Uncapped #21 | Brian Armstrong from Coinbase

Brian Armstrong is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, a leading cryptocurrency company that provides exchange, brokerage, and custody services to 100M+ verified users in over 100 countries. Founded in 2012, Coinbase went public in 2021 on the NASDAQ under the ticker COIN and as of August 2025 has a market cap of $83 billion. Brian is also the co-founder of New Limit, a longevity biotech company on a mission to significantly extend human lifespan that recently raised a $130M Series B led by Kleiner Perkins and angels including John and Patrick Collison, Elad Gil, and Joshua Kushner, among others. We covered: Working with the government When to jump to the hot new thing Choosing what frontiers to prioritize The inner game of being contrarian --- Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:26) Becoming the everything chain (4:20) Story behind the GENIUS Act (5:33) Working with regulators (10:45) The future of crypto and the government (17:10) When to jump to the hot new thing (23:03) Choosing what frontiers to prioritize (29:59) Brain-computer interface tech (34:48) Inside the mind of a contrarian (43:52) Creating a sustainable lifestyle --- More on Brian: https://www.coinbase.com/ https://www.newlimit.com/ https://x.com/brian_armstrong More on Jack: https://www.altcap.com/ https://x.com/jaltma --- https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod Email: [email protected]

• 0:00Speaker 00

  People shouldn't like seek out a specific moment to do something super contrarian. But if you're in a position of leadership, it will occasionally become necessary for you to do something really difficult, which will piss off some large group of people, but it's the right thing to do for the company. And so these moments present themselves to you. And when I did it, I had no idea I would be talking about it five years later.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Brian, thank you so much for doing this with me. I am extremely excited for this.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  So last week you posted on X that Coinbase is becoming the everything exchange. And you basically said all assets are basically inevitably going to be on chain. I wanted to start by asking, why is that inevitable?

• 0:38Speaker 00

  Well, the short answer is that it's faster, cheaper and more global, right? And so if you zoom out, I mean crypto, we think of as a technology to update the financial system broadly. It's happening with payments. It's happening with trading. It's happening with borrowing and lending, even some non-financial use cases, which we can talk about later if you want. But we do think trading is all going to come on chain, all these different asset classes. And I'll give you a couple of examples, like today, people have been trading crypto for a long time. What if we could trade stocks that were tokenized and brought on chain? Well, that would allow you to anybody, any country of the world to have access to these US assets and securities, which there's high demand for, but only usually like rich people in some of these countries, like in Argentina, to get a US brokerage account or something, you have to be kind of wealthy.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  So it sort of democratizes access to from an international point of view. It also allows 24/7 trading, which, you know, the traditional financial system has been slowly getting there, but they haven't gotten all the way there, fractions of shares. You can launch new types of order books, like there's these perpetual futures order books, which are very popular in crypto, but you could bring that to traditional securities. And I think eventually you'll see even more novel stuff that we haven't really explored yet. But the way that voting happens and governance can all happen on chain. You know, you could even create novel types of structures where like, let's say you only want long-term holders of your stock to be voters. So you don't have someone buy a few shares and turn into an activist or something. You could say, all right, you need to have held these shares for more than a year

• 2:04Speaker 00

  to actually vote in the next governance vote or something like that to incentivize long-term holders. So, yeah, it's. Crypto can make all these things more efficient. So I think eventually we'll get every asset class coming on chain, not just stocks, but also prediction markets, commodities, like the way startups raise money. All capital formation could be a lot more efficient on chain.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Is it something that people will choose to be able to put on chain? Or you think it will be something that everything's on chain regardless of what sort of the proprietor of the asset wants?

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Well, we want to do this in collaboration with companies. Like, I don't think it's a good idea to like, start making these derivatives without the company's permission, et cetera, et cetera. So there will be certain companies that opt into this, and they're on the frontier, and they want to raise money this way. And then I think eventually it'll just be so, such a well-trodden path that it'll be a more efficient way to do it. Like, why wouldn't you open up, open up your next fundraise to raise on-chain from these accredited investors and various things? So, yeah, eventually it'll, it'll become the majority.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Do you think more of this is to do with technology or like a cultural behavioral norms thing that, you know, is, you know, the reason that it's not already happening widespread for those kind of assets?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Well, the tech wasn't ready, the regulatory environment wasn't ready. I mean, we just now are like having really good conversations with this new SEC. There's a crypto task force, and I think there's a couple paths where this could now come to fruition. We're also trying to get this Clarity Act passed in the US. People might have heard that we just got this Genius Act passed for stable coins. There's another one being debated in the Senate called Clarity in the House, which is around market structure, which would help people raise money with crypto securities. So if that gets passed, so part of it's the regulatory environment needed to be ready, and then the tech needed to be ready as well. I mean, you, some of your listeners may have kind of heard about the ICO boom that happened a little while back. So that was an early precursor, I think, and it was largely happening outside of the regulatory perimeter, probably some good and bad parts of that.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  But this new one, if it happens, it will be bigger, more efficient, more well-regulated. Like, as an example, if you are registering a crypto security to raise money for a company, you know, under US law currently, you can only raise money from accredited investors. We have ways now you can determine that of someone's accredited investor status on-chain.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  You know, internationally, you could have a broader group of people investing. So these are the kinds of things that are starting to now get solved.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  What was the story with the Genius Act? Like, what, what does that mean for stable coins, crypto in general? Like, what was kind of the, what was the like double click on that?

