#627: Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase — The Art of Relentless Focus, Preparing for Full-Contact Entrepreneurship, Critical Forks in the Path, Handling Haters, The Wisdom of Paul Graham, Epigenetic Reprogramming, and Much More

Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase — The Art of Relentless Focus, Preparing for Full-Contact Entrepreneurship, Critical Forks in the Path, Handling Haters, The Wisdom of Paul Graham, Epigenetic Reprogramming, and Much More | Brought to you by ShipStation http://shipstation.com/tim shipping software, Athletic Greens http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement, and Helix Sleep http://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses. Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong) is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Coinbase https://www.coinbase.com/. Founded in 2012, Coinbase is building the crypto economy—a more fair, accessible, efficient, and transparent financial system enabled by crypto. Coinbase serves over 103 million verified users, 14,500 institutions, and 245,000 ecosystem partners in over 100 countries. In April 2021, Coinbase listed publicly on NASDAQ as COIN. Before founding Coinbase, Brian served as a software engineer at Airbnb, where he focused on fraud prevention. Before Airbnb, Brian founded and was CEO of UniversityTutor.com http://universitytutor.com/, an online tutoring directory and a subsidiary of Johnson Educational Technologies LLC. Brian also previously served as a consultant for the enterprise risk management division at Deloitte & Touche LLP. Brian has a BA in computer science and economics and an MS in computer science from Rice University. Over the last three years, Coinbase has worked with ten-time Emmy®-winning filmmaker Greg Kohs on a documentary about cryptocurrency and Coinbase. COIN https://www.amazon.com/Coin-Brian-Armstrong/dp/B0B8S2MYJK/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 is now available on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Coin-Brian-Armstrong/dp/B0B8S2MYJK/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/coin/id1643208919, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=990s4ibOhCw, Vimeo on Demand https://vimeo.com/ondemand/coin, and other platforms. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by ShipStation http://shipstation.com/tim! ShipStation http://shipstation.com/tim integrates with every widely used platform—including Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Shopify, etc.—making it easy to manage all your shipping from one simple dashboard. Save time with consolidated order management and automated shipping updates for your customers. Easily compare carriers, rates, and delivery times to get the most out of every send. And get the same discounted shipping rates as Fortune 500 companies, whether you‘re sending a stack or a truckful. 98% of companies that use ShipStation for one year become customers for life, so join the 130,000+ companies who have grown their ecommerce businesses with ShipStation. Go to ShipStation.com http://shipstation.com/timtoday and sign up with promo code TIM for a FREE 60-day trial. Get set up before the biggest shipping season of the year, and get 2 months FREE when you visit ShipStation.com http://shipstation.com/tim. Just click the microphone at the top and type in code TIM. * This episode is also brought to you by Helix Sleep http://helixsleep.com/tim! Helix was selected as the #1 overall mattress of 2020 by GQ magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. With Helix http://helixsleep.com/tim, there’s a specific mattress to meet each and every body’s unique comfort needs. Just take their quiz—only two minutes to complete http://helixsleep.com/tim—that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for a hundred nights, risk-free. They’ll even pick it up from you if you don’t love it. And now, Helix is offering up to 200 dollars off all mattress orders plus two free pillows at HelixSleep.com/Tim http://helixsleep.com/tim. * This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * [05:46] How Brian’s first book idea became a blog. [07:21] Brian’s time in Buenos Aires. [13:39] Present-day economic warning signs. [16:13] Coinbase beginnings: from genesis to the Buy Bitcoin button. [20:35] Influential human beings, books, and documentaries. [23:15] Core principles learned from early startup days. [26:39] Favorite Paul Graham essays. [28:12] Controversy: Coinbase becomes an apolitical, mission-focused company. [37:11] Cultivating resilience to resistance as a leader. [44:57] Competition. [46:51] What crypto skeptics and crypto bulls each get wrong often. [49:30] Main use cases for crypto. [50:18] Making the case that crypto is still in early days. [54:55] Novel crypto ideas Brian thinks will prove worthwhile. [59:57] Lessons learned from the launch of Coinbase’s NFT marketplace. [1:03:44] How Coinbase is addressing NFT security. [1:05:34] “Not your keys, not your crypto.” [1:10:56] Self-improvement. [1:14:14] Learning biology basics from a tutor as an adult. [1:20:03] The goals of NewLimit. [1:27:32] What is ResearchHub? [1:31:41] How open bounties work. [1:33:25] What excites Brian most about science today? [1:36:52] Brian’s billboard. [1:38:24] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

  Personally, for the last few years, I have been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one of those in the guest bedroom, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. They frequently say it's the best night of sleep they've had in ages. It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. Helix mattresses are American-made and come with a 10- or 15-year warranty, depending on the model. Your mattress will be shipped straight to your door, free of charge. And there's no better way to test out a new mattress than by sleeping on it in your own home. That's why they offer a 100-night risk-free trial. If you decide it's not the best fit, you're welcome to return it for a full refund. Helix has been awarded number one mattress by both GQ and Wired magazines.

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  For you, my dear listeners, Helix is offering up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows. Go to helixsleep.com/tim. That's helixsleep.com/tim. Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com/tim. Or click the link in the episode's description. Helixsleep.com/tim. With Helix Sleep, better sleep starts now. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. I've been asked this for years. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance, so you can cover your bases.

• 2:06Tim Ferriss?

  If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if you're Meals where they should be, it covers your bases. I've recommended it since the Four Hour Body, which was, God, eons ago, 2010, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'll be hard pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral, greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health and immunity formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens. You get the idea. It is very, very comprehensive. And I do my best, of course, to focus on nutrient dense, proper meals. But sometimes you're busy. Sometimes you're traveling.

• 2:48Tim Ferriss?

  Sometimes you just want to make sure that you're getting what you need. AG1 makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when whole foods aren't readily available. It's also NSF certified for sport, making it safe for competitive athletes as what's on the label is in the powder. It's the ultimate all in one nutritional supplement bundle in one easy scoop. Right now Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all in one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I've found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support.

• 3:32Tim Ferriss?

  Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com/tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 3:50Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 3:56Speaker 02

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:12Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm going to keep my preamble short because I want to get into the meat and potatoes of this conversation with my guest, Brian Armstrong. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Coinbase. Founded in 2012, Coinbase is building the crypto economy, a more fair, accessible, efficient, and transparent financial system enabled by crypto. Coinbase serves over 103 million verified users, 14,500 institutions, and 245,000 ecosystem partners in more than 100 countries. In April 2021, Coinbase listed publicly on the NASDAQ as COIN.

• 4:54Tim Ferriss?

  Before founding Coinbase, Brian served as a software engineer at Airbnb, where he focused on fraud prevention. Before Airbnb, Brian founded and was CEO of universitytutor.com, an online tutoring directory and a subsidiary of Johnson Educational Technologies, LLC. Brian also served previously as a consultant for the Enterprise Risk Management Division at Deloitte and Touche, LLP. Brian has a BA in Computer Science and Economics and an MS in Computer Science from Rice University. Over the last three years, Coinbase has worked with 10-time Emmy award-winning filmmaker Greg Coes on a documentary about cryptocurrency and Coinbase. Coin, that is the name of the documentary, is now available on Amazon, iTunes, Vimeo On Demand, and other platforms.

• 5:34Tim Ferriss?

  You can find Brian on Twitter, which I suggest you follow, @Brian Armstrong. Brian, nice to see you. Thanks for making the time.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks, Tim, for having me on the show.

• 5:47Tim Ferriss?

  And sometimes, in the course of doing research, I find a gingerbread trail that leads me to the story before the story before the story, and this may be a dead end, but I'm going to give it a shot. What was startbreakingfree.com? Does this ring a bell for you?

• 6:03Speaker 03

  That's impressive you found that. That's a blog that I started and I actually decided when I was right out of college, I was working on that tutoring company. Somehow I got the idea in my head that I should write a book. And I think what I was doing was I was, whenever I want to try to learn something or figure it out, I try to write it down. Now I just do blog posts. It seems a lot easier. But at the time I was like, let me, I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to build a company that was meaningful. And, you know, most people would probably go do that first and then write the book, but I somehow got it backwards and was like, you know what? Let me write the book to figure out how to do it. So I wrote a book called Start Breaking Free. And then after I wrote this, I didn't have a publisher or anything. I was, I was kind of doing a self publishing thing.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  And I read a book called How to Market Your Book. And, you know, I basically realized that I had to go make a blog or something to try to market the book. So I started, I created this blog. Honestly, the blog probably was more impactful in my life than, than the book in the sense that I just put something out every week. I got reactions from the audience in real time. So now my, I guess my takeaway from that was if I was going to do that again, I'd probably just go with a blog. And if I had a blog that had 10 or 12, 15 posts that had really resonated with people, I'd maybe later package those into a book and put, add a few more that were unique, unique or something like that. But at the time that was, I got the order wrong and I was just trying stuff. So that's what I put out there.

• 7:22Tim Ferriss?

  Well, sometimes it's the things you throw against the wall that sort of in retrospect form the puzzle that helps you to do so many things. And I suppose one of the experiences I'd love to at least bring up since we have this shared time in Argentina is your period of time in, in Buenos Aires. And it's hard for me to say it that way. Buenos Aires. And I'd like to, to hear specifically what you took away. Not just the experience of witnessing hyperinflation, which I do think we should talk about, but anything else that struck you culturally or otherwise. And also why Argentina in the first place?

• 8:06Tim Ferriss?

  Of all the places you could go and if you could just place us in time in terms of how old you are, when in your life this happens?

• 8:13Speaker 03

  I think I was probably 28 or 27, something in that timeframe. I graduated from college, I'd been working on this tutoring startup, I had tried working at a couple of different companies like Deloitte. You know, frankly, I wasn't feeling very successful. I hadn't really found a company that I wanted to work at. I thought I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but the tutoring company I had started was kind of limping along, fairly successful. I mean, I was kind of paying my rent type thing, but barely, and it wasn't really growing. And I had this sense of like, okay, I want to go have some adventure in the world. I want to learn how to do a startup in a different way. I had never really tried living abroad, like studying abroad. And there was part of me that was like, I just, I need to grow up. I need to try something crazy and just get adventure in my life.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  And I had never been to South America and I knew a little bit of Spanish from high school, but I was not very fluent at all. And so I decided, you know what, I'm going to go do a year, spend a month in every major city in South America, travel around, try to find myself. I was kind of doing like a vision quest to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And I can't remember how I chose Buenos Aires, but that was intended to be my first destination of many, one per month roughly. I think I just read some stuff online. You're, I think you were, I don't remember what timeframe you were down there, but I think I read your book maybe a couple of years after that or something. It was the timing was kind of odd, but I basically made it down there to Buenos Aires. Didn't really have a place to stay or anything. I was intentionally kind of throwing myself into like an unfamiliar situation. And I ended up staying at a hostel.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  I found finally a room to rent. I figured out how to use an ATM, got a local cell phone. And after a month, I was finally settled a little bit and I was like, all right, I don't, I don't want to go have to do that all over again in Brazil or Chile. So I was like, let me stay here a little bit longer. Long story short, I ended up staying there about a year and did a few trips into neighboring countries and things like that, but mostly planted myself in Buenos Aires. And I don't know, I guess the root of your question is kind of like what I took away from it. I mean, I can tell you at the time I felt very lost and in hindsight, you can look back and sort of connect some dots and like think about, oh, hyperinflation and that kind of stuff. But I don't know, one of the other things I guess I haven't talked about before that I sort of realized while I was there was that, you know, the culture of that country was just incredibly different from the US, right?

