Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong on the Evolving Future of Humans

The main thing for me is that, you know, we want to use this as a tool to accelerate progress, right? So nature can be quite cruel. Like, 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, you know, 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 like risky or dangerous not to do it.

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 bed is not made, as some of you who are watching may see. Otherwise, the sound on the podcast is fantastic, uh, as is Brian. He usually gets peppered with crypto questions, and if you're into crypto, um, 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, you've been funding all kinds of interesting science startups. He tweets or Xs 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 kind of 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 Bryan'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, um, I think you'll enjoy the show. Our continued quest to obliterate all other tech podcasts is not complete, so please do go to Court Lemery YouTube, Spotify, Apple, wherever you like, and, uh, 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, come here, Brian, and, and enjoy. Thanks.

Brian, hello. How are you?

Great.

You grew up in this area. Do you have this Silicon Valley stuff in your, your blood? I know both your parents were— one was an engineer, right? And your mom worked for IBM, I think.

Yeah, that's right. I grew up in San Jose, California, and really the dot-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, you know, I didn't know actually at that time that I was a kid, so I didn't really understand. I thought— I just thought this was normal. But I didn't, you know, I went to school and other things I did in life, and I realized actually how special it was only, 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 like reading all about it in the tech press at that time and Wired magazine. And I was kind of enamored with these people like Marc Andreessen showing up on the COVID of magazines. And I loved computers as even as a young kid, I was kind of shy, nerdy, introverted, wasn't as good with people, but I loved computers. And so I would like read the business section of the San Jose Mercury News every day and try to learn what Apple and Microsoft and everybody were doing.

And you were, did you already have, so you had a, that's what you aspired to. Did you have a sense as what you were going to end up doing or that you, you know, what you wanted to be?

I guess I didn't actually know at that time what exactly I was going to end up doing with my career. So I was trying, I was trying lots of things. I was, I mean, I, I wasn't always that interested in schoolwork because on my free time I'd be like building websites and installing Linux on computers, trying to learn how to program. And I didn't— I knew that that's something you could study in college, but I didn't know I wanted to be a tech entrepreneur.

Okay.

And you, you and I, we flipped. I grew up in Houston and then came to Silicon Valley. But did you end up going to school at Rice? Yeah. And how did you— how did you find Texas?

Yeah, I liked it actually a lot. So having grown up in the Bay Area and I, you know, as a young man in high school, I was like, I want to get away from my parents and go out there and explore the world. And so I applied to a bunch of schools on the East Coast. I really wanted to go and get— go to MIT, but I couldn't. I didn't get accepted. And but I did. I got into like, you know, Berkeley and Rice and a couple others. And so I, I went and visited Rice and they had a really good engineering school, but it was also just very fun to be there. And I actually ended up studying economics and computer science, which later made sense as an intersection for Coinbase. But at the time I didn't, of course, would have no idea that that's what I would end up doing. I guess it always— it also had a little bit of like, like a libertarian economics flavor in— and James Baker, Texas.

Yeah, that, that mindset.

Yeah. Like there was a building on campus, the James Baker Building. And like, I didn't realize it at the time, but I actually was learning about a little bit of like free market economics and how that might intersect with crypto down the road was interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah, Houston has no zoning laws. Yeah, you can just build any, any sort of thing anywhere you want. Just about. Yeah.

I love these experiments like that where almost every city in America has zoning laws. And if you ask the average person, like, of course you have to have zoning laws. Somebody would build, you know, a strip club next to an elementary school or something terrible like that. In Houston, they don't have it and it just kind of all works out. And so it makes you question the premise of a lot of things of like, Do we really need that? What would happen if you deleted it? And of course you can always re-add things if you delete too much. But, you know, Elon famously says, but yeah, I think a lot of, a lot of these things you have to question.

Well, you went somewhere I was hoping to go like a little bit earlier. I mean, I did because you were talking about sort of these libertarian vibes. Is that, is that kind of like how you think of yourself today?

Yeah, I would say I'm, you know, I'm an independent. I'd say I'm libertarian-ish. I think crypto is deeply libertarian. In fact, I think Silicon Valley is deeply libertarian. I, at least to me, the best parts of it are, you know, it also had a bit of a socialist aspect that came in during certain periods, which I think was not in the spirit of Silicon Valley, at least the one that I liked. But yeah, I remember there's kind of a calling card, like a lot of people are not publicly public about their libertarian views, which are very socially liberal. Fiscally conservative. It's not, it's not even really that crazy. It's kind of a combination of, of left and right. But they don't— people don't come out and say it publicly. But behind closed doors, you'll actually— there's, there's a whole bunch of closeted libertarians running tech companies.

Yeah. I mean, I would say that to me it's always felt like kind of the prevailing— one of the prevailing vibes. What I appreciate, I feel like, is you're quite open about some of these things.

Yeah.

And, and there's a, there's a movie about you and Coinbase Coin, like a documentary. It's really, it's fantastic. And I don't know, you get presented as like kind of being shy. At least this was my takeaway when you were, when you were growing up, that you were kind of on the shyer side. And, and I've always, in your role as CEO of Coinbase, I've always felt like you were— it's not like you were like out there yelling and seeking attention, but when you are, when you do care about something, you seem willing to be outspoken about it. And so I was curious if that's like something that you developed over time, if that feels comfortable to you, or if it's, if it's not, if it's like deeply uncomfortable.

Yeah. So I never really was somebody who sought out conflict. I was never that outspoken. I was more like someone who would listen and think and then speak later. But I also have a little bit of autism. And people— one characteristic of people who have— who are on the spectrum is that they're just very literal. They just— they just say what they think. Now, this can sometimes get you in trouble and you'll offend somebody, but it also is very helpful as an entrepreneur because you just look at the world the way that it actually is and it can help you just see things which are broken or opportunities or even inside a company. Sometimes people get caught up in like, oh, we really want this to be true because our ego is on the line, or we invested so much money in it. And sometimes if you can just look at something very objectively, it's like, oh no, that thing's failing, then we need to make a change. And it helps you sometimes get to the answer more quickly. So there are— there have been times where being a little on the spectrum, I saw something happening inside the company or in society, and I was just like, that doesn't seem right to me. And I would just say it. Now, Partially. I wouldn't— I won't claim like complete ignorance. Like many of these things I spoke up, I knew that they would be controversial, but I also just didn't really care. I just wanted to say what I thought was true. And I'm okay with some controversy and people not liking me. I just want to say what I think is true.

