E1042: Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) shares insights on Recode incident, need for decentralized citizen journalism, techlash through the years, potential COVID-19 endgames: bull, bear & base case scenarios

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 April 2020

⏱️ 112 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

0:55 Jason intros Balaji Srinivasan and tees up his incident with Recode's piece: “No handshakes, please”: The tech industry is terrified of the coronavirus
4:28 Balaji shares his experience with the story and his issues with corporate journalism
15:16 Balaji explains why he reacted the way he did to Shirin Ghaffary's request for an interview
19:52 History of techlash: 1995-2020, when things turned from positivity to overwhelming negativity
26:26 Balaji brings up a sentiment analysis chart published by Recode
31:25 Did both sides of the political spectrum fail in their coverage of the virus? Is citizen journalism the answer?
39:40 Balaji envisions for a new kind of journalism
41:43 Are corporate journalists too like-minded in their approach because of not being representative of the demographics of the US?
48:16 What is modern journalism's biggest blind spot?
51:22 Tips on how to start decentralizing media
54:34 Are modern journalists uncomfortable with subjects playing an active role in the reporting of the story? Did Recode & other outlets fail their readers?
1:01:55 Will the US "let it rip" strategy of dealing with COVID prove catastrophic?
1:05:53 Endgame scenarios: Bull, Bear & Base
1:10:08 Should we be experimenting with "Challenge Trials"?
1:18:52 How culpable is China for the spread of COVID-19? Should wet markets be shut down for good?
1:23:39 Why is the US still behind on mass testing? More on endgame scenarios
1:31:03 Possibility of COVID-19 being a biological weapon?
1:36:27 What should we learn from this crisis? What societal changes will happen?

Transcript

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0:54.0	All right everybody, welcome to another episode of this week in startups.
0:58.0	We're recording this on April 2nd, and it's important that I say that because every day is blending into the next and I'm losing track of what day of the week it is, where I am, and how long this coronavirus outbreak pandemic is going to continue on and early on I was able to track this in
1:18.0	January and February thanks to one of my followers and a friend of the show, Bilage Sri
1:25.3	Navasin, Sri Navasin,
1:27.1	Bilagei Navasin, I think I got it right there, is, and formally I knew him because he was working a coin base and In recent Horowitz, he's an angel investor,
1:37.0	he was on the pod back on episode 769, a lot of you love that back in October of 2017. And he's one of these smart investors, science folks on the
1:48.4	Twitter. And he was taking this very seriously talking about it and giving us a morning.
1:55.0	And many of us who were watching on social media, specifically the Twitter, were watching these
1:59.9	videos going, this seems pretty scary what's going on in Wuhan. This does not seem normal.
2:04.7	And Bilage was telling us it was not normal. And I saw a tweet, I'll pull it up here real quick,
	...

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