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Which is maybe an obvious statement, but the thing that stood out to me was that, you know, I felt like there was just a bit of, there wasn't optimism about the future, right? People kind of had this vibe like, Keep your head down, you know, don't do anything too crazy because everything could get taken away from you tomorrow. And there was like, kind of, I saw rampant corruption in various places where, you know, businesses were all kind of operating in the gray. Occasionally, there'd be people like, the fire official would come in and like, sort of, quote, "close a restaurant for safety issues," but they were really trying to get some payout, or it was, it was kind of a gray market. And what I saw was, I think, what happens when you have a once great superpower, right? Like, Argentina, I think, was one, like,

• 11:06Speaker 03

  the number eighth, eighth largest economy in the world, or something, in 1900. And then 100 years later, you know, it was basically 100 years of just mismanagement, corruption, bad government, endless protests. And the people sort of misplaced their faith in the government to do good things, whereas ideally, like, it would have been individuals empowering themselves and free markets. And that is kind of, in my belief, what happened, what caused the United States to, this unique experiment in the United States to really turn it into a world superpower. And so, seeing the change of optimism to pessimism in that country, just after 100 years of, you know, bad outcomes and feeling like you were powerless, that was something that did sort of stick with me. And so, I hope it doesn't come across too negative. Argentina has many beautiful things about it as well.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Culturally, I learned many things just about valuing, like, family and good food and experiences and things like that. But from an optimism about the future point of view, it was, it could not have been more different.

• 12:01Tim Ferriss?

  I can corroborate that. I was in Argentina 2004 to 2005. And so, this was a few years after the 2001 economic meltdown, which they seem to, almost like clockwork, have every five to 10 years, which we could talk about separately. But the degree of apathy was jarring, almost. And, I mean, I do think that for the porteños, there's a, the people in the capital, they're famous for complaining even by the standards of the people in the provinces. So you have to take a little bit of that along with things. But, as you said, there was very little sense.

• 12:44Tim Ferriss?

  Of optimism. And I remember talking to a shoe store owner who said at one point, you know, the equivalent of the first lady came in with security guards, shut down the store and just grabbed anything that she wanted. And she was like, thank you very much and walked out of the store without paying. And I mean, that I think is a reflection of the broader perception that people had of the government. And I remember walking around in 2004 and still there was graffiti all over the banks, some of which still had chains locking the doors shut from when people were prevented from withdrawing their cash savings in panic mode because of hyperinflation,

• 13:29Tim Ferriss?

  but the banks themselves effectively closed the doors and wouldn't allow them to withdraw. So you had vultures and thieves and so on in Spanish on the sides of all these banks. Let's hop to present day. I mean, I'm very curious because I think there are many ways to spin apocalyptic scenarios that are not altogether likely. But when you look at the macroeconomic climate currently, we're recording this in October of 2022. Are there any facets in particular that you find concerning or think that people are not paying enough attention to?

• 14:05Speaker 03

  In the broader economy? I mean, I don't know. The main thing I just I've been thinking about a lot is Ray Dalio's recent book Principles for a Changing World Order. And I thought he did a really good job of just kind of looking back at history and teasing apart some of these patterns. And so when I I found the book convincing, you know, I haven't dug into the data myself. He put a lot of it online, but it's not just like his opinion. He's trying to, he's trying to base it on facts of history. And I don't know, my observation is that I don't think America is in any kind of like imminent danger of rapid decline, but I do think it is in slow decline. That that part seems pretty likely to me. And so you see a lot of these telltale signs of, you know, increasing polarization and media starts to get more polarized and captured by,

• 14:48Speaker 03

  you know, various political organizations. We're seeing higher inflation, obviously, and that's worrisome. You kind of go on down the list. So, you know, I think this particular moment where whether we're in a recession or not, I my guess is that will be You know, something kind of like the 2008 crisis or whatever, which ironically is the birth of Bitcoin, what came out of that. So I don't think it'll be massive in terms of like the whole, you know, the US isn't like going to just fall apart overnight, but I do think it's in slow decline. And so it raises a lot of interesting questions about what is the next world order? Is that China? Is it something that's going to be more decentralized and internet-based, kind of like the network states that Balaji has written about? And I think crypto probably has a big part to play in this future because, you know, we

• 15:32Speaker 03

  really are building a new economy, the crypto economy, that's more global and decentralized. And I think a lot of people were thinking in this current macro environment, when we saw high inflation, hey, maybe, maybe people will now go to Bitcoin as the digital gold equivalent. And it didn't. Bitcoin went down along with the broader economy. And so it seems like people are still treating Bitcoin as a growth tech stock equivalent or something. But my guess is that that's going to change in the next five years or 10 years, something like that. And we will start to see the crypto economy start to become, you know, maybe over 10, 20 years, it'll become the main thing. It's sort of in the way that e-commerce back 20 years ago was sort of a sideshow, but now it's kind of the main thing. And so I think we'll see that happen with crypto, too.

• 16:13Tim Ferriss?

  So let's rewind for a moment, and then we'll go back and forth chronologically because I like the memento style of conversation. But if we go back to very early decisions and V1 Coinbase, I watched the coin documentary, which I enjoyed a lot. I have many questions that maybe we'll get to later, related to being a private person, but also inviting a film crew to follow you around, especially in many of those private contexts. But one of the key moments appeared to be the decision to put a buy Bitcoin button on Coinbase. So I'd love for you to just paint a picture for folks who may not know any of the genesis story.

• 16:56Tim Ferriss?

  What the traction looked like, what the activity looked like for Coinbase prior to that. And then, most important or interesting to me is how you arrived at that decision and thought about that decision and then what happened afterwards.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  So before that decision to add the buy Bitcoin button, I mean, we had no traction, really. Things were flat. And this is not uncommon, by the way. In startups, there is something called startup hype cycle. I think if you Google that, you'll find some Google Images. And it beautifully illustrates the process that a lot of startups go through, where you have this kind of, you launch and there's a big spike and then it comes down to zero because nobody cares. They're just busy with all the other stuff they're doing in the world. And you have kind of the trough of sorrow and then you keep working on the product and you, you know, that's where a lot of startups die. But if you go through it, you know, usually for like years, you have to kind of do this iteration of like, talk to the customer, improve the product, talk to the customer, improve the product. And if you don't die, you don't get distracted, you don't get disillusioned, you'll sometimes see these like wiggles of hope and eventually, maybe if you're lucky, you'll find product

• 17:57Speaker 03

  market fit and the thing will take off. So this is what they drill into you and you're, when you go through Y Combinator, which Coinbase did, and it's sort of a startup incubator where they teach you all these kind of war stories. And so that's what I was doing at this time as like a, you know, aspiring entrepreneur. I was, I had launched an early version of Coinbase, just on Reddit and places like that. You know, I'd gotten a couple hundred people to come sign up and check it out and then nobody would come back. And so what I did was I followed the Y Combinator advice and I emailed, I just emailed five of the people who had signed up and I said, hey, I made this, this app. I'd love to get your feedback. Can I hop on the phone with you? Here's my cell phone number. So I talked to five of these people and I think it was like the third or fourth person I was talking to. And the guy was like, yeah, I mean, the app seems cool and everything, but like,

• 18:41Speaker 03

  I don't really have any Bitcoins. So I just signed up and then I didn't have any Bitcoin and I didn't come back. And some kind of light bulb, this was like probably the second or third person who'd said something like this. And I, light bulb went off in my head. I was like, well, if there was a buy. A buy button right in the app, would you have just done that? And he was like, yeah, probably because you know, I don't know, it seems difficult. Like you have to wire money to Japan. There's the site Mt. Gox. I don't know, it was too much of a hassle, so I just didn't do it. So I went about putting this simple buy button basically as a hunch based on the user feedback. And it was, the button was simple, but the thing to actually get that working was very difficult. I mean, we basically, I say we, it was kind of like just me at the time, very shortly thereafter Fred Ursim joined. And he, he and I co-founded it really, but I had to go find a bank partner that would allow us to integrate with the ACH network in the US

• 19:26Speaker 03

  and convince them what our anti-money laundering policy was and then code up that integration and make sure that we were sourcing the Bitcoin once people bought it. Anyway, long story short, we got all that working and we launched a simple buy button. You could now connect your bank account. That was the first time that had happened in the US where you could connect a payment method and just buy Bitcoin really simply. And that's the moment we had product market fit. It started to grow organically every, every week after that. And it was like a boulder we were chasing downhill. I think, I think I say that in the film as well.

• 19:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, goes from pushing the boulder uphill to chasing it downhill. What was the timing on that? Was that late 2012? When would that have been that you implemented that button?

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably late 2012, early 2013 was right around then.

• 20:07Tim Ferriss?

  That would have been also exactly at the encouragement of Kevin Rose that I bought my first Bitcoin on Coinbase. Would have been literally a few months after that button was introduced. So thanks for that.

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Actually, I went, I did an interview with Kevin, I think right around that time. He did an interview, I did an interview with him at his house and I think that that's a fun interview to go back and look at too. But yeah, crazy times.

• 20:30Tim Ferriss?

  He makes a cameo on the doc as well, which you may or may not know, but I'm sure he'll be pleased with. So I'd like to talk about influences and maybe we'll start with a shared figurehead. And that is Richard Feynman. So I've read quite a few of your blog posts and you've written about books that have had an impact on you or that you recommend to others. One of them is surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman. That's a classic on my bookshelf that I revisit pretty often and there's a lot of backstory. There. Let's begin with that book. Is there anything about Feynman or that book that that really stands out to you or you would reflect to people who are not familiar with the book?

• 21:12Tim Ferriss?

  And then what other books come to mind that have had a maybe a disproportionate impact on your thinking? Or that you've simply gifted a lot or recommended much to other people?

• 21:27Speaker 03

  That book definitely did stand out to me. I think the thing that was exciting about it was he was just had this kind of curiosity for life and a boundless energy to go try different things and tinker around, experiment. And I guess what I loved about that was, I mean, first of all, it's just, it's just funny. It's quite a humorous book, but I guess what I loved about it was like, it gave you this kind of zest for life of never stop learning, always be curious. And also just, you can kind of treat life like it's a video game. Other people have talked about this, that this is not my original stuff, but I think there is something to that where if you stop taking life so seriously and you realize anything around you, you know, there was like that Steve Jobs quote, like everything around you was made by somebody else who just decided like, you don't have to just consume the world. The world is not happening to you. You can go

• 22:12Speaker 03

  create things in the world, right? And so, once you take it, start to think of it like that, it really changes your perspective. Like just one example would be, if you're going through something really difficult, you might start to get kind of down, right? You're like, oh, man, this sucks. And this person hates me and I'm, I'm losing on this or whatever. But if you start to think about if life was a video game, you know, the hardest part of the game might be like, kind of the most interesting or the most fun. It's like the part that you really need to pull together. And anyway, it just changes your, your perspective entirely. You asked about other books too. I mean, let's see, I already mentioned, uh, Dalio's book, Changing World Order. I thought that was good. I've gifted that to a handful of people. I think Milton Friedman has this book called Free to Choose. I actually have never read the book, but there was a TV series he did on PBS back in the day

• 22:56Speaker 03

  that was also called Free to Choose. And I thought that was kind of interesting. I mean, it's, it's kind of libertarian. So some people will like that. Some people won't, but I, I found it actually quite interesting just to like, get his view on sort of the global macro environment and different countries and how they work. And that was something I've also gone back to look at once in a while. I think it did influence my thinking in hindsight.

• 23:15Tim Ferriss?

