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

0:00 The minimum fee typically on a debit or credit card transaction is about 30 cent fee flat plus the additional percentage. Arguably, it doesn't really work well for anything under a dollar. Certainly, it doesn't make sense to pay 30 cents to send a 1 cent payment. And I believe the stats we last saw on this are that about like 76% of the Agentic Commerce transactions we're seeing are under 30 cents. We don't want the AIs to be unbanked. You know, we want to bank the AIs. They deserve financial services as well. The AI agents themselves are going to have to have their own accounts. And so we've made some simple tools where with a single command, you just prompt, you paste it into your AI agent, it can now have its own financial account. So it'll be interesting to see how the agentic economy evolves. There'll be more agents than humans in the not too distant future. It kind of stands to reason that the agentic economy will be bigger than the human economy at some point in the not too distant future as well.

0:50 Today on No Priors, we are joined by Brian Armstrong, the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, one of the world's most important and earliest crypto companies that has also been quite aggressive at adopting AI. Brian is also the co-founder of New Limit, which is a anti-aging and longevity company doing really interesting things in biology, including certain types of high throughput screening to understand aging, different uses of AI, etc. Brian is one of the most forwardthinking people I know. on different aspects of science, technology, art, the world, etc. So, it's very exciting to have this conversation with them and we'll be talking about everything from what's happening in the crypto world to what's happening in AI to what's happening in biology to how different individuals can have an impact over time. So, it's a very fun conversation. Brian, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to see you.

1:37 >> Yeah, good to see you a lot. >> So, I was hoping we could talk about a few different topics. I think there's a bunch of stuff relevant to Coinbase and crypto and you know Agentic Finance and things like that but also you started a company called New Limit which is focused on longevity and aging and biotechnology. So I think it'd be great to sort of cover both as part of this conversation. >> Yeah. >> And maybe we start with Coinbase. So Coinbase has been making some really big moves. You've been floating this concept of the everything exchange as you've been building out what I think is a new global payments layer. Can you tell us, you know, at a high level, what are some of the directions of the company and some of the areas you're most excited about right now?

2:12 >> Yeah, so we're at a really exciting time in Coinbase's history because on the one hand, every asset class is coming on chain. It's now possible to trade everything in one place with good liquidity and good cross margin. And so for markets and trading and that out there is stocks and commodities and crypto and derivatives perpetual futures like it's all coming to one place where traders can do it everything in one spot including prediction markets too and they can do that in more countries now given the regulatory clarity that's emerging which we can talk about if you want. So the everything exchange is is kind of our bread and butter our core business.

2:49 the next big area that's emerging is stablecoin payments which have just been growing like crazy. even when Bitcoin prices are down, stable coin payments just keep growing. And so we're helping companies all over the world integrate stablecoin payments which are fast and cheap and global. You can send money at the speed of information, right? It's kind of like under 1 second, under one cent US to move money anywhere in the world. And then the third big one is something I know you talk a lot about on this podcast, which is how is AI changing because AI is changing everything and so it's obviously going to change financial services too. And so we we call this Agentic Finance or AIFI.

3:22 And we're building this into Coinbase in a number of different ways. the first way is that people who have their existing financial account, they're going to want to have an AI adviser. Kind of like how wealthy people are able to get access to these investment advisors. But everybody should have access to them now. And they can help teach you about, you know, building the right portfolio and dollar cost averaging, tax loss harvesting, and all these kind of things. And you know if the market dips five or 10 or 15% leg into this kind of portfolio over time and try to save save money on fees and you know earn yield while it's sitting in cash and you can just talk to it like a human and it'll do all this things all these things for you. At least that's the vision and it's getting better and better. So we've we've launched an adviser in the Coinbase product. the next thing is that the AI agents themselves are going to have to have their own accounts, you know, and so we're on a mission to kind of like go out there. We we want we don't want the AIs to be unbanked, you know. We want to bank the AIs. they deserve financial services as well. and so we've made some simple tools where with a single command, you just prompt you paste it into your AI agent. It it can now have its own financial account and it's using a self-custodial wallet and crypto rails. So there's no there's not like a KYC process. You don't like our AI agents don't have a government ID. They don't they can't walk into like a bank branch, at least not yet, without their humanoid robots companion. and so now any a any AI agent can have its own financial account to do payments to pay for pay for goods and >> and is that tied to a account of somebody who's already on Coinbase? In other words, is this sort of like a subsidiary account? Is it an entirely new thing? Like how do you think about the hierarchy of that?

4:51 >> Yeah, so we're doing it both ways actually just because I think is going there's going to be demand for both use cases. So there's going to it's going to be possible to create a separate agentic account with segregated funds on Coinbase in the near future and you can give your agent access to just that to do trading and payments on your behalf. That's kind of linked to your identity as human. We're also going to provide self-custodial wallets to any a any AI agent out there that wants to hold a balance in stable coin or event it could actually raise money. It could you know issue a token. And so what's fascinating is that today we often talk to these agents and you know it's sort of like one person to one agent and they go get some work done but they often get stuck.

