Despite a tumultuous and volatile marketplace; scandals, arrests, and bankruptcies at rival digital exchanges; and social issues disrupting his own company, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong is a devout believer in digital currencies and the power of the blockchain. In this interview, Armstrong describes how he co-founded Coinbase, explains the basics of how digital currencies work, and responds to criticisms of cryptocurrency from Warren Buffet and others.
To view the full transcript of this episode, read below:
Peter Robinson: Cryptocurrency. That's Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the others. Cryptocurrency and spinach. How are they alike? You either love them or you hate them. The late billionaire investor Charlie Munger on cryptocurrency, quote, this is a quotation, "I hate it." Close quote. Which brings us to our guest today, who loves it. The co-founder and chief executive officer of Coinbase, one of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world, Brian Armstrong on Uncommon Knowledge, now. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. The son of two engineers, Brian Armstrong grew up in San Jose, California. Went to high school at Bellarmine Prep down the road from this studio, a Jesuit boys school, and then attended Rice University where he earned both a bachelor's and a master's degree in computer science. Mr. Armstrong worked for IBM, for Deloitte, and for Airbnb. And then in 2012, at the age of not quite 30, as I make it out, he founded Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange of which he remains chief executive officer. Coinbase now has a market capitalization of some $52 billion. Brian, welcome.
Brian Armstrong: Thank you for having me.
Peter Robinson: Okay, we have to begin with this. I'm going to quote a Twitter post, X post as it's called now, from something called Coinbase Support. And this is a post a few days ago, and we're talking in early March. This is from the very end of February. Quote, "We are aware," we at Coinbase, "We are aware that some users may see a zero balance and may experience errors in buying or selling. Our team is investigating. Your assets are safe." Close quote. Service interruptions at Coinbase. What's going on?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah. Well, for better or worse, crypto continues to go through these cycles of massive run ups and then a correction down, and then another, you know, massive run up to the next cycle. And so basically over the last year when crypto was down, we started to plan for when this next cycle would happen. And we load tested our site assuming, you know, a 10x of traffic could come in at any moment, which is pretty unheard of in most industries. Usually you might see a 20 or 30% increase. A 10x is pretty massive.
Peter Robinson: Tsunami stuff.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, and when the Bitcoin price kind of surpassed the previous all time high in the last few weeks, we saw more than a 10x come in in as little as an hour. And so there were some display errors that occurred on the site and things like that, but it didn't affect any of the assets held underneath. And unfortunately now that people are really relying on us, not just people who use the Coinbase app directly, but actually like, you know, massive financial institutions are building on top of our infrastructure, we've really gotta keep investing in that infrastructure to get to the next level.
Peter Robinson: Okay, so this is a glitch, all in lowercase letters. This was not an important event.
Brian Armstrong: Well, it was important from our customer's point of views and the other companies that rely on us. So, you know, there's no excuse for it, but the one you're referencing was a display error, yeah.
Peter Robinson: Okay. All right. Listen, I want to get to all kinds of things that are really profound and fascinating in my opinion. But first I'm conscious, because I've been asking friends all week, what do you make of crypto? What do you make of, I am conscious that at least I am of a generation in which, if you say, what do you think of crypto, you'll get some people who love it and some people who hate it just like spinach. But you'll also get some people say, well, I've never really understood. So can we just quickly do the basics? What the heck is a cryptocurrency?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, so when people talk about crypto, I mean, it's such a broad term. Crypto is really a technology that can be used to update the financial system in a bunch of different ways. And people have built many different things. But maybe let's start with maybe the first and the most important thing that crypto was able to build, which was Bitcoin. And you know, Bitcoin, you should just think of it as digital money. It's decentralized, so there's no country or company that controls it. It's a little bit like gold in that sense. There's no central authority. And so it's decentralized, it's probably scarce, like gold, and people are really treating it as this new form of digital money. And so that alone is a really powerful breakthrough, which kicked off this whole industry. We can talk about some of the other things that have come subsequently to that, but I think that's a good starting place for crypto.
Peter Robinson: So can I, you gave me a few reading assignments, and I have to say as I got into the technical aspects of hashing this, my head almost exploded. But I found this passage from a piece that Marc Andreessen, one of your board members wrote. Quote, "Cryptocurrency at its most fundamental level is a breakthrough in computer science. One that builds on decades of research in cryptography. It's a way for one internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another internet user such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure. Crypto gives us that for the first time." Okay, now why did I find that striking? Because, cranky old guy that I am, I was thinking, I found myself, I had bought into this, oh, it's some crazy thing that kids have invented. That's not so. Cryptocurrency is built on cryptography, which is an intellectual discipline, goes back at least to the second World War, to Bletchley Park and the efforts to break the Nazis codes and so forth. So what we're dealing with here, so let me try this out on you. If you take Marc Andreessen at his word here, and I assume you tend to do that because he is on your board. He's saying that crypto, that the technology that makes crypto possible, the code that makes crypto possible, belongs right up there, well, in the 20th century, we invented rockets that can go to space and computers. And in the 21st century, we've invented crypto. It belongs right up there as a major human achievement. Now am I allowed to believe that or is that getting a little overheated?
Brian Armstrong: I think that's a very fair statement. I think crypto is as important of an invention as the birth of the internet. And it truly is a computer science breakthrough. Now the research paper, the Bitcoin white paper that was published, happens to be published by an anonymous person. So we don't actually even know who wrote it, which is its own fascinating topic. But if we did know, I feel pretty confident that person probably would've been a Turing Award winner, which is kind of like, you know, the Nobel Prize for computer science. And so what it did, maybe a simplified way to think of the computer science breakthrough underlying it, is that prior to that paper, things in the digital world, it was very easy to make copies, right? So if I take a photo on my phone, I can send it to you, I can send it to my mother, whatever. You could make infinite copies of that image for free. The Bitcoin white paper showed a way that you could have a digital item that's probably unique. That's a powerful idea. Because now you can enforce scarcity and you can start to represent assets, whether that's money, digital gold, commodities, stocks, you know, you can start to digitize these things in a way that are provably unique. People can't just make infinite copies of it. And it really allowed there to be this new-
Peter Robinson: You can enforce property rights is one way to think of it.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, that's exactly right.
