The Power Broker #06: Mike Schur
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this is the 99 percent invisible breakdown of the powerbroker on Roman Mars and i of course， Emaliot Keylen today were covering the beginning section of part five the love of power chapter 2526 thats pages for 992606 in my book and later in this episode or special book club guest is Mike sure he is the creator behind blood said coms like Parkson recreation the good place in Brooklyn 99 he was a producer writer on the office and hes also written a book on moral philosophy called how to be perfect Mike is a huge fan of the power broker maybe the biggest fan of the power broker ive ever met and he assided this book as inspiration behind parks merack， so on this episode recovering pages for 99 to 606， my book thats the beginning of part 5 the love of power chapters 25 and 26 when we last left， the power broker Robert Moses had run for governor he had been such an unlikable unpleasant candidate that he lost more than any major party candidate had ever lost before and his reputation istarnishes completely on his as but present rows of out a unlikely savior in an attempt to removehim for good has an order issued staging that New York city will get no more wpa money until itfires anyoneholding both a city and a stateoffice this was a order written just to expell Moses Moses leaks this to the press hesableto frame this is the feral government trying to push around the people of New York city and itisjustwhatmoses needed to get his Halo affixed back over his head and under marigordia Moses perfects the system of providing physical achievements for politicians are run on while threatening to design who doesnget his way although ligoria finds a way to take the face out of him in this regard a little bit of the course， the last section Moses is even more flagrant about ignoring orders and laws again in his way， and hes even more ruthless about just destroying people who are trying to stop him from achieve in his hands but at the same time， hes beginning to get stretch pretty thin hes doing all these jobs around the city most of are not as accomplished or as thoughtful as like dons beach and is very clear that hes underserving New York cities poor and nonwhite population and will see more of that ruthlessness and neglect um in this episode because whats clear that Carol is getting to at the end of the last section was that this is not a man in love with this mission a man in love with parks hes become a man whos just in love with power the love of power the love of power that starts after 25 called changing uh i think is like the longest chapter in the book is right i believe so i this is a seventy five seventy six page chapter uh its kind of anomnibus chapter that encompasys a bunch of different things all under that heading of changing， and this is one of the times armlike Mr Carol maybe you could split this chapter into this of smaller pieces its a big chapter that and maybe this one isnt served by being called changing or driving in changing like theres some specificity in these stories that i think might have been broken out a little bit better but regardless i actually really dig all this stuff like it does like its accumulating to show what type of person Robert Moses has become kind of at the height of his power yes！

anyway， chapter five is in some way， theres some great stuff in it， but in some ways， it almost feels like property Carey was is like yeah yeah lets get through this i want to get to chapter 26， get to chapter 26， and so hes like i dont wanna hold bunch of chappers will just have one big chaffer， and then well get to the well get to the family stuff right， so lets jumping to it if theres a lot of numbersthis chapter i apologize listeners were gonna be doing a lot of numbers its a long chapter， but then chapter 26， such a its， such a dramatic kind of personal story at the end of this large scale metripolitiunicible story so youll see this this episode i think youfeels gonna be really well balanced even though its gonna seem like we spend a lot of time talking about how much things cost and how many thousandfeet of of rifrop are being used you know in in projects so uh we start this chapter its ironic thats called changing because rover Carol starts by saying that arrogance is just a basic part of Moses nature hes posing that just as it was for his mother first grandmother arriance comes naturally term this something is not changing in him and that once he had a taste of power he came to need power and dominance for its own sake and this is why he thinks most start seems to start going out of his way to antagonize people just with impunity before he would do it to get his way or because sometimes he just kind of a jerk but now he seems begetting pleasure just out of stepping on people and he goes to a couple examples theres a reproduction of mount vernin in prospect park my my own home park when i lived in Berkelin and uh he wants to tear it down and the community counsels of the sea of New York they dont want it to happen and the council sparilis robbernous Moses could just ignore them he has total power parks but he said he publicizes their opposition so that he can then plant quotes in the papers that are kind of like weiddi reposts to them hes like uh hes like i havent heard anything from any reasonable people about this and the reports like what about the community council the city New York can he goes exactly and its like see you doing anyway， just to get that that bont in the pippers and he goes all the way to the Rockaway is to give a speech to a local association just we can tell them that their airport Floyd bennetfield sticks， but its not very good like he didnhave to go out there there are ways is not an easy joint from where he lives there is a newlocal newspaper that criticizes him Swiss he essentially runs it out a business uh these are powerless people really cant really stop him but he just goes out of his way to step on them yeah and one of the ones i found me a most point in is this youngwoman who works for mail the gordia pearl burnstine uh shes a sectuary at the board of estiment and all shes doing is doing what legordia tells her to like putsopmos is a little bit does this does that whatever and he just makes a mission to destroy this womans life he makes life so horrible for her and is constantly abusive to her and he knows she sister proxy for legordia that she has no control over what shes doing but he cant fight legory a quite the same way he cant bleu ligordy the same way so he goes after her and is a story caretells of another one of Moses aids making a suggestion at a lunch meeting and Moses going now youre just a swaby on this ship do you understand then going do you understand？

do you understand until the fun guy finally says yes， sir and two things about that one its so unnecessary and two raremoses he can not avoid maritime water stuff you thats the analog he goes to me your swaby on this ship you know he just loves he loves the water you know even when hes attacking people hes and he starts to hes a hes a big guy hes got powerful arms from all that swimming and hes physically threatening to people and caretls the story of manhattonboro， president Stanley and maisics will come up a few times this book as a as a opponent of Moses， theyre at aboard vestant meeting and asic says these are misleading costfigures and Moses takes a swing in his direction and says i like to punch you in the nose and its like thats not theres no yeah thats not acceptable， but not acceptable for for an adult human to say that to an adult， another adult yeah！

and i think this is the one part where it it is uh Robert Moses changing like heis a very pugnatious individual， but usually his opponents or people who have you know similar power to him you know， there are governor， there are president who should be doing better things with his time you know， but now these are really lowly people that hes just believe you know and and this is kind of a different like just more extreme Moses yes！

as it as opposed for exactly before he was a fighter who wouldnlet people get this way now hes a boy is bulling people， and theres always been a little bit of that in m but now he has the power to really run Rampant with it because knowing he get this way and theres a story that a Carol goes into detail on i will see how much detail we go into it i think theres lot of good details but you may get board of it i dont know about the Columbia Yacht club which on the face of it doesnseem seem like the most sympathetic group of people just from the name Columbia Yacht club uh theybinid 6ST since 18 thats almost fifty years by the point the story is happening this is 1934 they paid a low rent to the city for the land because they had put the money into develop and build to maintain this Marina right that was a place for guests of the city to Dock their ships they had get involved with fleet weekend things like that when a British roll t stop by you know thats where they Dock their yacht somethings like that so March 1934， Moses says that the club is in the way of the west side improvement， which is this huge west side plan that were Gonna talk about a lot this chapter it this has been his dream for years he says were Gonna have to tear this yout club down and the members the club are like uh well can we stay through September because we promise to help host during Fleet week and if anyone i dont know if othercities have Fleet with the same way but in New York， Fleet week is its a big thing like their sales all over the place people love it and uh Moses says thats fine because the west side improving the such a big project is gonna take me so long to get to the part where we need to tell you down and then hes like actually， i kind of want to change that building into a restaurant and i want to start working on that now so you can stay through September if you donate the building to the parks department and the club comedor and its unclearhow this happens in a call with Moses agrees to this plan will stay through September and will give you the building but agrees in such a way that it irritates Moses in a way that the the commodor can never really figure out and the next day they get navy letter from Moses saying they have to vacate in twelve days and anything they leave behind will be considered abandoned property and Moses ghost the press and he runs his strategy this is the private interests versus the public good this these wealthy yodowners theyre standing the way of this big public improvement and the press just runs these statements without question no criticism they dont investigate it why would you investigate it？

the champing the parks is up against the Columbia Yacht club its a Yacht club like we they havent seen another movies yet in nineteen thirties but they they know they can they can guess Yacht club bonus are kind of average new Yorker they cant wait at the club they apply to the state spring court for ninjunction and the court hearing shows that a lot of Moses attacks are based on just outright lies the court issues in junction but right Moses does he he doesnt do injunctions hes like enterjackson tell the court you enforce your own injunction you know and he has already sent to steam shovels and they literally cut off the dirt roads leading to the clubhouse so its very hard to get to this clubhouse now the next day the power gets shut off and the people of the clubhouse they get in touch with conadd the connet goes oh， yeah， someone from the yacht club called and told us to shut the power off and its clearly someone from the park department as call pretending there from the club uh， while thats being sorted out a group of park employees combined theyre like oh， yeah， we heard theres a problem with the water main so Wes gonna dig it up and remove it and theyre just like this is it is one thing after another way of of forcing them out and the uh the board of alder， men of the city demands Moses receive order and he just ignores them he doesnt have to and in the end the club members have to leave monster early Moses tiers the building down and later on Carol reports that when someone else asked Moses， why did you do this to them？

he said， because they were rude to me thats amazing and we dont we dont even know what the rudenus was as far as the guy from the club nose， he just said yes OK well， agree your proposal yeah！

i mean a bullet with this type of weaponry at his fingertips like to to bring in you know uh steam shovels to cut off the road to bring in coned to bring in like the you know the people to to shut off the water i mean all that sort of stuff is just that is a stunning amount of power for a person who is not mature enough to willed it nomatturnof to wildit and also not selected official yeah！

you can say you know the last president before the current one he was a he was a bully but he was you know considering our weirdo election system he was selected to that office yes， you know uh some people had decided he deserved it whereas with Moses the people who decided he deserves this power are other elected officials but its not like the people of New York were like yeah， yeah， we elected him to do this stuff yeah and these goals are not just bulling they also help Moses achieve his goals by making people less likely across and Carol quotes judge jacoblutsky talking like a New York judge or he says if you know that every time， you get the guysway hes gonna kick you in the balls you make pretty damasure you dont get this way right and yeah if it lets start， i mean yeah， this is a judge talking you know thats from the not from the bench i soon but but thats good advice if you know guys gonna kick you in the balls dont get close enough to his feed and so the people the city brc are now making a have it just its stay away from Moses not just to let him have his way because they know hes such a troublemaker and its almost like private hero needs to remind us just the sheer power that he has at his hands hes not just being a believe the clu 逼 yacht club hespends a page talking about the literal physical changes to the map of New York that Robert Moses is making hes creating five thousand acres of new land hes joining islands together to make larger Matland masses hes built hundreds of parks and bridges hes the shape of the city the physical reality of the city is in his hands and so beyond just pushing out yachclubs you know intering down their houses heis heis literally changing the the map of the city in a way that nobody probably should have the power to do but certainly not someone who is accountable to nobody yeah！

this only going to get less accountable this time goes on i mean he opens two hundred fifty five playgrounds the nineteen thirties he just makes a big deal out of each one of their openings and he he numbers them in the press so they can you know you know keep keep account of his tali ground one 45 it just open playground one 46 it open， but what is clear as if you should pay attention to where these playgrounds are hes really only putting playgrounds in the wealthier neighborhoods and hes hes really ignoy in the playgrounds and the neighborhoods that needed the most specifically he is heis building a lot of playgrounds in the comfortable areas of the city and the least amount of playgrounds in the area。

the city and havedid by the cities 40 black residence 2 themare children and Moses is not really interested in providing safeplace from to play they need safeplace to play and the black community New York is calling out to him specifically to the city government and to him are childrene playgrounds they need safeplaces to go， but he doesnt want to do it and the press is not running the story Moses refuses to build playgrounds in black neighborhoods theyre running the story look at all these playgrounds look all these playgrounds yeah， 25 playgrounds this is amazing yeah and if anyone ask Moses what about playgrounds in slam areas he says Ive done a lot for the children of the slims and the papers are like yeah， hes set it folks hes doing a lot and beyond playgrounds this recaro talks about swimming pools and this is theres a detail in here that was one of things that always stuck with me in the twentyyears after i first read this book where Carolis timeout how swing pools were particularly personally important to Robert Moses he loves swimming there were very few poolsthe city public pools and now Moses nine thirties hes building all these public pools and hes putting a lot of his own personal attention because he likes hes not a kid， hes not gonna play on monkey， bars or or on a slide or something like that or you know hes but he is going to he is gonna go swim yeah， not those pools not with the regular people but you know what i mean he like swimming no， no and at heis putting all the little touches is known for care talks about how the problem was always had you get people to wash their feet before they walk into a public pool and they invent these footcleansing troffs that you have to step into theyre not theyre too widefeed a jump over or step over that have like a antibacterial stuff so you have to get this stuff on your feet um and its just all these these kind of ingenious solutions to making public pools possible any builds ten of these huge public pools and one of them is built in Harlem at 46 street and rovermoses is determined this is the pool that new yorkers of color are gonna use i dont want new yorkers of color he wouldnt said new yorkers of color we dont mean and white people i dont want them mixing at these pools some kind of troubles gonna arupt theres gonna be fights or something you know this cant happen and so i want this pool up there thats the one that fly people are going to use and theres one poolin particular that is seen as the one with the biggest threat of race mixing and thats in east Harlum which was at the time out white never hood but its close enough to the black parts of Harlem and to the Pre comparts and of Spanish Harlem to worry robber Moses and Paul Windows is like how are you gonna do it robber Moses， how are you gonna keep uh people of color for music pool and he tells him the solution is what？

first only Gonna hire white lifeguard seals without sign but secondly， theotherpoolsthe city theyve heaters that can keep them at 70 degrees this pool were not going to hit it because according to mos is black people do not like cold water and Robert Carl cant say that thats the reasony but they finds that yorkers of color who live closethat pool instead go to that hundred 46 street pool even though its much farther away if they live three blocks from this pool， theyd rather travel three mile see there pool and it always stuck with me the idea that like will you know of course， black people hate cold water so we gotta keep this pool cold， and it seems both a weird stereotype its not one that i encountered before i read it this vocket but also a pet， such a petty thing to do and such a gross thing to do to say like i gotta do i gotta do anything i can to make this pool unpalable to the people nearby that i dont want using it theres such a um casual kind of unquestion racism about it that i find really shocking， really stounding！

yeah， its really awful yeah i i just scan of like im struct by it all the time how many ways this uh poison in his mind sort of you know comes out and and the things he builds you know its unpleasant and of course！

we be ibess if we gave the impression that rivermosis was the one racist in anotherys beautifully uh integrated and coloured blind world you know that he he was the he was the he was the snake in the garden you know in this one its im im sure he can get away with this stuff partly because its except i mean Rover Carol doesnt call windowles arracist in the book but its not like Ethan recounts paas windowls saying oh Bob you cant do that oh， thats terrible you know its its kind of either tolerated or accept it or believed in by so many people uh which we talk to a little bit about in a previous episode so and then rovercarol goes i have this way to talk about how rivermoses has built this immense Stadium complex on Randos island it has 22 seats and it is usually， empty the first fiveyears it never sells out its attenitually in the hundreds and part of the problem is that you cant get there without a car theres no public transit at the time going there because Moses does not want public transit go he doesnt buses going around island and so its kind of beating him in the end that the state of he built is underattended because he he made a herforpeople to get there yeah！

totally！

total and this is when we get to the section that i like to call more bridges more problems where or more parkways more problems where we start get we get into the section about how little good a lot of these part ways need to be doing in a on in the massive scale of traffic that uh that the book is been dealing with so we start the summer of nineteen 36 the grand central Interboro and the Loralton parkways famous names and the Holohall parkways theyve opened up this means most is now built a hundredmiles of new parkways since he revealed his big Parkway plan in 124 and the newspapers alike the traffic problem has been solved for generations， and then theres a little bit of blank space on the page and then the next paragraph starts the new Parkway solve the problem for about three weeks and this is i love its such a its， such a new yourkey way to say it uh not you know and get there seem to be problems with the data it just like i saw over about three weeks like its a its and they we see this we start this pattern here where which we can go into more detail we or we can not if we dont have to where a bridge or a park way opens up the tribero bridge opens up， the one talks breathway opens up and people say well this is it this is gonna take care the traffic and then within a few weeks or a few months， the traffic is worst than it was before yeah the parkways and bridges are becoming a Jam almost immediately but the same time the old roads have just as much traffic as they did before somehow these bridges and these roads are bringing more cars in which is this theyre creating even more of a need。

