YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Armstrong

lines on the record: 165
first: 2022-07-29
most recent: 2022-07-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, I mean, I don't really subscribe to all the woo-woo interpretations of this, but my very rational brain interpretation of it is that if you just wake up every day and write down what you want to get done towards your longer goals, your larger goals, it's just on your mind that day. So you start to notice opportunities and you think about it more.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to get a billion people accessing the open financial system through our products every day. That would be cool for humanity. And that's a pretty crazy goal. There's only 8 billion people or something, right? So one out of eight. Or maybe I can radically, like if I make some right investments or whatever, I can help radically extend human health span or whatever, right? So try crazier stuff. I don't know. Even if it doesn't work, like hopefully you'll advance the state of affairs. Like something interesting will happen. And so most people today, they look at people trying this stuff and they're like, oh my God, they're so genius. So they're whatever. And it's like, or they're an idiot. Like one of the two, neither one are true. It's just like anybody can start by thinking about what they want and then go for it. And then once you get that, like go for something a little bigger. And like, you just have fun with it.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing that goal down. Coinbase had a valuation over a billion dollars. So it was out of my realm of what was even possible. And then within 10 years, you can accomplish more in 10 years than you think, less than in a year than you think. So now I'm like, okay, what's the next goal? Okay, maybe.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember one time I wrote down this goal where I was like, what's the craziest thing I could think of? I was like, what if I want to write? I want to start a billion dollar tech company. That's crazy. And I had never started like a million dollar tech company or any tech company, really. So what business did I have writing that goal down? I remember I wrote that on a piece of paper, like probably every day for a year or something almost, right? I don't know if it was every day, but like I wrote it down a lot. And so little things started to happen. I was like, all right, well, maybe I should move back to the Bay Area from Buenos Aires. Maybe I should try to apply to Y Combinator or whatever. And I started thinking about these ideas. And so whatever gets you fired up, it doesn't have to be like some company goal or startup thing. It could be anything, right? Maybe you want to publish a book or like do something creatively or whatever. Anyway, I think within seven years, no. It's probably more like 10 years of.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then that's what you start to go try crazier stuff. I mean, this is another one of those areas where, not to get too out there, but like, you know, when I was, I think you can build your comfort zone around people being upset with you. You can also build your range of what you think is possible, right? When I was in my 20s, I was like reading all these books about self-improvement and goal, right? How to write down your goals and stuff. My goals were like someday I want to make a hundred thousand dollars a year or something like and that was and you know and it seemed like a little outlandish or what and I wrote down these goals like I want to own rental property or something anyway and then I slowly started to get some of these things done over a couple of years and so I started to think a little bigger”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. I mean, that's like the Steve Jobs quote and all that, where he's like, everything around you was invented by somebody who just was like, this was a crazy idea they thought up. So once you realize you can kind of do anything you want.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And maybe we'll create another, as computers get better, we'll create the simulation inside our thing. And I think it's cool. Uploading their brain to the cloud, or basically through, we get biology to work or the strong AI to work or whatever. One of those two hopefully works out. And then we get to keep watching the movie and see how it all unfolds. I think that's fun. And so I don't know if that's like an answer, but I guess I don't think there's any real purpose. So just try to have fun.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This one person told me one time they were like, you know, Brian, you should probably snorkel, don't scoopa. I guess, and I think they were trying to say, some of my friends have done this, right? They'll go to like, you know, epic meditation retreats and they'll kind of come back with all this existential dread of like, what's the meaning of it all? And then as far as I can tell, we are just some organic molecules in the ocean started like dividing and replicating and the selfish gene and all this stuff basically ended up here. And it's some kind of like really naive algorithm that's just kind of trying to get us to survive and replicate. And we have DNA just like every other animal. And so we happen to develop these really cool neocortexes. And so now we're sort of self aware and we have all these big questions.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't really think there is any point to life. Somebody once told me. If you go into these really big existential questions, it can get a little scary because you stare off the cliff and there's like, there's nothing there, you know.