Brian Armstrong: Coinbase, Cryptocurrency, and Government Regulation | Lex Fridman Podcast #307

the following is a conversation with brian armstrong co-founder and ceo of coinbase the largest cryptocurrency exchange platform with 98 million users in 100 countries listing bitcoin ethereum cardano and over 100 popular cryptocurrencies i recorded this conversation with brian before this week's sec probe into whether some of the crypto listings are securities and thus need to be regulated as such as always with conversations that involve cryptocurrency i try to make it timeless so that the price soaring high or crashing down low doesn't distract from the fundamental technological economic social and philosophical ideas underlying this new form of money energy and information our world runs on money the exchange and store of value and cryptocurrency seeks to build the next chapter of how money works and what it can do coinbase and brian are trying to do this by working together with regulators and governments which is a long and difficult road bureaucracies resist change for better and for worse the latest sec probe is a good representation of this it is a serious attempt to limit fraud but one that also runs the risk of limiting innovation and limiting financial freedom of individuals this is a complicated mess and i applaud everyone involved for trying to work through it i hope in the end the interest of the individual wins decentralization after all is a hedge against the corrupting nature of centralized power this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's brian armstrong let's start with the fact that you're a programmer what was the first program you've ever written or the first one that you remember the first memory i have of programming was probably in middle school and i remember it was recess and they had this like this time period where you could read books and the other kids were like reading comic books and stuff and for some reason i had gotten into decide yet i wanted to get into computers and i was playing with computers at home and so i got this book i think from the library it was called like how to learn java in 30 days so i was i was reading this book at like you know the recess and i didn't understand anything and i remember i went home and i tried to get this thing working and you know if you've ever written a java program the first lines are like public static void main string args or whatever and it's just like it's so foreign and it's so difficult to get started and so i was kind of frustrated i was like i don't understand anything that's happening in this book so the first the first thing i wrote was probably just like a hello world app in java but it was so i felt like i was so confused about what was actually happening that i later learned a bit of php and php was like more fun for me because it was like oh just print out what you want you know it didn't have all this complexity around it so then i got more into php i started building like some simple websites i think learned some html so i think that was my introduction to programming at least the very beginning part yeah you know java has a lot of uh out of all the hello worlds you can possibly write java is the one where i think it's the longest yeah it's just which is quite interesting because java is often at least for a long time was used as the primary programming language to teach people how to program or at least about object-oriented programming i think most universities have now switched in high school switched to python i'm not sure if that's the case probably better it's easier to learn it lowers the it makes it less scary there's like less of a hurdle and certainly none of them use php i love php and i feel like it's a dirty secret i have to keep private to myself like it's somebody i'm seeing on the side or something like that because uh it's just not a respected programming language because i think there's so many ways you can write poor code with php yeah which is why it's not respected yeah it's a scripting language more so although of course facebook built like a huge stack on top of it and valuable company but i still love ruby to this day ruby is probably my favorite language python is great too but i just love the idea behind ruby that it's like let's make it easier for the human harder for the computer and make it a joy to be expressive and all these things so i was never the best computer scientist but i was a good i was good hacker i could rapidly prototype products and using languages like ruby do a lot of computer science programs still use like lisp and scheme and things like that no no they do for that's like that's if you're hardcore if you're legit you're gonna do some of the functional languages yeah i think there's a there's a few others that popped up but lisp is a distant memory for a lot of people that's like somebody has to like you go to library you dust off the book yeah but uh scheme a little bit i think if you're starting i mean there's courses about languages themselves like programming languages yeah this might be one of those you know how there's languages that nobody uses anymore like ancient languages yeah you might have to go to school in that same way for programming languages yeah back in the day we used to use parentheses i of course still use emacs as the editor for most things that i do and emacs is is um you know a lot of the customization you can do is in lisp and that's the language probably when i first really fell in love with programming is lisp because for a long time throughout the earlier history of artificial intelligence list was the primary language but it still had a life in the 90s and the arts where some people would use it such a beautiful functional language but it just somehow didn't pick up um that said i should say sort of push back php i feel like it's still true that most of the web runs on php most of the back end is still is still php so if you look at you know it's like the stuff that people don't talk about it's like what what runs most systems in the world what runs the most uh back end what runs most front end yeah javascript you know html script i think the stack exchange surveys show javascript's most popular language in the world i think right oh yeah in terms of programmers and numbers of i wonder by survey of number of programmers on stack stack overflow yeah but that's also the cutting edge right those are the people that are just like excitedly writing code i wonder if there's there's people that are just like maintaining gigantic code bases yeah i feel like the amount of java out there just running industrial systems has got to be enormous and then of course in the banking industry finance it's like even older stuff cobalt and whatnot but i've been actually looking for somebody uh to interview who who represents uh cobalt unfortunately like who's the figure still still there that holds the flag i did you know with java founder of java creator of java creator python creator of c plus plus but nobody wants to hold the flag for cobalt unfortunately even though some of the most important systems in the world still run on those yeah uh like power systems and infrastructure systems which is fascinating which and atms and stuff like that like a lot of stuff that we rely on that just works and the reason we don't change it because it works well yeah it's written in languages that people don't use anymore yeah that'd be a cool series of interviews get get the stuff that's like tech that was invented 40 50 years ago but still is being used widely i mean emacs is an example of that let me ask the big question of uh what are cryptocurrency exchanges and what's coinbase how does it work before i'll ask even bigger questions but it's just a nice kind of pilot cleansing question of what is coinbase coinbase is a cryptocurrency exchange brokerage custodian basically we're the primary financial account for people in the crypto economy how they buy crypto how they store it how they use it increasingly in different ways we can talk about that um so yeah we want to be the way that a billion people hopefully access the open financial system globally how does it work what uh what's cryptocurrency you know there's uh there's bitcoin there's ethereum um what does it mean to be an exchange what does it mean to store what does it mean to transact how does it what does coinbase actually do okay so you know basically in any given market there's some people want to buy some people who want to sell and there's you keep an order book of all those prices and then um you know if someone's willing to buy for more than the lowest price someone's willing to sell then you know you get a trade to execute that's kind of how an exchange works underneath and a brokerage is kind of simpler than that even you don't have to know look at the whole order book and everything but you just go in there and you say i want to buy 100 of bitcoin or whatever cryptocurrency you get a quote and if you like it you can hit accept and you know the core things that we do to make all that kind of just work make it seamless it sounds simple on the surface is we gotta we have to do payment integrations you know in a variety of places around the world to make it easy for people to get fiat currency into this ecosystem we have to work on cyber security a lot there's lots of hackers out there trying to break into our systems and steal crypto or to put stolen credit cards and bank accounts and things like that into these systems um we have to integrate with the blockchains themselves right which are periodically getting updated and having various airdrops and all kinds of things so we're integrated with lots of different blockchains and then we have to store the crypto that people buy securely as well so crypto is kind of like storing you store the private keys essentially and we've invented a lot of cool technology about how to do that securely that helps me sleep at night as one of the largest crypto custodians out there so those are some of the pieces that had to come together to get that early simple buy sell experience to work and yeah i mean coinbase actually has a lot of different products now so we have like an institutional product uh we we have coinbase commerce which is like merchant payments like stripe for crypto we've got a self-custodial wallet which we can talk about there's all kinds of cool applications people are building with web3 and they can access it through that we just just launched an nft product um i've gone down the list we have we so we're sort of like a portfolio of crypto products now we're big enough where we can do multiple things but yeah the core thing we got started with and still the majority of our revenue today is people just want to come in and buy and sell some crypto and we help them do that make it simple and easy to use uh and i'll ask you about wallet nft is about what is it called the stripe type coinbase commerce coinbase commerce yeah i'll ask about all that but uh order books and exchange what's the difference between that and stocks for example which there's also order books yes i mean stocks trade through order books too uh sort of commodities it's all similar type of situation so when i want to buy one bitcoin and i see coinbase say the price of that bitcoin is say forty thousand dollars and i press buy what happens um yeah okay so you've gotten a lot like you know when you press the button on your keyboard like the electrical signal goes up the wire on your keyboard well that's also important the timing right because it's not pricing yeah it's true it's giving you a quote right that's that's um you know some there's a whole concept of like slippage and like by the time the quote is executed um if the price has moved too much like we may reject it and you know there's there's various things like that but how do i i mean what's the simple version i can give you so we you know we'll we'll basically check the order book give you a quote it's good for some period of time or for some amount of slippage and then what's happening is we're initiating a debit to your payment method whether that's a credit card or a bank account or you know you're storing dollars or euros or something on our platform there's various payment methods so we're basically debiting that and then we're crediting you the crypto and uh we're taking a fee for it too so um that's fundamentally what's happening underneath and then there's some interesting slippage how do you how do you calculate the uh how much slippage is allowed like how do you how do you know these things you know because order books are fascinating you know the dynamics of that is pretty interesting yeah and the little i know about it yeah so there's a lot of people like traders who get super into this and like high frequency traders and arbitrage and all kinds of interesting topics flash boys was like an interesting book on this whole thing you want like access to information the fastest sometimes even putting your you know your thing in the data center right next to the thing we don't allow that colo stuff because we want it to be more democratized but you know basically you give a let's say we wanted to just keep it math simple we want to charge a one percent fee so if you're buying a hundred dollars of bitcoin and we'll charge you 101 you know we've presented you the amount of bitcoin you're going to get for 100 now let's say 10 seconds later you hit accept we go to we go to fill the order so it's going to be some error bound around that one percent fee right and if we think we're actually losing money on the trade i think we'll often reject it so some part of the fee the slippage is incorporated into that averaged over a large number of people they just just it's fascinating because like even just like that little detail probably requires a lot of experimentation yeah and it's kind of like a giant bug bounty out there because if you get it wrong there's people who are going to arbitrage that and we've we've had people sort of pen test our systems in you know really creative ways where like um they'll just fire like programmatically with apis they'll fire off like a million different quotes and look for one of them that's out of bounds and then actually take that money right there and you know we get people doing all kinds of crazy stuff but so how do you protect against that how do you protect so we'll talk about cyber security in interesting ways but there's a lot of clever people trying to do clever things to earn not even just to break into the system but to earn an edge of some kind yeah in the system how do you uh how do you stay one step ahead there's no silver bullet there's a bunch of lead bullets right so it's it's like you know one thing we do is we just have good test suites right so you're testing every piece of code that goes out that's like just common good best practice but it's particularly important in financial services another thing we do is we hire third-party firms to try to audit this stuff and break in another one we do is we have a bug bounty program so we basically pay white hat hackers to find this stuff before the black hats do and we've paid out lots of good bug bounties so you know try all the above and occasionally you don't get it right you lose some money and then you fix it and you keep going so yeah let's talk about sebastian security a little bit more yeah you mentioned using stolen bank accounts yeah so that's another one that's another interesting one how do you protect against that okay so fraud prevention yeah is a big topic so one of the there's a lot of things people do but one of the things they do is that you use machine learning right so you look at protector to attack to protect against it so um what you want to do is kind of build up a labeled data set of all the different people who have turned out to be fraudulent and good good actors and hopefully collect as much data as you can and then you'll you know you might feed hundreds or thousands of these factors into your machine learning model it'll come back with a risk score so you know an example of like the kinds of factors people create or put in there you know obviously i don't want to disclose too many of them because it's it's it's a cat and mouse game but just kind of i don't know relatively well known stuff might be um you know you have device fingerprints right so like what kind of device are you on and what fonts do you have installed a lot of people who are farming lots of these accounts they're using emulators and like virtual machines and stuff they're not like you know an average person on that device um and then you'll see sometimes like one of my favorite metrics we tracked for for this was called like improbable travel velocity so we would we're tracking people's ips right and you might see someone um who was one day in austin texas and then like an hour later they were in london or something it's like well that's very improbable i mean sometimes people are using vpns so you got to be careful with that because like there's legitimate people who use vpns too but if it's not possible for them to have gotten on a plane and gotten there that quickly then that's usually they're like spoofing a device or ip sometimes those are interesting factors but yeah if you feed enough of these in um you will oh oh the another fun one is like you know real users will type their credit card like one number at a time yeah scammers have a list of them and they'll just paste in a whole a whole number um so you can look at like the the number of milliseconds between keystrokes like there's all kinds of stuff people have come up with you for travel velocity you could probably incorporate vpns too because there's probably a travel velocity for vpn switching too that's human-like like if you're using legitimately vpn for something else yeah um that that might be there's like legitimate uses too actually you know i feel embarrassed that i don't know this probably should but the i'm not a robot capture thing capture thing yeah so that probably works in the same way like how do you move your mouse maybe or how the dynamics of the clicking totally but how does that even work that well then and why can't it be fake i need to look into this because it's it's such a trivial captcha it feels like should be very crackable and yet a lot of high security places use that yeah it's really interesting it's another cat and mouse game so i think they've yeah but it's using a lot of similar signals like mouse movements um keystrokes and then obviously all the stuff that comes over the the wire with your browser so like what operating system what fonts you know what headers are being sent over and yeah um there's actually there's an old website a camera was called it was kind of like panoptix click or panopticon or something but it basically was like a proof of concept site that um they would just show you all the data that was kind of getting sent over with your your request and like say that there's only one person in the world who has this exact set of data it's you and so it's almost like um a work around a clever workaround to track somebody um make identify a unique person even if like there wasn't a cookie involved or something yeah this is a fascinating world where you can't see anybody you're in the dark and yet you have a lot of signal