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
24 published records
01 / uncertainty
“I still live by that hypothesis, and I don’t know if I was at all influential on this.”
02 / belief
“My first read is that might be what’s true, at least nationally, in Mexico. So, as soon as you have transitions of government, I think there’s just a risk every X years of that conciliatory nature and that peace between the state and the gang falling apart.”
03 / belief
“I think that does happen, and so people who are living in one of these border communities and want to protest violently against some change or lack of change — that’s what worried me.”
04 / uncertainty
“We do drone attacks, I don’t know in how many countries, but it’s a large number: West Africa, Sahel.”
05 / belief
“I’ve spent a total of six days in Ireland, so I would say I think Brexit, and people feel like there’s a very real .”
06 / belief
“I would say the most important thing about this experience probably wasn’t the exposure to trauma and PTSD.”
07 / belief
“With great respect to Jeff Sachs, I think overrated only because there’s a handful of views .”
08 / observation
“The problem is that they’re interrelated, and no one of them is making a move for the whole side or the whole team.”
09 / belief
“I think what was fundamentally problematic about that — like in a lot of African countries — is that, in spite of the state capacity, you have power that’s very concentrated in a handful of elite groups.”
10 / belief
“I would say maybe it’s a particular group project. And maybe I’m just projecting my own experience because, even though I’m in a large institution, I’m this very autonomous individual, and so I’m not seeing that.”
11 / belief
“Really, many other people — I would say the mainstream — that until the attack actually came, they just thought it would be some bizarre limited police action in the east and not amount to much.”
12 / belief
“If we just took all the leaders and all the things they said, and then whether or not they did the things they said they were going to do, I guess my prediction is the correlation goes in the other direction, particularly with military exercises, but that might be wrong.”
13 / belief
“If I look who’s likely to launch a drone war, of course, I think the US, but not only.”
14 / belief
“In the US, we’re programmed to think in terms of federalism, which is a great example, but I think there’re lots of other ways.”
15 / recommendation
“Anytime anything you do is going to potentially blow back on you — for example, a nuclear bomb is one way to think about it — then it’s going to change your calculus because it’s going to be less attractive relative to the alternatives.”
16 / evaluation
“The thinnest one I read 25 years ago. So maybe I suspect a lot of people are like me in that they have bought the volumes and aspired to read but have not fully read, so probably underrated.”
17 / prediction
“What this led me to do, and how I got started on the path of studying war, actually, is by realizing that some commodities are just hugely volatile in price for various circumstances, and some are not. So, if we wanted to understand long-term paths of development and why some places weren’t prosperous, it’s because they lost the commodity lottery, and they got a volatile commodity rather than a stable one.”
18 / evaluation
“When I think about any splinter group, whether it’s some Northern Irish band of terrorists or a faction in Palestine or the Israeli government or wherever it may be, I think fundamentally it’s these groups who can act in their own self-interest because they have at least a temporary interest that can then push a situation into violence that was otherwise quite likely to be peaceful.”
19 / evaluation
“I think the problem, though, is actually the fact that we create a set of institutional or ideological rigidities that keep us from compromising.”
20 / evaluation
“The fundamental driver of that capacity are these competing state systems, and war is an occasional by-product of that. But when you run a regression — maybe they did; I don’t know this paper — of current state capacity and war, there’s just this omitted variable, which is the competitiveness of state systems.”
21 / evaluation
“I would say most Canadians — because I don’t think it’s nearly as polarized a place, although I haven’t lived there in something like 20, almost 25 years — recognize that there’s a strong conservative and anti-establishment sentiment in the country, slightly fewer than in the United States but not dramatically different.”
22 / evaluation
“I think we need more — I don’t know how to think about it systematically because I don’t think we’ve had 20 people with their shoulder behind the boulder, pushing and trying to understand that.”
23 / evaluation
“The way I think about this is that there’s usually a narrow set of people who decide whether or not to go to war, and those people are either accountable or not accountable to lots of people.”
24 / evaluation
“I’m not sure how they will ever solve the problem of violence because solving the problem of violence requires recognizing that these armed groups and criminal cartels have an immense amount of power, and that they have to find a way to live with them.”