Did you— have you always kind of felt like you were on the spectrum? This is something you thought about and were conscious of, or obviously it's gotten more, you know, people are more in tune with this and give it more attention in the last decade or so.

Yeah. I mean, now it's kind of a badge of honor.

Yeah.

You know, I don't think it's— yeah, there's, by the way, there's of course many people in different ranges of the spectrum. It can be quite debilitating in some ways too. But I think actually a large number of tech entrepreneurs are on the spectrum. So, you know, Peter Thiel has a famous line about this is like, that's actually a comment on society. Like, why do you know, why don't we have more people building companies, it's because like society is so eager to like belittle or make fun of people that don't succeed. And only the autists who don't perceive or care about it are the ones who can get through that. So it's like it's more commentary on society than it is on the autism. But yeah, I never really was like formally diagnosed early on, but like later in life I took some tests and things like that and I was like, oh yeah, I check a lot of those boxes. So I think we— yeah, it's funny, we might end up in a world at some point where parents are thinking about how to have kids with the right amount of autism, you know, as like a superpower.

Yeah. I mean, I've been doing this for a long time and it does seem like a superpower to some degree in a lot of cases. Okay. And you were talking about parents possibly Choosing babies. There's a tweet that I wanted to talk to you about because it's a bunch of stuff that I'm really interested in. I mean, my general premise here is that you're very comfortable talking about things that are kind of like sci-fi bordering sometimes on the controversial, where science is heading. And I want to get into that with you because I feel like you're comfortable talking about some of this stuff. And I think there'll be people who listen to this who— my audience is probably pretty pro a lot of these things, but then there's a lot of people looking at stuff like where we're heading with IVF and they don't like it, you know. And so anyway, this is a little bit of what I wanted to get into for you. I'm kind of putting you in a spot where you obviously don't have to, but like making a case for I feel like we're heading to this like sci-fi future moment, like quite quickly now. And, and I, I'm curious to see how the rest of the world adapts to this.

Yeah, I'm happy to talk about it. And just as context too, I like the through line in the different companies I've started has been about trying to accelerate civilizational progress. And, you know, that can happen via economic freedom. Which with crypto, I think we need that good foundation for society. Like people need to have property rights and like not have their money eroded and be able to keep the upside of their labor. That's how they're going to try to do more important things. With ResearchHub, it's accelerating scientific research, make it more like open source software. With Nulimit, it's radically extending human healthspan so we can have more productive years. Like these are all things which are kind of holding back progress in my view. And if you zoom out, I mean, I think I think really all progress comes from technology in a way. You know, even if you go back to cave people, we were these small bands of tribes running around and somebody had to invent fire and the wheel or even just having shoes on your feet. I mean, these are all technology, right? And today we sort of think of technology as the latest app on your phone or like a brain-machine interface or something. And people are always like a little hesitant, but Eyeglasses are also technology. And I'm sure like the first people who started running around with pieces of glass, like on their nose or whatever, looked pretty weird. And it was like, you know, societally controversial. And it's actually amazing the number of things you go back and look at that were controversial when they came out. Like there's a really good book on this. The name of it's escaping me, but even like the bicycle when it first came out in America was very controversial because people were like, oh my gosh, your kids could be anywhere around town. It's going to drive licentious behavior. Or when chess first came out, you know, people were like fixated at these boards for hours, like in a trance looking at the pieces. And they thought it was like, you know, like, like devil worship. Like, you know, people had all these kind of panics about every new wave of technology, like even cars versus horses.

I think even, even books, you know, when books first started to come out, I mean, it starts to change these oral traditions that we had, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. So anyway, there's just I, whenever you're trying to build something new in the world, you have to kind of, of course, every new thing is going to have a lot of skepticism from people, but you have to try to disentangle, okay, but is it actually a good idea that will— is this kind of— people are going to have skepticism just like they've had skepticism of all good ideas, or is this skeptical for a different reason? Like it's actually a bad idea.

Yeah.

And that's contrarian but right is the sweet spot, as Peter Thiel would say.

All right.

So this sets us up nicely for this, this tweet. I mean, you called out 4 things in this tweet, all 4 of which either currently writing about or attempting to write about. You talked about changes to IVF, really making eggs from a skin or a blood cell, I assume, kind of like any type of cell, really.

And then in vitro gametogenesis, that's called. Yeah.

And then this genetic testing, choosing an embryo, you know, with certain kind of traits that you want to see, which, which what we are doing now in many ways, embryo editing. And then my favorite, which is artificial wombs, which we'll spend some time on in a second. But you know, you put out this tweet, I saw the comments on this. Some people were pro and then there were a whole lot that were like, they said, you know, Gattaca was a dystopian horror movie. Did you miss that part? A mixed reaction. I saw there's a company called Orchid that is doing some of this IVF work. They had a big story in the New York Times. They let you, they let you filter embryos for disease right now to try and make sure one of your kids doesn't have a debilitating lifelong condition, which on the face of it, it's— to me, it feels like just about anyone would want to do that same thing. On, on— when the CEO tweeted out this New York Times piece, there was a lot of people, um, especially— I don't think I'm overgeneralizing— people who tend to be quite religious were, were seen offended by this technology. So, but you clearly see us moving to an era where, where childbirth is changing in a number of ways.