you have to figure out who's the real person who's not who's a robot who's not yeah uh let me step back we're gonna jump around all over the place step back that's why i like your interviews you get into like technical topics so so uh just let's use bitcoin as a measure of time you started coinbase when bitcoin was ten dollars yeah um and you just mentioned an incredible system with security with transactions everything is thought through there's a lot going on but what was version one back in those early days the first prototype of coinbase what did that look like yeah like what what did it take to write it to think through it and and uh make it work enough to at least make you believe that it's gonna work well i definitely didn't know if it was gonna work i mean it was kind of i felt like i was just following my gut so i mean i was working at airbnb i was a software engineer there project manager i was working on some fraud prevention stuff for instance and um i read the bitcoin white paper in kind of december of 2010 i started going to some bitcoin meetups in the bay area met lots of interesting people there like crazy people anarchists you know like really brilliant people all the above and so i started nights and weekends trying to hack put together a prototype and my initial thought was well you know smtp is a protocol that runs email and you know git is is a protocol for version control that and but people made like gmail and github they don't most people don't want to run their own email server or even their own git server they just want to like use a hosted thing that you know will do all the security and backups for them so the thought in my head at that time was bitcoin's this new protocol there's probably going to be somebody who makes a hosted service that does all the security and backups for you makes bitcoin as a protocol easy to use so maybe i should maybe i should make like a hosted bitcoin wallet or something that would that was my it was going to make gmail for bitcoin or something and a bunch of people told me that was a bad idea like bunch most of my smart friends who i told about it they were like well first of all i don't really get what you're doing at all like bitcoin sounds like a scam or something you got you've gotten involved in um but then other people who understood what bitcoin was told me i thought it was a dumb idea because they're like dude if you store all this bitcoin you're just gonna get hacked like nobody you know why would you why would you do that and so i i kind of had this thought like you know what i'm not gonna go all in and like make a story everyone's bitcoin that would be too much right now i have a job i have a day job you know um but let me just make a prototype and i'll tell people this is like a beta thing like don't put any real money in it and just see if there's interest and if i feel like i'm onto something maybe i'll go do this as a company because i did i really wanted to be an entrepreneur at that time i was like i was 29 i was almost turning 30 and i was i always wanted to like start a company but i was i was you know i wasn't yet i was an employee at a company that was great but so anyway i had this prototype i was hacking together nice and weekends i actually wrote a whole bitcoin node in ruby which turned out to be a maybe a weird decision in hindsight because ruby wasn't the most performant language we've subsequently had to rebuild that many times but yeah i had this hosted bitcoin wallet and the thing that i didn't have any users for it by the way i applied to y combinator because i was like maybe if somebody there writes me a check this will like make it feel like a real company and i was trying to find i was trying to find a co-founder at that time unsuccessfully so i was basically just wandering in the desert i had a lot of self-doubt about this because i i was like i don't know all my friends don't think's just kind of dumb and maybe bitcoin is just going to get shut down and like this all be some stupid thing so there was definitely a feeling of just wandering lost in the desert lots of self-doubt um paul graham and the y combinator group kind of wrote me the first check after i went and interviewed and stuff and they they wrote me a check for like 150k and that was the first time somebody who i really looked up to kind of said this is this is worth pursuing like maybe maybe you're onto something maybe or not but like let's at least try it and so i that was kind of what gave me the confidence to quit my job and try it and um i'll wrap the story here by saying that like we i you know i found the right co-founder after y combinator we still didn't have any customers the thing that you know i basically launched the hosted bitcoin wallet there were people signing up um i just posted on reddit and places like that and you know maybe like 100 people would sign up and then nobody would come back and so i was like i just in y comment do they often tell you like you know talk to your customers and improve your product talk to your customers improve your product that's all you're supposed to be doing try to find product market fit so i emailed like five of the users that had signed up and i was like hey i worked on this app i saw you signed up can i get on the phone with you i get on the phone with like five of these folks and i was like you know why didn't you come back and the guy was like well the app was okay for a for a beta but um like i don't have any bitcoins so i didn't really know what to do with it and i remember this light bulb kind of went off my head i was like well if i put a buy bitcoin button in there uh would you have used it and he was like yeah maybe so then i had this we went about the process my co-founder at that time we like got basically had to get like a bank partnership payment rails you know an exchange basic exchange functionality all that stuff i was mentioning earlier in place and the minute we launched that feature where you could just click buy put in your bank counter credit card buy it buy bitcoin it showed up in your account from that day forward like the number of users started go up like this and so we finally had found product market fit after two years of laundering in the desert so you weren't even thinking about to buy the on-ramps you would think it would be just a wall a place to store bitcoin you've already gotten yeah okay this is i mean uh because that's such a pain to do to have to work with others to convert dollars of any fiat currency into into bitcoin yeah so did you i mean were you uh overwhelmed by the immensity of the task here or were you just um sort of not allowing yourself to think too deeply through this whole thing and just letting the optimism take over here you know i was really looking forward to like doing something crazy and like a big challenge and um i wanted to i i love kind of crisis moments like that where you know i'm very determined right especially when i i get like very set on something and i'm just like you know what i'm gonna figure out a way to make this fucking thing work like no matter what and so i i reveled in that i i was sort of i had i had read all these books about startups and like every startup has these like you know major setbacks and just like nothing works and so that was a sign that you're doing something right i had no idea if i was doing anything right at all but i was like i was kind of loving the experience of it in a weird way it felt it felt stressful at the time like you know nothing was working and but i was just i felt like i was on the right path somehow and so i just kept going i don't know um what was the darkest moment that you've gone to in your mind during that time what was what were some of the tougher moments you said self-doubt yeah have you uh yeah where where'd you go where'd you go in your mind [Laughter] is there a moment where you're just like laying there this is this is hopeless well there's a couple moments i'm remembering i mean so for whatever reason i had this like big chip on my shoulder at that time and i was like i really want to do something important in the world like you know i could have a good life and like work for some good companies and write some software and i'm for some reason i never wanted that for myself that probably would have been healthier honestly just to like that as an expected value outcome that's probably a better thing in life but i was like i was like man i really want to do something important and have a bigger impact and i was like i was willing to sacrifice a lot for that i was like sleep and not going out with friends and stuff i remember one of the just for like years working on this stuff remember one of the darker moments was um we probably had like maybe five employees at that time and i remember like a bunch of bad things happened like all at once and it was so first of all you have to remember at this time we were all very sleep deprived which kind of exacerbates everything if you look at like the exxon valdez spell spill and all these like natural disasters like sleep deprivation is often involved so because the reason why we're so sleep deprived is not just because we were working so much but like the site would go offline in the middle of the night and we'd get i get paged i was like on pager duty so i'd get woken up sometimes like two or three times a night like have to try to fix something go back to sleep so in that environment you can kind of get you can get discouraged so one bad thing that happened was we had a bug on the website and there were thousands of people on reddit and twitter who were all like pissed at coinbase because like the balances were showing wrong and they were just like you know fuck this company it's over like i hate these guys and so that was i'd never had this feeling of a thousand people mad at me at the same time you know i feel like i'm a pretty chill guy like most time people don't get mad at me so that was one another one was that um can we pause on that that's so interesting so you you were saying like here's a dream i'm trying to create something and now forever the reputation of this dream is ruined it will never it's irrecoverable it's over that kind of feeling yeah well i didn't you're right i didn't know at that time i was like is this is this the end like everybody we're so we're so tiny now everybody hates us so is it over yeah um yeah nobody told me this before starting a company that like you're a bunch of people hate you for this which is like a very counterintuitive thing because you know if most companies i think are doing good things in the world at least you're trying right and so even if someone's like trying but they're not they're failing i'm generally rooting for them at least you're trying right yeah but that's not the case at all and most founders i've known have gone through this too where um they're very surprised at the amount of hate that they get and if it's i think it's actually like a muscle you can build your tolerance to it like because you know you go talk to somebody who's like for you it feels terrible because you're at the center of this storm and like but if you go then you go talk to like you know your family or some other person like dude i didn't even hear about that like my they're just busy in their own life and so they they have no idea that you had all this negative press or like whatever it was can i once again put lingard on that yeah there's an interesting person i'd like to bring up just as an example uh bill gates yeah so he gets a very large amount of hate on the internet yeah and there's something about him this is me talking that you that he seems out of touch about that hate he i i believe at least in my understanding that uh with the resources he has he's trying and is actually doing a lot of good and yet there's a gigantic amount of hate conspiracy theories and stuff like that right and it feels like that's the case because he's somehow out of touch with with people so i wonder how you stay in touch with the voice of the people without being destroyed by the outrage is there is there any wisdom you have to that or not i don't know about wisdom but i've thought about this too because yeah you want to always be open to feedback especially from people who have like your best interests at heart right and if you can become isolated from it and just like you know surrounded by yes people and um i mean who knows maybe maybe like she and putin and people like that are in situations i have no idea but if you listen to too much of it and you just try to please everyone you'll never get anything done and i mean most of the best leaders are people who they can act when they believe that they they're doing something net positive for the world and humanity and they actually don't really care if they piss off some proportion of the people almost anything you're going to do of significance in the world today is going to piss off five percent of people maybe maybe 49 of people or whatever maybe 60 i don't know so you never want to become so surrounded by people who just work for you and will say yes and then you think like well i'm a genius and i'm like i'm a that's how you become a dictator or whatever um but you also can't care so much about what people think because then you'll never do anything that's truly authentic to yourself one other thought on that by the way i think it's a really good question so i've thought about this a lot like why you know people generally kind of hate on zuck and they hate on bill gates and they hate on um they don't really hate on elon actually has a lot of haters too but it's a different thing this is measured this is measured i was looking at some surveys so i think uh zuck is the most so loved and hated right yeah uh zuckerberg is the most both uh loved and hated he's the most hated and then i think it's bill gates and elon is down there i think it's like uh 40 percent hey zuck people asked and then elon is in the double digits but low double digits and so it's interesting you you just look at this ask yourself why right so i ask myself this sometimes too because i don't claim to know any of these people well but like i've i've met them briefly and i my impression is that they're actually all smart people trying to do good things in the world so there's not too much difference there despite public presumption perception so why is it that some are really hated some aren't i mean it's a complicated question um obviously you know zuck and his facebook got blamed for the whole election thing and all that didn't help um social media has gotten a lot of pressure just from like you know hey why aren't you solving all of society's tough problems it's like well they're just one company but one thing i've noticed is that you know a lot of these people they're a little they have like asperger's right a little bit and um sometimes you know people with aspergers don't really emote in the same way and so i think it's almost a form of like um um like bias against um their cognitive type or something which is like that person doesn't emote right i don't trust their in their intentions and um the other thing i've thought about too is that sometimes i think some leaders you know um like maybe zak or bill gates they can come across as like a little bit pr rehearsed like they're basically um they're giving the pr approved answers as where elon just says whatever he thinks like to a fault so even if people hate what he says they're like at least i believe it's authentic so i've always thought about that too for myself i'm like how do i you can you can fuck it up on both sides right like if you just come out and you're like saying whatever's stream of consciousness you'll often end up like pissing off people on your team or like saying tripping over some like regulation that you you know um there's all kinds of things about running a public company you know you can't say certain stuff but if you're too pr approved and your answer is like nobody trusts you what you're saying and so anyway this is something i think about a lot i don't think i have the right answer but i'm trying to i'm trying to find that yeah and more and more with the internet there's a premium on authenticity just like you're saying yeah people really really appreciate that so for leaders it's a challenge to be how do i uh make sure i'm authentic but also um don't say stupid shit yeah and so that's an interesting thing i've noticed that um just having interacted with the with a bunch of leaders that you have to be careful how much you surround yourself with pr folks because the best i would say let me just say a nice thing about marketing and pr folks the best marketing folks are extremely good yeah so they understand exactly what great marketing is and get great pr it's authenticity it's showing revealing the beauty as opposed to uh pr and marketing out of fear oh don't say that don't say this don't that because then you you start living in this kind of that pushes you towards a bubble where you can't express the we your your beautiful quirks and weirdness and all that kind of stuff and also the cool the beautiful things about what you're doing i find like um especially with the tech thing like even like coinbase the way to reveal the beauty of it is not only by showing all the things you could do with it but showing that there's great engineering going on underneath so letting the nerds shine too it doesn't have to be like uh these kind of commercials where it's like uh a happy family using uh coinbase to send a transaction about uh flowers for mom or something like that like it could be also like gritty stuff and real stuff so um that's a general just observation i made but you said you were talking about dark moments and that there's people on the internet yeah they were pissed off that the site was down and you said there might be something else yeah so sleep deprived like a bunch of people on the internet were pissed at me the balances were fucked up like people were tweeting the company's over just give the money back whatever and then um oh yeah somebody posted so we had all this we didn't we started all these customer support inquiries and like we only had like a few people at the company and so we were backed up maybe like 20 20 000 support requests so people couldn't get a hold of us so somebody posted my cell phone number on reddit and they were like they're like if you need to get a hold of the ceo whatever because everyone's upset about where their money is so i remember we're in the office it's like it's like late at night we've been working like 12 hours we're all sleep deprived i'm trying to i'm trying to hack and like get this bug fixed and we all need like food at the office and so my phone my phone has been blowing up all day because someone posted my phone number on the internet and there's like a guy um there was a guy like trying to deliver food and i needed to answer my phone to like get the food from downstairs so i was like shit i gotta just see who if that's him so i start answering the call and it's like is this brian i'm like no wrong number click you know and i you know i the next i pick up the next call it's like every every when i finish the call another call is like coming in so i was like this i'm a reporter from japan like asking about a security nope wrong number click and i like finally get the