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

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Starting point is 00:03:34 gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash Tim. You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim. I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. want to get into the meat and potatoes of this conversation with my guest, Brian Armstrong. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Coinbase, founded in 2012. Coinbase is building the crypto economy, a more fair, accessible, efficient, and transparent financial system enabled by crypto. Coinbase serves over 103 million verified users, 14,500 institutions, and 245,000 ecosystem partners in more than 100 countries. In April 2021, Coinbase listed publicly on the NASDAQ as Coin. Before founding Coinbase, Brian served as a software engineer at Airbnb, where he focused on fraud prevention. Before Airbnb, Brian founded and was CEO of UniversityTutor.com, an online tutoring directory and a subsidiary of

Starting point is 00:05:06 Johnson Educational Technologies LLC. Brian also served previously as a consultant for the Enterprise Risk Management Division at Deloitte and Touche LLP. Brian has a BA in Computer Science and Economics and an MS in Computer Science from Rice University. Over the last three years, Coinbase has worked with 10-time Emmy award-winning filmmaker Greg Coase on a documentary about cryptocurrency and Coinbase. Coin, that is the name of the documentary, is now available on Amazon, iTunes, Vimeo On Demand, and other platforms. You can find Brian on Twitter, which I suggest you follow, at Brian underscore Armstrong. Brian, nice to see you. Thanks for making the time. Yeah, thanks, Tim, for having me on the show. And sometimes in the course of doing research, I find a gingerbread trail that leads me to the story before the story before the story. And this may be a dead end, but I'm going to give it a shot. What was startbreakingfree.com? Does this ring a bell for you?

Starting point is 00:06:03 That's impressive you found that. That's a blog that I started. And I actually decided when I was right out of college, I was working on that tutoring company. Somehow I got the idea in my head that I should write a book. And I think what I was doing was I was whenever I want to try to learn something or figure it out, I try to write it down. Now I just do blog posts. It seems a lot easier. But at the time, I was like, let me I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to build a company that was meaningful. And most people would probably go do that first and then write the book. But I somehow got it backwards and was like, you know what? Let me write the book to figure out how to do it. So I wrote a book called Start Breaking

Starting point is 00:06:36 Free. And then after I wrote this, I didn't have a publisher or anything. I was kind of doing a self-publishing thing. And I read a book called How to Market Your Book. And I basically realized that I had to go make a blog or something to try to market the book. So I started, I created this blog. Honestly, the blog probably was more impactful in my life than the book in the sense that I just put something out every week. I got reactions from the audience in real time. So now I guess my takeaway from that was,

Starting point is 00:07:06 if I was going to do that again, I'd probably just go with a blog. And if I had a blog that had 10 or 12, 15 posts that had really resonated with people, I'd maybe later package those into a book and add a few more that were unique or something like that. But at the time, I got the order wrong and I was just trying stuff. So that's what I put out there.

Starting point is 00:07:22 Well, sometimes it's the things you throw against the wall that sort of in retrospect form the puzzle that helps you to do so many things. And I suppose one of the experiences I'd love to at least bring up since we have this shared time in Argentina is your period of time in Buenos Aires. And it's hard for me to say it that way, Buenos Aires. And I'd like to hear specifically what you took away, not just the experience of witnessing hyperinflation, which I do think we should talk about, but anything else that struck you culturally or otherwise. And also why Argentina in the first place of all the places you could go? And if you could just place us in time in terms of how old you are,

Starting point is 00:08:11 when in your life this happens? I think I was probably 28 or 27, something in that time frame. I graduated from college. I'd been working on this tutoring startup. I had tried working at a couple of different companies like Deloitte. Frankly, I wasn't feeling very successful. I hadn't really found a company that I wanted to work at. I thought I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but the tutoring company I had started was kind of limping along, fairly successful. I mean, I was kind of paying my rent type thing, but barely, and it wasn't really growing. And I had this sense of like, okay, I want to go have some adventure in the world. I want to learn how to do a startup in a different way. I had never really tried living abroad, like studying abroad. And there was part of me that was like, I just I need to grow up. I need to try something crazy

Starting point is 00:08:52 and just get adventure in my life. And I had never been to South America. And I knew a little bit of Spanish from high school, but I was not very fluent at all. And so I decided, you know what, I'm going to go do a year, spend a month in every major city in South America, travel around, try to find myself. I was kind of doing like a vision quest to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And I can't remember how I chose Buenos Aires, but that was intended to be my first destination of many, one per month, roughly. I think I just read some stuff online. I think you were, I don't remember what time frame you were down there, but I think I read your book maybe a couple of years after that or something. The timing was

Starting point is 00:09:27 kind of odd, but I basically made it down there to Buenos Aires. Didn't really have a place to stay or anything. I was intentionally kind of throwing myself into like an unfamiliar situation. And I ended up staying at a hostel. I found finally a room to rent. I figured out how to use an ATM, got a local cell phone. And after a month, I was finally settled a little bit. And I was like, all right, I don't want to go have to do that all over again in Brazil or Chile. So I was like, let me stay here a little bit longer. Long story short, I ended up staying there about a year and did a few trips into neighboring countries and things like that, but mostly planted myself in Buenos Aires. And I don't know, I guess the

Starting point is 00:10:02 root of your question is kind of like, what I took away from it. I mean, I can tell you at the time, I felt very lost. And in hindsight, you can look back and sort of connect some dots and like, think about hyperinflation and that kind of stuff. But I don't know, one of the other things I guess I haven't talked about before that I sort of realized while I was there was that, you know, the culture of that country was just incredibly different from the US, right, which is maybe an obvious statement, but the thing that stood out to me was that, you know, I felt like there was just a bit of,

Starting point is 00:10:29 there wasn't optimism about the future, right. People kind of had this vibe, like keep your head down, you know, don't do anything too crazy because everything could get taken away from you tomorrow. And there was like kind of very,

Starting point is 00:10:42 I saw rampant corruption in various places where you know businesses were all kind of operating in the gray occasionally there'd be people like the fire official would come in and like sort of quote close a restaurant for safety issues but they were really trying to get some payout or it was it was kind of a gray market and what i saw was i think what happens when you have a once great superpower, right? Like Argentina, I think was one of the number eighth largest economy in the world or something in 1900. And then 100 years later, you know, it was basically 100 years of just mismanagement, corruption, bad government, endless protests.

Starting point is 00:11:17 And the people sort of misplaced their faith in the government to do good things. Whereas ideally, like it would have been individuals empowering themselves and free markets. And that is kind of, in my belief, what happened, what caused the United States to this unique experiment in the United States to really turn it into a world superpower. And so seeing the change of optimism to pessimism in that country, just after 100 years of, you know, bad outcomes and feeling like you were powerless. That was something that did sort of stick with me. And so hopefully it doesn't come across too negative. Argentina has many beautiful things about it as well. Culturally, I learned many things just about

Starting point is 00:11:53 valuing family and good food and experiences and things like that. But from an optimism about the future point of view, it could not have been more different. I can corroborate that. I was in Argentina 2004 to 2005. And so this was a few years after the 2001 economic meltdown, which they seem to almost like clockwork have every five to 10 years, which we could talk about separately. The degree of apathy was jarring, almost. And I mean, I do think that for the porteños, there's the people in the capital, they're famous for complaining even by the standards of the people in the provinces. So you have to take a little bit of that along with things. But as you said, there was very little sense of optimism. And I remember talking to a shoe store owner who said at one point, the equivalent of the first lady came in with security guards, shut down the store and just grabbed anything that she wanted. And she was

Starting point is 00:13:00 like, thank you very much and walked out of the store without paying. And I mean, that, I think, is a reflection of the broader perception that people had of the government. And I remember walking around in 2004, and still there was graffiti all over the banks, some of which still had chains locking the doors shut from when people were prevented from withdrawing their cash savings in panic mode because of hyperinflation, but the banks themselves effectively closed the doors and wouldn't allow them to withdraw. So you had vultures and thieves and so on in Spanish on the sides of all these banks. Let's hop to present day. I mean, I'm very curious because I think there are many ways to spin apocalyptic scenarios that are not altogether likely. But when you look at the macroeconomic climate currently, we're recording this in October of 2022, are there any facets in particular that you find concerning or think that people are not paying enough attention to? In the broader economy? I mean, I don't know. The main thing I just, I've been thinking about a lot

Starting point is 00:14:10 is Ray Dalio's recent book, Principles for a Changing World Order. And I thought he did a really good job of just kind of looking back at history and teasing apart some of these patterns. And so when I found the book convincing, you know, I haven't dug into the data myself, he put a lot of it online, but it's not just like his opinion. He's trying to he's trying to base it on facts of history. And I don't know. My observation is that I don't think America is in any kind of like imminent danger of rapid decline, but I do think it is in slow decline.

Starting point is 00:14:37 That part seems pretty likely to me. And so you see a lot of these telltale signs of, you know, increasing polarization and media starts to get more polarized and captured by, you know, various political organizations. We're seeing higher inflation, obviously, and that's worrisome. You kind of go on down the list. So, you know, I think this particular moment where whether we're in a recession or not, my guess is that will be, you know, something kind of like the 2008 crisis or whatever, which, you know, ironically is the birth of Bitcoin and what came out of that. So I don't think it'll be massive in terms of like the whole, you know, the US isn't like going to just fall apart overnight. But I do think it's in slow decline. And so it raises a lot of interesting

Starting point is 00:15:17 questions about what is the next world order? Is that China? Is it something that's going to be more decentralized and internet-based, kind of like the network states that biology has written about? And I think crypto probably has a big part to play in this future because we really are building a new economy, the crypto economy, that's more global and decentralized. And I think a lot of people were thinking in this current macro environment when we saw high inflation, hey, maybe people will now go to Bitcoin as the digital gold equivalent. And it didn't. Bitcoin went down along with the broader economy. And so it seems like people are still treating Bitcoin as a growth tech stock equivalent or something. But my guess is that that's going to change in the next five years or 10 years,

Starting point is 00:15:58 something like that. And we will start to see the crypto economy start to become, you know, maybe over 10, 20 years, it'll become the main thing. It's sort of in the way that e-commerce back 20 years ago was sort of a sideshow, but now it's kind of the main thing. And so I think we'll see that happen with crypto too. So let's rewind for a moment and then we'll go back and forth chronologically because I like the memento style of conversation. But if we go back to very early decisions and V1 Coinbase, I watched the Coin documentary, which I enjoyed a lot. I have many questions that maybe we'll get to later related to being a private person, but also inviting a film crew to follow you around, especially in many of those private contexts. But one of the key moments appeared to be the decision to put a

