Uncapped #21 | Brian Armstrong from Coinbase

23:00It helps your decision making to think a little more long -term. When you look around at other technologies that are on the frontier, which I obviously know that's what, you know, you're excited to buy it based on something that the 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 garrison, you can't work on everything? 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, biodes, like longevity is one of those.

23:33If you can fix longevity, it fixes a whole bunch of other diseases with whole, you know, if you can fix fusion energy like 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 would not happen unless you worked on it, right? Because 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 really big trends over the next 10 or 20 years that could really change humanity for the better?

24:01And there's not, there's something unique I could contribute to it. Like if there's already great teams or you don't have it, and you don't, you have an undifferentiated me too product that comes out, like that's a waste of time, right? So those two criteria, how I think about it. One of the choices that you sort of 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 free where you said, I believe there's real work that can be done here because some bit of science got unlocked or something was happening that convinced you that it was worth a real slug of time for me.

24:41So there's a couple of friends 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 scientist in CEOs we could find and just go around table and ask them, what's most exciting thing on the front here 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 trends that maybe is sort of why now it made sense.

25:08Like, 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, 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. 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 in it upfront.

25:47The other one was of course AI, right? And with AI and machine learning, you're getting much better at 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 Olympus 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. But it can reprogram cells to restore function ahead when they were younger. And there's novel therapies, we believe, that can get developed out of that.

26:17So that's a little bit about why now. I 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, it feels like a massive opportunity. You know, it's like trillion dollar drugs, like these GLP ones, like why wouldn't, you know, 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 we're gonna get to brain upload and AI, 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.

26:52And so, you know, ultimately what I came down to is, I think, brain machine interfaces and brain upload and all that is ultimately going to be a massive thing and 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 the planet that are going to want to preserve their body and their biology. So, I think it's still worth doing. 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. Yeah. It buys us even if all new limit ever did was bought us 30 years to get to the merge or something that would be worth it 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?

27:34Is most of it to do with life extension or like health ban 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 got to get people living to 120? Health span is kind of like a more socially acceptable way to describe because sometimes if you say longevity, people imagine like being kept alive on a ventilator and like some decrepit state for it. And they're like, that sounds terrible. Like just pull the plug, right? I don't, they don't want to do that.

28:04But yeah, what we are, so it clarifies to people we are talking about living more healthy years. Like imagine if you had that, the energy or the mental cutie of like someone in their 30s and you could do that, definitely. Right. So 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? Well the theory behind new limit and this is a theory we're going in testing but it's that most of the major diseases that kill people you know which would be part disease cancer diabetes etc. 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.

28:41And so one theory that we're testing is that, you know, 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. 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 a five days of work or something, right? And so what's happening is your immune system loses function as you get older. 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.

29:17Yeah, same thing with like, your cells are getting like these little, 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 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 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.

29:51So that's why it makes it a great meta problem to research. And again, I should underscore, we're early. We don't know if we're sure if this thesis will play out or not, but that's the thesis. Yeah, and it's just interesting to know what you're thinking about. On the other, on the brain computer interface side, And it was not quite the same level of involvement, but you know, your back company Nudge, which is really cool. Yeah. 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 that technology?

30:23Frederson, 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 whole drill in your head, right? That's good. Yeah. And it's the lower the barrier to entry, one might say. And so, you know, this 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.

30:58So the early indication, I think, would be people who have a really high met, that unmet medical need, right? It's like they have chronic pain, they have depression, and you could actually focus in area of your brain with this ultrasound kind of helmet, your wearing or baseball cap eventually, it might look a little cooler, or it might help you sleep, you go on 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?

31:30like Nourling can use other ones. And now you start to get a much bigger idea on the table. Because if over time your consciousness or your thinking can expand where some portion of it's happening within your brain, you know, and by the way, your brain is already a few, sorry, I could have a reptilian brain with a mammalian brain and a neocortex top, which only humans have. So it's already like three layers to the brain. The fourth layer would be, all right, let's connect your neocortex to the internet and a bunch of other people. And you can And the percentage of your brain power that's happening in the cloud, I think, will grow over time.