delivery guy downstairs bring the food up we were all like you know surviving to like fix this bug um i remember there was just basically a point that night where i was like fuck i need to just i basically just curled up on a and like a ball on the floor and i i just like cried for a little bit um i think i let myself just kind of wallow and self-pity kind of took a nap for about five minutes and i was like let's fucking solve this and i like you know stop being like a little whatever and like got back up deprivation combined with just the stress and the pressure of the site going down and everybody wants you the site to be up just the pressure from people and the number of users is growing and growing and growing so that pressure is just mentally mentally tough yeah what was your source of strength during that time like what like uh somebody that patted you on the back and said we got this yeah well it definitely helped to have a co-founder so you know there's like that old saying about it's better to be in a great relationship than to be single but it's better to be single than a bad relationship so co-founders actually blow up a lot of companies too but when you find the right co-founder which i was lucky to find with with fred ursum that was very important there was definitely moments where you know i was like kind of you know at the wit's end or whatever and he was like it's like dude let's rally like and he basically carried the team you know a couple times like in really key moments what advice would you give to startup founders about this particular stage about surviving it to the five and through the five employee stage where you yeah well if your pre-product market fit the best advice that i have from that period is um action produces information so just just like keep doing stuff you know i remember like um paul is a good life yeah paul graham had this great line like that i think that's his line and he he was like startups are like sharks if they stop swimming swimming they die you know so even if you're like not sure what to do like just do anything because when you do it it'll like it'll produce some information like people liked it they didn't this was very true for me there was times where i just did something um instead of debating it endlessly and like just try it you know like all right so we shipped it and like there was a couple times where like the minute i shipped it and i was like i knew i know we we built this wrong but now i have an idea of what to do next and it wasn't i only would have had that idea if we had actually gone through the exercise of going to build it it's like my other favorite analogy for this is that you're like at the base of a mountain that's shrouded in fog and you're looking up at the mountain and you're trying to think like okay how do i get up there but you can only see like three or four steps ahead because the fog is so thick so you have to just take steps into the unknown and when you take three steps another three steps will be revealed ahead of you and sometimes you'll end up on some local maximum you'll have to retrace your steps or whatever but or come up to a cliff you know but um most people in life don't take the steps into the fog into the unknown because it's scary or they're like i don't know what if i fail or like i don't know how that's gonna work or i might run out of money or i won't be able to get a job after or i don't know whatever reason but that that is like one of the things that separates i think entrepreneurial people with that kind of inclination is that they have sort of a comfort with this risk tolerance but it's actually not really risky if you think about it it's not like you know in at least in most um places like you know if you go to if you go to a startup and it fails like you're gonna you're even more valuable to your next employer right or you can go raise a seed round pay yourself a salary try it for like two years or three years if it doesn't work go get another job it's not like you're you weren't paying yourself a salary during that time so i think i think people overestimate the risk of doing a startup and they just never they never start because it seems crazy and all your friends think it's silly like that's sort of the default nature of every big startup idea it's just basic fear it's the same kind of fear that if you see a if you're a guy see a cute girl at a bar it's the fear associated with coming up to her yeah you like her asking her it's like what's the actual risk exactly right um she'll say i'm no thanks i'm not no thanks and i i guess the risk is like that's going to be mentally difficult to deal with rejection so just like it's mentally difficult to deal with failure if you if you had a bunch of ideas and you were excited about them and you implement them and you realize they're not good that could be difficult to to keep pushing through that but i suppose that's life you're supposed to you know perseverance through the failures yeah and then the risk is low so that's and then the whole time through the fog up the mountain you're looking for product market fit yeah that's right so you know you have it when the usage of your product keeps growing without any marketing dollars or anything like that it's just like more people keep coming back every week or month so you're kind of keep you're basically watching your stats nothing is working you see these little wiggles of false hope in your metrics and you basically just keep talking to customers fixing the improving the product talk to customers improve the product talk to customers you know and trying to run out of money so be really scrappy and then if you're lucky you hit some kind of threshold where like okay the thing is good enough now or we hit on some use case and then it'll organically start to grow a bit and then then you have a whole different set of problems once you hit product market fit which is how do we scale this thing how do we hire people how do we you know hire an executive team or raise more money and like so the problems totally change but um you're there through the whole thing so that's the other question that's fascinating again back to the girl at the bar how do you hire people it's like how do you find good friends how do you find good relationships and in this specific case how do you hire good people engineers executive all of it one thing is i've done a lot of reps on hiring at this point so um coinbase has about 5 000 people um probably the first 500 people or something maybe in that range um you know i i interviewed every single one of those but you have to remember there's probably like i don't know on average maybe 10 people that we went in the process for every one we hired or something so it was like by the time that we had 500 employees i had done like 5 000 interviews or something i was like very burned out in interviews i had been doing i had some days i did like seven interviews in a day or maybe um you know you've been you would do lots of interviews maybe you wouldn't get burned out but different kind of interviews uh very different very different yeah very different because you're uh so first of all most of your interviews lead to rejection yeah which is also exhausting yeah and there's a whole there's a whole part of the interview which is about candidate experience right sometimes you know it's not the right person but you want to make sure they have a good experience like if you're just exhausted and you're on your sixth interview and you're like well thanks for coming in and you wrap and you just and then like you're gonna create a detractor someone is out there like fuck that company or brian was rude to me or whatever so i had to honestly i had to work on that a little bit in the early days i was doing so many interviews like i needed to make sure that um when people came in i was like you know made them feel comfortable um asked him a couple of like warm-up questions just like how how was it getting in the office like did you find it okay and like what have you been up to this week and not just like you know like a factory assembly line like boom boom boom like yeah but also there's a moment because i've interviewed a bunch of people for like teams and stuff yeah there's also a moment when you early on no it's not gonna be a good fit yeah and you still have to land that plane and yeah and all that kind of stuff and that could get really really really exhausting so yeah anyway sorry so yeah so basically we tried all we've tried so many things over the years to make interviews more efficient because it's a huge time sync for um the team so you know we we basically will usually get them down to like 25 minutes i've seen if you're trying to hire like a big team let's say um you know of people who are like contractors or something not necessarily full-time employees i've seen people actually do 10-minute interviews you can even interview like a thousand people almost like in a week or something i'm not sure if that quite works out but let me a little less than that but you can basically get six and six done in an hour if you're just i need to get a team of 30 contractors for whatever purpose but if you're talking about full-time employees i usually do like 25 minute you know you're oftentimes like one one thing we've done is we'll put like a um like a google form online and it's like put some basic hurdles in there like you know ask them um to put in an answer which you can check in a spreadsheet if it was correct or not and like there were some funny examples in the early days of coinbase where we put in like brain teasers and stuff but we don't do that anymore we do like normal interviews we do references the kinds of things i ask in interviews um you know it's usually like i like to think about what what do we need this person to accomplish in this role right and get really specific about that it's like usually something pretty hard and then i'll ask them a question it's like tell me about a time you did x and um or tell me about the hardest the hardest kind of problem you've had to solve in why and what did you do specifically to overcome it right so i'm asking to see if they can actually do the stuff we need to get done but then i'm also kind of asking inter like culture questions if i'm interviewing for that and so i'm trying to see like are they concise communicators can they just give me a clear answer and stop talking some people like ramble on for like five ten minutes if you ask the first question some people are you know their interrupter like church of interruption so like they won't stop talking until you interrupt them which for me i know i'm always patient and i wait so yeah that's weird i'm looking to see for humility too like you know i'll tell ask people well tell me about a time something went really wrong like you had conflict or someone on a team or um and what i'm kind of looking for is were they part of the solution or are they still holding on to like blame and criticism about that and be like well i told them it shouldn't do that way but they didn't listen to me you know these are all like bad signs so i'm looking for yeah can they get the job done will they work together on a team can they communicate effectively do they fit into our cultural values and you know those kind of things yeah i mean there's uh because i've uh even even for help with this this podcast here but also at mit and so on i've done a bunch of hiring and uh i was always looking for you said brain teasers all kinds of simple questions that can that can reveal a lot of information and it's always been challenging i used to i still asked this question but uh do you think it's better to work hard or work smart and you know i had this idea that i've that i think i've matured about which is i kind of believe that people who say work smart on that question don't actually work smart so the right textbook answers what it's better to work smart but the reality is it's it's people that haven't actually ever done anything that say work smart they're like they haven't really struggled because my general belief at the time was in order to discover what it means to work smart to be efficient to you have to work your ass off so you have to really fail a lot and failure feels like hard work and so i was always suspicious of people that would say work smart i would want to interrogate that question um but then i also you know have have learned that there is people that are just exceptionally um exceptionally efficient they really do know what it means to work smart even at a young age and so like you can't just disqualify based on that you have to dig in deeper but some of the most interesting people i've ever worked with would say work hard unapologetically and they're usually the ones that know how to be efficient which is it's just an interesting thing like that and and i've always searched for questions of that nature to see can i can i get can i get a person to reveal something profound about them in as brief of a question as possible and i you know and then of course there's basic attention to detail and brain teasers and stuff like that depending on the role programming and so on to see can they can they solve a tricky puzzle and do so like one that doesn't require a lot of effort but requires a certain um non-linear way of thinking is there is there some i mean maybe you don't want to reveal but is there some questions that you sometimes find yourself leaning on you said like how did you solve a hard problem in your past and have them talk through it that's one you know we started with brain teasers periodically at coinbase and i we got we got away from that relatively quickly and i think one i it's a tough one because i actually think it does show how somebody kind of performs under pressure but it's i don't think it's a super reliable indicator because there's some people who are really good in what the typical work situation but that's not a typical work situation where somebody puts you on the spot like in a live interview and sometimes people get nervous and they can't think clearly and like they don't have their computer in front of them or whatever they normally use so yeah i i'm a little skeptical now of the of the brain teaser thing um there is a whole yeah there is a whole question about like a lot of universities are getting rid of you know entrance exams so if you're hiring right out of universities um sometimes it's becoming a less reliable indicator of like are they in that university and i've heard some companies we haven't done this yet but i've heard some companies are actually creating their own like for college grads like their own um basically exams like standardized testing almost to get people in the door because the degree almost like doesn't mean what it used to which is the whole topic but yeah that's fascinating because um it's fascinating both for that because it's not just about you trying to hire a great team it's also to help them find the right place to work at yeah just like it's like a two-way street um all right so once you found the the product market fit how did coinbase become what it is today so let me ask on an engineering question actually sort of uh from the the ruby wallet days what are some of the interesting challenges there or are they not engineering just the the things that had to be solved uh what were they engineering regulation um financial hiring lawyers what was it so post product market fit yeah a lot of it's scaling and you got to build up build out an actual company so i remember i was still writing a lot of code there for a while and we were we were hiring in we had like maybe 25 people or something i remember one of our investors came by one day and he was like brian how much your time are you spending writing code i was like maybe maybe 50 or something he was like how much time are you spending hiring people i was like probably 20 and he was like i think you need to flip those numbers like this company's not gonna scale you're the ceo you don't need to be writing code every day you're gonna have to transition that stuff like even if people can't all that stuff's locked in your head so maybe they're not gonna do it as well as you for the first six months or something but like if you don't start to transition it you're never gonna build a real company it's just gonna be you're gonna be the bottleneck so you know like a lot of founders that took me a while to like really internalize that lesson i'd always heard people say that and you know but i still was holding on too much to decision making and i probably still am by the way like even to this day at coinbase where we uh continually have to push down decision making in the org like even with 5000 people like who are the owners of each of these things and so the temptation is people to push it up and you become a bottleneck and anyway um so yeah you want you basically need to make sure you have enough money where you don't die if there's in some some kind of a downturn or hit break even profitability we were in a position where we were periodically profitable during up periods but then crypto would go down and we were unprofitable and so we had to kind of manage our own psychology and the balance sheet to make sure we didn't like die in the downturn which a lot of crypto companies did um we had to basically professionalize a whole bunch of services that had been just very quickly thrown together by like 20 year olds right whether that was cyber security it's like okay how do you get like a really senior experienced cyber security person but not someone who's so senior that they can't get their hands dirty and they can come into a company with 25 50 people how do you get a finance person to come and do that our finances were a mess like we didn't even really know how much money we had at certain times and stuff i mean this was it's embarrassing to say but it was true like i remember there was a point where um we had raised i think like our series c or something like that and i think we had our bank accounts i just put like 25 million dollars like in a different bank account that none of this stuff was touched to the actual operation the business because i was like you know our operations were so messy and we needed to hire a new finance person and i was like this i heard horror stories of actually startups where they thought they had x amount of money and then it turned out they had way less and then the whole thing was insolvent in like three weeks so you wanted to have some padding until yes like all right i can't at least count on this to save us if we go to like super negative right i mean it was like a cheap hack but that was like the only thing they could come up with and you know until we could hire like a real cfo and financial team who like okay now we got our arms around how much cash we have it sounds silly but we had such high volume of money coming in and out anyway what was the ordering of hiring by the way like uh how many engineers was it early on you said cfo was not did you even have a cfo for a bit yeah like what was the the landscape of hiring as you building up this company was it engineering focused well let's see i mean so the first person we hired was just like we need we need to solve customer support so we brought someone to do that because we were all staying up till midnight every night trying