The Man Behind Coinbase: Interview with Brian Armstrong | KMP Ep.52

17:05Katie Miller:Do you think the ability to control your own money is free speech? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, economic freedom is kind of like foundational to all freedoms. Because think about it, let's say you in theory have freedom of speech, but someone can debank you or seize your assets, you're not going to be very willing to go actually exercise your right to free speech, right? And that has happen with people in various cases. Famously, the Canadian truckers got debanked and deplatformed that way. Many people, including the president himself and his kids, got debanked in the United States. You can't get debanked from crypto though, right?

17:38That's right. If you have -

17:39Katie Miller:I'm asking this as a genuine question. Yeah. If you have a self-custodial wallet, that is the ultimate sovereignty because literally, if you have a phone, an internet connection anywhere in the world, you can get access to this and have assets in a way that is truly property rights. Like nobody can take it from you. What's your favorite coin? Well, Bitcoin is the original. I think that's great. And then, you know, things like USDC, like stable coins have been incredible. That's the top regulated stable coin in the world now that we have a role in. What's your favorite meme coin? Well, I love lots of memes.

18:12There's not like, the problem is if I say one in particular, it's going to be like, yeah, I mean, so I don't want to be seen as like pumping any of these in particular, but I do think there's been a particular fascination with my dog for some reason. And I do think it's funny that people create coins around that. And I'm not endorsing any of them, but I think it's funny.

18:35Katie Miller:So what's what's your favorite NFT that you've seen? So well, I actually just recently bought a Crypto Punk, if you know what that is. I don't. OK, well, these are kind of like some of the most original, the early NFTs on the internet and they were basically like profile or identity like characters and there was 10 ,000 of them and they were given away for free. Anybody could claim them. And now they trade anywhere from like 50 ,000 to$20 million each. And they're like, anyway, they're kind of like these, they're kind of like the Mona Lisa of the digital art world, if you want to make that analogy.

19:09So I think those are interesting.

19:10Katie Miller:What do you do with the digital art? Like, what do you do with it? Well, you can use it as your profile photo on the internet and people feel some sort of affinity to it if it represents who they wish to be online. Got it. Yeah. Why do you think so many tech founders are leaving California? You've seen the billionaire tax. What are you personally doing? Have you worked to fight against it? Yeah. I mean, it's the wealth tax, right? I think it's deeply un-American to seize people's assets. It might be unconstitutional. You know, we all benefit from various things in the United States enormously and we should pay taxes.

19:49I don't have an issue with that. I've paid tons of taxes on profits and income. But after you've already paid your taxes, they want to come take another tax from you and seize your assets. That to me starts to feel like a third world country that is a dangerous, dangerous path to go down. And if I thought they were going toward good outcomes, especially like in California, I wouldn't be so opposed to it, like if it was being well managed. But there seems to be a lot of fraud and waste, which is just so it's like an unconstitutional asset seizure and then going to fraud. And that's where I start to get it just doesn't feel right to me.

20:28It's against my values, I would say. I think it's bad for the state and for America. So we're considering any all options basically at this point to be in terms of relocation.

20:38Katie Miller:Ro Khanna had said for founders that he was going to take a percentage of, you know, say their assets were held in a stock instead of in cash, that the government could take some of the their percentage as well. Yeah, I mean, you go down a very dangerous path with that. I mean, just think for a minute about the way it's architected. So how do you even value all of these people's property, right? Can you imagine some government bureaucrat coming in and, you know, hey, how much is that necklace worth? How much is that lawnmower worth? I mean, these are matters of opinion. And the way it's currently drafted, you have to basically have an auditor come in and value all these things.

21:19And if they get it wrong, they're criminally liable or they're personally liable. So every auditor is going to sandbag it and put in all this kind of buffer. However, it just, you get into a, this starts to feel very third world to have the government coming in and seizing your private property. I think it's, it'd be a terrible precedent. You know, the political wins are such that in California, this could genuinely pass though. I mean, I think there's probably people in my own family who might vote for it, right? So it's just, if you see something on the ballot that says, hey, should billionaires pay more tax?