which is then being filled and Moses is only solution to any of this stuff is just build more bridges in roads and Roman you understand urban infrastructure more than i do whatgoing on here whatgoing on in the situation uh because the assumption they seem to be working from is theres a limited number of cars provide bridges those cars will dispers out but instead its almost as if the cars are spontaneously generating to fill this space yeah its true that you basically induced demand by providing more lane like you add more lanes it just fills up its its always been this way and what i wonder is is is this the first time we really learn that like that is a truism of urban design and i wonder if Robert Moses uh efforts is when we learn that empirically um as such a default pattern that we concern it like a law in urban planning that you just if you add a lane， if you add a bridge， it does not alleviate traffic it just induces a new type of demand and it just fills up exactly the same way unlikely and thats taken as a as a given now， whereas cause at the it completely as a given its！

its its about is true is anything gets in OK in urban planning as far as i can say because online knowwhat are reading books and by books i mean the power broker just this one book and the first multiple times and the this my third time through and the the people in the book there theyre like baffled by like its， like a mystery you know thats an enigma they cannot solve where these cars coming from as if a portal has opened up and cars from another dimensionor just pouring in but youre saying at this point its im now almost hundred years later its pretty well understand that if you create a need。

its people will will fill that need complete and thats why you know most of the sort of urban planning thinking is about restricting cars um and and there is no notion thats gonna make things worse that actually will make things better um you know， uh in in these ways and so， but this could be the moment that people really got this stuck in her heads because every city fell for this it in in this period of time but i think this is the the clearest and most acute example， becauseof the density of the city and the sort of the scope of the problem and it it the fact that it fills up so quickly！

so incredibly quickly， and its that is happening in the most important city in the world greatest city in the world， New York city best ever uh what other city has a giant gorilla climbing up building to we talk about it that is just just this one on some other scorings other movies but the uh i mean king goes to Tokyo one point hes in the hese hes in real i think in the new movie but anyway， mostly New York but uh that its happening there uh and such a scale and Carey says he says tenths of millions dollars have been spent and then that result is that there used to be four bridges with traffic jams on them now there are 6 bridges through the traffic jams on them and people say what if we add masterrange it links to some of these bridges and Moses refuses he doesnt want trains on these bridges at all and it seems like that his big Parkway system is now just make it easier to dump cars from one place to another in big numbers and i wonder if its like hes really coming from this world where cars were a thing that you had to have money to own yeah！

wetalked about before how like driving used to be about pleasure announce about commuting but hes also living in a world re like more and more people can afford cars and the car companies are making more cars so it seems foolish for them to be like this will take care the traffic problem as if there never will be more cars like theyre making cars all the time theres always new cars and someone get end of a New York city so its i dont know what do you think is the what you think the reason that they never factored in the fact that more cars can be made unpurchased i dont know i i think that theres you know rarte Moses has a number of blind spots and he really just i mean what Carol tells you of his upbringing it really set in motion like everything hethinks about the world and this one he just cant wrap his head around like he has been driven in a car mostly for pleasure but also for work as he gets hes got that sweet car office yeah buried around you know to take care of then Trump through uh wetlands install um， but um he has a very um you know for all of his genius as presented hehasareallyhardtime updating his firmwhereto the modern world as he goes along he just cannot adjust to the world as it is hes really like building a city for the world like e you could say that building for cars it is a little bit of a futurestor forward thinking because the subway system was was built out very very quickly in the early 20 sentry um and hes in a reversing all that uh momentum， but it is just so surprising how much he can not takeend certain types of details to adjust a city plan that would work for everybody during this part of the book used really remind me a lot of Elon Musk where it was like Elon Musk had kind of one good idea？

which was we should have a electric car company that operates like a large car company and then thinks assumed that meant he had lots of good ideas but really he he didnt after that whereas Moses has this one good idea， which is we need to have a way for people to get from one place to another but then he doesnt the best solution for it any keep supplyant solution or like um maybe a better way to compare to is like Walt Disney where Walt Disney is like i want a theme park full of robots so that i can recreate main street nineteen like it was when i was a kid wework jirasic park wegot all this amazing genetic technology used lets use it to recreate the oldest things we can think of dinosource like i want it theres maybe thats it maybe thats a human drive is to to be findtrying to figure out new ways to do old things until someone else comes long as like well， you can use this new thing for a new new new thing yeah or you can use this old thing in a new way like anyway， so the point is uh deep on another kind of Moses special， which is the destruction of a neighborhood and this is a kind of a microversion of something we are going to see in much greater detail leader in the book in a different neighborhood， but its November 141 World War two is about to start that doesnt intern to overtalking about and most session Moses opens up this thing called the Guana Spark way in Brookland and its an elevated road that hes unable to sell partly because its on pillars that used to hold the elevated subway line through that area runs through Sunset park its neighborhood very closeto where i used to live in Brooklyn park slope and in fact， real statebrokers in Brooklyn have been expanding the boundaries of parkslope into Sunset park for years now as a way of phrasing the rents in Sunset park， our producerisabels remaining a sheet live in parksleep to parksleeples were people working in in podcasting works for a great poc casting yeah！

yeah riders yeah！

yeah！

writers its a great neighborhood for its a great neighborhood for people in the arts who want to live in the city but they want to live like words really smelly in the city uh， so there is this elevated trainline that ran down third devenue it just became a regular part of the neighborhood elevated trains are not great they they darken things uh the resist of this neighborhood theyve kind of got used the lvated trainline but they know that an express way is gonna be its gonna block out much more light because instead of the slats of a traintrack its gonna be just a cement block its gonna be bigger and they much wider to and much wider yeah and this they say instead of running this expressway over the heart of our neighborhood can you move it one block over uh to where thats just industrial waterfront and even the comptroller of the city who lives in Sunset park is like yeah the express way would be way than the l tracks were uh and the Parkway route its gonna have to swing back toward second avenue after a mile anyway， so wont really be saving that much money to reuse these pillars but it will blade this neighborhood and Moses is like um its a slam its not worth preserving why would you bother and so Carol investigates that he goes into detail any interviews people from the area hes gonna do this again later and even much more detail uh with the treemonebrood in the in the box but hes hes innovating people are and that portrayed he bills is that its a poor neighborhood but it is not a slam it is neighborhood of nice houses were people to care of their their blocks you know， its quiet theres this uh kind of strong community of mostly noregions uh but the very active with each other there its poor but its not dangerous， its not unpleasant its a solid working class neighborhood of the kinds that i feel like used to be symbolic to me of the outer burrows when i was growing up， but now feels you know all fashioned and ruver Carl he takes us down a little walk down third avenue he can indulge me in quoting， he said， please the heart of the neighborhood the focal point that gave it unity and the sense of community was third avenue lining， it along with newstandsofwhich nine thousand nordisc to dendiswere sold every day thats the like Norwegian newspaper were seven movietheaters dozens of tiny restaurants run by couples and featuring recipes from the old countries little restaurants but good in so many would know where to go for lunch recalls Harald Benson whose hardware store was on thirdavenue 54ST and scores of small friendly Mama Papa stores the Northland giftshop the finishbookstore a hardware store that looked like a general store at the old west a buttershop that raffled off 25 bigturkeys every Christmas that occupied the ground floor of threeinfour story brickference in which mama and papa lived upstairs for the children the avenue was always busy people shopping or windowshopping or just walking Benson recalls this is like old school broklan like what i think of is like old school broklen what makes it nice the image you get is that there the neighborhood residence there are very proud of this neighborhood and they dont want this the understanely dont express way right over their heads and the board of estimate one of the reasons they approved Moses reusing those pillars is because they assumed oh， the pillars already there most system gonna have to get any new writeofwayland for this express right itll save us start we wont relocate anybody this will be great and remoses like uh funny story i need to relocate a hundredstores and thirteen hundred families because the board of estimate didnt realize you need on an offramps for a for expressway like over her Parkway that train doesnt on an offramps is the stations and Moses also， this is where he kind of heis twisting the rules comes in even more because hes like if i build this road and its not a park way the lawsays i dont have control over it so even though it is an elevated treeless stretch of highway that goes through a city im calling it， a Parkway and you know what i have another rule i dont allow trucks on my Parkway so trucks are said Gonna go on thirdevanyunderneath thats a four landing street im gonna have to expand that into a highway into a ten lane highway so that its more truck accessible and so now youve got uh so much more noise， so much more darkness after rebills this road and business start to close down and Carol makes the point that the elevated train brought people to sunset part and the park way just brings people through yeah and this is the big crux of so much of what Moses doing is hes not just in bringing people to participate he just wants to get them through it as quickly as possible yeah this is really key because if you ever lived in a uh anyroad with elevate train。

there are stops not too far apart that you just take the stairs down and you go by your Nordic paper you know and then you you go back up or you get a something a snack or whatever and it even know this is a you know a a a major ardery that you know brings people you know two and through it it just much more brings people to a place yes！

when i live in a story a Queens uh i was very close to to the elevated train there and like yeah you take the elevated train home you get off your stop and exactly like on the way home i could stop at the hard restore the growth restore the Chinese takeout place i did everything i needed in my errings to infrom the train and it felt like it wasnt super pleasant to walk underneath the tracks but it didnt feel like you were in like a tunnel yeah but with a road like this its not like someone can be driving down the the Parkway and lookout and see this this Norwegian restaurant be like yeah i think im gonna stop there like the next exit maybe miles away right？

right um its a different idea of what uh this sort of type of conveyences for and hes really hes just trying to get you through a place because he doesnt find that place desigable and thinks that if everyone else inside of it is gonna just have to have a card do it i mean maybe the i mean this thats one notion you know to the to the earlier um discussion we were having is like you know if you build a world like this where there is you know a mile and a half between exits entrances to the guangst park way rather than um you know a stop every three or four blocks you know if its not waita trainline all the sudden if you live in an everhood you do need a car you know and yeah itsort creates this need and therefore it becomes um a thing that fills it up and therefore makes it bumper to bupper and useless at a certain point and it just it just creates a worse and worse world when you design it this way i to quote uh。

the actor John Glover playing the role of Daniel clamp in the classic film gremlands to the new batch if he build a place for things， things come and thats and thats kind of what happens yeah， is he builds a place that is for cars， not people and the people leave it makes it harder for the neighborhood actually go about their business because this road is here makes it less pleasant people are less likely to go patronize the business there so business to start to close， which means even less people stop by some more business close people own those busines move away families are leaving now the side streets are also full of trucks so people dont want to live there and third avenue this place that was a kind of poor， but bustling kind of friendly street becomes exactly the kind of place that people are afraid to go to thats thats where you go to find trunks to find st violence to find drugadics uh its more more people moveway and becomes the slam that Moses said it was if you if you call it a slam and you give it the opportunity become a slam a neighborhood will become a slam just as happensing gremens to the new batch when that that shining skyscraper just turns into a Hive， a gremlands you know and to add the most bitter avirony to the whole thing the guanist Parkway is almost instantly backed up yeah with traffic， just like all the other parkways over and most of solution to this is we got a wide in the road， so he does to the point that if your apartment is on either side of the road than on what days， the cars are splattering your windows， the wheels are just throwing water at your windows and most has essential， essentially rect this neighborhood， but as carros says quote no newspaper mentions that fact the newspapers only there to talk about whats happenbeforehand and the how great it is this guys getting things done look this amazing road theyre not interested whathappens after the fact yeah and speaking of getting big things done this brings us to the westside improvement project。

which is a great section of the book that i actually really love but well talk about that after the break， we have to divide up uh chapter 25 to serve six because its a more digestable chunk yeah this very very long as weve said for but this is the west improvement project， which is this massive thing that i i love how Carol does this like demonstrates the problem solving and the process that Moses goes through so could you describe what what is this project？

yes， and i i agree that this this section is amazing to be reminded in the section also， just how brilliant most cities you know hes not just hes a he is if you comment even genius you gotta emphasize the genius part because hes just hes so hes amazing this but the west side improvement project this is the dream that Robert Moses had since the nineteen twenty is if you harken back so the first second chapter he and future labor secretary Frances perkends were walking around the west side of the Manhattan islands at night as young people and he is talking about couldnyou see a park here couldnyou see a road here the west side of Manhattan for years has been traintracks often groundlevel traintracks so people get killed there frequently by trains uh it is garbage dumps its meanest waste its a Newman hat island is such a different island than it was in the nineteen twice isn thirties because it used to be an island full of manufacturing， full of industry and now its been taken over by other businesses if you walk along the west side of manhattnow， youre gonna see very fancy building so youve see financial structures and things like that but there was a time when it was smell bad was full of animals it was full of Trash you know when things like that and so the idea is youre going to extit have an extended elevated park way all long manhattons west side the base the weside highway i think if igetting right， uh youhave a six mile long park you can build the Henry Hudson bridge finally across the Harlem river this bridge that up till now in in the bookterms is represented just by a pillar with no status of Henry Hudson of the top of it because they could not afford to finish it uh thats Gonna connect Manhattan the broncs youre Gonna have a connection from the broncs that leads you add the city to the Saumail river Parkway this is his stream to connect Manhattan to the wor to the parkways outside that hes building， but also to make the west side something that Manhattan can be proud of he really he does want to make beautiful things he wants to make things that are that at the very lease he can hold pride and havencreated and hes been timeat it for years now but it is going to cost an incredible amount of money he Moses estimates its going to cost a hundred and nine million dollars and this is during the depression the city does not have a hundred and nine million dollars and what makes it slightly harder is that theres this nineteen 27 agreement that he knows about between the city and the New York central railroad in its their tracks theyre going up and down the west side and the air central where road said in exchange for some other land in a different particity will cover those tracks will pay for covering them up oops， we didnfinish it sorry it just didnget done so mos is like im gonna have to cover up those tracks if the city pays for it， thats gonna be seen as the city giving away money to the railroad company which no Politician is Gonna go for and the railroads never gonna have that kind of money so what are i gonna do and it beyond that even if i do that theres still tends of millions of dollars that im gonna have to figure out to fund this thing and i feel like even to get an estimate of how much money is gonna cost im sure he has a staff working with him on it， even that takes a certain amount of genius to be able to put a dollar figure on a project this enormous with so many different pieces to it tolu， and as carroy said to see all these parts working together that this is not just a park this is a park and a bridge and a highway and hes looking at them all as pieces of the same thing and only thing i can relate it to in my mind is that like i can look at as a writer， i can look at a story and i can see how different scenes interact with each other to build a plot， while also building character， while also building theme， but that feels like such a small thing compared to like well were gonna， were gonna reconfigure the west side of this island thats the most densely hit populated island in the in the country you know its， its astonishing anyway， so the amount of money that he needs it seems insurmountable and this is when caro hetakes you very methodically step by step through the ways that Moses surmount sit it is no longer in surmountable it becomes surmountable uh which is the sounds sounds like like a， like a pun name that a night would have it like a， like a month， like a fun and maybe exactly like like an old buck cartoon you know and then surmountable comes in but uh he sees that uh in this nineteen twenty 7 agreement the railroad owes the city 8 point two million dollars for work on the west side the railway doesnafa kind of money does no line of credit it is in debt its paying back its loans and very higher industrates somosis first is gonna have to get money for the railroad and then convince the railroad to spend that money on the park rather than say pay its workers or get a debt and Moses is a lot of work on legal pads he only works on yellow legal pads which let me do honest thats how i work to i like to work on yellow legal pads Sari really get Robert Moses love of describling on yellow legal pads it is the single best way to workout ideas is on a yellow legal pad im sorry theres no other better way to do it i agree sorry tech industry younever gonna prove inever gonna its the perfect size of paper， its the perfect color of paper like just for that kind of work i would want to read a book thats all on yellow paper your eyes were eventually but uh after doing a lot of math on those legal pads he realizes he can arrange for New York state to give the railroad alone not a payout， but alone from this grade crossing elimination fund that is somehow incredibly well funded it has so much money in it the city can give them alone for thirteen point 5 million dollars that has such a low interest rate on it that the railroad can payback its old loans wealth saving money on its feature interesting payments and he writes up a law is this complicated agreement with taxlings and s growth stuff and that makes the loan appealing i guess and he pushes it to the legislator just at the end of the session an images convince laven to sign it on the last day the bill is vile but before it expires and he says you can take credit for it if you sign it and namos this only has 95 point 5 million dollars left to find theres still a lot of money left to go so whats gonna do well hey， heres something you can do this i feel like this is depressional thinking hes like oh when the railroad covers up all that land to xand expands the parkspace， it should create a lot of waste rocks and i need landfill i need four million dollars for the landfill why should i let these rocks go to waste ill just use that as the landfill as four million dollars he saved right there yeah now he only needs 91 point 5 million dollars more yeah this next one is not a lot of money yeah but its my favorite yeah its so great egos he goes if we build a boat basin and we put gargoils on the boat basin theres this fund for artwork on public works that we can tap it to that no owner members anywhat this full answer best years ago set up a fund to put freeze on public buildings so we would a freeze on it well do that and it says the book that the engineers like well wenever seen gargoils on about based but OK， and it gets them a hundred thousand dollars more， so thats 91 point 4 million dollars to go and the next one thisanother one is also boat based related so uh， its this boat base is gonna have a Marina its gonna have a restaurant prominent remember roses he loves the idea of recreational facilities he likes multiuse recreational facilities these grand buildings that a lot of people can use all at once and coinstantlyheraldickies over at the wpa or the pwi i get my letters mixup heraldicky is he wants to play more people this is Moses anime from from last episode， but parallegies is like only give quick approval to any plan ready project for things like railroad grade eliminations that can apply bunch people and one week later Moses has the plans run up for the 79 street grade elimination structure， which is just the boat basin building with the Marina and the restaurant and the beer creates at the in the federal garment theyre like it doesnt really look like a grade elimination structure but OK， but maybe these brass turtle ornaments are a little much for a structure for eliminating railroad grades and they slash a hundred fifty four thousand dollars on the budget now this is where i would have said i guess we dont need those Brass turtle ornaments but no instead Moses goes to logy and says hey， if the citychips in a hundred and 54 dollars for brass turtles， then we can get another one point seven million dollars from the federal government for this beautiful boat based and the cwa is gonna contribute another threemillion dollars for the labor look now！

