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
29 published records
01 / evaluation
“I actually disagree with the view that money doesn’t have an influence. That view is like saying marketing doesn’t work, and it’s clear that marketing can work.”
02 / belief
“If we think of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, they could arguably, by the standards of many people, be called weird.”
03 / belief
“I think that Peter’s reading of The Tempest would view the importance of the primacy of the individual, the importance of Prospero and the magician being self-creating, and that the individual is the primary focus of what matters.”
04 / evaluation
“If I talk to political scientists, most of them will tell me that money and campaign finance don’t matter that much for elections.”
05 / belief
“I would say the bad challenges are almost like an emotional response of “People should be listening to me, and yet they’re off doing this Facebook thing and not listening to me.” So the fact that attention flows in a different way — and that’s both economics and everything else — I think is what causes a bad response because part of Facebook is saying, “Hey, we’re enabling every individual to speak and connect and follow what they want.”
06 / belief
“I would say that probably the way that I tend to have grown thinking in networks and thinking of evolution, of incentives and cultures, probably didn’t come from Putney.”
07 / belief
“I would say that people most commonly misunderstand about friendship that they think that it’s strict loyalty to the other person.”
08 / belief
“I guess what I would say is that I tend to think in terms of systems — Dewey was a system thinker — but then I tend to think in terms of Archimedean levers, by which you change the systems.”
09 / belief
“I would say that my comparative strength was that I was willing to interface with these various massive platforms and institutions — eBay, Visa, Mastercard, government regulation, other companies — and to figure out how to win PayPal a place within those platforms, how to navigate their concerns, how to not make PayPal be organ rejection to those entities.”
10 / belief
“I think the primary thing that I was writing about in that essay was that one can articulate very good conservative values that are not trying to lock in the past against the future, but trying to articulate principles that help guide you in your own evolution of thinking about concepts like liberty and others.”
11 / belief
“If I think of radio people, they might be skeptical about Facebook, but they rarely hate Facebook.”
12 / belief
“I would say that usually science fiction is too simplistic in its theories of human nature, that the characters are, to some degree, too uni-dimensional.”
13 / belief
“If I view your work as a complete outsider, I think of you as a living embodiment of John Dewey, and you went to a John Dewey–inspired school.”
14 / belief
“I definitely hope to write a book on friendship. I think that’s one of the things that’s super important in our lives.”
15 / uncertainty
“I guess what I would say is, I am acting like it is not all determinism, but I don’t know if that’s actually the fact.”
16 / belief
“I would say yes, with maybe only the following asterisk, which is, part of the reason to be 10-out-of-10 idealistic is not to be naïve, not to be simplistic, not to realize that tragedy isn’t really possible, but that is actually, in fact, the goal of our lives and what we should work towards.”
17 / belief
“Buckley’s side, him sitting to my left, Arianna Huffington sitting to my right. This is when Ariana Huffington gave an impassioned speech — she’s awesome; I think the world of her — that the internet was a poisoned well that our children were drinking from.”
18 / belief
“I think we enjoyed the class as a way of being precise about thinking about things, like is dualism correct or not, for example.”
19 / belief
“I do think the notion of saying, how do we shape our system so that competent governance leaders — we as a society are made more aware of them, is I think the way we need to solve that problem.”
20 / preference
“I think we would actually prefer patterns that get to success not by being a reality television star, such as our current president, but actually, in fact, success and attributes in the things that lead to the good governance of a state.”
21 / recommendation
“If you look at it, my view would be that, as you have more successful tech companies that have an impact on society as a whole, part of what you should start doing is deliberately engaging in discourse with the various institutions of society in a public way, to say, “Here is the kinds of things that not only are we doing now, but what we’re trying to create in the future.”
22 / recommendation
“Where you can find really startlingly good talent, where the traditional mechanisms don’t work? So it’s a little bit of the contrarian question, where you say, “Hey, actually, looking for the person who dropped out of school because school was boring, and they wanted to achieve something really interesting, but they were still driven by curiosity and interest and these sorts of things,” is a way of doing it.”
23 / recommendation
“You need to be learning for the current modern networked age, and to be constantly learning, and make sure as many kids as possible learn that and keep learning because then you can adjust to the new jobs.”
24 / prediction
“” Because not only will I think that evolves a lot of productivity, but I think that will also evolve the society and morality in the right way because we should prefer non–zero-sum games.”
25 / preference
“One of my favorite handles when I join a new computer system is “Quixotic” because if it’s all determinism, maybe we should act as if it’s not, right?”
26 / evaluation
“I would say that the notion of thinking about — a central part of later Wittgenstein is to think that we play language games, that the way that we form identity and community, both of ourselves and as individuals, is the way that we discourse and the way that we see each other and the way that we elaborate language.”
27 / recommendation
“I would say Dune with Frank Herbert because of thinking of the broad scale of the interplay of politics and religion in the evolution of society, because science fiction is, by making these artificial future societies, a lens onto our own.”
28 / evaluation
“For example, there are some entrepreneurs that say, “Oh, this person is an absolutely great technologist,” and I go, “Well, that person doesn’t really understand technology that well, so that doesn’t matter.”
29 / preference
“One of the expressions I used when I was an undergraduate to describe the kind of philosophy I wanted to do is transcendental anthropology, which is, you’re looking at what humans are doing, but you’re applying Kantian analyses to it in order to derive good philosophy.”