Coinbase’s Everything Exchange: Agentic Finance, Stablecoins & Tokenization with CEO Brian Armstrong

[00:00:00] The minimum fee typically on a debit or credit card transaction is about 30 cent fee flat plus the additional percentage. Arguably, it doesn't really work well for anything under a dollar. Certainly, it doesn't make sense to pay 30 cents to send a 1 cent payment. And I believe the stats we last saw on this are that about like 76% of the agentic commerce transactions we're seeing are under 30 cents. We don't want the AIs to be unbanked. You know, we want to bank the AIs. They deserve financial services as well. The AI agents themselves are going to have to have their own accounts. And so, we've made some simple tools where with a single command, you just prompt, you paste it into your AI agent, it can now have its own financial account. So, it'll be interesting to see how the agentic economy evolves. There'll be more agents than humans in the not-too-distant future. It kind of stands to reason that the agentic economy will be bigger than the human economy at some point in the not-too-distant future as well. >> Today on No Priors, we are joined by Brian Armstrong, the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, one of the world's most important and earliest crypto companies. It has also been quite aggressive at adopting AI. Brian is also the [00:01:01] co-founder of New Limit, which is a anti-aging longevity company doing really interesting things in biology, including certain types of high-throughput screening to understand aging, different uses of AI, etc. Brian is one of the most forward-thinking people I know on different aspects of science, technology, art, the world, etc. So, I'm very excited to have this conversation with him. And we'll be talking about everything from what's happening in the crypto world to what's happening in AI to what's happening in biology to how different individuals can have an impact over time. So, it's a very fun conversation. Brian, thank you so much for joining us at No Priors. It's a pleasure to see you. >> Yeah, good to see you, a lot. >> So, I was hoping we could talk about a few different topics. I think there's a bunch of stuff relevant to Coinbase and crypto and, you know, agentic finance and things like that, but also you started a company called New Limit, which is focused on longevity and aging and biotechnology. So, I think it'd be great just for to cover both as part of this conversation. >> Yeah. >> And may we start with Coinbase? So, Coinbase has been making some really big [00:02:01] moves. You've been floating this concept of the everything exchange as you've been building out what I think is a new global payments layer. Could you tell us, you know, at a high level what are some of the directions of the company and some of the areas you're most excited about right now? >> Yeah, so we're at a really exciting time in Coinbase's history because on the one hand, uh every asset class is coming on chain. It's now possible to trade everything in one place with good liquidity and good cross margin. And so, for markets and trading and that out there, is stocks and commodities and crypto and uh derivatives, perpetual futures, like it's all coming to one place where traders can do everything in one spot, including prediction markets, too. Uh and they can do that in more countries now given the regulatory clarity that's emerging, which we can talk about if you want. So, the everything exchange is is a kind of our bread and butter, our core business. Uh the next big area that's emerging is stablecoin payments, which have just been growing like crazy. Um even when Bitcoin prices are down, stablecoin payments just keep growing. And so, we're helping companies all over the world integrate stablecoin payments, which are fast and cheap and global. You [00:03:01] can send money at the speed of information, right? It's kind of like uh under 1 second, under 1 cent US uh to move money anywhere in the world. And then the the third big one is something I know you talk a lot about on this podcast, which is how is AI changing cuz AI is changing everything. And so, it's all obviously going to change financial services, too. And so, we we call this agentic finance or AI fi. And uh we're building this into Coinbase in a number of different ways. Uh the first way is that people who have their existing financial account, they're going to want to have an AI advisor, kind of like how wealthy people are able to get access to these investment advisors. But everybody should have access to them now and they can help teach you about, you know, building the right portfolio and dollar cost averaging, tax loss harvesting, and all these kind of things. And, you know, if the market dips um 5 or 10 or 15% leg into this kind of portfolio over time and try to save save money on fees and, you know, earn yield while it's sitting in cash. And you can just talk to it like a human and it'll do all these things all these things for you. At least that's the vision and it's getting better and better. So we've we've launched an advisor in the Coinbase product. Uh the next thing is that the AI agents [00:04:01] themselves are going to have to have their own accounts, you know, and so we're on a mission to kind of like go out there. We we want We don't want the AIs to be unbanked, you know, we we want to bank the AIs. They deserve financial services as well. Um and so we've made some simple tools where with a single command you just prompt you paste it into your AI agent it it can now have its own financial account and it's using a self-custodial wallet in crypto rails. So there's no there's not like a KYC process. You don't like our AI agents don't have a government ID. They don't They can't walk into like a bank branch at least not yet without their humanoid robot companion. Um and so now any AI any AI agent can have its own financial account to do payments to pay for pay for goods and >> And is that tied to a account of somebody who's already on Coinbase? In other words, is it sort of like a subsidiary account? Is it an entirely new thing? Like how do you think about the hierarchy of that? >> Yeah, so we're doing it both ways actually just because I think there's going to there's going to be demand for both use cases. So there's going to it's going to be possible to create a separate agentic account with segregated funds on Coinbase in the near future and [00:05:02] you can give your agent access to just that to do trading and payments on your behalf. That's kind of linked to your identity as human. We're also going to provide self-custodial wallets to any AI any AI agent out there that wants to hold a balance in stablecoin or even it could actually raise money. It could, you know, issue a token. And so what's fascinating is that um today we often talk to these agents and you know, that it's sort of like one person to one agent