Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
23 published records
01 / belief
“I think market size matters greatly. So talented Canadians come to the US in great numbers, but not so much vice versa.”
02 / belief
“To me, it feels more like a series of independent city-states on our margins, but I think I would find it problematic to live in a city-state, even in the US.”
03 / 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.”
04 / 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.”
05 / 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.”
06 / 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.”
07 / 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.”
08 / 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.”
09 / 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.”
10 / 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.”
11 / 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.”
12 / belief
“Here’s a reader question: “I believe 95 percent of Catholic universities are Catholic in name only.”
13 / 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.”
14 / evaluation
“I think there are forms of antiquarianism that are sufficiently antiquarian to cease to be decadent and to become almost innovative.”
15 / evaluation
“Kanye is not decadent because decadence involves drift, repetition, and stalemate, and Kanye’s public persona is defined by creativity, conversion, and reinvention.”
16 / 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.”
17 / 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.”
18 / 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.”
19 / 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.”
20 / recommendation
“You asked about nondecadent spaces in the Western world. Israel is one, and you could argue reasonably, I think, that Utah is another.”
21 / 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.”
22 / 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.”
23 / 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.”