Starting point is 00:16:47 buy Bitcoin button on Coinbase. So I'd love for you to just paint a picture for folks who may not know any of the Genesis story, what the traction looked like, what the activity looked like for Coinbase prior to that. And then most important or interesting to me is how you arrived at that decision and thought about that decision and then what happened afterwards. So before that decision to add the buy Bitcoin button, I mean, we had no traction, really. Things were flat. And this is not uncommon, by the way. In startups, there is something called the startup hype cycle. I think if you Google that, you'll find some Google images. And it beautifully illustrates the process that a lot of startups go through where you have this kind of, you launch and there's a big spike and then

Starting point is 00:17:33 it comes down to zero because nobody cares. They're just busy with all the other stuff they're doing in the world. And you have kind of the trough of sorrow and then you keep working on the product and you, you know, that's where a lot of startups die. But if you go through it, you know, usually for like years, you have to kind of do this iteration of like, talk to the customer, improve the product, talk to the customer, improve the product. And if you don't die, you don't get distracted, you don't get disillusioned, you'll sometimes see these like wiggles of hope. And eventually, maybe if you're lucky, you'll find product market fit, and the thing will take off. So this is what they drill into you when you're when you go

Starting point is 00:18:01 through Y Combinator, which Coinbase did, and it's sort of a startup incubator where they teach you all these kind of war stories. And so that's what I was doing at this time as like a, you know, aspiring entrepreneur. I was, I had launched an early version of Coinbase just on Reddit and places like that. You know, I'd gotten a couple hundred people to come sign up and check it out and then nobody would come back. And so what I did was I followed the Y Combinator advice and I emailed, I just emailed five of the people who had signed up. And I said, Hey, I made this, this app. I'd love to get your feedback. Can I hop on the phone with you? Here's my cell phone number. So I talked to five of these people and I think it was like the third or fourth person I was talking to. And the guy was like, yeah, I mean, the app seems cool

Starting point is 00:18:40 and everything, but like, I don't really have any Bitcoin. So I just signed up and then I didn't have any Bitcoin. I didn't come back. And and some kind of light bulb this was like probably the second or third person who'd said something like this and i i light bulb went off my head i was like well if there was a buy a buy button right in the app would you have just done that and he was like yeah probably because you know i don't know it seems difficult like you have to wire money to japan there's the site mount gox i don't know it was too much of a hassle, so I just didn't do it. So I went about putting this simple buy button basically as a hunch based on the user feedback. And the button was simple, but the thing to actually get that working was very difficult. I mean, we basically, I say we, it was kind of like just me at the time,

Starting point is 00:19:17 very shortly after Fred Ursham joined. And he and I co-founded it really. But I had to go find a bank partner that would allow us to integrate with the ACH network in the US and convince them what our anti-money laundering policy was, and then code up that integration and make sure that we were sourcing the Bitcoin once people bought it. Anyway, long story short, we got all that working, and we launched a simple buy button. You could now connect your bank account. That was the first time that had happened in the US, where you could connect a payment method and just buy Bitcoin really simply.

Starting point is 00:19:47 And that's the moment we had product market fit. It started to grow organically every week after that. And it was like a boulder we were chasing downhill. I think I say that in the film as well. Yeah, it goes from pushing the boulder uphill to chasing it downhill. What was the timing on that? Was that late 2012? When would that have been that you implemented that? Yeah, probably late 2012, early 2013 was right around then. That would have been also exactly at the encouragement of Kevin Rose that I bought my first Bitcoin on Coinbase. It would have been literally a few months after that button was introduced. So thanks for that. Yeah. Actually, I did an interview with Kevin, I think right around that time. I did an interview with him at his house. And I think that that's a fun

Starting point is 00:20:28 interview to go back and look at too. But yeah, crazy times. He makes a cameo in the doc as well, which you may or may not know, but I'm sure he'll be pleased with. So I'd like to talk about influences and maybe we'll start with a shared figurehead and that is Richard Feynman. So I've read quite a few of your blog posts, and you've written about books that have had an impact on you or that you recommend to others. One of them is Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. That's a classic on my bookshelf that I revisit pretty often, and there's a lot of backstory there. Let's begin with that book. Is there anything about Feynman or that book that really stands out to you or you would reflect to people

Starting point is 00:21:10 who are not familiar with the book? And then what other books come to mind that have had a maybe a disproportionate impact on your thinking or that you've simply gifted a lot or recommended much to other people. That book definitely did stand out to me. I think the thing that was exciting about it was he just had this kind of curiosity for life and a boundless energy to go try different things and tinker around, experiment. And I guess what I loved about that was, I mean, first of all, it's just funny. It's quite a humorous book. But I guess what I loved about it was like, it gave you this kind of zest for life of never stop learning, always be curious. And also just, you can kind of treat life like it's a video game. Other people have talked about this, that this is not my original stuff, but I think there is something

Starting point is 00:21:58 to that where if you stop taking life so seriously and you realize anything around you, you know, there was like that Steve Jobs quote, like everything around you was made by somebody else who just decided like you don't have to just consume the world. The world is not happening to you. You can go create things in the world. Right. And so once you take it, start to think of it like that, it really changes your perspective. Like just one example would be if you're going through something really difficult, you might

Starting point is 00:22:22 start to get kind of down. Right. You're like, oh, man, this sucks. And this person hates me and I'm losing on this or whatever. But if you start to think about if life was a video game, you know, the hardest part of the game might be like kind of the most interesting or the most fun. It's like the part that you really need to pull together. And anyway, it just changes your perspective entirely.

Starting point is 00:22:41 You asked about other books too. I mean, let's see. I already mentioned Dahlia's book, Changing World Order. I thought that was good. I've gifted that to a handful of people. I think Milton Friedman has this book called Free to Choose. I actually have never read the book, but there was a TV series he did on PBS back in the day that was also called Free to Choose.

Starting point is 00:22:58 And I thought that was kind of interesting. I mean, it's kind of libertarian. So some people will like that. Some people won't. But I found it actually quite interesting just to get his view on sort of the global macro environment and different countries and how they work. And that was something I've also gone back to look at once in a while. I think it did influence my thinking in hindsight.

Starting point is 00:23:15 I want to come back to something you said, which was talk to the customer, iterate, talk to the customer, iterate. And just to maybe state the obvious, which is very often entrepreneurs try to iterate without talking to the customer, iterate. And just to maybe state the obvious, which is very often entrepreneurs try to iterate without talking to the customer. And one of the things I appreciate about many of the founders who've gone through Y Combinator, this includes the Airbnb founders and others, is in the early days doing things that don't scale, really taking a manual approach to interacting with customers. What else would you consider core principles or learnings that you took away from Y Combinator or Polygram specifically or anyone else involved? Well, I don't know if this came

Starting point is 00:23:59 up in your research, but actually I worked at Airbnb before starting Coinbase. So yeah, I mean, I was, i think it was employee 40 there or something like that and then i got to learn a lot from them too about yeah the perseverance and how they ran product and all it was really cool but i guess some of the lessons just generally from that that ecosystem because it all came from bicombinator and airbnb and all that stuff i mean another one of my favorite kind of polygramisms is action produces information so there's many times where you know you're sitting around and you're like all right I mean, another one of my favorite kind of polygramisms is action produces information. So there's many times where you're sitting around and you're like, all right, well, what if this happens?

Starting point is 00:24:29 What if that happens? And you're kind of staring into the abyss, like into the cloud, the fog ahead of you, and you don't really know what to do. And so people sometimes get stuck in those environments and they just, they never take any action basically. But if you just take some steps into the unknown, you might not be doing the right thing, but oftentimes by doing that action, you'll realize what you should have been doing instead. There was a great story that kind of went along with this, where the early days of Coinbase, actually before it was even

Starting point is 00:24:57 called Coinbase, I was just tinkering on some stuff nights and weekends while I was at Airbnb. And I built this very simple app with a friend of mine. I think it was just called Bitcoin Wallet or something. It may still be on GitHub somewhere, but it was basically an Android app. And we decided, hey, we want to make like a Bitcoin wallet that runs on Android. It was supposed to be very simple, right? And we didn't have any kind of cloud thing behind it. It wasn't any sort of a company or anything like that. And so we basically ran a full Bitcoin node right on the Android phone, which at the time, people might laugh at it now, but at the time, Bitcoin nodes were very small and lightweight and they could run on phones. And so we coded this thing up and we launched it. I was just trying stuff. I didn't know what I was doing. We weren't even trying to make a company.

Starting point is 00:25:36 We were just kind of like trying to learn this stuff in the evenings in our free time. I launched it. I remember the minute that we launched it, there was like Wired wrote some little article about it. I was like, wow, that's so cool. Wired wrote an article about it. But the minute we launched it, I realized we had built it wrong. And the reason I realized that was that we were trying to, again, we were running the whole Bitcoin node right on the phone and it would take forever. Like every time you open the app, it would say syncing and it would have to sync like for three, four minutes or whatever to catch up with the latest blockchain blocks and so that was a good example where like i knew instantly we'd built the wrong thing and then what went off in

Starting point is 00:26:09 my head was okay someone's gonna have to make a company around this that has a truly like a lot of this stuff running in the cloud where you can do all the backups and security and sync with the blockchains and and i was i remember thinking at that time oh that's not going to be me because i have a day job and like that's a really serious company to run. And someone will probably try to hack into it. And it's like, you got to have a lot of money for that. So I didn't immediately get to the next step was maybe I'll start that company. But that was a good example of just taking action,

Starting point is 00:26:36 produce information, which made the next step a little bit more clear. Do you have any favorite essays by Paul? I have one bookmarked that I reread often. I mean, he's got so many good essays, but the top idea in your mind, not that you should be familiar with that one, but that's one since I have a creative project that I'm focused on at the moment that I revisit with some regularity. Any favorite essays or other Paul Graham-isms that come to mind? You know, there's so many good ones. I think people should read them all, but there's one about, I think it's about how to, how to build wealth

Starting point is 00:27:09 or something. It just really nicely explains kind of the idea where people think, you know, money is zero sum. It's like, well, for me to have money, you have to, you have to take it from somebody else. So it's like inherently evil. And he's like, no, you know, if you just like assemble a bunch of things, either natural resources, or you improve a car, I think is the way he described it. He's like, you haven't made anybody else worse off. Like you, you made the mechanic better off. And like when you sell the, you know, but you made yourself better off in the process. And so value is not zero sum. I think that's really important for people to understand. And once in a while, I go back and read his essay,

Starting point is 00:27:43 I think it's called haters. Whenever I'm feeling down, like people are, you know, whenever I accidentally read the comments online, which is not a good idea, that's a good one to go back and read too. Amazing. I'm looking at two of them. So Haters, that's January 2020. And then I think this is the Wealth essay, which is How to Make Wealth from May 2004, which originally came from his book Hackers and Painters. So I will put both quite extensively in the doc and certainly was covered even more extensively in the news was your decision not that long ago to offer generous severance packages to people who disagreed with your statements about Coinbase as a mission-driven company that provides a refuge of sorts with that focus. And please correct my description if it doesn't fit. And in so being a mission-driven company wanting to avoid political and social conversations within the company that chew up time and energy and resources and attention.

