Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
67 transcript-backed records
01 / commitment
“I won’t say the deepest level. At the quantum level of reality, it seems, as far as we can see with our perception, that in order to go from contingency to reality, you need an observer.”
02 / belief
“There are powerful newspaper accounts, including, I think, in The New York Times.”
03 / belief
“I’d say when the pope defines a dogma of the church infallibly, like the dogma of the Immaculate Conception or something like that, I think that has a useful clarity.”
04 / belief
“At the same time, I think that the wide range of attested spiritual, just frankly bizarre experiences that human beings have — of which, UFO encounters are a subset — that, again, has familiar antecedents going back millennia — I think we should take those seriously and have a theory of what they are that is more complex than fraud meets insanity meets delusion.”
05 / belief
“I think he’s going to maybe elaborate his theories of the Antichrist at some point in the future.”
06 / belief
“When you say things like that, I think to myself that that might be true of my columns.”
07 / belief
“I think if you take a maximalist doomer view of strong AI, then that’s effectively a theory of the Antichrist.”
08 / belief
“Free for now, though once I get through two-thirds of it, I think I need to paywall and see how many people are actually interested.”
09 / belief
“If that were the only kind of experience you had, that anyone had, or that 99 percent of religious experiences fit that pattern, then yes, parsimony, I think, would suggest whatever might be out there, there’s not just probably one God, but that God is probably the only higher power concerned with us with whom we might be in relationship.”
10 / belief
“Again, I understand that this seems like an outlandish conception. I think in the end, it is the religious conception.”
11 / uncertainty
“I don’t know what the critical event is in the middle. I don’t think we have any kind of access to that.”
12 / belief
“I wouldn’t dismiss the simulation hypothesis any more than I would dismiss the various multiversal hypotheses that have ended up substituting in at least some intelligent people’s minds for what I think of as the rather more obvious likelihood that the old-fashioned religious worldview is correct.”
13 / belief
“I think works of art that have a human consciousness behind them are inherently better, no matter what our descendants might think about the subject.”
14 / belief
“I think Tyler Cowen, with some assistance, obviously, from angels on one shoulder, demons on the other, maybe some fairies thrown in.”
15 / belief
“I want to say that I think generalizing from that to a universal point that you could never have video evidence may be a little bit of a leap, and we should give it a few more decades, and see what surfaces.”
16 / belief
“You might think that we are among the first, in which case, we seem fairly special, or you might think that there are just very, very few, in which case, I think, we seem fairly special again.”
17 / belief
“I think, certainly, that if you’re driving through Arlington, Virginia, there is a set of unconscious things that your body does out of habit as you drive around that you are not self-consciously doing.”
18 / observation
“” But people change religions all the time, right? New religions come into being because of conversion.”
19 / preference
“I prefer the written word to oral culture. I prefer reading greatly to listening to podcasts.”
20 / evaluation
“I think the latter is inherently inaccessible to the tools that we use for modern science.”
21 / evaluation
“I think, functionally, the simulation hypothesis is doing some of the work of a polytheistic or Gnostic religion, where whoever is running the simulation, the version of advanced consciousness that is capable of effectively creating and sustaining our world and presumably however many trillions of others they have running inside their simulator — that entity is not the creator god of classical theism.”
22 / evaluation
“I think the interaction between what we know at the moment or understand at the moment about evolution in human origins and the traditional Christian account of the fall, that there are some real points of tension in there that Christianity has not figured out a perfectly satisfying resolution of.”
23 / uncertainty
“I guess it’s a case where I find the subject quite interesting, but I don’t want to make any kind of commitment because I think we just conspicuously lack evidence.”
24 / evaluation
“I don’t think he’d be surprised by some persistence, but I think the original Humean theory is, most people believe in the supernatural because someone has taught them about it at church.”
25 / preference
“Absent any other indication of what kind of religion you should be, what sort of religious perspective you should have, a default to the one that works in your culture is, I think, by no means, crazy.”
26 / prediction
“People argue about what constitutes a religion, but I think you can get somewhat probabilistically to the view that not just that deism is true but that there is a fundamental order to the cosmos in which human beings have an important or significant role to play.”
27 / belief
“I think the decadence we have now requires some sort of disjunctive event to shift us out of it, which could very well happen.”
28 / belief
“The pundit’s mistake is sometimes to try and think 14 steps ahead, and the partisan mind may have a certain advantage, where it just says, “No, we have to win this election and let the future take care of itself.” That still hasn’t brought me around to supporting Trump, but I think my arguments against supporting him are weaker than they were, again, pending the outcome of whatever happens with the coronavirus.”