wegot five million dollars for this boat basin all the city is to do is spend a hundred four thousand dollars on brass turtles and so he gets it and that leaves only eighty six million four hundred thousand dollars to go for the project theres still a lot of money but you see the way hes like chopping it down and hes able to find all these ways for to qualify for state in federal funds for housing for interstate highways for rivern Harbor funds for railroads and gets another twelve million dollars out of that hesoget it finding these program hes like Matthew lets go you know the guy who had the book about all these government programs that are giving out free money and all these different ways of like taxstrategies and like getting to this government fund and making it work for this and your breast turtles and and kind of whipsign uh ligordy into into thinking that um that he has to do this hundred thousand dollars to get the rest of the money versus just eliminating the breast turtles um is the his you know particular brand of genius but what gets him the most amount of of money off of this uh one or nine million dollar bill is he begins to see that he has a certain amount of plans for um this part cost about 8 million dollars per mile and he realizes that this actually goes up into Harlem and he does not care that the people parlim have a nice of park as uh the people in we know below hundred and so you know by building the park to different standards he saves 29 million dollars this isnlike a hundred thousand dollars here and hundred thousand dollars there like this is where he really eliminates it by just providing were services for people who need it more yes！

by short trifting the people in the neighborhoods that he consideres not really worth spending the money on yeah and so hes got this part that below hundred ten st is gonna be beautiful but we in a hundred ten and hundred fifth， its gonna be OK its not gonna be so bad and then from a hundred fifth up its gonna be done as cheaplistic can do it and thats over three miles of the park and so hesaving a lot of money theres only 45 million dollars to go hes more than halfway there yeah and at this point uh he goes he goes OK， the this section is Gonna cost thirty million dollars what i dont have paid for this section of the park ill tell the city i can get twenty million dollars in funding from the cdwa for labor if the city pays ten million dollars for materials and he does this， the same song dance are you Gonna let twenty million dollars in pay for this city going to be lost because you want spend ten million dollars and when they agree he goes to see， every he goes hey， i can get ten million dollars in the city give me twenty million dollars on labor funding and they agree hes whip song back and forth and he manges to make it fit the legal bounce of what they can contribute to by calling the Henry Hudson Parkway a park access road it has to have access to a park is this huge highway and now he has all the money he needs to build the stream project up to a hundred second street and this is when it always reminds me how much bigger New York is than any new yorker spend time in because the this a huge city and how many people spend time below fourteen st and above a hundred second st in the same lifetime very few but he only needs fifteen million dollars to pay for those last three miles and this is when we get into the partwhere， he starts do somethingsthat are irreversible changes to the city in order to find and save this money there were previous plans for northern highway that took a different root that kind of avoided cutting through any of the parks up in the north into the city uh the northanished and buildingthis this lower bridge this lower Henry has bridge that would go through an industrial area called Marvel hill and the idea behind this was lets avoid taking a plan the people might want to use for other things with this road this bridge but Moses has to run the road through the parks at least in some way because the funds are from a park access road and if he doesnt at least get into the parks， then he cant use these funds because its a legal to charge tools on roads that have certain types of federal funding and he needs to charge tools to pay if the bonds for funding the building of the Henry has sparkway， its are complicated in an end anyway， the end result is hes like i guess what i have to do is run this road right through these two parks for try on park in inwouldpark and its parklant ive control over i can do never i want and whos say a park accessroadcantrun allthewaythrougha park theres no greater access to a park than if you go all the way through it and this is gonna save him five million dollars of the fifteen million heed still needs so only need ten million dollars and this is the exact amount of money that the headrise in authority is allowed to raise unfortunately this is the depression and York city has almost done its loans bankers are really wearing investing in public bonds and this is when Robert Carl brings in a new characters in the shop every now then Michael Jack Matagain his name is Michael， but his mickname is Jack nt group on educated is a contractor originally from the pensive in a call country and he ends up as Moses as shrude kind of financial retailer who sells bonds from Moses projects to walstree bankers and here theres a lot of talk about interest rates and amarization coverage rates i do not fully understand it im no Jack Merligan the the point is he having trouble convincing letters that enough drivers will pay ten cents for the convenience of this Henry Hudson bridge and so theres a lot of hard selling and the banker say will by three point one million dollars no 30 bonds and no more than that so if mos is gonna build this bridge， it cannot cost more than three point one million dollars and the only way to do that is run as much of the Parkway as possible through the only city own land on the riverdale side of the bridge van courtland park and he does usual whip sign magic but he cant get the authorities share the bridge cost lower than 5 million dollars he cant cut it anymore he gets suppressed technology in 90 dollars and he doesnt what to do matigan has an idea what if they dont totally finish the bridge its supposed to be a six lane bridge or if they build a four lane bridge， but they make the arches supporting it strong enough that they could put an upper deck on there when they have the money for two more lanes and theys persuaded the bankers say OK and they signed an agreement that says if traffic， which is a certain level on the bridge thereby another two million dollars with a bonds to complete the bridge and with that the finance singof the west side improvement project is finally complete he did it he in a staff have succeeded doing something the city has been trying to do for fifty years funding improvement that will make the west side of the city livable and make it easier for people to drive north and south on the west side and river cars is this perhaps the supreme example of the practical side the getting thingsdone side of Moses thinking he has got this thing done only Robin this it when you when you， when you are gonna build this huge thing through parks yeah， thats totally fine right like that doesnt affect anything you know thats thats youre not sacrificing anything that you can never get back again right probably yeah！

i mean this is something thats really key to understanding in New York at this time i mean up here in this park this kind the last natural area of the island of manage i mean it is it is um not developed much at all and and these are the types of parks that Robert Moses doesnt really care for hes a recreation park kind of guy like woodlands doesnt really excite him because he didnt build it you know like yes so some people you know when this plan goes into effect， you know there they love this park including a couple of performers on bill extend and Bob Wineberg and you know they say you know like theres ways to build around this and what they probably dont know the amount of work he is done to get to this point he doesnt undo like a single like legal pad worth yes movements。

such a such a tightly constructed like an intricate house of financial cards that cant tumble and these two guys extend on Winberg and extend is particularly focused on Inwouldhill park， which is that kind of untouched wilderness its on the northwest tip of Manhattound this is like your saying this is a New York city that still has untouched parkland uh， it still has Marshland that hasnt been touched and all of that is gonna be rect a huge sixth land highway is gonna go through that would land uh， the plan involves them taking this last natural Marshland， which Carol paints as this kind of biological refuge that biology classes go to to see life that they cant see anywhere else in the city， thats gonna get turned into an enormous Clover leaf with like landscapes uh， sharbery because most doesnlike that stuff yeah and winebrag is protective of this neighborhood called that is its almost rural it at this point in the branch the small thing and right now has a two lane road and that would be turned in again into a six lane highway which kind of split this community in half and they find this original alternate root that avoid cutting through these places and they find oh this root will be cheaper， would be a little longer be cheaper， and also， and they dont have the terms to describe this at the time in the thirties， but it would be better environmentally an ecologically they do start to worry about things like whatgonna happen to drainage in the seriif we remove all these trees they dont have the words for that because of the time what who was thinking about the environment？

the nineteen thirties very few people i mean John muure was until he died dont know i dont know Winnie died but i was soon he was dead by then but uh there was a there there was no environoutermovement like that there is only a little bit of a preservation movement and uh theyre worried that not just environmentally but if you run this road through spot divel then like river Dale that areas can be overrun with people and i should have asked my mom my mom lived in river daylight until she was thirteen i should have asked her for felt overrun with people but she certainly she lived in her parmit building then and that was an area that headhouses it didnt apartments the design that when the in the thirties when this is happening uh my mom didnlive in the thirties dont worry about it dont understand my mom sign line uh and the thing is as Carol make the point of saying this classa thing can not be undone yeah if you destroy that marshland if you run a road through that first you cannot ever get that back thats impossible to return and not only that if you have this hes been timeout this this part that runs along the river but really is the highway that runs long the river for most of that length right along the water and that cuts off the waterfront from new yorkers forever， you wonbe able to walk along the river you cant fish from it you cant picnic by it and i grew up going to New York and then living New York where this is already the case the waterfront is maybe a flew at parts of it that you can fish off of a highway over passionate that or you know off the o over a railing but there were for most of New York history before this time you could go down to the water and just kind of be there at the water this is why New York was one of the great oyster fishing centers of the world you know the big oyster you could you could just go down to the water and get stuff and of course， that also met people just like sortrassion to into the water from centres but still Moses will be creating a walle of rushing cars that will separate new yorkers from their waterfront and well talk about this more later probably but i would live to New York for years and i would forget i lived in a maritime sitting here because you you are cut off on the water and you just dont think about it you dont involve yourself with it very much its a its a pretty big deal and it it im Gonna invoke another city of United States uh Chicago as um account example。

i think one of the most important reasons why Chicago is as good as it is is that there was an ordinance that you can not build um large commercial buildings on the east side of lake shore drive， which is the drive that um goes along lake Michigan and it allows just everyone to both you to see to go down experience the lake and make it a part of their lives and doesnt cut it off the way a bunch of highrises would and it really is like one of them the most important architectural features of Chicago making it as great as it is that preservation as opposed to you know building great things you know， sometimes you know in order to make the great things great you have to like have some strain you know， like and think about the system as a whole and yeah that it really does its so important Chicago i think its one of the most important things about Chicago that makes a great it feels so central to that city that its right there as opposed to if you want to see the water in New York！

you have to go out， you gotta go out to the four if you want to go to the beach， you got to go to the far reaches you know where cony island or you know Rockaway is this weird thing is its a place surrounded by water you know what yeah and and you dont get to experience it and its its a real choice and a real bad choice um that people made when they design these cities and they did these things yeah although i will ask this question just to play devels of get how many king cons to Chicago i rest my case your honor i rest my case i think we i think we i think we can end this trial here uh and Sarah Carroll going back to the book he he presents this as a nobody agree with you he presents this as a as a conflictive values like we talked about Moses generation parks are for upper class people you take leasally drives in them and as he was coming of age the question was wegot all this land how we gonna develop it so people can use it Natheland has been developed and the new question is how do you preserve whats left thats undeveloped for the people who need an escape from that development and how do you bounce the needs of people traveling through the city with needs people in the city and Cara talks about waying the need for this bridge against the risk of not having the money for it the future against the destruction of the things， the city can never bring back its a very complicated equation yeah and Moses refuses to think about it yeah， he doesnt talk to anybody about it he does grand to meeting to extend a parent expensive laughing at em the entire time， which again is bulling behavior why you gonna do that yeah and other city officials listen they notice that again Moses is planning these Parkway bridges to low for buses to pass under them we dont need to open up that cataloworms again， but uh hit most ignores that anyway and there are some civic groups that start listening to the reformers who are against it， but the group at the most cloud is the park association the park association is led by evident salt speaker and she just loves mos shes in the tank for him she has the park association a approve these plans and once again as we will see time in again the reformers are shocked to realize that this law they loveed for that gives Moses ultimate power over parks was not a great idea that hes not hes not the benefit king of parks that they were hoping for a much it like the king of cartoons on people playhouse is a benevent king you know he doesnt tell you what what should be in a cartoon or not he just shows you a little bit of a public domain cartoon and then and then leaves but Moses is much were destructive than that i uh he any doesfit his favorite stuff， he said he was oh oh hold hearings and they starts cutting down hundreds of three is weeks before the herings yeah and he drivestakes he whipsaws he missing forms um and the his opponents dont really have tactical experts who can examined mos his plans fully and without the support of the press without sport the mear because the mayor wants this west side improvement to run on for reelection theres little that anyone can do to abstructim and Moses begins work cartoonishly fast so the board of sed meets devote on the rootthrough spot by the time they meet to vote the bridge heads have already been installed so theres no worlsport to go it has to go there and the legislation authorizing the the building of the hidden bridge its signed AT 1PM onmayfirst 1935AT 5PM， Moses has already signed the contracks with the contractors and by 7AM the next day the workers working on it and a few exlater midnight theyre theyre putting the steel spans in place and theyinstalled by five 55 am in the uh that day and uh cars is when river dalians went to work in the morning therebefore them was a bridge where none had existed the night before like hes building bridges overnight this he its its bockers and Moses has workfast because he can allow people to discuss things he can not have it get out that he is referring to a highway as a park access road where that all these decisions about location and how the bridge is designed are not based on whats best for the bridge or whats best for the city but based on what are bankers could invest in what are they gonna buy moms in uh discussion might create controversy， controversy scares investors he is only interested in whats gonna keep the investment coming in and discussion also means delay and who knows New York city may never have access to this kind of money again for this project and Jack Matigen tells Caro there was no alternative and Carol is like in the book i dont， he said this to Matigan but in the book hes like uh there is alternative you just wait and not build the bridge right now like wait to later yeah， like why is that to be right now whats whats so like itbe great have this bridge but the rest of project is almost finished only need this bridge for the whole west side improvement legordias fixing the city budget is getting a little better if you need a bridge， do this cant you balance that against the fact that the economy may or may not get better or worse and the fact that there are things that were going to lose forever by building it in this place and tomoses and his men those things dont matter at all， so why would they bother out they dont have to care if those things matter someone else， they dont matter to them if the power would ignore them。

its the cuttingdownthe trees that just gets me so mad and sad yeah at the same overneath the marsh but the trees to the trees just like you know while people are discussing things you know he just just does what he always does and just like the of the places he controls he just destroys them so that theres nothing to save at a certain point and that just is like heartbreaking i i i find that extremely upsetting it really it reminds me of its a more effective version of um something that was said in a yeah when George showy bush was present where？

but someone in hit i forgetal it was if it was from sfolder rover， somebody was like well the press can talk about this stuff but well the press is talking about reality were gonna be out there creating a new realities and then the press can talk about that and its Moses is like yeah we can discuss whether we should cut those trees down but theyre down so you can talk about it but im gonna do it and once ill done it youre not gonna feel the stop me and its its so its its its its its r fine yeah and that fact that i remember reading this book for the first time when i was a youngman and being like so mad about him destroying that forest destroying that marshland and having to remind myself a getting physically angry while is reading it and having to remind myself this happened before your parents were board like this is no usegetting mad about it now you know yeah and Moses would im sure say the day after the trees cut down why get mad about it its done you know you can you know whats done is done but the care is such a good job of just of just making you so sad that happened even when you reading it decades， later when its not just a fade a complex its history it happens you know theres no change again um he talks about uh December twelfth， 1936 Henry Hudson bridge opens the ceremony doesngo great its raining and this detail that i love that legordia forces them to stop the ceremony so we can go to the radio and listen to king Edward the eighth abdicate from uh his his throne and i love the idea of that that like just that moment her mind the reader entermind may be Moses to that like theres other stuff going on on the world besides the Henry has been bridge opening like this is not the most important thing going on in the world right now not that the king of England acticatings the most important thing in the world either but theres other stuff going on uh but most is so proud of this and the whole thing is finished by October 137 has just sixmiles of parks and roads replacing sixmiles of garbage dumps and industral waste and shannie towns and this is the dream he has had since he was a youngman and is made it happen and Robert Carol goes on to this long very beautiful section describing the experience of driving through the woods right outside the city in the the woods that run longside the somul were Parkway and then going out the Henry Hudson and finally emerging into New York and he pretend he makes you imagined one of the reporters on opening day and the kind of magical effect descending from the forest the city and how beautifully this is all been put together this really no way for me to Ive love to read some set selections from it theres no way to abridget and keep the power in it so you gonna have to just read the book im sorry just read the just read the sectional the book about it and its for a moment i dont know if you have this， this uh had this impression but for the moment its almost like Robert Carol makes me agree that yeah maybe this what was worthwhile because its such a the way he describes it is so beautiful and so powerful and like Ive driven into New York before like its not ive never had that experience of like of all other than the moment you see the skyline for the first time is always a magical moment but he does eat a such a good job of um inditting Moses but then also being like yeah but look at this thing that he built like giving him his his fair rope you know yeah no i think thats right and and i do find a lot of the park ways in the server east coast nice to be on and a lot of these bridges are nice to be on i love going over the Golden Gate bridge for example！