Starting point is 00:29:08 Feel free to set the table a little better than I did, but can you describe the situation, the action, and then what is of greatest interest to me is how you thought about making the decision, how you thought about the possible ramifications of making that decision and prepared yourself for what might happen and then what did happen, just weathering that. A few years back, we put out this blog post that Coinbase was going to become a mission-focused company, which basically meant we were going to be apolitical, not focus on broader societal issues in the workplace. And so how did that all come to be? I mean,

Starting point is 00:29:45 really, I'd say for the couple of years prior to that, there was something that was sort of bubbling up inside the company, which initially was very slow and subtle, and I didn't really pay too much attention to it. But eventually, it culminated in a walkout, a bunch of employees being so upset that they kind of closed their laptops and decided not to come into work in protest. And that was sort of a big moment in the company history, because that had never happened before. And so what led up to that? Well, basically, there was a lot of, you know, COVID happened, people were at home, they were probably had less of a sense of belonging and cohesion as, hey, we're all one company, we're one group of people, we're all trying to do good

Starting point is 00:30:22 stuff in the world. So there was a little bit of frustration there. There was probably a lack of cohesion there. And then I'd say it became more popular in society. I've since gone back and read some books on this, like Jonathan Haidt's book about the coddling of the American mind and all these things that started on college campuses. I had loosely read a few things here and there about this, but I never really took it that seriously. I figured this was just, there's always been activism on college campuses, whatever. We're trying to build something in our company. I didn't pay much attention to it. But what happened was we started to get basically more activism inside the company. Whereas like initially I was always thinking, hey, we're on the same team. We've got competitors. We've got regulators. We've got, we're trying to

Starting point is 00:30:59 create all this change. We're all on the same team. And internally people started to think, actually, we're not all on the same team. My job is not to help the Coinbase mission. It's speak truth to power or to hold this other team to account or something like that. And so it manifested in strange ways, like at the town hall meetings that we'd have every two weeks, we'd have an open mic Q&A. And more and more of the questions started to be about things not really related to what we were building as a company, but to about broader societal issues. And it almost became this, this like thing where who can make the exec team squirm the most on stage and, you know, with these very difficult questions. And of course, you know, I didn't have great answers to many of the biggest broader societal issues. We were trying to all

Starting point is 00:31:36 focus on building a more, more economic freedom in the world. So as I was noticing this was happening, this was around the time of the George Floyd, you know, riots and everything like that, and the murder there. And so there was a moment, I think, where somebody in one of the all hands kind of came up and said, is Coinbase going to publicly support Black Lives Matter? I basically deferred to answer the question. I hadn't really read that much about it. I was like, we're going to go look at this. I don't know, to be determined. And that wasn't good enough. And they kind of held the mic and they pressed the issue. And this is where a bunch of people walked out of the company. I was frankly shocked. I was like, at first, I was just so surprised. We all got in a room as an exec team. I was like, I don't understand what does Coinbase have to do with police brutality? Like we're not, we're not related to this, but of course this thing was erupting all over societies, all over the world. And people just felt every company, every person had to make some kind of a stand on this. It was a very difficult leadership moment. I remember calling some people into the room, telling me and asking them, what does BLM actually stand for? If we're going to go out there

Starting point is 00:32:33 and like, say something positive about it. And you know, they're like, well, it's basically equality for people. And I was like, great. Okay, if that's what people want to hear, I don't understand it. But let's go out there and say it. And so I basically went out and made a statement supporting BLM as many companies did at that time. People people want to hear, I don't understand it, but let's go out there and say it. And so I basically went out and made a statement supporting BLM as many companies did at that time. People came back to work, which was fine. But as the months ticked by, I started to feel increasingly uneasy about it. First of all, I subsequently learned that BLM supported other things like around defunding

Starting point is 00:32:58 the police and all these things, which I was like, all right, we shouldn't be getting involved in those issues. I don't know what our point of view is on that. And I basically realized there was not a clear agreement amongst all the people in the company that some people felt the company should actually be engaging in broader societal issues to try to go help out. And other people felt that we should be focused on our mission, which was a very big and important thing already, increasing economic freedom in the world with crypto. And I was in that latter camp. And I felt like that's already a big enough thing to focus on. We can't be jumping to every issue of the month or the year. We have to try

Starting point is 00:33:29 to focus. It might take 10, 20 years for us to make a dent in that problem. That's a really big thing. So I realized the company was divided on this issue. And I was kind of failing as a leader if I didn't come out and make it clear. And so I basically, after a couple months of deliberating, and this is where you were asking about my thought process, I was really torn about this. Because I was, I basically, this is where I sat down to write. And I tried to write a blog post. Because when I try to, when I'm trying to formulate my thinking, I try to write. So I wrote probably two or three or four drafts of this where I just discarded it and tried to write it over again.

Starting point is 00:33:58 I was reading books, talking to people at this time. I eventually settled on this language around mission first. And I remember sharing it with some leaders inside the company and with our board. And there were some people inside the company who were like, do not share this under any circumstances. This is, this will be a terrible thing for the company. And I was like, I know it's going to be controversial, but we have to solve this problem, right? Like, I don't really care so much about a couple of bad headlines. I care if we're, are we building an aligned culture that can actually accomplish this mission long-term? And some people told me things like, you know,

Starting point is 00:34:28 an underrepresented person will never work at this company again. And I was like, really, is that true? I went and talked to some of our employee resource groups and they, you know, they told me, I asked them, what's the most important thing to you want to work at this company? And they're like, we just want to be respected at work, like learn things, be able to build cool stuff. Like it was basically what everybody else wanted. And so my, from talking with people directly, my hunch was that was not going to actually play out, but that was a fear people had. And I think the thing that finally pushed me over the line to do it, because I'm kind of a conflict diverse person by nature. I don't, I didn't, I don't want to be like,

Starting point is 00:35:01 I didn't really want to be known for this, but I think the thing that pushed me over the line was I was thinking like, God, like the CEO job is just not that fun, to be honest. Like if I'm just if I have to come in every day and be put in front of the hot mic and like have to answer all these crazy things like that I don't have an answer to. That's not what I signed up for. I want to build cool stuff with technology that changes the world. That's what I'm good at. And so I was basically thinking like, either I have to go, like, if this is just what the job of being a tech CEO is in modern day, I've got to go because this is not fun for me, or they've got to go. And from talking to a couple of friends and mentors and whatnot, I basically realized they've got to go. It was strange because it felt like such a vocal,

Starting point is 00:35:38 it felt like maybe it was 50% of the company or something, but it wasn't. It was a very vocal, tiny percentage of the company. And so I basically made this exit package available. I said, look, this is the direction we're going in. If you're not okay with that, I totally get it. I didn't make it clear up front. That's my fault. So we're going to give this great severance package, whatever, 5% of the company left. It created a bunch of drama for a few months. A couple journalists wrote hit pieces on us and things like that. But afterwards, it was better. It was like one of the best things I've ever done for the company, to be honest, because now we're fully aligned. We're making faster progress. Everybody who joins the company knows what they're signing

Starting point is 00:36:12 up for. And it was an incredibly important leadership moment for me because I was terribly scared to go do it. I didn't want the controversy. I knew people were going to hate it. Yeah, hopefully that gives some clarity. No, it does. And just for clarity, hopefully you don't feel I'm asking this question to make you squirm. That's not the objective. I'm genuinely curious about the thought process surrounding what is inevitably on some level going to be an unpopular decision. And I think that is a hallmark of good leadership. Otherwise, I mean, you're just taking votes and consensus and doing what the larger group would do anyway. So it seems to me that integral to effective leadership is having the ability to make unpopular decisions when it

Starting point is 00:37:02 is in the best interest long term of the company and the mission in this case right yeah that is why I asked so thank you for answering now I was I was chatting with Katie Han who's a mutual mutual friend and certainly has played a role continues to play a role with coinbase and she phrasedased it, I think, very well. I'm looking at some notes here. She effectively said that you seem to embody this kind of sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me set of attributes, or at least you seem from the outside unfazed by criticism or a lot of criticism. And I'm not asking you to bare your soul and tell me about all the things that have hurt your feelings. Also don't want to

Starting point is 00:37:52 give people sort of directions on how to attack you effectively. But I am curious, to what extent is that something you have developed and cultivated, if that's even an accurate perception? That definitely is something that I've cultivated. I don't think I was naturally that way. I'm probably more sort of steady than the average person, but I definitely have ups and downs and a lot of stuff has really affected me over the years. So it's definitely not something that I think it's a skill people can learn and develop. And it's a muscle that gets stronger and stronger. I mean, basically, this is something that was very counterintuitive to me. I assume that when starting a company,

Starting point is 00:38:27 there'd be many hard things, raising money, finding product market fit, even just a bunch of people being skeptical that it would ever work. I kind of anticipated all of that. What I didn't anticipate was that people would actually root for you to fail or actually misunderstand someone's intentions and think that they were bad or evil or whatever, whatever that would be. That was surprising. If you're just like a normal person, which I am as well, you got about your life, you know, you try to, you're not going to make everybody happy, but you're basically a good person. You try to do whatever. It's kind of rare, you know, maybe once in a while, someone get upset with you or something, you go smooth it over.