32:07Even today, we are connected to the internet by our thumbs on a keyboard or on a screen, visually with input, we can talk to an AI agent. But if you have a higher bandwidth connection between those things, 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 the merge with AI. 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? Like you're still, and so imagine if you kind of had rough, you have like two hemispheres, 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.

32:52And if one day your human brain got too old, maybe the longevity drugs ran out or whatever, and that one turned off, but you still have... It's almost there there. Yeah, you're still, you have continuity of self. You'll still feel like you and you'll be fully uploaded. 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, a bionic brain. But, you know, the way I 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.

33:22What 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. Yeah, cuz you're right. Some people think it might be like destructive upload right where your brain is as you're on your deathbed You brain will get just just 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 the easiest type metaphor about like slowly replacing each piece of what on the boat it's still the same boat, but you could, like if you're vision went away, but you replaced it with a camera system that connects into your brain, and you had a cochlear implant for your ears, and you replaced some other part of your brain, that would be like a ship -of -thesiest approach.

34:05I think the most likely one is that it's gonna be a gradual progression to the merge, where you're gonna have the BMI, or the ultrasound helmet kind of like Nudge, and you're gonna slowly do more of your thinking in the cloud, and then if one day, many years from now, your biological body parishes, the digital you will live on and you'll feel like you. There's actually a great science fiction story called The Gentle Seduction that talks about this, which people might enjoy. Yeah, that sounds amazing. Also, that world, once you're there, you can make many copies of yourself too. The possibility has become crazy.

34:39Yeah, totally. Then you merge it with SpaceX. We're all over the place. This is great. You can merge it with you know, your significant other, you can, whatever you want to do. Senator 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 tension several years ago, you basically said, I said, hey, we're not talking about politics here. That at the time was like a controversial thing to say.

35:16Who knows how many people were quietly thinking out at the time, but nobody was saying it. And you sort of had the courage to, and it was risky. And then a lot of people then agreed with you. There's other things you've done like suing the SEC. That's got to be scared to do that with somebody that you're also collaborating with, and they're powerful in 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 the inner game you had going on during that and what might be learnable for others.

35:52Yeah, so I'll try to draw out 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 employees to quit. We didn't really know how many were gonna take the exit package. There were some debates amongst the exec team. Some people begged me not to do it. Some people told me it would destroy the company. And we, some people have fears that half the company would quit. And I remember, there was kind of a moment where someone said, if we put this out and 50 % of employees go on walk out, like kind of protest, what are you gonna do?

36:32And 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 walk out it 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 either I need to leave a CEO or they need to leave because we're not on the same page. And 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, people said, what if they don't buy in?

37:03and it was like they need to go, right? I watched a couple of speeches actually and the run up to that, which gave me a little bit of confidence. I was, there's a great speech that Lee Kwan Yu, the founder of Singapore actually gave people can Google it and find out. And I think if you Google Lee Kwan Yu iron iron in his veins or something like that, he was giving a speech. There was these air traffic controllers or something, we're kind of striking and holding 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.

37:45And he said, if you all quit tomorrow, that's okay. I will do that. And 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. And he said, whoever rules Singapore must have, you know, iron in their veins to like have the sort of strength. So it was like a very compelling speech. Ronald Reagan actually gave another one, which I might be mixing. I forget if it was the air traffic controller, I think it was with Ronald Reagan not with the quantity. He was dealing with another strike. But like, you know, Ronald Reagan actually gave a speech where he went in front of the White House lawn and he said, anybody who doesn't show up for work on Monday is terminated end of message.