  I want to come back to something you said, which was talk to the customer, iterate, talk to the customer, iterate. And just to maybe state the obvious, which is very often entrepreneurs try to iterate without talking to the customer. And one of the things I appreciate about many of the founders who've gone through Y Combinator, this includes the Airbnb founders and others, is in the early days, doing things that don't scale, really taking a manual approach to interacting with customers. What else would you consider core principles or learnings that you took away from Y Combinator, or Pollogram specifically, or anyone else involved?

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know if this came up in your research, but actually, I worked at Airbnb before starting Coinbase. So, yeah, I mean, I was, I think it was employee 40 there, or something like that. And then I got to learn a lot from them too, about, yeah, the perseverance and how they ran product and all. It was really cool. But I guess some of the lessons just generally from that ecosystem, because it all came from Y Combinator and Airbnb and all that stuff. I mean, another one of my favorite kind of polygramisms is action produces information. So there's many times where you're sitting around and you're like, all right, well, what if this happens? What if that happens? And you're kind of staring into the abyss, like into the cloud, the fog ahead of you. And you don't really know what to do. And so people sometimes

• 24:39Speaker 03

  get stuck in those environments and they just, they never take any action, basically. But if you just take some steps into the unknown, you might not be doing the right thing. But oftentimes, by doing that action, you'll realize what you should have been doing instead. There was a great story that kind of went along with this, where the early days at Coinbase, actually, before it was even called Coinbase, I was just tinkering on some stuff nights and weekends while I was at Airbnb. And I built this very simple app with a friend of mine. I think it was just called Bitcoin Wallet or something. It may still be on GitHub somewhere, but it was basically an Android app. And we decided, hey, we want to make like a Bitcoin wallet that runs on Android. It was supposed to be very simple, right? And we didn't have any kind of cloud thing behind it. It wasn't any sort of a company or anything like that. And so we basically ran a full Bitcoin

• 25:22Speaker 03

  node right on the Android phone, which at the time, people might laugh at it now, but at the time Bitcoin nodes were very small and lightweight and they could run on phones and So we coded this thing up and we launched it. I was just trying stuff. I didn't know what I was doing. We weren't even trying to make a company. We were just kind of like trying to learn this stuff in the evenings in our free time. I launched it. I remember the minute that we launched it, there was like Wired wrote some little article about it. I was like, wow, that's so cool. Wired wrote an article about it, but the minute we launched it, I realized we had built it wrong. And the reason I realized that was that we were trying to, again, we were running the whole Bitcoin node right on the phone and it would take forever. Like every time you opened the app, it would say syncing and it would have to sync like for three, four minutes or whatever to catch up with the latest blockchain blocks.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  And so that was a good example where like, I knew instantly we'd built the wrong thing. And then what went off in my head was, okay, someone's going to have to make a company around this that has truly like a lot of this stuff running in the cloud where you can do all the backups and security and sync with the blockchains. And, and I was, I remember thinking at that time, oh, that's not going to be me because I have a day job and like, that's a really serious company to run and someone will probably try to hack into it. And it's like, you gotta have like a lot of money for that. So I didn't immediately get to the next step was maybe I'll start that company, but it, that was a good example of just taking action, produce information, which made the next step a little bit more clear.

• 26:39Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any favorite essays by Paul? I have one bookmarked that I reread often. I mean, he has got so many good essays, but the top idea in your mind, not that you should be familiar with that one, but that's one, since I have a creative project that I'm focused on at the moment that I revisit with some regularity. Any favorite essays or other Paul Graham-isms that come to mind?

• 27:03Speaker 03

  You know, there's so many good ones. I think people should read them all, but there's one about, I think it's about how to, how to build wealth or something. It just really nicely explains kind of the idea where people think, you know, money is zero sum. It's like, well, for me to have money, you have, you have to take it from somebody else. So it's like inherently evil. And he's like, no. You know, if you just like assemble a bunch of things, either natural resources or you improve a car, I think is the way he described it. He's like, you haven't made anybody else worse off. Like you, you made the mechanic better off and like when you sell the, you know, but you made yourself better off in the process. And so value is not zero sum. I think that's really important for people to understand. And once in a while I go back and read his essay. I think it's called haters. Whenever I'm feeling down, like people are, you know,

• 27:48Speaker 03

  whenever I accidentally read the comments online, which is not a good idea. That's a good one to go back and read too.

• 27:54Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing. I'm looking at two of them. So haters, that's January 2020. And then I think this is the wealth essay, which is how to make wealth from May 2004, which originally came from his book Hackers and Painters. So I will put both of those in the show notes. Let's talk about psychoemotional response to outside scrutiny or criticism for a second, because what is covered quite extensively in the doc and certainly was covered even more extensively in the news was your decision not that long ago to offer generous severance

• 28:35Tim Ferriss?

  packages to people who disagreed with your statements about Coinbase as a mission-driven company that provides a refuge of sorts with that focus. And please correct my description if it doesn't fit. But and in so being a mission-driven company, wanting to avoid political and social conversations within the company that chew up time and energy and resources and attention. Feel free to set the table a little better than I did, but can you describe the situation, the action? And then what is of greatest interest to me is how you thought about making the decision?

• 29:19Tim Ferriss?

  How you thought about the possible ramifications of making that decision? And prepared yourself for what might happen? And then what did happen? Just weathering that.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  A few years back, we put out this blog post that Coinbase was going to become a mission-focused company, which basically meant we were going to be apolitical, not focused on broader societal issues in the workplace. And so how did that all come to be? I mean, really, I'd say for the couple of years prior to that, there was something that was sort of bubbling up inside the company, which initially was very slow and subtle, and I didn't really pay too much attention to it. But eventually it culminated in a walkout, a bunch of employees being so upset that they kind of closed their laptops and decided not to come into work in protest. And that was sort of the a big moment in the company history because that had never happened before. And so what led up to that? Well, Basically, there was a lot of, you know, COVID happened, people were at home, they were,

• 30:16Speaker 03

  probably had less of a sense of belonging and cohesion as, hey, we're all one company, we're one group of people, we're all trying to do good stuff in the world. So there was a little bit of frustration there, there was probably a lack of cohesion there. And then I'd say there was, it became more popular in society. I've since gone back and read some books on this, like, you know, Jonathan Haidt's book about The Coddling American Mind and all these things that kind of started on college campuses. I had sort of loosely read a few things here and there about this, but I'd never really took it that seriously. I'd figured this was just, you know, there's always been activism on college campuses, whatever, we're trying to build something in our company, I didn't pay too much attention to it. But what happened was, we started to get basically more activism inside the company. Whereas like, initially, I was always thinking, hey, we're on the same team, we've got competitors, we've got regulators, we've got, we're trying to create all this change, we're all on the

• 31:00Speaker 03

  same team. And internally, people started to think, actually, we're not all on the same team, my job is not to help the Coinbase mission, it's speak truth to power, or to hold this other team to, you know, to account, or something like that. And so, it manifested in strange ways, like, at the town hall meetings that we'd have every two weeks, we'd have an open mic Q and A, and more and more of the questions started to be about things not really related to what we were building as a company, but to about broader societal issues. And it almost became this, this like, thing where, who can make the exec team squirm the most on stage? And, you know, with these very difficult questions. And of course, you know, I didn't have great answers to many of the biggest broader societal issues, we were trying to all focus on building a more, more economic freedom in the world. So, as I was noticing this was happening, this was around the time of the George Floyd,

• 31:43Speaker 03

  you know, riots and everything like that, and the murder there. And so, there was a moment, I think, where somebody in one of the all-hands kind of came up and said, is Coinbase going to publicly support Black Lives Matter? I basically deferred to answer the question, I hadn't really read that much about it, I was like, we're gonna go look at this, I don't know, to be determined. And that wasn't good enough. And they kind of held the mic, and they pressed the issue, and this is where a bunch of people walked out of the company. I was frankly shocked, I was like, at first, I was just so surprised, we all got in a room as an exec team, I was like, I don't understand, what does Coinbase have to do with police brutality? Like, we're not, we're not related to this. But of course, this thing was erupting all over societies, all over the world, and people just felt every company, every person had to make some kind of a stand on this. It was a very difficult leadership moment. I remember calling some people into the room,

• 32:28Speaker 03

  telling me and asking them, what does BLM actually stand for? If we're gonna go out there and like, say something positive about it. And you know, they're like, well, it's basically equality for people. And I was like, great, okay, if that's what people want to hear, I don't understand it, but let's go out there and say it. And so I basically went out and made a statement supporting BLM, as many companies did at that time. People came back to work, which was fine. But as the months ticked by, I started to feel increasingly uneasy about it. First of all, I subsequently learned that BLM supported other things, like around defunding the police and all these things, which I was like, all right, we shouldn't be getting involved in those issues. I don't know what our point of view is on that. And I basically realized there was not a clear agreement amongst all the people in the company, that some people felt the company should actually be engaging in broader societal issues to try to go help out.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  And other people felt that we should be focused on our mission, which was a very big and important thing already. Increasing economic freedom in the world with crypto. And I was in that latter camp. And I felt like, that's already a big enough thing to focus on. We can't be jumping to every issue of the month or the year. We have to try to focus. It might take 10, 20 years for us to make a dent in that problem. That's a really big thing. So I realized the company was divided on this issue, and I was kind of failing as a leader if I didn't come out and make it clear. And so I basically, after a couple of months of deliberating, and this is where you were asking about my thought process, I was really torn about this, because I was, I basically, this is where I sat down to write, and I tried to write a blog post. Because when I try to, when I'm trying to formulate my thinking, I try to write. So I wrote probably two or three or four drafts of this, where I just discarded it and tried to write it over again.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  I was reading books, talking to people at this time. I eventually settled on this language around mission first. And I remember sharing it with some leaders inside the company and with our board. And there were some people inside the company who were like, do not share this, under any circumstances. This is, this will be a terrible thing for the company. And I was like, I know it's going to be controversial, but we have to solve this problem, right? Like, I don't really care so much about a couple of bad headlines. I care if we're, are we building an aligned culture that can actually accomplish this mission long-term? And some people told me things like, you know, an underrepresented person will never work at this company again. And I was like, really? Is that true? I went and talked to some of our employee resource groups and they, you know, they told me, I asked them, what's the most important thing to you want to work at this company?

• 34:40Speaker 03

  They're like, we just want to be respected at work, like learn things, be able to build cool stuff. Like it was basically what everybody else wanted. And so my instinct, from talking with people directly, my hunch was that was not going to actually play out, but that was a fear people had. And I think the thing that finally pushed me over the line to do it, because I'm kind of a conflict versed person by nature. I don't, I didn't, I don't want to be like, I didn't really want to be known for this. But I think the thing that pushed me over the line was I was thinking like, God, like the CEO job is just not that fun, to be honest. Like if I'm just, if I have to come in every day and be put in, put in front of the hot mic and like have to answer all these crazy things like that I don't have an answer to. That's not what I signed up for. I want to build cool stuff with technology that changes the world. That's what I'm good at. And so I was basically thinking like, either I have to go, like if this is just what the, the job of being

• 35:25Speaker 03

  a tech CEO is in modern day, I've got to go because this is not fun for me, or they've got to go. And from talking to a couple of friends and mentors and whatnot, I basically realized they've got to go. It was strange because it felt like such a vocal, it felt like maybe it was 50% of the company or something, but it wasn't. It was a very vocal, tiny percentage of the company. And so I basically made this exit package available. I said, look, this is the direction we're going in. If you're not, if you're not okay with that, I totally get it. I didn't make it clear upfront. That's my fault. So we're going to give this great severance package, whatever. 5% of the company left. It created a bunch of drama for a few months. A couple journalists wrote hit pieces on us and things like that. But afterwards, it was, it was better. It was like one of the best things I've ever done for the company, to be honest, because now we're fully aligned, we're making

• 36:10Speaker 03

  faster progress. Everybody who joins the company knows what they're signing up for. And it was an incredibly important leadership moment for me because I was terribly scared to do, do it. I hate, I didn't want the controversy. I knew was people were going to hate it. Yeah, hopefully that gives some clarity.

