← All source episodes Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas' Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era
28 Oct 2025 21 published claims 2 attributable people
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
belief 7evaluation 7uncertainty 2prediction 2observation 1commitment 1preference 1
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
The useful parts, with receipts.
21 published records
“I’m not sure that the constellation of political forces in charge now can do it, but it absolutely can be fixed. I don’t know if you want me to go into some of the details —”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“When I was riding around with them, it was really amusing. They had an equivalent of a CompStat system, which told them where the hot spots were, which was where they had to police, and they’d make absolutely sure to do the opposite and not be in hot spots, because if there were only two of them, they were not sure that they could control people.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I don’t think you can generalize. I think scenes surprise you. I was always surprised by what happened at the scene.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“My puzzle was to put that all together in one psyche and one human being, and I think that in the end, I saw these amazing antinomies in her, not as contradictions, but as part of one psychic architecture.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Young people legitimately ask what sort of deal he made in the early 1990s and whether it was the right one and whether it worked.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I think the ANC governed reasonably well for 15 years. They were very lucky that they caught a commodity supercycle.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I think I remember him once saying that in South Africa, you’ll stop your car at a traffic light, and you’re watching a small-scale civil war around you, and that’s interesting.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“If we think about the South African economy, my sense is there’s ongoing de-industrialization.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I think Namibia, a bit like South Africa, goes on. It doesn’t grow very quickly.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I don’t know Musk, but I’ve thought for a while that his desire to settle Mars is perhaps a uniquely South African impulse, the notion that people need somewhere they can escape to.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I’m replying to your questions, and maybe that’s what makes me sound more pessimistic than I am. But I think that what South Africa has — which is quite remarkable given what’s happened to it over the last 15, 20 years — is it has a very solid political center which is very hard to dislodge, and a pretty sane liberal-minded political center.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“A number of his opponents and enemies were being policed by a function that was made to be a state function, not a party function. And that saw a rapid decline because once police are seen as a politician’s vehicle, it becomes very difficult to make its bureaucratic integrity.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“The only situation in which they’re comfortable is a situation in which they’ve been called, and that’s usually domestic violence because they walk into a scene because they’ve been asked to be there, and that gives them authority.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I think that in a poor ghetto on a Friday and a Saturday night, the police are very violent.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I don’t know what the numbers are now, but the per capita rate of murder of police when I was working on this stuff 15 years ago was considerably lower than a 25-year-old Black man in a ghetto who was not a police officer.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Well, I think because probably in Cape Town, you were in middle-class bourgeois spaces, which are privately policed.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“He is, in my view, one of the most underrated — in North America, at least — writers and thinkers.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“It’s also one of the cities that I don’t know best, Tyler, but I think that the main issue is absolutely shocking local-government management, and that is a symptom of the corruption of the ruling party.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“I really, really wouldn’t miss anywhere in South Africa because I was afraid of crime.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“The really sad thing about policing in South Africa is, very few ordinary people know what the law is, and it’s made up by police in the moment, and they have a lot of leeway because they’ve been called onto the scene.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler
“Mining has been a bit of a disaster because it’s been very badly managed by public policy, but there is potentially — with different politics — a great future in that.”
- Publisher
- Conversations with Tyler