“Before I start a book, I think through what I want the book to be, the whole book. … You got to get it down to one sentence. Or three years from now, you're going to be writing and you're going to be saying, what am I trying to do?”
Dwarkesh Podcast · AI Research & Frontier Labs · October 2026
Context
Dwarkesh asked how Caro stays on track when a book takes years and almost nobody sees the manuscript. Caro says he learned this the hard way on The Power Broker: before writing anything, he boils the book down to a sentence, or at most a paragraph.
Transcript
Okay.
…people who have seen the manuscript. So how do you make sure you're on the right track? Because, you know, you had to wait so long from when you start to when you get public feedback. How do you make sure that everything's going to hang together and you're pursuing the message the way you want to?
Well, part of your question is, how do you be sure you're on the right track? The answer to that is you're not, okay? But how do you try to stay on the right track? I do have a device for that. Before I start a book, I learned this the hard way with the power broker because I didn't do it with the power broker. Before I start a book, I think through what I want the book to be, the whole book. People say, you mean you think it through to the end? Well, the answer is yes. And then you say, well, what is this book about? I said at that desk sometimes for a long time before I start right when I'm thinking about the book, just asking myself in one way or another, what is this book about? You got to get it down to one sentence. You say, well, you can't get it down to one sentence. Then you…
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