and they go get some work done, but they often get stuck. They get stuck. There's like, "Oh, here's here's a paywall and you put in your credit card. I need to spin up these AWS resources or you know, you wanted me to book this hotel for you, but I here's the web page. Can you go put in your credit card?" That kind of thing. And in the future I think you're going to want to have these agents have their own spend accounts kind of like having a personal assistant or an employee who has their own spending account. It's going to need probably like a stablecoin backed credit card for backward compatibility, but we're seeing a lot of agentic payment now flow over these new protocols like X402, which is one that we incubated at Coinbase that we actually put into the Linux Foundation. So, Google and [00:06:02] Cloudflare and AWS, a bunch of people are working with us on that now. And so, that's been really cool. And we put together like this little fun website called agentic.market where people can go see the stats of how many payments are flowing in this new economy and see all the different services. So, we're helping a lot of businesses get enabled into the agentic economy. Like, you know, is your store ready to accept agents as customers? We could we're you know, we have a product called Coinbase Business that helps companies accept stablecoin payments and that's good for humans want to pay with stablecoin payments, but it's also good for agents and they kind of get both out of the box. >> You mentioned things like stablecoin or crypto backed credit cards. How do you think about what proportion of the future volume in the agentic future is going to be crypto versus, you know, more standardized finance rails? >> Yeah, so what's interesting is a lot of the agentic commerce that's happening, these are pretty small transaction sizes, sometimes just a few cents. And as you probably know, the minimum fee typically on a debit or credit card transaction is about 30 It's like a 30 cent fee flat plus the additional [00:07:02] percentage. So, arguably it doesn't really work well for anything under a dollar, certainly anything under 30 like it doesn't make sense to pay 30 cents to send a one cent payment. And I believe the stats we we last saw on this are that about like 76% of the agentic commerce transactions we're seeing are under 30 cents. >> What sort of transactions are those or what what's happening at that low of a price point? >> So, a lot of it is it's a gathering information. Um, and so you could you could think of it like um, it's venture firms doing research compiling from paywalled data or it's recruiters who need to scrape data from um, from LinkedIn. It's often times it's actually agents talking to other agents that are specialized in some in some way and getting source data from them almost like a tool call that's happening. Um and on that agentic.market website, we have a list of the top service providers that are doing like search and financial data. And I think what would be interesting is in the future you'll see actually other agents in the market that [00:08:02] that become specialized. Um like you know, the the the frontier models are trained to be quite good at good generalists, right? And they're kind of good at a lot of things. And we're seeing instances where smaller models that are open weight models can actually be fine-tuned or through reinforcement learning, they can become they can outperform the frontier models on a specialized task within within the company, right? Like I'm sure you've talked to a lot of startups about this kind of thing, but it's like a compliance review queue or so if you train it on 100,000 compliance cases with within Coinbase's proprietary data, a small open weight model can actually outperform a frontier model. And so I think you're going to see in this marketplace um a bunch of specialist agents. It might be like, "Hey, this agent is just really good at ordering you pizza if that's if that's what you want." Or this agent is like an really incredible designer. Um and that's all it's been trained on is like tons of proprietary Figma data or something like that. So it'll be interesting to see how the agentic economy evolves, but you know, it's probably like common wisdom at this point amongst your listeners, but I I there'll be more agents than humans in [00:09:03] the not so distant future. It kind of stands to reason that the agentic economy will be bigger than the human economy at some point in the not so distant future as well. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think one of the safest arguments is the concern that there'll be resource aggregation by AI and then that'll be used to manipulate society or things like that. It's always interesting to think through like what are the some of the implications of the scale of some of these things and how they work. I don't I don't share that concern as strongly. I'm just saying that's a that's something that comes up from time to time. >> Yeah. Well, just actually on that, it's funny. I I've heard people like Elon say um that they think there won't be money in the future, right? And I I mean I actually agree with Elon on most things, but that one I was like, "Okay." I think I know what he means. What he's basically saying at some point you start to measure things in energy and mass, and like those become the scarce resource. I I think in the end like in the limit case like he has a point. But the thing is there's going to be scarcity for a long time, even if the cost of goods and services really falls like we have price deflation because robots and AI start to just make [00:10:03] commodities and food and housing very cheap. That could happen. The government printing might also create a bunch of inflationary pressure. But I it's there's always still going to be scarcity of certain things, like like, you know, land, especially usable land in various ways, um you know, uh energy, like chips, you know, I if Dyson like there's not going to Dyson spheres are going to be expensive I think pretty pretty far into the future. So, I think we're still going to need a medium of exchange, and um it's really cool to see that like the as AI emerges, um crypto rails are just kind of a nice complement for all that stuff to finally work. Like crypto was I think crypto was really really good for humans, and it's going to be essential for AI. >> Yeah, people I feel have been talking about this for a while, too, particularly I think in the um early AI community. It overlaps so much with the crypto community, right? In terms of you'd see um you know, computer science majors coming out of the MIT, and depending on the year that they graduated, they would go into crypto, and 2 years later they're all going into AI. And it was roughly the same people. In terms of people [00:11:04] really into search and math or all of those other things. So, there's there's interesting