21:49Everyone's like, sure. But they don't think about the second and third order consequences of that. And by the way, it's not just going to be billionaires. They're already talking about it going down to 50 million. And so if you're an illiquid tech founder, I think people have this misconception that tech founders or billionaires have like billions of dollars of cash just sitting around. Most of the people who are billionaires are on paper and all of their net worth is tied up in like a private company stock that's illiquid. So, you know, you might raise$50 million for a company that now has a$2 billion valuation.

22:22And on paper, you're a billionaire, but you have like$2 ,000 in your bank account. So to pay this tax, you're going to be a forced seller of an illiquid asset. Like most of these founders are going to have to just move out of California. And it'll put a huge deficit on the state that is already overspending. So it does not bode well for California.

22:40Katie Miller:You've made billions building a crypto company and then you decided to fight human aging. Yeah. Why? And what's your hack that you found that works the best so far? Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, just zooming out, my worldview is that technology is a great way to improve the world, and we should all try to go build companies. Do you think AI is going to cure cancer? Yeah, eventually. Yeah. And AI is playing a huge role in this. These are all synergistic. People are thinking about what is the biggest application of AI. The biggest one I can think of is how do we get more years, more healthy years, right, and actually cure aging at some level.

23:15I think too many young people today are getting enamored with the idea of becoming an activist and being taught that this is like a virtuous thing, it's actually very easy to be a critic and it makes you feel important and smart. You might get to go to some rallies with some people and make some friendships. But at the end of the day, like you're not oppressed, okay? You live in the greatest country in the world. You have all these freedoms and you could do something useful with your life and try to contribute. And to be in the arena is hard. It's hard to go build something useful and help your fellow man or woman, right?

23:43And so I have a lot more respect for people that actually go try to create something new in the world. And that's what I was trying to do was live that motto myself. OK, so Coinbase is great. We went public in 2021. I finally got some liquidity. And I was thinking, like, OK, how do we go help the next big problem and help fix the next big problem in the world? I hosted some dinners with friends. And we were talking about all kinds of brain machine interfaces and space and fusion energy. And one of the biggest areas that I felt like was underfunded, there's good teams working on a lot of those things.

24:14Aging is something that people, I didn't see good teams working on it. I thought it was underfunded. And we needed to come up with, okay, is there a way to actually tackle this? Because a lot of the people working on it were doing snake oil. It had a low reputation, I would say, longevity in general. I mean, there's things that everybody can do that are just like exercise and sleep. These turn out to be very effective. If there was a drug on the market called exercise, it would probably be the most effective longevity drug out there. And the good news is it's free. You can go for a walk and you can sleep a little bit more.

24:45And everybody has access to these longevity drugs. But I was thinking, okay, how do we actually double expected lifespan? I mean, if you go back 100 years, people in the US, the average life expectancy, I think, was like 35 or something. And now we've more than doubled it. We did that, by the way, by discovering things like washing our hands with soap and And, you know, things like penicillin, antibiotics, like, so these things. Filtered water. Yeah. I mean, these things really actually doubled. We doubled life expectancy, okay, over the last 100 years. But recently, it's kind of started to plateau.

25:18And how do we get that next doubling? The best idea that we have, and this is why I co-founded this company, New Limit, along with other folks. It's about this thing called cell reprogramming or epigenetic reprogramming. And just the brief piece on that is that, you know, all of our cells lose function as we get older. And the genes that were on in a certain cell, some of them get flipped in the wrong way. Like a gene that should be on gets flipped off or vice versa. And so we slowly lose this function in our cells. We've now shown, and other labs have shown, that you can reprogram cells to restore function they had when they were younger.

25:52Katie Miller:Well, isn't that exactly what we saw today? I don't know if you've seen this, so sorry. But Reuters came out with a report that says Merck has a new vaccine for melanoma in which it's reprogramming through an mRNA vaccine, your own cells to be able to fight melanoma. And it's showing pretty much it's secure for a melanoma. Yeah, that's a great example. And if you look at all the major diseases that take us out, whether that's heart disease, cancer, cardiovascular, diabetes, mental health, these all are highly correlated with age. Okay. And it's sort of an obvious, like when you're young, we actually get like cancerous cells in our body all the time.

