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
33 published records
01 / belief
“When I look back to that era, it seems like a golden age, but I suspect if I had to go back and read everyone’s posts, I’d be pretty bored.”
02 / belief
“You’ve maintained the tone — both of you — over all these years, which I think is really impressive.”
03 / belief
“Speaking of that, I think about different eras of Marginal Revolution but I think the first era of Marginal Revolution is ’03 to ’08.”
04 / commitment
“Today, for the podcast, we will be talking about the now 20-year history of the blog.”
05 / recommendation
“I wrote the book The Great Stagnation. The title Great Stagnation, okay, but the whole last chapter of the book is about how we’re going to get out of it.”
06 / belief
“We both have pluralist ways of thinking in a slightly different way. That’s why I agree with that.”
07 / belief
“We were doing all these practice posts, thinking no one would read them and we would just get up to speed. Then we learned, people were writing us like, “Oh, loved your post.”
08 / belief
“I think we’re the children. We’re giggling about them. They may be disturbed sometimes, or just very smart people wasting their time.”
09 / belief
“I think nearer the beginning, I was more seeking out one or a very small number of big ideas that would explain a whole bunch of things.”
10 / belief
“I do that too, and it might’ve been my post. The MR search function is the most underrated part of the blog, I think.”
11 / belief
“I think there’s a large number of excellent history books coming out, but they don’t make sense for book clubs.”
12 / belief
“Then what was peculiar, I think strange — so I had that role, and then Tyler started Fast Grants.”
13 / belief
“I think some of the COVID posts, like on First Doses First and things like that — even though in the United States, we didn’t do First Doses First, Britain and Canada did.”
14 / belief
“Speaking of reading, let’s move to a segment I’m calling Mysteries of MR. A couple of times, I think from ’06 to ’08, you hosted book clubs.”
15 / belief
“The ability of the blog to bubble that person to the top who has this really specific knowledge about this tiny, tiny area of the world, and then you can learn from them — that, I think, is very valuable about the comments.”
16 / belief
“” Then the people who are anti basically said, “Look, here’s the section where he outlines what the four crazy risks are.” It seems like everyone just walked away — I hope some people, and I think lots of people did get interesting information, but definitely, many walked away just certain that their existing opinion is correct, which is, unfortunately, the default response to most writing anywhere.”
17 / belief
“The way I put it is that the first thing I do when coming to a problem is, strip away as much complexity as I possibly can and get down to what I think is the nut of the problem and try and deal with that.”
18 / belief
“The Reddit style, being able to just see the top comments versus wading through it all, I think has been a big improvement.”
19 / uncertainty
“Very knowledgeable. ‘Sure’ is good, ‘dan1111’ or 111 — I don’t know which one — good.”
20 / belief
“I think I definitely saw other spaces declining in quality, and MR didn’t, to its great credit, which I think was great.”
21 / belief
“I probably would have seen links to it from Twitter as well, though I think my Twitter usage was definitely pretty low back then.”
22 / belief
“I think in this era of the political discourse, the level-headedness of MR, which sounds both truly reflective of your natures but also an intentional norm that you try to establish, was as needed as ever.”
23 / belief
“I think I speak for Ben and Vitalik and myself, and all the readers, that we look forward to continue reading and hearing your ideas and seeing your influence in the world.”
24 / evaluation
“The bloggers were talking with top Treasury officials, and that made sense because, really, so few people understood what was going on, and everyone was trying to help one another and get different perspectives on it.”
25 / evaluation
“Yes, 2008–2010, the financial crisis, I think, was the peak of the blogosphere. To me, watching in real time, people trying to figure out what is going on and actually not having a clue, but seeing people like Tyler, Scott Sumner, Paul Krugman, Mark Thoma, really a bunch of macroeconomists, top people, the very best people in the world were literally, in real time, struggling to understand what was going on and trading ideas with one another.”
26 / preference
“When I write, it does take some time because, I think, especially when you have a lot of readers and you think, “Well, if I can save a reader a few seconds of time,” and you do the expected altruism calculation, where “We’ve got thousands of readers, so if a minute for me saves them hours — “”
27 / evaluation
“He just has a unique ability, and there’s nobody else, I think, in the world who can produce as much original, interesting new content as Tyler.”
28 / preference
“One is the specific, Jeff, posts, the specific ideas you’ve put forth in the world that had real impact. But there’s another vector of influence, which I think is more subtle but is probably how I would identify being influenced, because if you asked me what are the five posts that have most influenced me, I probably couldn’t tell you the five.”
29 / prediction
“It’s clearly the biggest economic issue in the world. That leads on to great stagnation, and how do we bounce back because it was such a long recovery.”
30 / evaluation
“I think, in part, they felt they trusted me in the operation because they had known of MR for so long, and they knew Alex was doing Operation Warp Speed, and it felt very credible.”
31 / recommendation
“Clearly, there was Twitter for the pandemic, but if you wanted one website where you didn’t have to scroll or fend off other things, we made that the place to go.”
32 / prediction
“We did ’06 to 2016, and I think the third era of MR is 2016 to 2020, which is the rise of populism, Trump.”
33 / evaluation
“When Google killed Google Reader, I felt like that was also a distinct end to a chapter in the blogosphere because suddenly all the distribution went to Twitter and Facebook, and you didn’t read every post anymore.”