Starting point is 00:39:02 I had never had the experience of having like a thousand or a hundred thousand people mad at you at the same time you know which is like a very uncomfortable thing the first few times it happens and you know i would respond to the stress of it just oftentimes i wouldn't be able to sleep it well at night i would kind of wake up or like in the middle of the night with these like stress dreams or just like ruminate on these things that, you know, it's not great, right? And so I don't know. I think I developed some strategies for sort of coping with it over time. I mean, one of them is that, again, I try not to read the comments, whether it's like Twitter or a hacker news or even like a lot of stuff, just notifications coming on your phone or whatever. Like there's a moment every day where

Starting point is 00:39:42 you have your own time and mental energy ready and your calendar is cleared and i really feel like you've got to tune out all that bullshit and basically think about if i only got one or two things done today that would actually advance what i want to get done in the world what would that be you know turn off your phone turn off like and all that stuff and just try to get the one or two things done that you want to get done that day and then later you can you can turn on your phone and read some stuff if you want to do some self-flagellation you know um and so there is there's a real art to like preserving your mental focus i think that's like the most valuable scarce resource you have and so you have to kind of really preserve that you don't want to isolate yourself so much that you're not

Starting point is 00:40:22 getting feedback from people because then you can just become like reclusive or you know turn into putin or whatever i don't know but so you want you want to um make sure you're getting input from people that have your best interest at heart right so i try to like my family they don't treat me as they don't defer to me at all they're just like i you know whatever take out the trash you want to have your board be like that you want to have your friends be like that my co-founder fred ursum uh and now like emily choi who's the president coo we have that relationship or she can she can just tell me like brian you're being an idiot like don't do that you know and so you always want to have people around you that have your best interest at heart and can tell you when you're being an idiot that's very important but you don't there's a lot of other people that are

Starting point is 00:41:01 playing their own game that don't have their best interest at heart they're trying to build their own status game in some virtue signaling thing. They're trying to get clicks on their article, whatever they're trying to do. And you don't really need to listen to that stuff. In fact, it's like really harmful to your progress if you are listening to that stuff. So there's a real art of just tuning that out and caring less, I guess. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. Caring less, I guess. ShipStation sets you up for growth by directly integrating with practically every shopping cart and storefront. So your products are easier to find, easier to manage, and easier to get into the hands of happy customers. ShipStation integrates with every widely used platform, including Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Shopify, etc., making it easy to manage all of your shipping

Starting point is 00:42:01 from one simple dashboard. 98% of companies that use ShipStation for one year become customers for life. So join the 130,000 plus companies who have grown their e-commerce businesses with ShipStation. Go to ShipStation.com today and sign up with promo code Tim, that's T-I-M, for a free 60-day trial. Get set up for the biggest shipping season of the year and get two months free when you visit ShipStation.com. Just click the microphone at the top and type in code TIM. One more time. Ship more and grow more with ShipStation. ShipStation.com. Promo code TIM. Is there any other advice that you would give or perhaps you have given? Of course, you're very involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. And I have to imagine that you invest in some startups and private companies, although you can correct me if I'm wrong. would you give to someone who is in a company that is beginning to scale and they're starting to get hit with the hundred and a thousand people, or maybe it's just 10 opportunistic journalists who are really just kind of smashing the rock against the head of this poor startup

Starting point is 00:43:19 because it gets a lot of clicks. What advice would you give to this person or what might you say to them? One thing I always remember is that if you go talk to other CEOs, they're all going through the same thing, but you haven't read any of their other articles. I remember talking to a friend recently and Bobby Kotick at Activision, he's been getting all this like negative press about whatever, like, I don't know. Anyway, I actually hadn't seen any of the articles the negative articles about it but for him it's like well he was kind of at the center of this storm and whatever he's a great guy he's gonna pull through it but it just made me realize like wow he's at the center of this hurricane and i hadn't even heard about it i'm too busy doing my own world doing my own thing and that's what's true of like 99 of people they don't they

Starting point is 00:44:02 see some article whatever like there's a million things that they're thinking about. They actually don't care that much about whatever the thing is that feels so existential and awful to you. The other thing I would just say is like, it's a rite of passage, honestly. Like you should celebrate it, right? Like if the first time you get like a New York Times hit piece or whatever,

Starting point is 00:44:19 I mean, congratulations, you earned your wings as an entrepreneur. And like the moment that you realize it didn't really matter and you can kind of keep doing whatever you think is good in the world and you level up, like you kind of earn your stripes and you become a more powerful CEO

Starting point is 00:44:33 because you're like, okay, I'm not gonna make a decision in the company based on how I'm afraid of how other people react. I'm gonna do what I think is best for the long-term of the company. And so that's actually a superpower. I think it's great when people go through it. And even when it feels like shit, I'm like, congratulations, you just made it to the next level. I like the reframe. Makes me all the more want to read this haters piece by

Starting point is 00:44:55 Paul Graham also. How do you think about, and this is related to Paul Graham in a sense, in the building wealth and the non-zero-sum game of wealth creation in many capacities, right? So looking at things from a lens of abundance rather than scarcity. But this brings me to the question of competition. How do you think about competition? I know that seems very broad, but I'm going to leave it broad and just see where it goes. On the one hand, I've got some competitive spirit too. And I think it's useful to have competitors. It actually makes us better.

Starting point is 00:45:30 It gets me fired up. It gets the team fired up. Honestly, if you don't have a competitor, people are naturally tribalistic. You'll sometimes get tribes will start to form inside the company and people start fighting each other. And so it's actually better to have something outside the company that you're struggling against. On the other hand, like it's just too, too much focus on competitors. You should almost ignore it. Like another Paul Graham ism, you know, is like startups die by suicide, not homicide. And that's kind of a gory

Starting point is 00:45:57 thing to say. But what he means of course, is that companies blow up because they're bureaucratic or the founders have some big fight or the board, you know, has some drama and they run out of money or whatever. They die due to dysfunction internally. It has it's almost never because some competitor directly hurt you. It's like you just get out executed because you're so focused on the wrong things. And so I think that's very true. And especially like in the crypto space, you know, we have lots of really great competitors

Starting point is 00:46:24 around the world. And, you know, I think it's good that we're competing with them, we get fired up. But like, ultimately, I care a lot more about how do we grow the size of the pie 100x than I do like trying to win a few points of share from some other company in crypto. So I try to mostly just be friends with the other companies that are ostensibly competitors. I try to stay friends with those CEOs and just learn from each other. And you know And sure, we're competing, but we're all trying to grow the size of the crypto economy 100x. And that's how I think about it. There are several directions that I want to go, and I'm trying to pick the most appropriate direction. In today's climate, what do you think the crypto bears or skeptics most miss or should pay attention to? And conversely, the manic bulls on NFT and crypto Twitter, what are they most missing about the landscape or should they pay

Starting point is 00:47:22 more attention to? So the extreme skeptics and the diehard, fill in the blank or die crypto aficionados. It's sort of a common theme. My personality is I try to reject tribalism. And so I try to, you know, it's never as good as it seems, never as bad as it seems in crypto. Neither side is correct. So I guess what the skeptics of crypto miss is that this is early days, right? It's kind of like if you had looked at the internet in 1999 or 2000, you might say, ah, dial-up modems are kind of slow. It's full of scams and people writing crazy things on their blogs. And they're looking at it through the lens of, well, compare it to the traditional financial system in every aspect today. But they're not seeing what the potential of it is. And the fundamental underlying technology is something that's inherently more global and can be more efficient and fair and free. And so anyway, they're not seeing the potential. I guess the people who are insane crypto bulls are just, I think they're basically too focused

Starting point is 00:48:30 on getting rich quick. I mean, it's not just, you know, everyone's trying to like find some shortcut or whatever and like pump something or buy it and flip it. And I just think there's no free lunches in life and go do the hard work of building something actually useful and take a longer term perspective. And that's where you'll see real value emerge. And by the way, it's not to say that like crypto is all future potential value. I think a lot of people miss that today, too. They're like, well, what are the use cases? Well, there's a lot of people using crypto today, not just for trading. They're using it, you know, to make art and to make payments to each other in

Starting point is 00:49:00 different countries and, you know, to raise money and to do games. And like, so there's tons of people actually using it for real stuff already borrowing and lending and, you know, earning a living and paying for tasks and earning yield on their assets and all kinds of stuff like that. So we, one of the metrics we track at Coinbase is kind of what percent of our active customers are doing something with crypto other than trading. And that number used to be like 10%, maybe three or four years ago. Now it's, I think over 50% of our active customers are doing something other than just trading with crypto. And it's emerging.

Starting point is 00:49:30 If you were to take that pie chart of other, doing other things with crypto, what are the main slivers, the use cases? Yeah. So again, it's not just one, but it's a mix of a bunch of things. So it's people earning yield on their assets with things like staking. It's people doing commerce with crypto. It's people buying and selling minting NFTs. DeFi has been a really big use case as well. Some of that, by the way, is trading. There's decentralized exchanges, but it's not all that. It's other aspects of DeFi.

Starting point is 00:49:59 Things like Coinbase Card have been really useful in terms of using crypto in the real world. brick and mortar or online, anywhere that Visa is accepted, they can spend crypto. Things like Coinbase Card have been really useful in terms of using crypto in the real world. Rick and Mortar are online. Anywhere that Visa is accepted, they can spend crypto. So we're seeing that as an emerging use case. Coinbase Earn is like another one that we've seen that's driven a lot of that activity. So yeah, peer-to-peer payments. It's a bunch of things. So I'm going to come back to art and NFTs momentarily.

Starting point is 00:50:22 But first, just to return to the the skeptic question and you mentioned it's still early days if you wanted to use data to make that argument and i suppose this will be slightly outside the purview of data but if you also want to talk about maybe watershed moments or shifts that are either in progress or that you anticipate as almost inevitable that still haven't happened that should accelerate things. How would you make the case with data or anticipated shifts that haven't yet happened? And just to speak for a second to the second portion of that question. I know this is a long question. I remember, as I mentioned, I first started buying Bitcoin late 2012, early 2013, have been involved since quietly doing my thing. And there are a lot of good reasons for the quietly part. But

Starting point is 00:51:17 I remember watching some of the early hedge funds getting involved and taking crypto positions. And I was like, okay, that's very interesting. And so I started to ask myself, well, some of their LPs, limited partners, are these institutional investors, whether they're endowments or pension funds or fill in the blank. And I started asking, what would it take for those types of institutional players to begin to allocate even a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of their total assets under management to crypto? And then even a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of their total assets under management to crypto. And then I started asking, well, what would need to happen? What social proof would be required for a sovereign wealth fund to then allocate a small sliver to crypto assets?

Starting point is 00:52:01 And it just seemed, inevitable is a strong word, but highly likely that there would be a certain cascade of events. And that's how I kind of backed into, maybe because I'm just, what do they call it? Pumping my bags, right? Because I have a vested interest. So there might be a bias there. But if you want to make the case to the skeptics that actually, like, let me show you a couple of slides. Let me show you a couple of historical examples. This is why I can make the case that it's early. Yeah. How would you do it? I guess going to your first point, I agree. Crypto adoption is kind of following a similar trajectory of like internet adoption. And there's probably 200, 250 million people or so in the world who have crypto now. And we can probably share a link that kind of shows a similar chart

Starting point is 00:52:44 kind of with the internet. And I think that's important. And then to your point about sovereign wealth funds and these, I think like 90% of the wealth in the world is actually locked up in institutions. So we analyzed that early on and we realized, okay, we had to launch an institutional product and Coinbase Prime, and we have actually been successful at getting more and more of these large institutions to move, starting to move percentages of their portfolios into crypto. That includes, I don't think we've been able to announce any of these yet, but there's, I know of at least, there are some sovereign wealth funds out there that have now done it. And we've closed these deals with like BlackRock and like the largest asset manager in the world to kind of get more and more of this

Starting point is 00:53:19 money flowing in. And there was a bunch of work that went on behind the scenes of that. So what are the major inflection points that can cause that to happen? I mean, the biggest one, I think, in my mind is regulatory clarity. That's the one that when I talk to institutional investors, they always bring that up. And the good news is we're starting to finally see regulatory clarity. And we can talk about what that is if you want. And I think even more regulatory clarity in the next year or two will actually drive a bunch more of that money. The other major inflection point that I focus on is scalability of the blockchains, because very similar again to the Internet with dial up moving to broadband. The initial blockchains, you know, I think Bitcoin was doing about seven transactions per second.