to do customer support and then we got more engineers and then i think maybe the sixth hire or something like that was a recruiter because that that turned out to be you you need to build hire the person who can hire more people yeah that turned out to be a great forced multiplier and then man you go on down the list eventually you want to hire some more senior people um we needed legal and compliance we needed that really badly because we you know there's all kinds of questions about what the legality of it was was it hard to find legal people that work with crypto like serious adults because it's such a cutting-edge new world yeah i mean there was nobody who had like more than nobody had three years of experience with it because it had only been around a year so yeah we were finding people from adjacent fields there's a certain personality type of people who are willing to join early companies because they have no structure you can't really commit to them about you're going to have this team or this boss or whatever like everything's in chaos and flux so it takes yeah hiring is one of the hardest things in the early stage for sure you got to find people crazy enough to join you on this journey so one of the interesting things about coinbase and you've written we've talked we'll talk about it a bit you're very focused on the mission yeah yeah you're very kind of i think that simplifies things that makes that makes hiring easier that makes working a coinbase easier that makes yeah i mean it's similar sort of elon has the same thing it's pretty clear it's pretty clear what we're here to do yeah so i suppose what's the mission of coinbase well it's to increase economic freedom in the world and what is economic freedom yeah so economic freedom is this term kind of like gdp that economists use and it's basically a measure of different countries around the world it looks at things like are there property rights in forest is there free trade is the currency stable can you start companies that you want to start and can you join the ones you want to join and you know is there corruption and bribery prevalent or is it relatively free of that and so this there's several different organizations that basically score countries by economic freedom and the really cool thing about economic freedom is that basically it positively correlates with things that we all want in society like um not only higher growth of the economy but also things like higher self-reported happiness of citizens better treatment of the environment better income for the poorest ten percent of people and it negatively correlates with things we don't want in society like corruption and bribery and war even and things like that and so it's this pretty pretty crazy provocative idea which is that if you give people good property rights and rule of law and allow them to trade it basically encourages them to do more good stuff and the whole society benefits like one of the things you know you may have noticed this growing up in various places you did or you know i spent a year living in buenos aires argentina that went through hyperinflation and there's a certain like pessimism that can creep into countries when they don't have economic freedom which it's basically like everyone has this bit of this vibe which is like don't stick your head up you know don't try too hard because it could all be gone tomorrow like the things that really are valuable in life are just family and friends and the past was better than the future will be and and so you don't really people don't try as many they don't try hard because you're not really sure you can actually keep the upside of your labor if you if you try hard so you just don't try as hard whereas in america historically um you know or high economic freedom countries you know people basically like they just try more stuff because they're like if i do good for other people i'll get to keep part of it for myself and i can improve my lot in life and for my children my community whatever so i realized when i read the bitcoin white paper a long time ago that at least i had a hunch at the time i was like this might be a really powerful piece of technology that can inject good financial infrastructure into all these countries around the world that don't have it basically good economic freedom principles in like you know property rights and things like that into these countries all over the world with just as long as you had a smartphone and now crypto got invented we could everybody could have economic freedom and it's crypto is kind of really well suited for economic freedom because if you want property rights it's based like crypto is if you can remember a 12 word phrase or you know have an app on your phone you can store as much wealth as you want and it can't be taken away from you you can even you know there's like refugees who need to flee and they want to take their wealth with them and they can't do it often in the traditional financial system and so crypto lets them do that right crypto's inherently global so it allows free trade and cross-border payments um it makes it easy to accept payments from people globally you know it's it provides a stable currency to everyone not only with bitcoin which is kind of like this new reserve currency but um also with stable coins right which are you know new new inventions there so yeah i basically feel like crypto is is this secret hiding in plain sight that can create economic freedom for people all over the world and a more fair and free and global economy well so the limit and by the way i didn't know about argentina why'd you end up in argentina okay so i was basically um you know i was living in houston texas after college where i went to school and i had never studied abroad um i kind of like i don't know i felt like i needed some adventure or something in my life and i was like i was running this other startup that i was trying at the time a tutoring company and i could i could work from anywhere so my plan was you know what i'm just gonna go do like a month in every city around south america just be like almost like to force myself out of my comfort zone because i i had never traveled by myself to a foreign country or whatever and where i didn't really speak the language and anyway i i landed in buenos aires thinking i'd go all around south america where i had never been there but i basically once i was set up in south in in buenos aires with an apartment and a cell phone and stuff then i was like i want to do that all again next month so i just stayed there for most of the time and took some day trips but but yeah it was kind of a formative experience in that regard you got a chance sort of unexpectedly to experience the the social effects of hyperinflation which is interesting but i also i've i've never been i really really want to go as a person who likes tango as a person who likes the argentinian national team in soccer yeah and uh and and steak all right uh and all the other things that argentina is known for okay so um economic freedom one of the limits on economic freedom comes from government and government regulations and all those kinds of things throughout the world um so how does cryptocurrency help resist that so can you sort of elaborate a little bit further what are the things that limit economic freedom and how does crypto help ease that you know today the world like traditional financial system is basically every country of the world for the most part has their own currency and so there's a group of people or institutions in each of those countries that's controlling that economic policy or that money supply and you know it can be it can be manipulated right so it's not like many of these currencies are not linked to gold standard you know the u.s kind of famously came off that in the 1970s for instance but if you read ray dalio and all this stuff like he talks about there's thousands of fiat currencies that have been in existence over time and basically all of them eventually get disconnected from um backing of like hard commodities and then they get over inflated and printed and so in times of stress um you know with nixon i guess it was like in the u.s it was the vietnam war or something like that it kind of drove government spending and so under times of stress they say hey it's a temporary measure we need to break the peg um temporary was like you know famous words that he used and um and they go they go like they go print and so the bad thing about that of course is that it sort of erodes people's like wealth if they can only hold their assets in cash which basically like poor people tend to do that you know if you're wealthy you can hold um stocks or like real estate and things like that but so it's a really attacks on the poorest people in society inflation so anyway crypto in in a way is a little bit of like um a return to the gold standard in this digital era right bitcoin there's guaranteed scarcity of it it's deflationary there's never going to be more than 21 million bitcoin and so that's that's a really important principle um i also think bic you know not just bitcoin but like cryptocurrency generally it's really important in terms of this um you asked about regulation right so think about like if you wanted to make a global um borrowing and lending marketplace or a global exchange you would have to go to all 200 countries in the world sometimes like maybe 50 states in the u.s and get lending licenses or an operating exchange or whatever and you know they're not gonna that's just an incredible amount of work and you can't even do business in many of these countries because like you know you have to bribe somebody or it's corrupt or whatever and so but with defy with decentralized finance people have published um you know like uniswap is a decentralized exchange everybody in the world no matter what country you're in what jurisdiction can i can interface with that decentralized exchange because it and there's no central um company operating it it's it's a it's a it's a smart contract on the ethereum blockchain which is globally decentralized so there's no throat to choke there's no one person you can or a company you can go to to like hey shut this thing down even if everybody who's working on unit swap today stopped the us the unit swap smart contract would continue to operate on the ethereum blockchain um similarly for like a borrowing lending marketplace you know like it's you know if you want somebody in india wants to borrow from somebody in the u.s or whatever like there's very difficult to do that in the traditional financial world but in a smart contract that's decentralized you can enable anybody to access it so it's it's really kind of this great democratizing force that is creating a new financial system that is more fair and more free um yeah and in some ways it is um it's a it's a clever it's a clever way that's not yeah it's it's enabling people to do that in a novel way so is unit swap in some sense a competitor coinbase in which way is it and which way is it not so because for people who don't know coinbase is centralized so let me ask uh doesn't that go against the spirit of crypto since kryptos is is decentralized what are the pros and cons of being centralized as an exchange so i don't think coinbase is fully centralized there we have many different products and the way that i think about it is that our exchange or our brokerage is a centralized regulated financial service business and it's actually important for the crypto ecosystem to have that because you want to allow a lot of the fiat money in the world to flow into the crypto economy so we you know we're very proud of that and i think we've helped a lot of that money flow in now once people have money in crypto they can choose to hold it in a variety of ways and they can choose to hold it in a self-custodial wallet which is more decentralized they can choose to use decentralized exchanges which we we love and uniswap is not really i don't think of them as like a direct competitor to us we we basically have integrated um unit swap into a number of our products we we love d5 decentralized exchanges all the whole thing so any coinbase wallet which is a self-custodial wallet is more decentralized and it allows people to um hold their own crypto they don't have to trust us can you explain what a self-custodial wallet is what is the wallet and what is the self-custodial wallet yeah so it's confusing so um so a custodial wallet means you're trusting coinbase to store your crypto the private keys themselves and you know for some people in institutions and everything just meeting them where they are today that's nice because it's simpler you know um they're not afraid of losing their crypto if they make some accident accidental mistake or so you know a custodial um crypto products are important to help get a bunch of people into the ecosystem but i'm very supportive of self-custodial wallets and i think in some ways they are the future because more and more people are going to want to store their own crypto not trust a third-party institution do it and in some ways that is much more authentic to the ethos of crypto so coinbase will help you convert the fiat into crypto in a frankly that's a more centralized thing but once you have crypto you can then go to the self custodial world store it yourself in in a to get into the technical details just for a second it's basically saying um you're going to store the keys on your own device and so um even if coinbase you know gets some court order to seize it we actually can't like from an architecture point of view we can't do it um or you know if coinbase gets hacked or something we can't lose your funds like now you the thing is you have to take the responsibility because we're not taking it so the individual person could get hacked right and there's a whole bunch of really cool research happening to make self custodial wallets more resilient to accidental loss hacks and just user error like you know they're i don't know how much you've looked at like various cryptography things but there's like basically um you can have multiple key multi-sig multiple signatures from different keys on different devices where you need like two of the three or three of the five there's a whole um technology called multi-party computation or threshold signing signatures which is really cool um but those are the things you would run locally like these are all security measures like cryptography measures to protect you without a centralized component right so like a simple example would be let's say you had a two of three key signature and you know one key might be sort of coinbase but that's not a quorum so we couldn't unilaterally move your funds but another key is on your device on your phone let's say oh cool um so that so in a normal situation you have a key on your phone we have one um but you and so two out of three now just you know it can all get signed very quickly for day-to-day use but let's say you lose your phone or something now there has to be a third key and that's where you know you could store it in a backup somewhere um like in google drive or icloud you could trust a third party that's not coinbase to also have that one key and they can't do anything unilaterally with that one key so that's a simple example you can get you can get way more complicated yeah that's an awesome idea and so like yeah if your funds get seized coinbase can't can't do anything right uh but you better not lose your phone maybe in that case yeah so yeah that's but it provides a there is so even if you lose your phone then there is a recovery mechanism because you can get the one key from coinbase the one from your backup provider and recover a new one back on your phone i know yeah but but what if coinbase is no longer but because of government because of what say it's in north korea government says you're no longer like coinbase is shut down in that country or something like that right then you can get it even if you have access to those too right so uh again perhaps a silly question but isn't a self-custodial wallet a competitor as a notion to coinbase no i mean we so we offer a self custodial wallet um we've built one and it's like but doesn't it bleed the like i guess i'm asking a sort of a financial question is uh like how does coinbase make money on transactions so does this not does it does not decrease the number or does not significantly negatively affect transactions or are you more focused on growing the number of the pie of the number of people that are using cryptocurrency yeah like a traditional financial service firm would probably say well we should be storing let's keep more of the custody with us because that's how we prove to the world that we're valuable or whatever i don't really believe that like i think that actually we kind of want to encourage our users to move to self-custody over time for those who are ready and willing and that technology needs to mature i'm not trying to like force anybody to do it who doesn't want to do it but to me that's like the future of how we get billions of people using crypto but doesn't that mean they can go somewhere else easier yeah that's sort of the point is like we're all using the same protocol so there's low switching costs which keeps all the companies accountable right like if you if you want to access the visa network there's only one company in the world you can go through to do that like visa but if you want to access the bitcoin network there's dozens or hundreds of companies out there who can do that so it's you know it's arguably you could argue it's worse for us as a company but i think it's better for it's what makes bitcoin interesting and cryptocurrency interesting is that nobody controls it there is low switching cost for customers it's better for customers and that means that all the companies in the space are going to be held to a high standard because the minute you lose someone's trust they're going to move their bitcoin to some other service and that's good for the world do you think of coinbase as uh so there's these ideas of layer one layer two layer three technologies yeah do you think of coinbase as layer one layer two layer three now that that said there's so many um products that are under the coinbase umbrella that's hard to answer that question but what do you think yeah do you acknowledge the existence of layer three so so you know usually when people are using those terms layer one layer to this so they're referring to like layer one would be um the blockchain layer one blockchain itself like like a bitcoin or ethereum or something not like a a centralized service like coinbase or even our decentralized um self-custodial wallet so um yeah i wouldn't consider us to be like a layer one these are these are the decentralized protocols that we're integrating but we are coinbase itself is not those yes but layer two is the thing that was basically doing transactions without the settlement on the blockchain and so you you get to have some of the benefits of faster transactions without um the the security associated with the blockchain and layer three is i suppose sort of apps built on top of that so you know uh at least i think talking to michael saylor he considers coinbase a layer three technology interesting okay i'm not really particularly familiar with this kind of