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- [00:00]
A
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.
- [00:22]
B
Brian, thank you so much for doing this with me. I am extremely excited for this.
- [00:25]
A
Yeah, thanks for having me.
- [00:26]
B
So, 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 want to start by asking why is that inevitable?
- [00:38]
A
Well, the short answer is that it's faster, cheaper, 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 to. But we do think trading is all going to come on chain, all these different asset classes. And I'll give you a couple examples 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 rich people in some of these countries, like in Argentina, to get a U.S. brokerage account or something, you have to be kind of wealthy. So it sort of democratizes access to from an international point of view. It also allows 24, 7 trading, which 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 could even create novel types of structures where 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 to actually vote in the next governance vote or something like that to Incentivize long term holders. So yeah, 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.
- [02:24]
B
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?
- [02:34]
A
Well, we want to do this in collaboration with companies. I don't think it's a good idea to 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 such a well trodden path that it'll be a more efficient way to do it. Why wouldn't you open up your next fundraise to raise on chain from these accredited investors and various things? So yeah, eventually it'll become the majority.
- [03:00]
B
Do you think more of this is to do with technology or a cultural behavioral norms thing that is the reason that it's not already happening widespread for those kind of assets?
- [03:11]
A
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 of 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 stablecoins. There's another one being debated in the Senate called Clarity and 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 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. 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. 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.
- [04:20]
B
What was the story with the genius act? Like, what, what does that mean for stablecoins crypto in general? Like, what was kind of the, what was the, like double click on that?
- [04:27]
A
Yeah, well, it, it basically clarifies that, 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, 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, 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, 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 primarily Elizabeth Warren and Gary Gensler were really kind of attacking the industry unlawfully, in my view, kind of saying, well, there's no clear legislation, it's all wild west and people are going to lose all their money. And so they really tried to 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.
- [05:33]
B
Yeah. Speaking of regulators and lawmakers, it seems like any sufficiently large, I guess, particularly consumer company, you, Airbnb, Uber, OpenAI, Meta, et cetera, 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.
- [05:59]
A
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 going to 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.
- [06:36]
B
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.
- [06:45]
A
Yeah. Self driving cars or all these things you're pushing on the frontier where there's no clear society still hasn't figured it out in our democracy. Right. And so what'll 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 flying under the radar doing bad things, but you also can't sit around and wait for the law to be clear because that can take a decade. Right. So every startup has to kind of balance this and push on that frontier and do the right thing in the absence of clarity while 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, I'd say about five or six years ago, I started going to D.C. at the encouragement of my board. They were like, okay, well you're about. 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 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. They're in their 70s 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 this is all some video game you're creating. Right. But others were really starting to get it, but nothing really ever happened. And I remember after three or four years of doing this, I remember thinking, why the inaction I didn't realize at the time Congress actually rarely acts. It's sort of a feature of our government.
- [08:21]
B
It is a feature.
- [08:22]
A
Yeah. 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 50 million people who had used crypto in the United States. There were still some very hostile members of Congress, and not a lot. 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. 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 D.C. 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 D.C. i think, said, okay, this is an issue Americans care about. And we started to get people elected who represent the constituents.
- [09:45]
B
Yeah, I mean, I guess 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 how much of what made this come together now was your experience that it was pressure from companies versus constituencies or just buy in from the politicians themselves. What do you think were the factors that got action?
- [10:09]
A
I think that D.C. kind of realized that there is a crypto voter out there. And that happened in really this last election in November. Yeah, I mean, I don't think most of them believed it previously, because the people who are in power in these roles, they're people who are for the thing that's going to happen. It's not a good idea to go in there and 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 realizing, okay, this is a thing that's going to happen. I better get on board. So that was a wake up call about how to actually create a policy.
- [10:45]
B
Function maybe at 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, all the major countries. And obviously that relationship is changing. Maybe 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 truth behind what the relationship will play out?
- [11:32]
A
Like, 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 in tension 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 have a monopoly on issuing currency. 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, usdc, other stablecoins. This is allowing the US reserve currency to perpetuate into the future, be used all over 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 where are they tethered to reality? Fiat currencies 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, which hurts, by the way, the poorest people in society 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.
- [13:18]
B
Basically, its existence is like saying, hey, don't inflate too much or people are going to run to Bitcoin.
- [13:22]
A
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.