• 36:23Tim Ferriss?

  No, it does. And just for clarity, hopefully you don't feel I'm asking this question to make you squirm. That's not the objective. I'm genuinely curious about the thought process surrounding what is inevitably on some level going to be an unpopular decision.

• 36:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:41Tim Ferriss?

  And I think that is a hallmark of good leadership. Otherwise, I mean, you're just taking votes and consensus and doing what the larger group would do anyway. Right? So it seems to me that integral to effective leadership is having the ability to make unpopular decisions when it is in the best interest, long term of the company and the mission in this case. Right?

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:09Tim Ferriss?

  That is why I asked. So thank you for answering.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 37:11Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I was chatting with Katie Haun, who's a mutual, mutual friend, and certainly has played a role, continues to play a role with Coinbase. And she phrased it, I think, very well. I'm looking at some notes here. She effectively said that you seem to embody this kind of sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me, set of attributes, or at least you seem from the outside unfazed by criticism, or a lot of criticism. And I'm not asking you to bare your soul and tell me about all the things that have hurt your feelings. Also, also don't want to give people sort of directions

• 37:54Tim Ferriss?

  on how to attack you effectively. But I am curious, to what extent is that something you have developed and cultivated, if that's even an accurate perception?

• 38:03Speaker 03

  That definitely is something that I've cultivated. I don't think I was naturally that way. I'm probably more sort of steady than than the average person, but I definitely have ups and downs. And a lot of stuff has really affected me over the years. So it's definitely not something that I think it's a skill people can learn and develop. And it's a muscle that gets stronger and stronger. I mean, basically, this is something that very was very counterintuitive to me. I assume that when starting a company, there'd be many hard things, raising money, finding product market fit, even just a bunch of people being skeptical that it would ever work. I kind of anticipated all of that. What I didn't anticipate was that people would actually root for you to fail, or actually misunderstand someone's intentions and think that they were bad or evil, or whatever that would be. That was surprising.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  If you're just like a normal person, which I am as well, you've gone about your life, you know, you're not going to make everybody happy, but you're basically a good person, you try to do whatever. It's kind of rare, you know, maybe once in a while someone would get upset with you or something, and you'd go smooth it over. I had never had the experience of having like a thousand or 100,000 people mad at you at the same time, which is like a very uncomfortable thing the first few times it happens. And, you know, I would respond to the stress of it. Just oftentimes, I wouldn't be able to sleep well at night. I would kind of wake up or like in the middle of the night with these like stressed dreams, or just like ruminate on these things, you know, it's not great, right? And so, I don't know, I think I developed some strategies for sort of coping with it over time.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  I mean, one of them is that, again, I try not to read the comments, whether it's like Twitter or Hacker News, or even like a lot of stuff, just mess notifications coming on your phone, whatever. Like, there's a moment every day where you have your own time and mental energy ready, and your calendar is cleared. And I really feel like you've got to tune out all of that bullshit. And basically, think about if I only got one or two things done today that would actually advance what I want to get done in the world, what would that be? You know, turn off your phone, turn off like, and all that stuff. And just try to get the one or two things done that you want to get done that day. And then later, you can turn on your phone and read some stuff if you want to do some self flatulation, you know? And so, there's a real art to like preserving your mental focus.

• 40:15Speaker 03

  I think that's like the most valuable scarce resource you have. And so, you have to kind of really preserve that. You don't want to isolate yourself so much that you're not getting feedback from people, because then you can just become like reclusive, or you know, turn into Putin, or whatever. I don't know. But, so you want to make sure you're getting input from people that have your best interests at heart, right? So, I try to like, my family, they don't treat me as, they don't defer to me at all. They're just like, you know, whatever, take out the trash. You want to have your board be like that, you want to have your friends be like that. My co-founder Fred Ursim, and now like- Emily Choi, who's the president COO, we have that relationship or she can just tell me like, Brian, you're being an idiot. Like, don't do that, you know? And so you always want to have people around you that have your best interests at heart and can tell you when you're being an idiot. That's very important.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  But you don't, there's a lot of other people that are playing their own game that don't have their best interests at heart. They're trying to build their own status game in some virtue signaling thing. They're trying to get clicks on their article, whatever they're trying to do. And you don't really need to listen to that stuff. In fact, it's like really harmful to your progress if you are listening to that stuff. So there's a real art of just tuning that out and caring less, I guess.

• 41:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 42:40Tim Ferriss?

  Is there any other advice that you would give or perhaps you have given? Of course, you're very involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. And I have to imagine that you invest in some startups and private companies, although you can correct me if I'm wrong. What advice would you give to someone who is in a company that is beginning to scale and they're starting to get hit with the hundred than a thousand people? Or maybe it's just 10 opportunistic journalists who are really just kind of smashing the rock against the head of this poor startup because it gets a lot of clicks. What advice would you give to this person or what might you say to them?

• 43:26Speaker 03

  One thing I always remember is that if you go talk to other CEOs, they're all going through the same thing, but you haven't read any of their other articles. I remember talking to a friend recently and Bobby Kotick at Activision, he's been getting all this like negative press about whatever, like, I don't know. Anyway, I actually hadn't seen any of the articles, the negative articles about it. But for him, it's like, well, he was kind of at the center of this storm and whatever. He's a great guy, he's going to pull through it. But it just made me realize like, wow, he's at the center of this hurricane and I hadn't even heard about it. I'm too busy doing my own world, doing my own thing. And that's what's true of like 99% of people, they don't, they see some article, whatever. Like there's a million things that they're thinking about. They don't, they actually don't care that much about whatever the thing is that feels so existential and awful to you.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  The other thing I would just say is like, it's a rite of passage, honestly. Like you should celebrate it, right? Like if the first time you get like a New York Times hit piece or whatever, I mean, congratulations, you earned your wings as an entrepreneur. And like the moment that you realize it didn't really matter and you can kind of keep doing whatever you think is good in the world and you level up, like you kind of earn your stripes and you become a more powerful CEO because you're like, okay, I'm not going to make a decision in the company based on how I'm afraid of how other people react. I'm going to do what I think is best for the long term of the company. And so that's actually a superpower. I think it's great when people go through it and even when it feels like shit, I'm like, congratulations, you just made it to the next level.

• 44:52Tim Ferriss?

  I like the reframe. Makes me all the more want to read this haters piece by Paul Graham also. How do you think about, and this is related to Paul Graham in a sense, in the building wealth and the non-zero sum game of wealth creation in many capacities, right? So looking at things from a lens of abundance rather than scarcity. But this brings me to the question of competition. How do you think about competition? I know that seems very broad, but I'm going to leave it broad and just see where it goes.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  On the one hand, you know, I've got some competitive spirit too. And I think it's like useful to have competitors. It actually makes us better. It gets, it gets me fired up. It gets the team fired up. Like honestly, if you don't have a competitor, people are naturally tribalistic. You'll sometimes get tribes will start to form inside the company and like people start fighting each other. And so that's, it's actually better to have like something outside the company that you're struggling against. On the other hand, like it's too, you're too much focus on competitors. You should almost ignore it. Like another Paul Graham-ism, you know, is like startups die by suicide, not homicide. And that's kind of a gory thing to say, but what he means of course, is that companies blow up because they're bureaucratic or the founders have some big fight or the board, you know, has some drama and they run out of money or whatever.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  They die due to dysfunction internally. It has, it's almost never because some competitor directly hurt you. It's like you just get out executed because you're so focused on the wrong things. And so I think that's very true. And especially like in the crypto space, you know, we have lots of really great competitors around the world. And, you know, I think it's good that we're competing with them. We get fired up, but like ultimately I care a lot more about how do we grow the size of the pie 100x than I do? Like trying to win a few points of share from some other company in crypto. So I try to mostly just be friends with the other companies that are ostensibly competitors. I try to stay friends with those CEOs and just learn from each other. And, you know, sure, we're competing, but we're all trying to grow the size of the crypto economy 100x. And that's how I think about it.

• 46:51Tim Ferriss?

  There are several directions that I want to go and I'm trying to pick the most appropriate direction. In today's climate, what do you think the crypto bears or skeptics most miss or should pay attention to? And conversely, the manic bulls on NFT and crypto Twitter, what are they most missing about the landscape or should they pay more attention to? So the extreme skeptics and the diehard fill in the blank or die crypto aficionados?

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Sort of a common theme, my personalities, I try to reject tribalism. And so I'm, I try to, you know, it's never as good as it seems, never as bad as it seems in crypto. Neither side is correct. So I guess what the skeptics of crypto miss is that this is early days, right? It's kind of like if you had looked at the internet in 1999 or 2000, you might say, ah, dial-up modems are kind of slow. It's too clunky to use for the average person. Why would I go read an article online when I get the newspaper delivered every day? You know, you can't trust anything that you read on the internet. It's full of scams and people writing crazy things on their blogs. And they're looking at it through the lens of, well, compare it to the traditional financial system in every aspect today, but they're not seeing what the potential of it is. And the fundamental underlying technology

• 48:15Speaker 03

  is something that's inherently more global and can be more efficient and fair and free. And so anyway, they're not seeing the potential. I guess the people who are insane crypto bulls are just, I think they're basically too focused on getting rich quick. I mean, it's not just, you know, everyone's trying to like find some shortcut or whatever and like pump something or buy it and flip it. And I just think there's no free lunches in life and go do the hard work of building something actually useful and take a longer term perspective. And that's where you'll see real value emerge. And by the way, it's not to say that like crypto is all future potential value. I think a lot of people miss that today too. They're like, well, what are the use cases? Well, There's a lot of people using crypto today, not just for trading.

• 48:57Speaker 03

  They're using it to make art and to make payments to each other in different countries and to raise money and to do games. And like, so there's tons of people actually using it for real stuff already, borrowing and lending and earning a living and paying for tasks and earning yield on their assets and all kinds of stuff like that. So we, one of the metrics we track at Coinbase is kind of what percent of our active customers are doing something with crypto other than trading. And that number used to be like 10%, maybe three or four years ago. Now it's, I think, over 50% of our active customers are doing something other than just trading with crypto and it's emerging.

• 49:30Tim Ferriss?

  If you were to take that pie chart of other, doing other things with crypto, what are the main slivers, the use cases?

• 49:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, so again, it's not just one, but it's a mix of a bunch of things. So it's people earning yield on their assets with things like staking. It's people doing commerce with crypto. It's people buying and selling, minting NFTs. DeFi has been a really big use case as well. Some of that, by the way, is trading. There's decentralized exchanges, but it's not all that. It's other aspects of DeFi. Things like Coinbase Card have been really useful in terms of using crypto in the real world, brick and mortar or online, anywhere that Visa's accepted, they can spend crypto. So we're seeing that as an emerging use case. Coinbase Earn is like another one that we've seen that's driven a lot of that activity. So yeah, peer-to-peer payments, it's a bunch of things.

