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
16 published records
01 / belief
“I think one of the most amazing things about that realization is that it was made by a German hygiene scientist named Max von Pettenkofer.”
02 / belief
“If we think of the notion of disease being transmitted through the air, it seems that comes to our attention really quite late in time — late 19th century.”
03 / belief
“Then in the 1600s, 1700s, there’s this group of people who say, “We think that there’s this invisible world of microorganisms” — fungi, bacteria, and so on, as they would be later known — that spread disease, not just in us, but in plants and so on.”
04 / belief
“In my book, Life’s Edge, I was writing about how far we can push our concepts of life and can we think about life elsewhere.”
05 / belief
“We have seen that people are certainly more than eager to jump from the basic findings of DNA to all sorts of conclusions which often serve their own interests. I think we should be on guard that we not do that again.”
06 / belief
“You’re just endorsing the mainstream, and I would agree with that. I think whales might be smarter than humans.”
07 / evaluation
“You will certainly see some studies that may not inspire you. But I’ve looked at a lot of these studies and talked to a lot of experts, and I would say, just judging from where we are now, that’s the consensus that I described before.”
08 / prediction
“I think great ideas can just sit around for a long time waiting to be discovered.”
09 / recommendation
“Ultraviolet lamps could potentially really help in certain places to make it possible to just go about our business and relax because the air around us is being disinfected.”
10 / evaluation
“If you run a clinical trial with poor study design or if you analyze it incorrectly, it’s not going to be as good as if you were to be taking more careful measures. So, I would say, yes, there’s certainly a debate that’s going on in the community, but certainly, in a number of reviews that have been coming out recently, the consensus is that masks do help.”
11 / evaluation
“I argue in the book that the way that aerobiology got turned into biological warfare was quite a tragedy because this was a science that, at the time, was just getting off the ground.”
12 / evaluation
“I think public health is just a really challenging line of work just because you want to reduce death and disease by coming up with measures that are going to apply across the board to the public, and that depends on what you understand about the disease you are trying to deal with.”
13 / evaluation
“You actually have to study lots and lots and lots of people, and then, if you’re going to try to tie people’s symptoms to the environment in some way, well you’re actually going to have to track them over months, years, and so on, because the environment is changing all the time.”
14 / evaluation
“I think that there were a lot of reasons, many different reasons for the scientific community to look away and to say, “No, this isn’t happening,” or, “It isn’t important.”
15 / evaluation
“I think that you just have to be incredibly cautious about jumping to conclusions about it because the genome is a wild and woolly place in there, and the genome exists in environments.”
16 / preference
“Then also, if you were to take one of these carbon dioxide meters on a plane — I own one — if you take one on a plane, you’ll notice when you land, that the carbon dioxide level will go way back up again because they turn the filter system off, and you’re taxiing around on the tarmac and waiting to get out.”