bifurcation I feel, too, of people's careers is based on when they graduated uh in terms of whether they ended up doing crypto um you know, in 2020 or whatever it was versus AI in 2022. >> Yeah. Well, I'm reminded of that that meme um you you have you seen that meme that says por que no los dos? Um >> [laughter] >> You can do you can do both. It's They're going They're going to intersect here. >> Yeah, it seems like they they just might. Um What uh I mean the other thing that you folks have really been focused on um is the use of AI within Coinbase itself. And can you talk about how some of I know there's obviously coding and other things, but what do you think are some of the more interesting projects that you all have done internally? >> Yeah, so like a lot of companies we started off with the basics, you know, we got some coding tools. Uh we got it hooked up into our various data repositories. Uh you we were we've been using it for a long time on machine learning for uh risk prevention, fraud prevention, um customer support inquiries started going through AI. So that was all like good table stakes stuff. And then the things that we've started [00:12:04] to do recently where we're sort of pushing the boundaries here, I think um one of them is that you know, we basically want to get to clo- as close as we can and actually achieve recursive self-improvement, right? And what does that mean in various ways? Like so it means that you have a brain um for the company. It that can be a sub but a whole bunch of subsets, by the way. You can have a brain for each team. You can have a brain for each service uh like repository within the company. You can have a brain for each individual, which by the way, I believe they should be able to take with them when they leave at Coinbase. So we're creating some good policies on that. Um but what it So let's say you have um like a ser- like a service like a GitHub repository or some backend service that's running. And today we have engineers spinning up agents to make changes to that. What we're just now launching and seeing recently is like every time that agent comes in to make a change to that service, it's actually ingesting the brain for the team working on it and for that repository. And so what is that brain? It's basically it's a history of [00:13:04] all the incidents that have ever happened with that service. All of the financial controls that have to be enforced with that. Um every AB test that we've ever run on that. Of course, like the full GitHub history of a a pull request that were accepted or rejected. And so the people running that team at any time can kind of go in there and look at it. Today it's just marked it's like markdown files, right? It sounds it's kind of simple at the end of the day. Um but the getting of this all hooked up so Okay, so let's say you you ask the agent, "Hey, I want to make a change to this service." It ingests the the brain. It makes that change. And then as a human you go to review it and you're like, "Ah, it missed something." Okay? Now the the simple thing someone might do in that moment is, "Okay, go make a manual edit to to fix it and then ship it." But the key step that we're trying to really enforce now in our software factory or software development life cycle is when you go to make that change edit the agent's thinking, that that context has to go back into the brain so that you not only fix it in this case, but in all future cases going forward. And then you basically what you start to see is like [00:14:05] the accept rate for, you know, one-shotted PRs or that kind of thing, it just starts to tick up over time and you have now got like a recursive self-improvement system. So, that's one of the big ideas we've been working on recently and just getting our own internal um um agent harness uh which we call Toshi uh just integrated with all these tools like it can now you know, it can now make calls out to external vendors and pay at using the agentic finance economy like over these X 402 protocols. Um if you want to edit the brain as you're making a change to that PR and it goes back into the brain, putting that into the harness, um asking it to sort of like, "Okay, you know, like actually just earlier today I was making um a plan for this like relatively complex feature. What's kind of amazing is it's now even allowing people like me the CEO to get back in there and ship features. Um but I asked I asked one of the you know, high-end expensive models, "Okay, go make a plan for how this feature might be implemented, break it down into three phases, each phase has 10 different pieces that need to get built." And I was like, "Okay, go go execute phase one. Go spin up 10 separate agents [00:15:07] to go execute each of those pieces in parallel. And by the way, you know, recommend the right agent to use cuz they might be cheaper models." And so it it spun up a bunch of open source, it spun up a bunch of Grok. Um and it's and it just like uh 2 minutes before I hopped on this podcast, it just pinged me, it was like, "By the way, all 10 of those things from phase one are now done and ready for you to review." So, and anyways, we're just I'm starting to get to this place where it's kind of addictive, actually, because in the past, I I kept Every time I'd have these like ideas or bugs I'd find, and I'm just like pinging the team all day long with like, "Hey, can we do this? Can we do this? Can we do this?" And now, instead of like pinging the team the team in Slack, I can basically tag an agent in Slack with that comment or drop it into our internal harness, and instead of bugging the team and asking them to do something, I just send them a PR for review, and it's already done. Like, and that's a magical moment that I just like I It's very addictive. >> Yeah, I feel like for people who are um best at adopting this who aren't day-to-day engineers, and I know you had a long background working as an engineer at Airbnb and other places. Obviously, you're helping start Coinbase. But, I [00:16:07] found that many folks who do best at this uh who are non-technical also almost treat it like a video game. And you're like leveling up in terms of your capability set and how you learn to do things. Sort of these recursive loops you start building for yourself and everything else. And so, I think it's I think it's fascinating once that adoption. How do you think that impacts uh you know, how companies are set up in the future? In other words, some people make the argument that the average company size over time should get much smaller. It could be a startup, it could be existing companies, etc. simply because you're able to harness so much of this intelligence, so much of this productivity, or you know, uh ability for people to do so much individually, do you think that's true? Do you think that's the direction things are heading? Like, is there a timeline where something Every