Peter Robinson: Okay. Okay, all right. One other basic. Coinbase is an exchange. What's an exchange?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, well, I usually like to say that Coinbase is the easiest way that people can, they can buy and sell crypto, they can store it safely, but they can also use it for increasingly more and more things. And so, but just to touch on the exchange point, because that's often the first way that people get involved. They have to come in and buy a little bit of it to understand it and start to use it. So an exchange is really just maintaining a list of people who, at any given moment, they wanna buy or sell a particular crypto asset and you're making an order book. So it's a little bit like the Nasdaq or the New York Stock Exchange. And if you have bids, you know, they call them bids and asks in this order book, and anytime somebody is willing to pay more than the person who's willing to sell it for the least, the prices cross and a transaction occurs. And so operating an exchange is certainly one of the things we do.
Peter Robinson: Okay. All right. So, I'll just... Here's my experience with Coinbase. About five years ago, maybe six years ago, a friend convinced me to buy a 10th of a Bitcoin. He said, don't buy a whole Bitcoin, just buy a 10th of a Bitcoin. So I set up an account on Coinbase and I tried to buy a 10th of a Bitcoin. I think the Bitcoin was then at about 11 thousand, so I tried to spend a thousand dollars roughly, and you guys had controls in place. That day I could only spend 700 because you had to verify my credit card, you'd only let me spend 700. So I spent 700 on Bitcoin and I got up the next morning and it was worth 300. And I thought, God did not put me on earth to invest in Bitcoin. So I forgot about it. Along comes Brian Armstrong, the date for this show. And I thought, I wonder. By a miracle, I had saved my password, I checked my account, it's still there.
Brian Armstrong: How much is it worth now?
Peter Robinson: And now it's worth a little over $3,000. And not only that, the displays, I mean it's attractively done, and what got my attention, I'm used to this old notion of if you're in a mutual fund, you mark to market every day. But there's a little window there where the value of my 10th of a Bitcoin goes up or down. It's adjusted by a few pennies, well, I think at intervals of about three seconds or so. This is not marketing to market at the end of each day. This is marketing to market every three seconds. It's an astonishing thing.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, I mean the market for it, it's 24/7, 365. There are people constantly trading these things. And crypto has been, especially, you know, Bitcoin, all these assets, they've been pretty volatile over the last 10 years. It's a nascent asset class, but I'd say over the last 10 years it's got less and less volatile. If you look at the extremes, like the peak, the trough, it's just partly because there's more and more people coming in to trade it now. There's about 52 million Americans who've used crypto at this point. And I think if you look at the last 10 years, or maybe even go back three years, five years, 10 years, each of those, I think it was the best performing asset class over that time. So, it's pretty remarkable. It has been volatile, but it started from a small base with wild swings and now it's become the best performing asset class of the last decade.
Peter Robinson: Best performing, but also, even as the volatility decreases, the bounces decrease.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, now, to be clear, it's still a lot more volatile than say, you know-
Peter Robinson: GM stock.
Brian Armstrong: GM, yeah. Or a major fiat currency or something like that for Bitcoin. But I think that over time as you get to, I don't know, a billion, 2 billion people who have used this thing, it'll start to approach probably the volatility of like, Bitcoin will probably approach the volatility of gold and then it may actually even get less volatile than that. Now there's no central bank, no central authority who's kind of changing interest rates to try to dampen the swing. So I don't think it'll be maybe as less, like the US dollar at some point, but it'll be closer to gold probably.
Peter Robinson: Okay. All right. We'll come to all that. Founding Coinbase. In 2008, this anonymous person who calls himself, I'm not sure I can pronounce this Brian, so correct me. Satoshi Nakamoto?
Brian Armstrong: That's right.
Peter Robinson: Satoshi is what everybody calls him, right?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: And we don't even know if it's a him or her, we know nothing about this person. Publishes a fairly elaborate, but I mean technically elaborate, but quite brief white paper, and a couple of, which describes the technical basis for this new thing that the unknown person is calling Bitcoin. And a couple of years later you read that white paper and what goes off in your head?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, I mean this was a really interesting moment. So I was home for the holidays in December of 2010. And you know, sometimes I get a little overwhelmed with all the family bustling around the house. So I just kind of retreated to my room and started reading some things on the internet. And I happened to come across this Bitcoin white paper, and as you said, it's pretty dense. Now remember I had a master's degree in computer science-
Peter Robinson: And you're the son of two engineers as well. I mean this is, you grew up in a household where people understood this kind of stuff.
Brian Armstrong: Well, I had certainly read research papers in college. And I had a bachelor's degree in economics. So I had some basics, but it's a dense, even for me, it was like dense paper. But as I was reading it, I remember having this thought where I was like, this is really interesting. In fact, this might be the most interesting, important thing I've read in a long time. And it was describing this kind of crazy idea, which was that, well, we have the internet, and the internet is a decentralized thing that no country controls and that's really democratized how we move information around. But what if we had a similarly decentralized protocol that democratized how we move value around? And this comes to that idea of provable scarcity of digital assets. It's not just information which can be duplicated everywhere. It's actually valuable because each of these can probably be unique. And I remember all these thoughts kind of went through my head. I had to reread that paper probably four or five times, by the way. But I remember thinking, would anybody actually use this? Why would they trust it? Would governments try to shut it down? Could there be some flaw in the cryptography that would kind of blow the whole thing up? And I kind of just couldn't stop thinking about it for about six months. And I started to go to these early Bitcoin meetups around the Bay Area. And I can tell you that was quite an experience too, if you wanna talk about that. So yeah, that was how it started.
Peter Robinson: Unusual people in the early days.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, the people who would show up there, so I kind of lovingly say like, half of them were computer science PhDs that were really interested in this cryptography and whatnot. And the other half were kind of like anarchists. And there were even, I think, some homeless people who showed up that were just kind of like, you know, just wanted free drinks or whatever. And so it was a really like, ragtag crew. I mean, did you ever see those photos of the computer club with Steve Wozniak and they all have huge beards and they're wearing sandals? It felt a little bit like that. It was like, a very hacker house kind of... It was not JP Morgan, let's put it that way.
Peter Robinson: Okay. Got it. Got it, got it. And so, okay, from reading the paper, excuse me, from reading the paper, you co-found Coinbase. That's a story in itself, but you've already told that story. And I want viewers to know this, that it's a fascinating story. But you've told that story to Guy Raz in his series of a podcast called How I Built This. So I won't take you through all that, although it's fascinating. But I do wanna stress this, this is from a blog post you wrote a couple of years ago. This is quoting you. "From the earliest days I built Coinbase to harness the power of cryptocurrency to create more freedom in the world. Silicon Valley, I understand to make more money, but to create more freedom in the world is an unusual idea. Explain.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah. I am very passionate about this idea of economic freedom. And I think that if you go look at what that even means, because most people don't even know what that means, you know, it's a term that economists use to look at the different countries of the world and they kind of look at different metrics like, is there sound currency? Are there property rights that are enforced? You know, how prevalent are corruption and bribery and can people engage in free trade? It's all this kind of wonky stuff. But I think to me it's very important because it basically touches on this idea of if I try to do something good for the world, can I be rewarded for that and actually keep it, right? And if that's true, like property rights, these very, you know, then people will try to do more good stuff. And I, you know, if you look at the data, this is actually highly correlated with really positive things that you want in society. So high economic freedom countries, they have not just higher GDP growth and things like that, but they have higher self-reported happiness of citizens, better treatment of the environment, less corruption-
Peter Robinson: Cleaner air, cleaner water, better schools.