5:28 They get stuck. There's like oh here's here's a payw wall. Can you put in your credit card? I need to spin up these AWS resources or you know you wanted me to book this hotel for you but I here's the web page. Can you go put in your credit card? That kind of thing. And in the future I think you're going to want to have these agents have their own spend accounts. kind of like having a personal assistant or an employee who has their own spend account. It's going to need probably like a stablecoinbacked credit card for backward compatibility, but we're seeing a lot of agentic payment now flow over these new protocols like X42, which is one that we incubated at Coinbase that we actually put into the Linux Foundation. So, Google and Cloudflare and AWS, a bunch of people are working with us on that now. And so, that's been really cool. and we put together like this little fun website called edgentic.market where people can go see the stats of how many payments are flowing in this new economy and see all the different services. So we're helping a lot of businesses get enabled into the agentic economy like you know is your store ready to accept agents as customers? we can we you know we have a product called Coinbase Business that helps companies accept stable coin payments and that's good for humans want to pay with stable coin payments but it's also good for agents and they kind of get both out of the box. you mentioned things like stable coin or cryptobacked credit cards.

6:40 How do you think about what proportion of the future volume and the agentic future is going to be crypto versus you know more standardized finance rails? >> Yeah. So what's interesting is a lot of the agentic commerce that's happening these are pretty small transaction sizes. Sometimes just a few cents and as you probably know the minimum fee typically on a debit or credit card transaction is about 30. It's like a 30 cent fee flat plus the additional percentage. So arguably it doesn't really work well for anything under a dollar. Certainly anything under 30.

7:08 Like it doesn't make sense to pay 30 cents to send a 1 cent payment. And I believe the stats we we last saw on this are that about like 76% of the Agentic Commerce transactions we're seeing are under 30 cents. >> What sort of transactions are those or what what's happening at that low of a price point? >> So a lot of it is it's gathering information. and so you could you could think of it like it's venture firms doing research compiling from paywalled data or it's recruiters who need to scrape data from from LinkedIn. It's often times it's actually agents talking to other agents that are specialized in some in some way and getting source data from them almost like a tool call that's happening.

7:48 and on that agentic.arket website, we have a list of the top service providers that are doing like search and financial data. And I think what'll be interesting is in the future, you'll see actually other agents in the market that that become specialized. like you know, the the Frontier models are trained to be quite good at good generalists, right? And they're kind of good at a lot of things. And we're seeing instances where smaller models that are openweight models can actually be fine-tuned or through reinforcement learning they can become they can outperform the frontier models on a specialized task within within the company right like I'm sure you've talked to lots of startups about this kind of thing but it's like a compliance review queue or if you train it on a 100,000 compliance cases with within Coinbase proprietary data a small openweight model can actually outperform a frontier model. And so I think you're going to see in this marketplace a bunch of specialist agents. It might be like, "Hey, this agent is just really good at ordering you pizza if that's if that's what you want." Or this agent is like an really incredible designer and that's all it's been trained on is like tons of proprietary Figma data or something like that. So it'll be interesting to see how the agentic economy evolves. But you know, it's probably like common wisdom at this point amongst your listeners, but I there'll be more agents than humans in the not too distant future. It kind of stands to reason that the agentic economy will be bigger than the human economy at some point in not too distant future as well.

9:11 >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think one of the safetiest arguments is the concern that there will be resource aggregation by AI and then that'll be used to manipulate society or things like that. It's just always interesting to think through like what are the some of the implications of the scale of some of these things and how they work. I don't I don't share that concern as strongly. I'm just saying that's a that's something that comes up from time to time.

9:30 >> Yeah. Well, just actually on that, it's funny. I I've heard people like Elon say that they think there won't be money in the future, right? And I I mean I actually agree with Elon on most things, but that one I was like, okay, I think I know what he means. He's basically saying at some point you start to measure things in energy and mass and like those become the scarce resource. And I I think in the end like in the limit case like he has a point. But the thing is there's going to be scarcity for a long time. Even if the cost of goods and services really falls like we have price deflation because robots and AI start to just make commodities and food and housing very cheap. That could happen. The government printing might also create a bunch of inflationary pressure. But I it's there's always still going to be scarcity of certain things like like you know land especially usable land in various ways.

10:18 you know energy like chips you know I if dice like there's not gonna Dyson spheres are going to be expensive I think pretty pretty far into the future so I think we're still going to need a medium of exchange and the it's really cool to see that like the a as AI emerges crypto rails are just kind of a nice compliment for all that stuff to finally work like crypto was I think crypto was really really good for humans and it's going to be essential for AI >> yeah people I feel have been talking about this for a while too particularly I think in the early AI community, it overlaps so much with the crypto community, right? In terms of you'd see you know computer science majors coming out of MIT and depending on the year that they graduated, they would go into crypto and two years later they're all going into AI and it was roughly the same people in terms of people were really into certain math or algorithms or other things. So there's there's interesting bifurcation I feel too of people's careers just based on when they graduated in terms of whether they ended up doing crypto you know in 2020 or whatever it was versus AI in 2022.