company is like 10 people or whatever, or do you think there'll always be these sort of larger-scale organizations? >> Well, I Productivity is definitely increasing, right? So, that's slightly different though than saying the average company size will be smaller. Um it's kind of like just saying tasks [00:17:07] are being automated or eliminated. Um people are not being eliminated. I think tasks are being eliminated. Um and so, if you take a company like any sort of company today, Coinbase or others that exist today, um it's not that I don't think it's like we're going to shrink down the headcount to 10 people or something like that. Um I think that the existing people we have are going to be able to just get much more done and the pace of everything will accelerate. Now, it's also true you're going to see some companies that are two people or five people or whatever, and they're able to do a lot more than what we would have historically thought was possible, and that's also true. So, >> So, it's increasing the velocity of like the existing team and making things ship faster, things automated. So, basically you're getting more scalability off people. As if you have a cost basis relative to revenue, then you suddenly have this ability to dramatically more with that same group of people, which means to some extent your margins should start to rise over time. If you're effectively growing revenue faster than you grow team, although I guess some people may still grow them at the same [00:18:07] pace. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, that's super interesting. Um and then uh I wonder if it's worth um spending a little bit of time as well on uh the everything exchange. I just think some of the things you're doing there are fascinating. Uh there's perps, there's um uh prediction markets, there's all these really interesting directions. What proportion of uh Coinbase either volume or revenue is sort of those other ancillary areas now, outside of crypto? >> Yeah, well we actually shared in our recent earnings deck, um which are, you know, those are the only numbers I'm probably allowed to talk about, but um you know, actually 88% of our revenue is from non-Bitcoin trading at this point. So, that's an interesting stat. I think it's funny cuz if you look at our stock price, it does trade like fairly correlated with the price of Bitcoin, but I can't I and I love Bitcoin. I think it's going to be around forever. It's digital gold. It's like um sound money for everybody in the world. I think it's amazing, but I also think all these other things are like crypto is updating every aspect of the financial system. So, like we just we [00:19:08] just announced um our tokenized stocks product, uh which is only available outside the US right now, unfortunately, but we're working with um the SEC and others to get on a path to do it in the US. Um but it's the first truly tokenized stock product that's not a synthetic, a derivative, or some debt instrument. It's a It's actually a security, um and it's one-to-one represented by the uh the actual security held in custody. Uh and so this is like broadly a trend called tokenization, right? Like stablecoins were the first major use case of this with a you know, a token that represents one-to-one a dollar in a bank account or a US Treasury. Um now we're seeing it with stocks, which is really exciting. It's going to There's like something like 4 billion people in the world who don't have access to any brokerage um or US investment account. So, they don't have any ability to invest in, you know, Coinbase, Nvidia, Apple, whatever. And so, um much like Tether was very successful XUS because a lot of people wanted dollar-denominated accounts, there's like 4 billion people who want like access to you high-quality investments. They don't have that today. [00:20:08] So, we'll do the tokenized stock piece, and then I think you just go on down the list, like private credit and um Treasuries and bank deposits, like everything's going to get tokenized, and it It's just going to mean that financial services is going to have modern modern rails to run on. So, of course, these can all be traded on the Everything Exchange. They can be sent back and forth. Like if you want to gift a share of stock to your your nephew or something like that, you can just send it to their wallet. You don't have to like go through some complex um stock transfer process. It's antiquated. It's like money can now move at the speed of information, just like a WhatsApp message. And crypto's updating all those rails. >> That's pretty amazing. It's basically broadening and modernizing uh the financial system but in a very broad way, right? It includes to your point eventually bonds, it includes a subset of stocks, it includes all sorts of things that before uh had much more friction in terms of using that or purchasing them. And it opens it up for the world, right? And there there were counter versions of this in China and other places where if something was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, sometimes these funds would almost be set up that people could [00:21:08] buy proportions of to be able to participate in some stocks that were listed in other countries. So, it'd be interesting to watch how sort of global capital flows change as these things get bigger and bigger. And to your point, it feels like the stable coins and Tether were were the first version of that with USD. Um so, it's kind of fascinating. I remember actually 7 8 years ago I invested in a company called Harbor that was trying to tokenize real estate. I think that was a little bit too far ahead. >> Yeah, I think that'll happen, too. I I think you were early, but early, but too early, but right, yeah, on that one. >> Yeah, so it's kind of fascinating watch those play out. How do you think about prediction markets? So, you know, a lot of the use cases that were mentioned in the past seem to have roughly consolidated around sports and a few other sort of areas. Um obviously, there's things in politics. Do you have a view on where in the long run prediction markets have the biggest footprint? >> Well, I'm very excited about prediction markets. Um they're growing super fast inside the Coinbase app. I think we shared in our last earnings call within months of launching it it hit like a $100 million revenue run rate. It's growing really nice, like over 100% quarter over quarter, something like [00:22:08] that. I'd have to go look at the exact uh number again, but um so, it's true that sports has been a part of it. Um I think that it's much bigger than that, though. And And that's great. Like that's a form of entertainment. Um you know, we we should we should celebrate that. I think that it actually has much broader implications though from a societal point of view that people maybe haven't fully appreciated. So, um you know, like uh politic elections are something that