said is that what you're worried about then you can stop worrying right now I
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can get you that just by picking up the phone everybody in New York knows about this book then she said you can stop worrying about money my job is to find you an editor you can work with for the rest of your life I'm going to set up some lunches for you there were four all well all with well-known editors three of the editors took me to some fancy restaurant and told me they could make me a star Bob gotle says well I don't go
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out for lunch but we can have a sandwich at my desk and talk about your book so of course I picked him so I want to go back to this idea that Robert Caro actually shares some traits with the people that he is researching the people
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that he is writing about and so one trait I actually think Robert Caro shares with Lindon Johnson and Robert Moses is the ruthlessness that all three of them have and all three of them use to get what they actually want that
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trait was not at all obvious in terms it's obvious when you read about Lyn Johnson and Robert Moses it was not at all obvious to me until I read this book so I want to go to the section on the power broker and Robert Moses and just there's a few uh stories in here that I think are interesting Robert Moses seemed to remember every vote even votes from 40 years ago and why it had been cast now he's he's he's actually sitting
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down for an interview at this point uh with Robert uh Carol on the Jones Beach appropriation it was 8 to7 against us in the ways and means uh committee he would say but the key this is again the ruthlessness that those that acrew power U you actually use and Implement that power that is a key theme in the work of Robert car what he's trying to or Carol what he's trying to explain to us uh but the key was that this little Upstate guy
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and then he named some long forgotten State Assembly man and he had a mortgage coming due on his farm and the mortgage was held by a bank up there and the key to the bank was was Charles huet who was the chairman of the Senate finance committee and the governor knew how to get to huet so it was 8 to7 for us so what just happened there Robert Moses said this guy was going to vote against us then I looked for where he was weak I
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found where he was weak then I found somebody that could push on that weakness until he changed his vote and if he went against me I would have foreclosed on his farm and this was not a one-off instance with Robert Moses
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this was how he did business a few pages later I asked Moses why Epstein had changed his mind he changed it Moses said after he was hit over the head with an axe when I asked him what that meant he said I won't tell you what we did to
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him he did tell me though he said we put our blood hounds this was a team of inves ators who had compiled dossier on other City officials which Moses leaked to newspaper newspapers if an official opposed him so he we put our blood
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hounds on Epstein and and then he said he had a talk he had he had to have a talk with Epstein who was married and the conversation had included some references to a woman and this is what Moses said to him I said this woman this
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woman is a Chum of yours he said she's not my Chum I said oh yes she is she's your Chum all right so Robert Moses said with a broad charming smile he wrote his letter meaning he flipped them and one thing that made Moses so effective is he had this ruthlessness that was also matched with a particular type this is from the book a particular type of vision of imagination that was unique and so intense that it amounted to a
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very rare form of Genius what Robert Caro is telling us is that Robert Moses was a ruthless genius and then he builds on this he adds another layer first he told us told us about his ruthlessness then he told us about his genius now he's talking about his Savage energy ruthless genius with Savage energy listen to this writing they had not been exaggerating when they described the Savage energy Robert Moses had put behind his dreams
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and his Fury when they were checked how mapping out strategies for overcoming obstacles he would Pace back and forth across his office hour after hour how the palm of his big right hand would Smash down over and over again on the table as talked how he would lunge out of his chair and begin as one Aid put it waving his arms just wild pick up the oldfashioned glass inkw well on his desk and hurl it at AIDS so that it shattered
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against a wall how he would pound his clenched fists into the walls hard enough to scrape the skin off them in a rage beyond the perception of pain I remember coming across something a few months ago I had spent I think three weeks s reading and rereading all of Paul Graham's essays I think it's episode 275 276 and 277 and there's something he talks about there's there's a bunch of themes that Paul repeats throughout his writing but one of them
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is that Founders need to be around other Founders and he has a few different ways of saying this I think the best way to describe this is I'm going to read an excerpt from his from his uh his essays on really why ambitious people need to be around other ambitious people and I want you to remember what Paul writes for the section we're about to go to because it comes at a time when Robert uh car car I keep saying Caro I know
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it's Caro that's why we just going to call him Bob uh when in Bob's life where he is struggling with doubt and uncertainty he's completely isolated he feels like the Project's never going to be finished he feels like a failure because it's taking so long I think he's on year I don't know four or five uh when on a project he thought would take him N9 months and so Paul Graham says ambitious people are rare So if everyone is mixed
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together randomly as they tend to be early in people's lives then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers when you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people they blo remember this sentence