• 50:18Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm going to come back to art and NFTs momentarily, but first, just to return to the skeptic question, and you mentioned it's still early days. If you wanted to use data to make that argument, and I suppose this will be slightly outside the purview of data, but if you also wanted to talk about maybe watershed moments or shifts that are either in progress or that you anticipate as almost inevitable, that still haven't happened, that should accelerate things, how would you make the case? With data or anticipated shifts that haven't yet happened. And just to speak for a second to the second portion of that question, I know this is a

• 51:03Tim Ferriss?

  long question. I remember, as I mentioned, when I first started buying Bitcoin, late 2012, early 2013, had been involved since quietly doing my thing. And there are a lot of good reasons for the quietly part, but I remember watching some of the early hedge funds getting involved and taking crypto positions. And I was like, okay, that's very interesting. And so I started to ask myself, well, some of their LPs, you know, the limited partners are these institutional investors, whether they're endowments or pension funds or fill in the blank. And I started asking, what would it take for those types of institutional players to begin to allocate even a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of their total assets under management to crypto?

• 51:47Tim Ferriss?

  And then I started asking, well, what would need to happen? What would this, what social proof would be required for a sovereign wealth fund to then allocate a small sliver to crypto assets? And it just seemed inevitable is a strong word, but highly likely that there'd be a certain cascade of events. And that's how I kind of backed into, maybe because I'm just, what do they call it? Pumping my bags, right? Because I have a vested interest. So, you know, there might be a bias there. But if you want to make the case to the skeptics that actually, like, let me show you a couple of slides, let me show you a couple of historical examples, this is why I can make the case that it's early.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:29Tim Ferriss?

  How would you do it?

• 52:30Speaker 03

  I guess going to your first point, I agree. Crypto adoption is kind of following a similar trajectory of like internet adoption. And there's probably 200, 250 million people or so in the world who have crypto now. And we can probably share a link that kind of shows a similar chart kind of with the internet. And I think that's important. And then to your point about sovereign wealth funds and these, I think like 90% of the wealth in the world is actually locked up in institutions. So we analyzed that early on and we realized, okay, we had to launch an institutional product and Coinbase Prime. And we have actually been successful at getting more and more of these large institutions to move, starting to move percentages of their portfolios into crypto. That includes, I don't think we've been able to announce any of these yet, but there's, I know of at least, there are some sovereign wealth funds out there that have now done it.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  And we've closed these deals with like BlackRock and like the largest asset manager in the world to kind of get more and more of this money flowing in. And there was a bunch of Work that went on the behind the scenes of that. So what are the major inflection points that can cause that to happen? I mean, the biggest one I think in my mind is regulatory clarity, you know, that's the one that when I talk to institutional investors, they always bring that up. And the good news is we're starting to finally see regulatory clarity, and we can talk about what that is if you want. And I think even more regulatory clarity in the next year or two will actually drive a bunch more of that money. The other major inflection point that I focus on is scalability of the blockchains, because very similar again to the internet with dial-up moving to broadband, the initial blockchains, you know, I think Bitcoin was doing about seven transactions per second, Ethereum was doing

• 53:59Speaker 03

  25 transactions a second. And basically like PayPal does about 500 transactions a second, Visa does about 4,000 a second. So we needed a couple orders of magnitude to get to like those more Visa levels, which in computer science, you know, an order of magnitude is not that crazy. So it's actually sounds, it's easier than it sounds probably. So the good news is we're starting to see that, things like Ethereum's merge that just happened has been an incredible technical accomplishment. And I think the future pieces that they're going to launch with that are going to improve the scalability even further with sharding and things like that. So we're finally starting to see the blockchain and other blockchains have been working a lot of really great scalability stuff too, Solana and others. So I think we're seeing the Lightning Network, you know, all the L2 stuff. So we're seeing

• 54:42Speaker 03

  a lot of really good focus now happening on scalability of the blockchain. So the regulatory clarity, scalability of the blockchains, to me, that's like, we'll probably get another order of magnitude or more out of that, just those two things alone.

• 54:56Tim Ferriss?

  So let me ask you a question off the top of my head, which might be a ridiculous question, but maybe that's my specialty. If you were getting started right now with the technical chops and know-how that you have, including the the expertise you've developed, the management capabilities, etc. at Coinbase, but you could not work Coinbase. Nonetheless, you had to remain in loosely speaking, the crypto web three world. Let's just say, is there a company that you would put on your shortlist for where you would work or a type of company, maybe focusing on a specific aspect of any of these technical pieces?

• 55:37Speaker 03

  Well, I can tell you, there's like certainly some cool ideas in crypto that I would consider doing. I mean, maybe that's like kind of the root of your question, but.

• 55:45Tim Ferriss?

  It is.

• 55:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:46Tim Ferriss?

  Like, I think. Thanks for translating my very convoluted question to simplicity.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  I was, I was, I was trying to think what our comms team would, would think if I was like, you know, I'd really love to work at this other crypto company, like what, what the hell?

• 56:00Speaker 03

  No, but.

• 56:01Tim Ferriss?

  Abort, abort.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  They teach, they teach you in the PR training. Hid the question to the one you wish was asked, you know?

• 56:12Tim Ferriss?

  That's a good question. Let me tell you a story that's unrelated.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  Decentralized identity is really cool. I think once we have, it's, it's already starting to happen, but once we have canonical identities, it makes payments easier, it makes reputation easier, it makes decentralized social media easier. There's probably a lot of stuff there. Decentralized social media, I think, could be a big one.

• 56:33Tim Ferriss?

  Could you give an example of decentralized identity? Are we talking about like ENS? Are we talking about something else?

• 56:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. ENS is probably the most well-known standard right now, but there's a handful of proposals out there and it's, you know, the simple way to think of it is like the internet initially, people were using IP addresses to sort of like connect. And then, then we got domain names and so a domain name is like human readable. You can have like timferrest.com and you know, that IP address is, is a machine readable. So right now Bitcoin addresses and Ethereum addresses, they, they look machine readable. They're the kind of these long random strings of characters. They look like a giant password or something. It's impossible for humans to really remember them or even know if you're sending it to the right spot. So we're getting closer and closer to having like kind of human readable names everywhere with, and ENS is a really big piece of that. So actually like with, with Coinbase Wallet, we recently set this up where anybody can go in there and claim a free ENS name.

• 57:23Speaker 03

  You can get like tim.cB.id at, at the end and trying to make that super simple. If people can buy their own as well and get like, you know, tim.eth, but we'll give you a free one with the CB.id on the end if you want. So that anyway. Long way of saying I think decentralized identity is a big piece of the ecosystem that'll come together. I think we need to have, in the crypto economy, I think we need to have a currency that's actually not linked to fiat, right? Like, we have USD coin, which is really great. It's kind of backed one-to-one by US dollar, and there's decentralized stablecoins like DAI. But it'd be nice to have like a stablecoin or a flatcoin that's actually linked to purchasing power. And kind of like, you know, if one coin buys you a McDonald's hamburger today, hopefully in five years, you know, one coin will buy you a McDonald's

• 58:06Speaker 03

  hamburger again. And there's various ways you could imagine constructing that. I keep thinking about how we could get crypto stored at various latitudes and longitudes. Like, I don't know, did you ever see like Pokemon Go? How people were like, they had these like AR experiences and they could kind of like geocash things and go find them. And anyway, there's lots of cool stuff we could probably do. I'll give you like three more ideas if you want, but I'll pause there. Sure. Yeah. No, let's do it. Let's do three more ideas. Okay. Well, by the way, these are not, I don't want to take credit for these. I'm talking with lots of random people, but I think there's an opportunity to do something with media and crypto where a lot of articles are out there. It'd be nice to have a community come together, probably backed by a crypto coin that sort of helps. It's a reward coin,

• 58:48Speaker 03

  you know, that helps people kind of fact-check articles, develop sort of truthiness scores on every article, publication, journalist out there. I think that could be a nice like community that comes together. There should probably be kind of like a Stripe Atlas for crypto in the sense that a lot of people are, and some people are doing this, they're trying to make it easier for people to create a company, like a DAO would sort of be like the new Delaware C corp, if you will. But just make that whole thing of like issuing a token, managing a coin table, payroll, you know, fundraising, like all that stuff could probably be powered in sort of a new kind of app. There should probably be like jobs and marketplaces all based around crypto, kind of like eBay for crypto, Elance for crypto,

• 59:30Speaker 03

  Amazon for crypto, all that stuff. So a lot of stuff out there that could probably be worked on. And I think we're seeing so many venture dollars go into crypto, it's kind of remarkable. I think even in the down market, like there's just probably about 10- Mind-boggling. Yeah, it's a lot. It's probably like five or $10 billion of dry powder in venture right now, ready to go to crypto startups. So that's a rough estimate. Somebody might have a better one, but it's a lot.

• 59:58Tim Ferriss?

  Let me segue from that back to art slash NFTs. And I recognize NFTs are not solely the domain of art or expensive JPEGs. But you know, I happen to be very interested in this world for a number of reasons. One of which being the JPEG slash parallels with contemporary art, I think, just provide a nice on-ramp for a lot of people who would otherwise be intimidated by blockchain technologies and so on to become part of the ecosystem. But let me ask you specifically, what did you learn from the launch of your NFT marketplace? What are some of the learnings from that?

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I'll talk about sort of NFTs generally for a second and then what I guess the NFT marketplace we did specifically. So, so NFTs I think are going to be a big thing in crypto. And obviously, these initial use cases around collectibles and art has been great in a, in one sense. But I think the idea of NFTs is actually much bigger than that. You know, it could be representing any unique digital item like in the metaverse, right? It could be like property in the metaverse, your spaceship, your clothes, whatever in the metaverse. It could be people kind of issuing concert tickets that are digitally unique, right? It could be people doing like citizenship in certain, like I actually got an NFT that was for the City Dow in Wyoming, which is like this plot of land that they divided up. And I think I have like access rights or voting rights or something like now with my passport,

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  which is this provably digital thing, right? So I think art and actually getting creators paid, because a lot of, a lot of creative people like have really bad contracts with, you know, record labels and all these things. So just getting all the creative stuff going is like a huge thing in itself, but it's actually going to be even bigger beyond that. So yeah, Coinbase launched Coinbase NFT and just like all things, we want to make it easier for people. We noticed what people were doing often was they're coming to Coinbase, buying crypto. And then they would have to kind of move it to like a Chrome extension in their browser, visit one of the many other apps out there, which are all very good and good things to say about them. We've invested in some of them, but then it's just kind of like a hard convoluted process, especially once you introduce like these layer two solutions.

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  Like sometimes you'd have to buy it there and move it to the Chrome extension, bridge it to Polygon, you know, like, and then it people were like losing their their NFTs because they don't understand how to manage their passwords and these things. So this is an example where the thing that Coinbase always tries to do is we just try to make crypto more trusted and easier to use. That's like kind of our brand, like all the, all the products that we've made are just like, let's make it more trusted. Let's make it easier to use for the average person. So we figured, all right, people are, they already have some crypto on Coinbase. They've already got their identity and all that connected. Let's just give them a bunch of NFTs there that they can click a buy button. So with Coinbase NFT, we've, we've now launched that. The very first version of it is out there, which nft.coinbase.com. We're doing it some work now to kind of more deeply integrate it right into the, the actual main Coinbase app.

• 1:02:51Speaker 03

  So that you don't really have to go to a separate website. You can just click buy right in there. We're also doing something where this is kind of what's cool about blockchains in general is that a lot of the other marketplaces out there, they're all built on these open protocols. And so we, what we've done is we've actually aggregated the supply out there of basically wherever people are selling their, their NFTs, it'll all be exposed in Coinbase NFT. And so, and if you click buy, it'll transact and that marketplace will get their fee, right? So in other words, we don't necessarily want to be so competitive with these other marketplaces as much as just provide a simple trusted interface. And if they were the ones who put out the smart contract for that, and that's where the customers are listing it, so be it like, you know, we'd, we'd want to like, kind of make it simple for people to transact, regardless of where it, the supply aggregated from.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  There's a few things like that that we're doing that I hope will just make kind of NFTs even easier for people to collect and own and buy and sell. And it's one of the many things that we're working on.