he enough to destroy a forus to create it but um but um i mean i probably probably part of procity out of you who knows are anyway but the um e i i also just like this this parties doesnt work on me i mean i own a couple of cars you know！

like a big family but i do not enjoy driving is just a functional thing for me i that whenever one says to me like oh shes such a nice drive its a beautiful drive im just like that for some reason just doesnt work on me um even though im a card dependent person uh where i live and so i just of i i get it but i also like this is for you know hes design in a world for himself to be sitting in the back of a showford car and i mean that makes um a drive way more beautiful now imagine you were sitting in the back of that showered car oh boy how great it would be no but i would be amazing i think i said its funny reading that i read this the first summer of this i was twenty years old and at that point i hated driving i didnlike it as a teenager i was living a New York i would live a New York for years without owning a car or touching the wheel of a car and the both the inside wheel and the outset the steering wheel and any the outsidewheels that hits touchtheground i dont know why i would touch those but i didntouch those either and maybe it i cant try remember i think it still affects me somewhat but now as a Los Angeles resident and someone who drives most days and has really come to enjoy driving maybe thats it im im like imaging yourself im like yeah that would be a really nice drive like， but im imagining that drive on opening the preview， the reporters get formally day open when there are no other cars and so a daily news repor he calls the most beautiful drive in the world the press loves it most is like this is going eliminate west side traffic jams its gonna take twenty six minutes to get from Canal street to the edge of the city which is cool this is amazing！

thats amazing and id like Ive made a note here Ive！

Ive gone on trips where i have to drive down Canal street and it takes more than 26 minutes because its so incredibly traffic jam there and theres all these statistics and how much hydralic feel they used and how much feed of steel in kubecards of granite and Moses says and the whole thing only cost 24 million dollars， which is of course， a huge， lie and Carol says ultimately， theres no way of knowing exactly how much it costs theres so many different sources there type of things things Carol estimates that the entire project all put together with all the money from everywhereon the text assessment things cost at least a hundred eighty million dollars maybe as high as 28 million dollars thats in nineteen thirties dollars this one a hammer or cost like a nickel you know and he says the bolder dam which at the time was the monument to how expensive you could build something cost 76 dollars and this this west improvement potentially cost two or or maybe even three possibly times more but its at the same time uh everyones talking about how great it is you know and its so beautiful and finally， the west side railroad tracks are covered up the press is excited about that and curl the carrogos not exactly the railroad tracks were covered until they reached a hundred twenty fifth street and then once or in Harlem the tracks run covered and theres i from one twentyfifth up to one hundred 55 st and see get stench in a certain grime and noise and cars is the white people who lived a long Riverside drive were free from those anoiences but the black people were not in task but how Moses said at a hundred thirty two acres of land to the parts of the Lark park below a hundred fifth street with all the field and stuff of that he added no new land to the park areas above a hundred fifth street that are likely to be used by black new yorkers incarol essentially describes two different parks one of them is very lush， very ornamented its beautiful and is free of commercial buildings and the other one above has had as little workput into it as possible theres a minimum of any sort of facilities and theyre not easily accessible and this is where Carol talks about how in the Harlem section of verside park there are decorations of Rot iron monkeys that appear to have shackles on their arms this is become a very controversial claim we dont need to get into it right now well， lock get into it in the future but yeah， this is something that there are two i feel like there are two aspects of this book that get picked at and one of them is this claim and the other is the the height of the bridges and will return to them again and again um but were were were talking about this this other thing right now so weget back to that another time the press theyre time at how Moses has reclaimed the waterfront for the people but Carol make the point that for much the improvement the parks are not on the waterfront the park way is so you cant even really see the water pass the road so a driver gets a few moments of a beautiful view but the person on foot cant with the time to absorb that view they can see almost none of it and he says the chance a wonderful chance to give the cities people away of escaping the city he hadna stead sealed them within it， which is such， which is such a anominous way to talk about it uh。

it is so scary and i have to meet when youre New York city you dont feel sealed in necessarily， but i do wish that you could get the water more easily and would be nice the driver totals are enormous the bankers had promised they would only buy more bonds when traffic reaches 6 cars per day on the first day of tolcollection over nine， thousand cars use it theyre like OK thats that its a new bridge people excited about driving over it its not gonna always be that way， but it the drivetotals continue to go up and up uh and they have a like a chart in the shape of a thermometer in the office measuring the daily traffic toles and experience in the numbers are rising above the top of the thermometer chart theyve broken the thermometer and bankers are rushing to by bonds the second tech gets added to the bridge most is finally puts off that status of Henry Hudson thats been meant to go on that pillar since nineteen no nine he builds a park there for small children of course， he putsteps in the parks you can bring babycarages in it takes twenty years of lobing to get the steps removed uh and this is the point where if youre reading the physical copythe book theres this section here of black and white photos of Moses bridges that that interrupts is chapter and the one i feel like one of the weaknesses of the book when the few weaknesses is the photo sections， which are kind of disorganized and the photos are not not amazing but theres this one picture in here that i maybe will come back to in the feature about the proposed Midtown expressway， which is expressway thats going through the buildings in Midtown in hand good yeah， it looks so feateristic its one of those things we look at youlike that looks cool and then you think about it for two minutes and youlike that would be terrible but up by 1 九三八 Moses has hootup allsparkways the second deck is on that bridge we heard about how beautiful that Parkway drive is when youre driving in its just you speeding along just getting， getting right into the city from the forest traffic is a thing of the past right Roman is traffic a thing of the past no sir！

because the central axim to uh urban planning is however， many lanes you build， how many bridges you build！

cars will fill it i dont know lets find out lets just take a look at the book and see what have it oh no， oh no oh its all backed up and they say and the old registerroads theyre also backed up back in the same it talks about a reporter decides hes like im gonna drive that that trip from the city line to Canal street back and see if it takes 26 minutes， this is a nine mile trip uh one way it took him fifty eight minutesanother way 73 minutes and its bumbered a buffer traffic along the water so youre not looking at the water youlooking at the bumper of the car in front of you， because you got a keep moving and it seems Kara says most had two objectives reclean the waterfront for new Yorkers and east traffic one of those things did poorly and the other thing it just did not do no unopening day for the west improvement bill extend he goes to inwithhill the park that now is a road running through it anyfines the peaceful this is all gone and wind spredictions about split divel and river Dale they came true there are becoming half has really developed suberbs uh the city didnreally plan for them to observe all this traffic coming through it that last freshwater marsh in New York its gone and carases these things are also part of the cost the west side improvement bonds that maybe two hundred million dollars they were spent on it this was the cost and it was barely considered for this build， but no ones think about at the time Moses hestill being celebrated first work people love him the children get new playgrounds of course are gonna love him at the old guard of the good government Google groups they still love him this is solsker is like the park association wants to give you our award for the year and hes like uh im really busy so even come to my office a give it to me and all these big business groups wanna celebrate him theres a movements name the west side highway the rovert Moses highway but it fails because New York Politicians are worried that people are Gonna call the Moses highway， which would sound to Jewish， which you cant even have a Jewish highway New York its not gonna happen anywhere， sorry you know and so many groups wanna him that one point theres a black tight dinner is owner that sponsored by sixteendifferent groups and the media is doing the thing of taking his faults and spinning them as strengths and and Carey says his vituperation and personal attacks on anyone who dared to opposing were outspoken this his refusal to obey the rules and regulations of the wpa or laws he had swearned to upholdwas independence and refusal to let the public interest be hanford by red tape and bureaucrats and the columns Westbrook peggler he makes a joke that a Moses when he starts projects its the oops sorry technique that a he just starts a project without authorization goes sorry and may learn kind of like laughing it off you know thats Moses thats what he does and national magazines have started picking up the story of the amazing guy New York was getting things done and uh harbors does the story talking about how great it is that Moses doesnat the law or personal property writes get the way of building his stuff and fortune magazine this is my favorite of the quotes that care has fortune magazine says this not only like a boyscout is Bob mos is always prepared like gala had his strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure， which even if bra， even if our Moses was like a truly noble parks builder thats a thats a bonkers we describe him！

and in his national reputation surge growth and growth and more and more people go to New York to study with Moses to try to figure out， how to build things， how to you know like ignore people you know what yeah its really something and if youre desenting voice？

then you are ignored or in one case literally drowned out by singing at a Moses event someone is like hey uh maybe you should have done this thing and people do sing really loudly to to dram out and this is when he starts being called the master builder were the master planner you know he is no longer just the man with the parks you know hes no longer just the guy who manwhocan get things done hes the master of it all the mass they someone who is unquestioned like the authority and revermoses he still visits else myth this recara takes us a moment to to look in at all smith else myth who is now fifty six years old not yet an old man but he has been sidelined from politics he blames rows of out hebecome bigger， hebecome obsessed with his hatred roseval he starting to fall in with right winkers because they also hate the new dealin hate roseval Mrs moskwits who might have been a temporing you know uh influence on him has died yeah his other chronies they dont see him much anymore because henot powerful he still beloved and popular and Robert hair talks about him getting on the bus and people on the bus will applaud him as soon see walks on isure people east side west side to him oh sorry， people are still singing the sidewalks of New York to its not call these i was it and that people are still singing a song to all the time but he is not a political force he is， he is not even an elder statesman he is just kind of like a relic and he tells Bob Moses public support is a slenderread to lean on， but Moses seems sure that hes never gonna lose it hes always gonna have that public support yeah， Roman you you made the sound as if as if at some point， the public may turn on ropper Moses but i dont think so i mean this is the end of the book right？

what i am strict by in this suction is what a good heart else myth has to most of his life ive sure he had um horrible blind spots did bad things but mostly is a champing of the you know the people he cares about the champing of the city and this obsession you know this bitterness and this peddiness towards about a begin or by rows of out really just undoes him and it is way that is just he was kind of heartbreaking its just so but its also just sort of like you know he has complete control over this like he could just you know let that go and and move on and do different things um but he can not and it really it just minicies them its its just like a poison that he he just drinks on his own court he like mixes it up and drinks it just this hatred um and it just makes him lesson less of a person um and and last less of a person birth um you know being a revered uh but Bob most is still you know like the you know the old cz old Smith but theres just something about em thats broken here that i find just truly heartbreaking and and mostly heartbreaking because its completely selfinflicted wound it feels very sad and it there two thoughts that i have about it and one is that this is a a premonition and i and i think Carol is setting it up this way of Bob Moses in the future Robert Moses also will someday be a better old man who is not lauded the way that he thinks is not listen to the way that he thinks and maybe thats just the the lot of anyone who goes for power you cant that eventually you lose that power either driving it taken from you were having it just just aging out of it retiring or something and you hear so many stories of elder statesmen who yearned for the days when they were important you know itnot enough to be respected its not enough to be loved they have to be important they have to have that power and Moses saw else myth is height and else myth has fallen from that height Moses like yeah but thats not gonna happen to me like im Gonna have it you know its im a fame im gonna live forever you know im learn how to fly this is i just have to worry about this ever happening to me but it happens and it says inevtable a part of life is dying you know and it feels me like Ive Smith very much there is like this is an earlydeath for me and its an ic its a itmission that my life event and my other thought is so why doesnt he like run for office like i dont know what that its a so were just thing and i wonder if its the machine politics of the day maybe or he feels like he cant get the support but like i feel like if else myth ran for that mean hes not gonna run for governor again that would be a slife in the face learning for mere？

which is something ligordy is deeply afraid of the begins always worried about yeah or he could run for congress like i think about jongquencyadams who was president， lost reelection and then went into congress for years and years you know was accomplished for a long time of that theres this idea that maybe that also that once youve had kind of ultimate executive power thats the only thing that will satisfy you to that we dont we dont know and there i have a biography Valve Smith thats been sitting on my tobe red shelf free a long time and i should have read it before we before we did this podcast but i didnt did for sure yeah no its a but i wonder if there was this feeling in him of like why had it why would i settle for anything less i want all because this is a man who thought he would be president you know ran for president and and probably should of one uh if not for you know anticatholic bigtree but its a good question he it feels like he has more than anyone else he is closed the door but hes blamed that on rows of out and maybe its like he knows he doesnt have it anymany more but its easier to blame rose about than to blame himself but it is very sad its a sad way for else myth to go he sub for some same thing that a lot of um people who compass things up suffer from which is theyre right for this section of time that right and effective and they have their finger on the pulse and they notice all problems for this little bit of time and they and all the worldview its coinsides with with having a great effect on the world and that passes with time no matter what you can not be that great and on top of things forever and he just can not turn it around and he just is this heis this uh kind of victim of the of the same political machine that that brought him to that prominence in power um and he just he he just becomes diminished and in that。

and and i dont anyway， i just i i would be curious to know if you ever do read that book out it um ill keep it maybe ill try to do it before the end of the actually！

maybe i read it next when i， when i finish this book a short science fiction， short stories thats unrelated to what were getting right now！

but i would love to know from another perspective what um is bigrapers say about his theend of his life in that in that regard。

stay tuned listers will i get to reading that bigraphy before we finish， the podcast will find out OK， so so thats how that chapter ends its a pretty sad bider end to the chapter luckily the next chapter is pretty happy right the next chapter is a pretty happy joyful sunchinechapter its a its amazing chapter great geity！

infrability， and all the goodness they goodness its called two brothers um， its almost exact opposite of the chapter that wetalking about now um， its super fascinating well talk about two brothers after this， so this next chapter chapter 6 Brothers is just somethingelse， and this chapter is one of things i most want to talk to Robert care about because its inclusion of the way you can can the different way Robert Moses uses power and to kind of hurt the people closes to him is such an authorial choice to include as opposed to all this are like you know like fighting with the board estimates and you know grounding down you know different newspaper， people and performers it isnt like this is one thing but the dastardly relationship with his brother is really somethingelse and im so intrigued by it and so i dont know it lets start talking about this！

this chaper what has this open so this chaperopens this like it begins like this often at the rear of a cheering audience there would be standing one figure who wasnt cheering who amid a roomful of men and women gather to honor rovert Moses should watching rovert Moses with a face twisted with bitterness and hatred and contempt he was robertmoses， his brother and this is a the out i should i like to continue to read more that the way this check runs Paul Moses had a strange story to tell about this hero who appeared particularly heroic because so the legend went he had absolutely no interest in money Robert Moses， paulmoses said had cut him out of part of his inheritance and paullsaid his brotherhad done more to minimize the possibility of mutual acquaintances finding out what he had done he had used his influenced to keep Paulaway from those acquaintances as much as possible by keeping him out of city posts for which he was eminently well qualified， and to which he would have otherwise been appointed， and so this is a like you， said this， a this kind of book this is a bify its not like a kitty Kelly you know tell all bigfeedwords like hmm here lets lets uh get into the posits and look at the skeletons， not the dirty laundry this is a book that is working on these huge scale themes of how a city works， how democracy works， how power works， and its almost like Robert Carroll has taken you to this long chapter about how you find a public work and the costs that are embedded in that both social and techlogical anys like wedone a lot of that signed a la its signed a get small and lets look at Robert Moses the person in his family i think that has really been touched on too much previously in the book but i think that he is he would tell you my is my guest id love to ask about this to is heis looking at Robert Moses as a personas， a whole and this is another way that his use of power reveals something about him because this isnjust Robert Moses getting at his brother and were gonna were gonna you know， revelled in the in the dirty laundry like i said this is Robert Moses using power not just against the faceless thousandor millions that he does know personally the same using power against someone who in theory is closer to him than anyone else to his brother who hes known is obviously his whole life it is it is slightly older brother yeah and this is an amazing magic trick to me how that last chapter was so huge and now its like were Gonna Zoom we in and were gonna look at his personal history something that we havent done before wecan talk about a new character someone we have never have not mentioned in the bookup to this point his brother Paul Moses so there something like if a tv showdid this， it would be startling to suddenly have this new character and be like oh！

yeah im his brother and be like i didnt he had a brother whats uh whats his story whats going out like is it hes masterful at this kind of storytelling and theres a little bit of the end will get to about most wife to and i feel like Carol touches on that briefly and that feels kind of like old world gentility to me that that is not what the chapter is about but its also who he had access to because were Carol had access to little bit lease to pallmoses to rard Moses rather anyreally makes use of it yeah and that s a point i wanna get two of this of this chapter that i found really intriguing so these two chapters this these two chapterside side by side that we that we have your group together sort of artificially in our sort of episode making you planning and stuff like this but i but i like to just pose them because i am im really fascinated by them is that you know theres this whole section that that one hundred nine million dollar section that i love in the previous chapter that represents so much work i mean just understanding that weird tax strategy loan thing yeah to to to get the money to the railroad uh legally and then pull that money back out to to fund his project that must represented so much work uh of just spade work of just just documents and talking to people and just understanding it and Carol gives no mention of how much work that really was even though i know that represents a ton of work but he spends a lot of time in the beginning of this chapter talking about how hard it was to get Paul Moses to talk to him yes and i would turn anything about why and i think its because hes not trying to show off how hard it wasnhow he got him eventually， hes trying to show you know in support of the story that palmoses just did not want to talk to him palmoses was not someone who wanted to speak ill of Robert Moses but to it to anyone who would listen um and especially。