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, it basically clarifies that, you know, a dollar-backed stablecoin has to have 100% of the reserves in US dollars in a bank account, or it can be in short-term treasuries. So they very explicitly said what types of assets the backing can be in. And then they also had some good basic hygiene things around, you know, passing an audit once in a while and these kinds of things, right? So, and they said what type of entity you needed to be. You don't have to be a bank, you can be a trust company. There's a couple other clear rules like that. But the big thing it did was more symbolic. It was saying, this is allowed and it's encouraged in the United States to be built. Because in the past, the lack of clarity really got weaponized against the industry, where, you know, primarily Elizabeth Warren and Gary Gensler were really kind of attacking the industry unlawfully, in my view, kind of saying,

• 5:12Speaker 00

  well, there's no clear legislation, it's all Wild West, and, you know, people are gonna lose all their money. And so, they really tried to like, just file lawsuits against everybody they could find to try to shut it down. So now that there's a clear federal law on the books, there can't be some future activist who comes and tries to kill it. You can actually now just comply with the law and build your company.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Speaking of like regulators and lawmakers, it seems like any sufficiently large, I guess particularly consumer company, you know, you, Airbnb, Uber, OpenAI, Meta, et cetera, like eventually you need to also work with regulators and the law. And I'm curious what you've learned over your years of doing that? Like what have been like the important things you've taken away about how to like work with those bodies over time?

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I would actually say, early on as an entrepreneur, I was kind of a little naive on this topic. So, I sort of had a very simple mental model, which was, we're just gonna follow the law, and then I don't have to engage with anybody from the government, right? To me, that was a distraction from building our products and talking to customers and, you know, all the stuff I really felt like, and that's what most startups should be doing, right? But as you get bigger, inevitably every company intersects with government, right? Because a lot of the areas of the law are just not clear, right? And now you're in the world where, okay, we're on the frontier that's undefined. How do we actually help shape that policy to make sure it doesn't? And there's kind of like that old saying, you know, even if you're not interested in government, government's interested in you.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, particularly when you're doing something new. And so it's like, you know, the companies that are big are often started because they, you know, they did something new, and the government's trying to figure it out.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, like a lot like self-driving cars or all these things like you're pushing on the frontier where it there's no clear that society still hasn't figured it out in our democracy, right? And so you'll what will usually happen in that lack of clarity stage is you need to go and build something and get it out there. You can't sit around waiting for clarity or by then it'll be too late. So you have to kind of do something in the absence of clarity that you think is responsible, is what would be required if a law eventually comes on the books. So you can't just be completely like, you know, flying under the radar, doing bad things. But you also can't sit around and wait for the law to be clear because it's that can take a decade, right? So every startup has to kind of balance this and and push on that frontier and do the right thing in the absence of clarity while

• 7:28Speaker 00

  eventually building a policy team and shaping the laws that are getting built. And I'll just tell you a quick story about that, which is like, you know, I'd say about five or six years ago, I started going to DC at the encouragement of my board. They were like, okay, well, yeah, it's time. And so every quarter or so I'd fly over there, I'd meet with a bunch of people, we hired some policy team members. And, you know, I tried to be an educational resource. This was like a phrase that was thrown around, right? And members of Congress would ask me these questions, you know, they're in their seventies or whatever. Sometimes their staff or their children would have the Coinbase app, but they didn't really know what we were doing. They'd ask us funny questions sometimes like, oh, so you're the CEO of Bitcoin or, you know, like, this is all some video game you're creating, right? Or, you know, they asked some, some, but, you know, others were like, really started to get it. And but nothing really ever happened.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  I remember after like three or four years of doing this, I remember thinking, you know, why the inaction? I didn't realize at the time, Congress actually rarely acts. It's sort of a feature of our government with the checks and balances, right? Especially in a bipartisan way now increasingly it doesn't, it doesn't take that much action. So what we eventually had to do was actually, I would say accumulate political power and influence, which sounds a little Machiavellian. But what we did was we actually got our, we had, you know, 50 million people who had used crypto in the United States. There were still some very like hostile members of Congress and and not a lot, like the majority actually were for it. They just didn't want to stick their neck out, but there was a couple that were really hostile. And so what we did was we got organized. We helped the crypto industry come together into this grassroots movement called StandWithCrypto.org, which we helped fund.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Created scorecards for every politician, like how pro or anti-crypto they were. And we eventually got like millions of voters to raise their hand and say they wanted to elect pro-crypto candidates. So using your app was actually like a key step. And then we also donated to this super PAC called Fair Shake, which, you know, for better or worse, our elections matter in terms of like money in the US and, you know, democracies can debate that. We also spun up this thing, like a policy institute that like puts out these white papers and research reports that kind of feed into the supply chain of how DC thinks about things. So it wasn't until we got all these things really organized and in this last election, like some people got elected or got fired essentially for, you know, voted out of office for not being pro-crypto. It wasn't until that happened that the rest of DC, I think, said, okay, this is an issue Americans care about.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  And we started to get people elected who represented the constituents.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I got it's it's been a while since there was a major financial regulation, right? Like it was Dodd-Frank is the last one, like 15 years ago. So what how much of what made this come together now was your experience? That it was pressure from, you know, companies versus, you know, constituencies? Or just like buy-in from the politicians themselves? Like, what do you think were the factors that got action?

