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
15 published records
01 / belief
“I think I’ve had to learn to live with myself, if that counts as a work habit. I have always thought that I should grow out of having essay crises, and I never have.”
02 / belief
“I think there were four or five stories in the sequence that are amazing. A number of the others quite seem flat to me.”
03 / belief
“I feel I can create my own version in my mind, and I have difficulty keeping track of everything as it’s spoken so quickly.”
04 / belief
“I realized, when I went to look exactly when it came out, that it came out in the same year as The Matrix.”
05 / belief
“I think Henry of Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, clearly was a reader, and he was much more interested in the written word and in music, much less interested in the visual arts.”
06 / evaluation
“They have a very important pragmatic interest in obeying the king because the king is the keystone of the hierarchy within which they are powerful and wealthy.”
07 / evaluation
“I have to say I’m no literary scholar, but the development of English as a language spoken across all classes of society really flexibly — because before the 14th century, of course, we go back to the Conquest, and we have a Norman French-speaking elite coming into an English-speaking country, and French and Latin — the lingua franca of medieval Europe — remain the languages of government until, if you like, the elite has bedded in sufficiently, and one of the things that helps the elite to bed in sufficiently is the war with France.”
08 / evaluation
“Because it was a parliament called by Richard, but he stands up in the assembly of the representatives of the realm and claims the throne through a complicated and slightly fudged series of assertions because he isn’t straightforwardly the legitimate male heir — Richard doesn’t have a straightforward heir.”
09 / prediction
“I think the one who gets the short straw is Henry because in Richard II, he’s Richard’s nemesis.”
10 / preference
“I tend to think of it as joining scattered dots, trying to paint a picture when you’re having to join dots, that can be very far apart. But because England was such a centralized state, we have vast quantities of documents that are produced by central government or by the law courts centrally, all in their delegated forms right down to manorial level.”
11 / evaluation
“[laughs] That’s not a bad analogy, actually, and science fiction is something I think about quite a lot when trying to understand medieval England. It is a stupid mistake but not one that Richard, I think, could have recognized because his whole approach to governing England was a stupid mistake.”
12 / evaluation
“I think that’s why I love the Middle Ages, because I’ve always felt, in looking at modern history, that I get bamboozled by structures, by the institutions through which power is expressed and mediated.”
13 / evaluation
“I’ve just seen Jonathan Bailey at The Bridge — completely different, equally fascinating. But I think I’ve realized, in the process of writing this book and then talking about writing it, that perhaps I’m not a very good theater-goer because I love reading the plays on the page.”
14 / evaluation
“I think people might be surprised at quite how much government could do in England at this point in history because England, at this point, was the most centralized state in Europe, and that has two reasons.”
15 / evaluation
“I think kings who had to deal with their subjects in terms of the needs of defense, including aggressive defense, also understood that they needed to deal with their subjects in terms of effective government at home, the imposition of law, and the provision of justice.”