Robert caro like so hesitting the struggled up to talk to paulmoses not as like this look this amazing thing i finally got to do as a reporter he sending up is like you should maybe trust what paulmoses is saying here because hes not out there like an every street corner talking about how bad robber Moses is i think this its a little bit of that and its also i think the other things that carosmantiman that last chapter theres that if he says it it means theres documentation yeah that backs it up theres no you can look at the paperwork and here its like he i think he wants to make it clear i got this from palmoses yeah herehow i tracked him that like he and heres i got him so if this anything in this isnt true， its because paulmoses is confused and so theres a little bit of him i think trying to both back it up and also this is himself yeah from the claim it that you know that that that the profinance of the material is not the same as his his normal level of like rigger that it really is single sourced in a lot of ways well and he says in it he says the truth of paulmos is charge about the inherdence will never be determined and i remember iheard Carol talk about how when he was writing about linen Johnson they would say no one will never know whether Linux Johnson stole the selection and he was like im never gonna write no one will ever know im gonna find out the answer to that but here he has to write ill never know this the truth this because by the time hes writingous pawmoses is dead rovermoses refuses to talk about it everyone else who was involved in it is also dead and so i think he is this is the first chapter maybe the only chapter where i can remember where carrows entering kind of like almost true crime is territory words like im gonna tell you somethingsthis is what ive come to believe what it but will never know this stuff for sure and everywhereelse hes hecertain about what hes saying yeah hes he is not playing that game and he says that the and theres something he says um Paul could have dispelled those shadows for monthsthe author asked him to do so he refused saying was noonesbusinessbut his own finally， he said he would at their next interview on the day before， that interview whois stricken with his finalillness from the hospital he telephoned the author and began the story before he get more than a few sentses into it he collapsed several days later， he died leaving the shadows forever undispelled and its like ute like also the pain of that forcaro two of like oh i had it like i almost had it his because as will see with pallstory there are parts of paalslifeed that are a mystery no one knows whatgoing on with him during that time and then well never know now and that Carol so close to having it but theres also something of a like theres something kind of Victorian novel about it to where its that want you want to learn more now that you know that will never know that the truth of it you know now its a mystery so i want to hear about it and any you really couldnt create uh affictional rivalary as rich as this one i mean these two men。

Paul and Robert are kind of you know refracted mirror images of each other theyre both considered very handsome， very charming， kind of know it alls um you know theyre theyre very close in age i think paas only about a year older and yeah hes only a year older！

and they have so much the same personality about them like you said theyre theyboth really smart theyboth really charming theyboth feel theyre superiority to other people yeah they feel that that not only the need both need to show it but they both feel the assumption that they are superior to other people uh and Carol he point to the they had two two differences one small on one big the small differences barrmoses did not care about lower class people or people of color whereas palmoses seem to be genuenly sympathetic towards them and even exseem to express warmth towards poor people that he would not show towards more aflome people yeah， but the biggest difference and ravercare was like this is the this is the turning point for them is that ravert Moses the guy who stands up to power and everything if his mother said something hebe like uh yes， mom whereas paulmoses would not so theyre disagreeen with bellamoses eventually， Bob would be like yeah， OK， i guess youright mom just pretend and paulmoses would be like no your wrong mom which means that the person who is the real secret weapon for our Moses in that she is bank rolling him for much of his adult life before he can abase that power is on his side because he will follow her lead whereas paulmos is the slightly older brother he will not follow her lead and we talk about paulmoses you here and theres these kind of blank spot she seems to have some kind of falling out with her mom use either over politics he was a democrat shes replicon or if it was over a girl that he was in love with but either way the upshot is that he drops out a Princeton and for four years hesdisgone and nobinknowswhereheis nobinos what hes doing and then he returns to college and instead of majoring in classics now hes majoring in electrical engineering and this is one of those dark spotsense life that Carol wanted to know about and is never going to know about in 130 both Bob and Paul want to go into public service Bella we know arranges for Bob to go to the bureao of musically research this is the you know the first big step his eventually becoming the power broker paulis told weve arranged job viewed an investment bank and pauls like i dont wanna do that but sucks and he leaves nobodynos where he goes some other family meres they tell Carol yeah， i think he might even in South America for a little bit nobodynos we does and the trails and pick up again until Paul is serving in the Navy drin rule for one and carolmentionstring wolver one Robert is staying out of the middle he doesnt do it whereas Pauln listenserve and well， Bob is kind of starting to compromise his antimachine in politics so we can learn from bell mosquites at this point if you remember back that far in the in the series， while hes doing that paulmoses working at conadd and is recking a very promising career by arguing politics with his bosses like he will not compromise he is in someways polymoses is the Bob Moses that Bob Moses is promise to be like he cares about people who blow him on the social scale he is uncompromising and it just keeps causing him trouble and finally， he gets the chance to enter public service hes offered a java the department of public works not the last minute else myth whose governor of the time v tos the appointment and paalmost i guess tells robot caro that he didnsuspect at the time that his brother might have been behind that because at the time it wouldnt occurred to him that his brother would be getting in the way of him ascending into that world this is so sinister yeah i i it really this is also really upsetting um and then one of the other things that they have uncommon is this love of swimming like this obsessions with swimming and so well you know balmos is building speech par is building this enormous swimming club and pensovenia umm which is again what an obsession i dont understand it i could understand it if this was like the Lu gainus family you know like if they you know they they they had a history of a family swimming but or diving or you know i just but the yeah they just love swimming i dont know and the differencer uh Paul Moses he hes like an alternatreality version of Robert Moses in so many different ways where Robert Moses can build Jones beach and he can go way over cost because he is the power of the governer behind him he can spend an entire Bath housebudget on the foundation for the Bath house and then say the legislator give me more money i got a finish this bat house but Paul when he overspends on this swimming club he has nowhere to turn he wont ask his mother for financial help yeah， Robert Moses remember he asked his mom to float him like 22 dollars to finish her project once and she did and paalmos is he wont do it so hes thinking further and further into debt and by nineteen twenty nine things are looking up is a great year for everybody， nineteen twenty nine and policies mom are starting to reconcile he gets a consulting job with common Edison， the pool is starting to bring in money and he has an argument with his brother and paulmoses tells ruby Caro that he didnt see it as any other different argument than before Robert Moses was a government guy but suddenly in nineteen thirty the next year paulness mom live another falling out and when he tries to make up with her， she refuses to see him and suddenly other relatives are cutting him out they wont talk to him and this is the the big mystery that im always drawn to in this chapter is they all seem to think he has done something horrible hes committed some kind of crime and he is too proud to ask what they think he did and he will never know and leader in the chapter Robert Carol talks to relatives and theyre like yeah i dont really remember he did something bad i dont remember what it was maybe Bob said he did something bad， but not nobody can seem remember whatthesin is that Paul committed that basically got him x communicated from the family no one knows and when Bella Moses dies， she divides her state up between Robert Moses and their sister Edna who webarely heard anything about and she leaves a trustforpaul its a hundred thousand dollars hes only allowed to receive the interest， which is not very much money never the principle it says in the will that if he contestes the will it allgoes to a siblings me loses it automatically， which is a very bobmoses move i feel like and and worst of all Robert Moses is named the trusty of the fund or one of the trustees and so now that his mother is gone pammoses is lost any financial security he ever felt like he had before and even into his old age heis wondering why did my mom cut me out of a full share of her will like hell hell never know and much like else myth curdling with with resentment towards belt someways， paulmoses comes to believe Robert Moses no， he does say Romos he was a Bob that palmoses comes in my notes i say Bob all throughout and im like oh not used to calling a Bob this is very is very disorienting Paul mos is comes to believe that his Brotherbob lied about him to the rest the family to poison his relationship and palmosis tells Rappa Carol there was an earlier will that divided the state into threeble parts and then when my mom was the hospital， Bob came and got her to sign a new will because he wanted my share the money and he alleges that then his brothermade it harder from definedwork and Carol he investigates paulscharges as best as he could defines pallhas some details wrong about when the new will be signed there was an old will in a new wonderous before she was in the hospital as resigned paas relatives they dont remember what the deal was they dont they sure he they sure he did something bad and paulmoses says Robert hero look at this in light of Roberts 1930 financial situation hes not secretary of statanymore he does not have a job hes forty one years old he has no income accept what is getting from his mom he had two girls to send a private school heget two homes to keep up and for the first time you can see he needs money because he submits a bill to the government for some work hedone for them and the bill is denied payment but he made such a big deal about i dont get paid for my work that just sent a bill means he needs money and he refuses leave public service for private industry job his whole deal is that hes the guy who doesnt care about money he spends lavishly that all the Moses do but he doesncare about money and meanwhile Bellamos is spending her money faster than can be replinished in her old age and Bob mos is like if i can get a fair share this inheritance， im not gonna be able to support my family and Carol says thisofcourse is pauls analysis， Robert will not discuss it and there is living noonelse who is able to and this is a leader but it is possible to ascertain the truth of paulmoses other charge it is possible to determinedwhether not it is true that rovert Moses secretly employeed his behind the scenes influence in city government to keep his brotherfrom getting jobs he deserved paragraph indent it is true and is like what and if probably carros saying it， its because people told them and he says i know this true because people like talk to told me it was true and i cant find anyone to tell me to not thats not true and this is what its like youreading at your life now OK， Ive Ive， i certainly have family members who are you with each other and blame each other for things that happened a long time ago and like they dont talk to each other now because of wills things like that its always like all right， all right so this story with palmos is some like all right maybe i dont know and then issues it gets to oh yeah he totally stopped his brotherfrom getting work youre like oh well maybe the will stuff was true i dont know its， its， its and this is when it gets some it its gets kind of strange you know the the length that Robert Moses going to to keep his brother from supporting himself from working in the same field that he is in yeah and this is just hard to figure out like the the its its funny the the the county amount of the will um is the motivations or or what Robert mos is rolling that is is harder to determine um but the motivation for such an action is very clear here the you know the trail of evidences is very clear but the motivation sort of alludes me you know of why you would make it so that he could not find consulting jobs in the city i mean its its very theres two only two thoughts i have about that want Robin do you have any brothers i do not OK so i have a brother and yeah sometimes i get kind of annoyed with him and then so you know this he he he robes me the wrong way but uh thats a thats a minor point but i this theres something about Bob Moses he needs to be the superior one he needs to be the authority he needs to be the bullet and i wonder if just having someone there who not only doesnt see him as an authority sees him as an equal or maybe even as slightly lesser this is younger brother like to have someone whois like oh yeah well， im not as afraid of you because like i leave remember when you were pooming in your pants as you were a little kid like that something i imagine Bob Moses can not have around even the will stuff so he goes about making sure that his brother cannot be hired in the city and then it both for the government， then leader in private industry and uh theres a point where ligoria he needs someone like paulmoses he needs a someone who understands electrial engineering and is liberal so that he can give him the information he needs to regulate investigate the utility companies for ripping off new yorkers and he also needs someone who has that knowledge expertise believes in the inthe cause and does not care if he pisses off utility companies that might hire him later on and theres basically， one guy who fits that bill and his pamos is and multiple people recommend Paas， ligordy and liberty a system i cant have them around as long as Bob is here yeah and people in the city government they can sometimes hiring for temporary consulting jobs they are impressed by him he cannot seem to get hired on a permanent job and whatinteresting is paullwindows seems to be trying to hire him all the time but then when Carol talks to paulmoses， paulmoses like yeah， Paul windles didnwant me around like even he doesnt fully understand whois really stopping him from from uh getting hired and whens paw windows leaves the government Paul can get temporary jobs suddenly even private companies wont hire him even that they used offer him work and the hand to behind this is rovermoses who again is controlls all this stuff he can hes the one person who both has the influence to stop his brotherfrom getting work and also would care it all whoelse would give us it yeah part my language who else would care if if palmos is uh get a job in the amount that this subatages his life is is not just hes throwing up roadblocks yeah to make things difficults that he doesnt gain a certain level of success in therefore， is somehow a more fornible rival to Robert Moses he brings them to poverty through these actions he ruins him completely yeah its not like and so paulmoses didnt work in government and he ended up becoming you know lawyer or yeah ran a shoe store or something no its like his react as a person probably its his own fall because par the Moses is spend money there lavishall mos is also a spend thrift and by the end of nineteen thirty eight when we you know the years return out the previous chapter hes Adam money hes in deep debt uh he used to be this kind of dapper man about town now hestaying at a salvation army were living in the office behind his his pool complex his suitser ragged his skipping meals he simply cannot afford to eat regularly and hes this bitterfrustrated guy any hates， brother and his and it doesnt help that his brotherhas managed to invest paulstrust money in a bad real state deal that has made paules even more money and put event to even deeper debt yeah and he also。

he also like lobies to as the trust as executor of the trust he demands！

but bomos is demands a salary the money like this is against injury its so terrible ravos he says i wanna be paid for this work also this investment uh we actually overpaid into it so you need to return some money to us into return a few thousand dollars you dont have and pamos is like my brothergonna get paid more money from the trusteinherited than imavergonna get like this is and he sues the trustees and the cases moved from an impartial judge to a judge whos friends without smith who not only rules for the trusteas and rules for roverosis but then lectures par about being greeting and like at this point its like the book a job you know， like its just one thing after another you have any tolmosis and hebecomes this guy who is fixated on his brother and its makes it easier for other people around him to believe oh， hes unstable hedidsomething bad in the past he must have he cant trust him and uh he doescant get workinnew York city and Robert Carroll says to him why dont you go to another city and Paul says to what let him drivemeaway and its like oh thats like thats not a healthyoutcome and it does remind you is like oh he probably could have gone to Chicago Los Angeles someothersi sentinating somewhere and got the job doing this kind of work but now theres a personal rivalrey to it and also New York is the place that that he knows by now hes becoming an older man and people in the New York are like thats pretty weird this Brilliant Electrical engineer whose brothercontrolls the hiring of engineers for public projects that he cant get a job very strange， i said hmm yeah， Robert youre having troublefindingengineers for the stampyourebuilding on the Saint Lawrence river didnt your brothery makeup plans for a dam on the Saint Lawrence river but you want hiring i dont know whatgoing on and it gets pointtheys saying he ends up in poverty hes an old man he lives in a one room walk up apartment at the very southern tip man hatton he lives with the woman named milly who cares nobody seems to know what her last name is she is just this this older woman who seems devoted to him and Carol hints that this may be the woman Paul loved it princedin when he was young theres something about that that feels a little too romantic to me a little too like so i dont know and i i wonder get i always remember that detail because its so pointent you know even if its you know it doesnt you know i dont know doesnt to sound like a new to sound like a new spirit say beautiful if true you know but it uh and by the nineteen sixties you know when Robert Moses is still a powerful person， paulmoses is an elderly man he cant get the series was building his brother is building of apartments in elevator buildings for people at paulmoses income level and rmoses giving out those apartments to people as favors and it never occurs to him or if it does he project the idea to give his brother one of those buildings， which is care points out would if improve his brothers life immeasurable yeah to live in a building with an elevator this is the how far there there lives of gone these two guys started in the same place the very similar men Rover Moses is the shaper of worlds who is re almost by hand remolting New York and Manhat island and things like that and putting up more bricks than anywhenever has more cement and his brothermeanwhile is struggling to get upthe stairs of a of this of to this tiny apartment he lives in and he haunts kind of city hall hes always hang around there to the point that the people he used to know uh retier and now paulmoses becomes just kind of like in the eyes the people work there like a nut who just goes into officism bothers people and finally， 1962 Paul collapses and his brotherfinally goes to visit him at the hospital and he brings him like a browsure about the tribro authority or something like that like he brings them like souvenears that are about how great hid Bob Moses work is and paulmoses at this point hes so nervous that milly is going to be left with nothing when he dies with no money that he swallows his pride after decades any writes， rower Moses， any ascem for a job and Moses arrangesfrom to become what Carol describes essentially an average boy at an engineering firm for 96 dollars in sixteensense a week like the least he can do is you know is what he does which is like oh my only brotherye ill get you this kind of low man on the poll job and where you should be probably running this firm you know this point uh its such a is that what you know theres other members the family that will get into a just a moment but the story of pamos is it really feels like youseen in someways。