Starting point is 00:54:01 Ethereum was doing 25 transactions a second. And basically like PayPal does about 500 transactions a second. Visa does about 4000 a second. And basically like PayPal does about 500 transactions a second, Visa does about 4,000 a second. So we needed a couple orders of magnitude to get to like those more Visa levels, which in computer science, you know, an order of magnitude is not that crazy. So it's actually sounds, it's easier than it sounds probably. So the good news is we're starting to see that things like Ethereum's merge that just happened has been an incredible technical accomplishment. And I think the future pieces that they're going to launch with that are going to improve the scalability even further with sharding and things like that. So we're finally starting to see the blockchain and other blockchains have been working a lot of really

Starting point is 00:54:35 great scalability stuff to salon and others. So I think we're seeing the lightning network, you know, all the L2 stuff. So we're seeing a lot of really good focus now happening on scalability of the blockchain. So the regulatory clarity a lot of really good focus now happening on scalability of the blockchain. So the regulatory clarity, scalability of the blockchains, to me, that's like, we'll probably get another order of magnitude or more out of that, just those two things alone. So let me ask you a question that popped to my head, which might be a ridiculous question, but maybe that's my specialty. If you were getting started right now with the technical chops and know-how that you have, including the expertise you've developed, the management

Starting point is 00:55:12 capabilities, et cetera, at Coinbase, but you could not work at Coinbase. Nonetheless, you had to remain in, loosely speaking, the crypto web three world, let's just say, is there a company that you would put on your shortlist for where you would work or type of company, maybe focusing on a specific aspect of any of these technical pieces? Well, I can tell you there's like certainly some cool ideas in crypto that I would consider doing. I mean, maybe that's kind of the root of your question. It is. Thanks for translating my very convoluted question to simplicity.

Starting point is 00:55:51 I was trying to think what our comms team would think if I was like, you know, I'd really love to work at this other crypto company. What the hell? Abort! Abort! They teach you in the PR training. Pivot the question to the one you wish was asked.

Starting point is 00:56:11 That's a good question. Let me tell you a story that's unrelated. Yeah, exactly. Decentralized identity is really cool. I think once we have... It's already starting to happen, but once we have canonical identities, it makes payments easier. It makes reputation easier. It makes decentralized social media easier. There's

Starting point is 00:56:30 probably a lot of stuff there. Decentralized social media, I think could be a big one. Could you give an example of decentralized identity? Are we talking about like ENS? Are we talking about something else? Yeah. ENS is probably the most well-known standard right now, but there's a handful of proposals out there. And it's, you know, the simple way to think of it is like the internet, initially people were using IP addresses to sort of like connect. And then, then we got domain names. And so a domain name is like human readable. You can have like timferris.com and you know, an IP address is a machine readable. So right now, Bitcoin addresses and Ethereum addresses, they look machine readable.

Starting point is 00:57:02 They're kind of these long random strings of characters. They look like a giant password or something. It's impossible for humans to really remember them or even know if you're sending it to the right spot. So we're getting closer and closer to having like kind of human readable names everywhere. And ENS is a really big piece of that. So actually like with Coinbase Wallet, we recently set this up where anybody can go in there

Starting point is 00:57:21 and claim a free ENS name. You can get like tim.cb.id at the end and try to make that super simple if people can buy their own as well and get like you know tim.eth but we'll give you a free one with the cb.id on the end if you want so anyway long way of saying i think decentralized identity is a big piece of the ecosystem that'll come together i think we need to have in the crypto economy i think we need to have a currency that's actually not linked to fiat, right? Like we have USD coin, which is really great. It's kind of backed one to one by US dollar. And there's decentralized stable coins like like die. But it'd be nice to have like a stable coin or a flat coin that's actually linked to purchasing power. And kind

Starting point is 00:58:01 of like, you know, if one coin buys you a McDonald's hamburger today, hopefully in five years, one coin will buy you a McDonald's hamburger again. And there's various ways you could imagine constructing that. I keep thinking about how we could get crypto stored at various latitudes and longitudes. Like, I don't know, did you ever see like Pokemon Go, how people were like,

Starting point is 00:58:19 they had these like AR experiences and they could kind of like geocache things and go find them. And anyway, there's lots of cool stuff we could probably do. I'll give you like three more ideas if you want, like geocache things and go find them. And anyway, there's lots of cool stuff we could probably do. I'll give you like three more ideas if you want, but I'll pause there. Sure. Yeah. No, let's do it. Let's do three more ideas. Okay. Well, by the way, these are not, I don't want to take credit for these as talking with lots of random people, but I think there's an opportunity to do something with media and crypto where a lot of

Starting point is 00:58:41 articles are out there. Be nice to have a community come together, probably backed by a crypto coin that sort of helps. It's a reward coin, you know, that helps people kind of back check articles, develop sort of truthiness scores on every article, publication, journalist out there. I think that could be a nice community that comes together. There should probably be kind of like a Stripe Atlas for crypto in the sense that a lot of people are, and some people are doing this they're trying to make make it easier for people to create a a company uh like a dow would sort of be like the new delaware c corp if you will but just make that whole thing of like issuing a token managing a coin table um payroll you know fundraising like all that stuff could

Starting point is 00:59:21 probably be powered in sort of a new kind of app. There should probably be jobs in marketplaces all based around crypto, kind of like eBay for crypto, Elance for crypto, Amazon for crypto, all that stuff. So a lot of stuff out there that could probably be worked on. And I think we're seeing so many venture dollars go into crypto. It's kind of remarkable. I think even in the down market, there's just probably about 10... Mind-boggling. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:59:45 It's a lot. It's probably like $5 or $10 billion of dry powder in venture right now, ready to go to crypto startups. So that's a rough estimate. Somebody might have a better one, but it's a lot. Let me segue from that back to art slash NFTs. And I recognize NFTs are not solely the domain of art or expensive jpegs but you know i happen to be very interested in this world for a number of reasons one of which being

Starting point is 01:00:14 the jpeg slash parallels with contemporary art i think just provide a nice on-ramp for a lot of people who would otherwise be intimidated by blockchain technologies and so on to become part of the ecosystem. But let me ask you specifically, what did you learn from the launch of your NFT marketplace? What are some of the learnings from that? Yeah, well, I'll talk about sort of NFTs generally for a second, and then what I guess the NFT marketplace we did specifically. So NFTs, I think, are going to be a big thing in crypto. And obviously, these initial use cases around collectibles and art has been great in one sense. But I think the idea of NFTs is actually much bigger than that. It could be representing any unique digital item like in the metaverse, right? It could be like property in the metaverse, your spaceship, your clothes, whatever in the metaverse. It could be people kind of issuing concert tickets that are digitally unique, right?

Starting point is 01:01:10 It could be people doing like citizenship in certain, like I actually got an NFT that was for the city DAO in Wyoming, which is like this plot of land that they divided up. And I think I have like access rights or voting rights or something like now with my passport, which is this provably digital thing. Right. So I think art and actually getting creators paid because a lot of a lot of creative people like have really bad contracts with, you know, record labels and all these things.

Starting point is 01:01:33 So just getting all the creative stuff going is like a huge thing in itself, but it's actually going to be even bigger beyond that. So, yeah, Coinbase launched Coinbase NFT. And just like all things, we want to make it easy for people. We noticed what people were doing often was they'd come into Coinbase buying crypto, and then they would have to kind of move it to like a Chrome extension in their browser, visit one of the many other apps out there, which are all very good and good things to say about them. We've invested in some of them. But then it's just kind of like a hard convoluted process, especially once you introduce like

Starting point is 01:02:05 these layer two solutions. Like sometimes you'd have to buy it there and move it to the Chrome extension, bridge it to Polygon, you know, like and then people were like losing their their NFTs because they don't understand how to manage their passwords and these things. So this is an example where the thing that Coinbase always tries to do is we just try to make crypto more trusted and easier to use. That's like kind of our brand, like all the all the products that we've made are just like, let's make it more trusted.

Starting point is 01:02:29 Let's make it easier to use for the average person. So we figured, all right, people are, they already have some crypto on Coinbase. They've already got their identity and all that connected. Let's just give them a bunch of NFTs there that they can click a buy button. So with Coinbase NFT, we've now launched that. The very first version of it is out there, which is nft.coinbase.com. We're doing some work people are selling their NFTs, it'll all be exposed in Coinbase NFT. And if you click buy, it'll transact and that marketplace will get their fee, right? So in other words, we don't necessarily want to be so competitive with these other marketplaces as much as just provide a simple trusted interface.

Starting point is 01:03:24 And if they were the ones who put out the smart contract for that, and that's where the customers are listing it, so be it. We'd want to make it simple for people to transact regardless of where the supply aggregated from. There's a few things like that that we're doing that I hope will just make NFTs even easier for people to collect and own and buy and sell. And it's one of the many things that we're working on. Now, my apologies in advance if this is already something you guys have launched. But if not, do you have plans to provide, I suppose, the equivalent of custody for NFTs as opposed to cryptocurrency? For instance, I know quite a few people, I may be one of them, who've collected lots of pretty JPEGs. And the value of some of these makes me very uncomfortable in terms of just having it hanging in my driveway, metaphorically speaking. the capability to basically safe house, store, guard NFTs themselves for people who want

Starting point is 01:04:28 additional layers of protection for their portfolios. Yes. And we offer this today. So the first app that we launched it in was Coinbase Wallet, which is our self-custodial wallet. And that's been an easy way for people to interact with NFTs for quite a while. But as you pointed out, some people, I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're referring to, but some people don't want to have to be responsible for the one password, kind of ruling everything in their self-custodial wallet. And so we now offer

Starting point is 01:04:52 the ability to store NFTs in the main Coinbase retail app, which is, you know, we're storing it on your behalf. And you can do that in our, we call it our Dapp wallet. It's kind of a decentralized app wallet. Anyway, you can store NFTs there. Even in Coinbase Prime for institutions, we will very soon be able to store NFTs there as well. Like if you have a family office or some of these institutions that now increasingly want to be storing NFTs as well. So lots of good options there. And yeah, there's a lot of funny stories in crypto where somebody had something on a thumb drive or whatever. And then they realized, you know, I probably shouldn't just be carrying this around in my backpack. I'm just walking around with, you know, $40 million in my backpack every day.