Brian Armstrong: Right, it even correlates with like, having less war and, you know, and I had seen a little bit of this, like I spent a year living in Argentina in Buenos Aires. And I got to see a country that used to be one of the top 10 countries in the world, this kind of Paris of South America. And essentially through a series of these negative government actions, had fallen to maybe, you know, 120th place in the world. And it was this society that had really been ruined by, you know, high inflation and corruption, and really a lack of property rights. I mean, people's assets could just be seized at a moment. And the poorest people in society were kind of having their wealth eroded because they were holding cash. And so I kind of, I was very much a student of that and very excited about it. And I'd seen some of your interviews with Milton Friedman and all these things. And so when I first saw the Bitcoin white paper, it took me a little bit to get to this conclusion, but I think the thing that excited me about it that I was later able to articulate was that, I said this actually might be the most important technology that could increase economic freedom around the world because it would essentially take anybody who had a smartphone, which increasingly was everybody in the world, and said if you just have a smartphone and an internet connection, no matter what country you live in, if you're in a corrupt regime or whatever, you know, you can have access to good financial infrastructure, you can have access to sound money that can't be inflated away. You can have access to property rights. And if we could inject that good financial infrastructure into the countries all over the world, it would actually lift the world out of poverty. We'd see more innovation. And so I got really excited about that idea.
Peter Robinson: So this, one of the things you mentioned that really fascinates me, so I wanna take you back to it and not go through it too quickly. You spent a year in Argentina after graduating from Rice and you were down there to do what? You were just traveling to see the world?
Brian Armstrong: Well, yeah, I was basically, I was working on a startup at the time in the education space, and I could live anywhere while I was doing that. And so I had never really done a semester abroad or I was never in the military or anything. And so I felt like somehow, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and I somehow was like, okay, I need to get out of my comfort zone, and go see the world and not live a sheltered life. And so I just moved there kind of on a whim and I was like, okay, I'm gonna, I wasn't planning to live there. I was basically just planning to show up and maybe do a month in different cities around the world and yeah, I was trying to put myself out of my comfort zone, figure out what I wanted to do.
Peter Robinson: So, I've only been to Buenos Aires once, but I imagine it's a similar experience that you had. You walk around Buenos Aires and you're looking at buildings that were built when the country was wealthy and self-confident. It's a city that you look around and you think, the city displays this shabby gentility. There was a time when it must have glowed, right? And then you become aware, because it's in the press and it's in the streets actually, it's particularly in the streets. If you are an American at a hotel, somebody's going to approach you and offer to do a deal between pesos and dollars. So you say to yourself, a currency that's unreliable. Bitcoin could fix that. A corrupt establishment. Bitcoin could fix that. Insecure property rights. Bitcoin could reassert property rights. So all of this is going through your head. The experience in Argentina is in your head as you're reading the white paper and thinking, wait a minute, I've been in a country that could have been transformed if it had had, all right. Okay, so Coinbase goes public in 2021. Brian, I have news for you. You now have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders. Your job is not to expand freedom in the world. Your job is to make your shareholders the highest returns you can. So isn't there a tension now between the stated mission, which as I understand it, is still very much the mission. You still emphasize this. The stated mission and just plain old what corporate America and your investors are going to expect of you?
Brian Armstrong: Actually, I don't think so. I think they're very much aligned. I think great companies should have a big important mission in the world that's beyond just making money. But usually the only way to actually go accomplish that mission is you need a lot of capital and you need a lot of really talented people, right? And so, how do you do that? I mean, you've gotta have a great business model and you've gotta generate a profit and you've gotta be able to use that capital to apply it towards even more important things so you can grow and make progress towards that mission. So, you know, example would be in the US, for instance, we operate our trading business, right? Which is very profitable. And we help a lot of people get fiat currency into cryptocurrency. And that's good. It just helps grow the crypto ecosystem. Now sometimes there's areas of the world, like in emerging markets where we say, well, it's not that there's a huge market there. Maybe people don't have as much money, but there's a high need from a mission point of view of they would benefit enormously from cryptocurrency. I mean, people in the US would benefit from it somewhat in some of these areas. If they're experiencing 140% inflation a year or confiscation of their wealth, it's like a existential problem for them. And so we've tried to build some products which actually serve emerging markets, too. And I think those could be interesting businesses over time, but we have to be appropriate capital allocators and make sure we're investing in the core so that we have, it throws off enough cash, so we can do the next adjacent business and some venture bets. But you don't want to get too distracted and have the venture bets become the main thing because you'll run out of money and you'll never accomplish the mission.
Peter Robinson: Okay, so you're a businessman with a mission, but you're a businessman.
Brian Armstrong: Sure. And by the way, that's how you attract the best people in the world to come work for you, too. You have to have an important mission that's about something bigger.
Peter Robinson: One more question about the founding of Coinbase. I wanna ask some questions about the current culture of Coinbase, but one more question about the founding. The Wall Street Journal not long ago did a profile of you in which they called you, I think I'm quoting this exactly, "the last man standing." And we know why that is. That's because Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded FTX, the gigantic crypto exchange, blew up and is now in prison. And because Changpeng Zhao, who founded Binance, which I think is the biggest crypto exchange in the world, has now pled guilty to violating US money laundering laws and he awaits sentencing. So, I want you to address this because in the back of their minds, people who are aware of these two cases and everybody's aware of them, they were huge news, still will be huge news. Changpeng Zhao is awaiting sentencing. How can you convince me that Coinbase is just fundamentally different?