Yeah. And the one on the list you didn't mention probably was the most controversial was embryo editing too. So I think all those, all those technologies are advancing. And ultimately this comes down to do we want to cure and treat disease? Do we want to give people more options to have children, or do we want to condemn them to infertility? Right. And I think Pew Research did a poll on this in America and a bunch of other countries, and they asked people, would you be okay with genetic editing to prevent disease? And like 80% of Americans said they'd be okay with that. Only 20% was skeptical. In other countries— oh, by the way, then they also asked, would you be okay with genetic editing for enhancement, not just disease prevention? And only 20% of America or something, maybe 25%, was are okay with that. But if you looked at other countries like, like India and I suspect China, although it was not in that study, it's probably like 80% are okay with it. So it really is cultural dependent and there could be religious aspects to that. Like in China, you know, it's more— I'm not an expert on this, but I think it's more of a Confucian-based society where they believe life starts at birth, not at conception. So anyway, it does tie back to some of those arguments. But the main thing for me is that You know, we want to use this as a tool to accelerate progress, right? So nature can be quite cruel. Like, it's a little bit of a lottery. And 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, you know, and some people are— 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 like risky or dangerous not to do it. And then there's a blurry line between disease prevention and enhancement too, right? Like if you, if you have a— some people have a genetic predisposition to have like low density, low bone density or something, or osteoporosis. So is that a disease? Yes. Is having stronger bones also an enhancement? Might help you, I don't know, lift heavier weights or just be more healthy? Yeah, it's also an enhanc— so it's sort of a— it's a semantics thing. Is that an enhancement or disease prevention? I think we just, you know, any parent who we do, we already do all of these things to try to make our children's lives better off. You know, we try to get them good education and like feed them really good nutrition and, they're already enhanced in many different ways, right? Like anybody who's ever had their kid do their homework or something is like enhancing them for the future. And so this is just one more way that I think people will do that in the future. And it'll be controversial at first, but like IVF, but it'll eventually become more common. Hopefully the costs of it will come down. I'll say one more thing about Gattaca, by the way, since that the tweet referenced that and I called those the combination of all those technologies, the Gattaca stack. But, you know, Gattaca was a— it was a really good film. I think it's inspiring. And it did have— it was portraying it as a, you know, dangerous thing. But I think it missed a couple of interesting points. You know, one is that eventually we'll be able to make these genetic edits in adult humans, too. Right. It's not like a— it's not just like you'll be at birth decided you're the chosen one or you're not. And it's actually like the technology to edit DNA, it's getting better and better in terms of like lower error rates. How many cells can you edit? And there's lots of therapies already being developed that use CRISPR and the base editing, prime editing that, you know, they're going through clinical trials. So adults will be able to make these choices to it to some degree. That's a little farther off, but I think it's directionally correct. Yeah. The last thing, let's see, I was going to say one other thing about Gattaca. What was it? Oh, I think in the film they sort of portray like the genetically enhanced person has an accident and he becomes very depressed and, you know, but the unenhanced person is just so determined that he's able to overcome it. Now, that's an inspiring story, especially for non-genetically modified humans, which is their whole audience, you know. But who's to say, like, you know, determination is not— doesn't have a genetic component? Like, that could be something, you know, you could also add in if you wanted. So Anyway, I think the real, the real picture will be much more complicated. And a lot of, a lot of sci-fi is dystopian, but you can take elements of it and leave others.

So how do you see this playing out? I mean, if we can edit the disease stuff, I totally am on board with the enhancement stuff, the traits, things like that. It starts to get—

I don't—

I could see that getting weird fast where you— I don't even know if I'm asking you, are you pro or against? I'm more curious. Whatever the number is, 50 years from now, whether it's an embryo or like you say, you're editing adults. Yeah, adults. I mean, how do you see this playing out?

What—

how do you— how do you think it plays out?

I actually think it's one of those things where it'll— people will have a lot of fear about it, but the actual change will be much less dramatic than people think. You know, like there's already lots of people in the world smarter than me. You know, there's people who can run much faster than me. We all live in this world already of like there's people with who spike much higher on certain dimensions. And so it's not going to feel that different if it just starts to— everything starts to shift up a little bit. And you have to remember that we're talking about children here. So even if, let's say, you know, there's been, I think, 2 genetically edited embryos by J.K. or He Jiankui, if I'm probably butchering his name, in China. But let's say that there was 1,000 babies or something tomorrow. I mean, first of all, they're babies, so it'll take them 20 years to grow up. So nothing's going to happen for 20 years. And secondly, it's 1,000 people out of, you know, 8 billion. And so it's just not really going to feel different at all, even if there were 1,000 of these. And the enhancements would probably be very minor too. Like you'd, especially for disease prevention, which is where this will all start off with. And just to be clear, by the way, I don't, I don't really actually have any company I'm working on in this space. I just kind of find it intellectually interesting. Um, but it wouldn't, you would not feel a single change in society from that. And so this was some, this is something that would take much longer than that to happen and play out, like 50, 100 years. So I, I think if there's some sort of moral panic about it, it's largely going to be unfounded, but that won't stop it from happening.

But have you But even if we go 50 or 100 years, you don't think we start to push towards certain traits and things get favored and fall in and out of— I mean, it's easy to run this in your head and see different scenarios, some of which are quite strange.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, the thing is, there's almost infinite variety in human preferences. So, you know, if it was— let's just imagine there was a button you could press and you could look like, I don't know, Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie or some fix whatever. It would, it would very quickly become uncool to look like that because everybody's looking like that. So the fashion— fashions are trend in all kinds of— there's infinite variety of remixing. People have a desire for uniqueness, right? People have a lot of pride in their own things that they care about. And so I actually don't really see it reducing diversity. I think it would actually increase diversity in many dimensions. I mean, there's, you know, maybe somebody will have gills and they can breathe underwater. Like, I don't know, you could see cat eyes and see in the dark or whatever. Like, anything is possible if you really take that to its natural extension in hundreds of years. So it's, it's actually more of like right now biological evolution has happened via natural selection, which is actually a pretty crude algorithm. It's just sort of how can you survive long enough to replicate? And if so, those things, you see more of them. And if not— so actually evolution doesn't really care about how happy you are or whether you're depressed. It doesn't care about how smart you are. It doesn't care about how many fellow human beings you helped or whatever. It's just did you survive long enough to replicate? So it's a pretty naive algorithm. It takes tens or hundreds of thousands of years sometimes to really make massive changes. And I think that if this really, if we're able to take control of our own biology in the next century or something, you will essentially just see evolution accelerate. And what it means to be human in thousands of years could be very different, but it's also going to be different for many other reasons like AI and merging with AI. And I mean, the world's going to be different in many dimensions. That's just one of them.

