The most recent episode of Conversations with Tyler featured Ezra Klein as a guest. I won’t delve into their discussion, but I will note two quirks in Tyler’s thinking that were somewhat off-brand.
When Ezra mentioned mass firings and re-hirings in the federal government, Tyler expressed uncertainty about that actually being the case — essentially a denial of what is widely known. As a counter, Ezra mentioned knowing people who were fired. I, too, know people who were fired simply because they got promoted and transitioned from contractors to full-time employees within the last two years, despite having deep expertise in the subject matter they were hired for. The “I’m not sure that’s happening” sounds what one would hear on the streets of Berlin in the late 1930s, motivated reasoning par excellence.
Another example is Tyler’s tendency to extrapolate into the future and then use that hypothetical future as a benchmark for current policy. Think “Sam Altman says it will be possible to have billion-dollar companies run by one person” at some unspecific time in the future as a context for massive federal government downsizing now. We do not, in fact, have billion-dollar companies run by a single person; that is a VC pitch at best, and if we are being less generous pure vaporware. Government hiring policy by vaporware sounds bad.
I think Tyler was aiming for provocation. He didn’t mention in his show notes that he “tried to “push him further from a libertarian point of view”, but then what is he really thinking? To come back to the 1930s analogy, I picture this interview’s version of Tyler in the FDR-era US and I see him praising Charles Lindbergh (they both speak German) and Henry Ford — progress über alles — and not really being a fan of FDR. Yikes!