Brian Armstrong: Well, I think seeing those, two of our major competitors really stumbled in a massive way. It was really validating of this strategy that we've taken over the last, I don't know, 11, 12 years now. Both FTX and Binance are relatively new companies. Coinbase has been around a long time and we've seen lots of ups and downs of these cycles. And unfortunately in the up cycles, we tend to see new entrants come in. And sometimes, especially the offshore unregulated exchanges, there's a little bit of like, cut corners, break the rules, you know, get rich or die trying kind of vibe that happens. And we see sometimes companies like these startups offshore that'll rocket up in popularity, but then they'll kind of blow up in spectacular fashion as well. So, Coinbase has taken a very different approach over the last 11 years. You know, from the earliest days we said, all right, I wanna build this company in America. I'm an American citizen. It was always obvious to me that you have to follow the law that exists today. We're probably gonna need new laws for cryptocurrency. because there's a couple areas of the law where it's a little unclear. But in the absence of that clarity, you know, don't try to steal a base, try to do something reasonable that you think would be the right thing to do in the absence of clarity. And so the earliest days we went and met with regulators, you know, I the put on the suit and tie, and we kind of advocated for clear legislation. We got all the licenses that were available to us at the time. Did that now in more and more markets around the world. So I think the last few years have been very validating of that strategy. By the way, if you're gonna follow a regulated compliant approach, you can't always move as fast. And that was sometimes really difficult to see, especially in 2021 when these competitors were rocketing up and our investors and people would ask us like, well, why haven't you launched that and that and that? And so there it required a certain amount of discipline to say no to those things at that time.
Peter Robinson: Okay, Coinbase culture. We've already talked about this mission of freedom, but there's a story about Coinbase in 2020 that I've heard, because it's a famous story now in Silicon Valley, and I want to hear it from you. It's the autumn of 2020. And this is a vexed moment in the United States of America. The death of George Floyd has led to protests, riots. At a Coinbase company meeting, some of your employees demanded that you and the company formally in one way or another, support Black Lives Matters. This is the way the story has come to me. And what happened next says something about how you built Coinbase. What did happen next?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, so this was a very interesting leadership moment for me as a new CEO. And you know, I had never really received a demand from employees like that before in the past. The sorts of questions that we'd get at town hall meetings, it was like, you know, how are we gonna beat this competitor? How are we gonna comply with this regulation?
Peter Robinson: Business questions.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: How do we advance the mission and the product?
Brian Armstrong: And I noticed around that time I started getting more and more questions at these town halls that were really about broader societal issues that were not even really related to our product or our mission. And it was uncomfortable, I have to say. In fact, I almost feel like there was a little bit of a feeling of how do we make the executives squirm on stage with the most difficult pressing questions of our time? And you know, I certainly don't claim to have, there's a lot of hard problems in the world that Coinbase does not focus on. I'm interested in those. I sometimes have opinions, I sometimes don't, but I don't think that it's my job to solve those. And it's also okay if everybody in the company has sometimes different points of view on how to do that. Now of course it's kinda like a polite thing, right? If you're at the dinner table at Christmas with all your relatives, it's like, you know, try to stay out of religion and politics or whatever if people are a little bit controversial or they get triggered by all these things. So it's like, my perspective was, we're here to work on work, we're here to work on the mission of the company. But increasingly I was getting people getting into massive debates with each other and upset with each other. And it culminated in this walkout actually, where I think 300 or 400 employees kind of walked out of the company, refused to work in protest, because we hadn't decided whether we wanted to support BLM. I later found out things which caused me a lot of concern about BLM, but at the time I didn't really know very much about it. And so that was a really stressful moment. So we got the team together and we said, okay, let's get people back to work. And I kind of said, okay, we'll look into this, and we'll support it in some way, shape, or form kind of noncommittally. But after a few months went by and this was really eating at me, and I was like something, I failed to create clarity in the company. I'd always been kinda walking on eggshells when people got into these topics and I realized I'm failing as a leader if I don't create clarity in this moment about what this company's all about and where we're going. And so I wrote this blog post which kind of got circulated around Silicon Valley about being a mission first company. And I essentially told the employees, look, we're gonna be an apolitical company. We're not gonna engage in broader societal issues or employee activism unless it's related to our mission, which is purely about crypto and economic freedom. And you know, I failed to make that really clear to everybody in the past. I'm now making it clear. If you feel like that's not what you signed up for, here's an exit package that you can take. I think it was, you know, three to five months severance based on your tenure. And about, by the way, a number of employees and executives kinda told me, oh my gosh, like, don't publish this. It's gonna be super controversial. Like, no underrepresented person will ever work at this company again. People told me all kinds of things. And I went to talk to the different employee groups and I wasn't hearing that from them. And they were telling me, you know, I just want to show up at a place where I can do good work and learn, contribute towards something important. It's kind of like what everybody else wants. So I made a very contrarian, but I think right decision at that time, which was, I'm gonna post it. And I knew that there was gonna be a firestorm and it was going to be controversial, but it actually turned out to be, I think, one of the best decisions I ever made for the company. Because after that 5% of employees resigned, they took the exit package, they said that's not what I signed up for. I said, great, thank you very much.
Peter Robinson: And goodbye.
Brian Armstrong: And goodbye. And after that, the company was aligned. We didn't waste all this time in unnecessary debates about whatever controversial topic of the day. We said, hey, we're gonna bring in people from all different backgrounds and different beliefs, but we're all unified in our belief about cryptocurrency and economic freedom. We're gonna focus on that at work. And I have to say, the job as CEO got a lot easier. A lot of other Fortune 500 CEOs called me and kind of said like, oh my gosh, how did you do this? We wanna do the same thing. They were all feeling under so much pressure, like there's just so much activism, we can't get anything done. And I mean, you're seeing elements of this still happen to this very day, like, you know, inside Google, et cetera. And so I think and I hope it'll be a playbook for other companies to follow. We were early, we got a lot of hit pieces on it. But I think now where people are, they've realized that that was probably the right thing to do.
Peter Robinson: That says something about Coinbase. If I may, it also says something about you. You seem like a peach of a guy. You also have to be tough, because all of Silicon Valley was moving in one direction and Brian Armstrong said, nope, not Coinbase. We're gonna do business.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: Okay. All right. I just, I'm making a mental note. Don't cross this guy. Okay, so this brings us to, we've got culture, we've got your management technique. We've established that you can be strong. And this brings us to Coinbase and the Securities and Exchange Commission. So give me a moment to set this up. SEC Commissioner Gary Gensler has called crypto, quote, "exceptionally risky and often volatile." And he has compared crypto exchanges to, again a quote, "the Wild West." Congress has never enacted anything like a comprehensive regulatory framework for crypto. So Gary Gensler has been attempting to bring crypto under the SEC's regulatory ambit by lawsuit. He's engaging in regulation by enforcement, I think is the term that's used in Washington, one lawsuit after another. So you find out what the regulation is when the SEC sues you. The central question here, as I understand it, I'm setting this up, correct the setup if you need to when I get to the question, do cryptocurrencies represent commodities or securities? To put it extremely crudely, are they more like pork bellies or like stock in General Motors? Gensler insists that most cryptocurrencies are indeed securities, which gives the SEC the right to regulate them. And Brian Armstrong has said, no, I don't think so. And you, not you, Coinbase, has sued the Securities and Exchange Commission, which forces me to remind you of another rule of running a public company, which is you keep the SEC off your back, whatever you do. What are you thinking? What are you doing?