11:18 >> Yeah. Well, I'm reminded of that that meme have you seen that meme that says porostos? >> you can do you can do both. They're they're going to intersect here. >> Yeah, it seems like they they just might. what I mean the other thing you folks have really been focused on is the use of AI within Coinbase itself and can you talk about how some of I know there's obviously coding and other things but what do you think are some of the more interesting projects you all have done internally? Yeah. So like a lot of companies, we started off with the basics. You know, we got some coding tools. we got it hooked up into our various data repositories.

11:53 We we've been using it for a long time on machine learning for risk prevention, fraud prevention, customer support inquiry, started going through AI. So that was all like good table stakes stuff. And then the things that we've started to do recently where we're sort of pushing the boundaries here I think one of them is that you know we basically want to get to as close as we can and actually achieve recursive self-improvement right and what does that mean in various ways like so it means that you have a brain for the company it that can be a sub a whole bunch of subsets by the way you can have a brain for each team you can have a brain for each service like repository within the company you can have a brain for each individual which by the way I believe they should be able to take with them when they leave Coinbase. So we're creating some good policies on that. but what so let's say you have like a like a service like a GitHub repository or some backend service that's running and today we have engineers spinning up agents to make changes to that. What we're just now launching and seeing recently is like every time the agent comes in to make a change to that service, it's actually ingesting the brain for the team working on it and for that repository. And so what is that brain?

13:01 It's basically it's a history of all the incidents that have ever happened with that service. All of the financial controls that have to be enforced with that. every AB test that we've ever run on that of course like the full GitHub history of pull requests that were accepted or rejected. And so the people running that team at any time can kind of go in there and look at it. Today it's just mark it's like markdown files, right? It sounds it's kind of simple at the end of the day. but the getting of this all hooked up. So okay so let's say you you ask the agent hey I want to make a change to this service it ingests the the brain it makes that change and then as a human you go to review it and you're like it missed something okay now the the simple thing someone might do in that moment is okay go make a manual edit to to fix it and then ship it but the key step that we're trying to really enforce now in in our software factory or software development life cycle is when you go to make that change and edit the agent's thinking that that context has to go back into brain so that you not only fix it in this case but in all future cases going forward and then you basically what you start to see is like the accept rate for you know oneshotted PRs or that kind of thing it just starts to tick up over time and you've now got like a recursive self-improvement system so that's one of the big ideas we've been working on recently and just getting our own internal agent harness which we call Toshi just integrated with all these tools like it can now you know it can now make calls out to external vendors and pay using the agentic finance economy like over these x42 protocols. if you want to edit the brain a as you're making a change to that PR and it goes back into the brain putting that into the harness. asking it to sort of like okay you know like actually just earlier today I was making a plan for this like relatively complex feature was kind of amazing.

14:49 It's now even allowing people like me the CEO to get back in there and ship features. but I asked I asked one of the, you know, high-end expensive models, okay, go make a plan for how this feature might be implemented. Break it down into three phases. Each phase has 10 different pieces that need to get built. And I was like, okay, go go go execute phase one. Go spin up 10 separate agents to go execute each of those pieces in parallel. And by the way, you know, recommend the right agent to use because they might be cheaper models. And so it it spun up a bunch of open source. It spun up a bunch of Grock. and it's and it just like 2 minutes before I hopped on this podcast, it just pinged me and was like, "By the way, all 10 of those things from phase one are now done and ready for you to review." So, anyways, we're I'm starting to get to this place where it's kind of addictive actually because in the past I I kept every time I'd have these like ideas or bugs I find and I'm just like pinging the team all day long like, "Hey, can we do this? Can we do this? Can we do this?" And now instead of like pinging the team team in Slack, I can basically tag an agent in Slack with that comment or drop it into our internal harness and instead of bugging the team and asking to do something, I just send them a PR for review and it's already done. Like and that's a magical moment that I just like I it's very addictive.

15:56 >> Yeah. I feel like the people who are best at adopting this who aren't day-to-day engineers and I know you had a long background working as an engineer at Airbnb and other places obviously helping start Coinbase but I found that many folks who do best at this who are nontechnical also almost to like a video game and you're like leveling up in terms of your capability set and how you learn to do things and sort of these recursive loops you start building for yourself and everything else. So I think it's I think it's fascinating to watch that adoption. How do you think that impacts, you know, how companies are set up in the future? In other words, some people make the argument that the average company size over time should get much smaller. It could be a startup, it could be existing companies, etc.