Starting point is 01:05:32 If it happens to get stolen, it's not good. Well, yeah, there's losing the USB drive. We're getting stolen. Then there are wrench attacks. Then there's all sorts of craziness. And I think there's the, and I respect a lot of people in this camp. There's the not your keys, not your crypto folks. And I think a lot of their arguments have some validity. At the same time, having dealt with death threats and crazy people, and I'm sure you've dealt with

Starting point is 01:06:00 a lot of that, once you get a taste of that experience, your appetite for some degree of self-management goes down, I think. And the really volatile unpredictability of some of those situations becomes a little realer to each person who experiences it. So just to grab onto that for a second. So there are folks who would be critical of Coinbase as a trusted third party, right? And then there are, I think, also some very compelling arguments to have robust infrastructure and security protecting high value assets. Where do you think the not your keys, not your crypto arguments have validity? And where do you think they're maybe missing the forest for the trees or missing certain aspects of what you're doing that have a real utility that can't be replicated in a decentralized way? To be clear, we're actually very aligned with this not your keys, not your crypto crowd as well, in the sense that Coinbase wallet is built for them.

Starting point is 01:07:10 It is a self-custodial wallet. So we don't hold the keys, the customer holds the keys. And I think that's actually a really important aspect of crypto because there is a danger that basically if crypto gets big enough that in two centralized, right? And Coinbase is one of those companies that could be storing a lot of crypto. We are that eventually there could be seizures or various governments around the world that

Starting point is 01:07:29 we have to interact with who may, you know, put our employees in jail or whatever. It's not going to be. I don't think that's likely, but I think just the fact that it's possible means that you need to have some kind of escape hatch, if you will, or lifeboat. So anyway, we built Coinbase Wallet for that exact purpose. I use it as a customer like everybody. And, you know, I also use our custodial app. I try to use both. And so we want to make it essentially easy for people to store their own crypto if they want to do that. I'll come back to sort of the personal threats you have to deal with in a second. But we also want to make it easy for people who don't want to have to worry about that to store it. We will store it on your behalf. And I think we're the best company in the world to do that. We're the most trusted. We store more crypto than anybody else I'm aware of, both for retail customers and institutions. We've built a lot of really cool stuff distributed across many data centers all over the world where, you know, I personally don't have the ability to do it. And there's consensus mechanisms and there's disaster

Starting point is 01:08:16 recovery mechanisms that contemplate all kinds of things from nuclear war to natural disasters. And, you know, whole countries going offline and things like that. So we can do that for institutions and retail really well. And I think a lot of institutions, they don't have any interest in self-custody, right? I think it's important. My TLDR, there was a lot of debate about this in the crypto community for a long, long time. And what I came away from it is with both of these are going to be massive segments that we need to address. We need to build products for both of them. It's not like an either or, it's going to be both. So to win these deals, like with BlackRock and Meta and to land like the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world and pension funds and to those kinds

Starting point is 01:08:55 of customers. And I would say even a large amount of retail customers, we have to have custodial solutions for them. They don't want to have to manage their own keys. So now coming back to, I guess, your original thought about self-custody and like how that'll play out. I mean, self-custody is evolving to a place where, you know, if you're storing kind of the amount of money that you would have like in your physical wallet as you walk around, like that's fine. If it's just, you're the only one with the password and you know, if you lose it or you get robbed or whatever, it's kind of like getting robbed on the street. It's unfortunate, but it's not like a life existential thing. And so how are people going to be able to store life meaningful amounts of money or their life savings or whatever? And I think they're going to be able to do it

Starting point is 01:09:32 basically with multi-party computation or something. It's, you know, multi-sig was what kind of people called it originally, but there'll be wallets where it's not Coinbase doesn't have like a quorum of the keys, but Coinbase might have one key. You have another key. There's a backup key with somebody else that you trust, right? You can kind of create these like two of three or three of five type signature schemes that have redundancy in the event that one or two of the pieces are lost. But it also prevents any one or two people from running off with the full amount of money. And I guess in the sense that if somebody experiences a personal security threat, they literally cannot send the funds, at least not in some short time period.

Starting point is 01:10:07 And it would sort of get into a situation just like you would have if your money was at Goldman Sachs or something like that and you got kidnapped in Mexico. I mean, somebody would probably call them and there'd be some negotiation or whatever. And so that's the kinds of technology that's being developed. And Coinbase is sort of building a lot of that into our Coinbase wallet product over time. It's an unfortunate thing. There is a GitHub that Jameson Lopp maintains on all the physical security threats that have happened with Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:10:33 And if you want to go scare yourself, you can go read that. Luckily, a lot of them haven't happened in the US, but there have been a couple of armed robberies and things like that. Law enforcement in the US is generally pretty good at cracking down on these kind of organized crime type things. It's a new financial system for the world. People are going to have to ultimately take responsibility if they want to do self-custody. And I think a lot

Starting point is 01:10:52 of people are going to want to do that with these new sorts of multi-party computation tools that have come out. Thank you for laying that out. I suppose I have spooked myself. I haven't read that GitHub repository, but just from a lot of names you would recognize, just chatting with people who are deeply involved with this space. You don't have to look very far to see some pretty intimidating examples of security threats. Let me shift gears and ask you about self-improvement. So you are very, as far as I can tell,

Starting point is 01:11:30 consistent with a focus on self-improvement. What would you change about yourself or improve about yourself? What are you most interested in improving about yourself at the moment? I did get pretty into self-improvement, I guess, in my 20s and read a bunch of books on that. And I just, I started to kind of like this idea of, you know, whatever you

Starting point is 01:11:49 have top of mind every day, you can kind of, it's just what you tend to focus on, right? So if you're surrounded by negativity and things like that, you just tend to be more negative. And if you wake up every day and you try to listen to like some good podcasts or read some stuff or write down your goals or your affirmations or whatever, you can kind of rewire your brain. brain i'm not i'm not into like the metaphysical woo stuff about it i just think it's more practical than that it's like all right what am i what am i choosing to focus on today right how to even just like get things done efficiently and i like david allen i think his name is has a good book getting things done right i mean i roughly follow some kind of a process like that and there's a lot of things i've read like that over the years once in a while when i'm

Starting point is 01:12:24 like wake up in the morning and i i like, oh, I'm supposed to be exercising, but like, I just don't feel like it today. And I'm like, I'm being kind of lazy. You know, my best like motivation hack is like just to type David Goggins into YouTube and watch a random video that comes up and then you will you'll be working out shortly. Otherwise, you will feel like, you know, total whim. I guess your question was, what do I want to improve about myself right now? I mean, so I'm 39 now and just going from like 29 to 39, you know, I've noticed I'm starting to feel like I'm getting older, right? It's kind of a scary thing.

Starting point is 01:12:56 Jet lag affects me more. And like, if I get injured, it takes longer to recover. And I think even my memory has gotten like a little bit worse. I feel like I used to, it used to to be my short term memory was like really good. If people told me like five or six things, I'd be like, yeah, I got them all in my head. And now it's like two minutes later. I'm like, what was that? I don't remember what they were really talking about.

Starting point is 01:13:12 So I start to write down a lot more things. So I'm noticing now that age is something where I feel like, hey, maybe I only have another 10, 20, 30 years of like really productive stuff. And what do I what do I want to do with that? So I started to think more about longevity, health. I've gotten a lot more into being healthy and even started a longevity company. Or at least it funded it, helped put some money into it. So we can talk more about that later if you want.

Starting point is 01:13:37 But I'm trying to think what else. I'm also just trying to... I don't know. I'd say the other thing I'm really focused on is I've had some success and some liquidity with Coinbase. And so early on, I think I was driven by just like doing something meaningful in the world and making some wealth. And I've sort of done that. And so I'm basically just driving my motivation from other things, which are like, what do I actually like doing? You know, which is like, I tend to like learning new things. I like to build things

Starting point is 01:14:03 with technology. So I'm trying to make sure that I can have like really high motivation and energy for hopefully many decades to come and keep building more and more cool stuff. Anything in particular here, you were taking a stab at learning at the moment. I rewound and watched, there's a very maybe half second or one second snippet in the doc where you're packing a bag for travel and you have three books. I couldn't identify the one on the bottom. I think it was Seven Days get a full read of, but it was something like The Healing Brain or The Healing Mind, something along those lines. I can't remember the exact title. So that may be a dead end, but there was a freeze frame of it. It was the second book in a stack of three. Anything that you're focused on learning at the moment or would like to learn in the next six to 12 months? Yeah, that's funny. Actually, I haven't seen the final film. I saw like a rough cut of it. And I

Starting point is 01:15:07 think I saw that perfect puppy book. And I was there. I was like, someone's gonna ask me about that. That's funny. That's me on cue. We were thinking about getting a dog at that point. But we ended up getting some cats instead, which who knows that maybe they'll make an appearance behind me here. But yeah, so I'm always kind of reading books like that. Those two in particular were not super memorable. But I'm trying to think like what else would be helpful right now i mean i'm actually i'm like trying to learn more about biology right now i started off trying to read some textbooks on this and there was a couple books out there that was kind of for like basically i never gotten a chance in college to like really study biology and i didn't have a specific reason

Starting point is 01:15:43 to but now as i'm learning more about health i'm like why don't i know more about biology i kind of wish i did one thing that i did was i actually hired a biology tutor so i was trying to go through these textbooks and you know i was doing it but it was taking me a long time like you know a little read like five minutes every evening and not light reading yeah i mean it's like it's no seven days to the perfect puppy yeah um so yeah you know you get really demoralized when you read a sentence you're like five of those words i have no idea what they mean you know if it's like one word every couple sentences okay i can maybe hack through it but like five words in the first sentence you're in trouble anyway i heard you know grad students are like woefully underpaid. And some of these people are just like brilliant

Starting point is 01:16:29 teachers. And so I asked a few friends of mine, and instead of trying to wade my way through this super dense textbook every night, it's actually been way more fun. I basically just for an hour on Sundays, usually I meet up with this guy. He's such a great teacher. And he can jump around to kind of teach me like, whatever I'm most interested in, you know, instead of having to wade through the whole book. So that's been a pretty cool hack. Let's deep dive on biology. What context have you provided this tutor?