- [13:41]
B
Right. Where the purchasing power of a Bitcoin they believe will go up. And so if you're an individual, you're like, well, it's time to move over. Yeah, I guess. You mentioned the unbundling. There is this dynamic where the US Dollar has, I guess, the military behind it ultimately is sort of what you would describe or some version of that. And then if we have bitcoin or crypto in general as this currency people are using and it's not backed in that exact same way, or what changes? What's the impact of that decoupling from, I guess, the state and on some level, the military.
- [14:16]
A
Yeah. So people have lots of philosophical debates about what is underpinning US Currency. 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 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. And you could make an argue it's backed by the dollar. Sorry, the military, but they don't necessarily go around collecting dollars at gunpoint or something like that. So it's a little bit hypothetical, I think. What ultimately happens if, let's say, the world moved to 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 a new kind of like a new gold standard. And people's wealth couldn't be inflated away, it couldn't be abused by certain people with 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. In economic freedom you get property rights, sound money, free trade. Some of these things are under. A lot of people believe, there's economists who debate this, that those are kind of foundational to societal progress. Because if you believe that your wealth could be eroded tomorrow, or 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 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 100 years of crazy hyperinflation and theft. At one point, 10 years ago or so in Cyprus, the government just decided to 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 eroded away. It's hard to actually have a functioning economy where people try to do good things and keep the upside of their labor.
- [16:12]
B
Is it a good thing if one day in the very far future everybody in the world was on one currency? Theoretically, in your mind, is that a healthy, positive good thing, or is there some reason that other than that it was historically how we got here for there to be hundreds of currencies.
- [16:29]
A
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 okay to sometimes to have a little competition too, because anything that becomes that big can become oss, slow or captured. So you actually want maybe like two or three or something.
- [16:58]
B
But like if you were redrawing it from scratch, you wouldn't make hundreds.
- [17:01]
A
Yeah, yeah. I think there'll be a consolidation. Like we have seen, like a proliferation of fragmentation of crypto chains. I think it'll consolidate down just like any industry.
- [17:11]
B
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 2000 and tens, I think it was like crypto was very, very early. Then there came a part of that decade where it was, like, extremely hyped and excited and a lot of people were kind of losing their minds and jumping in. And then that kind of has transitioned into new waves, and now there's AI in these things, and 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 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.
- [17:58]
A
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, this is sort of the analogy would be like the shopping cart or the checkout at the grocery store where that one looks a little better and that one looks better, and you're losing time in switching costs. And what I've seen is the companies that do the best, they actually are started typically by people who did it when it wasn't cool. 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. So I think Coinbase is an example of that. OpenAI is a good example of that. They started when it wasn't cool. Once the thing is off to 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, you should do the inverse. If something's riding up a irrational exuberance wave, I'd almost go to something else. And if it's in the Trenches. And you think it's cool. That's when I would make the contrarian bet. So, I mean, there were definitely awkward moments along the way for Coinbase where suddenly we'd be on fire, investors would be competing to get in, I'd be getting invited to all these fancy conferences. I remember in the downturns, I'd sometimes get uninvited to these cool parties and fan conferences. And then I remember one reporter at a conference asked me one time, now the crypto's over. What are you going to do next?
- [19:34]
B
What are you talking about?
- [19:36]
A
I was like, yeah, I don't think it is. But, you know, it was an awkward question on stage. So 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. 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 like, if we're going to do that, we should just shut down the company and give the money back, because, like, I didn't sign up to do that.
- [19:58]
B
Right.
- [19:59]
A
I don't want to spend the next 10 years Building software for banks. We're 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, has that.
- [20:14]
B
Changed the type of people that you've needed to hire, given that you just know you're going to go through cycles in a way that most companies don't.
- [20:20]
A
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 a company, a trit. And some people sold their stock in secondary markets and all these kind 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 authentic 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. This is not working. We're not where we wanted to be. I think let's all get our heads together and rally them to be part of the solution with you. How can we use this as an opportunity right now? 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 competitors, so there's always something you can do. You can also just buy crypto when it's down. 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 probably, probably why some people on the spectrum are more likely to be entrepreneurs or it's overrepresented is because 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.
- [21:57]
B
Yeah. 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?
- [22:12]
A
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 harmed the culture to grow that fast. Like there was no clear decision making. We couldn't. The quality bar went down. Our actually speed of execution went down a lot. So there's certainly times where we've got irrationally exuberant too. And there's times where we made offers to companies to buy them. Where I look, I think thank God they declined our offer because like, you know, that was like a peak bubble type price. Right. 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.