Brian Armstrong: Well, I think we certainly don't relish being engaged in any litigation with the SEC, or any one of our regulators. And I think you're right, the general rule, and this was the advice everybody said, like especially, I don't know, three or four years ago and up until then, the norm was you always just go in, work with the SEC, say yes, settle it out of court. I think under this SEC by the way, we're not alone. There's a lot of people engaged in litigation with the SEC now, and it's gotten to a place where they're really just not engaging in all cases, in good faith with the industry. There is a requirement that they actually have around rulemaking. It's something called the Administrative Procedures Act, which is, if they're gonna make a new rule, they have to engage in a comment period and then publish what the rules are. And then if you publish what the rules are and people aren't following it, then of course there should be enforcement actions, right? But if there's no clear rules, how can you go right to an enforcement action? That's actually against the law. And unfortunately, I think, you know, by the way, Gary Gensler is a smart guy. He actually taught a class at MIT on crypto and blockchains. If you go watch those videos, he knows, he understands the potential of this technology. He even says in those videos that some of these are commodities, some of them are securities. And it was only when he became SEC chair and I think there could be his own, you know, political motivations for this or career motivations. But he then suddenly became very, you know, sure that suddenly these were all securities. That's not what he said previously. And I think the reason is that in the US we have two federal regulators. We have the CFTC for commodities, the SEC for securities. by the way, in the UK they don't have this issue. There's just one regulator, the FCA. And when I go there, the regulator never talks about this difference of commodities and securities. They don't really care. It's all under one regulator. Same thing in Singapore. The US for historical reasons has two. And so suddenly it's become this massive turf war and an issue about which ones are which.
Peter Robinson: So your substantive argument, Coinbase's substantive argument is, it doesn't go to this question of commodities and securities, it goes to the question of procedure. Is that right? Have I got it right?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: You are arguing in court that the SEC doesn't get to make up the rules by suing people. It gets to make up the rules the way the commission makes rules, comment period publish, the rules.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, if you publish the rules, then people will follow them, yes.
Peter Robinson: That's the argument that you're making in court.
Brian Armstrong: It is. And by the way, my point of view is that there are some cryptos, like I said, it's a technology that can be used to update the financial system. I think that can be used to update crypto commodities. There's a lot that probably should be commodities. I think it could be interesting for crypto securities too. It could make how securities are traded and capital formation a lot more efficient. But there needs to be a process to actually go register these securities with the SEC, which in my view, they don't have at all today. And so it should be both. Crypto could create interesting commodities and securities. In the absence of this clarity, again, we took a very conservative approach at Coinbase. We evaluated thousands of different crypto assets. We rejected, I think, roughly 90% of them. We said, that's a little unclear, but these 10%, they vert clearly fit into what a commodity, how it would be defined. And you know, we worked with outside counsel and we had committees opine on this and we wrote all kinds of paper.
Peter Robinson: You spent money on it.
Brian Armstrong: Stacks of paper for every, so yeah, I think we showed a lot of good faith effort. And so, you know, for the SEC to come in and say, well, these are all securities, then we'll say, well, how did you get to that conclusion? You know, which ones and why? And we were just met with silence. I think we met with them 30 different times over a period of a year. Never got a single piece of feedback about them. And so it was really like, the message I was kind of hearing from them was basically, shut down the whole thing or you'll get an enforcement action. And then the rules were never clear. And so it was kind of an easy decision to go to court because, you know, I think that we're right on the facts and we're right on the law. And the only other alternative was to kind of stop doing the business.
Peter Robinson: I wanna come to the question of regulation apart from the SEC in a moment. But you've got this case making its way through the court, it feels to me, and according to the reading I did, other people agree, this feels like the kind of thing that could go all the way to the Supreme Court. So do you have some notion of how long it will take to get a resolution in this case? This could go on for years, it feels like to me.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, well, so it depends. I mean, we recently filed a motion to dismiss, it's rare for things to get dismissed this early in the case. But I think, you know, people looking at other judges that have ruled on other cases at this moment, they're kind of saying, wow, I think Coinbase has a really good chance of winning this. So whether we win it kind of earlier or we win it later, I feel pretty confident we're gonna win it. It'd be interesting if it went to the Supreme Court. We'd probably have to see different opinions in different, you know, districts. But I think under this Supreme Court, that actually would be a good outcome for us. You know, I think we like our chances even better if it went there. So the SEC probably doesn't want that.
Peter Robinson: So now while we're still on this question of regulation, because what's impressive to me is on the one hand, you say I got interested in this when it was a bunch of crazy libertarians and I'm interested in promoting freedom. That sounds like you're a crazy libertarian yourself or started out that way. Then you say, but what distinguishes Coinbase from these offshore crazies is that we're good guys.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: We try very hard to obey the regulations. We develop relationships with the regulators. And over the long term, we're American patriots. We believe that the industry needs its sane regulation. So regulation matters to you. Okay. So imagine for a moment that we had a functional congress, and who knows, maybe after the election we might. Imagine we had a functional congress that did its job and did enact a regulatory framework for this growing and exciting new sector of the economy, cryptocurrency. And then the SEC didn't need to engage in regulation by enforcement because Congress would've done its job. What should that regulatory framework look like?
Brian Armstrong: So, this is a great question. I mean, this is exactly what, by the way, the rest of the G20 countries are all doing at this point. Like Europe has actually already passed this legislation called MiCA. You know, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Canada, they're all in various stages of doing this. So the US is actually kind of behind on this process, which gets to some of the dysfunction happening in DC but I believe it'll come together. There's political will and there's 52 million Americans who now actually want to elect pro-crypto candidates that understand you have to balance the innovation potential of this with protecting consumers. So we need a comprehensive framework. We can't have a politicized SEC just trying to shut it down or something. Okay. So what should that framework look like? So some areas of the law around this are actually already clear. I don't think they need an update. So for instance, anti-money laundering rules, the way that sanctions are enforced, you can create a trust company or get money transmission licenses. These things can be useful already for all types of financial service companies, including crypto companies. The part of the law that's really the least clear is what we touched on earlier. Which of these are commodities, which of these are securities? Assuming we're gonna continue to have two federal regulators we need to sort of clearly delineate. Sometimes something could start as a security, but become a commodity over time once it's sufficiently decentralized. And those are really the kind of key questions that need to get this so that we don't occasionally have a politicized regulator try to weaponize the lack of clarity. That's what Congress needs to do. And I should say there's actually two bills going through the house committees that got bipartisan support already. And I think some of those may come to a full house floor vote maybe this year. If that goes well, they could go to the senate next year. So, we along with a bunch of people in the industry, are trying to help make that happen.