the same person its real sliding doors thing the same person net on alternate tracks and i wonder if part of it is like Bob Moses saying competition from his brother and when to cut that up or Robin mos is being like i could have turned out like my brother i dont wanna be remind of that like i just dont want anything to do with them you know thats the more than more sympathetically to look at it in a way you know or doesnt want anybody to see someoneso similar to him so down this luck so yeah so low and so there therefore you can imagine Robert Moses as this man you know as this man knocking around city hall talking about engineering you know you could totally i think this idea of Robert Moses selfmethologizing you he has to come from somewhere so obviously you know bellamoses you know is is part of his story but theres this way you know he doesnt talk about having a brother in any public forum um yeah is is biography when stuff like that is mentioned part of his personal life is mentioned he stops cooperating with his biografer um he never talks about a sister either and i think that theres a bit of him that just like he doesnt want any personal history that allows for some kind of weakness like some kind of like yeah different part of the story instead of what he makes of himself like he is the city builder anywashes like born you know， you know， fully armored out of zooses head as as the city builder and him you know like having a period of time where this like weak man this failure verman probably dominated him was maybe smarter than him he cant have a period of life um have any type of narrative in which he is below or the less than or we know whatever is i mean its just its really i mean this this chapters really hard breaking and its also you know like of all the different things and interpretations of whether not rard Moses is doing you know the right thing for the most amount of people the person who can get things done when most people can and you can argue these little bits in points about like you know him being just part of the entire culture of cars thats happening in cities around the nation， um and and his poor decisions were really the fashion of the time this type of thing were this is a man who could literally give him an apartment anyand gives to apartments to people all the time could just alleviate the softwingof his brother and doesnt do it is just its like so cold its so no theres no national ideological trend of ruining your brother yeah in America at the time like theres！

a theres a car culture， but theres not a torturing your siblings culture you know into adultwate kids torch the siblings all the time but anycould do it its so little its so nothing for him to to make pauls life better and it just blows my mind yeah its a sounning and its almost like the you know hes the master builder hes gonna reshape the world the way he wants it no matter who has to leave has to get relocated or hurt the process and hes going to reshape his history the way he wants it no matter who he has to relocate or get rid of in the process um and uh that mean the story only gets a little sator from here so uh buckle up focus i mean first Carol briefly talks about uh there sister ednow who really get short thrift in the book maybe because she didnt talk to Robert care i dont know but uh， or maybe because her life is not particularly eventful， which is fine but uh she kind of does whatever， Robert Moses tells her to do in terms a family stuff until she and her husband moved to Florida and then she finds that her brother effectively forgets she exists and just ignores her doesnt take her calls theres one point where hecoming to Florida and shes like oh can i see you and hes like yeah well， if you come to the airport， you can see me for a couple minutes before i leave for this other place and she goes OK i get the idea im just not going like thats it they i dont need to do that and it fits into that rubrick for him of like if i can use this person， there part of my life if i cant use this person， i dont need to beat them to be a part of my life but then Carol ends the chapter talking about uh the relationship training rover Moses and his wife Mary Moses and we remember Mary was the secretary at the bureao that he fell in love with he would talk his ideas out with her and she was the woman who when he was working too long hours you know and a long island part commission she come to the officein column by the year in get him home and she is a person whos effectively making his career possible by running there home while he is away and that split is pretty classic for the time that the man works up aside the home the woman is didnt said home but even further the normal shes buying all sclose shes paying the bills shes arranging first haircuts she make sure in the morning that he has carfare in his pockets in caseyas to take a car a train somewhere and if he is she moosing with city politicians she helps remember who people are she helps him to get them on his side she helps take care of the staff if hes in a bad mood when he leaves to work shalcall ahead and say hes in a bad mood today like just be careful if someone on staff loses a family member she is the one who remembers to reach out to them and give their their contolances like she is very much a partner in a lot of what hes doing and is also constantly defendinghim to other people constantly advising him and he said and what mos is quoted the chapter that what he makes mistaken something is workout he goes oh， thats one of the times i did listen to marry i didnt talk to marry about that one yeah anytime he makes a bonus because hes in listmemory yeah series us uh old fashion website yeah yeah the end but over the years Carol to fix this process and its not as detailed as the pallstuff i think because he wasnt talking directly to marry Moses and also i think theres a i get the feeling here that hes kind of covering his sources a little bit more than it does in other sections i have looking the notes the back to see uh every now then in the notes， yous find a partwords like this personally spoke if i kept them， anonymous or theres the mention in one part early in the book of of one of most staff member should commits suicide and because hes being driven so hard and he says in the notes， i am not mentioning this mans name matter perspect for his mother who still alive and like so theres a little bit of that i wondergoing on here but he talks about how as the years goon and robber Moses gets more powerful and louder marymoses is getting kind of weaker in 葵 ter and by nineteen thirty， she is seen by people no longer as like the vivatious equal partner of Bob Moses but as this kind of shy withdrawn woman， she still clearly idolized her husband and she boost him a lot while minimizing herself when hes running for governor， shes interview and shes like well i dont know why you talk to me you should talk to the candidi hes more interesting person than me i dont know what ive done and she seems to be aging dramatically perhaps from the strain of learning their household and bobs life and her own life or perhaps just from being ignored so much who knows you know， so much of our mos is life is spent with the things hes doing and as cares made a clear earlier theres almost no time in the day for any of the stuff its funny because Carol be like rovermos this was always there for climbax with the kids， but it seems like that i dont know how often that must have that seems a possible yeah， exactly and ravermoses is you know he at at any time of day or night he may suddenly leave and go swimming to stay kind of physically vigorous and carostarts jumping hands ingby the nineteen fifties Robert mos is scatching the eyes of younger women who see Mary as not being much to speak of and as early as the nineteen thirties there are rumors that Moses having affairs with kind of more glamorous women richarwomen and under the string of all this Mary begins to drink people began to assume that she is an alcoholic and there are times in sheembarasss yourself in public， because shes had too much drink and shes eventually， hospitalized several times and seems unclear whether thats because of alcoholibus or because of other kinds of breakdowns but we left with this portrait of this marriage that was between these two vigorous people one of whowas clearly subordinating herself for the ambitions of the other and now hes stayed powerful， hes got only more powerful and she is withdrawn more and more and i i i think its too far to say that Carol is saying this， but the impression i get is almost of Moses like a vampire kind of like draining the vitality from his wife in order to stay on top of his own life and then when she is no longer able to keep up in the same way， because shes got newder kind of like tucking her away you know and not necessarily openly mistrating her but sidelineingher from his life and theres its such a its just sadwayforthis chapter ten you know the last chapter ended with the sadness of else smith is this bit old man and this chapter has taken us through the ruin of paulmoses and then the just a minishment of marymoses and theres something i i love two thoughts about this chapter and one of them is that this is much more gossipy the other chapters in a way that Carol mostly stays away from， but also that to avoid showingthis to say only over only gonna talk about his public life for only talking about the public things he said is snotlook at the person in full all the ways that he used power because theres another sort of power thats the power between two people thats the power dynamic thats in a family and these are other aspects of power that are not democratic power theyre not urban infrastructure power or electric power you know， which becomes up so much in the book， the power of motor somethings like that， but every human interaction involves some sort of power dynamic and i feel like the last i dont know what ten fifteen years of American society has been about people having their eyes open to dip to kinds of power dynamics they maybe didnt recognize before or were refused to recognize before we were blueviews too and these are other aspects of power and they show us some more of the cost of someone being the master planner who can get things done you know in this way that the cost is not just in money its not just in marshland but its also when the people around this person and whether thats a fair cost where thats an equation worth balancing carros not going to give us the answer thats not his job to give us the answer his job is only to lay it all out there and then allow us to make the choice i think of how we feel about it uh and its its， its a hard。

its a thing that umm i dont know i like it when my books tell me what to think you know i donlike my books just ask questions its its pretty interesting to me how you know segregated this portion as it it both like extends in collapses time and interesting way it works on a different time scale than other parts that were talking about i mean we yeah we sort of reached the end of of Mary Moses life here somewhat and and definitely the end of paulmoses life， but its very sequestor to to do this thing， which is to to give a well rounded of you of Robert Moses as a as a man， um as opposed to his sort of just activities as a as the master builder， um is it strikes me that like you know the lended Johnson books that Carol row the personal ampletical are more integrated into the story of lbj in in there more document it to um so it it seems like hes figuring out how to place this he he sort of has a way of of of just integrating it better when hes talking about Lindon Johnson， um in in the later volumes of of the of the work that he did um the this is stands out this is one like strange chapter that tells a totally different story that um gives you a different view of this man that youve at this point grown to somewhat los and now you you really do because these are these are like its not that his actions are relatable at all theyre just more normal like more people have experienced like rifts within families that um that calls this type of strife and can place themselves more in these situations and you you can totally see how you know a person could read this and and see themselves and impall Moses or Mary Moses anyway， that they may be cant you know like you know a a person whos just has their favorite park uh bulldosed or yeah you know or something like that theys a Carol is so good i feel like i think youwrite that in the linen Johnson books。

the more integrated i wonder if part of that is because yeah， linen Johnson was already a famous personality but also， he had three he knew he would have at least three books to work on that with so he kind of get into it more but i also i wonder if like Carol is still kind of working in some ways in a reporter mode and the reporter mode is like youtellinga big story you gotta find the human element of it like we talked with the brandy last less episode about like people interested in people every story thats interesting has people in it you know and so heis very good i think it picking out who is the individual that hes gonna boil a story downto allowed the time when its when you know when he he gives a couple examples early on in the first chapter but like when its time from the talk about Moses as a bullet he focuses for a few moments on pro burnsting and the way that Moses treat a pro burnsting and it so much more powerful than if he said you know 4 hundred people quit for Moses staff something like that and here its like its like the reporter part of him thats like you gotta find the human angle lets well do it here this is that it will do about pamosis and yeah its a it is a strange checkwrit strangely its balance thats called to brothers but it ends talking about his wife about marimoses and im not quite sure how i feel about how little space marimoses gets whether i think more space would be allowing to tell her story more fully and she comes right now shes can almost tree like a side person in this whole story or if more space would feel like it was holding her up to um in indignity you know um whether its protecting her or not what what the the gentility of it the old fashionist of protecting someone were revealing the truth and theres a lot going on under the surface in this chapter and i wonder if thats also why like worfits if it its ade by the fact that Carey was so open at the beginning of like this is when i talk to palm Moses， this is what looked like where i saw Moses like hes hes much more inthischapter than he is another chapters yeah， its is so different and fascinating and i think its like you know when people look back and have read this with us over the year um i think its super likely that this will be the chapter they remember the most the most detail of and and has the most visual impact on them um its its just its really something else is it sort of like it just stands out in this interesting way that that i like i i but im im idislike im just kind of fastening about i i i i i think about all the time yeah its a powerful thing that it sticks out that much in such a its the book is so huge yeah you know and theres so much stuff going on it and it true that i feel the same way that like this chapter always stuck out to me and the in the details of it away that opening that youre in a room full of people applauding Robert Moses and way in the back is pawmoses and he is not applauting like that that visual that moment stuck with me so long and it so cinematic and this feels to me like um when a tv show does there one episode thats kind of like the weird episode you know what its like a musical or its like all set in one room or its toldbackwords and its so unlike what the rest of the series is but thats the episode people remember partly for that reason yeah you know that it sticks out their mind yeah， yeah， so guess this is this is Robert carros bottle episode but he didnt have the budget so so he had everything takes listen in one car or something walk up apartment yeah？

um well anyway， so its just a fastname chapter fast name discussion and uh when we and we move on from here next month will be covering pages 6072702 thatschapters 27 through 32， which will finish out uh the part 5 the love of power and continues on to part 6 the last for power just gets worse and worse oh， they thought the love of power was bad lusting for power is even worse that at least loving theres an emotional aspect to it lesting its just animal passionfor power yeah thats next month but after this break were going to talk to mark sure who uh created parks on rec and the good place and weve going to talk to him a little bit about what this book means to him and how he you know after Robert Carol presented the parks department as this uh secret source of power Mike sure came a long decades later to remind us that uh parks in rank is actually， i a little tiny department that does nothing， now for interview with television writer and creator Mike sure the man behind parks on reckon the good place in a bunch of other amazing television， we learned that not only is Mike a powerbroker， superfang， but he also used the book as inspiration and developing parks in rec， we just had to have a man the idea for having my conshow actually came from our discord server， so thank you to user Ben for the suggestion first well， lets talk about your experience with power broker how did you come to it and and what happened do you want you read it？

well， i dont wanna kick this off with a brag but Ive read it three times uh uh we call that the minimum around here call that the beginning step but yeah OK， yeah， thats right， yeah， Ive Ive achieved amature status by ready at three times um so i moved to New York after college and a in nineteen 97 and i love New York uh i grobbing connect at and New York was always like big and scary and exciting and then i moved there and just complete we fell in love with the city and i was at a party maybe a year after i moved and i was ranting about New York because i was saying this is the best city in the world and it is so beautiful and so it makes so much sense you know the the layout of the streets and the neighborhoods and Central Park right in the middle taking up a thousand acres of the greatest most valuable real estate in the in the certainly in North America uh and its just a everything about it is great except for one thing which is why is it so messed up in terms of its transportation and you know coming from connect， which is this north and a little east of the city every time i job home i would have the same feeling which is like what is this insane tangle of road that you encounter why is it so crazy the the van Wick expressway in the major digan and the saw mail in the bqe in the cross brongs blah blah blah blah blah you know you cant you cant can barely take the subway to the airport it takes four hours and its a i dont get it and someone i dont know who lost a history basically said like read this book and youunderstand and it was and ive heard you to talk about this on this very podcast it was like i was being inducted into the masons or something it was like a secret society where it was like just here it like so it like they opened a trench code and there were some knock off watches and a copy the power broker and they gave me the copy the power broker and i and i started reading it and i just tour through it i i read it in in a in a like two weeks and i thought when i was done uh i thought thats the greatest novel ive ever read is how i thought about its a its certainly the greatest book ive ever read but i i thought of it as a novel is like it you couldnt have no imagination could have come up with a better story than the story and i started uh i started talking about it so much thats my my then girlfriend in now wife actually banned me from talking about it at cocktail parties or other gatherings she it was its one of threetimes in her life shes been like you gotta stop talking about this first not like not for her sick formysick she was like youre gonna drive all of your friends away if you keep talking about this book and she was by the way totally right at so i instead of talking about it i just thought about it i thought about it endlessly for years i moved to la in two thousand four and a couple years after that i started working on the tv show parks in recreation， which was about a woman who worked in local government and the idea for lazyno baby polars character was she was going to be a person who was a pure idealist， but had no kind of understanding of the structures， the power structures， and the calified system of government and how to actually get things done and i thought i gotta read the power broker again like thats the book that helps you understand these things so i i read it for the second time sort of in preparation to run that show uh and it was very sort of meaningful in we in this new context， which was not about living in New York but about what happens when you are an idealist and you， but you also need to get things done because obviously that book is the greatest story ever of a person who who starts off with the best of intentions in the slowly corrupted by power and um and sort of like the understanding of how levers are pulled and the goal i remember saying early on to Amy the goal of this is to do is to have Leslie be Robert Moses but remain true to herself like yeah but did Robert mos is but good is its a pretty good it is a good expliation of the character and then so that was a sort of guiding principle， we actually worded into an episode she gave she mentiondid in one episode and i think gave it to a friend of her as as a as a president or something and then the third time i read it was over covid when when we were all locked in our houses， i sort of had this thought of like well， i cant leave my house and what should i do this spend my time and i was like i have a read that book and a decade all read it again so i read it for the third time and the wonderful and funny thing was that when i read it over a covid， it was the same copy is the same paper back copy i had read the first two times and it completely disintegrated in my hands like it just the binding broke and the huge chunks of the book had fallen out and i was white but the time i was done reading it it was the cover of the eleven hundred pagebook but with only like three hundred pages still actually adhearing to the spine so thats my history with it it started with how do i understand York city it changed to how can i understand this character who is obviously not anything close to Robert Moses but has the same set of goals as he did when he started out as a sort of widedreformer and then the third time was just because i love it and i wanted to read it again i i love that your your story with it is kind of like the story of a of a profit who has received the wordfromonahightries to share with everybody it falls on defiyears theyre not theyre not listening they tell you stop！