Starting point is 01:16:56 Because biology is kind of like physics, right? I mean, you can go in a million different directions. Are you starting with just the basic, basic building blocks? Okay, what's the Krebs cycle? What's this? What's that? What are the essential amino acids? How do they factor into A, B, and C? What context or direction did you give your tutor? I gave him the context of, I want to learn all the fundamentals, so I don't, I at least know the basics, so I don't sound like a complete baby. And part of the context was also, you know, those babies suck at biology it's true well this is kind of how i sound when i try to speak you know

Starting point is 01:17:32 spanish or not i sound like a five-year-old or whatever so and then i was also in the process of like funding this this biotech company new limit and we can talk about that later but that was i was trying not to sound like an idiot in front of the team basically and so yeah the cool thing is he's been able to not only, we went through a bunch of like basics around cells and things like that, but we've also started to get into just like, how do people develop these tools in biology, like PCR or flow cytometry? And like in a biotech context, like we're trying to leverage the latest tools to, of course, advance the state of the art.

Starting point is 01:18:04 How do you sequence these cells now? And what kind of data do you get out on the latest techniques but he's also kind of helping me understand the history of a little bit of this like previously everybody used this technique and that was considered the state of the art but somebody eventually at some point had to find a way to do it like at 10 or 100x the throughput and you know like the human genome project and how did they finally sequence this thing which seemed like an insurmountable project and so i've been getting to learn a lot about the really cool history of how people found you know something that already existed in biology in some heated pool somewhere and they're like they sort of hacked that to do our bidding and some and anyway that that part has been really interesting for me to understand

Starting point is 01:18:42 the history of it and how how to try to, like put another leaf on the tree of knowledge. That's kind of what our goal is with the biotech. So I'm going to ask you about New Limit. I would strongly encourage everyone to read more on the history of science. I think it would be such an incredible boon and gift to everyone involved if more people read up on the history of science for a lot of reasons because you can a deconstruct how thorny problems or seemingly insurmountable problems were tackled successfully which is like reading a detective novel in and of itself a lot of the time and also i think it is a nice remedy to certain

Starting point is 01:19:26 epistemological arrogance that humans tend to have. Like, oh, well, nah, there are a few things left to figure out, but we really have nature pretty much on lock. I think we've got it dialed. It's like, no, no, no. No, we really don't. So you should read up just the amount of confidence that people have always had at different points in history with the most ludicrous coping mechanisms for shoddy interventions and so on. There's no reason to think it's any different now. That's also another reason to read up just to give everybody a dose of kind of humble pie when considering not just what we know, but the possibilities moving forward.

Starting point is 01:20:04 What is the goal of New Limit? Why are you involved? Last year, Coinbase went public and it's a good liquidity event for everybody involved. I think actually, I think over like a thousand millionaires were created in that IPO just from various employees and investors who had worked on Coinbase over the last 10 years. So that was like incredibly fulfilling. And one of the things that caused me to do was kind of to pause and think about, all right, what do I want to do for the next 10 years, 20 years? And I was like, I want to continue to be the CEO of Coinbase. Like that's going to be my first priority. I think we're just at the very beginning of creating the open financial system for the world. And I'm going to keep doing that. But can I, I've got some liquidity now. Like I want to

Starting point is 01:20:41 try to do something useful with it because I think we're kind of in this golden age of software where fortunes are being made. And some of that wealth, even in crypto, is now being directed into hard science problems like atoms, not bits. And I think that's a really good thing, actually, because it'll probably create a secondary effect like a boon in these other areas. So I started to host these dinners, basically basically with friends of mine that were either other people like biotech experts, CEOs, investors, or scientists. And especially in this space around CRISPR, I had read about that and like CAR T cells.

Starting point is 01:21:15 And I was like, my spider sense is like there's something happening in this area in biology where it's starting to feel more like engineering, not science, where we have some of these tools to actually go do unique stuff so i just started hosting these dinners randomly and i basically just went around the room and asked everybody like what's the most thing you're most excited about right now and one of the topics that came out came up like during these dinners was uh something called epigenetic programming of cells which i can try to give a brief uh overview of that if it's helpful yes please okay well okay so long story short back in 2006 uh shunya yamanaka got the nobel prize for discovering that you could turn you know a skin cell back into a stem cell by exposing it to these four transcription factors which are just like proteins that you can expose a cell to and it it was kind of like a mind-blowing thing at the time

Starting point is 01:21:58 which is like wow you can really we can change the cell back to a stem cell and since then people have learned that they can change a cell into other types of cells. So for instance, you could turn a, I don't know, like a skin cell into a neuron cell or a muscle cell or something like that by exposing it to different transcription factors. So just in the last five years or so, several labs have shown that you don't want to change the cell state. You don't want to turn it all the way back to being a stem cell, but you can basically rejuvenate, right, or move the cell to sort of a more functional earlier state by exposing it to some of these factors. We have an existence proof of this, if you will, because we know that some animals in nature can regenerate, right. Like a salamander, like its arm, if it's cut off, it'll kind of regrow or like jellyfish.

Starting point is 01:22:39 Some of them seem to live indefinitely. And even like human beings, I guess, like if you, you know, if there's like a infant in a womb and there's like a prenatal surgery, it'll come out. There's like no scars. Right. And so we're seeing that even in our own human biology, there are there's sort of an existence proof for some amount of rejuvenation capability. I basically realized that this could be an interesting area to pursue.

Starting point is 01:23:00 I talked to a bunch of my smart friends about it because obviously I'm not I'm not a scientist in this field, which is always a dangerous thing to go into. So I partnered with Blake Byers on this since he's a PhD. He actually is a scientist and he's started a successful biotech company before. And he, as a partner at Google Ventures, he invested in a bunch of biotech companies. And I basically decided, all right, let me try to put some money into this with Blake and see if we can help this company get off the ground. And even if I'm not running it or anything like that, I can probably hopefully help this thing get off the ground. And so yeah, new limit is basically going to try to build a platform that tests a lot of different transcription factors with different cell types and uses machine learning to do that

Starting point is 01:23:39 in a virtuous cycle, because it's a huge short space of complexity that you could imagine the number of transcription factors, the number of combinations of it is like you know 10 to the 15th different possibilities and so you need some sort of way to kind of do a more directed search through this giant space and yeah so they've been able to build an incredible team to date there's about eight or nine people they're brilliant scientists young people machine learning folks with an office in south san francisco so if people are interested in that i'd encourage them to go check out the website and apply for a role if they're interested in the space. It's a new limit. And to try to ensure I understand the basics of this,

Starting point is 01:24:15 they're looking at different combinatorial cocktails of transcription factors that produce particular, that are optimal for producing certain types of changes in cells? Are they focused on reversing cell senescence? So reversing, let's just say, cell aging. Is that a primary objective? Or are they also looking at productizing in some fashion the conversion of one type of cell to another? Or are they really just creating the database that will then be used by other companies? Could you explain the business model a bit? Right. I should have mentioned that earlier. So yeah. So the goal of New Limit is really to radically extend human health span. So the moonshot of the company is really, it's a longevity company. We're trying to help humans live much longer, not just a little bit longer. But I think

Starting point is 01:25:09 in any good moonshot company, you know, you want to have intermediate milestones along the way. And so the intermediate milestones are more like, could we get a specific type of cell to be rejuvenated and be younger? And, you know, an example would be older people when they get the COVID vaccine, they don't have as strong of a response to it because their T cells are older, they're more exhausted. So if we could, in some sense, rejuvenate T cells, right, or pulmonary fibrosis is another issue that affects people, maybe there's a way to rejuvenate those cells to get them to be younger. So oftentimes people get hung up on this definition of well, what does it even mean aging? Like is a cell older or younger? And we sort of don't worry about like some big, fancy, rigorous definition.

Starting point is 01:25:45 We're just saying we're trying to restore function in these cells to get them to behave like younger cells. So hopefully we can find with this platform to test this rapidly at a scale that hasn't really been done before, an industrial scale, to test this with different cell types, different tissues. Basically, we'll hopefully find hits here for different indications, whether that's T cells or pulmonary fibrosis or others, and develop therapies for that. But the ultimate long-term goal of the company would be eventually some therapy that you could take that would actually just help humans live longer in a healthy state. Hypothetically, what might administration of these therapies look like? I don't know enough about the transcription factors to speak intelligently about them, but would these effectively end up as molecules that are synthesized and put into a capsule?

Starting point is 01:26:32 Is it some other route of administration? What might that look like? The actual delivery mechanism is a little bit further down the research path. It's not the main thing we're focused on at the moment because we're basically doing this with human cells in dishes, basically in vitro. But you can imagine, you know, mRNA is now something that we have huge proof point with, with the COVID vaccines.

Starting point is 01:26:52 And I think that's a very interesting delivery mechanism people have looked at. There's different viral delivery mechanisms that people have used more historically. You could even imagine there may be some cases where kind of like dialysis or something like people actually get cells taken out of their body. They could be then rejuvenated, put back in. There's various things like that, which could be attempted. But obviously for, again, the moonshot,

Starting point is 01:27:15 the long-term goal, it would ideally be something even like it could be a pill or a shot that you get that's something that's more mass market so i encourage people to check it out beautiful website very nicely designed newlimit.com so easy to remember so i encourage people to check that out would you like to describe for people research hub because i think this is related or at least overlapping in in some respects yeah well okay so thanks for asking i mean this is another project. By the way, you can see the theme in all these, which is I'm really passionate about basically improving the world with science and technology as kind of like the overarching theme here. And I feel like

Starting point is 01:27:52 cryptocurrency was a great breakthrough for that to create more economic freedom. And some of the dollars I mentioned now that are flowing from that industry into these other areas are helping, I think, accelerate scientific research. And it even ties into what we talked about in the beginning with Ray Dalio's book. He talks about the changing world order. The root of a lot of progress is basically education, which leads to science and technology innovation, which leads to unique products, which leads to economic growth. And then that's how societies prosper. They have higher GDP. They have surplus that they can invest in the arts and culture and defense or whatever they want to invest in.

