Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
13 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“The idea that you can regulate a politician’s speech because AI played a significant role, or maybe the entire role — that’s very hard to defend.”
02 / evaluation
“I think we should say that AI is like a vacuum cleaner or a toaster, let’s say a speaking one.”
03 / evaluation
“One thing — I think I haven’t gotten this clear enough in my own mind — but one thing the woke left, let’s say, has gone wrong with — both in terms of strategy, but also in terms of how to be in the world — is a kind of arrogant — the word “shaming” is right — shaming of people who are deserving respect.”
04 / evaluation
“Parfit — some of the anti-individualist and anti-identity and self stuff, the stuff that looks illiberal and also looks brilliant but peculiar — I think he’s replicating the early research agenda of Kahneman and Tversky, coming up with very exotic cases and then asking himself what he and others think about them and then giving those things authority.”
05 / evaluation
“Instead, he basically reported, after obsessive work — I think two years of work — on the correspondence between Mill and Taylor, and the correspondence is one of the closest things we have to the fictional correspondence in my favorite book, which is Byatt’s Possession, where the letters are ones of surpassing beauty.”
06 / evaluation
“I think the liberal view is — this is something that some liberal thinkers, including Martha Nussbaum, have written about — there’s tragedy, and to recognize that tragedy is inevitable is a way of keeping an incentive to reduce the number and ferocity.”
07 / evaluation
“There — one might be the least amazing and fantastic, but there’s none that is the worst of the Star Wars movies.”
08 / evaluation
“I think one of the, you know, sources of awesomeness in these cartoonlike, improbably awesome movies is that an interpretation like the one that you offered is eminently plausible, and there’s material there that justifies it.”
09 / evaluation
“But the title wrong-foots you. But I think that’s his greatest album, actually, and so it’s underrated.”
10 / evaluation
“Now, if you push me to talk about liberty — that liberty is an ingredient in welfare, meaning being able to go the direction that you want is welfare-promoting for the people who are exercising their freedom, that’s one point. And the other point is the Millian point that there are multiple contexts, at least, let’s say — we don’t want to make a theology of this, as I think Mill sometimes almost did — but we want to acknowledge that people know, you know, by and large, in acknowledging the behavioral biases better than third parties, what will make their lives go better.”
11 / evaluation
“Another way to put it is that — I think you’re onto something actually very deep about the movies, which is that Yoda is nominally the wise person, but he makes a kind of fundamental error, which is, he thinks that detachment is good and attachment is bad.”
12 / evaluation
“On the other hand, the federal government has some regulatory authority under the Civil Rights Act. And if you’re falling asleep a little bit because I’m not talking about transgender in the large, I’m sad you’re falling asleep but a little happy that hair isn’t on fire, because one way democracies work well is they put people’s hair on fire very rarely.”
13 / evaluation
“” And that was his model. But there’s a twist here that involves freedom of choice and redemption concretized in the idea of a father whose life course had been dedicated to terrible things repudiating that life course and choosing to save his child because he can’t bear that loss.”