golden thread
I was listening to a podcast episode of Dwarkesh Patel interviewing Robert Caro for last couple days during commute. For context, Dwarkesh Patel's is the hottest podcast in AI world, but this episode has nothing to do with AI. Robert Caro is a unique writer who spends years researching a topic (one book covered in this episode took 40 years), reading everything to read about the person/topic he is writing about, interviews 100s of people associated. This is grueling work and what motivates such a person to put their life into such endeavors is the reason why this is fascinating. Came across one segment in the interview quoted below – boiling down the idea of a book into one sentence or at max one paragraph. I had heard this about movies – the story to be told in one sentence. Like “Hollywood superstar actress falls in love with an ordinary bookstore manager” – as the story of the movie, Notting Hill, for example. This idea of a “golden thread” that can be distilled as the core idea...