And like that, this idea that the world will be different strikes me, it just like excites you.

Yeah. I mean, I'm— I think some people are really afraid of change and they feel like the world is moving too fast and it's like, you know, they have to be reskilled to get the new— the next job. And I think that makes sense to some degree. But I also think all progress involves change and we should actually in general be trying to accelerate progress. Yeah, I mean, our lives are immeasurably better off than they were 20 or 50 years ago. And people always make these comments which are true about, you know, like the average person today can afford antibiotics, which like it doesn't matter if you were the King of England or the wealthiest person in the world, like you couldn't have gotten that 100 years ago. So we're all immeasurably better off if we accelerate technological progress and it does require change, but I think it's worth it.

And you've always felt like this somewhere, or this is a position you've come to over time?

I think I've always felt that way in some sense. I was always just excited about the future. Some people live in the past, you know, and they revere the past. Some people live in the present. They're very— actually, being present is a pretty good thing. For some reason, I was always excited about the future. I'm actually not really sure what the origin of that is, but yeah, I was always looking forward to something better.

Have you seen that, the Chinese scientist that you mentioned? Have you seen his Twitter account?

Oh yeah. It's, he's like the Kanye of biology or something. I don't know. It's, it's really bizarre. And there's a parody account that's pretty funny too.

But like that other account is not a parody. I mean, he, that is, him legit tweeting like that.

Yeah, it's his real account. Seems like a parody at times, right? It's not. And there's a parody that's even more extreme.

Yeah, I've only just come across this. He's, he's kind of like embracing the supervillain role or something like that, or, or maybe—

yeah, I've never met him. I can't tell, but maybe he's on the spectrum too, but even too far or something. I don't know. I don't know what's going on there.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, well, I will put it in the show notes. It's a— it is a fun account to follow.

Yeah. Or maybe he did a bunch of ayahuasca or something. I have no idea, but there's something weird going on there.

On the artificial wombs.

All right.

So I've heard people so far working on this mostly, I guess, in stealth mode or in secret to some degree, but there's a growing— I hear about some companies that are, for one, it could just be more straightforward, an artificial womb where a child, you know, is brought up so that people don't have to do that. And then there's another part where it's kind of, could be like a body that's growing organs, you know what I mean? And doesn't, hopefully is not feeling anything, doesn't have a head, something like that. Do you, this is obviously something you're aware of. I mean, same kind of thing. You just see this natural progression that we're heading towards this type of technology.

Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, I think it's an important medical device for people to work on because, you know, many women don't have the option of having children. Even those who do, it can be risky, including death, and very debilitating and takes them out of the workforce. And it's, it's, it's important for equality and like choice and all kinds of reasons. We also have a declining birth rate too, right? So fewer and fewer people are having children. That's, that's its own issue. But I think the most interesting version of the artificial womb research— and again, I don't actually have any project in this space or investment, but I think it's, I think it's interesting. I hope more people work on it. So there's kind of— you can approach it from two, two sides. I mean, one is that an embryo in a lab, I think people have been able to keep those alive longer. I don't know, I forget, maybe it's like 8 or 12 weeks or something. It starts to go out from there. And then conversely, when babies are born prematurely, they can put them in these incubators and there's different technology. I'm actually not an expert on this, but the number of weeks that you can be born prematurely keeps getting earlier and earlier and still have a live survival, right? And so in some ways, those things are getting closer and closer together. And then there's this gap in the middle between the two where the embryo, I think it needs to like attach to the wall of the uterus. And this is where it gets the vasculature that, that nourishes it. And then it has a placenta and these all these kind of things, right? That part nobody, as far as I know, has figured out. And, you know, if they are able to figure that out, I think it would eventually it'll get to— it'll start with animals and different things as it always does, but in these studies, but eventually you could get it to a place where it's actually safer to do a birth that way than it is the natural way, so to speak. So it doesn't mean it has to be perfect and it just— it's kind of like self-driving cars. It's not that they need to have zero accidents ever. They just need to be better than human drivers. And this is sort of a similar thing that will progress over time, I think.

So when you say you're not invested in a startup that's pursuing this, I just always notice, man, I mean, we're going to talk about New Limit in a second. You're just so— you're really well-versed on science. Is this— is just stuff you're interested in and you read about? And I mean, you speak about it very fluently. It's like clearly a bit more than a hobby or something like that.

Yeah. Well, compared to most scientists, I thought— I don't feel like I'm fluent on it, but But yeah, I— and by the way, if there is a great embryo editing or artificial womb company, I'd like— I would be interested in talking to them.

But I know 3.

Okay. You should probably send them to me afterwards. But yeah, I have— I have learned a lot by co-founding NewLimit. And then I actually— I hired a biology tutor when NewLimit was first starting because I felt so, you know, inarticulate and I actually didn't understand it. From high school biology or whatever, enough of the concepts. So I tried reading some textbooks on biology to get up to speed, but it was— I found it very difficult to learn that way. And it's, you know, if you occasionally need to look up a word of something you're reading, that's fine. But if you read a— if you read a sentence and it has like 3 to 5 words that you don't understand, it's like impossible to get through that book. So yeah, actually, I reached out to one of our SAB scientific advisory board members at New Limit, who's this really famous scientist Alex Marson, and I was like, do you have any grad students or postdocs who can tutor me? So for about a year and a half on Sundays, Sunday afternoons, I would do like biology tutoring and it was a much more effective way to learn. And to be clear, I'm still not an expert, but I at least went from like a 1 out of 10 to like a 3 out of 10 or so. I was able to be a little more conversant with the team.

