Brian Armstrong
Appearances
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
But, you know, my naive assumption coming into business was that, you know, you pretty much you follow the law and then you just get to focus on your product and your customers and that would all work out. But it turned out over the last four years, we got caught in some political crosshairs and some people, you know, they unlawfully wanted to go after our industry and shut it down.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And so we realized even if we didn't really focus on politics, politics was very focused on us. And we needed to kind of get serious on that dimension. So we funded FairShake, which is a super PAC. We funded something called StandWithCrypto.org, which got up to 2 million advocates or voters in the U.S. that were pro-crypto and wanted to support pro-crypto candidates.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
We tried to go and meet with the various candidates, etc., And so, you know, we explicitly made a decision, by the way, to say that this is bipartisan. We do think crypto is a bipartisan issue. There's lots of Democrats who support it. For instance, like the Fit 21 bill that went through the House of Representatives last year, I think had like 71 Democrats voted for it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
So it's it's actually something that appeals to both sides, which is good because you need you need more than a simple majority to get legislation passed in the Senate. But I think Republicans resonate with it from a like a free market point of view, sovereign money perspective. There's really good national security arguments.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
I think Democrats tend to resonate with it more from a quality of access to financial services, financial inclusion. I mean, it's bringing down fees in financial services, which is benefiting, I think, poor people all over the world who don't have access to good financial infrastructure and the unbanked people in the U.S. So... There's a lot to like from both sides.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And then, you know, so in this past election, it was probably like two to one Republican Democrat who received funding and support from these organizations and voters. In future elections, who knows? It might be 50-50 or two to one the other direction. I really don't know. I think it's important that we do maintain a bipartisan view in this industry.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And so we've tried to do our best to help that happen.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Well, obviously, I can't speak for President Trump directly, but I kind of I'll give you my perspective as an outsider. So it comes back a little bit to that Peter Thiel quote you were saying earlier. I think that there is something inevitable about Bitcoin and crypto. We've seen now that the American people want it. There's about 50 million people who've used crypto in the U.S.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And there's a really a distrust with existing institutions, you know. I think only about trust in our institutions in the US is at an all-time low. I think it's at like 28%. If you survey Americans and ask them how many of you are optimistic about the future of the financial system, only 14% of them say they're optimistic.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And so all the inflation concerns, that was a massive issue where people kind of had this deep sense that the system is rigged here. Like they couldn't quite explain oftentimes in the way economists would how this works, but they had a deep visceral sense or like, why is my money worth less every year?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And it feels like there's these people with their fingers on the dial and they're blaming it on some other reason, but it's really because they want to print more money and spend money that they don't have, right? And so this was a massive cultural movement essentially in the United States where people said, we want this. And Trump is a very astute politician.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
He sensed that there was a political opportunity here where the Democrats had gone so hard against this industry Elizabeth Warren came out and said she was building the anti-crypto army, which didn't make any sense because there was no coalition for that. If you come out with an anti-crypto army, there's some people who don't really like crypto.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Exactly. Like the people who aren't interested in crypto or even don't like it, they just don't think about it a lot.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Yeah. But it turned out that there was a very large constituency of people who were very passionate about it. They really liked it. There was a pro-crypto voter, essentially. And the Democrats completely missed that. And it was essentially, you know, for some key people like Sherrod Brown, I mean, it became like they lost their election over it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
That sent a very clear signal, I think, through the Senate and Democrats. Congress in general, that it's just bad politics to be anti-crypto.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
I mean, I credit Elizabeth Warren and Gary Gensler for contributing to the loss of the Democrats in the last election. And I think they may have been somebody who was a piece of that puzzle for Trump to realize that this was an opportunity.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Yeah, well, you know, I don't want to share anything in private conversations, but, you know, and we tried to make an effort to reach out really to both parties before the election. We could not get a meeting with the Kamala campaign or her in particular.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
I don't know. If I were to speculate, I think she had people around her that were trying to protect her. And they just weren't sure about if they wanted people to be aware that they were meeting with the crypto industry. I don't know if that was like... you know, it's hard for me to say.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
I was able to get meetings with other members of the Biden administration, like lower level folks, but it always kind of felt like we were being brushed off a little bit. Like, you know, they'd say, okay, this person's going to show up and then their chief of staff would show up instead, something like that. And so they had like one foot in on crypto, but one foot out.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
They just, they never trusted it. And I think they were all, you know, the whole Sam Bankman Freed thing probably scarred them a little bit too, where they're like, oh my gosh, if we meet with this person and, they turn out to be fraudulent, then it'll be some huge scar on our reputation. I don't know. They were afraid. I'm not sure. That's my guess.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Yeah, yeah. And when they did put out messaging about crypto, it was kind of milquetoast, right? It was like, well, we're excited about innovation and financial services and we want to make sure consumers are protected from crypto. And it's like, well, do you view it as a bad thing or a good thing, right? It's kind of like AI or the internet or self-driving cars or whatever.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
It's like these things that, you know, bad people might use the internet, but like on net, it is a very good thing for the world.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Oh, yeah. I mean, they would just kind of politely take notes. And yeah, I mean, there was actually a moment where like Sherrod Brown, he was the chair of the Senate Banking Committee. And we spent lots of time in D.C. trying to get meetings with them and just be helpful and educational resource, talk about how we get legislation. You know, Democrats should be for legislation.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