26:30And when you're young, your body can recover from that and go kill off those cells. You get older and, you know, your cells lose a little bit of their function. And so it's not like, I think a lot of healthcare today, we're trying to go cure an individual disease, but there's a root cause, which is your cells losing function as you get older, which makes us much more susceptible to disease in the first place. So we're trying to solve the root problem of getting ourselves to act younger.

26:54Katie Miller:But don't you think that's the PFAS, all the microplastics, all of the chemicalization, diseases of civilization, you're talking about urbanization of our environment, like all of those things contribute. Yeah, well, it's true. I mean, when we're younger, though, we can recover from those insults to the body, right? And I think it's, I don't know if epigenetic reprogramming will cure like 100 % of all aging. It could be a multi-factor problem. But we, at least our hypothesis, is that we believe it is a, let's say, a material factor, maybe even a predominant factor. And the exciting thing is, this is with New Limit, the company, we've actually demonstrated successful reprogramming of human cells.

27:34We've done it in mice now who have humanized livers. And we are now getting ready for clinical trials in humans next year. So there's going to be a whole set of drug candidates that come off of this pipeline we've built, using AI, by the way, to test millions of hypotheses. And we'll bring the top candidates into the clinic, try five or 10 of those, and hopefully at least one or two of them hit.

27:56Katie Miller:When you talk about longevity, though, my brain immediately goes toward what we're seeing say in South Korea, where they have the world's lowest birth rate. I think it's like 0.6 or 0.7 births per woman. And they're having the oldest population at the same time. So there's no one to take care of their seniors. There's no one doing a lot because you have an older population and no young people anymore. And we're on that trend here in the United States as well, right? The birth rate's decreasing every year. We haven't plateaued. It's still going down. Yeah. So then if you're saying now we're going to live longer than ever, but we're not solving for the problem of having babies, then what?

28:29Katie Miller:And so to me, it's a multifaceted issue, not just longevity, but the fact that we don't have a birth rate that's sustaining population. Yeah, I'm right there with you, too. I think we should raise the birth rate. And, you know, sometimes when I talk about longevity, people will say, well, aren't you worried about overpopulation? I'm like, no, the birth rate is declining. So I think it'd be great if people lived twice as long and we should also fix the birth rate. I agree. The overpopulation argument that resulted in the one child policy in China is what's led to this declining birth rate, many things.

29:00Katie Miller:But one of China's biggest problems was that one child policy. Yeah, that was disastrous for them. Do you consider yourself maha? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I'm certainly like pro-health. Do you want me to define it for you? Yeah, please. What would that entail exactly? I would say like no seed oils. Okay. Are we eating whole foods? Are you avoiding plastics where possible? Are we cooking with stainless steel? Yeah, actually all those things, yes. Okay. Yeah. So like I would consider that like do you avoid highly processed food? Yeah, of course. So that's what I would consider Maha. Yeah, sure.

29:37Katie Miller:I guess. What's your healthiest take then? In my own personal life? I mean, all of the, so I think there's like a, there's a foundation of things that everybody should kind of get in place, right. Which are, you know, it's, it's exercise, it's nutrition and it's sleep and let's say mental health. Um, and then there's a bunch of stuff you can go do beyond that, but I think the foundation should be there in place first. So, you know, I, I work out like in the mornings, like six days a week, do some stretching. I either do some cardio or some weightlifting. Um, and then I track my sleep and do all kinds of things, you know, that you can try to boost your scores on that and get enough, get like seven and a half hours of sleep or so on average.

30:20Um, and then, you know, I think like the mental health part is important too, because we can all be caught up in like the day of just fight or flight and opening your phone in the morning and looking at all the scary messages coming in and crazy debates happening. And it's important. In the morning, I really try to take about an hour to not look at that stuff. Do you have kids yet? Not yet. Yeah. That'll be a whole other way of meditating, I suppose, in the morning. But, you know, maybe not having your mind on work. Maybe there's like...