Did you get homework?

Sometimes.

Yeah. Yeah.

Did you do it?

Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah.

Did you— I mean, because I know the Collison brothers, they've always— they've— as long as I've known them, they've had tutors in different subjects. But I—

oh yeah.

Yeah. Had you heard about that or you just—

No, I didn't know they used tutors. I borrowed that idea from somebody else. But I think, you know, if you can afford it, tutoring is a very effective way to get up to speed on something. And I know the Collison brothers, they're just avid. They devour books too. I listen to a lot of audiobooks, but I'm not as fast like visually reading. I think they just visually devour books.

So They read a ton and then, but then when I first started interviewing them, they would do a physicist for one year and then a lawyer and then just grab people from—

Yeah, polymaths.

Yeah, yeah. It's, those guys can speak about a lot of stuff.

Yeah.

Okay, and so New Limit is a company that you're invested in and we're gonna have an episode on them either before or after this podcast airs. I'm not sure at the moment, but I'll try to explain it and then maybe you can fix whatever I get wrong. But there was this discovery of these things called Yamanaka factors. It's, it's these four. They're called Yamanaka factors. They're also called transcription factors. These four basically proteins that it turns out you can take a skin cell, you can take a liver cell, brain cell, activate these 4 proteins on it, dial the cell all the way back to a stem cell state, this blank slate. And this is already fascinating right there because before we're dealing with embryos and things like that, and now we're creating these stem cells in a lab. And then I think it was Alex Ocampo, I believe, who really started to show some of the, the where this could be applied to aging and longevity that you don't maybe have to go all the way back. You can, you can take your liver cell back to a younger liver cell state, but, but maintain that liver identity. And then Nulimit, I think it's safe to say is we knew about these 4 proteins, these 4 factors, but you guys went on this hunt to see, you know, we know there's, there's possibly, well, it's like an astronomical number of combinations that could have these effects, right? And so you've been on this hunt to try to find other combinations of these transcription factors that might have interesting properties. Yeah.

I mean, you said it better than I could. So, uh, that's great. I mean, yeah. So the Yamanaka factors were really, I mean, he won the Nobel Prize for that. It was a groundbreaking discovery that just these 4 proteins could totally transform a cell, both, both the identity of the cell. It changed the type of cell, but it also changed the age of the cell back to this stem cell state. And that was, it really proved that Aging is not some irreversible accumulation of damage that happens because if we can reprogram a cell back to an embryo and it creates a new offspring and it has its whole healthy life ahead of it, then obviously that cell didn't accumulate a bunch of irreversible damage. It actually was reversible. And so what we're doing at NewLimit is we're actually trying to do kind of half of what Yamanaka did. We're trying to change the cell age without changing the cell type. Changing the cell type turns out to be a little dangerous because If you change it back to a cell, a stem cell in your body, it can grow a teratoma, these different tumors and things. So you actually don't want to change the type. You only want to change the cell age. And when I say cell age, I mean really restore function that the cell had when it was younger. So we're doing that by searching the vast space of transcription factors for novel sets. We're not trying to change, modify the Yamanaka factors. We're searching for totally novel sets. And as you pointed out, it's a massive search space. So there's maybe like 2,000 different transcription factors in the human cells. If you said, even if you were really smart, you picked 1,000 of them and discard the other half, and then you say, how many combinations of 5 or 1 through 5 are there of the 1,000? It's roughly like 10 to the 16th. It's more combinations than all the single-cell sequencing we've done on the planet combined. So you're not going to be able to do a brute force exhaustive search of all those combinations. But what we can do is use machine learning to triangulate to the answer. And that's what we started doing at NewLimit. So we're searching the novel space of transcription factors, see if we can reprogram these older cells to restore function they had when they were younger. And we've now screened about 12,000 different combinations. And if you look at our year-over-year progress, it's like, it's like an exponential, right? And so we're kind of building like the Gigafactory of of transcription screening. We're— one other framework I'll just leave you with is there's kind of a spectrum of biotech companies from bioinsight-driven to bio-naive. Bioinsight-driven is saying, hey, we're smart biologists, we can read a bunch of papers, we can do targeted experiments to try to understand really how the biology works. Bio-naive is saying, actually, we don't understand how a lot of biology works and maybe we don't need to. We just want to exhaustively search try tons of experiments, and if we find something that works, even if we have no idea how it works, it's more important that it works. Maybe retroactively we'll find out later how. And so on that spectrum, Nulimit is a little more bio-naive driven. We're not like 100% there. We do use literature insights to sometimes try to help get us there faster, but we are okay trying thousands of different hypotheses, hundreds of different experiments that don't work, to discover new things on the frontier, and it makes it a very exciting company.

You guys just gave a progress update. I mean, like you mentioned, I mean, the discovery process has been going well, but you're also— we're on the cusp of therapies possibly as well. Yeah, I don't know. Can you bring people up to speed on—

Yeah, well, when I first— I co-founded the company along with, you know, Jacob Kimmel, like, Byers, Greg Johnson, Dave, brilliant scientists who came together because I didn't have that background.

Right.