distinctional there three and two i don't see them as fundamentally different uh but some of the okay i mean one way of asking that is there some layer two like of magic happening in order to make transactions associated with the blockchain happen instant so that they're quick so that coinbase on coinbase yeah um is there some magic going on because you're okay we should say how many cryptocurrencies are currently on coinbase so it's more than two yeah it's a lot more than two yeah so you have to understand they have to incorporate all these technologies yeah so how do you make that magic of sort of universal transactions happen across all of these different cryptocurrencies there's our centralized products and decentralized products right the centralized products um we are storing that crypto for you and so if you're moving from one of your accounts to another account like each one account to eth2 account or um from my ether ethe coinbase centralized account to your ether so we can do that transaction off chain to make it faster and it saves the customer fees and it just confirms instantly but it's not truly using the decentralized blockchain right so you can also send to any any bitcoin address or a theorem address for instance and that is putting the transaction on chain now our decentralized products like coinbase wallet the the self custodial wallet every transaction is happening on chain with that and so basically what it just shows a little bit of the evolution of coinbase and the blockchains themselves like in the early days um these you know the we these networks were not scalable and so there were no l2 solutions for instance and so we had to do sort of these hacks like moving the crypto off chain if you were moving between your own accounts and stuff like that otherwise the miner fees would have just eaten us alive as a company right and we yeah but now that like the blockchains are starting to scale there's a whole bunch more work that needs to be done on that and we're getting l2 solutions so i think more and more of the transactions are going on chain whether it's l2 l1 and you know we shouldn't be like ideally we shouldn't be doing that many transactions um you know off chain but just internal coinbase ledger or something that's not really in the spirit of crypto so when you say unchained that includes like a lightning net that includes layer layer two technology that the blockchain proposes yeah so you're when you yeah okay so i guess i was asking how much fun magic is happening off-chain within coinbase and you're saying in the early days you had to but you try and do less and less so look there's a bunch of like high frequency traders that use the centralized products and even just regular retail people like they don't want to pay the gas fees and stuff and they're trying to it actually we we um back at the envelope you know calculated this out at one point and just like it would be completely infeasible for like high frequency traders to put everything on chain at this point that's basically what dexes are doing and so both are important i think more and more is going to move decentralized over time which is great and we're and we're basically our decentralized exchanges yeah by the way yeah yeah um so anyway we want to we want to encourage more and more of it to move decentralized over time but i don't the centralized things aren't going away for like a long time it's a decade from now there's gonna be some big institution or pension fund or central bank that's like all right we gotta hold crypto let's set up the account in a centralized way so that's that's fine both both are important do you know the number of cryptocurrencies currently on coinbase do you know that number it's over a hundred but it depends it depends what jurisdiction you're in and you know are you um an institution versus retail it's like there's so many different categories now yeah so what does it take to become to to to become an asset to become a cryptocurrency on coinbase to add your technology to coinbase okay well so we're trying to get away from this idea of being listed on coinbase as being seen as like an endorsement or something because i actually think it's very important that we are not considered um judge and jury about you know like imagine in the early days of the internet and you were like what's a good web page and what's a bad web page like you would have been totally wrong or anytime big tech companies try to make these um review review boards of like you know apple famously gets in trouble for this a lot with their app store review process right and so something that you think like a committee of people somewhere thinks looks silly may turn out to be the next big thing right and so it's very difficult so what do we do i mean we basically have a test of legality right we we check um you know do we belie do we believe this is a security if so it can't be listed on coinbase and there's a very rigorous process we go through for that um just currently the way the laws are in the us you can't you can't do that and we've been we acquired a broker dealer license from the sec we're trying to work with them to get that operational and hopefully someday we can trade real crypto securities but today that's not possible in the us at least um then we look at sort of the cyber security of the the crypto asset does it do we think there's some flaw in the smart contract or you know a way that somebody could um manipulate it without the customer's permission we look at some compliance pieces to it as well like the the actors behind it and like you know they're any kind of criminal history anything like that but if we believe it meets our our listing standards basically the this test of um legality and everything for for customer protection then we want to list it because we want the market to at that point decide and it's kind of like um it's kind of like amazon or something like that where you know it a product might have three stars or it might have five stars but if it starts to get one star consistently like it's probably fraudulent or it's defective or something like maybe amazon will remove it but otherwise you want to let the market decide what these things are um so that's generally how we do it and by the way more and more of these assets um i think especially like low market cap assets are going to be traded on dexes through coinbase it's not that we we don't need to list every asset on a centralized exchange i think dexes are really good for the long tail and then it becomes an even it's even more clear to people like this is not some endorsement by a coinbase of like this assets good and this one's bad like you know my belief is there's going to be millions of these assets over time and so um i hope it doesn't like make news every time we add one in the future basically yeah i wonder how you get there because i even i look to coinbase for for example you know people as you could imagine sort of tagged me on twitter or something like that and all that like you should interview our sort of this the the founder of this particular coin right yeah and i it's so hard for me to know what's ha first of all what's interesting technology what's uh who's a scammer or not who's actually legitimately representing an ambitious new thing versus a scam and i you know there's very few sources of uh like verification signal and unfortunately coinbase in part has become a little bit of that too and you're trying to get away from that because you're trying to get as many so let the people decide so you're thinking of like amazon star type system where the people could rate yeah so i think we'll actually probably add like user ratings and reviews so um and and we'll be very cautious about like you know these are real people um there's a bunch of stuff we have to do from that already so i think wisdom of the crowds is good in terms of getting feedback on items but we also we're gonna do our own review which i mentioned earlier right which is like okay it meets this minimum bar to be listed on our site yeah um i think yeah both are important how do you know if if a coin is a scam or not well you can you can see a few things so you know i hate to use the word scam because a lot of these these are judgment calls you got a kind of a court made me or a jury may land either way but things that would be red flags to look at would be um you know is a bunch of the asset owned by an insider or insiders um with short vesting periods um you know are does the background of the founders like they may have criminal records or they've perpetrated other frauds in the past right um there's a difference between something which is just a me too product it's like it doesn't have anything interesting about it and something that's an actual fraud or outright scam and um you have to a lot of this data what's cool about it is that it's now available on chain you can look at like the tokenomics behind it and see who owns economics and are they yeah and are they selling it you know in like inappropriately or are they pumping it on like youtube and twitter and making promises about hey the value of this thing may be a higher in the future and like all those are just big big no-nos that we would um you know we just don't want to go there so our whole thing is like we want we want to enable innovation in this space but not allow anybody to curtail the advancement of this industry by like doing some kind of fraudulent thing or get rich quick thing so it's a tricky industry because i'm trying to figure out who to you know uh what's interesting to to to to understand to research yeah and uh it's hard to know let me ask you about a trick you want to add to a centralized exchange which is privacy preserving cryptocurrency so like monero yeah is that is that technically difficult or is that why why is like monero for example forget that specific one but like privacy preserving cryptocurrency blockchains uh why is that ever possible to add so that's that's a great question so the answer is maybe so um here here's the here's the what the reason why so um because we're a regulated financial service business we have various um licenses to do that we are we are regulated by various regulators part of those licenses requires us to have a quote reasonable um program to monitor for suspicious activity um you know an aml program anti-money laundering right and so if it if a coin is 100 anonymous and we can't really do blockchain analytics to track um sorts of funds and where these things might be going it makes it harder to have a um a reasonable program around that that's defensible now there are privacy preserving coins like zcash which have something called a view key and a view key is basically another key which allows you to de-anonymize the transactions in specific situations where you want that so for instance um you know we do support zcash and one of the ways we got comfortable with that is that when you're buying it on coinbase um you know you can basically have a view key the the transactions are not anonymous while you're buying it and we can see where it goes afterwards and do our our whole standard program um now if it gets a few hops away down the road i mean people could eventually turn on privacy preserving aspects so you know these are tough judgment calls but at least in terms of our interaction with the customer and everything we feel comfortable at that i think there's a broader point here which is that i actually think privacy coins are a good thing for the world and we and they should be allowed and more like you know despite we've made this judgment call to operate in a regulated and safe and compliant way but just taking my coinbase head off for a minute i think the world would be a better place if there were more privacy coins because it's kind of like the internet when it first came online like there was no https everything was http and there was you know so people were afraid to put their credit cards on the internet and um your your messages could be intercepted and all the stuff and now the whole internet has basically moved to https with a little lock icon in your browser which is better like and and financial information is like the most important information to keep private right so there's times where let's say you're running a charity or something and you want to have total auditability transparency for the whole world who donated and where did the money go that's great you want it to be public but if it's like your personal money or something like that you don't want to be broadcasting that to the whole world and in some ways that's what blockchains are doing you know pseudonymously because like but it is a public ledger and so if you can know who owns each address you can basically de-anonymize it i you know i think basically the people should fight for um privacy and freedoms of all kind but privacy of money is a good thing so i would like to see more of that in the future you chosen with coinbase to to uh to have a seat at the table with the regulators yeah so what kind of what kind of conversations are there at that table what are the regulations like what is the level of understanding with regulators what are they worried about what are they thinking about what are the positive and what are the negative regulations that you're facing that you're educating struggling with pushing back on supporting all that kind of stuff yeah oh man there's so many because we're i mean we're live in like you know maybe 100 countries or more at this point so the the conversations are all over the map um i'm trying to think what broad strokes i could paint for you so i'd say one trend that's that's positive is that basically regulators around the world are con are more and more as over the last five years i would say it's more and more common to find a regulator today asking how can we preserve the innovation potential of this technology while keeping the bad actors out than it was five years ago where they were saying this is all bad activity how do we prevent it and so um maybe this is when you say more and more what fraction [Laughter] i'll give you like a u.s specific example although we operate in many countries so when i go to dc now i would say you know 50 60 of the people who i meet with are basically you know they're in the camp of crypto has a lot of potential we should regulate it to make sure the bad people don't do something bad with it but this is here to stay and it has a lot of upside we should basically um create thoughtful regulation and celebrate it and actually encourage this innovation to happen in the u.s that's a huge change from just three years ago where it was probably 30 of people saying that now it's like 60. it's like almost double it's getting harder to find like true cryptoskeptics in dc um i'd say that you know maybe maybe only like 20 or 30 of people are like willing to say something negative like they actually think it's net negative it's like it's really hard to defend that position at this point because almost like one in five americans have used or tried crypto at this point so you're kind of condemning 20 of your fellow citizens if you say that at this point um you know especially with nfts and all these things like a huge segment of people who don't even care about investing or whatever came into the space so and then basically that's that same conversation is happening um but you know delayed by a few years in in like india and europe and in in some asian countries and um some countries have really embraced crypto and they're like trying to really they're they're ahead of where the us is because they're trying to actually uh attract the best startups and entrepreneurs like you know like dubai and uk and australia and all kind of pushing good regulation um el salvador actually i guess adopted it as like bitcoin as a legal tender there was another country central african republic i think that supposedly did that as well but you know there's countries like china that are more autocratic that are saying hey this is a threat to our power and like we're going to try to really curtail it so what kind of regulations are there that you feel the most that are limiting or that are empowering like is there specific examples yeah okay so um i mean basically i think the securities laws in the u.s need to be clarified about um what there's crypto is many different things that's what people don't realize so like some crypto like bitcoin ethereum and many others are probably more like commodities um they're not controlled by any one person you know like anyway there's people who want to raise money for a company that sounds more like a security that should be regulated by the sec commodities are regulated by the cftc then there's some cryptocurrencies which are more like uh currencies like stable coins and central bank digital currencies and those are probably you know should be regulated by the treasury or someone like that and then there's a whole another category of cryptocurrencies which are none of those things they're they're nfts like artwork or their metaverse items or decentralized identity and voting and so i i think that there's a very um unhelpful point of view out there by some folks which is hey this is all most of this is like bad activity we need to shut it down so we're just going to pursue enforcement actions or something like that most people in dc don't feel that way anymore and i think the people of the us don't feel that way anymore because a lot of them are using this stuff and their their general view is there's a lot of upside potential here we can all agree let's get rid of the fraud and the scams we all want to get rid of that so let's create a relatively simple test which says you know if it's like nobody controls more than 20 of it or some threshold it probably is more like a commodity if someone's raising money for they're selling this thing for a business then it's probably a security and then you know if it's more like a medium of exchange it's a currency and if it's none of those things maybe it's artwork or whatever a legal test like that would help clarify who which regulator is regulating what and then um you know we also want to have probably like a sandbox for innovation where if you're a startup and you're doing less than i don't know some number um less than some amount of payment volume or customer funds you're storing it's like just let those things get off the ground without a soul-crushing amount of legal bills you know and uncertainty so if the u.s can get there that would be great i think a bunch of other countries now are rushing around the world to sort of create that regulation that it does attract innovation and so um in the nash international bodies like imf and g20 and stuff they're they're starting to look at proposed regulation i hope that coinbase and a bunch of other crypto companies can help in that conversation too we have a whole policy effort i think actually crypto policy efforts are like probably one of the biggest things in dc right now so um it moves it moves slow at the speed of government but um yeah and in the meantime we're just trying to help more and more people use crypto because ultimately that's what in the democracies that's what they care about like they'll do what the people of the country want so you want governments to start understanding uh differences