Lex Fridman Show – Balaji Srinivasan: Social Media, War, Censorship, Wokeism, Crypto, and AI
Balaji Srinivasan is an angel investor, tech founder, philosopher, and author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country. He was formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz
Deplatforming a sitting President
- Regardless of what you think about Trump, do we really want giant corporations determining who can say what on the internet?
- If a giant corporation can de-platform the sitting president and “most powerful man in the world”, then he is not the most powerful man in the world
- If this de-platforming can happen, the people are electing democratic figure-heads who have less power than the heads of networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, and Amazon who colluded to remove the elected leader
The most popular thing in a supermarket is not on the shelf because it’s been sold out: the “known” people aren’t as dangerous as the unknown people that may emerge.
Social media today is like China under communism in a really key sense.
War
- The United States was able to defeat Nazi Germany because it had a giant manufacturing base overseas; it simply out-produced the Nazis
- Today, the United States’ manufacturing base is in the country it may fight a war with (China)
- Trying to fight your factory in the physical world is probably not going to work
- Pelosi going to Taiwan did not strengthen Taiwan; it’s important to actually strengthen Taiwan if you’re going to provoke China
- The United States did not do enough to supply Ukraine with the resources it needed prior to the Russian invasion, an argument also made by Palmer Luckey
- An effective military must contribute to the deterrence of conflict
Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done.
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