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remember this sentence for where we are in Bob's life they bloom like dying plants given water probably most ambitious people are stared for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers and so I'm going to read
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note that's on this page before I read what Bob wrote wrestling with doubt and uncertainty what if this book never happens imagine if he quit here as the year followed year the project had in my mind taken on an air of unreality this was due to the lack of any relationship between writing the book and the inescapable realities of the rest of life such as earning a living remember he's still broke at this point my wife and I watched our savings
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run out and we sold our house to keep going and the money from the sale ran out the book sometimes seem more and more like a rather unreal interlude in my life the most fundamental reason for the feeling of unreality was I had for 5 years been living in a world utterly unpopulated by anyone else who was doing what I was doing I need to repeat that the most fundamental reason for this feeling of unreality I had for 5 years
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been living in a world utterly unpopulated by anyone else who was doing what I was doing that's the exact same idea that Paul Graham realized from observing thousands of Founders Founders need to be around other Founders I don't
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think that during the first 5 years I was working on the power Brer I had any contact with a single other writer of serious books there was no writer with whom I could discuss a writing problem I was bothered by the length of time I had
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been working on the book that was the thing that made me doubt the most when I had started I had firmly believed that I'd be done in a year as year followed year I became convinced that I had gone Terri astray one day in 1971 I came across a magazine article describing the Frederick Lewis Allen room it said that the only requirement for admission was a contract from a publisher and that its 11 resident writers were allowed to keep
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books and other research materials at their desk I'm pretty sure this at the New York City public library after a wait of some months I was assigned one of the 11 desks it was not books that were the most wonderful things that I
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found in the Allen room what is about to happen he's is about to find other people like him he winds up meeting a writer and it says the next question was the question I had come to dread how long you've been working on the book
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this time however when I replied 5 years the response was not an incredulous stare oh he said that's not so long I've been working on my George Washington biography for 9 years I could have jumped up and kissed him the next day I could have jumped up and kissed Joe lash when he asked me the same question and after hearing my answer said in his quiet way Eleanor and Franklin one of his biographies took me seven years in a
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couple of sentences these two men Idols of mine had wiped away 5 years of doubt and so now he's having lunch every day with fellow Craftsmen with the people doing the same thing he is doing the talk was often about problems of research and writing about the mysteries of our c there is not a more mysterious craft than entrepreneurship the talk was often about problems of research and writing about the mysteries of our craft our shared
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craft to me this book is full of just reoccurring themes that appear in his life and work over and over again one of them I don't think I've mentioned yet and it's this idea of just how bad do you want it and it's this theme that
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just reoccurs over and over again in the history of Entrepreneurship that those that get to the the top of their profession those are the very best of what they do just spend more time thinking about their work practicing
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their work so it says during all the years since Alan Hathaway had given me that first piece of advice turn every page never assume anything turn every goddamn page I had never forgotten it it was engraved in my mind at this point he
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is now doing the research the the power broker is already published I think he one the pullets are on if I'm not mistaken it's a massive success that allows him uh the reward for great work is more the reward for great work is
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more work that's a quote from the new Kevin Kelly book that my friend Patrick ashany sent me and I really feel applies to to the to to the uh the life and career of Bob and so really what I'm talking about is like he's just going through all of he's using Allen's Maxim right turn every page Maxim and he's applying it to the research that he's doing in the Presidential Library of LBJ it would take multiple lifetimes to read
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everything but what pops out at you is that the fact that Bob was willing to spend more time mining in that yielded unexpected diamonds uh looking through a lot of file folders that from their description one would assume contain
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nothing of use to me and the wisdom of Allen's advice was proven to me again and again scores and scores of times this happened and so what he's talking about is this almost deliberate inefficient way where he's like okay you
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think from the everything in the LBJ Library is organized into files and they have these things called finding AIDs that kind of tell you okay this is about his time in Congress or his time in Texas or whatever the case is and and you know some things are obvious like oh let me read the Vietnam stuff let me read the the Civil Rights Act stuff but Carl is just like I'm just going to spend as much time as possible and
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that's why you know these books take 10 years to do and because he spent more time in things that other people overlooked he read files Almost sure that no one else has ever read that spending more time mining yields unexpected diamonds and these twin traits of persistence and determination that are present in all of Bob's career it it feeds into to this idea is like you can tell he's demonstrating how bad he wants it by the length in which he's