regulation of these industries that's how you that's how you clean up the bad actors right so we thought he would be interested in that um this and this was during an election year too we actually and i was like okay maybe he doesn't want to meet with me you know i'm some rich guy who runs a giant company and he doesn't want to be seen mixing that was the other issue democrats had an issue like meeting with wealthy people at a certain point at least um some of them
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
But we actually, our policy team organized this thing where we brought in, I think it was like maybe five or 10 different startups in Ohio that were blockchain crypto startups. So they were in his state during an election year. They flew into DC to meet with him and they essentially canceled the meeting and they sent like some lower level people. And it was like,
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
You know, are you trying to lose the election? I don't I don't understand what's happening here. So, yeah, it was it was a very bizarre place they got themselves into. And I and I don't want to say paint this with a broad brush. I think there was a number of Democrats who really got it and they really embraced it. You know, Richie Torres in the House is is kind of very helpful here.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
There's like Kirsten Gillibrand. Chuck Schumer was very helpful.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Ro Khanna. I think he's he's said a lot of positive things about crypto. I don't I don't have a deeper understanding of where he's at on it. But yeah, there's a large number of Democrats that are very positive on this issue. But there was enough and then the Kamala administration or campaign that didn't didn't embrace it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
President Trump has said they want to make the United States the crypto capital of the world. I think he's very much leaned into that. And appointing David Sachs, for instance, as the crypto AIs are, David is very capable, very smart. And so I think we have a world now where we can pick up the phone and at least get a meeting. It doesn't mean that they're always going to do what we want.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
They have lots of different voices in their ears. And ultimately it has to be what's right for the American people. But, you know, at least we can get a meeting now. That is a huge change. So the access is really a huge improvement.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
He was just very gracious and thanked us for, you know, what we did in the election with standwithcrypto.org and just the fair shake pack. And I think he wanted to make sure that we, along with the rest of the crypto industry, you know, had a chance to help bring this industry back on shore, work with people like David Sachs.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
No, that did not come up. So I didn't share anything on that. I didn't actually know that was even going to launch when it happened.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
So the best way to think of this is artwork, right? It's literally like an artist putting out paintings or a song or doing a drop. It's like some sneaker drop, like on this, you know, in a certain market or a certain zone. And I think overall, it is a good thing. Like people should be able to create artwork and put out meme coins if they want.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Now, of course, like just when you buy artwork, it could go up or down in value. Right. And so that people should be mindful when they do these things. But Trump is probably the most famous person in the world. And so if he wants to put out artwork, I don't have any issue with that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
In this particular case, we didn't have any knowledge that it was happening actually before we saw the news just along with everybody else. And then we always have this question of, well, should we list it on our platform, right? And so we really just try to have listing standards that have a minimum in terms of compliance and security for the customer.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
But beyond that, we don't try to make any kind of recommendations. We're not a registered investment advisor or anything like that. And so... In this case, it met our minimum listing standards. We decided to list it on our exchange. And I hope that more people put out art and artists get paid, essentially.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
The kinds of contracts and deals they've had in the past have really been, I think, punitive in terms of how they get paid. So to me, I'm more interested in the broader concept of how this could spread. And there's something like a million tokens a week being created now, which is insane, the growth and adoption of it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
That's fair. Maybe another way to say it would be like a collectible, right? Like a baseball card or a Pokemon card. It is a commemorative piece of artwork or something people might want to collect. But you're right. Maybe it's not like the Sistine Chapel. You know, a lot of these meme coins are... I think the Trump meme coin in the Sistine Chapel.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
So what's funny is Dylan Field, who's the CEO of Figma, he put out this post about CryptoPunks where they were one of the early NFTs, these artwork or collectibles that came out. And there was a very rare CryptoPunk
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
which he actually compared it to the Mona Lisa, where he was like, it'll be looked back on historically as significant as the Mona Lisa, because it was the creation of this new form of art that was digital, that you could own and transfer anywhere in the world within seconds, that had provenance and attribution linked into the blockchain in a cryptographically provable way.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And so, look, I don't know if I fully buy it, but I thought it was a cool... It was a cool thought. And it's true that a lot of the most significant art is significant because it creates a new movement or a new genre or a new medium. And so in that sense, I don't know, crypto art or something like that could be exciting over time, but it's still early days.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
A lot of it looks like a toy, and I don't want to overstate it. Some of it is kind of pretty lowbrow, to be honest.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
If you look at a lot of modern art, I'd say that that's true. I mean, there's people who buy these things and they're worth nothing. You can go buy art for $25,000 and the next year nobody wants to buy it. So that is a criticism that applies to traditional art as well, I think.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
I was surprised to see it. So, you know, that kind of comes with the package with Trump. There's a lot of things that he's, he's a very unique individual. And, you know, I think on net, you know, he's doing a lot of good things for the country. So you kind of have to take take it all as one package.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
The main use case for Bitcoin is really as a store of value or an inflation hedge. That in alone is a very important use case for people all over the world. It's kind of like the new gold standard. And there's a whole interesting analysis about why Bitcoin is actually a better form of money than gold or a store of value than gold.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