Peter Robinson: So as you work this along, it sounds to me as though you think it'll be a single digit number of years before we get the SEC settled down and get regulation that makes sense. You see it coming together.
Brian Armstrong: I do think over the next few years we'll see a lot more clarity. And the reason is that we have a couple horses in this race. So one is the court case. One way to get clarity is actually just to create case law. And in some ways it doesn't even matter what the outcome of the court case is.
Peter Robinson: You get clarity.
Brian Armstrong: Yep. You can point to what a judge ruled. And the court system can overrule the SEC, right? So that starts to get clarity. The other option is congress. So these bills can start making progress. You know, we could have a different administration, different SEC heads that could, or CFTC heads that could start to come out and put clarity out there. So there's a few options like that that could, I think help. I think we'll start to get more and more clarity. Another example is like, we just got these ETFs approved for Bitcoin and the SEC-
Peter Robinson: Exchange traded fund is what ETF stands for.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, and so the SEC had to approve that.
Peter Robinson: That did that very grudgingly though.
Brian Armstrong: Begrudgingly, yeah. The courts really had to compel them to do it. But it's an approval nonetheless. And so now all these new pools of capital are coming in, so we're just kind of moving the ball forward one yard every day. And I think it's on the right track, even if it's frustratingly slow.
Peter Robinson: Okay. Brian, may I play devil's advocate for a moment?
Brian Armstrong: Sure.
Peter Robinson: And when I say devil's advocate, what I mean is I'm going to assume the role of Warren Buffet and his late investing partner, Charlie Munger. And Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger make the point often that you can't use this stuff, you can't use Bitcoin in transactions. And I, even a moment ago, quoted a piece by Marc Andreessen, one of your board members. He wrote, Marc Andreesen wrote, "Critics point to limited usage by ordinary consumers and merchants. But that criticism was leveled against PC's and the internet at the same stage. Every day, more and more consumers and merchants are buying, using, and selling Bitcoin." Marc Andreessen wrote that 10 years ago. And transactions are still at a very, very low level. How come?
Brian Armstrong: Well, I'd say it's actually grown a lot since 2014. If that's when it was written, I think. But I at that time there was probably only, you know, maybe single digit millions of Americans who had used crypto at that time. There's now about 52 million. And so by the way, globally, I think it's probably about 400 million or so people have used it. So oftentimes people go through, I think partly that criticism is correct. By the way, let me just acknowledge that.
Peter Robinson: Yeah, but nobody pays for groceries with crypto or tanks up with crypto, right? Okay.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, so everyday items, especially kind of in retail merchants in the United States they're not gonna be the earliest adopters of this. The more early adopters of it are people, it's basically digital payments, so online, and then it's in emerging markets. And I will say if you'd asked me 10 years ago, I actually would've thought we had have made more progress to now.
Peter Robinson: You would've expected more.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: You and Marc Andreessen were together.
Brian Armstrong: And I can talk a little bit about why I think that is, but still, I don't want to fully acknowledge the point that it's very small. Because I think getting 400 million people in the world to use anything is actually a really great step if you zoom out 10 years. Look at the trajectory of the internet kind of through the eighties and nineties. So people start often using crypto. they want to buy a piece of it to sort of, hey, this is interesting. I might wanna own a piece of the future. It's a little bit like when domain names first came out on the internet and some people are like-
Peter Robinson: Buy them up for fun.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, yeah. Who knows, maybe this will be valuable someday. That was kind of the early days. It's often still how people get their feet wet. Then we saw people start to use crypto for payments. And especially with US dollar backed stable coins and what's called layer two, which is allowing payments to be faster and cheaper. You know, we've started to actually see quite a bit more activity in the payment space, especially in emerging markets, which I can talk about if you want. And then more recently we've seen people start to use crypto for a few things. One of them is called NFTs, which are essentially artists who are trying to publish their work in a digital way so that they can have a relationship with their fans directly for monetization. Things like decentralized social media have just gotten started where it's censorship resistant. So you're not gonna get censored by big tech or something, but it's also a way where you can actually monetize social media directly and not, you know, have ads put on top of it by the platform. So anyway, there's a lot of utility that we can talk about that's emerging. I think if you make an analogy to the internet, the internet had to do a few things. First, you know, people don't remember this, the internet started off with just IP addresses and those are kind of machine readable, but they're not human readable. So we needed domain names to translate to IP addresses to get that to be kind of human readable and email addresses and things like that we could remember, not just a series of numbers. Crypto again started off with something kinda like IP addresses, like Bitcoin addresses just look like a random string of characters. We now have things that are more human readable and I can talk about what some of those are. So we had to make the names and addresses human readable. The second thing we had to do was actually get it to be more scalable. So the internet, remember, it kind of went through dial up to broadband. And you could load a page of text or something on dial up, but on broadband you could start to have more interactive applications. Crypto is going through its own kind of dial up to broadband moment, which is in crypto, it's called going from layer one to layer two. And then the other big thing that needed to get the internet to broad adoption was the web browser. You know, average people, they didn't really wanna be on a command line typing in commands. Once there was a web browser, anybody could use it. They didn't know underneath they were using these internet protocols like HTTP and SMTP, but they didn't know that, they just wanna click the link. And so there was this moment with Netscape and the early browsers that kind of opened up the aperture of how many people could use the internet without even caring about the underlying technology. And so crypto is, I think, it's yet to maybe have that moment where, how do we make this easy and accessible to a broad range of people? And that's part of what Coinbase is trying to do with our self custodial wallet, which I can talk about if you want. But anyway, I think those three pieces are probably going to, when we look back on crypto in five, 10 years, we'll say those were kind of similar moments that led to, okay, eventually we got to a couple billion people using it every day.
Peter Robinson: Okay, thank you. And now that was Warren Buffet. Now a couple seconds of Charlie Munger, his late investment party.
Brian Armstrong: By the way, I don't know if that answer would've helped Warren Buffet, but... I think his point of view may actually, I haven't met him personally, but I think his point of view might be a little bit more like the dollar is king and
Peter Robinson: Well, here's Charlie Munger.
