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
22 published records
01 / belief
“I think you are dealing with something there at 10,000 people that is a lot more like how a corporation is governed.”
02 / belief
“Oh, because I think that in terms of . . . if we’re just asking should the edge cases be decided a little bit more towards censoriousness or a little bit more towards permissiveness.”
03 / belief
“I would say that’s not so polarized in terms of policy, though the opiate of the affective polarization clearly is going on.”
04 / belief
“I think there is something very interesting and important — I actually tried to talk about it in the book — in the way we actually key left or right increasingly to this cultural dimension. But it is very far from the only dimension operating, and I think that one of the destabilizing tensions of American politics right now is that the Right feels like they are losing on culture, which is what they care about most, and the Left feels like it is losing on economics, which is what it cares about most.”
05 / belief
“I think that the media has not in any way effectively adapted to the social media age. So, the way in which we’ve been overturned is that, among other things, we think that our primary power as an institution is that we can cover things positively or negatively, that the thing we’re covering doesn’t much matter so much as how we are covering it.”
06 / belief
“I think virtually every politician and media figure who goes on Twitter is a worse version of themselves on it than off of it, and that we are in a collective action problem, where it is individually rational for everybody to be on it, and it is collectively bad for all of these institutions to be on it.”
07 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if it’s gone down, but I agree that it is incoherent, and I’m not sure it’s gone up.”
08 / evaluation
“Most of those will probably happen. But for most of the budget, it seems it doesn’t matter.”
09 / belief
“I was in Lahore for a lot of it, and the level of air pollution there — recognizing what people are living through in a daily way is, I think, a very sobering moment.”
10 / belief
“I have said this before: I think we would be better off if there was no Twitter.”
11 / belief
“If you are able to get hired by McKinsey, you’re able to get hired somewhere else. I think to a first approximation, there’s zero people who .”
12 / commitment
“I think that’s actually a pretty deep question, and this is a question I would like to have a better answer to, and hope over the next year — now that my book is done — to find a better answer to. But I will say in a big level that I think the failures of governance in California are much more profound failures for the Left and for progressivism than people give them credit for.”
13 / evaluation
“I think that the thing it has probably changed the most is, I have a little bit more appreciation, even than I did before, for the work that people do when they’re actually doing the hard work to understand bureaucratic and human and social complexity because that is something that, when you’re trying to build things, it will scale, or build ideas that really sound great when you say them at a party or something, you tend to underrate.”
14 / evaluation
“I think a useful heuristic here — people don’t have nearly as strong views on policy qua policy as certainly people like you and I tend to assume they do.”
15 / prediction
“All the questions people bring up in these cases are important. But I think all of them are also less important than the question of, is the future of how we will communicate with each other, of how politicians will communicate with the public, of how, basically, all important communication will be structured and incentivized — is it what gives you the strongest emotional countercharge?”
16 / evaluation
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and I’ve been thinking about it in a sense of understanding temperament as a separate axis in politics from ideology, this being something that is particularly hard for us to keep an eye on because we use the same words to describe different things.”
17 / prediction
“Maybe a very simple way of putting it is, given the stated views of both the Democrats and Republicans on questions like harm and sacredness and so on — where Jon would put them in moral foundations, or other people would put them just in terms of caring about government interference — it seems very plausible that you could’ve had the two parties reverse their position ultimately on abortion, that you could have had a Republican Party that was much more pro-choice because it was worried about government interference in people’s lives, a Democratic Party that had taken the other position for other reasons.”
18 / preference
“I think that running an organization that is entirely telecommuting is probably — I don’t want to call it easy, but it’s a lot easier than running an organization where most people are in one place, and then some significant, but not near majority percentage of them are not, because what you end up having then is dual processes, where a lot of things are built for everybody being around each other, and then the people who are not around everyone else are at somewhat of a disadvantage.”
19 / evaluation
“I am not sure that I think the right way to measure what polarization does, at any level, is policy divergence, and here’s why: To a first approximation, what I think polarization tends to do is make it harder to pass anything because most of the American political system, both at the state and the national level, is built on requiring reasonably high levels of compromise to work.”
20 / prediction
“I also know, at the same time, that the way that Johnson was covered on the BBC has created incredible levels of anger on the UK left, which is probably weakening the BBC’s hold on that constituency as well. So I suspect that the BBC is both subject to the same competitive dynamics as you’re seeing here — although it starts from a place of more power in centralization and funding than PBS does here, than NPR does here — and then secondarily, is in a more intense form of its political vise than those players are here, in part because it’s more important, and so there’s more margin for different political players in attacking or weakening it.”
21 / recommendation
“I will say that Fintan O’Toole just wrote a book called The Politics of Pain that I thought was really remarkably sharp on this, and as an analysis of the British psyche was one of the most convincing things I’ve read, making an argument, going way back in Britain’s history, that there’s a deep, unresolved set of psychic questions around Britain won WWII, and then somehow feels like it lost the piece that it deserved to, if not own Europe, then be understood as a savior of Europe in an ongoing way.”
22 / evaluation
“I had to go through a lot of different drafts, and a lot of reporting, and a lot of reading on that chapter to come up with something that I found convincing, but asymmetric polarization was a very big part of my story of American politics, and recognizing how undertheorized it was in my head was striking. So, I think that writing a book — it forces you to pull forward things that you might assume are pretty settled because some level of intuition, or value, or just hearing other people talk about it has made you think it is more sure than it is.”