But if you want to talk about crypto more broadly, crypto is much bigger than just Bitcoin, of course. So that's a very important use case for Bitcoin. We should not underestimate that, by the way. Inflation is a massive issue for people all over the world, especially the poorest people in the world.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And I think most of the fiat currencies of the world are abused and manipulated where it literally erodes the wealth of the poorest people in society. So if that's all that crypto ever was, I think that would still be a massive win. But crypto is broader than that. Stablecoins, have seen enormous growth in terms of just payments.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And it's actually getting to a place where you can go buy things in the deli or the sandwich shop, stuff like that. I mean, I use my Coinbase card and some of that's still going over Visa rails, but I can spend USDC at any merchant that accepts Visa with that. Brick and mortar is not going to be like the really killer early adopter use case for this though.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
A lot of it is, it's people in emerging markets doing cross-border payments. It's people doing B2B payments where it's enormous cost to these businesses.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
It is Internet native applications where like stable coins or crypto is the only way to pay because that's sort of the most the only way you get a global audience to come together online for some a game or a community is you have to use a currency that's native to the Internet. You can't just use like one country's currency.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And then how are you going to get people in India to participate or whatever? So these are the ways that stable coins are really starting to be adopted. And then there's lots of other use cases, too. I think like prediction markets. got a ton of popularity in this last election as a source of truth about what's actually happening in the election.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
We can go on down the list, but crypto is many different things. It's kind of like the birth of the internet or something. It's going to affect a lot of different industries and spaces.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Yeah, well, gold was traditionally a store of value, a hedge from inflation. So Bitcoin was that too. It doesn't mean you're necessarily going to use Bitcoin or gold in your everyday life. But yeah, if you want to go into a 7-Eleven and use your Coinbase card, it'll work. I've done it.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
That's a great question. So you're absolutely right. I think there's a segment of people that are very pro-America, as I am, and many people are. But they're a little concerned about crypto in the sense that, might this threaten the dollar's dominance or make it harder for the US to do sanctions? And I think it's a nuanced question.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
It's not perfectly one side or the other, but crypto is going to be net very positive for America. And Here's why I say that. First, I think America's strength primarily comes from freedom and having free market capitalism, freedom of speech, like rule of law, property rights. And by the way, these are all the values of crypto, too.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And so this is the only large economy in the world where if you have a new idea, you can try something new. You know, if it works, you get to keep the upside of your labor. It's a relatively free society. I think it needs to be more and more free, as we discussed earlier. But America is still that place.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And what that means is that we are going to have the best new ideas created here, whether that's in crypto or AI or self-driving or rockets. It means we're going to attract the best and brightest from all over the world who want to come build something in a free society. And that's going to ultimately create economic growth.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
you know, economic growth and technological growth is kind of what creates military superiority. If you have the biggest GDP in the world, you can have the biggest, you know, military, you can have the dollar reserve currency, right? So underpinning the dollar is really economic might. And that all comes from us being in this free society where we have to embrace new technologies and trends.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
We can't try to imagine if the internet had been created and we said, you know, That's kind of democratizing the publishing of information a little too much. We're a little bit nervous about that. There were voices in the US, by the way, at the time at the dawn of the internet that said things like this.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And if we had just kind of closed our eyes, pretended that wasn't happening as a technology shift, the big internet companies wouldn't have been built in the United States. technology is the fastest growing, most important sector in the United States economy today, we would not be the world's superpower, right? So we can't afford to ignore crypto.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
It is just as important as the internet or AI or any of these things. Now, the last kind of nuance I'll say on this is I actually think Bitcoin, you know, by the way, today, it hasn't really been an issue on sanctions and these kinds of things. Like, you know, people are seven times more likely, bad actors are seven times more likely to use the traditional banking system than they are crypto.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
You know, the fears about crypto being used by bad actors is actually widely overblown and misreported. But in the, you know, you could imagine some hypothetical scenario in the future where, people try to get around these sanctions in some way that undermines the US's ability to do that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
I still think that it would be better for America to have embraced crypto because it's the economic argument I mentioned, but it's also that Bitcoin is going to be a check and balance on deficit spending and inflation for the dollar. We went off the gold standard fully in around 1970 or 71. I can't remember which. And At that point, we've had larger deficits. We've had a lack of discipline.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And a lot of people have written about this, but every fiat currency that got disconnected from hard commodities eventually overprinted and kind of lost the reserve currency status. And so Bitcoin, in a way, might be extending the American experiment another couple hundred years by being that check and balance on deficit spending so the dollar can actually remain the reserve currency.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
I don't know if we'll ever see like a re-pegging of the dollar to a hard commodity. If they did it, Bitcoin would be the right choice. I think it's more likely we'll get a Bitcoin strategic reserve, things like that, that are a step in that direction. But it's more likely people will just, if in times of dollar uncertainty, like let's say Doge, does an amazing job.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
But in five or 10 years, we see a return back to deficit spending and inflation. We'd see people move money as a hedge back to Bitcoin, and it would sort of create a natural check and balance there.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Yeah. So again, crypto is many things. If you're talking about Bitcoin, I consider it to be more of a store of value, like a new gold standard. And it's also an investment. So when you're talking about volatility, volatility is not a bad thing in an investment necessarily. You actually want it to go up, for instance. Every reward comes with risk and an investment, so it might go down too.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
But Bitcoin, you should think about it more as like a store of value. Now, a medium of exchange, like the dollar, that's something you want to be more stable in its value. And this is where crypto also has an answer with things like USDC, USD coin, which is just backed by a dollar in a bank account. So it has the exact same value as a dollar.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