• 10:09Speaker 00

  I think that DC kind of realized that there is a crypto voter out there. And that happened in really this last election in November.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think most of them believed it previously because, you know, they're they're the people who are in power, they in these roles, like they're they're people who are for the thing that's going to happen. Like it's not a good idea to go in there and like stick your neck out and lose on some big issue. So they kind of are all looking around to say, okay, I care about a few things. I want to be for the thing that's going to happen. And people started to realize, okay, this is a thing that's going to happen. I better get on board. So that was that was a wake-up call about how to actually create a policy function.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Maybe you had a one higher abstraction about, so that's like individual politicians and, you know, their sort of relationship to crypto. There's also whole governments in their relation to crypto. And obviously, you know, there's like a Checkered past is probably too strong, but like the government and crypto hasn't like always gotten along. And now, obviously, it's, you know, changing a little bit like sovereigns are like having strategic Bitcoin reserves at like all the major, you know, major countries. And obviously, that relationship is changing. Maybe, yeah, just a sort of foundational question I have is, is there a sense in which Bitcoin is like a threat to like governments? Is it a boost and a help to governments? Like, how do you think, what do you think is like the

• 11:29Speaker 01

  truth behind what the relationship will play out like?

• 11:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a nuanced answer because crypto is about fundamentally creating more economic freedom for people. And in many cases, that is in collaboration with the government. And sometimes it's intention with the government. I'd say if you look at most countries around the world, the people really want Bitcoin and crypto, if I were to speak just generally. And some parts of the government love it, and some parts are skeptical of it because it can be a shift of power. It can be an unbundling of the state power to issue, have a monopoly on issuing currency, right? So in some ways, I'll give you an example where it's like unequivocally good for the United States as an example would be, we now have a digital dollar, you know, USDC, other stable coins. This is allowing

• 12:16Speaker 00

  the US reserve currency to perpetuate into the future, be used all of these countries all over the world. It's creating incredible demand for US treasuries as an example, and fast, cheap global payments with dollars. Great. Okay. Now Bitcoin is interesting because I think of Bitcoin as a check and balance on deficit spending because it's kind of like a new gold standard, a digital gold standard. And so we have, democracies actually broadly right now are having a lot of challenges with how to deal with deficits and inflation. And, you know, where are they tethered to reality? Like fiat currencies kind of used to be more pegged to these hard commodities. They're disconnected from that now. And so where is the discipline going to come from to actually balance the budget and not inflate away everyone's wealth, right? Which hurts, by the way, the poorest people in society

• 12:59Speaker 00

  the most. And so if inflation and deficits get too out of control, I think people are going to flee to Bitcoin in a time of uncertainty. If deficit spending is under control, people will continue to use fiat currencies. And so actually, I think Bitcoin is a great way to sort of extend Western civilization, if you will.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Basically, its existence is like saying, hey, don't inflate too much or people are going to run to Bitcoin.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. Exactly. And to me, that's a great thing because I want the United States to exist and to flourish and to be a leader in the world. And if the US can't get its deficit spending under control and it's going to lose the reserve currency status, I hope that doesn't happen. But if it does, I'd rather people go to Bitcoin than to the Chinese yuan.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Right, where the purchasing power of Bitcoin, they believe, will go up. And so if you're an individual, you're like, well, it's time to move over.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  I guess you mentioned the unbundling. There is this dynamic where like the US dollar has like, you know, I guess, I guess the military behind it ultimately is sort of what you would describe, or some version of that. And then if, you know, we have Bitcoin or crypto in general is like this currency people are using, and it's not backed in that exact same way, or, you know, what changes? Like, what's the impact of that decoupling from, I guess, the state and, you know, on some level, the military?

• 14:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, so people have lots of philosophical debates about what is underpinning US currency. You know, is it because you can pay your taxes in it? Is it because it's backed by the full faith and credit of the United States? But, you know, what does that mean? It's not really actually backed by gold anymore. Nixon took us off that standard of 1971, famously saying it was a temporary measure. This is during the Vietnam War.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  And you could make an argue it's backed by the dollar, sorry, the military, but they don't necessarily go around, you know, collecting dollars at gunpoint or something like that. So it's a little bit hypothetical. I mean, I think what ultimately happens if, let's say, the world moved to like a a transnational currency like Bitcoin that was not tied to one country. I actually think it would be very good for the world in a way because it would create this, it would create a new kind of like a new gold standard. And, you know, people's wealth couldn't be inflated away, it couldn't be abused by, you know, certain people with like their fingers on the dial. So it would be totally decentralized. There wouldn't be one country or company who could really manipulate it. And to me, this is like a foundational principle around economics, you know, in economic freedom, you get like

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Property rights, sound money, free trade, some of these things are under, a lot of people believe it's it, there's economists who debate this, that those are kind of foundational to societal progress because if you, if you, if you believe that, you know, your wealth could be eroded tomorrow, or your, the government could kind of seize your stuff out of your bank or something, people just don't invest as much in the long term, right? That, that might sound a little far fetched to people who've only grown up in the US, but there's a lot of, I mean, I spent a year living in Argentina that went through a hundred years of kind of crazy hyperinflation and theft. You know, at one point, 10 years ago or so, like in Cyprus, the government just decided to like take half the money out of everyone's bank account to try to pay off their debt. So if you don't have basic property rights, which we take sort of for granted in the US, and you don't have sound money that can't be like eroded away,

• 16:04Speaker 00

  it's hard to actually have a functioning economy where people try to do good things and keep the upside of their labor.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Is there like, um, is there, i- is it a good thing if one day in the very far future, everybody was in the world was on one currency? Like theoretically in your mind, is that like a healthy, positive, good thing? Is there any, or is there some reason that, other than that it was historically how we got here for there to be hundreds of currencies?

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Well, there would be a benefit in terms of interoperability, like if everyone was running on one global standard. It's kind of like the internet really just runs on TCP IP, it's like a global standard. You know, I also don't hate it if it's a couple standards. It's like a lot of industries start off super fragmented and they kind of come down to, you know, iOS and Android, or like DHL and FedEx and UPS or whatever, Coke and Pepsi. So it's, it's okay to sometimes to have a little competition too, because anything that becomes that big can become ossified or slow or captured. So you actually want maybe like two or three or something?