But I initially, when I was putting in money into this, I initially thought this might be like 5 or 6 years of just kind of basic research. Turns out that part went faster than we thought, and it already has started to generate exciting early results in that we've actually successfully demonstrated reprogramming of a human cell that we thought that would not take— that would take much longer. And that's really like a milestone in the field. So we we've been able to demonstrate— take an older human liver cell, hepatocyte. We get these from aged donors like in their 80s. And we also have a bunch of donors that are younger, like in their 20s. By the way, side little morbid fact, you know, you might wonder where you're getting from the elderly people. It's people get biopsies of the liver and stuff. Why are there 20-year-olds donating their liver cells. It's unfortunately, I think it's largely from motorcycle accidents, young people who passed away anyway. And so we, we have taken some of those older human cells and actually reprogrammed them and they've now started to go through functional assays and demonstrate that they are acting like the younger cells. Now, that doesn't mean that it's going to work in humans. We are doing it in human, human cells. But the not to get too in the details, but these are actually human cells that have been grafted into mice. They're—

When I was there, I got to hold a mouse that had a partial human liver.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I believe it's called like a xenograft model or something. Yeah. But it's kind of crazy. You can actually have like a mouse running around with a human liver. And, you know, if you give it like a high-fat diet or too much alcohol or whatever, it has all the same things that like it happens, you know, in humans when you drink too much or— Yeah. So, Anyway, it's, it's still early. I want to, I want to just caveat all of this. We haven't entered human clinical trials yet. We'll probably do that in 2027 or something. So this is going to be a long time before this is going to be commercially available to people. But it could still fail at many points along the way. So I want to set expectations here. But just the fact that we're seeing these early results in the field and having successfully demonstrated a human cell being reprogrammed to restore its youthful function, that's, that's exciting. And it's caused us to really double down.

How do you— is this a question? Same thing I always have for the Carlson brothers. I mean, Coinbase, amazing company, very exciting space. And then you've got this other company, you know, could make people live longer, healthier. How do you— is there— isn't there sometimes a part of you that's like, oh, I'm going to switch gears, I'm going to go spend all my time at New Limit and this is where I'm going to put my focus now.

No, no, I really enjoy actually doing a plethora of things and Coinbase is very much still my main job. And, you know, I'm an investor in New Limit, board member. I'm also helping them like 20% time here and there, try to help, you know, build the company. But I find it very intellectually engaging to just work on a handful, a small handful of different things. And learn, take the best practices from one company and try to apply it to the other. It's a little bit like some CEOs are on the board of other companies and they learn a lot from it. I'm not on any other boards than like New Limit, though I guess the one I invested in and Research Hub. But yeah, I, you know, it's different because Coinbase is at scale now. I mean, we have, it's, I, we, you know, I don't want to share the exact numbers, but a public company, but it's a massive company.

We have—

we can apply big teams, lots of resources to really innovative things. New Limit is more of a startup, right? And so both are exciting. And I hope that the people who are— we're living in this golden age of software, right? Like fortunes are being made in software, if in some cases. And so it's really cool to see this next generation of entrepreneurs. And you mentioned some of the other ones that I think are taking some of the proceeds of the golden age of software and moving it into the land of atoms. Atoms is more expensive to move than bits. Some of the biggest problems to go solve in the world are in the world of atoms. You know, it's all the things you're probably doing your show on. And I think like if you had to pick the 5 most important trends, to me it's like you got AI, crypto is creating more economic freedom, got space, brain-machine interfaces, maybe like fusion energy or something to get. And then, and then I think it's longevity.

Right.

And how to take control of our biology and like accelerate evolution essentially. So to me, those are the big ones. Um, there's already really good teams working on a lot of those things I just mentioned, including Coinbase. Like the longevity piece was the one I didn't see enough smart people working on. And so that's partly why I decided to take some of the— this was after Coinbase went public. I took some of the proceeds of that and kind of like, let's, okay, let's put it into the land of atoms and try something really hard, but that would be really impactful if it worked.

Okay. I was gonna ask you, if you look at someone like Sam Altman, I think he's got a bet in each one of the areas.

Yeah.

You know, OpenAI, obviously. And then World is kind of his finance identity thing. Helion and a couple others, energy, um, Retro for longevity.

Mm-hmm.

And then I'm forgetting one on our list somewhere in there, but, um, has made, but you, You haven't found other spots in all those areas that have interested you enough where you just said it was, it was kind of been there. Other people were doing that. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of it is you're trying to pick something that to spend your time on where if you didn't do it, it wouldn't happen, or at least not anywhere near as fast. Like if there's already somebody doing a really great job on AI, I don't personally, unless I feel like I have some much better idea that just has to happen in the world, I'm not going to like enter just to compete with them. I'm looking for things that are underinvested in that I could try to help accelerate and bring forward.

Yeah.

Okay. I'm just keeping an eye on time. I mean, I'm going to do a couple crypto questions, but nothing great, nothing massive. I was reading this New York Times story. This is from 2022. It was not the most flattering profile of Coinbase. It presented you guys as having made a lot of big bets that didn't pay off. Going through some financial struggles. There was an amusing part of this story, I thought, though, you know, it says it's talking about your competitors at the time, SBF and Binance, and says, you know, its competitors appear to be faring better. Sam Bankman-Fried, chief executive of FTX, said in an email that his financial results had been, quote, ballpark similar to last year. You know, as I was reading the story, I mean, this is 2022. The thing that stands out is that you did not go to jail. Thank you.

Thank you for noticing that. I appreciate that. Yeah.

Among these other guys, I've heard you talk about this a little bit, but I mean, there must be— must be so bizarre to operate in just such a chaotic business for this many years. I think I signed up for Coinbase super early. Yeah, I don't know. You seem very chill, like you're, you're still together. I would have thought, you know, it seems like a good way to lose your, to lose your head. Hmm.

Yeah. Well, it's true. I mean, crypto has gone through lots of ups and downs. We've tried to be this responsible player in the room, have a long-term perspective, help mature the industry. I actually think one of the important things as an entrepreneur is, I mean, as a journalist, I think of you in a very different category than most journalists, but I actually think it's important not to read a lot of press about your company because you kind of— you really want to only read things from people who have your best interests at heart. Like if, if my board member calls me like, Brian, you're really screwing this up, like I need to give you some feedback. I'm like, okay, I take that very seriously. Or if our customers are complaining or something, or if I call somebody like to ask them for advice, but You know, I actually, I actually never read that, that New York Times piece that you're quoting. So you were quoting things to me I didn't know about, but because I think you want to preserve your, your mental cycles for the day. I mean, like the most scarce thing we all have is time. And if you just— if there's something on your phone in the morning and it's like some text message and it makes you angry and now like it's just stealing energy from your your, your concentration and your time. And so I want to use my time and energy to focus on my priorities, not somebody else's priorities or whatever game they're playing to try to do their thing in the world. So I actually really consciously try to tune out everything that I think is not operating in good faith or trying to serve my interests or has my interests at heart.