• 1:03:44Tim Ferriss?

  Now, my apologies in advance if this is already something you guys have launched. But if not, do you have plans to provide, I suppose, the equivalent of custody for NFTs as opposed to cryptocurrency? For instance, I know quite a few people, I may be one of them, who've collected lots of pretty JPEGs and the value of some of these makes me very uncomfortable

• 1:04:12Tim Ferriss?

  in terms of just, you know, having it hanging in my driveway, metaphorically speaking. Do you have any intention of providing the capability to basically safe house, store, guard NFTs themselves for people who want additional layers of protection for their portfolios?

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  Yes, and we offered this today. So the first app that we launched it in was Coinbase Wallet, which is our self custodial wallet. And that's been an easy way for people to do with, interact with NFTs for quite a while. But as you pointed out, some people, I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're referring to, but some people don't want to have to be responsible for the one password kind of ruling everything in their self custodial wallet. And so we now offer the ability to store NFTs in the main Coinbase retail app, which is, you know, we're storing it on your behalf. And you can do that in our, we call it our DAP wallet. It's kind of a decentralized app wallet. Anyway, you can store NFTs there. Even in Coinbase Prime for institutions, we will very soon be able to store NFTs there as well. Like if you have a family office or some of these institutions that

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  now increasingly want to be storing NFTs as well. So lots of good options there. And yeah, there's a lot of funny stories in crypto where somebody had something on a thumb drive or whatever, and then they realized, you know, I probably shouldn't just be carrying this around in my backpack. I'm just walking around with, you know, $40 million in my backpack every day. If it happens to get stolen, that's not good. So.

• 1:05:34Tim Ferriss?

  Well, yeah, there's, there's losing the USB drive, we're getting stolen. Then there are wrench attacks. Then there's all sorts of craziness. And I think there's the, and I respect a lot of people in this camp. There's the, you know, not your keys, not your crypto folks. And I think a lot of their arguments have some validity at the same time, having dealt with death threats and crazy people, and I'm sure you've. dealt with a lot of that. Once you get a taste of that experience, your appetite for some degree of self-management goes down, I think.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Tim Ferriss?

  And the, you know, the, the really volatile unpredictability of, of some of those situations becomes a little realer to each, each person who experiences it. So just to, to grab on to that for a second. So there are, there are folks who would be critical of Coinbase as a trusted third party. Right. And then there are, I think also some, some very compelling arguments to have robust infrastructure and security protecting high value assets. Where do you think the not your keys, not your crypto arguments have validity?

• 1:06:50Tim Ferriss?

  And where do you think they're maybe missing the forest for the trees or missing certain aspects of what you're doing? That have a real utility that can't be replicated in a decentralized way.

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  To be clear, we're actually very aligned with this not your keys, not your crypto crowd as well, in the sense that Coinbase Wallet is built for them. It is a self-custodial wallet. So it's, we don't hold the keys, the, the customer holds the keys. And I think that's actually a really important aspect of crypto, because there is a danger that basically if crypto gets big enough, that in too centralized, right? And Coinbase is one of those companies that could be storing a lot of crypto, we are, that eventually there could be seizures or various governments around the world that we have to interact with. Who may, you know, put our employees in jail or whatever. It's not going to be, I don't think that's likely, but I think just the fact that it's possible. It means that you need to have some kind of escape hatch, if you will, or lifeboat. So anyway, we, we built Coinbase Wallet for that exact purpose. I use it as a customer, like everybody. And, you know, I also use our custodial app. I, I try to use both.

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  And so we want to make it essentially easy for people to store their own crypto, if they want to do that. I'll come back to sort of the personal threats you have to deal with in a second. But we also want to make it easy for people who don't want to have to worry about that to store it. We will store it on your behalf, and I think we're the best company in the world to do that. We're the most trusted. We store more crypto than anybody else I'm aware of, both for retail customers and institutions. We've built a lot of really cool stuff, distributed across many data centers all over the world where, you know, I personally don't have the ability to do it. And there's consensus mechanisms and there's disaster recovery mechanisms that contemplate all kinds of things from nuclear war to natural disasters. And, you know, whole countries going offline and things like that. So. We can do that for institutions and retail really well. And I think a lot of institutions, they don't have any interest in self custody, right? I think it's important. My TLDR,

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  there was a lot of debate about this in like the crypto community for a long, long time. And what I came away from it is with both of these are going to be massive segments that we need to address. We need to build products for both of them. It's not like an either or, it's gonna be both. So to win these deals like with BlackRock and Meta and to land like the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world and pension funds and to those kinds of customers, and I would say even a large amount of retail customers, we have to have custodial solutions for them. They don't want to have to be managing their own keys. So now coming back to I guess your original thought about self custody and like how that'll play out. I mean, self custody is evolving to a place where, you know, if you're storing kind of the amount of money that you would have like in your physical wallet as you walk

• 1:09:15Speaker 03

  around, like that's fine if it's just you're the only one with the password and, you know, if you lose it or you get robbed or whatever, it's kind of like getting robbed in the street. It's unfortunate, but it's not like a life existential thing. And so how are people going to be able to store life meaningful amounts of money or their life savings or whatever? And I think they're going to be able to do it basically with multi-party computation or something. It's, you know, multi-sig was what kind of people called it originally. But there'll be wallets where it's not Coinbase doesn't have like a quorum of the keys, but Coinbase might have one key, you have another key, there's a backup key with somebody else that you that you trust, right? You can kind of create these like two of three or three of five type signature schemes that have redundancy in the event that one or two of the pieces are lost. But it also prevents any one or two

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  people from running off with the full amount of money. And I guess in the sense that if somebody experiences a personal security threat, they literally cannot send the funds, at least at least not in some short time period. And it would sort of get into a situation just like you would have at Goldman Sachs or something like that. And you got kidnapped in Mexico. I mean, somebody would probably call them and there'd be some negotiation or whatever. And so that's the kinds of technology that's being developed and Coinbase is sort of building a lot of that into our Coinbase wallet product over time. It's an unfortunate thing. There is a there is a GitHub that Jameson Lop maintains on all the physical security threats that have happened with Bitcoin. And it's if you want to go scare yourself, you can go read that. Luckily, a lot of them haven't happened in the US, but they're having a couple of armed robberies

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  and things like that. Law enforcement in the US is generally pretty good at cracking down on these kind of organized crime type things. It's a new financial system for the world. People are going to have to ultimately take responsibility if they want to do self custody. And I think a lot of people are going to want to do that in with these new sorts of multi-party computation tools that have come out.

• 1:10:57Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for laying that out. I suppose I have spooked myself. I haven't read that GitHub repository, but just from a lot of names you would recognize, just chatting with people who are deeply involved with this space. You don't have to look very far to see some pretty intimidating examples of of security threats. Let me shift gears and ask you about self-improvement. So you are very, as far as I can tell, consistent with a focus on self-improvement. What would you change about yourself or improve about yourself? What are you most interested in improving about yourself at the moment?

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  I did get pretty into self-improvement, I guess, in my twenties and read a bunch of books on that. And I just, I started to kind of like this idea of, you know, whatever you have top of mind every day, you can kind of, it's just what you tend to focus on, right? So if you're surrounded by negativity and things like that, you just tend to be more negative. And if you wake up every day and you try to listen to like some good podcasts or read some stuff or write down your goals or your affirmations, whatever, you can kind of rewire your brain. I'm not, I'm not into like the metaphysical woo-woo stuff about it. I just think it's more practical than that. It's like, all right, what am I, what am I choosing to focus on today? Right? How to even just like get things done efficiently? And like David Allen, I think his name is, has a good book, Getting Things Done, right? I mean, I roughly follow some kind of a process like that. And there's a lot of things I've read like that over the years. Once in a while, when I'm like, wake up in the morning and

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

  I, I'm like, ah, I'm supposed to, I was supposed to be exercising, but like, I just don't feel like it today. And I'm like, I'm being kind of lazy, you know? My, my, my best like motivation hack is like just to type David Goggins into YouTube and watch a random video that comes up. And then you will, you'll be working out shortly. Otherwise, you will feel like, you know, total whim. I guess your question was, what do I want to improve about myself right now? I mean, so I'm 39 now and just going from like 29 to 39, you know, I've noticed I'm starting to feel like I'm getting older, right? It's kind of a scary thing. Jet lag affects me more and like if I get injured, it takes longer to recover. And I think even my memory has gotten like a little bit worse. I feel like I used, it used to be my short-term memory was like really good. If people told me like five or six things, I'd be like, yeah, I got them all in my head. And now it's like two minutes later, I'm like, what was that?

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  I don't remember what they were really talking about. So I start to write down a lot more things. So I'm noticing now that age is something where I feel like, hey, maybe I only have another 10, 20, you know, 30 good years of like really productive stuff. And what do I, what do I want to do with that? So I started to think more about longevity, health. I've gotten a lot more into like being healthy and even like started a longevity company, or at least funded it, helped put some money into it. So we can talk more about that later if you want, but I'm trying to think what else? I'm also just trying to, I don't know. I'd say the other thing I'm really focused on is I've had some success and some liquidity with Coinbase. And so early on, I would think I was driven by just like doing something meaningful in the world and making some wealth. And I've sort of done that.

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  And so I'm basically just driving my motivation from other things, which are like, what do I actually like doing, you know? Which is like, I tend to like learning new things. I like to build things with technology. So I'm trying to make sure that I can have like really high motivation and energy for hopefully many decades to come and keep building more and more cool stuff.

• 1:14:14Tim Ferriss?

  Anything in particular here, you are taking a stab at learning at the moment? I rewound and watched, there's a very maybe half second or one second snippet in the doc where you're packing a bag for travel and you have three books. I couldn't identify the one on the bottom. There was, I think it was seven days to the perfect puppy on the top. And then another one that it was hard to, hard to get a full read of, but it was something like the healing brain or the healing mind, something along those lines. I can't remember the exact title. So that may be a dead end, but there was a freeze frame of it. It was the, the second book in a stack of three.

• 1:14:57Tim Ferriss?

  Anything that you're focused on learning at the moment or would like to learn in the next six to 12 months?

• 1:15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's funny. Actually, I haven't seen the final film. I saw like a rough cut of it. And I think I saw that perfect puppy book. And I was there. I was like, someone's gonna ask me about that. That's funny.

• 1:15:12Tim Ferriss?

  That's me on cue.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  We were thinking about getting a dog at that point, but we ended up getting some cats instead, which who knows, then maybe they'll make an appearance behind me here. But yeah, so I'm always kind of reading books like that. Those two in particular were not super memorable, but I'm trying to think like, what else would be helpful right now? I mean, I'm actually, I'm like trying to learn more about biology right now. I started off trying to read some textbooks on this. And there was a couple of books out there that was kind of for like, basically, I never got a chance in college to like, really study biology. And I didn't have a specific reason to. But now as I'm learning more about health, I'm like, why don't I know more about biology? I kind of wish I did. One thing that I did was I actually hired a biology tutor. So I was trying to go through these textbooks. And, you know, I was doing it, but it was taking me a long

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  time, like, you know, read like five minutes every evening and

• 1:15:59Tim Ferriss?

  Not light reading.

• 1:16:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's like

• 1:16:01Tim Ferriss?

  It's no seven days to the perfect puppy.

• 1:16:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, yeah, you know, you get really demoralized when you read a sentence, you're like, five of those words, I have no idea what they mean, you know?