between in the crypto space commodities securities currencies nfts i still don't understand what is supposed to make sense of nfts what is nfts exactly from a perspective of a regulator yeah so um is it the other categories is that yeah you know most nfts you could think of as like artwork although it's it's who knows where it's going to go it could be you mentioned metaverse right you mentioned some kind of unique identity of a thing yeah like i mean there's everything yeah right nfts i actually i bought this nft that's like um it's like citizenship in this like city dao in wyoming like i've never been there but um it's almost like a like a as like a badge or at a station like to get access to this location um there's like people doing like like tickets to events like you know they're called uh co-ops like um proof of attendance and things like that so it'll be very interesting to see where nfts go over time it could get that's and that's the danger you don't want to try to like define the regulation if you don't even know where this thing's going to go so and so your efforts on the policy arm is is education yeah education advocacy we're just trying to be like a helpful educational resource essentially and then if they give us feedback and like hey don't do this or don't or do this like we're more than happy to do anything that's requested we generally go get licenses and we've just tried to do the right thing in the absence of clarity because it's if it's not clear what what the law says then you should just basically do good things that you think may be required in the future to show good faith effort towards the right thing and uh that's part of like innovating in a regulated field which is you know whole topic in itself so if you are at the table i mean this is less the case in the united states but can government agencies seize a person cryptocurrency by forcing coinbase to to hand it over so when you're centralized you they have a phone number to call okay so this is a complicated topic um like if you really want to be sure that um this is why people want to store their own crypto right like with self-custodial wallets like with coinbase wallet and bracing decentralization they want to avoid that now in the u.s there is rule of law right so we have reasonable protections in place around um like search and seizure and things like that um you know coinbase does we publish transparency reports on this we get subpoenas court orders things like that from various um countries around the world and um there are situations where we have been ordered to freeze accounts things like that um you know we have to follow the law is there's no another way to put it we're a regulated financial service business and so if the money is used to break as part of breaking the law that's what that uh in a particular jurisdiction in particular right and then the other thing sometimes you we will actually get court orders or subpoenas that are overly broad we've seen so they need to follow due process right and so we've seen um some in the past that were like well we need you to freeze this huge number of accounts and it's like well we'll actually have gone to court and like pushed back on some of these and said like what is your the probable cause and is that has the threshold been met and like we've won some of those cases on behalf of our customers so yeah it's it's actually really it's kind of unfortunate and frustrating as a you know as a large business you spend a lot of resources basically interacting with inbound requests by all kinds of lawyers and people and requesting things and some of them are silly and ridiculous and you have to push back and say no and so it's kind of a tax on every company at a certain size which ultimately gets passed on to the the customer in higher fees so you have to employ armies of lawyers to deal with this stuff can you educate me on something how much innovation is there in the legal space so for lawyers working with coinbase because it's such a new cutting-edge thing so you're if there's a lot of gray area you're supposed to be operating under like how hard is is it being a lawyer at coinbase like uh how much precedence is there i guess is what i'm asking i mean just like you said three years it's kind of a new space yeah well it's probably very hard to be alert coinbase and very fun because you know whenever you're in a new field that's growing fast there isn't a lot of um case law and just precedent set so that's also an opportunity for you to go create that stuff and that's what a lot of legal careers are made out of is like take a complex situation where you have to balance difficult things like how do we prevent bad activity but still enable an innovation that's a hard question and there's you can go draft legislation and circulate it to policy policymakers or come up with these policies and you know how do you operate a business in an environment where the law is just unclear right it's like try to do the right thing um but like you know strike the right balance so yeah a lot of our lawyers have to come up with that very creative stuff you mentioned one of the things you're focused on is expanding the number of people maybe a billion people on coinbase or using cryptocurrency where are we at now how did we get to a billion as of q4 last year we had 89 million verified accounts on coinbase but in any given uh quarter only you know maybe like 10 or a little more million of those are like really active so um and then if you look at globally i think some of the estimates i've seen is maybe there's like 200 million people or something like that who have ever used or tried crypto so we're along you know ways from a billion but it's not like that far off um how do you get there yeah so a few things one is the blockchains have got to become way more scalable um it's kind of like we're all running dial-up modems and we need broadband and so it's just like too expensive too slow to do all these transactions and i think if we just get l2s working and scalability you know we'll see another order of magnitude kind of come out just from that um i think the second one be more clear regulation that would help a lot um i do talk to you know pension funds and um you know various asset managers sovereign wealth funds and stuff and a lot of them tell me we've we've got one percent of our portfolio in crypto today but we really would rather have like 20 in there but what we're waiting for is more clear regulation um coming out and saying that clear test that i was saying these assets are commodities regulated by so if you see these are my sec these are about treasury whatever so that would be a big unlock do transactions so one of the things that you mentioned uh payments sorry yeah well does that unlock a lot of users yeah it does i mean remittance is like a huge thing people sending money home to their families in other countries where the fees are super high so yeah if we get blockchains to be more scalable and there's more global adoption like i think we'll see remittance quarters um move over to crypto a lot there's also just um the other thing that's driving a lot of crypto adoption is basically the creation of more and more third-party apps so or adapts they're sometimes called decentralized apps so a lot of startups now um you know how like you used to use in the early 2000s they called them.com startups but now you don't need to say.com because everybody's using the internet and so now there's like hundreds or thousands of these crypto startups but i think in the future you won't need to call them crypto startups because they'll just be called startups because everyone's using the internet and crypto and whatever so anyway the the the use cases the utility of crypto is is getting better and better with like all these third-party apps getting funded and created and do you think there's gonna be a killer or a set of killer daps like a thing where nobody can live without are we still waiting for that there's gonna be a bunch of them it's just like it's like the internet like what were the killer web companies you know like uber and wikipedia and airbnb and google and like so there's going to be some big winners but there'll be thousands of this is basically the new it's like what happened with the dot-com startups in the early 2000s it's like a lot of the best entrepreneurs are building crypto startups now so um tons of venture money flowing into the space a lot of smart young people so do you think bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency will become the reserve currency of the world at some point so this is kind of a controversial idea but i actually think yes um i do think bitcoin could end up becoming a reserve currency of the world there's so you know i've been reading ray dalio recently um with his new book like the changing world order and i i thought it was a really well researched book um he talks in there he looks back at history right he looks at like empires and um you know going back to various chinese empires the dutch and ottomans and everybody and how did they rise and they they were able to have the reserve currency as they as they rose and what produced that like it came from you know good education and innovation and better trade and anyway so the u.s by some measures is kind of looks like it's maybe it's had a really good run and it's coming down a little bit and china is kind of kind of coming up who knows how that'll play out by the way like the world is very complicated it could that could switch um but i guess if the u.s dollar is going to be seeing more inflation in the future the chinese yuan is not like necessarily better right i mean they have a ton of debt as well and um you know it's not like you could really that that the yuan could be inflated as well right i probably will be and so i do think that there's this group of people today which probably most traditional um i don't know like the people who run big banks and like governments and stuff that they're not this is not really on their radar today but i think there's there's a basically a group of younger people in that kind of you know 25 35 year old range who are tech savvy they're starting to think of crypto as like the primary thing in their financial life it's like i basically hold my wealth in crypto and i use dollars or euros or whatever if i if i happen to need something i convert it to that last minute it's like if i if i go home if i'm traveling i might convert some local currency in the moment but that's not where i hold my most of my wealth so this segment of the population is not like massive yet from a gdp point of view but um i think it's a leading indicator of where things could be going and this is actually good for the world it's kind of like especially if china does continue to rise and it has a more authoritarian view it'll be kind of this very centralized east versus a decentralized west um where people are in the west in the free world really kind of embracing um crypto and a more open fair free global financial system which i think will be enormously beneficial for humanity and i do think basically bitcoin is the reserve currency the gold standard of the crypto economy um so that's pretty crazy yeah the gold standard i mean it's also like with ray dalio um i feel like china will drive a lot of this either in response or directly i mean um i think the ruble i'm not paying as close attention to the financial systems but i think they're trying to tie it to gold once again so that's an interesting maybe it'll be one of the more authoritarian regime that will switch to bitcoin standard first and then um it's the the west that will out of that pressure will catch up versus uh versus the other way around it's it's it's fascinating to think of what is the the forcing function what kind of perturbation is required to switch to change anything honestly about the financial system but it could be um as you're saying just waiting for the people that are young now that are embracing crypto to enter the positions of power essentially but i hope that's not the case because that's uh if for any innovation we have to wait um sorry to say for the older folk to to pass away yeah that's not an efficient way to uh to make change yeah that is that's a super interesting topic of how people's minds become less plastic as they age yeah i guess it's a feature it's called wisdom but then we also need the wild ones to explore exploration versus exploitation you wrote a blog post that's really interesting in september 2020 titled coinbase is a mission-focused company like what we're talking about so one interesting thing you said in that blog post is that we're not going to be distracted by sort of activism within the company that's not related to the mission of the company now that's a rare thing for a company to state for companies here at the state especially in this climate um can you first of all describe in a little more detail what you meant uh did you receive blow back for this i definitely received some blow back but yeah i'll describe what i meant and um if you want to talk about how it came to that too we can talk about that but what i meant is that um there's a lot of companies right now including tech companies but not exclusively where um you know i think like great companies they have an important mission they're trying to do something really good for the world and unfortunately they're getting a little distracted from that at times because of employee activism that is causing the company to basically jump into whatever the current thing is and try to help is like the positive interpretation you know the negative interpretation would be to virtue signal and my view is that this is actually kind of destructive to um this is largely an american company phenomenon by the way i i i do worry that this is making america less competitive um even though i think of myself as kind of internationally minded but i you know i'm a u.s citizen and have a lot my whole life here so um when we put out this statement we had employees that were not in the u.s who were confused by it they were like why did brian need to say that you're just saying you're going to work focus on work at work that's what we were doing already yeah you know and there was certain pockets of the us certain cities you know in particular where we had employees that um a very peculiar cultural phenomenon had evolved where i think people really wanted the company they worked at to be you know uh almost acting like the government or something and like trying to solve the hardest societal issues and and how at least have an opinion on it if not contribute to the solution on almost everything um and for me i kind of uh you know i was it was a very uncomfortable situation for me as a ceo i'd never quite been in this situation where most the time when employees in the past were kind of asking me questions um they would be asking about like you know how do we make this product better like what do we do with this competitor what about this regulator and it got to a place around that time where um most of the questions we were receiving were i think even about things not related to the company they were about broader societal issues like brian what's your stance on xyz controversial thing and you know it was i often like didn't have an opinion on these really hard questions right and um i didn't really i felt like it was distracting the company people internally were getting into fights a lot too like disagreeing with each other there were there was a thing where like the social slack internally was turning into social media almost with people putting in flame wars so and this culminated by the way with um a walkout that happened in the company we we received like some demands from employees groups about various things and there was like basically an antagonistic thing with management and employ and i was like we're all on the same team here if you want to be antagonistic let's do it with somebody else outside the company you know that we're trying to improve the world on in that dimension so yeah eventually i was like okay the company is not aligned on this i just don't feel i don't like the job as ceo frankly like if if the job is to come in here every day and like have to squirm in front of like these the most difficult societal questions um i don't think i want to do that job so like either they're gonna have to go or i'm gonna have to go and i founded this company and i really believe in the mission so they're gonna have to go and what i realized was that um so i basically i made an exit package available to anybody who wasn't on board with this direction five percent of employees took it i got the company realigned towards this this mission we're all here to do work by the way people can they can go do anything like political or social activism outside of work it's totally fine like we all everybody has stuff like that um in their personal life but while at work we can also disagree at work by the way on the work you know this is not like a no disagreement culture like we should let's try to get the truth um but don't bring stuff into work that's just going to create division make the workplace a refuge from division about all these crazy things and like we're all aligned here to work on the mission let's do that yeah that was really really really refreshing to hear so this is me speaking but there's a sense when companies take on these issues publicly from a ceo position or anywhere else that it does seem to optimize for virtue signaling versus solving a particular problem because to solve a particular problem you really have to really put in a huge you have to hire a huge number you basically have to create a company within a company to take on a particular thing right uh but if you allow yourself to internally care about a particular issue you're basically pacifying some number of employee like making sure slack doesn't get out of hand and then you're doing this kind of from my perspective especially on issues that care about fake virtue signaling basically trying to understand what will make me look the best what would make the company look the best in this particular aspect and it just seems very shallow and it's optimizing for the wrong thing not for the solving of the problems yeah but for the making yourself look like the good guy and trying to then leverage that to say i'm the good guy in all situations and it's just it's it's the wrong thing and perhaps from your perspective as a ceo for as a leader it's also creating division unnecessary division within people like they get yeah there's something to bother us we get extremely argumentative about certain topics they really bring out the emotion yeah and i think that probably as you were saying that emotion is even probably okay maybe productive when that emotion has to do with the mission of the company yeah like you really care about those disagreements versus like something that has nothing to nothing to do with a particular with uh with increasing economic freedom uh using crypto yeah it's fascinating but it was so refreshing because it's rare why do you think that's a rare so you the city you're mentioning i mean there's a bunch of cities uh but you know san francisco is one such city when one when that culture and it's sad because san francisco is also the bay area