Yeah. And when I got the Shiba tokens in 2021, I fully identified as EA then, and I was fully on board with defending the EAs against all of the various Twitter criticism. But at the same time, if you look at where I gave those donations, it was just a pretty broad spray across a bunch of things — the largest share of which basically had to do with global public health
(emphasis mine)
And as for the timing, in that same podcast episode he says:
What ended up happening was I was anticipating that these coins would just totally crash and burn, and they’d at most be able to cash out maybe $25 million. And I thought that, OK, there’s this very acute emergency situation in India, and they have to go and act quickly. And let’s act quickly, because if you act slowly, then, one, the COVID issue would… like, the opportunity to help would be gone — but also because that was in the middle of a crazy crypto bubble, and those coins could drop by 90% tomorrow. So I was definitely acting very hastily.
I agree with Greg that I’m not sure how causal that all was, as Vitalik says on the 80000 hours podcast:
(emphasis mine)
And as for the timing, in that same podcast episode he says:
I find it very funny that such a huge donation basically happened by accident. Surreal stuff.