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  If it's like one word every couple of sentences, okay, I can maybe hack through it. But like, five words in the first sentence, you're in trouble. Anyway, I heard, you know, grad students are like woefully underpaid. And some of these people are just like brilliant teachers. And so I asked a few friends of mine, and instead of trying to wade my way through this super dense textbook every night, it's actually been way more fun. I basically just for an hour on Sundays, usually I meet up with this guy. He's such a great teacher. And he can jump around to kind of teach me like, whatever I'm most interested in, you know, instead of having to wade through the whole book. So that's been a pretty cool hack.

• 1:16:50Tim Ferriss?

  Let's deep dive on biology. What context have you provided this tutor? Because biology is kind of like physics, right? I mean, you can go in a million different directions. Are you starting with just the basic, basic building blocks? Okay, what's the Krebs cycle? What's this? What's that? What are the essential amino acids? How do they factor into A, B, and C? What context or direction did you give your tutor?

• 1:17:15Speaker 03

  I gave him the context of, I want to learn all the fundamentals. So I don't, I at least know the basics. So I don't sound like a complete baby. And the part of the context was also, you know,

• 1:17:24Tim Ferriss?

  Those babies suck at biology. It's true.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  Well, this is kind of how I sound when I try to speak, you know, Spanish or I sound like a five year old or whatever. So, and then I was also in the process of like funding this, this biotech company, New Limit, and we can talk about that later. But that was, I was trying not to sound like an idiot in front of the team, basically. And so, yeah, the, the cool thing is, he's been able to not only, we went through a bunch of like, basics around cells and things like that. But we've also started to get into just like, how do people develop these tools in biology, like PCR or flow cytometry? And like, in a biotech context, like, we're trying to leverage the latest tools to, of course, advance the state of the art. How do you sequence these cells now? And what kind of data do you get out on the latest techniques? But he's also kind of helping me understand the history

• 1:18:11Speaker 03

  of a little bit of this. Like, previously, everybody used this technique, and that was considered the state of the art. But somebody eventually, at some point, had to find a way to do it, like, at 10 or 100x throughput. And, you know, like, the Human Genome Project, and how did they finally sequence this thing, which seemed like an insurmountable project? And so, I've been getting to learn a lot about the really cool history of how people found, you know, something that already existed in biology, in some heated pool somewhere, and they're like, they sort of hacked that to do our bidding. And some, anyway, that, that part has been really interesting for me to understand the history of it, and how, how to try to advance, like, put another leaf on the tree of knowledge. That's kind of what our goal is with the biotech.

• 1:18:49Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm gonna ask you about New Limit. I would strongly encourage everyone to read more on the history of science. I think it would be such an incredible boon and gift to everyone involved, if more people read up on the history of science, for a lot of reasons. Because you can, A, deconstruct how thorny problems, or seemingly insurmountable problems, were tackled successfully, which is like, reading a detective novel in and of itself, a lot of the time. And also, I think it is a nice remedy to certain epistemological arrogance that humans tend to have. Like, oh, well, nah, there, there are a few things

• 1:19:31Tim Ferriss?

  left to figure out, but we really have nature pretty much on lock. I think we've got it dialed. It's like, no, no, no, no, we really don't. So, you should read up, just the, the amount of confidence that people have always had at different points in history, with the most ludicrous. Coping mechanisms for like shoddy interventions and so on. There's, there's no reason to think it's any different now. That's also another reason to read up, just to give everybody a, a dose of kind of humble pie. When considering not just what we know, but the possibilities moving forward. What is the goal of New Limit? Why are you involved?

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  Last year Coinbase went public and, um, you know, it's a good liquidity event for everybody involved. I think, actually, I think over like a thousand millionaires were credited in that IPO just from various employees and investors who had worked on Coinbase over the last 10 years. So that was like incredibly fulfilling. And one of the things that caused me to do is kind of to pause and think about, all right, what do, what do I want to do for the next 10 years, 20 years? And I was like, I want to, I want to continue to be the CEO of Coinbase. Like that's going to be my first priority. I think we're just at the very beginning of creating the open financial system for the world. And I'm going to keep doing that. But can I, I've got some liquidity now, like I want to try to do something useful with it. Because I think like, you know, we're kind of in this golden age of software where like fortunes are being made. And some of that wealth, even in crypto is now being, is now being directed into hard science problems.

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  Like, you know, atoms, not bits. And, um, I think that's a really good thing actually, because it'll probably create a secondary effect, like a boon in these other areas. So I started to host these dinners, basically with friends of mine that were either other bio, people like biotech experts, CEOs, investors or scientists. And especially in this space around CRISPR, I had read about that and like CAR T cells. And I was like, my spider sense is like, there's something happening in, in this area in biology, where it's starting to feel more like engineering, not science, where we have some of these tools to actually go do unique stuff. So I just started hosting these dinners randomly and I basically just went around the room and asked everybody like, what's the most thing you're most excited about right now? And one of the topics that came out, came up like during these dinners was something called

• 1:21:36Speaker 03

  epigenetic programming of cells, which I can try to give a brief overview of that if it's helpful.

• 1:21:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, please.

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  Okay. Well. Okay, so long story short, back in 2006, Shinya Yamanaka got the Nobel Prize for discovering that you could turn a skin cell back into a stem cell by exposing it to these four transcription factors, which are just like proteins that you can expose a cell to. And it was kind of like a mind blowing thing at the time, which is like, wow, you can really, we can change a cell back to a stem cell. And since then, people have learned that they can change a cell into other types of cells. So for instance, you could turn a, I don't know, like a skin cell into a neuron cell or a muscle cell or something like that by exposing it to different transcription factors. So just in the last five years or so, several labs have shown that you don't want to change the cell state, you don't want to turn it all the way back to being a stem cell, but you can basically rejuvenate, right, or move

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  the cell to sort of a more functional, earlier state by exposing it to some of these factors. We have an existence proof of this, if you will, because we know that some animals in nature can regenerate, right, like a salamander, like its arm, if it's cut off, it'll kind of regrow, or like jellyfish, some of them seem to live indefinitely. And even like human beings, I guess, like if you, you know, if there's like a infant in a womb and there's like a prenatal surgery, it'll come out, there's like no scars, right? And so we're seeing, even in our own human biology, there are, there's sort of an existence proof for some amount of rejuvenation capability. I basically realized that this could be an interesting area to pursue. I talked to a bunch of my smart friends about it because obviously I'm not, I'm not a scientist in this field, which is always a dangerous thing

• 1:23:05Speaker 03

  to go into. So I partnered with Blake Byers on this, since he's a PhD, you know, he actually is a scientist and he's started a successful biotech company before. And he, as a partner at Google Ventures, he invested in a bunch of biotech companies. And I basically decided, all right, let me try to put some, some money into this with Blake and see if we can help this company get off the ground. And even if I'm not running it or anything like that, I can probably hopefully help this thing get off the ground. And so, yeah, New Limit is basically going to try to build a platform that tests a lot of different transcription factors with different cell types and uses machine learning to do that in a virtuous cycle, because it's a huge search space of complexity that you could imagine. The number of transcription factors, the number of combinations of it is like, you know, 10 to the 15th different possibilities. And so you need some sort of way to kind

• 1:23:50Speaker 03

  of do a more directed search through this giant space. And yeah, so they've been able to build an incredible team to date. There's about eight or nine people there, brilliant scientists, young people, machine learning folks with an office in South San Francisco. So if people are interested in that, I'd encourage them to go check out the website and apply for, for a role if they're interested in the space.

• 1:24:09Tim Ferriss?

  So New Limit and to... Try to ensure I understand the basics of this. They're looking at different combinatorial cocktails of transcription factors that produce particular, that are optimal for producing certain types of changes in cells. Are they focused on reversing cell senescence? So reversing, let's just say, cell aging? Is that a primary objective? Or are they also looking at productizing in some fashion? The conversion of one type of cell to another? Or are they really just creating the database that will then be used by other companies?

• 1:24:53Tim Ferriss?

  Could you explain the business model a bit?

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  Right, I should have mentioned that earlier. So yeah, so the goal of New Limit is really to radically extend human health span. So the moonshot of the company is really, it's a longevity company. We're trying to help humans live much longer, not just a little bit longer. But I think in any good moonshot company, you know, you want to have intermediate milestones along the way. And so the intermediate milestones are more like, could we get a specific type of cell to be rejuvenated and be younger? And you know, an example would be older people, when they get the COVID vaccine, they don't have as strong of a response to it because their T cells are older, they're more exhausted. So if we could in some sense rejuvenate T cells, right? Or pulmonary fibrosis is another issue that affects people. Maybe there's a way to rejuvenate those cells to get them to be younger. So oftentimes people get hung up on this definition of, well, what does it even mean aging? Like, is a cell older or younger?

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  And we sort of don't worry about like some big fancy rigorous definition. We're just saying, we're trying to restore function in these cells to get them to behave like younger cells. So hopefully we can find with this platform to test this rapidly at a scale that hasn't really been done before, at industrial scale, to test this with different cell types, different tissues. Basically, we'll hopefully find hits here for different indications, whether that's T cells or pulmonary fibrosis or others, and develop therapies for that. But the ultimate long-term goal of the company would be eventually, you know, some therapy that you could take that would actually just help humans live longer in a healthy state.

• 1:26:16Tim Ferriss?

  Hypothetically, what might administration of these therapies look like? I don't know enough about the transcriptions, transcription factors to speak intelligently about them, but are these, would these effectively end up as molecules that are synthesized and put into a capsule? Is it some other route of administration? What might that look like?

• 1:26:36Speaker 03

  The actual delivery mechanism is a little bit further down the research path. And it's not the main thing we're focused on at the moment because we're basically doing this with human cells in dishes, basically in vitro. But you can imagine, you know, mRNA is now something that we have huge proof point with, with the COVID vaccines. And I think that's a very interesting delivery mechanism people have looked at. There's, there's different viral delivery mechanisms that people have used more historically. You could even imagine there may be some cases where kind of like dialysis or something like people actually get a cells taken out of their body. They could be then rejuvenated, put back in. There's various things like that which could be attempted, but obviously for like, again, the moonshot, the long-term goal, it would ideally be something even like, it could be

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  a pill or like a shot that you get that's something that's more mass market.

• 1:27:24Tim Ferriss?

  So I encourage people to check it out. Beautiful website, very nicely designed, newlimit.com. So easy to remember. So I encourage people to check that out. Would you like to describe for people Research Hub? Because I think this is related, or at least overlapping in some respects.