16:37 Simply because you're able to harness so much of this intelligence, so much of this proactivity or, you know, ability for people to do so much individually. Do you think that's true? Do you think that's the direction things are heading? like is there a timeline where suddenly every company is like 10 people or whatever or do you think there will always be these sort of larger scale organizations? >> Well, productivity is definitely increasing, right? So, that's slightly different though than saying the average company size will be smaller. it's kind of like just saying tasks are being automated or eliminated. people are not being eliminated. I think tasks are being eliminated. and so if you take a company like any sort of company today, Coinbase or others that exist today, it's not that I don't think it's like we're going to shrink down the headcount to 10 people or something like that. I think that the existing people we have are going to be able to just get much more done and the pace of everything will accelerate. Now, it's also true you're going to see some companies that are two people or five people or whatever and they're able to do a lot more than what we would have historically thought was possible. And that's also true. So, >> so it's increasing the velocity of like the existing team >> and making things ship faster, things automated. So, basically you're getting more scalability off of people and so if you have a cost basis relative to revenue, then you suddenly have this ability to dramatically more with that same group of people, which means to some extent your margins should start to rise over time. If you're effectively growing revenue faster than you grow team, although I guess some people may still grow them at the same pace.

18:08 >> Yeah. >> Yeah. That's super interesting. and then, I wonder if it's worth, spending a little bit of time as well on, the everything exchange. I just think some of the things you're doing there are fascinating. there's per, there's, prediction markets there. There's all these really interesting directions. What proportion of Coinbase either volume or revenue is sort of those other ancillary areas now outside of crypto? >> Yeah. Well, we actually shared in our recent earnings deck which are you know those are the only numbers I'm probably allowed to talk about but you know actually 88% of our revenue is from non Bitcoin trading at this point.

18:49 So that's an interesting stat. I think it's funny because if you look at our stock price it does trade like fairly correlated with the price of Bitcoin. But I can't and I love Bitcoin. I think it's going to be around forever. It's digital gold. It's like sound money for everybody in the world. I think it's amazing. But I also think all these other things are like crypto is updating every aspect of the financial system. So like we just we just announced our tokenized stocks product which is only available outside the US right now unfortunately but we're working with the SEC and others to get it a path to do it in the US. but it's the first truly tokenized stock product. It's not a synthetic or derivative or some debt instrument. It's it's actually a security and it's one to one represented by the the actual security held in custody. and so this is like broadly a trend called tokenization, right? Like stable coins were the first major use case of this with a you know a token that represents one to one a dollar in a bank account or a US treasury. now we're seeing it with stocks which is really exciting.

19:45 It's going to there's like something like 4 billion people in the world who don't have access to any brokerage or US investment account. So they don't have any ability to invest in you know Coinbase, Nvidia, Apple, whatever. And so, much like Tether was very successful XUS because a lot of people wanted dollar denominated accounts, there's like four billion people who want like access to high quality investments, they don't have that today. So, we'll do the tokenized stock piece.

20:09 And then I think you just go on down the list like private credit and treasuries and bank deposits. Like everything's going to get tokenized and it it's just going to mean that financial services is going to have modern rails to run on. So, of course, these can all be traded on the everything exchange. they can be sent back and forth. Like if you want to gift a share of stock to your your nephew or something like that, you can just send it to their wallet. You don't have to like go through some complex stock transfer process. It's antiquated. It's like money can now move at the speed of information just like a WhatsApp message. And crypto is updating all those rails.

20:43 >> That's pretty amazing. It's basically broadening and modernizing the financial system, but in a very broad way, right? It includes to your point eventually bonds. It includes a subset of stocks. It includes all sorts of things that before had much more friction in terms of using them or purchasing them and it opens it up for the world, right? And there there were counter versions of this in China and other places where if something was listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange, sometimes these funds would almost be set up that people could buy proportions of to be able to participate in some stocks that were listed in other countries. So, it'd be interesting to watch how sort of global capital flows change as these things get bigger and bigger. to your point, it feels like the stable coins in Tether were the first version of that with USD. so it's kind of fascinating. I remember actually seven, eight years ago, I invested in a company called Harbor that was trying to tokenize real estate.

21:28 >> I think that's a little bit too far ahead. >> Yeah, I think that'll happen too. I you I think you were early but early but too early but right yeah on that one. >> Yeah. So it's kind of fascinating to watch those play out. How do you think about prediction markets? So you know a lot of the use cases have been mentioned in the past seem to have roughly consolidated around sports and a few other sort of areas. obviously there's things in politics. Do you have a view on where in the long run prediction markets have the biggest footprint?

21:54 >> Well, I'm very excited about prediction markets. they're growing super fast inside the Coinbase app. I think we shared in our last earnings call within months of launching it. It had hit like $100 million revenue run rate. It's growing really nice, like over 100% quarter over quarter, something like that. I'd have to go look at the exact number again, but so it's true that sports has been a part of it. I think that it's much bigger than that though. And and that's great. like that's a form of entertainment. you know we should we should celebrate that.

