Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on the Evolving Future of Humans

**Brian Armstrong** (0:00)
The main thing for me is that we want to use this as a tool to accelerate progress, right? So, nature can be quite cruel. It's a little bit of a lottery. When people, children are born, they could end up having some really terrible disease that is no fault of their own. It's actually like a form of genetic privilege, if you will, that some people are just born on third base, and some people have something that's really terrible and debilitating. That shouldn't really be the case. I think that in 25 or 30 years, it could be actually inverted, where if someone is having children without some of these modern tools, it's kind of like the anti-vaxxers of today, or it would be considered a little bit luddite or risky or dangerous not to do it.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:54)
All right, friends, this is Ashlee Vance with another episode of the Core Memory Podcast. The headline news here is that our guest today is Brian Armstrong, the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, crypto god, as it were. The apology that follows is that I'm recording this on the road. The sound, or at least this intro part, may be less than ideal, and my bad is not made, as some of you who are watching may see. Otherwise, the sound on the podcast is fantastic, as is Brian. He usually gets peppered with crypto questions, and if you're into crypto, there's going to be some of that in there for you. However, I will not lie, I took him in a very different direction than he's ever gone in an interview before, which is that we talked science. Brian has been funding all kinds of interesting side startups. He tweets or exes regularly about some pretty out there concepts. I appreciate that he is unapologetic in his views, which are sometimes controversial. You might remember Brian caught some strays for trying to more or less ban political discussion at the office at Coinbase, and some employees walked out of the company. As a result, he's also been fairly combative with the media and with regulators, letting his views out in the open. And this rubs some people the wrong way. I, as ever, appreciate people who are willing to express themselves, live unusual, slightly eccentric lives, and stand by what they're doing. I think Brian's really eloquent on his views. They won't be for everyone, but at least you can hear how he thinks, and he was very generous with his time, and I think you'll enjoy the show.
Our continued quest to obliterate all other tech podcast is not complete, so please do go to Core Memory, YouTube, Spotify, Apple, wherever you like, and give us some love so that we can achieve a rightful position at the top of the podcast food chain, and my dulcet tones can be heard the world over. With that, listen to someone other than me. Come here, Brian, and enjoy. Thanks. Brian, hello. How are you?

**Brian Armstrong** (3:38)
Great.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:39)
You grew up in this area. Do you have this Silicon Valley stuff in your blood? I know both your parents were, one was an engineer, right? And your mom worked for IBM, I think.

**Brian Armstrong** (3:51)
Yeah, that's right. I grew up in San Jose, California, and really the.com boom was happening. I graduated high school in 2001, right as it blew up, but in high school, really, it was happening all around me. So my mom worked at IBM. We had early PCs in the home. My first job actually was building a website at a tech startup in someone's garage in Silicon Valley. And I didn't know actually at that time that I was a kid, so I didn't really understand. I just thought this was normal. But I went to school and other things I did in life, and I realized actually how special it was only later. And I eventually wanted to come back to Silicon Valley. But as a kid, I was very drawn to computers, and I was reading all about it in the tech press at that time in Wired magazine. And I was kind of enamored with these people, like Mark Andreessen showing up on the cover of magazines. And I loved computers, even as a young kid. I was kind of shy, nerdy, introverted. I wasn't as good with people, but I loved computers. And so I would read the business section of the San Jose Mercury News every day and try to learn what Apple and Microsoft and everybody were doing.

**Ashlee Vance** (5:00)
And you were, did you already have, so you had a, that's what you aspired to? Did you have a sense of what you were going to end up doing, or what you wanted to be, I guess?