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can improve the world is with technology, joining companies, starting companies that are working on the right stuff. So I hope more young people do that. And just if you're not sure what to do, just get started with anything. That's how you learn.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Climate change, a lot of the best ideas like carbon sequestration, all these things, it's a technology thing, right? If you want to try to fix education, it's like look at Khan Academy and all the stuff going online, right? If you want to fix whatever, transportation and the financial system and global freedom and equality of all these things, there's typically the way to get something changed in the world today is with technology. And so I do think people, it's very bizarre to me that there's this kind of like anti-tech thing going on. Look, nothing is perfect. Like if you create something new and tens of millions of people use it or billions of people use it, it's like there's going to be some bad people who use it too. Okay. And there's, you know, society is complicated. But like, I think most of these things have been net positive because most people in the world are good, at least my view. So yes, we can mitigate like the 1% of bad people trying to abuse something, but 99% of people in the world are good. And the way you”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So be the person in the arena that Theodore Roosevelt quote. I think he said it, right? Like go chew glass and stare into the abyss. Like if you really want to have an impact, either join a company that has a mission that is trying to fix the thing you're passionate about or start that company if it doesn't exist or start a charity if it's not suitable to be a company or whatever it is. But go try to be a part of this solution. Just criticize or be a part of the problem. My hope is that more people can Know Realize that they actually can have a meaningful impact that way. And I think that to me, technology is actually one of the most important ways to improve the world. If you look at”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To me, I don't think that's the right way to actually have an impact on the world because Know, everybody has probably, I think people have more power than they realize. And by the way, it's easy to be a critic. It's hard to actually change these things and fix it. And so you'll get a lot of accolades from friends and things like that if you kind of go around criticizing. You know, it's easy to do. Everything is broken and could be better, including stuff I'm working on. I find so frustrating. There's a million things I want to be better about what we're doing at Coinbase.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So people can do whatever they want to be happy, right? So there's not one way to do it. I do think that some people, a particular type of people out there, a lot of people actually, they want to have an impact on the world. That's how they get a sense of fulfillment, right? So, I mean, you need to have health, physical health, you need to have good relationships. There's lots of things, but most people want to do something important. They want to have fulfilling work a way that they can feel like they're contributing. I think a lot of people, young people today, are thinking I should be an activist or something like that. And there's people in the world who have power. And a lot of people who don't. I don't have power. And so the way to change the world is to speak truth to power or criticize power and try to pressure them to change.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's very new. There's a small team today, just a handful of people. And so we're hiring more there. If people are excited about that space, reach out. And same thing for Research Hub. There's a small team there that's really awesome that's doing more like software engineering, design, product, that kind of stuff.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I can give a quick plug. So, yeah, I'm on the board at New Limit. We're hiring talented scientists that are interested in the cylinder programming space. They don't necessarily have to be coming from like an aging background or anything like that. There's sort of a small group of people doing even something.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know that's actually a little inspired by Elon, right? Is like what are some of the biggest things in the world that are probably high technology risk, but if they did work, maybe they're kind of low chance of working, but if they did work would have enormous impact. I like the idea of trying hard tech problems, especially for people like founders like me who've made some money in software, which I think we're in kind of like a golden age of software. So there's like fortunes to be made. But if you do make some money in that, my hope is people will like do atoms, not bits, you know, and try some of the harder things like in biotech or I guess he's doing cars and rockets and stuff. But anyway, I think we should try hard tech or physical science problems as well and see if that can advance for Team Human.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know, 10 or 20 years that you've taken from a whole body point of view is sort of rejuvenating tissue, not just one type of tissue like your immune system, but eventually your whole body, maybe even your brain, so that we don't have that issue where people who are older have trouble learning or they're more ossified in their thinking. To me, this is just, I always think about...”