dont tell us anymore then you find the person that you or the form that you can actually communicated in and you reach i guess Amy polar you reach the one person who who is open to that message and then when you try to return to the original source the original word its like god has shut off that that valve and is like you dont need this anymore to your you know my time with with usedone youre no longer a tool i need in the universe in the book to Sintegrates like something in a fanacy novel you know！

exactly yes！

it like the words floated off the pages and disappeared is the the lost golden disks of meroni yeah！

yeah！

exactly yeah am i saying im a profit of some kind out of thats not formeta decide its a thats up to your listeners yeah， thats right！

um thats outstanding i mean the world reasons why i was so entry to talk to you is this parkson rec uh， you know， connection of like Robert Carol um， you know， creating this masterpiece to talk to us about how the parks department is this you strange source of hidden undemocratic power and then you you know， you know like whatever forty years later， uh talk about being like as sort of silly as you might expect you know parks in rec to apartment to be， but also having all these sort of you know intricache and and good people doing you know bad things bad things you know most these good people doing good things on forks yeah so but its its so funny to me um that theres this connection there when you are already connected to this material in some way yeah！

i mean that the research that Greg Daniels and i did early on in order to write the show was was very iopiting and also very unedasmall scale level obviously very reminiscent of the earlychunk of the power broker because what we learned was like your you start off when you try to do public worksprojects you start off with a inidea and the idea can be very pure and then because this is America the public gets to wayin and the public has a lot of opinions and some of them are good and some of them are bad but they all have to be heard and we talk to this one guy who he had uh he was trying to design um a redesign a small park and he had this uh a in New York city and he had this idea for to sort of restore the park to the way that it had looked in the like 190 you know and that involved like you know light stantions that had a certain kind of like at the time i think it was like a doric column kind of feel because it was the gilded age you know and yeah and so he was gonna do these like old timey nineteentsentry sconces and all the sort of stuff and it was a very beautiful idea and then meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting people say those are too tall theyre gonna shine in my apartment and im is im not gonna be able to sleep and so he makes alterations and then someone else says im this is where we walk our dogs and if the paths arent if theres an enough green space than the dogs when have places to walk or whatever， and they just kind of like chip away in chip away in chip away and by the time the design was actually approved by the by the public commission it was like he had want like the the columns were just now like steel poles and you know everything was like flatent and there is this one little tiny like little flourish like at the top of the lightstantions there was like a tiny bit of like you know intrikitstone relief that he had managed to like， keep and salvage from as original design and we said like that must have been so devastating and he kind of shrugged and he was like look i got this， like small win， like i have this idea to do this bigelaborate thing and like with the end of the day yes， not what i wanted， but like thats not the job of the of thats not my job my job is to serve the public and so， if i can manage to salvage like one little tiny thing that im proud of then great and then the public to the extent that the public can never be truly satisfied with something the public will be satisfied with the project and it was both sort of heartbreaking and also kind of lovely because his attitude was like i， i managed to do something that i am proud of and also the public was served in the way that they asked to be served and we sort of had that its not like a i dont know you would call it just not quite a north star for the show but it had a it had this vibe of like this is what Robert Moses lacked especially as he gained power was he forgot about the second part right he forgot about the part where his job was to serve the public and all he wanted was for it to be the way that he wanted it to be and with i thought like well theres the difference right if youre trying to create a character whois the good version of our Moses then the the part of Robert Moses， the idealist and the reformer should be 99 percent of the of the character and the and the part of bryrtmoses that just wanted to run roughshot over everybody and do things only the way that he saw fit should be one percent or less than the way that this person goes about their business and you know there were a lot of moments like that where we would hear a story or a sort of tail of wow up from a public servant and the first thing i would think of is rover Moses i would think about the book and like the and the difference the fundamental difference between the way that folks who are responsible public service behaveverses how Moses ended up behavingford the great majority of his life yeah and like any resource i bet you found as i think i have found sort of like in my life is the public service there more like Leslie nope than they are like rubber Moses out there in the world yeah！

i think thats probably too i mean really many of them are not like either yeah yeah what are we right there neither angels nor Damon so i dont know what yeah like but they theres a sense of per serving the public in a way that mean they know whats right and wrong， and sometimes you put yourself in a position of leadership， because you feel， you know， what is right you know and then therefore， you releciantly take the advice of other people but i found that you know most people are trying to do good this worlds mostly i think thats true yes！

i think that that theres lets put it this way there are very few people who are trying to be Robert Moses in part because itll never happen again yeah， that part part of what makes the book so compelling is its the exact person and personality type and sort of like a and family， age and city at a time of possibility you know everything in a most things in American cities are pretty well formed at this point you know theyre not making a lot of new big cities that i even have the opportunity for someone to do what Moses did in York and then also the kind of weird confluence of events of Moses coming of age in a time when like tamini hall was running， New York and him getting that firsthand look at how you know idealism is fine， but power is what getthings done and him learning that lesson getting crushed by that power and then shifting gears from ideal list to power gatherer and at at a time when the entire west side of Manhattan was you know garbage and and landfill and there were no highways and cars were just kind of coming into vogue as individual modes of transportation and there were beaches all around and no one could get to them and so he was able by building those roads to get people the beaches which then gave him the power in the public sphere to that he could wheld as as the great you know man of the people like all of those things had to swirl around and join forces at exactly the right moment so if your public servlet now you know you dont even have the opportunity to become Robert Moses because its too late yes， so i think that most people go into public service especially in urban design or in um you know working for a parks on rec department or something with the goal of like doing something good for the public they dont go in no one in the right mind would say like i want to be the most powerful man in the world im going to join the parks of right department of this of the city that gets its hard to imagine what kind of psychopath would think that was even possible um so i think youright i think the diff if theres a if theres a default setting for the folks who have these jobs now it is on the side of good it is like i wanna i just want to like make the socker field look nicer for the girls you know youth league to play on and not im going to im going to dominate the little the urban landscape for fifty years you make you make a good point that the the time when thats possible is is fairly over i feel like within my lifetime the only person i can think of a New York at least that was it wanted to do that sense sort thing was maybe uh Michael Blueberg when he was mer where yeah he was like im a billion air i can do whatever i want im gonna make it so i can run for a third term like and i everyone is gonna let me do what i want and he and he had these big visions but he still coloringinthelines that Robert Moses setdown you know there just isnt the blank canvas i mean Robert Moses canvas was not that blank since you know as as happens throughout the bulky displaces thousands of people but yeah this this sense of like oh the city is clay that i can mold with with Bloomberg even with his his vision was still limited by the fact the city was now instead of clay was like plastic so is like i can break this piece off but i cant i get moldit you know i can i can melt this warp this kind of plastic so structure but i cant yeah i cant totally wheni was leaving New York so i left New York and oh for and just as i was leaving and i might have the timeline wrong its been twenty years obviously um they unveiled blueberg unveiled a giant plan for west side redevelopment and it involved it involved um massive new Stadia for i think the Yankeys and maybe the met and maybe the New York giants and jets and like is many teams as he could push to the west side yeah and the end his end he wanted the Olympics to be in New York so badly so yeah we have to build all these facilities to make New York a world class city for the Olympics i remember that that that it i i felt is a New York at time i was like uh were already the greatest city in the world like i dont the Olympics would be lucky to have us but get right yeah this huge plan for all these this stadium development yeah and it， and it was not just as a stadium it was it was like the whole west side was complete in this plan that he laid out the whole west side it was exactly the kind of project at Moses would have not only proposed， but actually just ramrotted through right and i remember thinking like well， this is insane， this guys lost is mine there you cant theres no this would this is of hundredtrillion dollars worth of development but i remember reading a quote from him and the quote was fascinating and i think both scary and also true and what he said was New York is a city that builds things and if New York ever stops building things New York will die and thats a paraphrase but thats what he said and i remember thinking of course， immediately of the power broker but also that hes right that one of the things about New York that has defined the city is that even though you can walk down blocks on the upper west side or the upper eside you can see these brownstones that have been there for a hundred and fifty years and there are enormous cathedrals and there are structures the data back to hundred years which for American cities is pretty old the defining characteristic of the city is that every time you go back its different there are， there are stores of uh in restaurants of disappeared in new ones are there and buildings have been torn down in new skystrippers have been built and forbetter or worse the city just moves forward and it moves forward in through construction and Bloomberg was the last measure i think who who was trying to sort of not only acknowleged that fact but also like get like downwind of it and like sale on the on that aspectofthecity and say like the stuff that Moses did yes it might have it might have been racist and awful and displaced thousands of people and destroyed neighborhoods but thats just what this city does its what the city has always done and we cant stop doing that we at maybe can do it more responsibly and less racist lead but we cant stop building and i i do think that part of again part of what made Moses a singular person was he was doing it in that city if Robert Moses does what he did in Cleveland， Ohio or even Chicago or Dallas or Phoenix or even Los Angeles i dont think its the same thing because New York is so its so concentrated its so packed in and in order for it to have this kind of like this you know， the ages of of emperors were traditionally very long and the ages of emperors in yorker very short you know the these these time periods that we think about in the city theyre measured in years or may be decades but not centuries， not millenia there everything is knock down and build back up very quickly and so he was just Moses was the guy who did it the most but other folks who have come after him have recognized that and have triedin some cases like blueberg to actually replicate it by saying like hey if we stop moving this doesnt this isnt New York anymore and its its one of the things that is so wonderful and also kind of hard breaking about lovingthat city is just how often it is arased like an edge sketch and then rebuilt uh and i dont know i dont know what that means about the future whether that will continue whether the time of New York is coming gone but it is a its part of the reason the book is so fascinating is because that true fact about New York met the greatest builder whos ever lived and they in the score in the course of whatever it was call it thirty years basically built a new city within the city the dirty existed its true that you you are a yeah i mean thats very whats it was set yeah that its money cuz its i you kind of get it the idea that uh that comes after the book is written because its its interesting to me to read the book now also！

you know fifty years after was written and there are certain things in it where most is a saying the things on building i got last for centuries this is gonna be for centuries for centuries people be going to the New York policy um thats gonna last as long as the Roman colic um and its gone you know for sentries people are Gonna go to Shay Stadium thats not there anymore that even Moses hes building the biggest sandcastles the maybe thats the the nature of New York is that its its a wave thats gonna eventually wears down anything you know！

so maybe theres hope to get that waterfront back i dont know what thatpart again another fascinating aspect of this right is that he was right in some cases and very wrong in other cases especially toward the end when he kind of lost his fastball is like he didnt understand he built chastadium she stadium was always a piece of crap always it was never a good stadium ever and in he had right next to it he had Yankee stadium that is was in also now gone but was like a testiment to history and to something that had blongevity compared to other other similar stadiums across the country but he was so um shortsighted to think that she stadium this kind of like random collection of slabs of concrete， an aterable blue and orange color scheme and all of the other stuff that made chased atim terrible that like this is Roman colleceem like this is whats gonna stand the test of time like that thing was doomed from the beginning i want to chase stating for the first time in 1987 and i remember thinking like what a piece of crap like a i mean just awful and its its very funny to have the attitude that he had which was i am the one guy who will build things in this city that will never be torn down and then to build she studium its a very funny its a very funny ps uh but the uh his like his like is slow growth and you might say like delusion of um i like ive won this race i have i have conquered the city i i will be the person whois never forgotten the irony is a defit werent for Robert Carro he would absolutely have been forgotten by now yeah， because its not that people would know he was hestill has his name on a thousands state parks all over the state and people would go like oh whos like i yeah you built the van wiker whatever， but the uh the like all truly kind of narsossistic delusional lunitics by the time he was done， he felt like he was gonna be you know， Caesar or Nero， or whoever he was gonna be a uh he was a piece of history that would never be displased， which is why the last line of the book spoiler alert is so beautiful！

which is when cars this interview right now listeners yeah， then this is the rest the series， then come back and finish this interview that something i want to ask about so in this episode we talk about one of the chapters talk about is that is two brothers the story of paulmoses and robermoses and you are， you are， you know， you are very verstall writer but you are pa majority of your writing until vision is sitcoms uncurious how would you develop a sitcom about the rivalry between the two Moses brothers is that basically just frasure or is there？

which there we do that but you know what it really is it some level is the succession kind already did it like it six of that when i was watching succession the James Cromwell character is its a its got a similar vibe i yeah to yeah to get the James cromall brand Cox relationship its slightly different because James Croml is also like a billionair you know， but he broke a different way and he has this and in in that version Cromwell was um his character was a hundred percent convinced that his brotherwas just a terrible evil daemon right like it was its not the the relationof the book is very different the relationthe book is more heartbreaking because Moses just essentially like writes like ignores his brotherhis brothers living in poverty and Moses could et Carol make it clear at any moment gifhim any number of hundreds of thousands of different jobs iteke controlled to like lift amount of poverty and just didnt because of his vendictiveness and his acid and everything else so its not its you know Cromwell in succession was also， because he was a part of the family this Titanic family was like a billionaire， but the the way in which those two brothers just a rift formed that was unhealable and the and the differences in the way that they approached the world we had a like i reminded me of the book a lot like it different times and they didnt pull their punches you know in succession again spoiler alert if you have what succession， but what it gets all the way to Bryan coxes characters， funeral and Cromwell just dislike im going to speak at this funeral and what you expect because were so trained for this is that there would be like a a little bit of a like there are moments where i you know regret the way that we grow up or will we trace each other and you get like one tiny fleck of that in this in the ulogy that i remember but mostly its Cromwell going like my brother was an asshole he was a terrible， terrible， terrible person and its so shocking but its like yeah thats the truth of these relationship sometimes is like just because your brothers it doesnt mean that when one of you dies its all everything that a wounds are heal like Moses was so awful to his brother and so many ways that i cant imagine if Paul spoke， it is funeral that he would have been like you know he was he was a bad guy he was all right we had our differences but look of those bridges you know， ifthoughtof of course， guys i work into the ithouse so many times about like can you ever film？

this right？

like its the greatest story ever told about America could you ever film it？

the conclusion of cometois no， you could not because you would need fifty hours you would need fifty hours of drama and you would need an actor who could play both an eighteenyear old at A 79 year olldsomehow or you have to do that thing where you cast different actors who kind of look like each other to play these different errors or whatever i mean like the crowded it may be its possible but its its one of those um if like if you could snap your fingers and have the good the version of like a crown like show about rover Moses it would be the greatest filmed story ever told like it it just theres no theres no more compelling portrait of an American than that book you know i mean weve been talking about the book as this you know great novel as this depends in experience of。

but its also this like this great ethical case study and you know you wrote a book on more of philosophy and yeah and i， and i you know i wonder you know about that so we were were whatcarosetting up is you know Robert Moses values that inform his sort of Utilitarian calculation for of a greater good are being questioned by Carol because he has extremely different values you know about um what the greater good is and you know when you how do you look at the book as you know someone whos thought about wrote about the show about you know more of philosophy its an incredible case study for a number of different issues i would say the pop up in more of philosophy the first and most obvious to me is um is what i would sort of broadly call the danger of the shifting overton window right like what what you find i wrote about this in in the book。

i wrote theres a danger in violating any moral principle that you hold in even the slightest way and the danger to me is it once you do that youre overtin window for what you personally find permissible ethically speaking shift to tiny bit right？

