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
19 published records
01 / recommendation
“The only very long book I like is Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. You can read that for your entire life, [laughs] in a way, and on and off in bits.”
02 / belief
“If you take a bit longer one, if you include the Aztecs and the Romans, not just the Meiji Empire but Edo Japan, which by the way, I think was incomparably more cultured and civilized than the majority of human cultures are today.”
03 / belief
“” I think that’s tremendously clever, much more intelligent than most authors, because what he recognized was that belief — when you get outside of formulating scientific propositions and so on, it’s a very fluid, vaporous thing.”
04 / belief
“Today I’m chatting with John Gray, who is one of the most important and influential thinkers, not just of one generation, but I think you could say of two generations.”
05 / belief
“You might say, I guess, in my view, that there are recurring patterns in history which illustrate some of the flaws of the human species.”
06 / disagreement
“For example, John Stuart Mill, even though I disagree with him profoundly — a very resourceful and intelligent thinker.”
07 / belief
“Many love affairs lead to disappointment, but if you decide then, “I’m not going to have them,” I think that’s a rather miserable view of life, which, by the way, is one of my objections to traditional Epicureanism and Lucretianism.”
08 / belief
“I think, in all of these things, in most countries, at most times, in most places, the aim is to achieve a balance.”
09 / prediction
“” What I’m saying when I say things like that, or when I criticized Fukuyama in 1989, is I expect human history to be in the future as it has been in the past.”
10 / belief
“The Book of Genesis because I believe, in the myth of Genesis, one of the central neglected truths of the human situation is brought out, which is that knowledge is ethically neutral.”
11 / belief
“There may be values or goods or bads I can think about in an abstract way, but they’re not Platonic in the sense that they exist in some metaphysical realm independent of the human world. They’re all, I would say, projections of the human world, or at least of the living world.”
12 / preference
“I like aphorisms because, as I say, they’re short and uncluttered and can be beautiful.”
13 / preference
“I am attracted more to Eastern Orthodoxy than I am to Catholicism, partly because its rituals and art are so beautiful, and for me, many of my judgments are aesthetic.”
14 / prediction
“We might never be in significant contact with these other intelligences if they exist. But it doesn’t really matter much to me one way or the other because I think we’ve actually done a rather good job making ourselves more alone already, actually, by crudifying the biosphere through mass extinctions and so on.”
15 / recommendation
“I haven’t been able to do much recently because of the pandemic and other things, and I think, if you have a cat or another animal companion, leaving them for long periods is not a good idea.”
16 / preference
“I guess it would be animal conservation, conservation of environments, or at least of species that are rapidly disappearing now because I did say earlier on that a lot of my value judgments are aesthetic.”
17 / preference
“I don’t know about influence, because I’m not a novelist, but it’s one of the books — Moby Dick.”
18 / evaluation
“No, not the kind of atheism I hold. But what you say, Tyler, is, of course, very true of many traditions of atheist thinking, perhaps even the dominant ones, because the dominant traditions of atheist thinking in Europe and America and elsewhere — remember, atheism in this sense is something that comes from within theism, from within monotheism — reproduce the central categories and concepts of the religion they deny, even as they deny the beliefs.”
19 / preference
“I’m a fan, too. It’s funny because it’s absurdist humor, and I like absurdist humor, and lots of British people do.”