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of a crazy thing. You can turn one cell into another type of cell. Well, people recently have been. Experimenting with different types of transcription factors that would either not, you don't want it to sell to go all the way back to being a stem cell. You can end up getting cancerous cells and things like that. But you want it basically the cell to revert a little bit earlier in its, you know, they would call it the Waddington landscape, but it's basically like start to act like a bit of a younger cell, but not to de-differentiate and become more like a stem cell. And so I decided this might be an interesting area to go fund. I think that that team has come together. There's like some really talented people who've come together to help get that off the ground and they're basically building a platform that can test a lot of different transcription factors on different cell types and hopefully find ways to rejuvenate different types of cells and tissues to extend human health span. I mean, the moonshot goal here, you know, the get to Mars is that there could be some therapy here that in”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, okay. So as you can see, I'm excited about science. I think science is sort of the, basically if you get scientific innovation, then you get better products and you get better economic growth and then you get all kinds of like surplus in society that can go to arts and philosophy and like all kinds of stuff. But with New Limit, so yeah, I kind of got it. I started hosting some dinners with scientists last year and I was learning about all kinds of the latest stuff happening in bio and there's a lot of really cool stuff happening with like CAR T cells and CRISPR and all these things. And anyway, one of the topics I started to learn more about was something called cell reprogramming. And people maybe have heard of this induced PlurPoint and stem cells where you could take like a skin cell and turn it back into a stem cell. And Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for this work that was done in 2006.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Won't start off that way. It'll probably start off like being a little more quirky. Remember when YouTube first started, it was like people posting weird cat videos and stuff. But now, if you have a million subscribers on YouTube, that's probably better than getting a TV show on NBC or whoever the traditional gatekeeper was. So my hope, it might take 10 years, 20 years, whatever, but I'm hoping that this can sort of be the new prestigious way that young people publish in science and it'll become to be viewed as more prestigious. The journals, nutritional journals will be viewed as old-fashioned.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I should mention too there's a crypto angle to this too, which is, so Research Hub has a coin associated with Research Coin. And it's basically if people upvote your paper or support it, you'll accumulate more research coin, which is basically rep or like a reward token. And so that is a way to. Guess, measure the community's collective view of that paper, a form of peer review. And it can even be weighted by the reputation of the people voting on it and that sort of thing over time. Yeah, I think the last thing I'll just say is that, so I think from a prestige point of view,”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is the top papers in each category in each month, or whatever. And people want to put that in their wall in the lab. So I do think we need to sort of change, I don't know, like the traditional folks in academia or science would probably think this is a crazy idea, but I think we need to change the culture to not celebrate getting published in paywalled journals almost like friends don't let friends publish in paywalled journals like because that's Just not helping humanity. So, you know, it should be more prestigious to publish in an open science way and get the top spot. That should be celebrated above being published in whatever, I don't even want to name one of them, you know.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you're right. Like the whole academia progress track is about where you got published and how many citations. And it's kind of like a false economy of reputation because there's not real money backing it. And so I think we've thought about this a little bit. And I think the research hub team has an opportunity to do something here that basically says like, okay, I had the top paper for 2022 in biology in here. And you basically publish a list, a leaderboards of these top, you know, for the month, the year in all these different categories. Then actually, you know, we should probably give out grants and awards in addition to that, fund those people almost like fellows or even give out like, you know how like the Nobel Prize there should be like a research hub prize or something and like ship people maybe maybe even ship like a print version of a journal”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Various bio hubs or whatever, and like beginning to source the best innovations, but also discuss them and prove them and publish through the site.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, most business people are creating companies that don't have any scientific innovation. They're just marketing based on whatever. And then a lot of scientists are making things which never actually benefit humanity because they're not commercialized and turned into products. And so if we can somehow create a translation layer between those two groups and help them helps align the market forces, align scientific research to market forces so that they're more incentivized. Like if you discover CRISPR or something like that, you should be a billionaire and like all the downstream implications of that, not going through some antiquated tech transfer office or whatever. And if you're an entrepreneur, you should be looking to commercialize the latest scientific innovations. And so that's kind of like the long-term vision for that site. I think it's just an early step today, but we've got like a really passionate community on there that are jumping into like, you know, computer science or longevity.