have already happened in prediction markets. But let's say that you want to try to understand like what policies should be implemented from a from a government point of view. You could actually like say, all right, if we were to implement this policy a policy, what would be the unemployment rate be within 1 year, 2 years, 3 years? And then a prediction market could form on that. It could help inform what policies out there. It could allow I think you could also ask people the big the big questions in life, you know, is there a god? Um what were we designed by evolution uh or you know, intelligent design or like these are Some people would call these [00:23:08] more like opinion markets. It's not that there's ever going to be like a resolution date where we definitely know for sure on some of this stuff. Um or if we did, it'd be very far in the future and hard to imagine. But, you know, if you ask somebody a difficult a difficult question um and then there's events that are always unfolding in the world that which might shift like maybe 60% of the population believes X, but a new scientific paper comes out or um a new a new terrorist attack happens or like who knows what and then it shifts from 60% to 80%. People could still make bets on this. It's kind of like like when you invest in the stocks, there's not some resolution date of the stock um where it's done and you get your payout from Nvidia. You're just betting on is it going to do better or worse in the future? And I think you could imagine a whole other category of for instance of prediction markets for like the big life questions and things like that. It's We're just start We're just scratching the surface. >> The other thing that you've been working on is new man, uh which is I think um really fascinating when uh great founders do a act two. And you were doing an act one while [00:24:08] simultaneously doing an act two. So, how did you think about starting a company while running a public company? >> Yeah. Okay, so this is a really interesting topic because um you know, like like you, I'm interested in lots of different ideas. Um I think that's part of the benefit of being an investor by the way is that, you know, you just get to talk to lots of smart people about a million So, it's very intellectually stimulating. I don't know, maybe the downside of it is a little bit like you don't ever feel like um you've got you're all in on one thing and you're you know, in the arena sometimes and you might be sitting there sometimes from the sidelines saying, "Ah, I know exactly what they should be doing. Why don't they just do this?" And then if so, if you're the CEO, you actually get to decide these things uh for better or worse. So, anyway, long way of saying I I like being a builder or like an entrepreneur. I'm probably better as an entrepreneur than I am as an investor. Some of my investments are a little bit more like, "Wow, that'd be so cool if that happened." But, once in a while someone has to remind me you do realize the point of investing is like to make money Brian. So [laughter] anyway, I digress. Okay, so basically coinbase went public in 2021. [00:25:08] We were you know, we were very profitable like it felt like 10-year journey. Okay, do I want to do something different? Do I have another thing or am I just at the beginning of this and I realized I'm just at the at the beginning of the journey with coinbase. I think our mission of increasing economic freedom is just it's like we're just getting started about half of 1% of global GDP is running on crypto. We've got a lot of jobs not finished, right? But I do want to have the ability to try some other ideas maybe and help incubate some companies or get them off the ground whether I run it or not. And what I did was I sat down at some point and I was like okay, what are the big technology trends that I'm excited about and I think by the way if you make some money in software you kind of have an obligation to like put it into hard tech and help some of the bigger things that might advance society. Which are tend to be more capital intensive intensive and I was a little bit inspired by Elon when these kind of things with PayPal. So I sat around with some of my friends and we were like okay, what are some of the big trends? It's like it's space, it's AI, it's fusion energy, brain machine interfaces. I was like there's good teams working on those. I don't I don't have a strong thesis about what I would do that might be different and when you're coming up with an idea you [00:26:08] want to you want it to be something that you know, you're like this needs to happen in the world, but also there's not like but for me and maybe it wouldn't happen that quickly. Like you want to do something that you think you uniquely add value. And I didn't see like that many great teams working on on longevity. I thought a lot of it was like kind of snake oil. I mean you came from a bio background. I mean I actually I I I cornered you and I was like what's going on with this space? Like what and you're like all this all the science is like a little bit bogus and like that you know, people have tried these things for a long time like you know, um like caloric restriction or whatever we found a bunch of ways to make mice live longer and it doesn't work in humans, okay? So I was like all right, well let's let's host this dinner and see if we can invite some of our smartest um CEOs, scientists and you know, you attended, I think, one of these dinners, which I really appreciate you inviting some people. And we kind of just went around the room and we asked all of them, "What's the most exciting thing on the horizon from a bio point of view that you think is high potential and underfunded today?" And people had all kinds of ideas, but one of them they came back [00:27:09] with was this epigenetic reprogramming idea, which some labs had seen early results with, like Shin'ya Yamanaka's lab. And it was kind of showing how you could reprogram cells to restore function they had when they were younger. Um, in that case, they were changing the type of the cell, but we didn't want to do that. And through a series of these dinners, I basically kind of went down this rabbit hole and I started to like sometimes you just can't get something out of your mind and you just need to keep reading more and more about it and thinking about the implications. It's kind of what happened to me with Bitcoin in 2010 or 2011. And I started to feel about epigenetic reprogramming kind of how I did about Bitcoin at that time, where I just couldn't stop thinking about it for like 3 months. And when that happens, you you kind of want to hold on to that moment of inspiration or motivation and like try to do something with it so before it fades, cuz it's perishable. And so, through a series of these dinners, you know, we happened to find the right group of people that came together, which turned