• 16:58Speaker 01

  But you're like, if you were redrawing it from scratch, you wouldn't make hundreds.

• 17:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  I think there'll be a consolid, like we have seen like a proliferation of fragmentation of crypto chains. I, I think it'll, it'll consolidate down just like any industry.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  I want to go back to like the early days of Coinbase and not about, you know, how you came up with the idea or anything like that. But as you were building, you know, in 2000, you know, the early 2010s, I think it was like crypto was very, very early. Then there came a part of that decade where it was like extremely, you know, hyped and excited. And a lot of people were kind of losing their minds and jumping in. And and then that kind of has transitioned into new waves and now there's AI and these things. You've obviously stayed really steady through it. And one of my questions for you is what's what's driving you in these ups and downs to either,

• 17:50Speaker 01

  you know, turn your attention towards new things or to say, you know what, I'm not going to get caught into the FOMO of what's around me?

• 17:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, crypto kind of went through an extreme version of this, but I think every tech company has variations of it and choices to make about when to jump into the hot new thing or when to stick through a downturn. I mean, one lesson that I internalized from this is you don't want to be jumping to the hot new thing every time something runs up. I mean, like this is sort of the analogy would be like the shopping cart or, you know, the checkout at the grocery store where that one looks a little better and that one looks better and you, you know, you're losing time and switching costs. And what I've seen is like the companies that do the best, they actually are started typically by people who who did it when it was when it wasn't cool. You know, they started in the trenches where nobody thought it was interesting. Their friends maybe thought they were wasting their time. And then when it did hit an inflection point, they were well positioned to ride that wave up.

• 18:43Speaker 00

  So I think Coinbase is an example of that, you know, OpenAI is a good example of that. They started when it wasn't cool. Like if you're, once the thing is off of the races and you're like the 14th company who comes in, I think it's a lot harder to differentiate. And then when things go on the downturn, people bail and it's like the exact wrong time. I should do the inverse, like if it's if it's if something's riding up a, you know, irrational exuberance wave, I'd almost like.

• 19:06Speaker 00

  Go to something else and if it's in the trenches and you think it's cool, I would, that's when I would make the contrarian bet. So, I mean, there were, there were definitely awkward moments along the way for Coinbase where, you know, suddenly we'd be on fire. Like investors would be competing to get in. I'd be getting invited to all these fancy conferences. I remember, you know, in the downturns, I'd sometimes get uninvited to these cool parties and conferences. And then, you know, I remember one reporter at a, at a conference asked me one time, like, now that crypto's over, like, what are you gonna do next? You know, they asked-

• 19:34Speaker 01

  What are you talking about?

• 19:35Speaker 00

  I was like, yeah, I don't, I don't think it is over, but you know, there's an awkward question on stage. So, I, I, yeah, I think we always say internally, it's never as good as it seems, never as bad as it seems. Like if you, and we had board meetings, I think where people said, should we just pivot into like building software for banks and stuff like that? And I remember at one point I was, I was like, if we're gonna do that, we should just shut down the company and give the money back. Cause like, I didn't sign up to do that, right? I don't want to spend the next 10 years building software for banks. Trying to build an open financial system. And so people later credited me of having like incredible foresight that it would go back up. And really it was just me being stubborn. Like I just didn't want to work on bank software, right? So, yeah, I don't know.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Has that changed the type of people that you've needed to hire, given that you just know you're gonna go through cycles in a way that most companies don't?

• 20:20Speaker 00

  Totally. Yeah. I mean, it's the classic mercenary missionary thing, but there were certain cycles of when crypto was not hot. Two or three years in and, you know, we had 25, 30% of the company attrit. And some people sold their stock and secondary markets and all these kinds of things. So there was times where, yeah, I remember I was feeling like it was tough to just get up in front of the company every day as CEO. Not every day, but at least once a week or something and like put on a good face. And I realized at a certain point, you know, people don't want me to be fake. They can sense the authen- the lack of authenticity. And so, you know, great leaders are also vulnerable, right? And so it's okay to go up there and be like- I feel like I'm frustrated, I'm pissed off, like this, this is not working, like we're not where we wanted to be.

• 21:05Speaker 00

  I think like, let's all get our heads together and rally them to be part of the solution with you, right? Like, how can we, how can we use this as an opportunity right now? Like in the, when things are down, we can use it to build. We don't have to focus on scaling as much. We can try new innovative ideas, we have fewer, fewer competitors. So there's always something you can do. You can also just buy crypto when it's down, you know? When it's, when things are rocketing up, you can sell, issue more shares. When it's down, you can buy. So there's always an opportunity, whether things are up or down. And you have to not give a shit too much what other people think. There's a real, there's a real art to that over time of like, not being afraid of upsetting people, not being afraid of doing something that looks stupid. This is partly, probably why some people on the spectrum are more likely to be entrepreneurs, or it's, it's overrepresented is because

• 21:50Speaker 00

  I think they just have a little bit lack of that, like social awareness or cohesion or something where they just care a little bit less about what other people think.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yep. Is there any inverse psychology management you have to do for yourself or the company when things are like running hot? Like obviously when things are bad, you know, what you just described makes sense, but like when you're like, this is a little hot right now, do you have, is there the other side of it?

• 22:11Speaker 00

  Absolutely, yeah. I mean, like in 2021, post-IPO, things were just ripping. We had a lineup, line around the block of like, everybody coming, can you build this product? And we have, we can't, we couldn't even onboard all the customers, there were so many coming in. And so we just hired like crazy. I think we grew headcount like 2.6X in a year. We later had to like unfortunately reduce headcount because we over hired, right? It really, it harmed the culture to grow that fast. Like there was no clear decision making, we couldn't, the quality bar went down. Our, our actually speed of execution went down a lot. So there's certainly times where we've got irrational exuberance too. And there's times where we, we made offers to companies to buy them, where I look, I think, thank God they, they declined our offer because like, you know, that was like a peak bubble type price, right?