22:23 I think that it actually has much broader implications though from a societal point of view that people maybe haven't fully appreciated. So you know like polit elections are something that have already happened in prediction markets. But let's say that you want to try to understand like what policies should be implemented from a from a government point of view. You could actually like say all right if we were to implement this policy a policy what would the unemployment rate be within one year two years 3 years and then a prediction market could form on that it could help inform what policy is out there. It could allow I think you could also ask people the big the big questions in life you know is there a god were we designed by evolution or you know intelligent design or like these are some people would call these more like opinion markets. It's not that there's ever going to be like a resolution date where we definitely know for sure on some of this stuff. or if we did it'd be very far in the future and hard to imagine. But you know, if you ask somebody a difficult a difficult question and then there's events that are always unfolding in the world that which might shift like maybe 60% of the population believes X but a new scientific paper comes out or a new a new terrorist attack happens or like who knows what and then it shifts from 60% to 80%. people could still make bets on this. It's kind of like like when you invest in the stocks, there's not some resolution date of the stock where it's done and you get your payout from Nvidia. You're just betting on is it going to do better or worse in the future. And I think you could imagine a whole other category for instance of prediction markets for like the big life questions and things like that is we're just we're just scratching the surface.

23:58 Another thing that you've been working on is New Limit which is I think really fascinating when great founders do an act two and you were doing an act one while simultaneously doing an act two. So how did you think about starting a company while running a public company? >> Yeah. Okay. So this is a really interesting topic because you know like like you I'm interested in lots of different ideas. I think that's part of the benefit of being an investor by the way is that you know you just get to talk to lots of smart people about a million. So, it's very intellectually stimulating. I don't know, maybe the downside of it is a little bit like you don't ever feel like you've got you're all in on one thing and you're, you know, in the arena sometimes and you might be sitting there sometimes from the sidelines saying, " I know exactly what they should be doing. Why don't they just do this?" And then so if you're the CEO, you actually get to decide these things for better or worse. So anyway, long way of saying I I like being a builder or like an entrepreneur. I'm probably better as an entrepreneur than I am as an investor.

24:53 Some of my investments are a little bit more like, "Wow, that would be so cool if that happened." But once in a while, someone has to remind me. You do realize the point of investing is to like to make money, Brian. Okay, so anyway, I digress. Okay, so I I basically Coinbase went public in 2021. we were, you know, we're very profitable like it felt like 10-year journey. Okay, do I want to do something different? Do I have another thing or am I just at the beginning of this? And I realized I'm just the at the beginning of the journey with Coinbase. I think our mission of increasing economic freedom is just it's like we're just getting started. About half of 1% of global GDP is running on crypto. We've got a lot of the job's not finished, right? But I do want to have the ability to try some other ideas maybe and help incubate some companies or get them off the ground whether I run it or not. And what I did was I sat down at some point and I was like, okay, what are the big technology trends that I'm excited about? And I think by the way, if you make some money in software, you kind of have an obligation to like put it into hard tech and help some of the bigger things that might advance society. which are tend to be more capital intensive intensive and I was a little bit inspired by Elign when these kind of things with with PayPal. So, I sat around with some of my friends and we were like, "Okay, what are some of the big trends?" It's like, it's space, it's AI, it's fusion energy, brain machine interfaces. I was like, there's good teams working on those. I don't I don't have a strong thesis about what I would do that might be different. And when you're coming up with an idea, you want to you want it to be something that, you know, you're like, this needs to happen in the world, but also there's not like but for me, maybe it wouldn't happen that quickly. Like, you want to do something that you think you uniquely add value. And I didn't see like that many great teams working on on longevity.

26:25 I thought a lot of it was like kind of snake oil. I mean, you came from a bio background. I actually I I I cornered you and I was like, "What's going on with this space? Like what?" And you were like, " all this all the science is like a little bit bogus and like that, you know, people have tried these things for a long time like you know like caloric restriction or whatever. We found a bunch of ways to make mice live longer and it doesn't work in humans."