is also the hub historically of some of the greatest innovation in human history yeah so that there's that tension how did that culture emerge there where like the innovation was done by people that are very mission driven you get a bunch of smart people together to solve a difficult problem they get maybe sometimes too much blinders on but they try to balance that and because it requires that focus to solve an actual problem and yet that's also the place where this culture emerged it's a fascinating human dynamic i don't know somebody will one day tell the history of of uh silicon valley not just the innovation but the social dynamics that occurred there anyway why do you think that's so rare well because people don't want to get attacked it's like super you don't want to get canceled right it's super unpro un uh comfortable you know nobody wants to be called a racist or whatever whatever you know people want to say on twitter so um get attacked yeah yeah i definitely got attacked i mean and i knew i knew it would be controversial the only reason i did it frankly was that um i was kind of at my wit's end i was like well like i said earlier like the job the ceo job sucks like either i don't want to do it or they have to go and i'm going to make the company into something that i want and you know i spent um i'd spent eight or nine years of my life at that point kind of building this thing i was like well i could go start another company but it takes a long time to get momentum with these things and you know coinbase is a very rare thing that happened in the world i feel very passionate about it so um yeah i'm not going to go like i need to make this the company that i want to work at and what was really interesting was that there was such a huge outpouring of support so i knew that it would be controversial and i would get attacked and predictably you know there was some um some journalists and you know new york times and all these people who kind of like went and started writing hit pieces on on the company after shortly thereafter and they basically just call people who've left the company and like you know can get quotes on whatever they want and then they'll write a story so mainstream media i lost a lot of trust in mainstream media frankly after that and of course it's kind of become obvious since then that um most mainstream media is like hyper politicized at this point it's basically either super left or super right and it's not really that focused on um truth so that's that's kind of unfortunate because i think journalism is actually like really important in society so that that whole thing got eroded in the u.s luckily there's sort of new media people like you um and a whole bunch of people did that blog post help that statement the the 95 people that remained is this still something you struggle with because there it's also a culture of the broader tech space okay so that was an interesting thing which was that so the 95 percent of people stayed i got a huge outpouring of support from people who said thank god you finally spoke up and said something because frankly it was making not a very fun place to work either and i realized that there is i think there was a i think is it the steam to lab has this blog post about the tyranny of the the one percent or something like that but there's basically a relatively small group one five percent or something like that that is really upset about something it's not the majority of the company it's like five percent there's another 15 or something that are sympathetic to the cause they're they're actually somewhat suggestible they will go along with whatever because it sounds reasonable you know these are like real issues they're talking about it's not not to say that it's not real and they'll kind of get swept up in it but there's an 80 of the company that basically doesn't agree or just wants to get their work done without all this drama and or distraction and they're afraid to speak up because if they speak up they're afraid of being again called a racist like fired you know ostracized amongst their peers and so it did require um it to get to a bad enough place for me to finally say you know what i just i feel like i have to do this live through the short-term attacks of the press which ultimately was very freeing for me because now i don't really care and now i can actually just build the company that i want to build without like caring about that so and then what was cool was a lot of really great people reached out to the coinbase too after that and were like i you know i'm an early engineer at google or wherever and like this culture has gotten kind of messed up and like i want to work at a company that's willing to stand for that and so we've gotten a lot of good people come over basically what i realized and by the way are diversity numbers and all that stuff like people told me when i was drafting this post they're like don't post this you're like people underrepresented groups will never want to work at this company again and i was like i don't think that's true like i talked to like our erg groups and they're not telling me they care about this stuff that much they're telling me they just want to like be respected at work and do good work and contribute so my gut was telling me that that advice was wrong and like i can tell you a year a year after doing it like our diversity numbers are basically either the same or better in every category so that turned out to be false um look i i hate to be like like i'm you know polarizing on in either dimension here like i just want to get good work done and build good stuff with technology so you know um i think companies should just have like reasonable policies like you want to get rid of bias and hiring you want to attract great people from all different backgrounds like you know we have pledge one percent we put one percent of the company equity into a foundation like i hope we're able to do good stuff with that that's you know give back in some way but like the main the main message i guess for me is like the core the core mission the core work that we're doing on economic freedom and just all of our products are that is like the main value that we're contributing in the world like let's just do that more and hopefully we can get from 89 million verified users to a billion or whatever and then um i just think that's how we'll have the biggest impact it's tempting though it's so interesting how companies get tempted to to help yeah it's like and you step in and it's almost like a drug and then you can't you forget i mean like all of us in life doesn't have to be companies you get distracted yeah and maintaining focus like you're absolutely right the way for coinbase to add value to the world is just to maximize the mission that it's on not not other not other stuff and when you get wealthier more successful there's becomes more and more tempting to just help out in some other shallow ways and it's fascinating and you just kind of brought that to light so it was very refreshing and it shouldn't be controversial to sort of focus on just getting stuff done well let me ask you i mean do you think that this it's all these things tie together there's like a general trend of like more censorship you know there's like more cancel culture um there's uh some of these like freedom values are kind of you know even like freezing people's accounts like the trucker thing that happened and it seems like there's a general trend of um more authoritarian you know uh policies there but do you think that do you feel like the tide is turning on that like there's counter examples to it we've seen recently yeah i think it's uh the last gasp of old way of doing things and so there's desperation and so on because to be fair it's kind of the internet which is where is the source of a lot of this where people have a voice is making the power centers of the world really nervous and so that's where that's coming from i think and and the internet is tricky it's weird it's full of bots yeah it's full of like misinformation of all kinds yeah full of large groups with conspiracy theories and so on uh and i mean misinformation broadly people are misusing the word misinformation they're just governments are just labeling random things with misinformation just to censor them but i just think it's just like a new world where the internet is really finally taking hold where there's billions of devices and everybody has a voice it's it's almost uh basically governments and powerful people are slightly losing hold of power and they're starting to freak out a little bit that's it and so and then once you have young people that are coming up now gain power i think will will rebalance everything and and then there's yeah like you said promising signs um that it's obvious that the majority of people want freedom and that means a lot of things that means economic freedom that means freedom to have a voice um freedom to move around freedom to act in the way they you know without without reasonable sort of um limitations by people that don't have their best interests and i i gain more hope from just regular people that are uh fighting and like demanding the being able to have freedom of speech or more specifically sort of resisting crude overreach of government in the acts of censorship at least in the united states uh and hopefully that percolates out to the rest of the world that's struggling on a much more basic level where people are being put in prison for the worst they say not just banned from twitter right could be worse what are some lessons from your failures and your successes about what it takes to run a company i think one of the things that i've learned about leadership is that you know i never really thought of myself as a very natural leader to be honest i don't think i was a natural leader but so i always envisioned you know good leaders as like these military generals like they seem so like confident and they're just like bark orders you know like charge that hill and do this and i was i was actually like more introverted and kind of um i wasn't really confident in the way i communicated and you know and so what i realized is that there's lots of different kinds of leaders you can be any kind of ceo you want right i was kind of more like a product technical focus ceo and i preferred to sort of hear everyone's opinion and i wasn't just gonna like render a decision in the room in some like kind of heated moment and like piss off half the people i would be like all right i'm gonna go think about it and i'll send you my decision later today or tomorrow or whatever and so i i would i found ways to kind of make it work for me where i could basically i always tried to avoid like um you know when people getting like super emotional about something and like i think they're they're thinking their judgment goes down right and it's like never make a decision when you're angry right and so if i would always sort of try to get a sense of are these people like trying to be right or are they trying to seek the truth you know and you you can do these little tricks like you know okay you argue that person's position and you argue the other one and like see if you can genuinely represent it now i know you're listening and you know these kind of things um but i guess sorry getting back to your question about leadership i think i basically just kept doing things that were a little outside my comfort zone and then my comfort zone kept getting bigger and bigger you know yeah and so that's i think that's how you build confidence is you you do the thing that's scary and it's like a little outside and like when i first started coinbase i had never managed anybody i would have i would have never i would have been scared to death to have put out like a very controversial opinion like that and sort of all right five percent of people go you know we didn't know what percent was gonna be by the way it could have been one percent it could have been fifty percent like but we went into it scary because i it was a scary thing i was like i don't know i think this is right i'm just gonna do it so if you do if you do enough scary things like you'll build the confidence and i feel like i'm still on that journey every every year or two at coinbase there's some big thing that comes out is like oh my god like i didn't sleep well for a week and like this is the next level right um but that's how you that's how you learn and grow so you're still going up that mountain through the fog one step at a time yeah uh can i just quickly ask you about a couple of other efforts that are super interesting that you're involved with so first of all a little bit more old school fascinating effort of research hub um so what what what's that about the github for open science yeah okay so basically i've had a chance to try to help a couple other companies get off the ground too because i want to see various efforts out there um succeed and um one of them i've always thought about like why is scientific research not more like open source software or why couldn't it be much faster right and there's you've probably have seen this like in an academic setting right but there's all kinds of things that feel very antiquated to me about scientific research everything from the funding process and grants to how peer review works to how you submit the journals all the costs associated with journals you know that the people you'd think like you'd get paid for this or something and it would then be available to all the taxpayers for free but no they're like they're all paywalled and there's like these big companies that have sort of in my view kind of held back um innovation here so and the preprint servers like bioarchive and archive.org have really helped this but those websites are they look like they're kind of from like 15 years ago or something yeah it's like craigslist yeah so anyway i one of the things i once once coinbase went public last year i had a little bit of liquidity and i was like all right let me fund a small team let's see if we can if they can like go off and make something better here so we have a we have a prototype out there uh it's at researchhub.com people can check it out and it's basically um you know the first version is kind of like reddit for science there's like various hubs which are like journals um you but you know you can publish papers there you can use an electronic lab notebook to sort of have a modern day paper which is not just a pdf that's static but it's a living document ideally in the future you know you can get comments and feedback from people on there you can update it over time we want people to be able to share the code and the data sets associated with their paper research paper is not just a pdf in the future we want to make it even where like you know people can um get funding for science through through that site and even license out innovations that they've made because the other thing i've noticed in life is that there's kind of like there's a bunch of people working on science and there's a bunch of people building companies and they very very rarely intersect but when they do you get the best things like like spacex and genentech and even google and like even coinbase was based on a research paper the bitcoin white paper and so most business people are like creating companies that don't have any scientific innovation they're just like marketing based on you know whatever and then a lot of scientists are making things which never actually benefit humanity because they're not commercialized and turned into products and so if we can somehow create a translation layer between those two groups and help them you know help align the market forces align scientific research to market forces so that they're more incentivized like if you if you discover crispr or something like that like you should be a billionaire you know and like all the downstream implications of that not going through some antiquated tech transfer office or whatever and if you and if you're an entrepreneur you should be looking to commercialize the latest scientific innovations and so that's kind of like the long-term vision for that site um i think it's just an early step today but we've got like a really passionate community on there that are jumping into like you know computer science or longevity or um various bio hubs or whatever and like beginning to source the best innovations but also discuss them and prove them and publish through the site so i have a question about incentives but first let me say for people listening who are outside of academia might not be familiar with an absurd situation so there's journals like you mentioned and scientists publishing those journals and the journals provide very little value except matching you with reviewers that are unpaid and so uh in the digital world they're providing basically almost no value except hosting your paper and they put up a paywall and charge people to access that and that charge is not like even netflix fees you're talking about a lot of money so they're basically blocking your research that should be wide open uh from the world and creating a paywall it's a fascinating like scam that's actually holding back i don't it's it's a shitty scam because you're not making that much money i feel like a definition of a scam you should at least be making money that's like significant amount of money you're basically making shitty money and holding back all of human knowledge okay so that put aside and people get a little confused because the journals aren't the ones paying the scientists people think like the journals are somehow funding the scientists therefore they have the right to put up a paywall no no the funding is coming from elsewhere journals yeah are the middle man that nobody asked for especially in the digital world anyway that said there is uh interesting kind of incentives for scientists which is prestige and so on so there's a thing with journals if there's if there's a prestigious journal and you uh pass the review process you get into that journal or a prestigious conference in computer science then that's seen as a good thing in your resume and not just your resume within your community that's a respected thing is there some way to achieve that same kind of incentive in an open um in the open setting of research hub so like where i could say i got x y and z like look i'm impressive because this happened on research hub i think you're right like the whole um academia like progress track is about like where you got published and how many citations and it's kind of like a false economy of um reputation because like there's not real money backing it and so i think we've thought about this a little bit um and i think the research hub team has an opportunity to do something here that basically says like okay i had the top paper for 2022 in um you know biology on in here and you basically publish a list a leaderboards of these like top you know for the month the the year um in all these different categories then actually you know we should probably give out grants and awards um in in addition to that fund those people almost like fellows or even give out like you know like the nobel prize there should be like a research hub prize or something and like ship people maybe maybe even ship like a print version of a journal that