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's kind of like a bunch of people working on science, and there's a bunch of people building companies, and they barely, very rarely intersect. But when they do, you get the best things like SpaceX and Genentech and even Google and even Coinbase was based on a research paper, the Bitcoin white paper.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, anyway, one of the things once Coinbase went public last year, I had a little bit of liquidity and I was like, all right, let me fund a small team and let's see if we can, if they can go off and make something better here. So we have a prototype out there. It's at researchhub.com. People can check it out. And it's basically, you know, the first version is kind of like Reddit for science. There's like various hubs which are like journals. But you can publish papers there. You can use an electronic lab notebook to sort of have a modern day paper, which is not just a PDF that's static, but it's a living document ideally in the future, you can get comments and feedback from people on there. You can update it over time. We want people to be able to share the code and the data sets associated with their research papers, not just a PDF. And in the future, we want to make it even where people can get funding for science through that site and even license out innovations that they've made. Because the other thing I've noticed in life is that”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, okay. So basically, I've had a chance to try to help a couple other companies get off the ground too because I want to see various efforts out there succeed. And one of them I've always thought about like why is scientific research not more like open source software? Or why couldn't it be much faster, right? And you've probably have seen this like in an academic setting, right? But there's all kinds of things that feel very antiquated to me about scientific research. Everything from the funding process and grants to how peer review works to how you submit the journals, all the costs associated with journals, the people you'd think like you'd get paid for this or something and it would then be available to all the taxpayers for free. But no, they're all paywalled and there's like these big companies that have sort of, in my view, kind of held back innovation here. And the preprint servers like Bioarchive and Archive.org have really helped this, but those websites, they look like they're kind of from like 15 years ago or something.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is you do the thing that's scary and it's like a little outside, and like when I first started Coinbase, I had never managed anybody. I would have never, I would have been scared to death to have put out like a very controversial opinion like that and sort of, all right, 5% of people go, you know, we didn't know what percent it was going to be, by the way. It could have been 1%, it could have been 50%. But we went into it scary because it was a scary thing. I was like, I don't know, I think this is right. I'm just going to do it. So if you do enough scary things, like you'll build the confidence. And I feel like I'm still on that journey. Every year or two at Coinbase, there's some big thing that comes out that's like, oh my God, like I didn't sleep well for a week. And like, this is the next level, right? But that's how you learn and grow.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think their thinking, their judgment goes down. And it's like never make a decision when you're angry, right? And so if I would always sort of try to get a sense of are these people like trying to be right or are they trying to seek the truth? And you can do these little tricks like, you know, okay, you argue that person's position and you argue the other one and like See if you can genuinely represent it. Now I know you're listening, and these kind of things, but I guess, sorry, getting back to your question about leadership, I think. Basically, just kept doing things that were a little outside my comfort zone. And then my comfort zone kept getting bigger and bigger. And so that's, I think that's how you build confidence.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't really confident in the way I communicated. And so what I realized is that there's lots of different kinds of leaders. You can be any kind of CEO you want, right? I was kind of more of a product, technical focused CEO, and I preferred to sort of hear everyone's opinion. And it wasn't just going to render a decision in the room in some kind of heated moment and piss off half the people. I would be like, all right, I'm going to go think about it and I'll send you my decision later today or tomorrow or whatever. And so I found ways to kind of make it work for me where I could basically, I always tried to avoid like...”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the things that I learned about leadership is that I never really thought of myself as a very natural leader, to be honest. I don't think I was a natural leader. I always envisioned good leaders as these military generals. They seem so confident and they're just like bark orders, you know, like charge that hill and do this. I was actually more introverted and kind of”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But let me ask you I mean, do you think that all these things tie together? There's like a general trend of like more censorship, you know, there's like more cancel culture some of these like freedom values are kind of, you know, even like freezing people's accounts, like the trucker thing that happened. It seems like there's a general trend of more authoritarian policies there. But do you think the tide is turning on that? Like there's counter examples to it. We've seen recently.