• 22:54Speaker 00

  So yeah, it's fascinating to have gone through a couple of these cycles and I think. It builds character, you know, it builds, it helps your decision making to think a little more long term.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  When you look around at other technologies that are on the frontier, which I obviously know that's what you know, you're excited by based on some of the other work you've done. How do you choose which other frontiers to dedicate some of your time and energy to, given that, you know, it's scarce and you can't work on everything?

• 23:20Speaker 00

  One framework to look at it is like, what would be the big meta problems to solve, right? If this worked, it would automatically solve a whole other category of problems, right? Like AI is one of those, you know, bio, like longevity is one of the, if you can fix longevity, it fixes like, it fixes a whole bunch of other diseases with whole, you know? If you can fix fusion energy like that, that does that, right? If you fix brain machine interfaces, like a whole bunch of other problems just go away, which we can talk about. But the other thing, the other lens to look at it, I think is what, what would not happen unless you worked on it, right? Cause there's already really great teams working on a lot of these things. So you have to sort of say, okay, what are one of the, the really big trends over the next 10 or 20 years? That could really change humanity for the better. And there's not, there's something unique, I could contribute to it.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Like if there's already great teams or you don't have it and don't, you know, have an undifferentiated me too product that comes out like that's, that's a waste of time, right? So those two criteria are how I think about it.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  One of the choices that you sort of spent, have been, you know, deciding was fitting that Venn diagram was, you know, the work with new limit and longevity. What was sort of the, or actually I should ask, was there a piece of science you learned about or some information that clicked for you? Where you said, you know, I, I believe there's real work that can be done here because, you know, some, some bit of science got unlocked or some, something was happening that convinced you that it was worth like a real slug of time from you?

• 24:41Speaker 00

  So there's a couple of trends that were happening and basically the way this started was I kind of, with a couple of friends I reached out to and I was like, hey, let's host a dinner with the smartest biotech scientists and CEOs we could find. And just sort of go around the table and ask them like, what's most exciting thing on the frontier you think is being underfunded, right? So that hosted a couple of dinners like that. And one of the topics that came out was this epigenetic reprogramming concept. And by going down the rabbit hole, I realized it had high potential and there were a couple of trends that maybe is sort of why now it made sense like. One is that the cost of single cell sequencing is just falling kind of like Moore's law, right? Where you can now get a full readout of the state of a cell for like five cents. It used to be like $500 and it's just getting cheaper and cheaper. So you can run these like mass scale screens where you don't even,

• 25:24Speaker 00

  you can test like millions of hypotheses now for a reasonable budget. Whereas before, some smart scientists had to understand the actual biology and sort of, I believe if we do X and Y, like this will work. And now we can kind of say more of like a bio naive approach. Like we don't, what if we don't really know how any of this works, but let's just test a million things. And if we find something that does work, maybe retroactively we'll figure out how, but it's okay if we don't know how upfront. The other one was of course AI, right? And it's like with AI and machine learning, you're getting much better at doing, testing these hypotheses in silicone, one would call it. So those two trends made this concept of epigenetic reprogramming, I think, tractable for the first time. And just briefly, like what New Limit is doing, right? Is they're searching the space of transcription factors that could reprogram. They're called transcription factors, just proteins you put in these cells,

• 26:09Speaker 00

  but it can reprogram cells to restore function they had when they were younger. And there's novel therapies, we believe, that can get developed out of that. So that's a little bit about why now we think it could be tractable. I'll tell you one other funny thing, which is the biggest hesitancy I had about, when I was thinking about longevity feels like a massive opportunity. You know, it's like trillion dollar drugs, like these GLP-1s. Like, why wouldn't, you know, this, this feels like it would benefit everyone on the planet, potentially wipe out a bunch of disease, like the root cause of it. The one thing I kept thinking about was like, you know, if, if, if we're going to get to brain upload and AI, does human, does human healthcare even matter? Like over the long term I'm talking about, because any of these companies will take 10, 20, 30 years to like really start to pay off.

• 26:53Speaker 00

  And so, you know, ultimately what I came down to is I think brain machine interfaces and brain upload and all is ultimately going to be a massive thing. And it may, it may actually make some of this less relevant for humans, but there's still going to be like eight billion or so humans running around on the planet that are going to want to preserve their body and their biology. So I think, yeah, I think it's still worth doing.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  I guess we also don't know for sure that the brain upload is going to work. And so at least as a consolation prize, we can be longer living and healthier.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, it buys us, even if all New Limit ever did was it bought us 30 years to

• 27:23Speaker 01

  30 years would be great.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  To get to the merge or something, that would be worth it.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  For New Limit, do you think most of the therapies that are, you know, that you guys are sort of thinking through and that seem like they could be on the horizon, is most of it to do with life extension or like health span extension? Or I mean, I guess those go hand in hand to some extent, but like when you are having these conversations, are you more thinking about, you know, how do we make people healthy into their 80s or is it more like we gotta get people living to, you know, 120?

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Health span is kind of like a more socially acceptable way to describe because sometimes when you say longevity, people imagine like being kept alive on a ventilator in like some decrepit state and they're like, that sounds terrible. Like just pull the plug, right? I don't, they don't want to do that. But yeah, what we are, it so it clarifies to people, we are talking about living more healthy years. Like imagine if you had that, yeah, the energy or the mental acuity of like someone in their 30s and you could do that indefinitely.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Right. So is most of it like treating specific diseases or is it more like about extending sort of just like the baseline even in a healthy, but you know, declining with age state?

