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
20 published records
01 / recommendation
“Srugim — you should watch. It’s a great show. Shtisel, Valley of Tears, Prisoners of War.”
02 / belief
“In both cases, what you have is people supporting the state, not necessarily for traditional foreign policy reasons, but because they think it’s a sign of God working in the world. And this both reassures them in our very dangerous and terrifying world that there is a benign, omnipotent deity is in charge of our destinies, but also, “Well, we believe that in these latter days, God is doing great things and new things.”
03 / belief
“Bush and Richard Nixon probably are the two, in my mind, who best understood what they were dealing with.”
04 / belief
“Here’s a sociological question. I think you’ll follow what I’m getting at. I’ve noticed that so many anti-Trump neoconservatives — they seem to have flipped almost entirely into just flat-out Democratic positions, like Bill Kristol.”
05 / belief
“I think that some of the problem, though, is not so much in the intellectual weaknesses of a lot of conventional postgrad education, but simply almost the crime against humanity of having whole generations of smart people spend the first 30, 35 years of their lives in a total bubble, where they’re in this academic setting, and the rule .”
06 / belief
“I would say at the height of neoconservativism, I would tell people, “I’m not a neoconservative.” Because, fundamentally, I’ve always been much less enchanted by the idea that promotion of democracy is a solution to America’s great power problems.”
07 / belief
“I think that if the war in Ukraine continues to drag on for Putin, diverting NATO’s attention and resources to the southern flank, to the western Balkans makes a lot of sense.”
08 / belief
“I think we can say that the future of Chinese policy toward Taiwan will reflect that same kind of thinking, which would suggest nibbling and nibbling before you finally take the big bite.”
09 / belief
“Bureaucratic groupthink, I think, tends to dominate the products of both the State Department and the CIA in ways that often obscure the best of the thinking that’s being done inside them.”
10 / belief
“I think the relationship can be reconfigured, but we’ve got some work to do on our end.”
11 / evaluation
“I think what we have to be doing in terms of analyzing where German foreign policy goes is to think a little bit less about ideology or things like the German anti-war sentiment or these kinds of things.”
12 / evaluation
“Again, we’re ending up where we started, maybe, but a religious faith, connected to one of the great historical traditions, gives you a degree of insight and potential for self-criticism that are absolutely crucial to foreign affairs.”
13 / evaluation
“When I think of all the people that die in the DRC due to medical problems that simple medical treatment could fix, this seems to me, frankly, an insane misuse of resources, a murderous fetishization of ideology over reality.”
14 / evaluation
“I think, to some degree, you can say it’s historical that the Democratic Party believes in — as people like President Biden or Secretary Kerry would say — learning the lessons of Vietnam, that our over-reliance on hard power is dangerous, that soft power really is where it’s at, and that America needs to accommodate two different regime types and so on, around the world.”
15 / evaluation
“I think the idea that the existence of nuclear weapons means that we can all forget international politics just doesn’t work.”
16 / evaluation
“In some ways, being a small, insecure country is very good for your political intelligence because when you feel you have an immense margin of error, then you don’t really care that much, but when you feel that your survival is on a knife edge, you think hard about what you’re doing, and you really ruthlessly weed out incompetent people from your national security structure.”
17 / evaluation
“I think I would put that, Tyler, in the context of a much larger question — which is one of the things that my research for The Arc of a Covenant put in my head — was that from 1850 to 1950, you see these large, multinational states crumbling away into individual ethnic, almost monocultures, and at the cost of enormous wars, fanaticism, all kinds of things.”
18 / evaluation
“It remains a really complicated part of the country — very sensitive set of issues there. But I think the Indian interest in preventing China from moving in there, and in supporting its own national sovereignty, plus the very sound argument you can make to a lot of people in the northeast.”
19 / evaluation
“Bush left office, that you could possibly mess up the Middle East worse than the Bush administration. But President Obama proved that that was wrong and that you could actually take the Middle East at the end of 2008 and make it almost infinitely worse, both for American interests and for the safety and happiness of the people in the region.”
20 / evaluation
“I think, in our society, the ebbing of religion among some, certainly not all, Americans has tended to dissolve these bonds and leads, in all kinds of ways, both on the left and the right, to some of the sense of suspicion, of paranoia, a lack of trust, and declining support for democracy.”