38:23And then he left and it was like kind of a mic drop moment. So I was, people, you know, we're sending me clips of this as building up the courage to do it. But I remember getting in front of the company and my voice was like, you know, was cracking and my leg was shaking and like, I almost couldn't get through it like presenting it to the company. But ultimately it turned out to be one of the best things we ever did. So I don't know if there's like a great lesson in there. You can draw a little bit of inspiration from historical figures and other people have gone before, but ultimately getting, getting out, building the comfort to do this takes you getting out of your comfort zone over and over again.

38:59Were there any people in your life that like we're 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? Because 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's 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?

39:31Mm -hmm. Cause I mean, I was a CEO but at the same time going through a lot of that, bunch of my other CEO, zero of my other CEO friends moved like, I mean, it was own, you know, as if nobody did it. Well, in one hand, 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. You felt like if you didn't do it, it was just going to fall. You know, it was just going to become too much of a mess or something.

40:04Well, 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 cut, when a handful of like 300 employees did a walk out and protest of something I had said. And that's where I started to really feel like I don't want to come into work anymore. So it was literally either I had to go or they had to go that put me to the breaking point. And then I'd also say there's there could be a psychological aspect of this of just disagreeableness, right? Like, I don't think I'm the most disagreeable person I know.

40:34And it's not like I was seeking it out either. In fact, the opposite. I was like desperately trying to avoid it. So I think, you know, 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. I thought it was just, you know, you do hard things every year.

41:06You start with going to be to do with your own company, but you can see it rippling through the whole industry. Yeah, it's very unpredictable, which of these things will go viral and it won't. It's interesting you say about disagreeableness. I mean, 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 done a couple things like this?

41:44You're like, okay, I've been through it before. Like a cruise cycle. I would say every year, I get pushed a little outside my comfort zone. It, I become more comfortable there. And if I look back eight years ago, or 10 years ago, at the early stages of the company, there was things like talking to a journalist that would make me really nervous, right? Or if an employee came to me and said, If I had to go 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?

42:22So 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 punches you in the gut, and 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 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 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 is CEO, but there's times where it's incredibly stressful and I don't sleep at night.

43:01Yeah, it's like painful to grow a lot, basically. Yeah. 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. Yeah, it builds character. So that's the tuition you're paying every time is like giving you a great education. Yeah, I mean we chat about this briefly before but it's just like 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 the next way to say at the heart of the state is that it's like very Difficult in taxing and you know like even for me at 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 all the time.

43:52Do you feel like there's something that you've learned as you've gone through like these stages where you've enjoyed it more as time has gone on? Because it does seem to me just talking to you that you've settled into some version of it that you appear to really enjoy. Or is it still always like this year are there things that you can't talk about yet that are also really hard and you're like, oh God. Well, one just mental shift that I made early on after a few years in the company, we were working like 12 R 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.

44:32And so I did a few things. I mean, 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 to wind down in the evening, whether it's reading a book or like Sana or trying to meditate, I've tried different things over time. I got an executive coach at various points, which is really like a therapist, to be honest. That helps. And I needed to run it at a marathon pace, not as not an all -out sprint, because you can do all that sprint for a little while, but you will burn out. I've seen founders like to get into very unhealthy states.

45:08It's like, in one case, actually literally, 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 scheduled one week every quarter where I would take it off, right? I'd either, I'd be, I'd be doing 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. 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, I do find it deeply fulfilling.

45:42It's not always fun, it's work. Yeah. If you want to do something meaningful in the world, which to me ultimately gives me fulfillment, it's not always going to be fun. It's going to be, it's going to, sometimes it's really going to suck actually. It's going to be awful. Yeah, it's like type two fun or whatever that thing is where it's like the type of fun that it's like fun and retrospect, more than it's fun in the moment. Yes, yes. So that's how I've, you know, And there's moments even today where I'm just sometimes I'm like, God damn, why am I doing this? You know, like, this is like awful.

46:10And 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 for something. It 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 it's certainly very amazing. I'm going to let you go. Thanks a bunch for your time. I really appreciate you doing this with me. Likewise, thank you.