So there's a lot of people out there that are crypto curious. I think the way they get started is that you just they buy a little bit of Bitcoin. They see how it changes over time and value. They're familiar with the concept of owning maybe like, you know, treasuries or bonds or stocks or, you know, they might have a little investment portfolio or 401k or something like that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
You should think about Bitcoin in that sense as just a part of anybody's portfolio, kind of like if you go on, I don't know, Wealthfront or something and they make a portfolio for you, some percentage of it is going to be commodities, right? Mm-hmm. And commodity, they make sense to people, wheat and copper, and it's things that we need to use in our everyday life.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
To your point, they're physical. Now, the only difference here is that this one is digital. And I get that for a lot of people, that is kind of a bridge too far. It doesn't feel real. So some of this is generational. I'd say there's an entire generation of kids. They're not even kids anymore.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
I mean, they've all they're probably like in their 30s and 40s as well that they just they're digital natives. Right. They grew up on the Internet. And for them, everything digital is real. In fact. moving around some paper stock certificate would feel really silly. And so when I go meet with members of Congress or people's mother or father or whatever, Like Chuck Schumer. Yeah.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
What's funny is a lot of times I meet with these members of Congress and they'll say, you know, I kind of get what you're doing. I don't fully get it, but my kids love it. They all have your app. And they go talk to their constituents too. And their constituents are like, yeah, I mean, I don't really trust keeping my money in a bank. They seem to go out of business once in a while.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
They have high fees. They're sort of using crypto as kind of their primary financial account in some cases, right? So it's a generational thing, but I think anybody can understand it as just It's a new asset class. And then they use the internet, right? Probably 10 or 20 years ago, they probably thought the internet was some wacky thing, but everybody can use it now.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
So that's part of our job is to just make crypto more accessible, demystified a little bit, make it trusted. These are the things that I think Coinbase as a brand can do best.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Yeah, I mean, that's definitely been very frustrating to me as somebody who's taken a long-term view here and tried to make a compliant company built in America, not offshore. Because I do feel like it's our job to try to help make the industry more trusted and to clean it up. So there's definitely been some setbacks along the way, and the industry has attracted some bad actors.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
I think it's not insurmountable. And actually, I think most people I talk to now, FDX is a bit of a distant memory. These things tend to really burn into someone's consciousness for about a year in my experience. And it reminds me of the early days of the internet, right?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Early days of the internet, people were trying to figure out email and they'd be getting these kind of scams from Nigerian princes.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Yeah. Yeah. Um, you know, still, yeah, still to this day, there's people, um, trying to, uh, call and get you to sign into your pay, you know, pretending to be PayPal customer support or whatever. And yeah, so I don't, and the internet obviously overcame all of this and we developed systems and spam prevention and, um, better encryption and privacy, et cetera. So it's, it's work in progress.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Bad people are going to try to use crypto as well, just like any new technology or tool. It's like, you know, Al Qaeda uses WhatsApp and they use Toyota trucks. And, um, But we also know that there's a lot of good people in the world who benefit from those. And I think it's like 99% good to 1% bad, roughly, if I were to pick an order of magnitude.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And so we got to keep trying to make it safe for everyday consumers and weed out bad actors. But yeah, I'm very proud of Coinbase's track record over the long term of being the most trusted in the space. And we're going to keep doing that.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
I definitely disagree with that characterization. And I'll tell you why I think it's unfair. So to answer your question directly, Chainalysis is a company that puts out reports about illicit activity in crypto. They're an independent third party. They estimate that illicit activity is about half of 1%. of crypto transaction volume.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Now that's not great, but just for comparison, the US dollar cash is about 4% illicit activity. And so by that dimension, crypto is far better. And if you look at even not just cash, which is still king for illicit activity all over the world, but if you just look at the traditional banking system, criminals are 7x more likely to use the traditional banking system than crypto.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
So there's no doubt that there is bad activity out there in the world, and we need to do better in terms of helping law enforcement. We actually do a lot of coordination with law enforcement, and we receive subpoenas, and once in a while we get an award from them about helping crack some case, just as all financial service companies do.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
But it's important to remember that anybody claiming crypto is uniquely crime-ridden is is they have some other agenda because that's absolutely incorrect. The right way to think about it is that there's people all over the world who don't have access to any good financial infrastructure. Their wealth could be taken away from them at any time. It could be eroded by inflation.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
They can't get access to a loan. Just basic property rights is something that a lot of people in the world don't have. There's a lot of women who don't have access to bank accounts in the world. It's actually illegal for them to own bank accounts in some countries, which keeps them in bad situations. And so crypto is a tool for freedom.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
It's going to create good financial infrastructure all over the world. And so if half of 1% of the activity is bad and we try to mitigate it, that doesn't mean we should characterize the whole thing that way.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
Around that time, I noticed inside the company, we'd get more questions at the town hall, for instance. Usually at the town hall, we'd host it and people would ask about our products or regulation or... Different things we could be doing better. But we started to get more questions. This was all kind of leading up in the few years prior to that around different broader societal issues.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And many of these things, you know, I was pretty focused on our company and the work we were doing. And so I didn't necessarily have a deep opinion about many of the world events or controversial issues out there. I was always somebody who actually was not that interested in politics. And at a certain point, there became this kind of like activist contingent within the company.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And it started subtly, but they sort of became increasingly strident and they sort of built their confidence. And occasionally it started to feel like when you'd be at these town halls, it was sort of a game that some employees were playing. It was like, who could make the exec team squirm the most on stage with the most uncomfortable question, right?