• 1:27:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, okay. So thanks for asking. I mean, this is another project. By the way, you can see the theme in all of these, which is I'm really passionate about basically improving the world with science and technology. It's kind of like the overarching theme here. And I feel like cryptocurrency was a great breakthrough for that, to create more economic freedom. And some of the dollars I mentioned now that are flowing from that industry into these other areas are helping, I think, accelerate scientific research. And it even ties into what we talked about in the beginning with Ray Dalio's book. You know, he talks about the changing world order. Like, the root of a lot of progress is basically education, which leads to science and technology innovation, which leads to unique products, which leads to economic growth. And then that's how societies prosper. They have higher GDP, they have surplus that they can invest in the arts and culture and,

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  you know, defense or whatever they want to invest in. So more universities or education. So anyway, I really think that a lot of people today, this is sort of a tangent, but a lot of people today are thinking like, how do I improve the world? They're an aspiring young person. And there's a temptation to say, hey, like, we should advocate for different government policies. We should go become an activist or protester and like, I don't know. My, my message to people, this is part of why I created the documentary as well, Coin, is I wanted to show people like, if you want to try to impact the world, I think one of the best ways to do it is to build a company that's based around science and technology. And anyway, this all ties back to Research Hub, which is another company that I funded and tried to help get off the ground. So the team there is doing really awesome stuff around trying to make scientific research

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  more like open source software, like GitHub or something. And you can see all the different challenges that are out there in the scientific research space today. There's a replication crisis where a lot of time people are publishing papers and it turns out later, nobody can reproduce it. A lot of scientific research is done in academia where it's done in a silo in isolation because, you know, they're not actually getting like the material benefits from these technologies that are when like, if you invented CRISPR, you should have been able to help commercialize it and make, you know, become a billionaire. It's such a big breakthrough, but they're not doing that. They're basically only able to get citations and publications and tenure. And so they're living in this kind of artificial, I don't know, academic environment. And so you get people more siloed. It takes a long time to publish a paper. They're basically writing it, these small innovations are written up in some big flowery

• 1:29:53Speaker 03

  language that's inaccessible to the average person. So with Research Hub, yeah, we're trying to make it easy for people to sort through all of the millions of papers that are published every year to what are the most impactful. We're trying to help get things like peer review, Q and A, comments, feedback around research to be more collaborative with people. And we're trying to get like data sets and the code to be published alongside the papers. So it's not just reading some static PDF. And we're trying to help with things like fundraising for, for science in the future. So there's actually a coin associated with this research coin, which is a reward coin that was created that helped in a governance token that helps the community sort of get rewarded as they contribute more and more to that site and that, that community. So it has like a really passionate, small nascent community that's, that's helping grow

• 1:30:38Speaker 03

  a lot of the content on the site today. And I think the roadmap for it is really exciting to hopefully just get rid of a lot of like the barriers to scientific innovation. You know, we saw a small example of this during COVID where like everything went warp speed during COVID to find a vaccine. People were publishing their papers on Twitter instead of going through like a two-year journal process that had all these paywalls and stuff like that. And everything just went faster. That's how it should be all the time. And that's how we can advance civilization, I think. So we're trying to help do that with Research Hub as well.

• 1:31:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, looking at the website right now, this is quite cool. I'm looking at the front page. I have some, some questions about the front page, but just to look at a few things that are seemingly popular. You've got long-term health effects of antidepressant use. You've got alcohol impact on sports performance and recovery in male athletes. You have greater effects by performing a small number of eccentric contractions daily than a large number of them once a week. I will probably read that in the next two hours because that's very of great interest to me, especially for connective tissue repair with tendinosis in the elbow. Now, there are, I'm noticing, open bounties. Could you just explain what these open bounties mean to the people who are posting them and

• 1:31:52Tim Ferriss?

  for anyone who might be a bounty hunter?

• 1:31:55Speaker 03

  So this is one of the things that we're testing out with basically adding a crypto asset into this platform to try to see if it improves the collaboration of people there. And so what we did was we allowed anybody who had basically a question, a scientific question, or anybody who wanted like a peer review, or maybe they want a video summary of their paper, or they want help kind of, a task that people often have in, even in private industry or in scientific research is they'll say, I want a summary of the literature. I want someone to go out there, read the 20 or 50 most relevant papers on a certain scientific question and give me kind of a meta-study, aggregate that information. And we're sort of building the tools for people to do that as well. So people can do that with ResearchCoin. It's, it's a way to, the, the people who are kind of contributing the most are earning

• 1:32:40Speaker 03

  it, that's improving their reputation on the site, but it's also a way for people to kind of get recognized. And, you know, I always tell people, imagine if like the early hosts on Airbnb or the early drivers in Uber had gotten a chance to like participate in the, the network that they helped create. And that's kind of what's coming together here on Research Hub.

• 1:32:58Tim Ferriss?

  Is the

• 1:33:00Tim Ferriss?

  Method of redemption, or I guess, let me phrase it a different way. The value of research coin at the moment is one, social credibility and two, with the research coin that you earn, you can then post your own bounties and make requests of the community. Are those the sort of two main values to an individual contributor who is accruing research coin? Okay, got it. What has you most excited? So let's pretend that you're at one of these dinners you're hosting. And I said, look, I know you're not a biologist. I understand that. However, you've, you've crossed the, you know, speaking like a five-year-old point, you seem to have a good grasp of the basics. You also have an engineer's mind, which I would argue is more similar to top-end

• 1:33:44Tim Ferriss?

  scientific minds than one might think. I think the disciplines are different, but the mental frameworks, the ability to ask questions, attempting to replicate, et cetera, transfer quite well. What are you most excited about in the world of science?

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  If I just think about all the biggest challenges that we have in the world today, I think science and technology are like pretty good hammers to swing at those nails. You know, it's like, okay, we've got, we've got climate change, right? Everyone's talking about climate change. So, I mean, I think fusion energy is super exciting. I think people working on carbon sequestration is pretty interesting. You've got, you know, again, Elon is kind of working on that with, with Tesla and solar panels and electric vehicles and as are Rivian and all these other companies. To me, those are the most promising solutions we have to that are using technology, right? If you look at education, it's like Khan Academy, stuff like that gets me really excited. It's like, all right, let's make a free world-class education available to everyone. That's really cool, right?

• 1:34:45Speaker 03

  If you look at, why don't we have better economic, you know, financial infrastructure in all the countries of the world? And why do we have big inflation problems? And why is it cost 2% every time you swipe your credit card? You know, it takes forever to move money around the world. And like crypto is, is a really important solution to that, which is basically a science and technology breakthrough, right? So I kind of feel like, I don't know if this is exactly what you were asking, but I just feel like.

• 1:35:12Speaker 03

  Science and technology and building, commercializing it is like the thing that is really the most exciting thing. Another thought I've had is like, there's kind of two very different worlds. So there's one world of scientists and academics, and there's another world of entrepreneurs. And they actually, very rarely do they cross-pollinate. Most people who are entrepreneurs, they're making something that's like mostly based around marketing. It's like a new tequila with a celebrity or whatever. And then most scientists are building things which never get commercialized, like because they're living in a pure academic world. But if you think about a lot of the most valuable companies in the whole world, Genentech, SpaceX, even Coinbase, which was based on a research paper, the Bitcoin research paper, right? It's basically, even Google was, came out of like a, basically

• 1:35:54Speaker 03

  a research project at Stanford with Larry and Sergey, right? So the most valuable companies in the world are when we cross-pollinate a true scientific innovation with someone who can go commercialize it. And the problem is, these two groups of people are like sometimes oil and water. Like, the scientists don't like people who make money and they think it's like kind of low integrity. And, you know, the, the business people don't have any understanding of science whatsoever, and they basically get caught up in pseudoscience and all these things. And so, anyway, I think the more you can cross-pollinate and get those two areas to talk to each other, the few, the few people in the world who can speak both languages, like a translator, they, they know enough business to be dangerous and enough science to be dangerous. Those are going to be really valuable things that get credited for all humanity.

• 1:36:36Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like you might be one of those people. So I'm looking forward to it.

• 1:36:39Speaker 03

  I'm trying to be. That's why, that's why I'm doing the biology tutor. Yeah.

• 1:36:44Tim Ferriss?

  I might have to pick up on this biology tutoring idea. I could also use some basic groundwork, lest I get myself into trouble. Last question, or second to last question, and this may be a dead end. I'll take the blame if it is, but I like to ask this one. The metaphorical billboard question. So if you could put a, a message, or quote, image, anything non-commercial on a billboard to get the message out to, let's just say, billions of people, assuming they speak whatever language is on the billboard, what might you put on that billboard?

• 1:37:19Speaker 03

  I guess there was one we said earlier, which was like, action produces information. I like that one a lot, but if I had to pick a second one, since we already said that, one of my favorite sayings is the greatest risk is not taking one. And I feel like a lot of people, they have ideas, they just debate it endlessly. They never take that first step and there's really a scarcity of risk tolerance. And I don't mean like doing anything that's like actually that risky. In fact, I think you put out like a great framework a while back about sort of imagining, what is really the worst thing that's going to happen? And could you actually live with that, right? It's like starting a company. I mean, okay, so you went and raised some money and what's the worst thing that happens? I mean, it's basically the company fails, you shut it down, maybe you go get another job. You know, and if you raised a little bit of seed capital, you can probably pay yourself during that time period.

• 1:38:03Speaker 03

  So like, is it really that big of a deal? I mean, if, you know, if that's truly the worst case scenario, then like what's stopping you, right? So everybody has their own unique personal situations. Maybe it's harder for them than others. Like, I don't, I don't mean to belittle any of that, but oftentimes the fears that people have, it's, it's greater in their own mind than it is in reality. So yeah, greatest risk is not taking one. Maybe I'd put that out there.

• 1:38:24Tim Ferriss?

  I dig it. Well, Mr. Armstrong, maybe someday Dr. Armstrong, biologist, PhD, astrophysicist. Is there anything else you would like to add before we wind this to a close? Any, any closing comments, requests of my audience, things to point attention to, public complaints you'd like to lodge, anything at all?

• 1:38:47Speaker 03

  No, I mean, I guess mostly just want to say thank you. I think you're one of the group of people out there that you're really celebrating builders, which is people who are trying to do ambitious stuff in the world, you know? They don't always succeed, but at least they're trying. And I think frankly, there's like too many people out there want to be a critic and poke holes and everything. And it's easy to be a critic. It's actually easy way to sound smart, but it's hard to do difficult things. And I think you're. Encouraging people to do that. You've done that yourself. I'm just glad that there is like new media out there, you know, which I consider you to be part of that podcast and blogs and YouTube and kind of like this documentary coin as well, that we're trying to participate in this new media movement to sort of, let's go celebrate builders, you know, let's tell the behind the scenes stories

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  of the ups and the downs, the good, bad and the ugly. And so I appreciate you being a part of that. And yeah, I hope people go check out the documentary. It's called Coin and I, I partly I created it because I wanted to show people what it's like to try to create something new in the world, going from your laptop, you know, to being a public company and sort of demystify it. And hopefully more people will watch it and say, hey, you know what? I could do that. I want people to go create more companies in the world. So hopefully that'll happen.

• 1:39:58Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks for the kind words, man. I really appreciate it. And Coin can be found on Amazon, iTunes, Vimeo, on demand, other platforms. One final question related to the documentary. What's the story with, are they dinosaur pajamas? What is?

• 1:40:14Tim Ferriss?

  I saw it come up multiple times, like the onesie pajamas. What is the background there?

• 1:40:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. When I made this documentary, I was like, so I'm either going to look like an idiot or this is going to be great. But either, either way, I'm going to try it. So that's one of those moments where I probably look like an idiot. But yeah, in the early days, building Coinbase, I mean, it was literally just like 12 hours a day, kind of like, you know, try to write some code, talk to customers. And I was, for whatever reason, I thought this, this onesie was just hilarious. I had it around the house. It was kind of, it kind of became, like, I never thought it would turn up in a documentary. I'll guarantee you that. But I think I wore it to a couple of hackathons we had at the Coinbase office, too.

• 1:40:52Tim Ferriss?

  I dug it.

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  So, you know, you gotta, you gotta keep it fun. Have fun while you're trying to do.

• 1:40:56Tim Ferriss?

  Coinbase team mascot uniform. I dug it. I had to ask, I wasn't sure if that was like a formal attire for board meetings or something else. Well, Brian, thank you so much for making the time and for being so game for the conversation. People can find you on Twitter, at Brian underscore Armstrong. And we will link to everything, including the new documentary and all the books, resources, names, companies, et cetera, that we've discussed. People can find in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, everybody, be a little kinder than is necessary. And remember, the greatest risk is not taking one. Be safe out there.

• 1:41:38Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday? That provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 1:42:20Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out. And just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. I've been asked this for years. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance. So you can cover your bases. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases.

• 1:43:02Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:44:29Tim Ferriss?

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