Starting point is 01:28:27 So more universities or education. So anyway, I really think that a lot of people today, this is sort of a tangent, but a lot of people today are thinking like, how do I improve the world? They're an aspiring young person. And there's a temptation to say, hey, like we should advocate for different government policies. We should go become an activist or a protester. And I don't know, my message to people, this is part of why I created the documentary as

Starting point is 01:28:50 well, Coin, is I wanted to show people, if you want to try to impact the world, I think one of the best ways to do it is to build a company that's based around science and technology. And so anyway, this all ties back to Research Hub, which is another company that I funded and tried to help get off the ground. So the team there is doing really awesome stuff around trying to make scientific research more like open source software, like GitHub or something. And you can see all the different challenges that are out there in the scientific research space today. There's a

Starting point is 01:29:16 replication crisis where a lot of times people are publishing papers. It turns out later nobody can reproduce it. A lot of scientific research is done in academia where it's done in a silo in isolation because you know they're not actually getting like the material benefits from these technologies that are when like if you invented crisper you should have been able to help commercialize it and make you know become a billionaire it's such a big breakthrough but they're not doing that they're basically only able to get citations and publications and tenure and so they're living in this kind of artificial, I don't know, academic environment. And so you get people more siloed. It takes a long time to publish a paper. They're basically writing it. These small innovations are written up in some big flowery language that's

Starting point is 01:29:54 inaccessible to the average person. So with Research Hub, yeah, we're trying to make it easy for people to sort through all of the millions of papers that are published every year to what are the most impactful. We're trying to help get things like peer review, Q&A, comments, feedback around research to be more collaborative with people. And we're trying to get like data sets and the code to be published alongside the papers. So it's not just reading some static PDF. And we're trying to help with things like fundraising for science in the future. So there's actually a coin associated with this research coin, which is a reward coin that was created that helped in a governance token

Starting point is 01:30:28 that helps the community sort of get rewarded as they contribute more and more to that site and that community. So it has like a really passionate, small, nascent community that's helping grow a lot of the content on the site today. And I think the roadmap for it

Starting point is 01:30:41 is really exciting to hopefully just get rid of a lot of like the barriers to scientific innovation. scientific innovation. We saw a small example of this during COVID where everything went warp speed during COVID to find a vaccine. People were publishing their papers on Twitter instead of going through a two-year journal process that had all these paywalls and stuff like that. And everything just went faster. That's how it should be all the time. And that's how we can advance civilization, I think. So we're trying to help do that with Research Hub as well. Yeah, we're looking at the website right now. This is quite cool. I'm looking at the front page. I have some questions about the front page, but just to look at a few things that are seemingly popular. You've got long-term health

Starting point is 01:31:18 effects of antidepressant use. You've got alcohol impact on sports performance recovery male athletes you have greater effects by performing a small number of eccentric contractions daily than a large number of them once a week i will probably read that in the next two hours because that's very of great interest to me especially for connective tissue repair with tendinosis in the elbow. Now, I'm noticing open bounties. Could you just explain what these open bounties mean to the people who are posting them and for anyone who might be a bounty hunter? So this is one of the things that we're testing out with basically adding a crypto asset onto this platform to try to see if it improves the collaboration of people there. And so what we did was we allowed anybody who had basically a question, a scientific question, or anybody who wanted like

Starting point is 01:32:11 a peer review, or maybe they want a video summary of their paper, or they want help kind of a task that people often have in even in private industry or in scientific research is they'll say, I want a summary of the literature. I want someone to go out there, read the 20 or 50 most relevant papers on a certain scientific question and give me kind of a meta study, aggregate that information. And we're sort of building the tools for people to do that as well.

Starting point is 01:32:34 So people can do that with ResearchCoin. It's a way to, the people who are kind of contributing the most are earning it. That's improving their reputation on the site, but it's also a way for people to kind of get recognized. And I always tell people, imagine if the early hosts on Airbnb or the early drivers in Uber had gotten a chance to participate in the network that they helped create. And that's kind of what's coming together here on Research Hub.

Starting point is 01:32:58 Is the method of redemption, or I guess let me phrase it a different way. The value of ResearchCoin at the moment is one, social credibility, and two, with the ResearchCoin that you earn, you can then post your own bounties and make requests of the community. Are those the sort of two main values to an individual contributor who is accruing ResearchCoin? Okay, got it. What has you most excited? So let's pretend that you're at one of these dinners you're hosting. And I said, look, I know you're not a biologist.

Starting point is 01:33:31 I understand that. However, you've crossed the, speaking like a five-year-old point, you seem to have a good grasp of the basics. You also have an engineer's mind, which I would argue is more similar to top-end scientific minds than one might think. I think the disciplines are different, but the mental frameworks, the ability to ask questions,

Starting point is 01:33:51 attempting to replicate, et cetera, transfer quite well. What are you most excited about in the world of science? If I just think about all the biggest challenges that we have in the world today, I think science and technology are like pretty good hammers to swing at those nails. You know, it's like, okay, we've got climate change, right? Everyone's talking about climate change. So, I mean, I think fusion energy is super exciting. I think people working on carbon sequestration is pretty interesting. You've got, you know, again, Elon is kind of working on that with Tesla and solar panels and electric vehicles and as our Rivian and all these other companies. To me, those are the most promising solutions we have to that are using technology, right? If you look at education, it's like Khan Academy, stuff like that gets me

Starting point is 01:34:39 really excited. It's like, okay, let's make a free world-class education available to everyone. That's really cool, right? If you look at why don't we have better economic, financial infrastructure in all the countries of the world? And why do we have big inflation problems? And why does it cost 2% every time you swipe your credit card? It takes forever to move money around the world. And crypto is a really important solution to that, which is basically a science and technology breakthrough, right? So I kind of feel like, I don't know if this is exactly what you were asking,

Starting point is 01:35:09 but I just feel like science and technology and building, commercializing it is like the thing that is really the most exciting thing. Another thought I've had is like, there's kind of two very different worlds. So there's one world of scientists

Starting point is 01:35:22 and academics, and there's another world of entrepreneurs. And they actually very rarely do they cross pollinate. Most people who are entrepreneurs, they're making something that's like mostly based around marketing. It's like a new tequila with a celebrity or whatever. And then most scientists are building things which never get commercialized, like because they're living in a pure academic world. But if you think about a lot of the most valuable companies in the whole world, Genentech, SpaceX, even Coinbase, which was based on a research paper, the Bitcoin research paper, right? It's basically, even Google came out of basically a research project at Stanford with Larry

Starting point is 01:35:56 and Sergey, right? So the most valuable companies in the world are when we cross-pollinate a true scientific innovation with someone who can go commercialize it. The problem is these two groups of people are like sometimes oil and water like the scientists don't like people who make money and they think it's like kind of low integrity and you know the business people don't have any understanding of science whatsoever and they basically get caught up in pseudoscience and all these things and so anyway i think the more you can cross-pollinate and get those two areas to talk to each other the the, the few people in the world who can speak both languages like a translator, they know enough business to be dangerous and enough science to be dangerous.

Starting point is 01:36:32 Those are going to be really valuable things that get created for all humanity. Sounds like you might be one of those people. I'm looking forward to it. I'm trying to be. That's why I'm doing the biology tutoring. I might have to pick up on this biology tutoring idea. I could also use some basic groundwork lest I get myself into trouble. Last question or second to last question, and this may be a dead end.

Starting point is 01:36:56 I'll take the blame if it is, but I like to ask this one. The metaphorical billboard question. So if you could put a message or quote, image, anything non-commercial on a billboard question. So if you could put a message or quote image, anything non-commercial on a billboard to get the message out to, let's just say, billions of people, assuming they speak whatever language is on the billboard, what might you put on that billboard? I guess there was one we said earlier, which was like action produces information. I liked that one a lot. But if I had to pick a second one, since we already said that, one of my favorite sayings is the greatest risk

Starting point is 01:37:27 is not taking one. And I feel like a lot of people, they have ideas. They just debated endlessly. They never take that first step. And there's really a scarcity of risk tolerance. And I don't mean like doing anything that's like actually that risky. In fact, I think you put out like a great framework a while back about sort of imagining what is really the worst thing that's going to happen and could you actually live with that right it's like starting a company i mean okay so you went and raised some money and what's the worst thing that happens i mean it's basically the company fails you shut it down maybe you go get another job you know and if you raise a little bit of seeded capital you can probably pay yourself during that time period so like is it really that

Starting point is 01:38:04 big of a deal i mean if you know if that's truly seeded capital, you can probably pay yourself during that time period. So is it really that big of a deal? I mean, if that's truly the worst case scenario, then what's stopping you, right? So everybody has their own unique personal situations. Maybe it's harder for them than others. I don't mean to belittle any of that. But oftentimes, the fears that people have, it's greater in their own mind than it is in reality. So yeah, greatest risk is not taking one.

Starting point is 01:38:22 Maybe I'd put that out there. I dig it well mr armstrong maybe someday dr armstrong biologist phd astrophysicist is there anything else you would like to add before we wind this to a close any any closing comments requests of my audience things to point attention to public complaints you'd like to lodge, anything at all? No, I mean, I guess mostly just want to say thank you. I think you're one of the group of people out there that you're really celebrating builders, which is people who are trying to do ambitious stuff in the world. They don't always succeed, but at least they're

Starting point is 01:38:59 trying. And I think, frankly, there's too many people people out there want to be a critic and poke holes and everything and it's easy to be a critic it's actually easy way to sound smart but it's hard to do difficult things and I think you're encouraging people to do that you've done that yourself I'm just glad that there is like new media out there you know which I consider you to be part of that podcast and blogs and YouTube and kind of like this documentary coin as well that we're trying to participate in this new media movement to sort of let's go celebrate builders you know let's tell the behind the scenes stories of the ups and the downs the good bad and the ugly and so I appreciate you being a part of that and uh yeah I hope people go check out the

Starting point is 01:39:40 documentary it's called coin and I I partly I created it because I wanted to show people what it's like to try to create something new in the world, going from your laptop to being a public company and sort of demystify it. And hopefully more people will watch it and say, hey, you know what? I could do that. I want people to go create more companies in the world. So hopefully that'll happen. Thanks for the kind words, man. I really appreciate it. And Coin can be found on Amazon, iTunes, Vimeo On Demand, other platforms. One final question related to the documentary. What's the story with, are they dinosaur pajamas? What is... I saw it come up multiple times, like the onesie pajamas. What is the background there?

Starting point is 01:40:23 Yeah. When I made this documentary, I was like, so I'm either going to look like an idiot or this is going to be great, but either, either way I'm going to try it. Um, so that's one of those moments where I probably look like an idiot, but yeah, in the early days building Coinbase, I mean, it was literally just like 12 hours a day, kind of like, you know, try to write some code, talk to customers. And I was, for whatever reason, I thought this, this onesie was just hilarious. I had it around the house. So it kind of became like, I never thought it would turn up in a documentary. I'll guarantee you that. But I think I wore it to a couple of hackathons we had at the Coinbase office too. I dug it. So you know, you got to keep it fun. Have fun while you're trying to do Coinbase team mascot uniform. I dug it. I just had to ask.

Starting point is 01:41:00 I wasn't sure if that was like a formal attire for board meetings or something else. Well, Brian, thank you so much for making the time and for being so game for the conversation. People can find you on Twitter at Brian underscore Armstrong. And we will link to everything, including the new documentary and all the books, resources, names, companies, et cetera, that we've discussed. People can find in the show notes at Tim.blogs slash podcast. And until next time, everybody, be a little kinder than is necessary. And remember, the greatest risk is not taking one. Be safe out there. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a

Starting point is 01:41:52 little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one.

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

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