30:52Katie Miller:That's a different morning routine. Cheerios being thrown around or whatever, but at least you're not caught up in this. That's a different kind of meditation. But yeah, I think people should get all those kind of foundational things in place. But then, yeah, you can go further with it. And like I get it, I get like a blood panel done every quarter. And I just look at all the biomarkers. And I was with my doctor, I kind of tweak it a little bit. And why I'm a little deficient on this or I, you know, want to improve this one. So a seven and a half hours, the optimal sleep? It's person dependent.

31:21I mean, actually, one of the great things like, you know, appears like President Trump and other people have this short sleeper gene, which I think is understudied. There's actually, this is a fun story. I mean, do you know the short sleeper gene? Like some people genetically don't have to get as much sleep. It's not that they're just running around tired all the time. They can sleep three to four hours a night and apparently be totally fine. A lot of really high performing people have this. Arguably, Elon may have it. Like Indra Nui, who was the CEO of Pepsi, had this. There's other people. But I actually funded this study to see if you could induce the short sleeper gene into adult mice because it's interesting to think, like, do you need to have this genetic thing from birth and it changes the development of the brain?

32:05Or as an adult, could you have some therapy that could give you that short sleeper gene or phenotype? Because if it works in mice and we can induce it in adult mice, then I think it'd be cool to fund some research to see if... I don't know. I would personally love to have that gene. I think it'd make me more...

32:21Katie Miller:I love sleeping. Why would I give that up? Well, it's fun and you can sleep whenever you want. But oftentimes I'm excited to go build things. I just want to get more stuff done. So what's a trendy biohack you think is total bullshit? I mean, total bullshit is like a big statement. I mean, I've tried some of the peptide stuff. I think a lot of it is, some of it may work. I mean, GLP-1s are peptides also, by the way.

32:50So I think some of the stuff that's being done in compound pharmacies is not that effective. And a lot of it's placebo. Like people, you know, if you get like some sore thing at the gym and then you take these and then like three weeks later you feel better, you might have felt better if you had just not done anything or just rested a little bit and not gone so hard at the gym. So it's a little hard to tell. Anyway, most of those peptides that are done in compound pharmacies, I haven't seen like good evidence from a randomized control trial.

33:16Katie Miller:What's the craziest longevity thing you've tried? Let me think about the craziest. I mean, a lot of the stuff I do is pretty standard. I take creatine. Do you think creatine works? Yeah, there's good evidence on that. Creatine works.

33:39In my family, there's high cholesterol. And my grandparents passed away at a relatively early age from heart disease. So I've taken like there's statins are now like cheap and off patent to everybody. It's kind of like good therapy. There's newer ones like they're called like PCSK9 inhibitors and things like that. So anyway, my cholesterol is great. That was like a good one to finally get in there. OK, this is this is probably the craziest one I did. I'm not even sure I would recommend this, but just to be clear, but I banked some stem cells, which I believe there's a standard of care now, which maybe your kids went through, where I think they bank stem cells now from the umbilical cord.

34:18Katie Miller:I'm paying like 4K a year for my kids' stem cells. I'm not sure if we're going to use them. I have all my kids. When I just had a baby, I went into precipitous labor. I didn't know I was going to give birth that day. I didn't buy the stem cell kit that time. My husband was like, you got to do it. I was like, why? We already have three. Why do I need four? He's like, well, you don't want to let the fourth kid not have it. That's rude. I was like, great. My mom's like calling around to try to get this stem cell kit. We eventually get it. Don't worry, it's banked. But I'm like, why am I spending 4K a year for something I may never use for my kids' stem cells?

34:51Katie Miller:But don't worry, I have them all. Yeah. So that, I think, you know, at least when I was born, that was not the standard of care. And so I don't know if these will be useful in the future or not, but I'm just interested in health and longevity. So I went to actually go bank my stem cells when I was like 35 or something like that. And you know, they actually, it sounds like awful. They have to like drill this little hole into your hip bone because the inside the bone marrow is where you get like, and it was kind of pain. It was pretty painful actually. But anyway, I have, you know, the doctor warned me, he was like, on a one to 10 scale, this is going to be like a seven.