out to be, you know, Jacob Kimmel, who's now the CEO of New Limit, Blake Blake Byers, one of the other co-founders, Greg Johnson, who co-founded the company. And, you know, I put some initial money in, committed that, helped them with some of the company building part of it, [00:28:10] but the science was like totally new to me and I I was basically just a sponge of knowledge trying to soak that up as much as I could. And so, anyway, long story short, the science progressed faster than I thought. We we've got a lab now in South San Francisco, about 50 or 60 people running these large-scale It starts with AI, as with all things these days, you know, you can test millions of hypotheses about what sets of transcription factors, which are these proteins that could reprogram different cell types. It's a massive search space, but like so, we're using AI for that. We've built the the leading frontier model for epigenetic reprogramming that recommends the next set of experiments that we should run in our in our lab, which are these large pool screens and we'd run those at the scale, you know, as big a scale as we can, but it's like at moving atoms and liquids in a lab, not not at just software. And so we do these large pool screens to see if we can see if we get phenotypic hits for compounds that might be possible to reprogram these cells. The best ones of those we then run through functional assays, which are typically animal models. And those are a little more expensive, a little slower. And the best ones of those we run [00:29:11] through human trials. And so the exciting thing is we've now got we've demonstrated successful reprogramming of at least one human cell type in these humanized mouse models. We're now testing that in human primate non-human primates. And then the first phase one clinical trial will be launching next year. So and there'll be there'll be I don't know, three three to 10 other drug candidates coming off this platform in the coming years. So that's been an incredible journey just for me to learn about what it takes to try to spin up another company, try to see where I can be helpful, where you know, I don't be be humble about the things I don't know. And yeah, I mean I I I want to make sure that I'm focused on Coinbase. That is my full-time job. I'm basically just an investor slash board member at New Limit. But I think it's fun and intellectually stimulating to try to create these companies that can advance the world. It's hard enough to get any any one company to work. So I probably tried like 10 different ideas before Coinbase started to to to really work, right? And then I you want to make sure you don't try to go do multiple things too early. Like the distraction can be really dangerous. It's arguably like [00:30:11] irresponsible to try try to go do it. But there are some people I think you know, you're one of these people you've you've managed to help incubate a lot of different companies at this point. Um you know, Joe Lonsdale has done this. Sam Altman has done this. Palmer Lucky has now a handful of companies like with Air Borer where you know, of course Elon is sort of like the most famous example of this. Um And so yeah, I I think there's a blurry line between like you know, I'm the CEO of one company and like I'm a pure investor. You know, in some sense you're both capital allocators at the at a certain size of company, you know, you're basically just allocating budgets and capital. There There's There's a bit more to it than that, but um I think having like a small handful of things you're trying to do and and you don't want to get overwhelmed where if like a couple of these things have a problem at the same time, you're just going to not be sleeping and probably ignoring your family and stuff like that, which is not balanced and healthy. But you also if you're just doing one thing forever and you have the potential to help incubate more in the world, then you're just limiting your potential. >> Yeah, I I totally agree and I think uh [00:31:12] more and more founders are waking up to your realization and your actions in terms of once you hit a certain scale or point of things just have a skate velocity, they're working is enormous leverage. You know, sometimes you're able to do incremental things and I think Daniel Ek would be another good example of that. He's been doing very interesting things in Europe. >> [clears throat] >> He's Yeah, he's he's made that successful transition to incubating more companies over time and yeah, figuring out where he can plug in to help um some capital, but it's really his time, his probably the most valuable part. >> Has NewLimit um announced where it's starting or what indication areas it's starting with in terms of uh what it's hoping to impact biologically or for a patient center perspective? >> Yeah, it has. It's actually um on the website there's uh newlimit.com. You can check out therapeutics. So that we published the road map there. So the first three cell types that we've started running our platform against um the first is liver cells or hepatocytes. The second would be um vasculature uh cells and the third would be in immunological uh immune [00:32:12] immunological uh cells um through through your immune system, T cells uh most most specifically. So, you know, we're following a pattern that's kind of similar to uh the GLP-1s like Ozempic and all these things, which is you know, initially in drug drug design or drug um search you're going after an indication which has like a high unmet medical need. It's It's typically um sometimes it's a smaller market and that's just how drugs are developed because you go after things where people have no no better option. So, for instance, like with our liver uh program, the initial phase one clinical trial will be in people with um alcohol liver disease or alcoholic liver disease ALD um and today they don't have really have any other options other than like a liver transplant and most of them um don't have that in time. So, I think the the survivability of it within 12 months is like once you're diagnosed is very low. Um, so we'll do a phase one in that and that alone would be like a pretty large market. Uh sadly there there is a lot of people there are a lot of people in that situation. [00:33:12] I think we estimated that um yeah, like just that if if that were drug alone works in ALD, it might be worth $20 billion or something. But the the goal here is not just to make a liver drug for um you know, alcohol damage, it's to build to take to make a drug ultimately that healthy people like if you're if you're 40 and you want to have a liver that's like you're 20 or your immune system or your vascular system or eventually, you know, your brain, your muscles, all these different cell types, your skin, that's a big one, right? That that that's probably a trillion dollar market right there if you can get um your skin rejuvenated. But