- [23:04]
B
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?
- [23:20]
A
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 those. If you can fix longevity, 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 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? And there's something unique I could contribute to it. Like if there's already great teams or you don't have an undifferentiated Me too product that comes out, that's a waste of time, right? So those two criteria are how I.
- [24:14]
B
Think about it, one of the choices that you sort of have been deciding was fitting that Venn diagram was 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, 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 like a real slug of time from you?
- [24:41]
A
So there's a couple 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 the 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 trends that maybe is sort of why now it made sense. One is that the cost of single cell sequencing is just following kind of like Moore's law where you can now get a full readout of the state of a cell for like 5 cents. And it used to be like $500 and it's just getting cheaper and cheaper. So you can run these 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, this will work. And now we can kind of say more of like a bio naive approach. 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 with AI and machine learning, you're getting much better at testing these hypotheses in silico one would call it. So those two trends made this concept of epigenetic reprogramming, I think tractable for the first time. And just briefly, what new limit is doing 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 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. It feels like a massive opportunity. It's like trillion dollar drugs like these GLP1s. Why wouldn't this feels like it would benefit everyone on the planet, potentially wipe out a bunch of disease, the root cause of it. The one thing I kept thinking about was if we're going to get to brain upload and AI, does human healthcare even matter over the long term? I'm talking about because any of these companies will take 10, 20, 30 years to really start to pay off. 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 actually make some of this less relevant for humans, but there's still going to be like 8 billion or so humans running around on the planet that are going to want to preserve their body and their biology. So, yeah, I think it's still worth doing.
- [27:13]
B
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.
- [27:19]
A
Yeah, it buys us. Even if all new limit ever did was bought us 30 years to 30 years would be great to get to the merge or something. That would be worth it for new limit.
- [27:28]
B
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 got to get people living to, you know, 120?
- [27:51]
A
Healthspan 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. They don't want to do that. But yeah, what we are. So it clarifies to people we are talking about living more healthy years. Yeah. 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.
- [28:14]
B
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 declining with age state?
- [28:25]
A
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, 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 these diseases are more like a symptom. And the cause of it is that your cells are losing function as you get older. A simple example would be if you're in your 80s and you get the flu, it's really serious. It could be fatal. If you're in your 20s, you get the flu. It's not that serious. You might lose five days of work or something. 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 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. There's actually like cell divisions happening with small mutations all the time. You sometimes you'll 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 load, 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 reduce the incidence of a lot of these diseases. So that's why it makes it a great meta problem to research. And again, I should underscore we're early. We don't know for sure if this thesis will play out or not. But that's the thesis.
- [30:00]
B
Yeah. And it's just interesting to know what you're thinking about on the brain computer interface side. I know it's not sort of quite the same level of involvement, but you backed company Nudge, which is really cool, I guess. What's the sort of state of play with BCIs and what's possible in the short term? What do you think is coming down the pipe with that technology?
- [30:23]
A
Fred Ersam 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 a hole drilled in your head. Right.
- [30:35]
B
That's good.
- [30:36]
A
Yeah. And lowers the barrier to entry, one might say. And so this sort of early indications and things that they're going after are similar to. There's people actually who get these deep brain probes and for these diseases they have with their movement and depression and stuff. So the early indication I think would be people who have a really high met unmet medical need. Right. It's like they have chronic pain, they have depression 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 if you have insomnia. 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 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 can expand where some portion of it's happening within your brain. 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. 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 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, right? Is let's say that how you are today. If you had, I don't know, your arm got cut off in an accident or something, but you still feel like you, right? And so imagine if you kind of had, you have two hemispheres of your brain. What if you had 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 have some, are there? Yeah, you're still, you have continuity of self, you'll still feel like you and you'll be fully uploaded.
- [33:05]
B
It's a good explanation because I mean, like, you know, I, 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 had always thought about it is there's this upload moment where you upload 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 grains of rice thing and eventually you kind of can't see the difference and then maybe if a little bit fades out, I'm still mostly there somehow.
- [33:32]
A
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 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 you're, 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 replaced 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. And then if one day, many years from now, your biological body perishes, the digital you will live on and 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.
- [34:33]
B
Yeah, I mean, that sounds amazing. Also, I guess in that world, once you're there, you can make many copies of yourself too. I mean, the possibilities become crazy.
- [34:39]
A
Yeah, totally.
- [34:40]
B
Then you merge it with SpaceX. We're all over the place. This is great.
