Barry Weiss
speaker
976 appearances
13 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Barry Weiss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So it's like we're not going to go back to tethering to gold, but actually in the future, five years from now, you wouldn't be surprised if we were tethering the dollar to Bitcoin?
One of the things that makes ordinary Americans skeptical of crypto is how volatile it is, right? I think it was in 2022, crypto lost $2 trillion of its $3 trillion in market capitalization. You'll correct me if I'm wrong. And I think if like the dollar had gone through something like that, we would all be like, stay away from the dollar. How do you, you know, but crypto obviously is siloed.
So the people in your world and certainly you were affected. Most Americans weren't. But in a world where there was much wider, there was widespread adaptation of crypto, we all would have felt that. And I think that scares people away from it. What do you say to people about the volatility question?
I'm thinking about my mom listening in on this conversation and I just want to like keep her in mind as I ask you the following question.
I think that a lot of people will not understand like the comparison between a commodity like gold or ore or oil to gold. because crypto is a number on a computer. You know, it feels more like an idea. It doesn't feel like a real physical thing. Draw that out a little bit more. Explain why the comparison is correct.
One of the things that's hurt the broad brand, I know crypto is many things, but one of the things that's hurt, I think, public trust are the people that are now in prison. And, you know, companies like FTX, Binance, I'm sure there are other ones that you have in mind. Like, how do you overcome as an industry those kind of fraudsters that for many, like many people who hear crypto think of SBF?
And that's just like their immediate connection. Do you think that that's beginning to fade? How do you move away from it? What do you say to people who say, yeah, cool, the underlying technology here might be awesome, but the whole industry seems awash with scammers and grifters?
A lot of our parents are still on those spam lists, Brian.
One of the other criticisms of crypto, and then I want to talk a little bit about your political evolution, is that it's used for just all the illicit things in culture, right? It's used for sex trafficking and drug cartels and like everything in like the darkest realms of society. And Elizabeth Warren obviously hits this theme a tremendous amount. Why is that wrong?
Like respond to that broad criticism. So like in my mind, there's sort of two core criticisms of crypto that seem to stick in people's minds. One is the fraudsters and the grifters like SBF. And the other is that the people that really use crypto are bad criminally people who we want, who we don't want to give access to lots and lots of money to be able to do the bad things that they do.
How much of crypto is actually used for the kinds of things that Elizabeth Warren is constantly talking about?
After the break, Brian Armstrong tells us how he stood up against the mob in his own workplace by saying, no politics here. Stay with us. Brian, long before I knew anything about crypto, and I'm still a newbie when it comes to the topic that dominates your life, although I'm trying to learn more, you came on my radar because you did something really radical in September of 2020.
Now, given the vibe shift, it seems hilarious that this seemed so radical. But what you did is you basically said, no politics in the workplace. And if you want to bring politics into the workplace at Coinbase, you should go work somewhere else. you received a tremendous amount of blowback for this decision.
And I was sort of like going back and looking at your, maybe it's unfair to say it this way, and you'll tell me if it's not fair, but this political evolution really that you've gone through. Because I went back a little bit before that, and June of 2020, you sounded a lot like a lot of other CEOs and founders when you tweeted in the wake of George Floyd's death that, I've decided to speak up.
It's a shame that this even needs to be said in this day and age. But racism, police brutality and unequal justice are unequivocally wrong. And we need to work to eliminate all of them from society. So that's what you said in June. By September of 2020, you're saying no politics in the workplace.
Tell me about your decision to go from someone that was speaking out very clearly on political issues, and there was a tremendous amount of pressure on everyone to do that at the time, to someone saying, you know what, we're here to do business and keep politics outside of Coinbase.
I was like... You're saying that that tweet that I read in June, that you were kind of blackmailed to put that out.
Well, yeah, the playbook is the person wrong thinks and then the sort of the hounds are unleashed to go and find anything that will further discredit you now that you've added yourself as a baddie.
What do you regret most about that period?
When you did it, I cheered so hard. It felt like such a – I had left the New York Times that July and you put that out in September. I wonder if you experienced the phenomenon that I've experienced a lot of times over the past five years, maybe longer, of kind of what people say in private versus what they say in public.
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