26:45 Okay. So, I was like, "All right, well, let's let's host this dinner and see if we can invite some of our smartest CEOs, scientists, and you you know, you attended, I think, one of these dinners, which I really appreciate you inviting some people, and we kind of just went around the room and we asked all of them, what's the most exciting thing on the horizon from a bio point of view that you think is high potential and underfunded today?" And people had all kinds of ideas, but one of them they came back with was ep this epigenetic reprogramming idea, which some labs had seen early results with, like Shiny Yamanaka's lab. And it was kind of showing how you could reprogram cells to restore function they had when they were younger. in that case, they were changing the type of the cell, but we didn't want to do that. And through a series of these dinners, I basically kind of went down this rabbit hole. And I started like sometimes you just can't get something out of your mind, and you just need to keep reading more and more about it, thinking about the implications. This kind of what happened to me with Bitcoin in 2010 or 2011. And I started to feel about epigenetic programming kind of how I did about Bitcoin at that time where I just couldn't stop thinking about it for like 3 months. And when that happens, you you kind of want to hold on to that moment of inspiration or motivation and like try to do something with it so before it fades because it's perishable. And so through a series of these dinners, you know, we happened to find the right group of people that came together which turned out to be, you know, Jacob Kimmel, who's now the CEO of New Limit, Blake Blake Buyers, one of the other co-founders, Greg Johnson, who co-ounded the company. And you know, I put some initial money in, committed that, helped them with some of the company building part of it, but the science was like totally new to me. And I I was basically just a sponge of knowledge trying to soak that up as much as I could. And so anyway, long story short, the the science progressed faster than I thought. We we've got a lab now in South San Francisco about 50 or 60 people running these large scale. It starts with AI as with all things these days. You know, you can test millions of hypotheses about what sets of transcription factors, which are these proteins that could re reprogram different cell types. It's a massive search space like so we're using AI for that. We've built the leading frontier model for epigenetic reprogramming that recommends the next set of experiments that we should run in our in our lab which are these large pulled screens and we run those at the scale you know as big a scale as we can but it's like moving atoms and liquids in a lab not not just software and so we do these large pulled screens to see if we can see get phenotypic hits for compounds that might be possible to reprogram these cells. The best ones of those we then run through functional assays which are typically animal models and those are a little more expensive, a little slower. And the best ones of those we run through human trials. And so the exciting thing is we've now got we've demonstrated successful reprogramming of at least one human cell type in these humanized mouse models. We're now testing that in human primate non-human primates. and then the first phase one clinical trial will be launching next year. So and there'll be there'll be I don't know three three to 10 other drug candidates coming off this platform in the coming years. So, that's been an incredible journey just for me to learn about what it takes to try to spin up another company, try to see where I can be helpful, where, you know, I don't be be humble about the things I don't know.

29:43 And yeah, I mean, I I I want to make sure that I'm focused on Coinbase. That is my full-time job. I'm basically just an investor/board member at New Limit. But I think it's fun and intellectually stimulating to try to create these companies that can advance the world. It's hard enough to get any any one company to work. So, I probably tried like 10 different ideas before Coinbase started to to really work, right? And then I you want to make sure you don't try to go do multiple things too early. Like that this distraction can be really dangerous. It's arguably like irresponsible to try try to go do it. But there are some people I think you know you're one of these people I think you've you've managed to help incubate a lot of different companies at this point. you know Joe Londale has done this. Sam Alman has done this.

30:23 Palmer Lucky has now a handful of companies like with Arabore where you know of course Elon is sort of like the most famous example of this. and so yeah I think there's a blurry line between like I'm the CEO of one company and like I'm a pure investor. You know in some sense you're both capital allocators at at a certain size of company. You know you're basically just allocating budgets and capital there. There's there's a bit more to it than that, but I think having like a small handful of things you're trying to do and and you don't want to get overwhelmed where if like a a couple of these things have a problem at the same time, you're just going to not be sleeping and probably ignoring your family and stuff like that, which is not balanced and healthy. But you also, if you're just doing one thing forever and you have the potential to help incubate more in the world, then you're just limiting your potential.

31:10 >> Yeah, I I totally agree. I think more and more founders are waking up to your realization and your actions in terms of once you hit a certain scale or point of things just have escape velocity they're working there's enormous leverage you know sometimes you're able to do incremental things and I think Daniel E would be another good example of that he's been doing really interesting things in Europe >> across he's made that successful transition to incubating more companies over time and yeah figuring out where he can plug in to help some capital but it's really his time is probably the most val valuable part Has the new limit announced where it's starting or what indication areas it's starting with in terms of what it's hoping to impact biologically or for a patiententric perspective?

31:51 >> Yeah, it has. It's actually on the website there's newlimit.com you can check out therapeutics. So we've published the road map there. So the first three cell types that we've started running our platform against. the first is liver cells or hippatocytes. The second would be vascular cells and the third would be im immunological immun immunological cells through for your immune system T- cells most most specifically. So you know we're following a pattern that's kind of similar to the GLP1s like ompic and all these things which is you know initially in drug drug design or drug search you're going after an indication which has like a high unmet medical need. It's typically sometimes it's a smaller market and that's just how drugs are developed because you go after things where people have no no better options. So for instance like with our liver program the initial phase one clinical trial will be in people with alcohol liver disease or alcoholic liver dis and today they don't really have any other options other than like a liver transplant and most of them don't have that in time. So I think the the survivability of it within 12 months is like once you're diagnosed is very low.