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And so at some point I was like, man, this is kind of uncomfortable. I don't really like doing this. And there was this big moment where somebody came up to the microphone one time and they said, you know, I want to know if we're going to support Black Lives Matter. And I kind of deferred. I didn't really know that much about Black Lives Matter at that time.
Honestly with Bari Weiss
The Future of Money with Brian Armstrong
And so I sort of said, you know, we'll look into it, but I don't want to commit to anything right now. And they sort of held the mic and created this moment in front of the company where they said, that's not good enough. I need to know if we're going to support Black Lives Matter. And I declined to answer or commit to anything on the spot.
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And a walkout ensued of, I don't know, about three or 400 employees closed their laptops in protest and walked out and stopped working. And I had never experienced this before. And I was kind of bewildered by it because I thought, you know, what does Coinbase have to do with police brutality? This doesn't make any sense to me. We kind of got the we got the executive team together and a few people.
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And I was sort of asking them questions like, first of all, what the heck does Black Lives Matter even stand for? Let's see what this is all about. Later, I found out they wanted to defund the police and all these kind of things. But I didn't know that really at the time. And then, you know, I was like, OK. Let's put out a statement and get people back to work. So that's where that came.
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I actually felt like I was being blackmailed, kind of, or like I had a gun to my head in a way. Although I could have stood firmer in that moment, too. I don't want to give myself any free pass here. But after we got people back to work, it really didn't feel right to me.
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Yeah. Yeah. And, um, I felt like I was being held hostage and that was, that was the whole point of it. I mean, this was kind of the activism that was happening within some universities and then it eventually made its way into these companies, um, where I, I didn't notice it happening. It And so I realized at a certain point, I was like, this didn't sit right with me.
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Why do we have a segment of the population of our company who thinks it's okay to stop working and serving our customers if there's something that is happening unrelated to our mission in the world that they want us to public? They can hold the company hostage to support their point of view if they don't like it.
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And so I realized at a certain point, either I need to leave as CEO, because this is just not the kind of company I want to run, or they need to leave. And from talking with a bunch of people, my board and others, I realized they need to go. And I was actually failing as a leader because I was not creating clarity about the kind of company that we were all going to work in.
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And I was very, by the way, this was a very, as I started to write a draft blog post and formulate my thoughts on this, I got some very nervous people within the company. Like, Some people came to me and said, don't post this. It'll destroy the company. No underrepresented minority will ever work here again. I went and talked with some of our employee resource groups and asked them about it.
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They gave me a much different answer, which was, we just want to show up at work and learn and have good opportunities for growth and contribute. We're not that... We don't want to get involved in all this stuff either. So that was an interesting data point. And eventually I just built the confidence to put it out because I was like, I don't know.
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I'm not going to be... If this blows me up, I was going to leave anyway because I didn't like... If this is the job of being a CEO in the 21st century, that's not what I want to do. I'm going to go start some other company, right? But it turned out that there was a silent majority that was feeling exactly how I felt about...
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But they were afraid to speak up too because of the cancel culture or the mob or whatever. And by speaking up, we did get some attacks from traditional media. And, you know, I think you may have been at the New York Times at the time. And so you can tell me what might have happened over there.
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But they immediately kind of put a hit squad on us from my point of view and kind of dig up some dirt on Coinbase and try to write some negative articles implying that they're a racist company or something to that effect.
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Yeah, I mean, that was like kind of the final nail in the coffin for my losing respect for the New York Times. And actually much of mainstream media, which we can talk about if you want. But long story short, it turned out to be, I think, one of the best decisions I've ever made in the company. 5% of the company left. They took an exit package that we made for them.