- Crypto is evil because it undermines the Federal Reserve system and the national currency system, which we desperately need to maintain its integrity and government control and so on.
Peter Robinson: Okay, so that's a serious accusation. That's not just this thing isn't useful. Charlie Munger says, the late Charlie Munger says, that as crypto grows, more people hold crypto, fewer people hold dollars. That limits the ability of the Federal Reserve to control the currency, manage the economy, keep employment up, keep inflation down, all of that. And so what you are doing, as I understand Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet, their ordinary view would be, oh, what the heck, let Brian Armstrong play with Coinbase and see what emerges. That's the way the economy works. We take bets on things, we see what happens. But you're posing a threat to the currency of the United States. And he even goes as far as to call it evil. How do you answer that one?
Brian Armstrong: So I think this is actually the crux of the argument, and this is where people's views may diverge, but here I'll give you my perspective on it. So I think that one of the most patriotic things you can do for America is to ensure that western civilization continues to flourish and that the dollar remains relevant and everything is to have a check and balance on deficit spending and high inflation. You know, in 1971, we kind of went fully off the gold standard with Nixon. And because the dollar was no longer backed by any hard commodity, it allowed essentially unlimited inflation of the money supply. And since then, I think America has started to see challenges. There's actually a really great website. I think it's called WTF Happened in 1971. It just shows a whole bunch of charts that happened at that time and-
Peter Robinson: The troubles that started when we decoupled from gold.
Brian Armstrong: Right.
Peter Robinson: All right.
Brian Armstrong: And so, you know, I'm a US patriot. I think that America is a great country and I chose to build Coinbase here in this country. I think that if we don't have a check and balance on the dollar, there is not an incentive. Basically the incentive is for the supply to just be inflated away. And you can look at the history of this, you know, Ray Dalio has a great book on this, but essentially great empires fall when they lose the financial discipline with the currency and they lose the reserve currency status. And so-
Peter Robinson: So Brian, could I? I was thinking about Charlie, because when he said crypto is evil, I thought, ah, where does that even come from? Well, he died last year at the age of 99, and what that means is that he was an old enough man, so that a formative experience in his life was the depression, the Great Depression. And like a lot of people, I'm doing this because my parents, a lot of people who grew up during that period, the government in one way or another was important in getting us out of it. And in one way or another, the Feds, the Federal Reserve, the banking system, finally figured out what to do so that we don't have to go through that again. I just wonder whereas, if you take, we're recording this at Stanford University, you take the kids around here, since Joe Biden became president, inflation's eroded 20% of the value of the dollar. In other words if you're a younger person and you watch this happen, you don't think the Fed is that great in the first place. Is there some generational problem here?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, I mean, I think that you can look at it in the data. There's all these polls that show a loss of trust in our major institutions. But I think you're right, a well run Fed could actually manage the shocks in the system and the ups and the downs. And it's not just the Fed, by the way. I think they've actually done a reasonable job, all things considered. It's also just the way the incentives are set up in Congress, right? There's really no party right now that wants to pass a balanced budget. And so this is not just unique to America, by the way. It's true of every great empire. If you go back and look at the British and the Dutch and China, et cetera, they, once you have the reserve currency status, your temptation is to abuse it and to inflate. And eventually you go too far and you lose trust in the system. And so I think there needs to be an alternative, and people are kind of waking up to that, that Bitcoin is probably scarce. You don't have to trust the good intentions of man or mankind or women or anything. You're trusting the laws of math, right? They're unbreakable in that sense. And so it always kind of felt a little bit odd to me, or just it didn't feel right, that there was a very small number of people with their fingers on the dials of, you know, changing interest rates or the money supply writ large. It's like the Ring of Power. The potential for abuse is too tempting.
Peter Robinson: And we're all human after all. Even Jerome Powell is human after all.
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, and it's not just him. I think he's a reasonable person. But it's the system, and the incentives are set up wrong. And Argentina is just a hundred years further on this history, but you can see that America, America is still, I think, the strongest country in the world, and it's the best place to do business and everything. And I think there's nowhere else I'd rather be, but you can see some of the strain on the system. And I do think that the best way to ensure the survival of the dollar and making sure that that's a source of soft power for the US, we need a digitized dollar. The way to ensure the survival of America is to ensure that the currency is strong and we continue this American experiment. I actually think Bitcoin and crypto is really essential to that.
Peter Robinson: Got it. You have a company to run. So last questions here. You've run the company since it was founded, that's 11 years now. You're at a position in life in which you could go off and do anything else you wanted to do, but you have let it be known that you're going to continue to run Coinbase for some undetermined period of time. It's 11 years. Let's take another decade into the future. What is left for Coinbase to achieve?
Brian Armstrong: I mean I actually feel like we're very early on our mission, right? The last 10 years have been great. We've gotten a great exchange, and custodian in some of this utility applications off the ground. But how do we get to a billion or more people benefiting from this technology every day? You know, earning a living with it, paying for goods and services, paying friends and family, maybe even doing all kinds of things beyond financial services, which I alluded to, you know, with artists and businesses having direct relationships. Basically all the pieces of financial infrastructure that could help bring this economic freedom to the world. So I don't feel like the job's really done until we get at least a billion people using it every day.
Peter Robinson: So Brian, when I began prepping for this show, I didn't understand it. And the other thing that just threw me was I tend to defer to someone whose judgment of the markets has made him a billionaire, but on crypto, there are billionaires on both sides. But I go through my reading list, which you kindly provided, and you know what? A very strange thing happened. I began to see that certain arguments for crypto are really strong. So let me just go through a couple of these because there's a question at the end. Transactions. If you're a merchant over here in the shopping mall, every time somebody uses a credit card, you end up paying the credit card company 2%. You could drop that to almost zero by using Bitcoin or another crypto.
Brian Armstrong: Yep.
Peter Robinson: Security. Here's a headline from the New York Times Online just a couple days ago that I noted. "Cyber attack paralyzes the largest healthcare payment system. The hacking caused financial chaos from large hospitals to single doctor practices." The judicious use of crypto would have made that impossible, or extremely unlikely. From the point of view of securing payment financial systems, the benefits are enormous, right? And then here's one, because of my background, writing, the old journalism model has just collapsed. You used to sell the news against ads, but now Google has taken all the ads away. So Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are selling subscriptions and they sell, sell, and sell, and they can't get over 2 or 3 million people when you know that in a country of 330 million there are many tens of millions who'd be interested in this article or that article. Maybe not a subscription that costs several hundred dollars a year, but. And with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, you can do micro transactions. So I can pay 10 cents because that article interests me or a penny. Okay. You begin to see the things that crypto makes possible and you end up with a question, why hasn't this been more widely adopted already? And so, that's the question. The arguments in favor of this stuff are really quite powerful in specific ways that I would've expected to have been built political, I'm thinking in terms of the politics now, political constituencies pushing for wider acceptance, greater use, and for the SEC and Congress to get its act in order. Okay, so are we simply up against, is the slowness of the adoption of crypto for transactions, for example, the slowness of the political system to respond, is this simply a measurement of human inertia? Is that what's going on? Or is there something that I'm missing here? Are there deep suspicions, reasons to be cautious about this? Some kind of financial precautionary principle that I'm just plain missing?