35:29I was like, let's do it. I'm, I'm It was rough. But anyway, but I did get my, so now I have these stem cells banked. Is it going to be useful in the future to develop custom therapies or something? I don't know. But anyway, I did that one. That was a little out there.

35:44Katie Miller:So where did you meet your wife? We were at this event in LA and yeah, I just was captivated kind of. So I heard that her and her family came to the United States after she was fleeing persecution. Well, she fled, her family fled communist China. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And so is her family now here? or they're still in China? No, they're all here. Yeah. And she's a citizen and everything. So yeah, she's in some ways, she's actually more patriotic than I am because she's seen what the alternative is. A lot of Americans, I think, take what we have for granted. So yeah. Has their experience shaped the way you view freedom and democracy?

36:18Katie Miller:And has it shaped, you know, how you guys view things together? I know that like when my husband and I talk about things, it often shapes my world view. Yeah. Sometimes I radicalize him more than he radicalizes me. But how does that work for you? Yeah, there's many times where, you know, I think, like, especially in the past, like, when the prior administration, we were having all these issues with Gary Gensler and stuff, and I would sometimes be kind of critical of the United States, and I'm like, well, yeah, this, the government is doing this and that, and she was like, you have no idea how lucky, don't you dare say that, you know, and she was, like, going and reading the Federalist Papers, and, like, she's, like, you know, understands all the founding father stories, And then she was like, how dare you say that?

37:00Like, you live in the best country in the world. Like, is it perfect? No, but you at least can. She's like, you don't understand how much of a gift it is that you, as a private citizen, can go publicly criticize the head of the SEC. You're like, do you realize you would be put in jail instantly in China for saying that? Like, you don't. So anyway, she definitely made me more patriotic.

37:21Katie Miller:We're going to play our famous game now of Would You Rather. Okay. Would you rather have to explain Bitcoin to a five-year-old or explain meme coins to Congress?

37:32Either one sounds fine, honestly. I mean, I think explaining Bitcoin to a five-year-old sounds more fun.

37:38Katie Miller:How often do you explain Bitcoin on a daily basis? I mean, I used to do it all the time. Like, one thing I realized is, you know, if you, you might have been building something for 10 years, but there's still a huge swath of people who are just getting comfortable with it. So as a founder CEO, you kind of have to get comfortable with like preaching to the choir on a regular basis. And that's normal. Would you rather let AI manage your personal investments or let AI make all of your business decisions? I think AI agentic trading will become a bigger and bigger thing. And we're experimenting with this at Coinbase, like Coinbase Advisor.

38:14I don't think it's quite I'm not quite ready to hand over the reins on all my investments. But you got to pick. I do use AI, though, frequently to get input on business decisions. I think it's better there. So I'd say the business decisions.

38:26Katie Miller:Would you rather know exactly when you're going to die or exactly how you're going to die? I think when. It doesn't matter so much how. If you know when, I think it starts to create a lot of sense of urgency. Like, you know, Steve Jobs was working on the iPhone on his deathbed. Like, you know, arguably one of the people who worked on Bitcoin, who maybe one of the Satoshi Nakamoto is Hal Finney, and he was on his deathbed. So there is something powerful about knowing, like people say that, you know, live every day like it's your last and it's a cliche. But when it's really true, it focuses the mind and you do the thing that you've been putting off.

39:06Katie Miller:Would you rather know exactly what Bitcoin will be worth 10 years from today or know the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto? Sasoshi Nakamoto. Yeah.

39:18I think the price of Bitcoin, I mean, I have a good sense of what it might be in 10 years. But I think, first of all, the idea of Bitcoin stands on its own regardless of who invented it. But there's been a good documentary that came out recently arguing that it's, you know, likely was Hal Finney and Len Sassman. I tend to buy into that theory, but nobody will know for sure, and that's fine.

39:43Katie Miller:What do you think of when the news got it wrong that they were like, it's this guy, he's living in Argentina. That got it wrong on me? No, wasn't this recently, and I'm not big into conspiracies, but they were like, we know exactly who he is and where he's living. Oh, on Satoshi Nakamoto. Yeah. I did briefly live in Argentina, that's what we were referring to. Was the steak good? Most of the, sorry. I said, was the steak good? Yeah, it was great. I mean, yeah, most of the things that have been published on the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto are totally wrong. I mean, we're clearly wrong. So yeah, that's not out of the norm, I suppose.