33:04 so we'll do a phase one in that and that alone would be like a pretty large market. sadly there there is a lot of people there are a lot of people in that situation. I think we estimated that yeah like just that if if that were drug alone works in ALD it might be worth $20 billion or something. But the the goal here is not just to make a liver drug for you know alcohol damage. It's to build to take to make a drug ultimately that healthy people like if you're if you're 40 and you want to have a liver that's like your 20 or your immune system or your vascular system or eventually you know your brain, your muscles, all these different cell types, your skin, that's a big one, right? That that that that's probably a trillion dollar market right there if you can get your skin rejuvenated. But the the idea is that over time you'd be able to take like a cocktail of these therapies or and they would target probably different cell types with slightly different payloads, but they would all have the same theme of reprogramming your cells to restore function they had when they were younger. And most of the diseases that take us out are all correlated with age. Like when you're when you're in your 20s and you get some errant cancerous cell or a little bit of damage to your liver, whatever, your body recovers from it because and then and then as you age, they lose this function. And so most of the diseases take us out, they're all they're all highly correlated with age. And so instead of kind of going after each disease like the symptoms of it, we're sort of trying to go for the meta problem of well, how do we just restore the function your cells had when you were younger? And maybe that would be a way to take a bite out of a lot of these major diseases and attack the root cause of it.

34:30 >> This goes back to the ammonica factors that you mentioned where they were able to change the imprint for both age as well as cell type and you're saying just focus on the age component of it. So you're reversing the potency of the cell to something that has more regenerative capabilities, you know, like younger cells or tissues generally are able to rejuvenate or regenerate better than older tissues, right? You see that with wound healing or injuries or other things like that.

34:54 Somebody's in an accident when they're old versus young, right? They get better much faster. So, it's really fascinating stuff. So, I I think you're this really unique and wonderful mix of somebody who's really grounded and pragmatic, but who also thinks big and goes after these giant shifts or trends. What are you most excited about over the next five years? either for Coinbase or New Limit or in general like in the world, you know. >> Yeah. Well, I'm always thinking about this, you know, on my free time and my weekends, I'm always thinking about what are what are the most important trends?

35:24 What what is technology making available now that wasn't available before? What do I want the future to look like? How can I help shape that, create that for civilizational progress? And so, I think it's good for more people to do that. Just as an aside, it's not exactly what you asked, but I think I think that everybody should try to contribute in some way to civilizational progress and think about what they could build because that's it's actually a really hard it's it's easy to be a critic. It's easy to poke holes what other people are doing or to be an activist or whatever.

35:51 It's kind of a common thing amongst a certain generation. I think it's better to try to be a builder and you're going to fall flat on your face and you'll get an appreciation for how hard it is to contribute sometimes. maybe maybe more empathy, but it's actually much more fulfilling if you helped build something in the world that benefited a lot of people. So anyway, to answer your question directly, I mean my main focus is going to just is going to be on Agentic Finance, right? Like that's what's happening at Coinbase. I think you know and then stablecoin payments at everything exchange like crypto is really only powering about half of 1% of global GDP right now. there's maybe about 700 million people in the world who have used crypto or hold crypto, but not all of them use it every month, which might be more like in the 50 to$100 million 50 to 100 million people range. And so we need to get that to a billion or more. And like just that's how we're going to truly update the financial system. We can do that with humans, we can do it with agents. That's that's going to be a big focus if you and then of course like new limit.

36:47 but I think if you want to talk about like frontier ideas that I've sort of been contemplating. I mean one idea I've been contemplating a little bit is around cognitive enhancement. and there you know there's been these things people have realized like if you I think in in development of children like if you give them enough like folic acid and like certain nutrients like that in certain countries it actually raises IQ like they just they develop better.

37:12 and it might be interest I might host a dinner on this at some point of just you know what are the various ways someone could target therapies whether in adults, children, embryos, whatever to try to just level the playing field a little bit of the baseline sort of cognition and IQ that people are born with or could be born with. I think that that would that's another one of these big meta problems. I haven't found a great thesis about how to exactly tackle that, but if somebody has one, let me know.

37:38 >> That's super interesting. It's basically how do you increase the the collective intelligence of humanity? >> Yeah, there's the biological form of that and then there's like the digital or AI form of that. >> Exactly. I I I I really we're in a race right now like AI is getting smarter and smarter. I think humans need to at some point take control of our evolution and get smarter and smarter. And then of course there's the hybrid of the two with brain machine interfaces where we all some people will choose to merge, some people will not. But even if you know I believe that like you do there's there's going to be probably more AI agents than humans in the not too distant future but humans still need to advance and progress. Like that's that's important. I think there's a lot that we can do with these AI tools to actually benefit humanity and you know healthier outcomes, live longer if you want, you know, have more energy, have less back pain, you know, wake up not tired in the morning, and and yeah, increase our cognition like and just have, you know, have healthier offspring, have children that are free of diseases. there's a company I invested in called Preventive that's doing embryo editing, which is a controversial topic. You know people have seen these movies like Gatka and things like that but actually like 80 if you look at the pure research like 80% of Americans embryo editing for disease prevention is supported by the population. nobody wants these rare genetic diseases for their children.

