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
14 published records
01 / uncertainty
“” Deny, if it’s not true, or to do damage control — somehow spin it. I don’t know how you spin “the cheetah was sucked dry by fleas,” but I didn’t.”
02 / uncertainty
“I don’t know what is getting in the way of the vast spread of bamboo housing construction in earthquake-prone areas.”
03 / uncertainty
“Last question before I turn it over to the audience: To write that book and the others, what is it you did or what was done to you to get the sensibleness out of your system? I don’t know how else to put it.”
04 / uncertainty
“I don’t know, I suppose cooked well enough it would be safe, but there’d probably be some certain guidelines that you might want to share with the novice road kill eater.”
05 / evaluation
“It’s a tendency to treat them as though they’re still people and to accord them the same sort of courtesies and respect. This is problematic for people who do cadaver research because there’s a tendency to say that to cut this person open, and to take their pancreas and do one thing, and send their arm over to the automotive safety lab, and take their brain over here to put them in pieces like that, and to do these sort of seemingly brutal things is disrespectful.”
06 / preference
“The french fry to me is a vehicle for mayonnaise. I’m using it essentially to spoon up small globs of mayonnaise.”
07 / evaluation
“I think that people may know what they want, but they are sometimes reluctant to go for it because there’s a tendency to do things that they think are expected of them, particularly with pornography and it being quite ubiquitous.”
08 / preference
“I need more unstimulated saliva right now because otherwise you can get those horrible mouth sounds that radio people hate.”
09 / evaluation
“No, now astronaut food has gotten a lot better. It tends to be bland because anything spicy and exciting, you get tired of.”
10 / preference
“[laughter] I think that I don’t have any — it isn’t a talent, it may be a character flaw — I don’t have a lot of hesitation or self-censoring when it comes to asking questions.”
11 / preference
“My favorite study from Spook, my second book, was a University of Virginia psychologist who studies near-death experience, had this idea, because near-death people who’ve had a near-death experience often report floating in the operating room, looking down onto their body on the operating table.”
12 / preference
“I don’t know for the first few months, really, even six months, I don’t really know what this book should contain, what fits and what doesn’t fit. It’s not very good advice to give anybody, to feel comfortable with randomness and chaos — because I think that is the healthy first stages of a book — well, for me anyway.”
13 / preference
“Well, when I travel, I’m often traveling in the context of research, which is my favorite way to travel because it’s a way in.”
14 / preference
“I’m trying things on and rejecting them. They’re not quite working because most of science doesn’t work for me.”