40:20Katie Miller:Would you rather be remembered for building Coinbase or for helping humans live longer? I think Coinbase is the thing I've been working on the longest and it's economic freedom, I would say is more like my life's mission. But I think that I can utilize some of the skills and proceeds from that to go. I'd like to help create lots of different innovative companies on the frontier of technology. And so I'd like to think that it's almost like Jeff Bezos kind of built his wealth at Amazon, but he's helping put that into lots of good things for the world. Or Elon with PayPal or something like that. I think those are good.

41:01models to emulate.

41:02Katie Miller:What's a conspiracy theory that you believe in? Well, there's some, I don't know if this is true or not, but I think it's really funny to think about whether Justin Trudeau is Fidel Castro's son. Like you have to admit that if you go look at the photos of his supposed father and Fidel Castro, it's like, it's pretty funny. It's so close. Yeah, it's pretty, so there's got to be some like DNA test or paternity test that could prove this. But I don't know. Yeah. So that's one that's just kind of funny. I think that's out there. But maybe I don't know if this is a conspiracy theory, but maybe like a contrarian view is that I think like the common view is that philanthropy is like this noble cause.

41:45And, you know, like Bill Gates, after the DOJ thing, he's like, I'm going to go rehabilitate my image and do philanthropy. I guess I have sort of a contrarian view, which is like a lot of charities and philanthropies are actually net negative on the world and they get captured. It's actually remarkably hard to find a foundation that has not gotten captured by ideology. And that's, I think a lot of people by trying to do something good, like maybe like criminal justice reform or something. And then it turns out they just increased crime by like letting a bunch of people, like all these kind of unintended consequences happen.

42:18So once in a while, you know, when you, when you have a company go public, you get all these financial advisors around you. and stuff like that. And they're often for like various tax reasons are like, okay, we should set up this foundation for you. And so far I've just been like, no, I'm not going to do that because my fear is that it just gets captured by some ideology that I lose control of it. Like if you look at like the Ford foundation, I think Henry Ford would be like turning over in his grave if he knew what they were up to. So I try to just, I have like a DAF, a donor advised fund, and I just try to put money toward things that I think are helping civilization advance.

42:56But I don't think I'll, I don't know, I don't want to say never, but I don't think at this moment I would ever create a foundation.

43:02Katie Miller:What's the craziest thing you've ever spent money on?

43:08There's this video game called Polytopia. Have you heard of it? Okay. It's pretty fun. It's kind of like the game Civilization. Yeah, but it's on mobile. Anyway, my wife and I kind of got into playing this game. And it has a pretty small following. I think only like 50 ,000 people like globally play it. But we decided at some point, a lot of the tournaments people were playing were like for like 25 euros or like different. So at some point I was like, maybe Maybe Coinbase should sponsor the Polytopia Championship that happens once a year. And we were kind of like fans of it. We were watching the top players and things like that.

43:54And the first year, I actually reached out to them and said, hey, do you want us to sponsor it? And they initially said, no, we're not doing any sponsors. It's very pure and we don't have any corporate influence or whatever. But then the next year, they came back like, actually, it would be nice to have some sponsors. So I think we might still be finalizing the details, but I think Coinbase is going to sponsor the Polytopia World Championship, and I'm pretty psyched about that.

44:14Katie Miller:It's a personal hobby. Yeah. What's the first app you open in the morning? Well, the danger, the temptation is always to look at the messages, whether that's on Slack or any other tool that we might use. And there's a temptation to go look at X, right? But I try actually not to do that because I think it can be a bad way to start the morning. And so try to listen to podcasts or audiobooks to kind of get my head right for the day, try to learn something, something that's educational or like positive or helps me think about how to build the world and build the future. What's something you're hilariously bad at?

