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
21 published records
01 / evaluation
“He did this study of incomes of the medical profession, and we can’t really trust it because he’s looking for a particular conclusion.”
02 / uncertainty
“There’s a debate in one of the episodes of Free to Choose where Peter Jay, who is British, takes on Milton Friedman. I don’t know if you remember this.”
03 / belief
“Aaron Director was a skilled woodworker, and his basement had a whole setup. I think Friedman built all the furniture for their first home by hand.”
04 / belief
“I have to say, there’s a historian — I think he’s at the University of Rhode Island — Robert Van Horn, who’s really excavated a lot of the early life of Aaron Director, and it’s absolutely fascinating.”
05 / belief
“If you are a person who values tradition and values established norms and social practices, that may not be an environment conducive to creating imaginary worlds. So, I think you need a culture to support artistic creation and fiction creation.”
06 / belief
“I think he helped the elder Friedman keep his pulse on what was happening with a younger and more radical student movement.”
07 / belief
“I think he had opportunities to do that throughout his life, some of which he took and some of which he passed on. But I would say he had a model of that very young in his life when he was a graduate student, in the figure of Henry Simons, who is one of these forgotten figures in the history of economics, who I became absolutely fascinated by.”
08 / belief
“I’m also interested in writing sort of a history of postmodernism because I’ve been teaching an intellectual history class here at Stanford that’s been tracing it across the century, and I think that’s potentially really interesting.”
09 / belief
“I think her equilibrium was what she achieved briefly, which was a doting and supportive husband and an exciting secret lover, much younger than her.”
10 / belief
“The real reason his presence there is so controversial is the Nobel Prize, which is awarded, I think, about a year later.”
11 / belief
“I think she was pulling on these tropes, and then she was imagining this heroic manly man, that if she actually ever met in real life, she would not be attracted to and probably not even be able to tolerate, but in her imagination, this could be an idealized partner.”
12 / evaluation
“People still read Keynes and Mill and figures like that to see what did they say in their day that was so influential. I think that Friedman has got into the water and into the air a bit.”
13 / evaluation
“I think most of it was manufactured as a campaign against Friedman because ultimately, his impact was similar to what any Western-trained economist would have had.”
14 / evaluation
“I would say one of the reasons it’s happened is that conservatism became an establishment, and then you have a set of greatest hits, and you have a variety of ways you can make your living within this establishment, provided you adhere to the greatest hits.”
15 / evaluation
“Sometimes I give a talk called “Milton Friedman Was a Woman” because I think if you pulled all the women out of his life, you’d have a good economist, but I don’t know that you’d have a great economist.”
16 / evaluation
“I wasn’t sure, well, they did this because they wanted to manicure the story, which is super upright to begin with, to be clear, as I think you would agree.”
17 / evaluation
“He said, “He can’t be trusted, not in that he lacks integrity, but that he’s so committed to what he wants to see that he will selectively interpret the data.” It’s interesting because I see in his letters with him and Schwartz, at one point he says to her, “We didn’t just go and take a bunch of monetary statistics to see what we wanted to see.”
18 / evaluation
“The presidential lecture he gave in 1967, saying there wasn’t a long-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment — there are definitely several key figures in the British political establishment who found that made a big impact on their thinking because they felt like they were living that.”
19 / evaluation
“She, in the end, would say, “Russia, it’s just a mystical state.” It’s interesting because, in recent years, when we’ve seen the glories, the fantasies of Mother Russia, or the role of the Russian Orthodox Church, the mythic importance of Kyiv, or whatever it may be, I think back to Ayn Rand grumbling, “It’s just a mystical state, and they’re all obsessed with mysticism.”
20 / evaluation
“I think there are other contributions just allowing him to be really singularly focused on his work because she took care of everything else.”
21 / evaluation
“The other thing I would say — I talk about this in some detail as well — in the 1950s, there was a large conflict at the University of Chicago between Friedman and a group associated with the economics department, the Cowles Commission.”