“Every once in a while, someone comes along who's sort of 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 big is ever going to be built again. And then someone suddenly comes along and all of a sudden things get built.”
Dwarkesh Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026
Context
Dwarkesh Patel asked how democracies can get big projects built, pointing to California's years of rail spending with no new track. Caro answered that he's not sure there is a good middle ground, and that progress tends to wait for a rare political genius like Robert Moses or Lyndon Johnson.
Transcript
…they were saying the same thing. Nobody's ever going to 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 going to be able to do it. But he comes along and does it. So today, someone would come along and do it.
…City in the 40s and 50s, where they have a very Moses-type attitude and they put up tens of thousands of miles of railways over the last 10, 20 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?
…out into Long Island because the road would have to cross scores of properties. most of which the people didn't want the road coming and had the power to stop them then because he didn't have the power of eminent domain then. But Moses said, basically, 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, someone comes along who's sort of 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 big is ever going to 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 happen to be writing about two guys, Lyndon Johnson and Robert Moses, who in both cases, Johnson with civil rights and Moses with public works, where people were saying, you can't do this, but they did it.
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.
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