44:57Well, okay, so something I'm hilariously bad at, I think that sometimes like reading social situations, because I think I think I'm somewhere on the autism spectrum where I'm not too far, obviously, but one of the gifts of autism is actually you're somewhat oblivious to social norms. This is part of the reason why a lot of entrepreneurs, I think, have a little bit of autism and they're willing to just go try things, which most people would be like, that's low status or it's weird, it's contrarian. And like, believe me, starting a crypto company like in 2012 was pretty weird. And like most of my friends were like, I don't get this.

45:43Why are you? This is weird. Why are you doing it? I didn't. It certainly was not high status or anything like that. So there's sometimes, you know, the positive aspect of it is I'm just willing to play with contrarian ideas in my head all the time and be like, oh, maybe we should try this. Maybe we should try that. Now, the downside of it is that sometimes like in a room, I could be completely oblivious where someone's like laughing at me and I'm like, I actually have no idea. I'm just going to talk, keep talking to them regardless. So it's a superpower and a weakness.

46:12Katie Miller:How would you explain Congress to somebody who's trying to get a bill passed?

46:19Well, by design, the founding fathers in all of their wisdom made sure that it was difficult to get a bill passed as it should be, right? I mean, if you wanted to make it simple and efficient, you'd have like a CEO kind of equivalent who is a single decision maker, but they created the balance of powers and the bicameral legislature and everything. And so you not only have to get a vote in the house, but also, you know, there's a hundred kings and queens so-called in the Senate. And so what does that mean? It's just complete like chaos and factions and collecting votes with, you know, different issues.

46:57But so it's so hard to get legislation passed, but that is by design.

47:00Katie Miller:What's the best part of trying to get a bill passed? I mean, there's just so many big personalities in D.C. It's kind of fun and awesome to just like there's crazy people, there's brilliant people like it's never boring. And I don't know, someone somebody told me one time there's like there's more actors in D.C. than in L.A. or But I think it's, I think like I've made some true, genuine relationships here that are just really fun and brilliant, like smart people. And then there's like some completely crazy people too. And kind of just have to roll with it. If you could host a dinner party with three people that are alive, who's sitting at the table, and what are you eating?

47:39I just recently, I was like reading more about like Claude Shannon and like Oppenheimer and John von Neumann and people. So these were just like brilliant engineers who worked on projects historically. I think that would be a fun dinner to get those folks together. That's just kind of, I think the Wright brothers are particularly interesting too. I've read their biography. You have to remember in the early 1900s or late 1800s, flight was considered kind of a joke by most serious people. They're like, man is never meant to fly. And like occasionally like these loony people would like jump off of a bridge with some like wings attached to their arms.

48:21They would always crash and everyone would laugh at them. And it's like it's really underappreciated. I think that these like two bicycle store owners with a very limited budget, like I think in modern I might get this wrong, but in modern day dollars, it was like they had maybe like a 10 or$20 ,000 budget from their personal savings. They didn't have any venture capital. They had competitors who were trying to build planes that were funded like 10 or 100x as much money. These two bicycle shop owners, just by tinkering in Kitty Hawk, you know, with their own inventions, managed to bring us into the aviation age.

48:58And then like the craziest thing about it is that you would have thought if somebody invented an airplane, everyone would be like, wow, that's super interesting. For years, they were going around like giving these demonstrations and nobody really cared. It was like shockingly, right? It's like the actually the military, the War Department or something at that time in the U.S. said, we believe there's no military application of the airplane. This was in like 1904 or something like that.

49:21Katie Miller:The Wright brothers landed their one of the planes on Fort Myers on Summerall Field here, North Carolina. Yeah. As like a demonstration. Yeah. And then, you know, arguably just 40 years later, it won it won World War Two for the Allies. right? So the airplane. So anyway, it's amazing to suspend disbelief and believe something. What if it was possible? Well, let's try it. That's incredibly important for people to do that. And then you have to be willing to be misunderstood and even vilified in certain cases when you first do something. And the full power of it won't be known for decades. Thank you so much for doing this.

49:58Thank you.

49:59Katie Miller:Thanks so much for watching this episode of the K. Miller podcast. Don't forget, We're live Tuesday nights, 6 p.m., everywhere you get your podcasts. See you next week.