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
17 published records
01 / recommendation
“Now, when I read Virgil, I see so many visual representations of history. There’s the temple of Juno, there’s Pallas’s belt, the ivory gates of the underworld, the Daedalus relief, the shields.”
02 / belief
“Sparta wants to squash Athens. They think that the West is very much invested in making sure that China does not become a global power on a par with the West, which I think is inevitable.”
03 / uncertainty
“Underrated. We don’t know enough about it. It seems to be fascinating. The Romans probably got their skills of augury — telling the future by looking into animals or observing the flight of birds — from the Etruscans, and a lot more, but there’s so little left of the Etruscans.”
04 / commitment
“You might say we’ll use this form of technology to stop malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, and that’s two thumbs up. But we’re not going to use this kind of technology — this is all theory because, of course, everybody uses all these kinds of technology — but we won’t use this technology that simply produces more effective gases for warfare.”
05 / belief
“Either folks don’t understand, or they’re seeing something that’s very altered from historical reality. This all goes back, I think, to show us that poetry itself, as a form of art, is not to be taken as reflecting history or trying to say something true about the political situation of the day.”
06 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if the divide between the “let’s read classics to bolster our sense of Chinese identity” versus the “let’s read classics to understand classics” groups — I don’t know if that divide is going to grow, disappear, or stay the way it is now.”
07 / uncertainty
“I really, actually, don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that question. I would hazard a guess, and I’d say maybe we have a fifth of it, but that’s just a completely crazy guess.”
08 / preference
“I love ABBA. “Waterloo” just because you can dance around your room and shout “Waterloo.”
09 / preference
“I will say underrated only because I obsessively listen to Dido’s lament from Dido and Aeneas, and every time I get to the line, “Remember me, but ah, forget my fate,” I burst into tears, which I’m about to do now.”
10 / evaluation
“I would not because there’s not much value for most Latinists in spoken Latin or spoken ancient Greek because that’s not how they’re taught.”
11 / evaluation
“” The idea is, if the sacrifices are done correctly, and the auspices are good, what we’re doing in invading Spain is a just war because the gods have allowed it to happen, and they’ve nodded at it.”
12 / evaluation
“I have a feeling I’m going to get a lot of flak on this, but I would say yes, because, like Aristotle, he understands that sometimes poetry is truer than truth, and also because he manages both to represent a political ideology and to show how a political ideology is created at the same time, thereby undermining what he’s shown us how to do.”
13 / evaluation
“Another interesting thing that he does is that, even though everything has been boiled down into them versus us — or actually them versus them because there’s nobody good in the epic except for Cato, who ends up dying — even as he takes on so serious a subject, he refuses to partake of its seriousness in a way.”
14 / preference
“You have to become a classics professor. It was very weird because I knew a little bit about the Greeks from the Persian perspective, and now I was reading about the Persians from the Greek perspective, and they’re both treating each other as barbarians.”
15 / prediction
“Yes, I think we will because not only are we continuing to dig and to explore in many places where we know that manuscripts continued to exist but have not been found, but also the technologies for reading these papyri has gotten so amazing.”
16 / preference
“What I like about Seneca is all these things he writes, he never says, “I’ve accomplished them.”
17 / evaluation
“I think the lack of obvious self-interested motivation for the polarization is what strikes me as so contemporary about Lucan.”