38:54 Everybody wants healthier better lives for their children. I think that's one of those topics that's like seems controversial today. I think it'll be more normal over time and at some point it'll be abnormal to to have children without doing this kind of screening and editing because it's it'd be like what this is so risky like why would you do that you know it's like it's like driving without a seat belt or something like that. I always wondered by the way on that one whether or not if you imagine in a future whether like gene editing is reasonably common.

39:22 there may be like packages that you buy, right? There's the intelligence package and there's the health package. Yeah. >> I sometimes wonder whether you're overall like if you think about different ways to be intelligent, there's processing speed, there's recall there. You know, there's like five or six different ways you can imagine different forms of intelligence. And I sometimes wonder whether these packages will effectively diminish the neurodeiversity of humanity because it'll push everybody down the same package. It's almost like you're buying, you know, the Ford Model T of intelligence for everyone or something.

39:51 So, I've always been curious about what are the implications of active editing relative to just human diversity and capability set and you know, will parents default opt into like the basic package or whatever which will always be the same thing. So, it's kind of a random aside, but there's all these weird downstream implications of some of these things. >> Yeah. So, I've heard I've heard that argument before and I actually I actually think it's the opposite. I actually think it could increase diversity. The reason is that there's just unlimited diversity of human preferences, right? I think if it was this simple, and it may not be this simple, parents would say, you know, okay, do you want to make have a great artist, a great general, a great engineer, a great politician, you know, it's like every parent is going to have some different favorite thing. And by the way, that sort of assumes that they're mutually exclusive. A lot of this might just be like raising the floor and then the kid is still still who they are and what they were going to be. just they don't have schizophrenia or depression or something, right? So anyway, I think I I actually don't think it'll decrease diversity. I think you actually could I mean in the limit case you could actually get diversity that's that's really out there. Like you could have you know kids born with with gills they can breathe under breathe underwater or like you know have have wings and fly or something like who knows how far it could go if if you really can take control of your evolution. So one thing that's long been discussed in crypto circles and libertarian circles and other things are basically different forms of special economic zones and obviously those have been implemented at scale in some cases like Shenzhen in China I think in part exists as a large scale manufacturing region in China because it became a special economics zone one form there's others that have been discussed in the Philippines relative to certain US interests you know so there's really interesting things right now there how do you think about that or how's your thinking evolved over time especially since crypto's played a prominent role in some of the underpinnings and philosophies behind some of these things.

41:41 >> Yeah. So, I'm super interested in special economic zones because again I'm interested in meta problems that you know unlock progress across a whole category of things. And I think if you look at what slows down progress in many parts of the world it is overregulation right like Europe certainly is could be an example of this. you know the US has its own version of it that is not perfect and there has been interest at various points in different solutions to this you know there's seasteading and Mars and going up brain upload into cyerspace and all these kind of things there's you know there there's a one called Prosper which is in Honduras and Coinbase actually made an investment in that just to like learn more about it and see what was going on and they've had a mixed up and I'd say with like the local government there, but they're getting closer to a resolution is my understanding that will you know, I think I think they're going to make it.

42:37 I think they're going to do a good job. The there was something I'd say there was a little bit more interest in this before the most recent Trump admin just because you know the deregulatory environment has created a lot of opportunities here in the US and that's a nice that's a great substrate market to build on. There was actually an idea that was discussed at one point I think in the campaign about something called freedom cities. If people Google it they can kind of see that idea and the idea was to try to create some federal land in the U. You know you the federal government owns lots of different pockets of land. And if we say all right you know we want to we think it's important strategically for America to get really good at nuclear power or drug discovery or you know having a crypto or drone delivery or what whatever it is. You could take a piece of land somewhere. The US has a ton of land, right? You could take a piece of this federal land 10 or 100 square miles and say, you know what, in this area, you you don't need to go through all the normal red tape on EPA and all these things and like you know, local community. You can build you can just build data centers there. You can build nuclear power plants there.

43:42 you can do unlimited drone delivery there. You don't have to get approval from the FAA. because we want to create these zones where experimentation can happen in a safe contained way to see what works and what doesn't and if something works via experimentation then you can go through the normal process in the rest of the US to see if it's it's ready to be brought to that location. The problem right now is in many cases there is no sandbox to go try this innovation and that is just incredibly stifling. you can't you can't really solve a problem as an entrepreneur unless you can iterate on it, right? And so anyway, I I think it'd be really fun to get some these pieced cities or special economic zones in the US. yeah, as you mentioned like Shenzhen, Singapore, Dubai, like these have been very successful in many other parts of the world and driven a ton of economic growth. and in some ways like the US is 50 special economic zones because of federalism and the state system. So that level of competition has I think allowed the US to be the leader globally in this. But it's just we could go even further and do even more.

44:44 >> Yeah. Very exciting. Brian, thank you so much for joining me today. >> Of course. Thanks for having me. >> Find us on Twitter at no prior pod. Subscribe to our YouTube channel if you want to see our faces. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That way you get a new episode every week. And sign up for emails or find transcripts for every episode at no-briers.com.