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I hate to be like polarizing on in either dimension here. I just want to get good work done and build good stuff with technology. I think companies should just have like reasonable policies. Like you want to get rid of bias in hiring. You want to attract great people from all different backgrounds. You know, we have Pledge 1%. We put 1% of the company equity into a foundation. I hope we're able to do good stuff with that. give back in some way but like the main The main message, I guess, for me is like the core mission, the core work that we're doing on economic freedom and just all of our products, that is like the main value that we're contributing in the world. Let's just do that more and helpfully we can get from 89 million verified users to a billion or whatever. And then I just think that's how we'll have the biggest impact.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm an early engineer at Google or whatever. And this culture has gotten kind of messed up. And I want to work at a company that's willing to stand for that. And so we've gotten a lot of good people come over. Basically what I realized, and by the way, our diversity numbers and all that stuff, like people told me when I was drafting this post, are like, don't post this. People underrepresented groups will never want to work at this company again. And I was like, I don't think that's true. Like I talked to like our ERG groups and they're not telling me they care about this stuff that much. They're telling me they just want to like be respected at work and do good work and contribute. So my gut was telling me that that advice was wrong. And like I can tell you a year, a year after doing it, like our diversity numbers are basically either the same or better in every category. So that turned out to be false.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or distraction. And they're afraid to speak up because if they speak up, they're afraid of being, again, called a racist, like fired, you know, ostracized amongst their peers. And so it did require it to get to a bad enough place for me to finally say, you know what, I feel like I have to do this, live through the short-term attacks of the press, which ultimately was very freeing for me because now I don't really care. And now I can actually just build the company that I want to build without caring about that. And then what was cool was a lot of really great people reached out to the Coinbase too after that and were like.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so that was an interesting thing, which was that the 95% of people stayed. I got a huge outpouring of support from people who said, thank God you finally spoke up and said something. Because frankly, it was making not a very fun place to work either. And I realized that there is, I think there was Nasim Teleb has this blog post about the tyranny of the 1% or something like that. But there's basically a relatively small group, 1% or something like that, that is really upset about something. It's not the majority of the company. It's like 5%. There's another 15% or something that are sympathetic to the cause. They're actually somewhat suggestible. They will go along with whatever. Because it sounds reasonable. These are like real issues they're talking about. It's not to say that it's not real. And they'll kind of get swept up in it. But there's an 80% of the company that basically doesn't agree or just wants to get their work done without all this drama.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can get quotes on whatever they want, and then they'll write a story. So mainstream media, I lost a lot of trust in mainstream media, frankly, after that. And of course, it's kind of become obvious since then that most mainstream media is hyper politicized at this point. It's basically either super left or super right. And it's not really that focused on truth. So that's kind of unfortunate because I think journalism is actually really important in society. So that whole thing got eroded in the US. Luckily, there's sort of new media, people like you and a whole bunch of people.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, I definitely got attacked. I mean, and I knew it would be controversial. The only reason I did it, frankly, was that I was kind of at my wit's end. I was like, well, like I said earlier, like the job, the CEO job sucks. Either I don't want to do it or they have to go and I'm going to make the company into something that I want. And, you know, I spent eight or nine years of my life at that point kind of building this thing. I was like, well, I could go start another company, but it takes a long time to get momentum with these things. you know, Coinbase is a very rare thing that happened in the world. I feel very passionate about it. So yeah, I'm not going to go. I need to make this the company that I want to work at. And what was really interesting was that there was such a huge outpouring of support. So I knew that it would be controversial and I would get attacked and predictably.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, because people don't want to get attacked. It's like super, you don't want to get canceled, right? It's super comfortable. Nobody wants to be called a racist or whatever people want to say on Twitter.