Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
100%.
Five, five years later, yeah.
What did you feel like before you hit send on that blog post?
Brian, there's a piece that I worked on a few years ago now with one of the most interesting, provocative, strange people on the Internet, Balaji Srinivasan. And the piece was a reaction to something that Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's longtime right-hand man, had said that year. I think it was 2022 at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting. And I want to read it to you.
He said, of course, I hate the Bitcoin success. I should say modestly that the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization. And Balaji's piece was extremely interesting because what he basically said was,
The reason that Charlie Munger thinks that Bitcoin or crypto is an enemy of civilization is because he implicitly identifies civilization with the Pax Americana, with sort of implicit American empire and the order that it erected in the aftermath of World War II. And here's what Balaji wrote. And I've gone back and reread this a lot of times. I think it's a very provocative vision.
He says this, that order worked very well for a time. It produced peace and prosperity in the Western world. It outlasted the Soviet Union and it gave rise to the digital revolution that's the driving force of our era. Not bad. But the post-war order is now showing its age.
It's no longer obvious, he writes, that America is a model for the world, that it should rule the world, that it wants to rule the world, or that it even can rule the world. I do appreciate, he writes, what the U.S. once was, just as I appreciate what the U.K. once was, or what Kodak, Sears, or Lockheed Martin once were.
Every great run, though, eventually comes to an end, and the world we were born into is not the one we are entering. And I've wanted to ask you about this for a long time because I do see this. I think that anyone with eyes to see would agree that the world we were born into is not the world we're living in or certainly the one that we are entering.
But the question is, do we want to sort of, in my view, what Balaji here is doing is sort of accepting American decline and saying we're on the ruins already of empire, time to try and build, you know, from those ashes? Or is there a way to sort of harmonize Pax Americana and Pax Bitcoinia, as it were?
Or are they, as Balaji says, sort of is Pax Americana dead and Pax Crypto the thing that has to replace it?
Okay, Brian Armstrong, in the last minute that I have you, we're going to do a quick lightning round. Are you ready?
Okay. How would you describe yourself politically in a word?
One word to describe Elizabeth Warren.
Is there a cryptocurrency you feel is undervalued at the moment?
Who's the single smartest person you've met in Silicon Valley?
Do you think Mark Zuckerberg's move to the right is genuine, opportunistic, or a mix of the two?
Elon Musk and Sam Altman have a long running feud. You know, both of them. Do you take a side?
Will the United States still be the world's hegemon in a hundred years?
Americans know that fascism is bad. We grow up learning about why it's bad. Why do you think we don't have an education or a similar education about communism or socialism?
Showing 141–160 of 976 · page 8 of 49
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