• 28:24Speaker 00

  Well, the theory behind New Limit, and this is a theory we're going and testing, but it's that most of the major diseases that kill people, you know, which would be heart disease, cancer, diabetes, et cetera. They're all highly correlated with age, right? Like if you look at the graph of it, it's just older people are the vast majority of them. And so one theory that we're testing is that, you know, the, these diseases are more like a symptom and the cause of it is that your cells are losing function as you get older. Like a simple example would be if you're in your 80s and you get the flu, it's really serious. You could, it could be fatal, right? If you're in your 20s, you get the flu, it's not, it's not that serious. You might lose five days of work or something, right? And so what's happening is your immune system loses function as you get older.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Now, if we could reprogram your immune system of an 80 year old to be, have the function of a 20 year old, it takes like that, we're not like curing the flu, we're just making your immune system. Yeah. Same thing with like, your cells are getting like these little, um, there's actually like cell divisions happening with small mutations all the time. You sometimes will get a cancerous cell, but your body's killing them off when you're younger, right? It's only as, as you sort of accumulate this low, you lose some function as you get older, that sometimes these things can overwhelm, you know, with the loss of function. It's a balance, right? So we, the theory we're testing is that if you could actually reprogram and restore function these cells had when they were younger, it could eliminate or, let's just say like, reduce the incidence of a lot of these diseases.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  So that's why it makes it a great meta problem to research. And again, I should underscore, we're early. We don't, we don't know for sure if this thesis will play out or not, but that's the thesis.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's just interesting to know what you're thinking about. On the, on the other, on the brain-computer interface side, and it's not sort of quite the same level of involvement, but you know, you backed company Nudge, which is really cool. Yeah, I guess, what's the sort of state of play with, you know, BCIs and like what's possible, you know, in the short term, like what do you think is sort of like coming down the pipe with, with that technology?

• 30:22Speaker 00

  Fred Ursim co-founded Coinbase with me back in 2012, amazing guy. So anyway, he started this really cool brain-machine interface company called Nudge, which is using focused ultrasound, so it's non-invasive. You don't have to get like a hole drilled in your head, right?

• 30:35Speaker 01

  That's good.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it lowers the barrier to entry, one might say. And so, you know, I, what the sort of early indications and things that they're going after are similar to, like, there's people actually who get these deep brain probes and for like, you know, like these diseases they have with their movement and like depression and stuff. So the early indication I think would be people who have a really high unmet medical need, right? It's like they're, they have chronic pain, they have depression.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  And you could actually focus an area of your brain with this ultrasound kind of helmet you're wearing or baseball cap. Eventually it might look a little cooler. Or it might help you sleep, insomnia, like, so there's a lot of kind of medical issues there. Now, over time, I think it'll evolve where you can get read and write out of it. And so if you can start to read brain state and then write to it, you have a way to connect your brain to a computer and get connected to the internet, right, like Neuralink and these other ones. And now you start to get a much bigger idea on the table because if over time your consciousness or your thinking or, you know, can expand where some portion of it's happening within your brain, you know, and by the way, your brain is already a few, it's like a reptilian brain with a mammalian brain and a neocortex on top, which only humans have. So it's already like three layers to the brain.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  The fourth layer would be, all right, let's connect your neocortex to the internet. And a bunch of other people and you can start to like the percentage of your brain power that's happening in the cloud, I think will grow over time, right? Like, you know, we even today, we are connected to the internet by our thumbs on a keyboard or like on a screen visually with input and we can talk to an AI agent. But if you have a higher bandwidth connection between those things, more and more of your thinking over time will happen in the cloud. And so what I think is going to be interesting is this is how you get to upload or or the merge with AI, right? Is like if, you know, let's say that you, you know, how you are today, if you had like a, I don't know, your arm got cut off in an accident or something, but you still feel like you, right?

• 32:37Speaker 00

  Like you're still. And so imagine if you kind of had rough, you have like two hemispheres of your brain. What if you had like four or 16 or 32 of them? And now there's a bunch running in the cloud with these AI, you know, kind of like an AI agent or some kind of AGI thing. And if if one day your your human brain got too old, maybe the longevity drugs ran out or whatever, and that one turned off, but you still had.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Mostly are there.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're still you have continuity of self. You'll still feel like you and you'll be fully uploaded.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  It's a good explanation because I mean, like, you know, I mean, probably like a lot of people like the merge sounds great, would love to merge into like a bionic brain. But you know, the way I'd always thought about it is there's this upload moment where you upload the brain to a computer and now you basically forked and I'm not getting to enjoy that fork of me's experience. What you're basically saying is there's this slow augmentation, you know, grains of rice thing, and eventually you kind of can't see the difference. And then maybe if a little bit fades out, like I'm still mostly there somehow.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, because you're right. Some people think it might be like destructive upload, right? Where your brain is as you're on your deathbed, your brain will get destroyed one atom at a time recreated in software and like maybe that tech will get invented too. But I think it's and there's also like the ship of theseus type metaphor about like slowly replacing each piece of wood on the boat and it's, you know, is it still the same boat? But you could, you know, like if your if your vision went away, but you replaced it with a camera system that could connect into your brain and, you know, and you had a cochlear implant for your ears and you replace some other part of your brain, that would be like a ship of theseus approach. I think the most likely one is that it's going to be a gradual progression to the merge where you're going to have the BMI or the ultrasound helmet kind of like nudge and you're going to slowly do more of your thinking in the cloud.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  And then if one day, many years from now, your biological body perishes, the digital you will live on and you'll you'll feel like you and. There's actually a great short science fiction story called The Gentle Seduction that talks about this, which people might enjoy.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that sounds amazing. Also, I guess that world, once you're there, you can make many copies of yourself, too. I mean, the possibilities become crazy.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Then you merge it with SpaceX. We're all over the place. This is great.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can merge it with, you know, your significant other. You can, yeah, whatever you want to do.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Send it to Mars. Okay, I want to talk about sort of some of the contrarian things that you've done and said over the years and not, I'll talk about them, but my question will just be about sort of what's going on for you and sort of what others could learn from it. You sort of, at the height of sort of political tensions several years ago, you basically said, hey, we're not talking about politics here. That at the time was like, you know, a controversial thing to say. Who knows how many people were quietly thinking it at the time, but like, nobody was saying it. And, and you sort of had the courage to, and it was risky. And then, you know, a lot of people then agreed with you. You know, there's other things you've done, like, you know, suing the SEC, you know, that's got to be scary to do that with somebody that