And you, I mean, you, you've caught some strays from the press, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Over the years.

I should have mentioned that too. I think the reason reason that they were writing that hit piece, although I didn't read it, was like we had put out the Mission First blog post and people have subsequently who worked at The New York Times subsequently told me that after we put that out, they spun up a little squad of people to like go, go write a bunch of hit pieces on this company. So it just didn't align with their worldview. I mean, I think I actually don't think they're really journalists. I think they're more like, like political activists. So I don't think it's— it's not real journalism.

And like, since all that happened, I mean, you famously said, you know, look, we just don't want to be doing a ton of politics inside of our company. We're going to do the company, you know, and if you have a problem with that, you're welcome to go work somewhere else. And people covered a lot of this. I don't know, we're what, 2, 3, 4 years away from that now. Any— has hindsight brought out any other thoughts on that experience or how it played out?

Yeah, I mean, I think in hindsight it was a really good decision. It's— it definitely— a lot of other CEOs called me to like thank me for that, and many of them followed in other ways that were probably received fewer arrows. So that was good for them. You know, it was hard to go through, but it was because it happened because I was failing as a leader to provide clarity about the kind of how we were going to work together and where we were going. I was kind of walking on eggshells. I didn't know how to deal with that at the time. And so it, it taught me to be a better leader and just to not be conflict averse. And you need to provide clarity to the organization and then people can choose if they want to be in that organization or not.

At the time you were seen as like a radical and, and, and like I said, caught, caught quite a few strays for that as the years played out. Even companies like Google, you know, as far as I could tell, kind of ended up much closer to your position and that this became sort of like a vaguely accepted mainstream way to maybe run your company.

I think that's true. Yeah.

Yeah. As the—

I'm sure you've been asked this a ton. I have to apologize. I don't cover crypto a ton. That's fine. You know, as this new administration has come in, obviously we have like a crypto czar now and people who like David Sachs has been in this arena for many, many years and knows what's going on. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, what is your 50,000-foot view? Has this helped things trend in a direction you wanted to see or not?

Yeah, I'd say this new administration has been markedly better than the prior one on crypto. And we have the most pro-crypto Congress now too, which is very bipartisan, by the way, both on the left and right. We have much more crypto champions. So it's been really good. I mean, first of all, the SEC case against us got dropped, which was bogus, and I think we would have won it eventually anyway in the courts. But it was nice just to have them admit that it was bogus and just drop it with zero fines, zero changes to our business. It was great to have the United States government come out and say they want to actually buy and hold Bitcoin and then Bitcoin strategic reserve. I thought that was incredible. I would have never in my wildest dreams imagined that that might be possible 10 years ago. But to see it actually happen was really cool. And then now we're on the cusp of getting legislation passed, which will be the, the final, the trifecta here. And stablecoin legislation has gotten passed in the Senate committee, the House committee, and it's now going hopefully to the full Congress and then the president's desk. Same thing with market structure legislation, which helps clarify which of these assets are securities, commodities, payment tokens, or artwork, which was the big— that was the big lack of clarity in the past. So that legislation, the president has said he wants to sign that by August. We'll see if that happens. So with those two pieces of legislation, I think the world looks very different. For other— by the way, other democracies will go copy and emulate that to some degree. But lots of institutional money will come in that was waiting on the sidelines, kind of waiting to see when regulatory clarity would emerge. Lots of startups will now get built because there is regulatory clarity. In the past, they were worried about getting sued by the SEC. And I think it'll ensure that America continues to be a technology and a financial hub and leader by— because crypto is really just a technology to update the financial system and make it more efficient and fair and free. And so we'll now get a chance to go do that. It'll greatly increase the TAM potential of Coinbase.

And you, you ticked off a couple of these big items. There were— I put a thing on X, you know, questions to ask you, and people were like, you know, what are the 3 specific things you would like to see? I mean, as the government— what you just laid out, does that really cover all your big ticket items, or you think there's still 1 or 2 specific things you would also like to see done?

Well, those are the big ones, but Yeah, I mean, like any financial service company, we're going to have lots of interaction with regulators and Congress over time. You know, for instance, we'd love to actually begin to tokenize equities like, like, you know, Nvidia and Tesla and other stocks that people are trading. There's, there's a bunch of reasons I think that's interesting. We could get into if you want. There's also like perpetual futures has some— is something that outside of the US has been enormously successful in crypto. It's a superior trading product. For a bunch of reasons, like people can get additional leverage and anyway, but they actually weren't approved in the United States. I think if that could get fixed, that would be a huge opportunity for the US. So there's a handful like crypto payments now with stablecoins are getting really, really good. And so there's a lot of things like that that could be— we'll work with the government on.

Yeah, I mean, it is like a weird feel. I wrote a ton of stories in the early days when people were just starting to do Bitcoin mining and everything. I was so into it. And then obviously I'm not saying anything people don't know. I mean, it's like crypto's had such booms and busts and then people kind of still, I think, roll their eyes. You know, some people roll their eyes when it's like, oh, crypto is like, I never even understand this and it's never living up to everything I was, I was told. It's, I mean, you, it sounds like you feel like if some of this legislation gets passed, then some of these more practical applications, it just, it starts to clear out these blocks that make this more of an everyday type thing.

Yeah, it'll, it'll clear out any remaining bad actors, which hopefully there aren't too many more. And then I think for the average person, they'll end up using crypto in something that it's not like that they love crypto just for crypto's sake. Right. But I'm just trying to send the payment to my friend or overseas or whatever. And that's like, oh, USDC is the cheapest, fastest way to do it. Or, you know, they have a diversified portfolio with their wealth manager and it's like, ah, one, you know, 1 to 5% of that should probably be Bitcoin because it's not correlated with these other asset classes. And then there's a whole other set of kind of applications on the frontier, like prediction markets and things people are building where at one point, like in the election, the, the, some of the prediction markets were the top apps in the App Store. So there's things that will go mainstream where I don't think people actually even really know they're using crypto underneath, but they're just— it's just the fastest, cheapest, best way to do something or to access some application. It's kind of like using electricity. Like most people don't understand how electricity works, but they can turn on a light switch.