um the idea is that over time you'd be able to take like a cocktail of these therapies or uh and they would target probably different cell types with slightly different um payloads, but they would all have the same theme of at reprogramming your cells to restore function they had when they were younger and most of the diseases that take us out are all correlated with age. Like when you're when you're in your 20s and you get some errant cancerous cell or a little bit of damage to your liver or whatever, um your body recovers from it because and then and then as you age [00:34:12] they lose this function and so most of the diseases that take us out they're all they're all highly correlated with age. And so instead of kind of going after each disease like the symptoms of it, we're sort of trying to go for the meta problem of well, how do we just restore the function your cells had when you were younger and maybe that would have be a way to take a bite out of a lot of these major diseases, um attack the root cause of it. >> This goes back to the Yamanaka factors that you mentioned where they were able to change the imprint for both age as well as cell type. And you're saying just focus on the age component on the two. Reversing the potency of the cell to something that has more regenerative capabilities. You know, like younger cells or tissues in general able to rejuvenate or regenerate better than uh older tissues, right? You see that with wound healing or injuries or other things like that. Somebody's in an accident when they're old versus young. Get better with faster. So, um it's really fascinating stuff. So, I I think you're this really unique and wonderful mix of somebody who's really grounded and pragmatic, but who also thinks big and goes after these giant shifts or trends. What are you most excited about over the next 5 years? [00:35:12] >> Hm. >> Either for Coinbase or New Limit or in general like in the world, you know. >> Yeah, well, cuz I'm always thinking about this, you know, on my free time and my weekends. I'm always thinking about what are what are the most important trends? What What is technology making available now that wasn't available for? What do I want the future to look like? How can I help shape that, create that uh for civilizational progress? And so, I think it's good for more people to do that just as an aside. It's not exactly what you asked, but I think I think that everybody should try to contribute in some way to civilizational progress and think about what they could build cuz that's it's actually a really hard It's It's easy to be a critic. It's easy to poke holes in what other people are doing or to be an activist or whatever. It's kind of a common thing amongst a certain generation. I think it's better to try to be a builder and you're going to fall flat on your face and you'll get an appreciation for how hard it is to contribute sometimes. Maybe maybe more empathy, but it's actually much more fulfilling if you help build something the world that benefited a lot of people. So, anyway, to answer your question directly, I mean, my main focus is going [00:36:12] to just is going to be on agential finance, right? Like that's what's happening at Coinbase. Um I think you know, and then stablecoin payments and everything exchange like crypto is really only powering about half of 1% of global GDP right now. Um there's maybe about 700 million people in the world who have used crypto or hold crypto, but not all of them use it every month, which might be more like in the 50 to 100 million dollar 50 to 100 million people range. And so we need to get that to a billion or more. And like just that's how we're going to truly update the financial system. We can do that with humans, we can do it with agents. That's that's going to be a big focus. If you And then of course like new limit um but I think if you want to talk about like frontier ideas that I've sort of been contemplating, I mean um one idea I've been contemplating a little bit is around uh cognitive enhancement. Um and there you know, there's been these things people have realized like if you I think in in development of uh children like if you give them enough like folic acid and like certain um nutrients like that in certain countries, it actually raises IQ. Like they just they develop better. Um and there might be interest I might [00:37:13] host a dinner on this at some point of just um you know, what what are the various ways someone could target therapies, whether in adults, children, embryos, whatever to try to just um level the playing field a little bit of the baseline uh sort of cognition and IQ that people are born with or could be born with. I think that that would just That's another one of these big meta problems. I haven't found a great thesis about how to exactly tackle that, but if somebody has one, let me know. >> That's super interesting. It's basically how do you increase the the collective intelligence of humanity? Yeah, cuz there's the biological form of that and then there's like the digital or AI form of that. >> Exactly. I I I I I really We're in a race right now. Like AI is getting smarter and smarter. I think humans need to at some point take control of our evolution and get smarter and smarter. And then of course there's the hybrid of the two with brain machine interfaces where we all Some people will choose to merge, some people will not. But even if you know, I believe that like you do there's there's going to be probably more AI agents than humans in the not so distant future, but humans still need to advance and progress. Like that's that's important. I think there's a lot that we can do [00:38:13] with these AI tools to actually benefit humanity. And um you know, healthier outcomes, live longer if you want, you know, have more energy, um have less back pain, you know, wake up not tired in the morning, um and and yeah, increase our cognition. Like and just have you know, have healthier offspring, have children that are free of diseases. Like Um there's a company I invested in uh called Preventative that's doing embryo editing, which is a controversial topic. You know, people look I've seen these movies like Gattaca and things like that. But actually like 80 if you look at the Pew Research like 80% of Americans uh embryo editing for disease prevention is supported by the population. Um nobody wants these rare genetic diseases for their children. Everybody wants healthier, better lives for their children. I think that's one of those topics that's like seems controversial today. I think it'll be more normal over time and at some point it'll be abnormal to to have children without doing this kind of screening and editing because it's it'd be like what this is so risky. Like why would you do that? You know, it's like it's like driving without a seatbelt or [00:39:14] uh something like that. >> I always wondered by the way on that one whether