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just don't feel I don't like the job as CEO, frankly. If the job is to come in here every day and have to squirm in front of the most difficult societal questions, I don't think I want to do that job. So either they're going to have to go or I'm going to have to go. And I founded this company and I really believe in the mission. So they're going to have to go. And what I realized was that I made an exit package available to anybody who wasn't on board with this direction. 5% of employees took it. I got the company realigned towards this mission. We're all here to do work. By the way, people can go do anything like political or social activism outside of work. It's totally fine. Like we all, everybody has stuff like that in their personal life. But while at work, we can also disagree at work, by the way, on the work. This is not like a no-disagreement culture. Let's try to get the truth. But don't bring stuff into work that's just going to create division, make the workplace a refuge from division about all.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Flame wars. So, and this culminated, by the way, with a walkout that happened in the company. We received some demands from employee groups about various things. And there was basically an antagonistic thing with management. And I was like, we're all in the same team here. If you want to be antagonistic, let's do it with. Somebody else outside the company that we're trying to improve the world in that dimension. So, yeah, eventually I was like, okay, the company is not aligned on this.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it got to a place around that time where most of the questions we were receiving were, I think, even about things not related to the company. They were about broader societal issues, like, Brian, what's your stance on XYZ controversial thing? And it was, I often didn't have an opinion on you. These are really hard questions, right? And I didn't really, I felt like it was distracting the company. People internally were getting into fights a lot to disagreeing with each other. There was a thing where the social slack internally was turning into social media almost with people putting.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost acting like the government or something and like trying to solve the hardest societal issues and at least have an opinion on it if not contribute to the solution on almost everything And for me, I kind of was a very uncomfortable situation for me as a CEO. I'd never quite been in this situation where most of the time when employees in the past were kind of asking me questions, they would be asking about how do we make this product better? Like, what do we do with this competitor? What about this regulator?”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And my view is that this is actually kind of destructive to this is largely an American company phenomenon, by the way. I do worry that this is making America less competitive, even though I think of myself as kind of internationally minded, but I am a US citizen my whole life here. When we put out this statement, we had employees that were not in the US who were confused by it. They were like, why did Brian need to say that? We're just saying you're going to focus on work at work. That's what we were doing already. And there were certain pockets of the US, certain cities, in particular where we had employees that a very peculiar cultural Phenomenon had evolved where I think people really wanted the company they worked at to be”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely received some blowback, but yeah, I'll describe what I meant. And if you want to talk about how it came to that, too, we can talk about that. But what I meant is that There's a lot of companies right now, including tech companies, but not exclusively where I think great companies have an important mission. They're trying to do something really good for the world. And unfortunately, they're getting a little distracted from that at times because of employee activism that is causing the company to basically jump into whatever the current thing is and try to help is like the positive interpretation.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this segment of the population is not massive yet from a GDP point of view, but I think it's a leading indicator of where things could be going. And this is actually good for the world. It's kind of like, especially if China does continue to rise and it has a more authoritarian view, it'll be kind of this very centralized East versus a decentralized West where people are in the West, in the free world, really kind of embracing crypto in a more open, fair, free global financial system, which I think will be enormously beneficial for humanity. And I do think basically Bitcoin is the reserve currency, the gold standard of the crypto economy. So that's pretty crazy.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dollars or euros or whatever, if I happen to need something, I convert it to that at the last minute. It's like if I'm traveling, I might convert some local currency in the moment, but that's not where I hold most of my wealth.”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Chinese Yuan is not necessarily better, right? I mean, they have a ton of debt as well. And it's not like you could really the yuan could be inflated as well, right? It probably will be. And so I do think that there's this group of people today, which probably most traditional, I don't know, like the people who run big banks and like governments and stuff, this is not really on their radar today, but I think there's a basically a group of younger people in that kind of, you know, 25, 35 year old range who are tech savvy. They're starting to think of crypto as like the primary thing in their financial life. It's like, I basically hold my wealth in crypto and I use”
2022-07-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #307 – Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source