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So it was a very win-win outcome. Treated everybody with respect. Now the company was aligned, again, toward a mission. We had clarity. I was fulfilling my obligation as a leader. And so we actually, I think it's a huge contributor to our success over the past three, four years has been being a mission-first company. We've actually just executed much better. We avoid these distractions.
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If people want to engage in politics outside of work, we're totally supportive of that. Just don't bring it to the workplace. And we are very political about one thing, which is the mission of the company. So people sometimes, they get confused, like, why are you engaging in all this lobbying efforts and the grassroots movement with Stand With Crypto? And I'm like, well, that's,
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That's related to our mission of increasing economic freedom. We're going to be very unapologetically pro-crypto, including on the political front. But every other societal issue, we try to, it's okay if the employees have different opinions on that. We just try not to get into unhelpful debates at work about it.
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I don't regret the decision. I think if anything, I just regret not being more clear about it earlier on in the company because I was really just, I didn't, it was just an inexperienced thing as a leadership, as a leader. I was walking on eggshells when these issues would come up and I just didn't want to blow anything up. So I kind of avoided it for many, many years.
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And then it created this lack of alignment in the company. So that, I think if anything, I should have just had the courage to do something sooner and been more clear about it.
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I mean, and of course, there's a great book on this, of course, like The Private Truth, Public Lies and The Preference Cascade. You know, once somebody speaks up and it gives others the courage to do it. But yeah, I would say that my stock went way up after that blog post. Like, I'd say...
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multiple CEOs in the, in the, you know, the largest companies in the world that kind of reached out to me and people I'd never even like met or I wouldn't have been able to get on their calendar. And they either thanked me or called to ask for like how we did it. And could they do something similar? Um,
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So there was, yeah, I mean, just the fact that you're even asking me about this, you know, three or four years later, it's testament to kind of how big of an impact it had.
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Honestly, I had no idea at the time that it would have that positive of an impact, but it was almost like a defining moment of my career, which I did not expect, yeah.
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Scared, I would say. I, you know, I... I always had this fear, um, even going back to being a kid of, um, upsetting people and like, you know, them getting angry and disappointed in me. And, um, I remember, you know, I, I got up in front of the, before I hit send on it to the company and then externally, I, we had another town hall where I announced it and, um,
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it was one of the only times I've had trouble getting through a presentation in front of the company where I, I was kind of so overwhelmed by emotion and I was almost, I had like tears forming in my eyes and I was almost crying in front of the company. I had to like take a break during the middle of the presentation. And, um,
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Afterwards, the team told me we were about to jump in and have the next speaker come up because we didn't know if you could even continue. I was like, this is going to cause so much hurt and upset. I was just really afraid of hurting people, but I knew it was the right thing to do. I kind of forced myself to do it anyway.
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Well, America is so important for the world and it's worth saving. And I do think that in the last four years, I was pretty negative on America in terms of, I do believe it was in decline. And I think that was essentially a move towards socialism and Marxist ideas being tried more and more in the US and in other countries around the world. We actually saw economic freedom in decline.
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You could measure it. There's different indices of economic freedom. I will say with the adoption of Doge and this new Trump administration, which has an incredibly competent cabinet, if we can actually get rid of a bunch of regulations that are unnecessary and bureaucracy and these departments, shrink the size of government, cut the deficit,
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it starts to make me a lot more optimistic about extending the American experiment. And I really hope that that's the case because America is so important to get right. We have disconnected from the gold as a hard commodity with the dollar.
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And so what I'm very interested in is how can Doge or the Trump administration actually memorialize some of these changes and align incentives so that they stand the test of time? Because Doge isn't going to be around that long after a year or two. I do think crypto can play a really big role in that.
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Crypto is essentially returning to the founding fathers' values of America and what can make it great. Free market capitalism, property rights, rule of law, sound money. These are the things which I think were foundational to American growth over the first couple hundred years. If we can return to that, it'll be a huge benefit to society.
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And I'm hoping we're seeing this in places like Argentina with President Millay. That's a step in the right direction. In Canada, with Trudeau stepping down and if Polivar wins, that's a move towards economic freedom. I think that Bukele in El Salvador is a signal of that. We may see similar changes in the UK or Germany. with a move towards that.
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So this is kind of the mission of Coinbase is to increase economic freedom. That's another way of saying we need to defeat socialism in the world. And this experiment has been run for hundreds of years. I think the results are in. We know that socialism doesn't work.
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And it's kind of a combination of people who are, you know, with empathy, their hearts in the right place, but they don't understand the implications of how it actually turns out. And then there's other people who are proposing these ideas because they want to capture power and they're sort of abusing it. But we know that that experiment doesn't work.
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Free market capitalism is the best way to lift people out of poverty. Crypto is the way to do it. And I hope that America is leading the charge on that in the next couple hundred years.
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I'd say independent and or libertarian.
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Lots of them, but I don't want to make investment recommendations. Bitcoin. Let's say Bitcoin.
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I hate to compare because people are going to get, there's people that are geniuses in many different ways. I mean, someone you've had on your program recently, Mark Andreessen, I consider up there in the top few for sure.