or not If you imagine a future where the like gene editing is reasonably common. Um there may be like packages that you buy, right? There's the intelligence package and there's the health package. >> Yeah. >> I sometimes wonder whether your overall like if you think about different ways of being intelligent, there's processing speed, there's recall, there you know, there's like five or six different ways you can imagine different forms of intelligence and I sometimes wonder whether um these packages will effectively uh diminish the neurodiversity of humanity because it'll push everybody down the same package. It's almost like you're buying you know, the Ford Model T of intelligence for everyone or something. So I've always been curious about what are the implications of active editing relative to just uh human diversity and capability set. And you know, will parents default opt into like the basic package or whatever, which will always be the same thing. So it's kind of a random aside, but there's all these weird downstream implications to all these things. >> Yeah. So I've heard I've heard that argument before and actually I actually think it's opposite. I actually think it could increase diversity. The reason is that [00:40:15] there's just unlimited diversity of human preferences, right? I think if it was this simple, and it may not be this simple, parents would say, you know, okay, do you want to make have a great artist, a great general, a great engineer, a great politician? You know, it's like every parent is going to have some different favorite thing. And by the way, that sort of assumes that they're mutually exclusive. A lot of this might just be like raising the floor, and then the kid is still still who they are and what they were going to be. It's just they don't have schizophrenia or depression or something, right? So, anyway, I think I think I actually don't think it'll decrease diversity. Um, I think you actually could I mean in the limit case you could actually get uh, diversity that's that's really out there. Like you could have, um, you know, kids born with with uh, gills they can breathe under breathe under water or like, you know, have have wings and fly or something. Like who who knows how far it could go if if you really um, can take control of your evolution. >> So, one thing that's long been uh, discussed in crypto circles and other chain circles and other things are basically different forms of special economic zones. And obviously these have [00:41:16] been implemented at scale in some cases like Shenzhen in China I think in part exists as a large-scale manufacturing region in China because it became a special economic zone in one form. Uh, there's others that have been discussed in the Philippines relative to certain US interests, you know, so there's there's really interesting things that are out right now there. How do you think about that or how's your thinking evolved over time especially since crypto's played a prominent role in some of the underpinnings and philosophies behind some of these things? >> Yeah, so I'm super interested in special economic zones because again I I'm interested in meta problems that you know, unlock progress across a whole category of things. And I think if you look at what slows down progress uh, in many parts of the world it is overregulation, right? Like Europe certainly is could be an example of this. Um, you know, the US has its own version of it that is not perfect. And there has been interest at various points, um, in different solutions to this. You know, there's sea steading and Mars and going up brain upload to cyberspace and all these kind of things. There's um [00:42:17] you know, there there's a one called Prospera, which is in Honduras. Um and uh Coinbase actually made an investment in that just to like learn more about it and and see what was going on. And they've had um a mixed up and down, I'd say, with like the local government there, but they're getting closer to a resolution is my understanding that will um you know, I think I think they're going to make it. I think they're going to do a good job. The There was something I'd say there was a little bit more interest in this um b- before the recent most recent Trump admin just because you know, the the deregulatory environment has created a lot of opportunities here in the US, and that's a nice that's a great substrate and market to build on. There was actually an idea that was discussed at one point, I think, in the campaign about something called freedom cities. If people Google it, they can kind of see that idea. And the idea was to try to create some federal land in the US, you know, you the federal government owns lots of different pockets of land. And if we say, all right, you know, we want to we think it's important strategically for America to get really good at um nuclear power or drug discovery or um you know, having a crypto or drone [00:43:18] delivery or what- whatever it is, you could take a piece of land somewhere the US has a ton of land, right? You could take a piece of this federal land um 10 or 100 square miles and say, you know what? In this area, you don't need to uh go through all the normal uh red tape on EPA and all these things and like, you know, local community You can build You can just build data centers there. You can build nuclear power plants there. Um you can do unlimited drone delivery there. You don't have to get approval from the FAA. Uh because we want to create these zones where experimentation can happen in a safe, contained way to see what works and what doesn't. And if something works via experimentation, then you can go through the normal process um in the rest of the US to see if it's it's ready to be brought to that location. The problem right now is in many cases there is no sandbox to go try this innovation. Um and that is just incredibly stifling. You can't You can't really solve a problem as an entrepreneur unless you can iterate on it, right? And so anyway, I I think it'd be really fun um to get [00:44:18] some pure these piece like these freedom cities or special economic zones in the US. Uh yeah, as you mentioned like Shenzhen, Singapore, Dubai, like these have been very successful in many other parts of the world and driven a ton of economic growth. Um and in some ways like the US is 50 special economic zones cuz of federalism and the state system. So that level of competition has I think allowed the US to be the leader globally in this but it's just we could go even further and do even more. >> Yeah, very exciting. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today. >> Of course, thanks for having me. >> [music] >> Find us on Twitter at No Priors Pod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you want to see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. [music] That way you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no-priors.com.