29 / belief
“I know that there are areas where that line gets blurry, but I think, yes, over a long enough life-expectancy horizon, human beings would need to create a culture of refusing and withdrawing care.”
30 / belief
“Two thousand years of history probably offers a lot of counterexamples, but I think the Christian world, in general, has been hospitable to dynamism.”
31 / belief
“I think I would assign a slightly higher probability to the weird-advanced-military-technology explanation for those, that they seem a little different from the UFO abduction stories.”
32 / belief
“Whereas I think that — and I say this: I’m not a professional architecture critic, so take this with a grain of salt — but the last 25 years of public architecture has been less spectacularly ugly and more just mediocre imitations of more striking modernist forms.”
33 / belief
“In that scenario — now we’re into totally speculative terrain — I think that you would expect popes to be elected later, and I think a 50-year pontificate is generally an unwise thing for the Catholic Church in the same way that a 50-year span of governance by any really powerful figure often ends up in bad places in the end.”
34 / belief
“Now politically — we’re recording this in the midst of the interregnum between Israeli elections, of which we’re on track to have 17 in the next year or so — I think that you can see elements of the same political decadence on display in other countries on display in Israel too.”
35 / belief
“I would put it this way: I think France is, in certain ways, very advanced in decadence, but it’s also a place where a lot of forces of post-decadence — whatever that may be — are sort of in play in really interesting ways.”
36 / belief
“Now, I think what we’ve seen over the last 30 years — and it’s been thrown into sharp relief by the sex abuse crisis — is that the modern world may not allow that model to exist; that if you have this global institution that has a celebrity figure at the center of it, who is the focus of endless media attention, you can’t, in effect, get away with saying, “Well, the pope is the pope, but sex abuse is an American problem.”
37 / evaluation
“I think there are forms of antiquarianism that are sufficiently antiquarian to cease to be decadent and to become almost innovative.”
38 / evaluation
“Kanye is not decadent because decadence involves drift, repetition, and stalemate, and Kanye’s public persona is defined by creativity, conversion, and reinvention.”
39 / evaluation
“I don’t know about 95 percent, but I think, generally, Catholic universities have followed the same path of imitation and assimilation that I was describing earlier.”
40 / preference
“I like its mix of intimacy and history and the New England landscape. And I think that if you could rescue Connecticut from decadence, maybe you could rescue the whole world.”
41 / evaluation
“I think that he — in his own evolution — has followed, but in certain ways blazed a trail for other evolutions of younger conservative intellectuals who are, in certain ways, in search of a new fusionism — one way to put it.”
42 / evaluation
“I think that America, in many respects, really did represent a particular peak of civilizational progress in the years of its ascent from somewhere in the 19th century up until the moon landing.”
43 / recommendation
“You asked about nondecadent spaces in the Western world. Israel is one, and you could argue reasonably, I think, that Utah is another.”
44 / preference
“” And in that sense, to the extent that it’s a technical label, you have to be able to say things could happen that ended decadence and didn’t lead to collapse or catastrophe, that led to development, change, dynamism, that from a moral perspective I might find repellent. It’s also why I’m drawn much more to the older frontier, the idea of the space program and space as a frontier, because that’s a case that I think the idea of human beings, as they are, going exploring seems to me much more fundamentally appealing than the idea of human beings staying put and changing who we are.”
45 / evaluation
“I think readily available, constantly available pornography pushes men away from women, pushes men away from the cultivation of masculine virtues, makes them less marriageable, makes them literally more impotent in certain ways, and is a sort of underappreciated aspect in the decline of men.”
46 / evaluation
“In fact, I think having a commitment to celibacy at the heart of your religion is better for the diversity of human types and experiences than just making marriage the summit of all things.”
47 / belief
“The issue there, though, is just that the orthodox Christian believes that at a certain point the revelation is actually final, that God essentially doesn’t play tricks on you. And this is I think an important idea — that too much Hegelianism leads you to the point where you’re saying, “Well, what God is saying in one era just doesn’t hold true in another.”
48 / belief
“I think the Hegelian insight can be true in the development of political forms and responses to problems that social changes create, problems that basic technological changes create, and you can hold that view while also holding the view that the Hegelian dialectic can’t be usefully applied to certain ideas and certain truths, and you can take extreme examples and say there isn’t a synthesis to be had with — to violate Godwin’s law early in our conversation — there isn’t a synthesis to be had with Nazi Germany.”
