Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
25 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I suspect that it begins to screw you up over time. You might go in normal, but it takes a big psychological toll to be trying to maintain multiple identities and always worrying about divulging information.”
02 / uncertainty
“I guess that’s possible. I don’t know. Personally, I’m just not interested in it.”
03 / belief
“I think there’s a scattershot phenomenon going on, where a science fiction book might include a large number of hypothetical inventions, and the ones that are in there might be described somewhat vaguely.”
04 / evaluation
“The story, for those who don’t know it, is that Stalin said, “I want the world’s biggest steel mill,” and at the time, it was Gary, Indiana. So they just got the numbers on Gary, Indiana, and increased them by, I don’t know, 10 percent, and started working on this huge steel mill in this place called Magnitogorsk, which means magnetic mountain, which is in the Urals out in the middle of nowhere and called magnetic mountain because it’s an incredibly rich load of iron ore.”
05 / preference
“The only thing I am interested in hearing about is how many billions of dollars these companies are putting into the development of content to run on these devices, because nobody’s going to use them or want them unless there’s a reason to put them on, a reason to use them.”
06 / evaluation
“My position on this, which I put out in a Substack a couple of weeks ago, is that the real purpose of art and the reason we like art is because it exposes us to a very dense package of micro decisions that have been made by the artist.”
07 / evaluation
“There were a lot of, not just Americans, but Westerners in general, who went to the Soviet Union in those years because they thought that this was an opportunity to build something great.”
08 / evaluation
“I think that was maybe a big part of why a lot of Western leftists thought it was a great place, because there really were a lot of women getting better education, becoming doctors, getting roles in the military.”
09 / recommendation
“I think that if you’re going to depict it, the key thing is to do it in a way that doesn’t appeal to the worst parts of the readers’ human nature.”
10 / preference
“Keyboard goes burrrrr, where stuff gets put down on the screen almost as fast as ideas are coming into my head, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. It’s valuable for a sentence to be lodged in the buffer for a little while because it’s really easy to improve it or even just to get rid of it while it’s between your ears.”
11 / evaluation
“There are various people who went there in the ’20s and ’30s and wrote memoirs, Americans who wrote memoirs describing their experiences there. And because they were written at the time before people knew about Stalinism and the excesses of Stalinism, it’s written without a full premonition of how bad things were going to get.”
12 / evaluation
“I don’t think that worked because even fancy paper doesn’t cost very much, and I like opening the package too much.”
13 / belief
“I saw that article last week on this topic, and I realized that the guy who’s writing it is largely just goofing, but I hope nobody takes it seriously.”
14 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. A lot of this kind of philosophizing can just have the effect of pulling you back, zooming out from the day-to-day particulars of your life, and thinking about things in a more detached, let’s say, maybe calmer frame of mind.”
15 / belief
“I think actual real-world examples of that happening are somewhat few and far between.”
16 / evaluation
“We think of Victorian novels as a kind of stodgy, old-school way of writing, but he was all over the map in terms of nutty, random things that he would put into his books.”
17 / evaluation
“A lot of it, I think, seems to be well intentioned, but somebody was pointing out to me a little while back that the Golden Gate Bridge was built in a shockingly brief period of time compared to almost anything that we try to build today.”
18 / preference
“I think that the nonmonetary applications of distributed ledgers seem to be more interesting than just making money.”
19 / preference
“Well, they’re certainly of their time, but I find that of all of the science fiction writers that I read when I was a kid, his stuff has stayed with me more than others because he had this knack for capturing little moments, little human interactions, and images that produced really vivid memories in my head that are still with me.”
20 / prediction
“I think we’re actually living through the worst-case scenario right now, so look about you, and that’s what we’ve got.”
21 / recommendation
“I think people just have to be diligent and be aware of what’s happening in that area and push back against it.”
22 / prediction
“Dystopia is an interesting idea because a lot of times, what science fiction writers are really doing is writing a kind of metaphorical story about the present.”
23 / evaluation
“I think that part of it begins with empathy because, in order to tell somebody a thing, you need to know and understand what it’s like to not already know that thing, which seems kind of obvious.”
24 / recommendation
“I’ve been talking about a really interesting book called A Culture of Fact by Barbara Shapiro, which is a sort of academic-style book that discusses how the idea of facts entered our minds in the first place because we didn’t always have it.”
25 / evaluation
“I would say underrated because it’s got just crazy, random stuff in it that you almost can’t believe that you’re reading it.”