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
26 published records
01 / belief
“Now, you’re intrigued by the John Stuart Mill–Harriet Taylor correspondence and also by Byatt’s novel Possession from the early ’90s. I think you once said it was your favorite novel.”
02 / belief
“I think that — yeah, yeah, Irish family. I think underrated. Ulysses is arguably the richest novel in the last 150 years.”
03 / belief
“I think you’re more of a sentimentalist than I am. [laughter] But let me get to what I view as our point of deepest disagreement in all of political philosophy, and then you respond to it.”
04 / belief
“Now, it is true that the heroin ban does not eliminate heroin, and it has ancillary consequences that aren’t good. But I would say with respect to some product — let’s say it’s a food where there’s a 1/x chance of death from consuming it, and x is not that high a number — to say to people, you know, “You can have this.”
05 / belief
“” To be too critical of your own production, I think, is — at the early stages, at least — is an error.”
06 / disagreement
“Where we disagree, if we do — I think we probably do — is that I am more concerned about the need for stable rules that discipline judicial authority, even if it would be exercised wisely by some judges.”
07 / belief
“I think hope and change of the New Hope sort, whatever your political affiliation — you know, Senator Cruz is a big Star Wars fan; Donald Trump is a Star Wars fan.”
08 / commitment
“I have no writer’s block, but I will write a lot of stuff that no one will ever see because it’s too terrible.”
09 / commitment
“Over the summer, we will have podcast-only episodes of Conversations with Tyler.”
10 / belief
“We can be a decent person on that day or not.” And I think that kind of somewhat innocent and earnest thinking — that you are at a crossroads, you can go one way rather than the other — is basically the authorial voice behind Star Wars.”
11 / belief
“I think Yoda — maybe that’s a headline to a more convincing account than Yoda was able to give in the confines of the movie.”
12 / belief
“What I think Zhou Enlai said about the French Revolution is true here: it’s too soon to tell.”
13 / belief
“I think the answer is that there’s a technological something that Star Trek captures, and there’s nothing quite like that that Star Wars gets at.”
14 / evaluation
“There — one might be the least amazing and fantastic, but there’s none that is the worst of the Star Wars movies.”
15 / belief
“I think that’s part of what makes the Star Wars saga work, that these are legitimate questions.”
16 / belief
“I think preferences are a very good clue to what is going to promote people’s welfare.”
17 / evaluation
“I think one of the, you know, sources of awesomeness in these cartoonlike, improbably awesome movies is that an interpretation like the one that you offered is eminently plausible, and there’s material there that justifies it.”
18 / evaluation
“But the title wrong-foots you. But I think that’s his greatest album, actually, and so it’s underrated.”
19 / evaluation
“Now, if you push me to talk about liberty — that liberty is an ingredient in welfare, meaning being able to go the direction that you want is welfare-promoting for the people who are exercising their freedom, that’s one point. And the other point is the Millian point that there are multiple contexts, at least, let’s say — we don’t want to make a theology of this, as I think Mill sometimes almost did — but we want to acknowledge that people know, you know, by and large, in acknowledging the behavioral biases better than third parties, what will make their lives go better.”
20 / preference
“If I think of Richard Epstein, I think of classical liberalism, some mix of rights and utilitarian reasoning.”
21 / commitment
“You know, I worked with him for four years, and people who work under the President, I think, have an obligation not to break with their former boss publicly.”
22 / prediction
“I think presumptively that’s a very good idea — 480,000 Americans die every year; if we can cut that number, that’s a good thing.”
23 / evaluation
“Another way to put it is that — I think you’re onto something actually very deep about the movies, which is that Yoda is nominally the wise person, but he makes a kind of fundamental error, which is, he thinks that detachment is good and attachment is bad.”
24 / evaluation
“On the other hand, the federal government has some regulatory authority under the Civil Rights Act. And if you’re falling asleep a little bit because I’m not talking about transgender in the large, I’m sad you’re falling asleep but a little happy that hair isn’t on fire, because one way democracies work well is they put people’s hair on fire very rarely.”
25 / evaluation
“” And that was his model. But there’s a twist here that involves freedom of choice and redemption concretized in the idea of a father whose life course had been dedicated to terrible things repudiating that life course and choosing to save his child because he can’t bear that loss.”
26 / disagreement
“I agree with a lot of what you said, but there’s one thing you said which is the level of colossal error of the President’s in saying New Hope is the best.”