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
31 published records
01 / belief
“I suspect we’re not innovating as much in those dimensions, either, but I think that one, you’d just end up projecting your own biases onto society.”
02 / belief
“The truth that I know to be the case is that the future of human evolution and how we think about how we structure society lies in privately funded, managed, for-profit cities built in partnership with, but independent from, governments today in the world.”
03 / uncertainty
“I think that I don’t know if the right question for many of these countries is what to do on the level of the country itself.”
04 / belief
“Post the crisis, trade and world GDP are going up at about the same rate. I think in rate terms, that has peaked.”
05 / belief
“I think most nonprofits fail at this, where they end up supporting things that are super conventional, they can get funding for them, but if they didn’t do it, there’d be 100 other people doing it.”
06 / belief
“I think we’ve had this sort of Gresham’s law, where the bad scientists have driven out the good, or people who are nimble in the art of writing government grant applications have replaced the eccentric scientists who’ve really pushed the research.”
07 / belief
“We accept that we’re all going to die, and so we don’t do anything, and we think we’re not going to die anytime soon, so we don’t really need to worry about it.”
08 / belief
“I think almost everything that Christ said could be described as an answer to something that’s true, that most people did not agree on.”
09 / belief
“I think the nonlibertarian perspective that I think we always should think about a little bit harder is that there’s also also been a tremendous decline.”
10 / belief
“In Silicon Valley, San Francisco, where I live, I would say the single biggest variable that makes people feel the stagnation is the sense in which housing costs, rental costs, are through the roof.”
11 / belief
“If you look at the history over the last 150 years, I think there have been four points where people were hyper-bullish on Brazil.”
12 / belief
“I think artistic things, things of a very qualitative nature, are hard to measure.”
13 / belief
“Then I think there is another modality where you just become aware of how conventional our conventions really are, and then that becomes sort of an indirect route of trying to start thinking for yourself.”
14 / belief
“I think the most natural hope is that information technology starts to broaden out and starts to impact this world of atoms.”
15 / belief
“I’d much prefer to focus on the level of atoms, the real economy, than on the virtual level of bits, which I think of money as being linked to.”
16 / uncertainty
“I don’t know if it’s ever really this top-down agenda that I try to set. A lot of what I end up doing is somewhat serendipitous.”
17 / belief
“I think a lot of these smaller countries are somewhat underrated generally because you have an adaptability, an ability to change things that can move a lot faster.”
18 / evaluation
“The optimism about Brazil, was always from all the potential that will happen, when it became linked to globalization, and then the disappointment happens when it turns out it doesn’t work.”
19 / belief
“I think often the smarter people are more prone to trendy, fashionable thinking because they can pick up on things, they can pick up on cues more easily, and so they’re even more trapped by it than people of average ability.”
20 / belief
“New Zealand arguably is the most democratic country in the world, I would say, or very close to the most democratic.”
21 / belief
“Science starts with the number two, whereas every moment in the history of science, technology, business, I believe, happens only once.”
22 / prediction
“I worry that the conformity problem is actually more acute than it was in the ’50s or ’60s, so that the category of the eccentric scientist, or even the eccentric professor, is a species that is steadily going extinct because there is less space for that in our research universities than there used to be.”
23 / prediction
“I think with the benefit of hindsight, we will realize that 2007 was not just the peak year of the finance boom, but also the peak year of globalization, like maybe 1913.”
24 / prediction
“I gave you these halfway, in-between ideas that are a little bit edgier. But I will also go a little bit out on a limb: I think the monopoly idea, that the goal of every successful business is to have a monopoly, that’s on the border of what I want to say.”
25 / evaluation
“” I am actually quite skeptical of that as a term, so yes, I think I did say the Straussian reading of Zero to One, was that perhaps — I had the adverb in — but perhaps you should not be an entrepreneur. It was because on one level, the book is advice about how you would go about building a business, but then on some level, you could also read every single chapter as discouraging people from going into business potentially as well.”
26 / preference
“I like to get things where you get these combinations of unusual traits, so if you have people with some really interesting, very different ideas, that suggests we’re in the idiosyncratic category.”
27 / evaluation
“In your view, perhaps the contemporary world is becoming, I don’t know what the word would be, stranger, or weirder, or more shaped by individuals who are different, precisely because conformity is being piled on other places.”
28 / prediction
“Because I think the other thing that has driven the stagnation is the hysteresis.”
29 / evaluation
“My updated version on it would be that — I made the case that I thought democracy and capitalism weren’t quite compatible — the updated version I would give is it’s not at all clear that we’re living in anything resembling a democracy.”
30 / evaluation
“We need to ask, what is it about our society where those of us who do not suffer from Asperger’s are at some massive disadvantage because we will be talked out of our interesting, original, creative ideas before they are even fully formed?”
31 / belief
“A slight aesthetic thing I believe in very strongly is the names of companies are often very predictive of future failure or success.”