• 35:31Speaker 01

  you're also collaborating with and they're powerful and all these things. And so, less about those sort of decisions themselves, but more about what was giving you the courage or ability to do that? How did you feel as you were doing those things? I'm just curious to learn about like, the inner game you had going on during that and what might be learnable for others.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I'll try to draw some lessons from it. I mean, the short answer is during those times, I felt quite scared, you know, to be honest, especially like the apolitical one. I knew that that was going to hurt a lot of people. It would be very controversial. It was going to cause some percentage of employees to quit. We didn't really know how many were going to take the exit package. There were some debates amongst the exec team. Some people begged me not to do it. They, some people told me it would destroy the company. And we, some people had fears that like, half the company would quit. And I remember, you know, Like, there was kind of a moment where someone said, if we put this out and 50% of the employees go on walkout, like, kind of protest,

• 36:32Speaker 00

  what are you gonna do? And I said, I'm gonna fire every single one of them. And that was like a really awkward moment in the meeting, but I had really committed at that point. I was like, because a walkout had happened previously. That's kind of what kicked this whole thing off. And I realized the company was not aligned. And so at that point, I was like, this job is just not fun. Like, I, I, either I need to leave as CEO, or they need to leave because we're not on the same page. And, um, you know, it was my fault as a leader. I hadn't created clarity, right? And so when I was finally ready to do it, I was like, and people said, what if they don't buy in? I was like, they need to go, right? Um, I, I, I watched, I watched a couple of like speeches, actually, in the run up to that, which gave me a little bit of like confidence. I was,

• 37:13Speaker 00

  you know, there's a great speech that Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore, actually gave. People can Google it and find out. And it's, I think if you Google Lee Kuan Yew, uh, iron, iron, iron in his veins, or something like that. He was giving a speech, uh, there was like these, uh, air traffic controllers or something were kind of striking, um, and holding the company, the country hostage. And he basically went in there to negotiate with them. And he said, I will rebuild the entire thing from the ground up because rather than let you destroy it, right? And he said, if you all quit tomorrow, I, that's okay. Like, I will do that. Um, and he, as a founder, he had the moral authority to do that because he was like, I've done it once before. I'll do it again, right?

• 37:56Speaker 00

  And he said, whoever rules Singapore must have, you know, iron in their veins to like have this sort of strength. So it was like a very compelling speech. Ronald Reagan actually gave another one, um, which I might be mixing. I forget if it was the air traffic controller. I think it was with Ronald Reagan, not with Lee Kuan Yew. He, he was dealing with another strike. Um, but Lee, you know, Ronald Reagan actually gave a speech where he went in front of the White House lawn. And he said, um, anybody who doesn't show up for work on Monday is terminated. End of message. And then he left. And it was like kind of a mic drop moment. So I was, people, you know, were sending me clips of this as building up the courage to do it. But I remember getting in front of the company and, um, my voice was like, you know, was cracking and my leg was shaking and like, I, I almost couldn't get through it, like,

• 38:40Speaker 00

  presenting it to the company. But ultimately, it turned out to be one of the best things we ever did. So I don't, I don't know if there's like a great lesson in there. You can draw, um, a little bit of inspiration from historical figures and other people have gone before, but ultimately, Getting out, getting, building the comfort to do this takes you getting out of your comfort zone over and over again.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Were there any people in your life that like were helping you get there? Is this something that you had done through childhood? Like what, what, what do you think was able to get you through that? Cause I think other people have had sort of dreams of doing, maybe not that exact, maybe that exact thing, but maybe other things. And a lot of people just like can't do something that scary and that risky. And so I'm basically, you know, I'm wondering, is that always, has that been innate to you? Is it something that you somehow learned? Is it people in your life that somehow gave you courage to do that kind of thing?

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Cause I mean, I remember, you know, I was a, you know, CEO at the same time going through a lot of that. A bunch of my other CEO, zero of my, zero of my other CEO friends moved like, I mean, it was only, you know, it was a, nobody did it.

• 39:41Speaker 00

  Well, in one hand, I say, I, I think my hand was forced in a way because we did have the walkout that preceded that, that based on my answer to a question at a town hall. So in some ways that is the catalyst for it. Otherwise I would have probably just been walking on eggshells like everybody else.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  You felt like if you didn't do it, it was just gonna fall, you know, it was just gonna become too much of a mess or something?