49 / belief
“All of which is to say I don’t have a brilliant answer for your question, but I think there would be a lot of very strange and different cross currents that the people most inclined to make the pro-life argument right now would be disinclined to immediately run with whatever political possibilities had presented, but also that the nature of the technology, its level of invasiveness and what making it work would mean, would in turn determine where liberalism went, and so on.”
50 / belief
“In that way and various others that I could go on listing, I think the tensions between Mormonism and the dominant American culture still leaves it quintessentially American, just as .”
51 / belief
“I think that a lot of the time, in politics, I suppose, I am — in certain areas of our politics, I’m looking for that point, I guess you could say.”
52 / belief
“I think that we’re going to wake up in 20 or 30 years and be — well, we may not wake up, but I would like to think that we’ll wake up in 20 or 30 years and say — “Why were we putting all of our children in front of these screens for so much of their childhood and shouldn’t this be something that we had exerted actual control over instead of just leaving it to some combination of experiment and market forces and governments wanting to be hip and cool and buying a lot of Chromebooks that Microsoft wanted to unload,” and so on.”
53 / belief
“I think that there is a very natural story to tell about Western civilization, in which particular Christian ideas about the individual, the individual’s relationship to God, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” and so on — that these sort of embedded ideas eventually develop into the constituent forms of modern liberal democracy.”
54 / belief
“I think conservatism in America at its best is trying to preserve a kind of American exceptionalism that doesn’t sort of have applications really when you’re thinking about what a German conservatism would be, or a Russian conservatism, and so on.”
55 / belief
“I think a therapeutic shift on divorce would have negative practical effects on the everyday lives of Catholics. But the reason the issue is particularly important to me, and the reason I’ve written about it so much, is that I think the church is risking betraying its connection to Jesus.”
56 / belief
“I don’t want to, having done my Butlerian Jihad rant, I don’t want to oversell the horrors of social media, because I think if you look at a lot of the polarization in American life, it’s being driven by an older technology: cable television.”
57 / belief
“I think if I were playing the optimist, I would say that there is a Euro-African future for the church where African forces, African migration, African ideas, African leaders help renew and enrich and return European Catholics to their faith.”
58 / preference
“There are a lot of people who wanted to like The Wire more than The Sopranos because The Wire was sort of sociological and political in a way that Sopranos wasn’t.”
59 / evaluation
“I think for the synthesis, I guess when I think about the synthesis in that case, I gave it quite a low probability because it seems to me that Judaism and Christianity make — and, again, this comes back to the storytelling issue maybe — but I think there’s a more organic and obvious unity in that story than there is in the combined story.”
60 / evaluation
“There was an argument that this was a matter of distributional justice, that the tax code was penalizing parents in various ways because of their kids’ contributions to Social Security, and so on, through a rather elaborate schema — that I think was true and correct.”
61 / evaluation
“Well, anyway, it’s some sort of rebellion against the use of computational replacements for human beings. And so you have this far-distant spacefaring culture that relies on Mentats, these humans who have developed their intellect to somewhat superhuman levels — perhaps through the use of CRISPR — thereby I’m trying to unite all the themes of tonight, Tyler — But they don’t use certain forms of computing power that we would assume people in the far future would.”
62 / preference
“I could never actually finish all of Herbert’s novels, which makes me a Dune noncompletist, which means I might be the wrong person to lead the Butlerian Jihad.”
63 / evaluation
“My mother had health issues when I was young, and we ended up as religious as we were in part because of healing services that she went to because she was ill or because she had friends who recommended them.”
64 / evaluation
“I think that the situation in Europe is a very challenging one for anyone to think through, but particularly for a Catholic, because you have this sort of — it’s the ancestral homeland of my faith.”
65 / prediction
“I think that there is a sort of sincere limit to human imagination when it comes to contemplating the idea of the beatific vision and so on, and that comes across.”
66 / evaluation
“She started the book shortly after we started having children and one of the interesting things that she realized was how much of her reaction to cats was a displaced child reaction; that cats have these faces that look like infants’ faces and have the eyes and the wide faces, and they meow in this way that approximates an infant’s cry, and they essentially hijack the maternal instinct.”
67 / preference
“I think that male productivity is — I don’t want to say this isn’t true of female productivity too, but I only have the male experience to go by — I think male productivity is often .”