Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…[laughs] It’s a puzzle to me. South Africans are very preoccupied with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and their South African connection. I honestly don’t know. I do think that I’m more or less the same age as Musk. He grew up maybe 50 kilometers away from where I did. There was something about 1980 South Africa, where everybody knew that the old order would not last very much longer, that a new order was on its way. And certainly, in my circles, that produced a kind of an excitement about first principle thinking, about having no shibboleths, about imagining the unimaginable. It’s quite possible that he took that with him. It was certainly enormously formative for me. Beyond that, I’m not sure. I don’t know Musk, but I’ve thought for a while that his desire to settle Mars is perhaps a uniquely South African impulse, the notion that people need somewhere they can escape to. I’m skeptical of those thoughts. I mean, there are a lot of them, a lot of similar thoughts. It seems too obvious to me. [laughs] I think that human beings are always more interesting than you imagine them when you actually sit down with them and talk to them.…

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