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It's a mix. I, my impression is that he's always had these leanings toward free speech, but you know, he was under incredible pressure. I don't fault him for that. Both from government advertisers, um,
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you know, this is partly why Elon is so successful is he just has such high disagreeableness and he's willing to stand in the, he has like a heat shield and the force of a thousand suns can be blasting on him and he just gives zero fucks. Am I allowed to say that on your program? I don't know. Yeah.
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And so, you know, I think there is a certain, there's many things that can make you successful as an entrepreneur, but like
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being high disagreeableness when it matters, which was probably, I had an ounce of that, you know, when I did the Mission First blog post, but I'd like to, you need to, it essentially comes down to getting over your fear of people not liking you and doing the right thing in spite of it.
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No, they're both smart guys. I like them both.
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From a purely country point of view, I hope so. And if I had to guess, I would say yes. It's not certain by any means. It's like a 60-40 type outcome. I think the U.S. really seriously was at risk of losing it in the last... in the last election. And then also, honestly, like China, um, really fumbled the ball, um, with under Xi Jinping.
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I think that that's another example of Xi Jinping kind of returning to more Marxist, uh, ideas, punishing the most successful people in, in Chinese society. I mean, they were, I know this is supposed to be a one word answer, but on, Just a quick tangent on that. I mean, under Deng Xiaoping, they did introduce more free market capitalist policies, which I think really contributed to China's rise.
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And they were on a path to surpass America's GDP by 2030 or something like that. Now it's looking very unlikely that'll happen. And it's essentially because they returned to Marxism and socialism. So it's just one more data point where like the US, it wasn't because the US was so great. I think we were the least bad option, and China totally fumbled the ball.
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America probably could have had double the GDP growth if we had not had all these kind of crazy socialist policies and DEI things and everything. You know, it's it's remarkable to me that in America there are many candidates in office today who they just openly say they're members of the Democratic Socialist Party. They call themselves socialists. I think that's it's shocking.
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I mean, like Karen Bass, who's the current mayor of L.A., spent a bunch of time with Fidel Castro. You know, if you look at her Wikipedia page. Like, these are just dyed-in-the-wool socialists. But, you know, there's lots of... If you like socialism, there's a lot of countries you can go to around the world. They're pretty bad countries.
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Like, America is an exception because it's not a socialist country.
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Well, it depends where you go to school, but...
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I think this is one of the most interesting questions of our time is why does this idea keep surfacing its head? Why does it keep getting tried when we know it's such a bad idea and it's led to the death of tens of millions of people? You know, there's lots of theories on this.
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One thing people point to is that it's like the hard times create strong men sort of, you know, line of quote that goes through that. And America has just been winning for so long that we sort of, I think we got a little bit complacent. There was a sense of guilt about it that we had to give back.
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you know, and some, a lot of the attraction to socialism, it comes from this place of like ruinous empathy, um, and, and actually like guilt about, um, success. But in the, ironically in the, in the process of trying to, you know, help people on the surface, they end up hurting them and themselves even more. So that's a counterintuitive idea.
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Most people can't quite wrap their mind around, um, why sharing things in a socialist economy would somehow be bad, but it, It elevates the worst people in society and you lose that kind of competition for excellence.
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I'm not the deepest person in AI, but from what I can tell, America is still ahead, but not by very much.
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No, I think it's actually very effective in terms of him generating the political support that's needed for Doge.
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There's a handful of them. Obviously, the Bitcoin white paper had a huge impact on me. I think... Ray Dalio's book, Changing World Order, you hear some of the ideas reflected in my comments today. I think there's books like The Sovereign Individual, which I think were very provocative and led to some of the ideas that I'm mentioning here today.
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Also just books like Atlas Shrugged and these kind of things. Some of Milton Friedman's writing was very influential on me. So that's not just one book, but those were a few.
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Yeah, well, I'm incredibly excited about Doge. I mean, my whole personal philosophy is I'm pro-freedom. That's economic freedom, which is the mission of Coinbase, but freedom of speech, you know, up and down the board, I'm pro-freedom. I think that's what creates civilizational progress. And so... One big way you can get economic freedom is by having a smaller, more efficient government.
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So I am a huge supporter of Doge. I think it's probably the most inspiring thing I've seen in government in my lifetime. And it's kind of what you touched on, which is that the government, I think the government should be really limited to setting policy. You know, a few core functions like having courts and a military, but they're not good at building things, right?
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You don't want to have the government actually building fighter jets. You outsource that to the private industry. And I think we don't go far enough with that in our society. And over time, if you look at the last couple hundred years of the United States, it's the size of government measured by percentage GDP going to government has gotten bigger and bigger.
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And now they're kind of running larger and larger areas of the economy, you know, whether it's education or health care, these banking, these things are all kind of like quasi government. And so the U.S. is a pretty free country, but you can think of it as a spectrum between like 100 percent run by the government and 100 percent run by the private sector.
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percentage of GDP going to government in the form of taxes is kind of a way to estimate what percent socialist or communist are we, right? And it's been trending up over the last 100 or 200 years. I think that we need to cut that dramatically back. And the private industry is just far more effective at building things and running things.