- [34:43]
A
Yeah, you can merge it with, you know, your significant other. You can, yeah, whatever you want to do.
- [34:48]
B
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 tension 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 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 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 the inner game you had going on during that and what might be learnable for others. Yeah.
- [35:53]
A
So I'll try to draw some lessons from it. I mean, the short answer is, during those times, I felt quite scared, to be honest, especially 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. Some people told me it would destroy the company. And some people had 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 the employees go on walkout, like kind of protest, what are you going to do? And I said, I'm going to 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. Either I need to leave as CEO or they need to leave because we're not on the same page. And it was my fault as a leader, I hadn't created clarity. And so when I was finally ready to do it, I was like, people said, what if they don't buy in? I was like, they need to go, right? I watched a couple of speeches actually in the run up to that, which gave me a little bit of confidence. 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 iron, iron in his veins or something like that. He was giving a speech. There was like these air traffic controllers or something were 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, right? And 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. Right. 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, which I might be mixing. I forget if it was the air traffic controller. I think it was with Ronald Reagan, not with Dae Kuan. Yeah, he was dealing with another strike, but 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. And then he left. And it was kind of a mic drop moment. So people were 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 cracking and my leg was shaking, and I. I almost couldn't get through it, 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 a great lesson in there. You can draw a little bit of inspiration from historical figures and other people who've gone before, but ultimately, building the comfort to do this takes you getting out of your comfort zone over and over again.
- [38:59]
B
Were there any people in your life that were helping you get there? Is this something that you had done through childhood? Like, 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 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? Mm. Because, I mean, I remember, you know, I was a, you know, CEO at the same time, going through a lot of that. Bunch of my other CEO, zero of my. Zero of my other CEO friends moved. Like, I mean, it was, you know, as if nobody did it.
- [39:42]
A
Well, in the one hand, I say 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.
- [39:59]
B
You didn't do it, it was just gonna fall, you know, it was just gonna become too much of a mess or something.
- [40:04]
A
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 in 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 if this is. 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 could be a psychological aspect to this of just disagreeableness. Right. I don't think I'm the most disagreeable person I know. And it's not like I was seeking it out either. In fact, the opposite. I was desperately trying to avoid it. So I think people shouldn't 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 you thought.
- [41:06]
B
It was going to be to do with your own company, but you didn't see it rippling through the whole industry like that.
- [41:10]
A
Yeah, it's very unpredictable. Which of these things will go viral and which won't.
- [41:14]
B
It's interesting you say that 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, 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 things like this, you're like, okay, I've been through it before, like a crypto cycle.
- [41:48]
A
I would say every year I get pushed a little outside my comfort zone. 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, or if an employee came to me and said if I had to go layer somebody in the organization or have a difficult conversation, 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 and makes you feel stressed at a new level. Right. Maybe it's 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 as CEO. But there's times where it's incredibly stressful and I don't sleep at night.
- [43:01]
B
It's like, painful to grow a lot, basically.
- [43:04]
A
Yeah.
- [43:04]
B
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.
- [43:16]
A
Yeah, it builds character.
- [43:17]
B
It does.
- [43:18]
A
So that's the tuition you're paying every time is like giving you a great education.
- [43:22]
B
Yeah. I mean, we chat about this briefly before, but it's just like, in general, I mean, I think being a CEO, particularly of a company like this, is like, you know, incredibly. Character building, I guess, would be the nice way to say it. The hardest 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? Because it does seem to me, just talking to you, that you've, like, settled into some version of it that you appear to really enjoy or is it still always like, you know, this year, are there things that you can't talk about yet that are also really hard and you're like, oh God.
- [44:17]
A
Well, one mental shift that I made early on after a few years in the company, we were working like 12 hour days, 7 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, 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. You know, I got an executive coach at various points, which is really like a therapist, to be honest. That helped. And I needed to run it at a marathon pace, not a, not an all out sprint, because you could, you can do all out sprint for a little while, but you will burn out. I've seen founders get into very unhealthy states. In one case, actually literally, they got addicted to prescription meds and all kinds of stuff you've probably seen too. So I realized I wanted to make it sustainable. And then I scheduled one week every quarter where I would take it off. I'd do 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. It's not always fun. It's work. Yeah, right. 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.
- [45:55]
B
Yeah, it's like type 2 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.
- [46:01]
A
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, like, 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.
- [46:26]
B
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.
- [46:32]
A
Likewise. Thank you.