is the top papers in each category in each month or whatever and like people want to put that in their wall in in the lab and like so i do think we need to sort of change i don't know like the traditional folks in academia or science would probably think this is like crazy a crazy idea but i think we need to change the culture to not celebrate getting published in paywall journals almost like friends don't let friends publish in like paywall journals like because that's it's just not helping humanity so like you know it should be more prestigious to publish in an open science way and get the top spot that should be celebrated above being published in whatever i don't even want to name one of them you know well there's currently it's the culture has already shifted to where almost everybody publishes an archive and by archive and so on yeah but so that the culture is there on that that scene friends don't let friends not publish open but then the prestige thing is missing which is like anyone can publish an archive yeah so how do you know it's actually a strong paper now funny enough even with the crappy systems we have now word of mouth is powerful like you have a like citation system is pretty powerful so like you say okay this is a strong paper we don't need reviewers our human eyes are the reviewers like that the community are the reviewers so it's already it's like that part is there but it it would be nice to have like uh you know nature level like this is respect this is a respectful accomplishment yeah and something like a leaderboard but a stable kind of system yeah and i should mention so there's a crypto angle to this too which is um so research hub has a coin associated with research coin and it's basically if if people you know upvote your paper or like support it you'll accumulate more research coin which is basically like rep or like a reward token um and so that is a way to um i guess measure the the community's collective view of that paper a form of peer review um and it can even be weighted by like the reputation of the people voting on it and that sort of thing over time um yeah i think the last thing i'll just say is that so i think from from a rep like a prestige point of view it won't start off that way it'll probably start off like being a little more quirky like you know like remember when youtube first started it was like people posting weird cat videos and stuff and but now like you know if you have a million subscribers on youtube that's probably better than getting like a tv show on nbc or whoever the traditional gatekeeper was so my hope it might take 10 years 20 years whatever but i'm hoping that this can sort of be the new prestigious way that that young people publish in science and it'll become to be viewed as more prestigious the the journals nutritional journals will be viewed as old-fashioned well it's definitely a system that could do a lot better and there's a lot of incredible brilliant people doing science they deserve better the better platforms yeah uh so another thing you're taking on and helping out with is this new limit which is looking at longevity yeah what's what's the idea there yeah okay so as you can see i'm excited about science like i think you know science is sort of the basically if you get scientific innovation then you get um better products and you get better economic growth and then you get all kinds of like surplus in society that can go to arts and philosophy and like all kinds of stuff but um with new limits so yeah i kind of got i started hosting some dinners with scientists um last year and i was learning about all kinds of the latest stuff happening in bio and there's a lot of really cool stuff happening with like car t cells and crispr and all these things and um anyway one of the topics that i started to learn more about was um something called cell reprogramming and you know people maybe have heard of this induced pluripotent stem cells where you could take like a skin cell and turn it back into a stem cell and um shinya yamanaka won the nobel prize for this work that was done in 2006 and um you know it's kind of a crazy thing you can turn one cell into another another type of cell well people recently have been experimenting with um different types of transcription factors that would either not you don't want the cell to go all the way back to being a stem cell um you can end up getting like cancerous cells and things like that but you want it basically to the cell to revert a little bit um earlier in its you know it would call it the waddington landscape but it's basically like um go become act start to act like a bit of a younger cell but not to to de-differentiate and become more like a stem cell and so i decided this might be an interesting area to go fund i think that that team has come together there's like some really talented people who've come together to help get that off the ground and they're basically building a a platform that can test a lot of different transcription factors on different cell types and hopefully find ways to rejuvenate different types of cells and tissues to extend human health span i mean the moonshot goal here you know the get to mars is um that there could be some therapy here that in i don't know 10 or 20 years that you take and from a whole body point of view um it's sort of rejuvenating tissue not just one type of tissue like your immune system but eventually your whole body maybe even your brain so that you know we don't have that issue where people who are older have trouble learning or they're more ossified in their thinking um to me this is just i always think about you know it's it's actually a little inspired by elon right it's like what are some of the biggest things in the world like that are probably high technology risk but if they did work maybe they're they're kind of low chance of working but if they did work would have enormous impact i like the idea of trying hard tech problems especially for people like founders like me who've made some money in software which i think we're in kind of like a golden age of software so there's like fortunes to be made but if you if you do make some money in that my hope is people will like do atoms not bits you know and try some of the harder things like in biotech or you know i guess he's doing cars and rockets and stuff but anyway it i think we should try hard hard tech or you know physical science problems as well and see if that can advance for team human yeah so he's also doing bio with neuralink yeah and i feel like bio is tough yeah because it's messy we don't understand it as well we don't understand it the risk is higher in terms of uh not the risk is higher but like you have to deal with uh the actual sort of um to get to human to get to stuff where it could be uh therapies for actual human bodies um is is tricky because you have to prove that it's safe it's effective all those kinds of things with uh with fda i mean it's just it's tricky it's very difficult it's yeah it's a long it's a long journey i mean if i can give a quick um plug so i yeah i'm on the board at new limit we're hiring talented scientists that are interested in the celebrity programming space they don't necessarily have to be coming from like an aging background or anything like that there's sort of a small group of people doing even something's a new thing this is a is new limit relatively new yeah it's very new there's a there's a small team today just a handful of people and so we're we're hiring more there um if people are excited about that space reach out and um same thing for research hub there's a small team there that's really awesome that's doing more like software engineering design product that kind of stuff what advice would you give if you put on your old wise sage hat what advice would you give to young people today high school maybe undergrad and college about life so like career having a career they can be proud of or maybe a life they can be proud of so people can do whatever they want to be happy right so there's not one way to do it i do think that some people a particular type of people out there a lot of people actually they want to have an impact on the world that's how they get a sense of fulfillment right so i mean you need to have like health physical health you need to have good relationships like there's lots of things but most people want to do something important they want to have fulfilling work a way that they can feel like they're contributing i think a lot of people young people today are are thinking like um you know i should be an activist or something like that and there's people in the world who have power and i and i don't a lot of people who don't i don't have power and so the way to change the world is to you know um speak truth to power or like criticize power and try to pressure them to change to me i don't think that's the right way to actually have an impact on the world because you know everybody has probably i think people have more power than they realize um and by the way it's easy to be a critic it's hard to actually change these things and fix it and so um you'll get a lot of accolades from friends and things like that if you kind of go around criticizing it you know it's easy to do like everything is broken and could be better um including you know stuff i'm working on i i find like so frustrating it's the million things i want to be better about like what we're doing in coinbase um so be be the person in the arena you know like that theodore roosevelt quote i think he said it right like go chew glass and stare into the abyss like if if you really want to have an impact either join a company that has a mission that is trying to fix the thing you're passionate about or start start that company if it doesn't exist or start a charity if if it's not suitable to be a company or whatever it is but go try to be a part of this solution don't just you know criticize or be a part of the problem my hope is that um more people can you know realize that they they actually can have a meaningful impact that way and i think that to me technology is actually one of the most important ways to improve the world like if if you look at um climate change like a lot of the best ideas like carbon sequestration all these things it's a technology thing right if you want to try to fix education it's like look at like khan academy and all the stuff going online right if you want to if you want to fix um you know whatever transportation and like um the financial system and global freedom and like equality of all these things like there's typically the way to get something changed in the world today is with technology and so i do think people it's very bizarre to me that there's this kind of like anti-tech thing going on um look no nothing is perfect like if you create something new and like tens of millions of people use it or billions people use it it's like there's going to be some bad people who use it too okay and there's you know society is complicated but like i think most of these things have been net positive because most people in the world are good is at least my view so yes we can mitigate like the one percent of bad people trying to you know abuse something but 99 of people in the world are good and the way you can improve the world is with technology joining companies starting companies that are working on the right stuff so i hope i hope more young people do that and uh just if you're not sure what to do like just get started with anything that's how you learn and basically have the optimism that you have the power to do the change so yeah um it's easy to distract yourself by being the critic um that's almost like acknowledging to yourself that that's all you can be but basically everybody has the power to be the fixer i like chew glass and look into the abyss um that's much more fun than it sounds [Laughter] uh what do you think is the meaning of this whole thing why are we here it's life yeah what's the meaning of life what's this existence we got you're trying to increase the amount of economic freedom on this planet earth trying to alleviate some of the suffering yeah but why i don't really think there is any point to life um you know uh somebody once told me um you know if you go into these like kind of really big existential questions um it can get a little scary because like you you stare off the cliff and there's like there's nothing there you know um one this one person told me one time they were like you know brian you should you should probably s uh snorkel don't scupa i guess and i think they were trying to say like i i some of my friends have done this right they'd they'll go to like you know epic medita meditation retreats and like all they'll kind of come back with all this existential dread of like what's the meaning of all and like as far as i can tell we are just some organic molecules in the ocean started like dividing and replicating and the selfish gene and all this stuff like basically ended up here and our only it's it's some kind of like really naive algorithm that's just kind of trying to get us to survive and replicate and we have dna just like every other animal and so we and we happen to develop these like really cool neocortexes and so now we're sort of self-aware and we have all these big questions and maybe maybe we'll create another you know as computers get better we'll create the simulation inside our thing and um i think it's cool like we should basically i just want to keep watching the movie you know unfold that's part of why i want to work on um like new limit is really cool because it's help if people can live longer whether that's uploading their brain to the cloud or um you know basically through we get biology to work or the strong ai to work or whatever one of those two hopefully works out and then we get to we get to keep watching the movie and see how it all unfolds i think that's fun and so i don't know if that's like an answer but i guess i don't think there's any real purpose so just try to have fun well the cool thing is that uh we get to write the movie as it as as we watch it yeah that's exactly right i mean that's like the steve jobs quote and all that where he's like everything around you was invented by some somebody who just was like that this is a crazy idea they thought up so once you realize you can kind of do anything you want um then that's what you start to go you start to go try crazier stuff i mean what this is another one of those areas where um not to get too out there but like you know when you're when i was i think you can build your comfort zone around like people being upset with you you can also build your your range of what you think is possible right like when i was a when i was in my 20s i was like reading all these books about like self-improvement and goal right how to write down your goals and stuff and my goals were like someday i want to make a hundred thousand dollars a year or something like and that was and you know um and it seemed like a little outlandish or what i wrote down these goals like i want to own rental property or something anyway and i and then i slowly started to get get some of these things done over a couple of years and so i started to think a little bigger i remember one time i wrote down this goal where i was like what's the craziest thing i could think of i was like what if i i want to write i want to start a billion dollar tech company that's crazy and i had i had never started like a million dollar tech company or any any tech company really so what business did i have writing that goal down i remember i wrote that on a piece of paper like like probably every day for a year or something almost right i don't know if it was every day but like i wrote it down a lot and and so little things started to happen i was like all right well maybe i should move back to the bay area from buenos aires maybe i should try to apply to y combinator or whatever like and i started thinking about these ideas and so whatever gets you fired up it doesn't have to be like some company goal or startup thing it could be anything right um maybe you want to publish a book or like do something creatively or whatever anyway you you know i think like within seven years uh no it's probably more like 10 years of me writing that goal down um coinbase had a valuation over a billion dollars so it it was out of my realm of what was even possible and then within 10 years you can you can accomplish more in 10 years than you think less than in a year than you think so now i start now i'm like okay what's the next goal what's the crate okay maybe i want to get a billion people accessing the open financial system through our products every day you know that would be cool for for humanity and that's a pretty crazy goal like it's only eight billion people or something right so one out of eight um or maybe i can radically like if i make some like the right investments or whatever i can like help radically extend human health human health span or whatever right um so try crazier stuff i don't know even if it doesn't work like hopefully you'll um you'll advance the state of affairs like something interesting will happen and so most people today they look at they look at people trying this stuff and they're like oh my god they're so they're a genius or whatever and it's like or they're an idiot like one of one of the two neither one are true it's just like um anybody can start by thinking about what they want and then like go for it and then once you get that like go for something a little bigger and like you just have fun with it and the universe is a way of smiling and uh helping you out if you just write it down and and you dream big yes there's something about just karma about the energy you put into this world other people will help you out doors will open you'll notice that the doors open and you'll make you could actually have a shot at making it happen it's a funny world yeah i mean i don't i don't i don't really subscribe to all like the woo interpretations of this but my my like very rational brain interpretation of it is that if you just wake up every day and write down like what you want to get done and towards your longer goals at your larger goals it's just it's just on your mind that day so you start to notice opportunities and you think about it more so so brian thank you for dreaming big um thank you for doing what you're doing doing incredible engineering at scale uh trying to help out people from all over the world and uh actually helping me personally get more into crypto just because it's so easy so um thank you so much and thank you so much for giving your extremely valuable time today to this awesome conversation thanks for your awesome podcast i i love it i listen to it often thanks for listening to this conversation with brian armstrong to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from benjamin franklin an investment in knowledge pays the best interest thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you

Channel: Lex Fridman

Views: 564,423

Keywords: agi, ai, ai podcast, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, bitcoin, brian armstrong, btc, coinbase, crypto, eth, ethereum, lex ai, lex fridman, lex jre, lex mit, lex podcast, mit ai

Id: VBPTFlpv31k

Length: 149min 24sec (8964 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022