Tyler Cowen

But I think I was mostly right.

Well, I was surprised when SBF was insolvent.

I thought it was a high-risk venture that had no regulatory defense and would end up being worth zero.

But I didn't think he was actually playing funny games with the money.

I just have a long history of seeing movements in my lifetime from the 1960s onwards, including libertarianism, and there are common patterns that happens to them all.

We're here in Berkeley, my goodness.

Free speech movement?

Where's free speech in Berkeley today?

Like, how'd that, you know, work out in the final analysis?

So it's a very common pattern.

And just to think, wow, the common pattern is going to repeat itself.

And then you see some intuitive signs.

And you're just like, yeah, that's going to happen.

And the private benefits of belonging to EA, like they were very real in terms of the people you could hang out with or like the sex you could have.

But they didn't seem that...

concretely crystallized to me in institutions the way they are like in Goldman Sachs or legal partnerships.

So that struck me as very fragile and I thought that at the time as well.

while not seeing the very clear, crystallized, permanent incentives to keep on being a part of the institutions, a bit of excess enthusiasm from some people, even where they might have been correct in their views, some cult-like tendencies, the rise of it being so rapid,

that it was this uneasy balance of secular and semi-religious elements that tends to flip one way or the other or just dissolve.

So I saw all those things and I just thought, like the two or three best ideas from this are going to prove incredibly important still.