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willing to dedicate to his work to make sure his books are the best in class and at one point this is like this is another example of this it's like well I can write a book on Robert Moses because I'm a New Yorker I was born in New York I grew up in New York Robert Moses worked in New York I'm doing all this research I'm talking to all these people and it's like I can't understand the people because I'm not from the Hill
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Country I'm not from these tiny remote impoverished towns that Lyon Johnson was and look at listen to what he does I said to Ena that's his wife I'm not understanding these people and therefore I'm not understanding Lyn Johnson we're going to have to move to the Hill Country and live there Ena said why can't you do why can't you do a biography of Napoleon but Ena is always Ena loyal and true she said as she always says sure we readed a house on
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the edge of the Hill Country where we were to live for most of the next 3 years I want to go back to this idea that was the very opening of the podcast and I think one of the most important parts of the book and it's something
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that reappears over and over again that you can always understand the son by the story of his father the story of the father is embedded in the son and it's because goes it ties into what we were just talking about like how bad do you
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want it a lot of people wrote biographies of lenon Johnson before uh none of them moved to the Hill Country like he did and as a result this is what living there spending more time there taking time to get to know the people allowed Caro to understand Johnson and the Rel ation ship with his father at a more fundamental uh level and one of this was the fact that uh he kept trying to interview and and successfully first
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unsuccessfully and then eventually successfully got information out of lynon's brother this is lynon's Young younger brother by the time uh Caro starts writing the books lynon Johnson had already died Lyon died early at 64 and so he says I felt that a key to lynon Johnson's youth was his complicated relationship with his father and so he's interviewing lynon's Brother Sam Houston now Sam Houston I said I'd like you to tell me again about those
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terrible arguments that your father and lynon used to have at dinner time Sam Houston was recreating family dinners at the Johnson saying almost shouting back and forth what his father had shouted at his brother and what his brother had shouted back you're you're just not College material are you godamn it you're just a failure Lyndon you're just a failure Lyndon and you're always going to be a failure and lynon would shout
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back what are you you're a bus inspector that's what you are sitting there against the wall I felt I was getting closer to the heart of Lyndon Johnson's Boyhood now Sam Houston I want you to tell me about all those wonderful stories about Lyndon when you both were boys there was a long pause tell me those wonderful stories again about you growing up I can't Sam Houston said why not I asked because they never happened I now had a picture of lynon
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Johnson's youth that terrible youth that character hardening youth Youth and when I got to that sentence the point of reading is to understand right it's not just to like put my eyes on the page and run across the words I'm
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like I'm done it's to stop it's to think about what the hell is going on I had a different picture of Lyndon Johnson's youth that terrible youth that character hardening youth this is the environment that hardens a person that kind of
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childhood that kind of relationship with his father and yet again maybe Robert Carol understood this when he's WR writing this and maybe that's why he's writing it but maybe he didn't but it's obvious if you sit with the words and you reread certain parts of this book and you think about all the the parts that jump out at you he's describing lynon Johnson it's the same description of his childhood Sam Houston was talking about
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the screaming matches at the dinner table the same thing happened in Robert car's life he never wanted to come home because his father yelled and screamed and then once you see the similarities between their two childhoods and the way
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the ruthlessness the the the determination that the Superhuman levels of determination superhuman levels of Genius that both of them possess and as the book goes on it clicks what did Steve Jobs say I'm a reflection of what
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I do the way I work is an innate part of my being that applied to Steve Jobs that applied to Robert Caro and that applied to Lyndon Johnson I wanted to examine a stone election in detail this is the the main story in the second Lyon biography the means of ascent so this is what he's talking about I wanted to examine a stolen election in detail but part of the reason was neither straightforward nor professional nor to be honest was
47:09
just something it had much to do with reason it had to do with something in me that's something in my nature which wasn't a quality that I could be proud of or take credit for it was just part of me like it or not the part of me now
47:23
that as I was writing books kept leading me after I'd gotten every question answered to suddenly think despite myself of new questions that in an instant of thinking of them I felt must be answered for my book to be complete
47:35
the part of me that kept leading me to think of new avenues of research that even as I thought of them I felt it was crucial to head down it wasn't something about which I had a choice in reality I had no choice at all think about that section of the book he is describing himself and simultaneously he is describing lynen John son think back to the beginning of the podcast where Lyndon is pushing that plow at 18 and 19 in the hot sun that he