• 40:03Speaker 00

  Well, initially, yeah, people would sometimes raise this and I didn't know how to answer it. So I would just kind of waffle and like just try to move past, but it came to a breaking point when the, when a handful of like 300 employees did a walkout and protest of something I'd said. And that's where I started to really feel like I don't want to come into work anymore. If this is, so it was literally either I had to go or they had to go. That, that, that put me to the breaking point. And then I'd also say there's, there could be a psychological aspect to this of just disagreeableness, right? Like, um, I don't think I'm the most disagreeable person I know. Um, and it's not like I was seeking it out either. In fact, the opposite, I was like desperately trying to avoid it. Um, so I think, you know, people shouldn't like seek out a specific moment to do something

• 40:46Speaker 00

  super contrarian, but if you're in a position of leadership, it will occasionally become necessary for you to do something really difficult, which will piss off some large group of people, but it's the right thing to do for the company. And so these moments present themselves to you. And when I, when I did it, I had no idea I would be talking about it five years later. I thought it was just, you know, you do hard things every week.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  You thought it was gonna be to do with your own company, but you didn't see it rippling through the whole industry like.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's very unpredictable which of these things will go viral and which won't.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  It's interesting you say that about disagreeableness. I mean, I, I, I think disagreeing just for the sake of it is. Really bad and agreeing for the sake of it's really bad. And so it's like clearly the right thing is to just act on your convictions when you have them. Did your experience doing this and it going the way that it did, has that, did that update your brain like in ways that you now when you're making decisions, you have a different level of confidence or is it still, you know, scary to do a scary thing? Or is it now that you've like done a couple of things like this, you're like, okay, I've been through it before, like a crypto cycle?

• 41:48Speaker 00

  I would say every year I get pushed a little outside my comfort zone. I become more comfortable there. And if I look back, you know, eight years ago or 10 years ago at the early stages of the company, there was things like talking to a journalist that would like make me really nervous, right? Or, you know, if, if an employee came to me and said, um, like if I had to go layer, layer somebody in the organization or have a difficult conversation, like these things would make me quite nervous and I would stress about it quite a lot. Now those things feel more normal to me, or even just speaking to the company at a town hall or something, right? So I don't feel as nervous when I do those things, but every year in the company, there's at least something that comes along and punches you in the gut.

• 42:28Speaker 00

  And, you know, makes you feel stressed at a new level, right? Maybe it's like a flurry of bad press or it's a congressional testimony or it's engaging in litigation with your, um, with your main federal regulator or it's a hacker trying to break in and steal things or whatever. So there's new levels to the game. And I think part of, it's, it's a weird fascination I have with it because I actually enjoy learning and growth. That's part of the reason why I like the job as CEO, but there's times where it's incredibly stressful and I don't sleep at night.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like painful to grow a lot, basically.

• 43:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  I guess maybe the meta learning is like the way to get through the levels of the game is that you just have to like push yourself as much as you can tolerate all the time and you'll just keep building like a new set of calluses and then you can do the next thing.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it builds character.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  It does.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  So that's, the tuition you're paying every time is like giving you a great education.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we, we talked about this briefly before, but it's just like, um, in general, I mean, I think being a Being a CEO, particularly of a company like this is like, you know, incredibly character building, I guess would be the like, nice way to say it. The hard way to say it is that it's like very difficult and taxing. And you know, like even for me, you know, I, I, you know, I did it, you know, obviously not to this scale, but it's incredibly challenging, like, you know, on a daily basis and you know, you're kind of continually signing up for it. You know, all the time. Do you feel like there's something that you've learned as you've gone through like these stages where you've like enjoyed it more as time has gone on? Cause it does seem to me, just talking to you that you've like settled into some

• 44:06Speaker 01

  version of it that you appear to really enjoy. Or is it still always like, you know, this year, are there things that you like, can't talk about yet that are also really hard and you're like, oh God?

• 44:16Speaker 00

  Well, one mental shift that I made early on, after a few years in the company, we were working like 12 hour days, seven days a week. And I realized at a certain point, I've got to make this sustainable to be able to do it for many decades and really accomplish the things I wanted to accomplish. And so I did a few things. I mean, I, I started to focus more on getting enough sleep, exercise, nutrition, kind of the basic things. I tried to find a little bit of time every week to wind down in the evening, you know, like whether it's reading a book or like sauna or trying to meditate. I've tried different things over time.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  And I got an executive coach at various points, which was really like a therapist, to be honest. That helped. And I, I needed to run it at a marathon pace, not as, not an all out sprint. Cause you can, you can do all out sprint for a little while, but you will burn out. I've seen founders like, you know, to get into very unhealthy states. Like in one case, actually literally, uh, you know, like they got addicted to prescription meds and like all kinds of stuff you've probably seen too. So I realized I wanted to make it sustainable. And then I also, I, I scheduled one week every quarter where I would take it off. Right. I'd either, I'd be, do like a learning week or I'd be at some conference or I would go on a trip with my significant other. And that helped make it more sustainable.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  I think when I look at it now, it's not that it's like easy. There's still always hard things, but I've tried to, um, I do find it deeply fulfilling. It's not always fun, it's work.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:43Speaker 00

  Right. If you want to do something meaningful in the world, which to me ultimately gives me fulfillment. It's not always gonna be fun. It's gonna be, it's gonna, sometimes it's really gonna suck, actually. It's gonna be awful.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like type two fun or whatever that thing is where it's like, it's the type of fun that is like fun in retrospect more than it's fun in the moment.

• 46:01Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. So that's how I've, you know, and there's moments even today where I'm, sometimes I'm like, god damn, why am I doing this? You know? This, this is like awful. And then, you know, go to bed, think it over, come back the next week and solve the problem. And you're like, okay, I'm making progress towards something that feels good and important. And, you know, I think I would be, if I wasn't working on something challenging, I'd probably be like a very tough person to be around at home, so.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Well, it's certainly very amazing. I'm gonna let you go. Thanks a bunch for your time. I really appreciate you doing this with me.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Likewise. Thank you.