Brian Armstrong: I mean, you're getting into an interesting psychology question about how progress happens, really. I mean, so part of it is generational. I do think that the 18 to 40-year-old demographic is actually much more interested in crypto. They're already using it more. Actually, the majority of people in that age group in America are actively looking for alternatives to the existing financial system. They don't think it's working for them. The fees are too high. There's delays, there's unequal access. And when I go to meet with members of Congress that are over 40, which is the majority of them, oftentimes they haven't personally used crypto, but their kids do and their staffers do. And so part of it is generational. And then I think you're right, there's a lot of people in America still paying their rent with paper checks. And so change does, and by the way, you know, our system of government, like you talked about, it's a feature and a bug, right? That we wanna have different branches of government so nobody can have unilateral power. But what it means is it's political. You know, you have to form these alliances. It takes a small miracle to get new laws passed. And so the government moves very slowly. And that's certainly been a barrier to innovation. In some cases we've seen active resistance, you know, in the case we talked about. But young people want this. They clearly understand this is the future and there's now 52 million million Americans have used it. And so they're gonna, as a constituency, by the way, that's like 3x the number of people who hold a union card, it's 5 times the number of people who own an electric vehicle. I think the generation in DC is actually just starting to take notice of, oh my gosh, this is a massive voter base, and it's just bad politics to be anti-crypto. You're not gonna win any votes by being anti-crypto, you're actually gonna turn off 52 million Americans. So I think this election in November is gonna be really interesting. There's organizations like StandWithCrypto.org that are kinda like a grassroots movement of people who want to vote for pro-crypto candidates. There's a super PAC that we donated to along with a bunch of others called Fairshake. It's one of the largest super PACs now. So this is gonna be a massive issue in this November election. And I think DC is gonna recognize that it's political suicide to be anti-crypto essentially at this point.
Peter Robinson: Okay. I have two last questions. Here's one. You're still only 41. You've already accomplished more than a lot of people even hope to accomplish with their whole lives. You are, to put it crudely, forgive me, but to put it crudely, you're rich. You're really rich. I also, to put it crudely, if I were in your position, I would be on a beach right now, not about to get back in a car and go off and run a big company. What's the rest of your life for?
Brian Armstrong: That's a great question. So, you know, once I had some amount of wealth built, I think this was a great question I had to ask myself. It's like, what do I wanna spend my time on, right? And not all parts of being a CEO are fun. You know, just like any job, to try to do something important, there's gonna be some parts of the work that are, oh my God, this is gonna suck. But I'd say if I zoom out, I do find it to be at the very least, very fulfilling. And at times it's very fun. I mean, I get to have cool conversations like this, you know, you wouldn't be talking to me if I was just some beach bum or whatever, right? Even if I had a lot of money. So, I also feel there's a certain sense of responsibility that people have to society. You know, we're living in a golden age of software innovation and fortunes are being made. If you're lucky enough to be one of the people who does generate a lot of wealth from software and building a company, I really like this idea of taking some of that capital and applying it to hard tech problems or, you know, going after things which could really move the ball in society, because there's, with a startup like a software company, you can raise relatively small amounts of money and there's high margins and it's a, no business is easy, but it's easier to be successful in software. If you wanna start, you know, doing rockets and cars and things.
Peter Robinson: That's harder.
Brian Armstrong: There's a company that I invested in, it's a biotech company that I'm helping out called NewLimit, working on longevity. There's a company I invested in called Research Hub that's trying to help accelerate scientific research. So I'm very much a believer in the power of technology and science to make the human condition better, to grow the economy, to improve all of these things. And crypto is one of those most important ones for economic freedom. But how do I take some of that capital that I've generated and try to make the future happen even faster? You know, that's really exciting to me. And I think I'd be really bored. In fact, I sometimes I try to go on vacation for a week and I feel kind of like, stressed and anxious at the end of it. I'm like, I don't know, I kinda wanna get back into it and do something. So personality wise, I don't think I'll ever really retire. I'm always gonna be working on something.
Peter Robinson: I think the Jesuit father's down at Bellarmine would be very proud of you.
Brian Armstrong: Well, yeah, I mean, Bellarmine-
Peter Robinson: Some sense of responsibility here. What do I do with this belt that's good, right?
Brian Armstrong: Yeah, I mean, the motto of Bellarmine actually is, you know, men for others. And I have to say at the time as I was going through high school, I didn't really think about it that much. You know, we would do some volunteer work and things like that, but I was very much focused on like, I don't know, I don't feel like I have time to think about other people. I need to get to college, I need to make some money. I need to, you know, do whatever my goals were. But I have to say, I don't know if it was just from that, but as I got older, it started to play up, play more in my mind and I started to think about, yeah, how do I try to do something good for team human. And capital helps.
Peter Robinson: Team human. Last question. There's a camera right here. What would you like to say to Warren Buffett?
Brian Armstrong: Well, I mean, I have a lot of respect for him and everything he accomplished in his career. And I've read lots of his books. Or at least his letters and things like that. You know, I don't feel like I need to convince him. I mean, he's a very sweet old man, and you know, it's not my, I don't feel like I need to go around and convince everybody about crypto. I think this trend will play out over time. And there's a little bit of this innovator's dilemma, right, that's like the incumbents, like, I don't expect every big bank CEO who I meet to just instantly fall in love with it. Although the smart ones are actually integrating it because they recognize they need to have a plan for it. I more just wanna focus on our customers and growing, making crypto more useful, make it more scalable. If we get a billion people using it every day, these are all gonna be non-issue. Everyone's gonna have to admit, okay, okay, begrudgingly, I guess it did provide something valuable in the world. So I try to mostly focus there. And for fun at dinner parties, I debate people sometimes, but it's not my primary focus.
Peter Robinson: Okay. Brian, thank you. Brian Armstrong, founder and chief executive officer of Coinbase. Thank you. For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution, and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.