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knows he is paying for the mistakes of his father and when lynon gets the opportunity to escape the mistakes of his father he was willing to do everything to do everything not to make a mistake because he understood the consequences the repercussions of one single mistake and so just like Caro had to turn every p age lynon had to count every vote it is just the way they work it is an innate part of their being and
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it stems from the relationship with their father the Perpetual need to escape to run from a great source of pain in their formative years that is incredible when you realize that and the similarities don't stop there this about the negative selft talk that they both share I had all I needed a good story and enough details to make the reader see the setting in which it took place why did I say to myself is there any more to the story I had the
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story plenty of details I kept saying to myself you schmuck this is what you always do you don't need any more details you've got it now just write it there is still so much about myself that I don't understand but by putting down on paper these short Recollections I have come to understand that this was simply another instance among so many and which which there were available to me no Alternatives that was about Caro's
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negative selft talk and his work ethic the fact that no one else worked as hard on biographies as Caro did this is about Johnson's work ethic the fact that nobody worked harder than him and his negative selft talk everyone I talked to
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about Johnson's first run for Congress would say I never saw anyone who worked as hard as Lyndon Johnson who would really know what this means I thought there's one guy who's with lynon Johnson most of the day and it's not his
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campaign manager it's his chauffeur I kept coming back to him I would ask what was Johnson doing between campaign stops what was he doing in the back seat finally he told me that Johnson often would be talking to himself it was like he was having discussions with himself about whether he had a successful day whether he had made a good impression on voters or not and so I'd say what do you mean by that and he'd say well lots of time he felt
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he wasn't doing too good and he would tell himself that it was his own fault Johnson would say to himself boy wasn't that dumb you know you just lost that Ballot Box you lost it and you need it and he would talk out rehearse over and over again out loud what he would say to the voters in that Precinct the next time this book is incredible I really hope I can convince you uh to get a copy for yourself I want to close with what
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is my favorite story in the entire book I think it's a story that a lot of entrepreneurs can relate to the determination to outrun desperation Lyndon is 23 in this story I wasn't fully understanding what these people were telling me about the depth of Lyndon Johnson's determination about the Frantic urgency the desperation to get ahead and to get ahead fast as if the passions the Ambitions that he brought to Washington strong though that
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they were Were Somehow intensified by the fact that he was finally there in the place where he had always wanted to be I wanted to show the contrast between what he was coming from the poverty the insecurity and what he was trying for I first got a clue about how I might be able to do this by talking to the young woman who worked with him as the other assistant in that congressman's office Estelle harbon he was very poor Miss
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Harbin told me he arrived in Washington in December 1931 with a cardboard suitcase in only one coat a thin top coat not adequate for Washington winners she told me how quickly lynon Johnson learned how desperate he was to learn
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how he became so quickly in her words the best Congressional assistant there ever was one thing that got me was her saying that when he came to work in the morning he was always out of breath because he had been running I wanted to
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make the reader see the contrast between what he was coming from and what he was trying for something on the way to work had excited him and thrilled him so so much that he'd break into a run every morning here's what I wrote about when Lyndon Johnson first came to Washington he lived in a basement of a Shabby little hotel leaving his room early in the morning he would turn left down the alley onto a street that ran between the
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walls of other shabby hotels but when he turned the corner at the End of the Street suddenly before him at the top of a long gentle Hill would not be brick but marble a great shadowy mass of marble the capital and the marble of the
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Eastern facade already caught by the early morning sun would be gleaming brilliant almost dazzling white a structure as Majestic and imposing as the power of the sovereign state that it had been designed to symbolize and as
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lynen Johnson came up Capitol Hill in the morning he would be running the woman who worked with him coming to work in the morning would see the gangling figure running awkwardly arms flapping past the long row of columns on his way to the house office building at first because it was Winter and she knew that he owned only a thin top coat she thought he was running because he was cold but in Spring the weather turned
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warm and still whenever she saw lynon Johnson coming up Capitol Hill he would be running well of course he was running from the land of poverty to this everything he had ever wanted everything he had ever hoped for was
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there and that is where I'll leave it this book was incredible and I do think it's going to have an impact on me in ways I can't even fully comprehend right now if you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes in your podcast
54:11
player you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time another way to support the podcast is by signing up for the founders premium AMA feed I'm going to be doing a lot more ask me anything episodes this week there's already 20s something that uh you can listen to immediately that link is down below in the show notes and available at Founders podcast.com that is 305 books down 1,000 to go and I'll talk to you again soon