BREAKDOWN: Coinbase’s New Policy – Anti-Woke or Just a Joke?
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2020
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
CEO Brian Armstrong’s letter has not just the crypto world but the larger world of tech and business talking about the role of corporations in society.
This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Bitstamp and Nexo.io.
Monday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong published the innocuously titled “Coinbase Is a Mission-Driven Company.”
While the post talked a lot about Coinbase’s core mission, its real goal seemed to be to make clear Coinbase would not be engaging with any other social or political issues beyond that, and to the extent employees wanted to do so they needed to do it on their own time.
The reactions were intense, immediate and in many instances, totally opposite.
In this episode, NLW breaks down the entire social media reaction and the arguments for and against this policy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The ironic thing and the thing that shows just how far we've gotten away from being able to have hard conversations |
| 0:06.0 | is that I think there's a lot of folks who I'm seeing on both sides of this who feel like the central issue |
| 0:11.9 | is their inability to express their full perspective for fear of retribution and reprisal. |
| 0:17.3 | When people of all political persuasions feel that, you know you have a system that is |
| 0:22.2 | really, really screwed up. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on |
| 0:31.1 | macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world. The breakdown is sponsored by |
| 0:36.9 | Crypto.com, Bitstamp, and nexo.io, |
| 0:40.1 | and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, September 29th, |
| 0:47.0 | and today something interesting happened. I joked this morning on Twitter that my podcast today |
| 0:52.2 | was going to be called Everyone's Angry at Everyone for Everything, and that's really what it has felt like for the last few days |
| 0:58.6 | on Twitter. We have infighting in the Bitcoin community, we have a defy hack that people are |
| 1:04.1 | throwing blame around, and of course we have the reactions to this Coinbase post about effectively |
| 1:09.3 | saying that employees need to be silent politically, |
| 1:12.1 | at least on company time. I went to record a show today that was half about the Defy hack |
| 1:18.3 | and half about the Coinbase post and the response to it. What I found, however, is that they're |
| 1:23.5 | each big enough subjects on their own to really be their own thing. And frankly, |
| 1:28.0 | I try to think about subjects that would be interesting for everyone who listens, but I realize |
| 1:32.6 | that these are areas that may have really divergent focuses for different sets of breakdown listeners. |
| 1:39.1 | Because of that, I'm doing something that I've never done before, and I'm actually splitting |
| 1:42.6 | today's podcast into two. |
| 1:45.0 | The first is about Coinbase and their new No Politics at Work Policy and whether it can |
| 1:51.4 | actually work. This has created an incredible amount of conversation and controversies, |
... |
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