so you normally dont um park in a handicap parking spot but today you do because youre in a rush and nothingbad happens and so the next time that your driving around you you see like theres a fire lane that you could park in and year again in a Russian so youre like oh， the last time i parked in the handicap spot and nothing bad happens so that this is fine ill just do this and then nothing bad happens then youre like you dingsomeonesmear when youpulling into your next parking space and its like a tiny little chip of paint and youlike oh， this isnt that much worse than parking in a handicab spot or a fire lane and so im just gonna drive away its whatever cars get banged up its fine and like you know ding ding， ding ding ding ding the overton windows shifts a little bit more and a little bit more and soon you know your serial killer thats the thats the end of the stores up you may Wes seen it so many times yeah， we have right， but no youre not a serial killer but youre a person who has now deemed it permissible for you to do certain things and then you certain things that crop up that are only slightly worse than the thing that you are OK within it just its snowballs right yeah and the problem obviously with thinking this way is that no one likes a rulesnerd and i know that because im a rulesnerd and no one likes me and so you dont want to be the kind of person who never does anything even room you never jaywalks or never you know that like thats not a way to live either so the the trick and this is what i wrote about the trick is in those moments where we have to do things small things that arent quite you know arent quite right or you know are bending the rules a little bit which we all do the trick isnt never do them the trick is when you do them just just note it in your brain just be like you know i should make a habit of this right like i this is not quite a hundred percent in line with my personal effical code and im im not going to make a habit of this and im not going to justify more severe transgressions by saying well， i did that other thing and that was OK so well do this now and Moses uh trajectory was so granular you know， it was so and thats again why the book is eleven under pages long its like the peace by peace， bit by bit he goes from a guy who is a pure idealist reformer into a themost corrupt person whos ever been a part of any government， which is saying a lot in this country and and you can read the whole book as just a continual slide of his personal overton window it from for my delisterformer to completely corrupt， lunatic and those moments where he does something he pulls a lever of power it works out for him he gets what he wants and then the next time he pulls two levers of power and gets what he wants even more theyre laid out so perfectly and so completely that you can just watch in real time its a slow motion trainwreck of a guy moving from one kind of person to another kind of person so thats to me thats the biggest sort of philosophical or ethical story of the book the other one is is that again no one likes cont because contis too rigid to actually be helpful in the world you know like e like you cant lie ever you cant ever do you cant you would say you cant ever j walk because j walking you know j walking isnt allowable and if everybody j walk then， the world will be chaos so well， never let you j walk and if its like a hundred and twenty degrees and you need to go to cvs and the light is taking a long time and theres no cars coming you can jaywalk its fine just jaywalk its OK you know but what count would say is that he was following essentially a a pretty strict moral code in terms of how he was trying to go about his business and then he gets to a point where you know hes crushed by the levers of power and the gears grind him up and speech out and he basically in that moment just flips a heflips from a peer contian to appear utilitarian and says like if this if i can justify what im doing for the greater good if if what im doing， even though its seems like its a little ifi if it gets people to Jones beach and they can swim then its worth it and it doesnt matter what i did thats irrelevant what matters is the result and when you combine that shifting personal over to window with a flip from count and ethics to utilitarian ethics and utilitarian ethics are the most easily justified ethics in the world because it doesnt matter you can murder a busload unnums but if it helps you know， if it helps like fifty more people than there， were none s have a certain amount of happiness that that uh you know that over overtakes the amount of sadness you calls to the nuns in their families then youfind and so he just found a haven in this really corrupted view of utilitarian it ends justify the means uh， uh， you know power and its its its the greatest causionary tail may be ever of why a corrupt version of utilitarianism is a bad idea because he he justified everything he did essentially by saying itgood for the people， itgood for the people， its good for the people long after the things he was doing stopped being good for the people that he was supposed to be helping yeah！

yeah， i think its so amazing that Robert Carol identifies the moment that the overton would know shifs in taking the sort of deal with autocoon any yeah， he knowsed thats the moment any knowsed that Robert Moses a sensitive to that moment because maybe even Robert Moses knows that thats the moment that he began to shift is over ten window well。

i heard you talk about this in an earlier pockest um but the primary attitude i think they Carol adopt is that power doesncorrupt it reveals and i think that what is so great about that moment is what he has set up for you is a guy who was waiting kind of waiting all his life for that moment to be presented to him right its like he was a guy who was like he had these goals he had this idea his head of how to to achieve them he was wrong someone else was like this is how you achieve them and he was like great then ill do that and you know your tag meta guy who you know lest we think that he was actually a good person who was corrupted by power youtalking about a guy who didnt only believe that all cities should be planned and all city planning should be executed by only Ivy graduates he thought they should only be planned and executed by people from Harvard dealer princethanlike like screw you Columbia like you not not good enough to build our cities sorry brow nice try good readins cornelgrads like he was so he was such an inveterate snob and so a leadest that the the actual disconnect when you read the book to me， is his combination of extreme alledism and his initial stance on sort of idealistic populism thats the part of the character that doesnt make sense to me the part of it they gets corrupted by all the deal with autoconn and then executees miserable plan of of running roughshot over rules and regulations and the public for forty years that make sense thats the part that seems like yes this lines up with the guy that we learned about it yale and the guy who who had this absurd view of how it was that cities should be run and so when that deal happens it， what it actually feels like is the gears were not messing properly until then yeah for him yeah， and then once the day labs is like yeah click， click， click now everything is working the way was supposed to for him yeah well！

i think that what i could use to explain Robert Moses is delusion in his younger years is that you know he thought that these sort masses of the universe should be anoiented masses the universe out of merit um right！

and then he ran into reality any realized that there there was no merit and so he just had to use the old systems to uh to get things to totally a hundred percent and thats why else smith is again this confluence of event else Smith essentially a an alliterate man who did not but why go to harvr dealer Princeton right like i think Moses met him and was like wait this son of a bitch is the guy who has all the power in the city like how was that possible im six four and dev devilishlyhandsome yeah and Ivy the educated and i wrote a thesis on civic planning and like how was our smith running rings about me and so it shaghted his worldview that like because you are borne to the right kind of family look a certain where are educated a certain place that you shall be granted from on high the ability to just do whatever you want to do he learned that lesson from a slave only functionally a literate guy who is just very charming and had figured out how a consolidate power and that what it was incredibly revealing for him obviously it was like this， if this， if this， jackas who do what didneven go to college can be just knocking me off my game so easily then there then i havenactually learned how to achieve what i need to achieve yeah， thats right thats right its totally right any any else learns that this idea of like the tools to use that is is how to learn loss and how to write loss and learning the scale throughout smith and i i find it to be stunning i i just love that oh the details of him bearing and footnotes all of those that all like you know were gonna use the definition of this thing as laid out in the eighteen twelve law that says this thing which allows this commission to be set up like the i mean it it is very its very damming because i dont think this is one way in which the world i think is very similar right you learn all the time about these omnibus spending bills are passed in congress and theyre given to people the read with like 48 hours before the vote and theres hand written notes just thrown into the margins and things crossed out or whatever and you see the politicians on the in the minority party say like were having a void on this tomorrow when its 6000 pages long and no ones read it and then it just passes and youlike alright whatever is in that bill is now the law of the land and money is being thrown around and wasted and given out to people left and right that we have no theres no accountability for and when you read how Albany functioned back in that time and you realize that the all of the people in the taminyhall world are just theyre just out getting drunk they dont read the bills and him realizing they dont read the bills and if i learn how to do this， i can do anything i want because it becomes the law its just such an amazing like a its such an amazing lesson to learn and be right about and its probably still right today yeah！

its such its such classic um i keep brand back to stories i apologize i it keep it such classic kind of like fanacy or martial arts storytelling Brits like oh， okay i want to learn how to be the greatest fighter in the world well， youre gonna have to carry this bucket to that well and back again a hundred times a day everyday oh， i cant live in doing it wait a minute these are the motions i need so its almost like he he， he walks in and hes like of course， im gonna run the world but no uh it turns out hes gonna have to read every bill so we can learn this are cane you know magic language of the law and then suddenly hes yeah， suddenly hes neo in the matrix and he can see the code and know else can see it and its the really slow and boring version of getting that neo getting that thing plug into the backers head and then saying i know kong Foo its that but it takes like four years and it involves reading a billion really boring bills from from legislators its the real life version of that the way that like um the it you know if you want to be a yeah if you want to be a holy man you have to go sit on a mountain and just think for nonstop for years and its like thats a lot of work i guess the you maybe i dont want to be wholythat badly， but Moses wants to be controlthat badly theys like ill do it and ive smith to ill do it im gonna re im gonna put the work in and its such a if this will say if this was a different kind of book if Carol was more on Moses side this could be a book about how kids if you put the work in， if you strive and you work harder than everybody else you get to the top of the heap um and thats kind of buried in there but but unfortunately， usually！

no stories the person does the work and then there are a good person and thats thats not exactly the case in real life or in the book i wanna read that version of the book now over its like hey kids you want to you want to become powerful and and do good things like follower like thats Robert Moses is selfappointed yeah， biografer like thats his span on it is like its the story a nobleman who did the work and reap the rewards like thats an amazing version of the power broker id love to read that i mean the funny thing is is that story was written you know for decades in the newspaper right yes！

thats true and um and you know when he began to believe that in his own way when somebody interrogates it even slightly and they go what about that brotherball is like i know i know rather brotherball there has to be i i get it in that overtin window uh moral choice！

uh mindset there has to be a moment where you say if im telling the worldmy brotherdoesnexist maybe im doing the wrong thing here maybe this from denying the existence of my closest siblingmaybe im not the good guy at the moment or maybe i am i dont if the that the unknowable thing right what will that is never to be known is to what degree if any those thoughts pass there Moses brain right did he ever？

did he ever？

did you have a single pang of regret or sadness？

or did he feel like oh， oh maybe this is so great like all of the times that he wanted to build something and a group of people came to him and said if you just do this three blocks to the south that you will destroy a bunch of abandon buildings and you wont destroy this neighborhood and you wont displace these people， and he ignored them， and then all the people were displaced and he said， and he would say to the press theyre all beinggivenhousing and none of them were beinggivenhousing， and they were driven from their house like home families ruin neighborhoods ruin in all of those moments was there ever a moment where he thought to himself like oh！

this isngreat and it sure doesnt seem like doesnt seem like it now does it and i just cant imagine what youre thinking about when your swimming all those labs except for that like thats whats always on my mind at all times and right its just building bridges and to me is did i accidentally upset that person in junior high you know yeah what yeah i mentioned when when Moses in the shower。

hes not thinking about what are all the mistakes that i made when i was young and instead its how do i get this thing done how do i get that and i wonder that if theres a um， theres an aspect of it of his psychology that is like mere bloombergsvision of New York that i have to keep moving i have to keep building or i stop and if i stop， i think i cant think Ive gotta keep thinking about the next project because i cant think about my life for what ive done， i doubt， i doubt he was conscious enough of of those things were cared enough， but it does feel like when hes swimming you know， i certainly i dont like swimming partly for the reason that my mind wanders to embarrassments in the past or things like that yeah and but im sure hes just thinking about OK， if i can put this bondacross at that percentage rate。

then i can get the money from the federal government to to get the labor and then i can build this bridge across like it it seems like his mind just always going at at these problems get out yeah like i what in in i dont know nothing 93 i was getting on a plane and the woman at the like counter help me change my seat and she gave me my ticket and she said have a nice flight and i said you two and then i and then i walk down the plane and i was like shes not flying anywhere why do i say you two and that was thirty two years ago and i havent stopped thinking about i think that once a month you know like just like that was so weird why did i do that？

what did i say you two to a woman who wasnt flying anywhere and that its like theres a its something essentially human about reflecting on your own forables and like mistakes and small goofs and gafs， and and certainly more serious things times that you offend someone hurt， someone broke up with someone in a crappy way and and made their lives miserable or anything like you eh that stuff haunses and it should haunt us its probably evolutionarily uh a beneficial that it haunts us because it helps us correct our behavior or maybe do better the next time were in a similar situation and he Moses had apparently such a hardened kind of lizard brain just a like a fighter flight guided brain that you get the sense that none of that， nononly did it not hauntam i dont think he ever would have seen any of those things as mistakes or forables or or failuers of character or anything i think he i think he just somehow had a constitution that allowed him to focus only on the future and of like youre saying and what else he could accomplished in his limited time on earth and had a true belief that everything he did was right and good and proper yeah and thats just not a mindset that i think most of us can access thank god i dont think wed want a i dont would not want to access that kind of mindset what kind of person do you become if you never if theres no selfreflection， i think we know the answers Robert Moses， a a couple other people we could probably name in national politics right， its like thats the thats the kind of person who no did never apologize， never admit you were wrong， never admit defeat， never never focus on anything except the next thing youre going to do and be one hundred percent sure that that thing is right and good and proper its a of a very brutal way to go through life and it seems like and that that alongside that if he does think about the past。

he does seem very conscious of how other people have wrong to him or things oh， yeah， that hes mad about and its its like Richard Nixon where he seems powered by just wanting to be like ill show em， ill show em all like theres this theres this spike that that is just feeling him that is very in the right person is real powerful and you can accomplish a lot if you！

if you can harness that spike you know yeah no look dictators can accomplish more than democratically elected officials like thats thats the thats always been true like the the parapids were not voted on by the Egyptian public you know its like that that is the thats why certain folks who have this mindset have dictator fantasys thats why Trump li is constantly praising world leaders who have dictatoreal powers its because to him and a focus with this mindset that is the ideal kind of methodology for a world its like you have all of the power no one can challenge you， you do whatever you want and your convince that what you do is the right thing to do its just completely antithetical to the American system of government and its why Moses worming his way up to that amount of power through nonealected position is such a causionary tail and such a fascinating porter of a person not who ran for president or who ran for governor and didnt really care he had already figured out the way to do what it was it he wanted to do and it it was through legislation and commissions and he know by the time he hit it the peak of his power he had a a theater that only he could go to and restaurant in every burrow that were fully staffed even though by definition you can really only eat it one restaurant per meal uh because youre only one person and he achieved all of that dictatorial power without ever being elected anything， which is just incredible well！

itspend so much fun talk to you about power broker i i love the fact that is confused all this parts of your work and that you read it three times it just been a real pleasure for us to have you here so thank you so much for joinus on the book thanks so much for joinus really appreciate it its a greatest book ever written im so glad youdoing this podcast i will be listening to every episode and it is a its been a real pleasure to be here so thank you for having me on！

thatsallforthismonthpowerbrokers next month were going to cover chapters 27 through 32 whoreally burning to the chapters there only to this episode so many next episode will be finishing part five and starting part 6 the lust for power its pages 六七 through 72 in my copy of the book if you just need to hear my maliffluence voice sometime between now and next month then please listen to the flop housepodcast it is my badmoviepodcast icohost with danbicoin stroke Wellington it is as foolish and devoid of information as this podcast is serious， literary and educational if you have a guest idea！

just want to keep talking with fellow powerbroker fans head to our discord to join in the link is on our website or you can go to discord dot ggslash nine nine pi thanks again to Ben for suggesting marksure as guest anyyou mightofnoticed that Mike didnt finish his thought about what makes the last line the book so beautiful well in case youhavenready before we just we dont want to spoil it for you only halfway through we dont give way the last line right now but wedlove what？

Mike said so much he had so many great ideas about it in thoughts that we are saving that for the end of the series so stay tuned you will hear it inthe appropriate time the 99 percent physical breakdown of the power broker is produced by Isabelle Angel edited by committee。

music by Swan Rio， mix by Dara Hersh 99 pisecutaproduceris Cathy 2 senior editor is delayhawk， Curt colestead is the digital director the resident includes CRISPR Ruby， Jason Dalione， emitfitzerald， Gabriel a Gladne， martinganzalis， Chris for Johnson， Vivian Lee Lash， Madonna Jago， multinautomodina， Kelly prime， Joe Rosenberg， Nina Potok and me Romanmars the 99 percent of Buzvalogo was created by stuffing Lawrence the art for this series was created by air and Nester we are part of the Stitcher in serious examplodcast family now headcord six blocks north in the Pandora， building in beautiful Uptown Oakland， California you can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as around DISCORD server where we have fun discussions about the power broker， about architecture， about movies music all kinds a good stuff its where im hanging out most the time these days you can find a link to the DISCORD server as well as every passed episode of 99PI AT99 pi dot work， if you have five more hours i can keep talking you know what im just i just gave us a wrap up point because we cause we gave us an hour but like i have tons my questions i i i actually probably need to go actually do my actual job。