So yeah, I was talking to the CEO of Stripe, acquired Bridge, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it was kind of like fascinating, this idea of, of all the remittances that people do overseas to send money to families and how complicated that process is, but in the back end they're using these stablecoins to facilitate this whole process. I was kind of curious what you made of that acquisition.

Yeah, well, we know all the players and they're all great. And I think it's really good that Stripe is getting more into crypto, just like, you know, Block is getting more into crypto with Cash App and PayPal is getting more into crypto. Robinhood is getting more into crypto. Like really every fintech company is which is great. And then the traditional financial service companies are also getting more into crypto. I think payments is going to be massive for crypto. You know, there was about $30 trillion of stablecoin volume last year, which is kind of an insane figure. It grew 3x year over year. So the growth rate is enormous. We're actively integrating payments into all of our products. There's B2B cases like people paying vendors overseas and paying contractors and then payroll, you know, and then there's, there's retail payments like the remittance case you mentioned and there's merchant payments. So there's going to be a lot of different categories for this. And, you know, we, we had a big goal for a while internally. We said we need to get payments to be under 1 second and 1 cent on-chain. And the early blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, they call it Layer 1. They were this computer science breakthrough in that they were global, decentralized, permissionless, but they were kind of slow and expensive, right? Like a transaction on Bitcoin layer 1, it took like an hour to confirm. It might cost you like $5 or something, $20. It depends on the time of day. And with these layer 2 solutions like Base coming online, which is built on top of Ethereum that we helped create, You know, it's now under 1 second, 1 cent anywhere in the world. And so it starts to look a lot more like a WhatsApp message or something. I mean, a WhatsApp message, you can send it to anybody anywhere in the world. It's not like you have to pay some FX fee at the border or like wait 3 days and come in, you know, as a bank holiday on the weekend, the messages don't work. It's like money should move like a WhatsApp message instantly anywhere in the world, less than 1 cent. It's actually far less than 1 cent now. It's probably less than a 10th of a cent. And so what's possible in the economy if we get rid of all that friction? You know, like sometimes I, I tell people this, this example where if you think about messaging, you know, go back to like the 1800s when people had to mail letters and by stagecoach and these kind of— and like how many letters did the average person a month send? You know, it was probably like 1 or something, right? Ben Franklin might have written a lot of letters, but like the average person on the frontier wrote like 1 letter a month or something. And then, you know, things like email came around and everyone was like, oh, well, email is going to disrupt paper mail. Well, it didn't, but people started to send a lot more emails. Text messaging came out. Remember when text messaging was $0.30?

I do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think actually I could stand for that to come back.

Yeah. Yeah. There's too many. But I think what was the figure? I think when text messaging was $0.30, it peaked at, I want to say like a billion messages a day or something. I don't quote me on the exact number, but it was something like that. And then, and then the messaging apps like WhatsApp came along and they took it down to free and text messaging got cheaper. And there's now like 130 billion messages a day or something like that. So I don't remember the exact number, but it went up like 2 orders of magnitude from a 30-second, 30-cent text message to a free, to a free message. So, you know, what's going to happen in our economy when you take all that friction out of, out of payments? I don't know, but it's going to be exciting. I mean, right now, for instance, people, they have to wait 2 weeks to get their paycheck. Like, that doesn't make any sense. You should get your paycheck every day or hour or something, right? Or, you know, if you're, if you're on a freeway and like, you know, you want to pass the car, your self-driving car wants to pass the other self-driving car in front of you, maybe you can do a microtransaction and, you know, they'll pull over and you can go ahead or find like a little parking spot or whatever. There's going to be microtransactions happening or macro transactions happening all over the time, all over the place. It'll probably increase, you know, the number of transactions by a couple orders of magnitude.

When there's like an idiot like me, you don't get tired of explaining this stuff over and over again.

No, no, I think it's fascinating. I like talking about it.

Yeah. You know what? I saw the movie when you and Fred were in the earliest days of Coinbase. It looked like it was just like the two of you in a makeshift office and you were in an Oxford shirt and a tie. This stood out to me. So you were— Yeah, you were playing the—

were you—

were you playing?

Yeah.

Well, you were dressing up for the occasion.

Like, you know, already nobody was taking us seriously at that time, you know, including investors. So we were like doing our best to be presentable and bring legitimacy to the field. So at that time, yeah, we— Fred and I actually wore button-down shirts like every day. We didn't wear a tie every day, but yeah. And, you know, crypto is big enough now where we're back to the founder t-shirt, but But yeah, I mean, I was not afraid to suit up and go talk to regulators. Yeah, DC, whatever was needed.

I didn't know if this was— I know it was pre-Zoom, so I was just— I didn't know if you were, you were just getting pumped for the phone calls you were making or something like that. Or maybe, maybe you were meeting with, with regulators already. I don't know. Well, I honestly thank you so much for the time. It's awesome to get to talk to you. And, and New Limit is in particular is like one of these companies that I'm deeply, deeply fascinated by. I think there's, there's like a— I won't, I don't want to play my cards really. I think there's a book, book in, in this, this field of technology, you know, over time. And I'm so excited to see where it goes.

So, um, thank you for saying that. I, it's the first interview I've done that spanned all the things I'm working on. And, um, and, and the first time I really talked about me about the biology piece too. So that was really fun. And, um, Yeah, I hope more people kind of get inspired to go build the future.

Yeah, cool. That's a great note to end on. Thank you. Thanks so much, man.

Thank you.

For Memory is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. Today's guest was Brian Armstrong. The show is produced by me and David Nicholson. Our theme song is by James Mercer and Jon Sortland. The show is edited by the auspicious Jon Sortland.