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And we're seeing, like, if they go into the government, like you're seeing here, the amount of waste and corruption and fraud and just incompetence is staggering to anybody who's worked in the private sector.
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Yeah, I do think so. I'm not an expert on this, but I've tried to go read a little bit of the Federalist Papers and all these kind of things. But yeah, I mean, if you go back, I'd say like around 1900, I think total revenue going to the government was maybe like 10% of GDP. And today it's probably, I don't know, 3x that. Yeah. at least maybe three to four X that.
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And so we have been trending to a society that has more and more functions run by the government and they're just less efficient. You know, the department of education, for instance, it's like the test scores didn't go up and it's incredibly expensive. Right. And so it's, How do you create excellence? It's by competition.
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You want to have a free market of ideas where people are choosing where to send their children or where to spend their hard-earned dollars. And competition creates that excellence to say, well, if there's a better product at a better price or something that I think will teach my children better, I want to have the choice to put it there. That's what's creating excellence.
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It's accountability through competition. The government is a monopoly. We get the worst customer service from monopolies. Why would it be any different in government?
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I think that's right. If you're a regulator in the executive branch and the law is unclear, you don't just get to make up your own laws. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution says Congress shall make the laws. The regulators need to go enforce the laws that exist. They don't get to create new laws.
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And that's a good example of what we're seeing now as a transition where all of these agencies that got created and a lot of the regulations were actually unconstitutional and they need to get dramatically pared back.
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Directionally, he's right. Yes. I do think there's very few people in DC who understand technology. That's a pretty uncontroversial statement. And I think even when they do try to create a barrier to it, like we saw some of these AI executive order came out of the Biden administration, which in my view was a mistake.
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It really said, hey, you can't have more than this number of parameters in a model, which is just like... You know, anybody who knows anything about technology knows that Moore's law, right? It's like every 18 months, the thing gets faster, cheaper, more capable. And so they were just kind of it showed that they didn't understand how technology worked.
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And I think that with the release of these open source models and then countries like China putting out these models, that's a great example of where they didn't have the ability to really control it, even if they wanted to. This debate goes back to even encryption in the early days, right? Where encrypted messaging apps are now kind of like ho-hum, you know, kind of boring everyday stuff.
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Yeah, Signal, WhatsApp, even iMessage is encrypted now, where when they subpoena Apple, I don't think they have the ability to get it. There's always some debate about, you know, does the NSA have some secret backdoor? But as a broad, you know, when encryption first came out, people were kind of afraid, oh, this is all going to be used by terrorists and everything like that.
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And so it's usually something like protecting the children or terrorism is the fear mongering piece of it. But encryption is a powerful technology that just got out there. Governments, I don't think, had fully the ability to control it. And this is good.
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I mean, I hate to say it in some ways, but we wouldn't have this level of progress in society if everything the government wanted to do actually stopped it in its tracks. Innovation keeps moving forward, and that's very important for civilizational progress.
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Yeah, I mean, this is not like dragging it into the future would be like, let's put all federal spending on a blockchain so you can have total transparency. It's an immutable ledger and corruption proof. You know, that would be a massive undertaking because all their systems are kind of ancient. Yeah.
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I think he's trying to do just much more basic things like, hey, let's actually have a category code on each of these payments or make sure that payments to unauthorized recipients are blocked and just kind of basic accounting principles, reconciliation, etc. So.
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Um, I think what they're trying to do is just get some of the very basic ideas working and this, anybody who's worked in private industry and had to kind of go in there and clean up, um, something in a company knows this firsthand, you know, there's a concept called like zero based budgeting, right?
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Where you, you come in with a fresh perspective and you say, okay, how many it people should we have here? How many customer sports people should we have? Instead of just every year, someone asked for a little bit more budget because that's the default state of everything. It wants to grow in its scope. Um, And that's a really hard thing to do.
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But companies that don't do it eventually are unprofitable or die or go bankrupt. And so that's the natural way that these things get weeded out in the private sector. In the government, there is no accountability mechanism like that. It can persist for decades or centuries, especially if you have the reserve currency.
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that you can print and just get away with total lack of accountability on things. So in part, this is what the beauty of Bitcoin, right? It's kind of saying, hey, like if you're worried about the inflation of the dollar and deficit spending and money printing, There's a refuge from inflation.
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And I do think actually this is a crypto is going to be very good for the United States and for the dollar because through, you know, USDC and kind of a digital dollar is going to help it maintain the reserve currency. But I also think Bitcoin is going to serve as a very important check and balance on inflationary spending and money printing.
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Well, Coinbase and the crypto industry certainly played a massive role in this last election. And I think that we were really tired of kind of getting beat up on the playground after school. Who was beating you up the most?
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Oh, I mean, you know, the SEC, I think, and Gary Gensler, Elizabeth Warren were kind of unlawfully going after the crypto industry because they didn't like it, but it was perfectly legal what we were doing. So it was an example of lawfare. That was the primary example.