It's actually not that great to be human. You know, maybe that's okay. Like, if the AIs take over and they do better than us. Brian Armstrong founded Coinbase. Now, at New Limit, he's trying to help everybody live longer. It's unlikely to me that our current biological life form is going to be the best suited to explore the galaxy. Brian's not buying the AI doom scenarios. I think it's much more likely that we end up in a world where it looks more like C3PO than Terminator. His idea for keeping America on top sounds straight out of a Marvel movie. You could have a sandbox for innovation to really accelerate the future and try to make an American Shenzhen or Wakanda.
For any founder trying to change the world, Brian has a warning. I had never had like a thousand people like angry at me at the same time. He also digs into why founders can't stop building. I think we just find it fulfilling to try to improve the world. It literally is that simple. I'm Scott Phoenix and this is Progress.
In 2020, employees everywhere were demanding their CEOs get political. Brian Armstrong told his team, 'We're not here to be activists,' and offered generous severance to anyone who disagreed. Less than 5% walked, and Brian became an icon for what it means to be mission first. Today, the company is worth over $50 billion. And now Brian's betting his next decade on a second unicorn, New Limit, where he's reprogramming ourselves to younger states, so we live not just longer, but healthier lives. This is Progress in the mind of Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase and co-founder of New Limit. Brian, it's so good to have you on the podcast. Thanks for making time.
So, a couple things I wanted to go over today. First, I wanted to talk about what your vision of the future looks like. Like when you imagine 2035, like what's it like?
I'm generally a believer that technology is the most important force shaping the future and there's a bunch of important trends happening right now. Obviously AI, crypto. I think where AI is going to intersect with humans in terms of brain machine interfaces, that's a big one. We got to have more energy so we can keep building all these data centers and everything, probably get them plugged into humanoid robots. And then I think there's the whole space thing and then there's the bio thing. So on the bio side, I think longevity, embryo editing, generally just like taking control of the bio stack and accelerating evolution is going to be a big deal. And so I don't know if like 100% of those things are going to hit by 2035. I think didn't Ray Kurzweil in his famous book The Singularity is Near, I think he predicted by 2029, this was back in the 90s by the way he made this prediction which is amazing in hindsight but now it's looking more and more prescient. I think by 2029 we'll have a computer for $1,000 with the power of a human brain. Right? That was his prediction. And so I think generally we're on track to that and you know what happens if that world emerges, right? Intelligence is going to become much more abundant and inexpensive. Our brains will go from not just having an iPhone connected to it with our thumbs but like hopefully a high bandwidth connection accessing the sum of all human knowledge maybe connecting into more hive minds. I think eventually people are going to have some sort of brain upload that happens, right? If more and more of your thinking is happening in the cloud and you happen to have one human body and you have some robot bodies and eventually you know if the human body doesn't work as well or perishes, hopefully we'll get that solved with longevity too but if it does go away more and more people will be, or not I guess they won't be people, like the definition will have to expand, right? Of like what are these conscious beings, some hybrid of AI and human and they'll be living with real world human bodies with robots and they'll be in the cloud and hopefully it's someday exploring the galaxy.
So, I think you used this phrase one time. You said, 'How do we achieve a positive singularity?' And I like that framing of it a lot. So, I'm very aligned to that mission. I love the articulation of what 2035 can be like. And I also feel like if I did a random survey of like people I meet on the street, I'd be like, 'What's 2035 like?' The answers I would get would be like, 'Well, you know, like the phones are smaller. It's more like Her where you have like an AI friend.' Or like it would be a much less expansive vision of what it could be and it's sort of rooted in sort of what we have now plus like a little more whimsy or something. How do you bridge that gap? You know what I mean? Like people are experiencing what I think is like one of the most remarkable periods in human history, right? We're going from no AI to AI everywhere and that's a really big change. You've clearly wrapped your head around it. Like how does a normal person come to grips with like the kind of future that you described?
I think you're right. A lot of people are still grappling with issues that are, I don't know, they're a little bit more like they feel super important to them like let's say rising political violence or maybe tension between the US and China, right? But if you start to extrapolate this out a few steps ahead and we're in a world where you can start to explore other planets with your AI robot body or something, the competition between the US and China may feel a little less important. But you're right, like people today are probably wondering, is that cab driver or truck driver going to have a job? And the changes are going to be so much more profound than that that it will seem so, it's going to be like why are you and I not farming a field, you know, in early 1900s. It's going to seem like a very quaint and parochial thing to think about in 10 years is my guess.
I mean, I think your call back to the industrial revolution is like a really good one in so far as, you know, for context, we went from, I think it was something like 65-70% of people working on a farm in 1900 to like less than 5% now, in not that long of a period of time. And like lots of new jobs are created in factories and cities and stuff. But I feel like this change that's happening now is like a lot faster and less comprehensible to the average person. Like I think about like I have kids who are seven and nine and explaining to them like oh here's the kind of future you might get to live in and like here's how to relate to that. I feel like I haven't found a good way to describe it because it all sounds so different from the life they're used to. How do you think about that?
Well, I feel like in every generation there is some technology trend that happens and the people who are middle-aged or a little older have a freak out about it. You know, when I was young, I remember my parents, their big fear was like, okay, you're spending a lot of your time playing violent video games and you're watching the TV and in their world that was like super scary and they thought maybe these violent video games were creating murderers or, you know, who knows what. And if you go back and read history, I mean, believe it or not, like the bicycle when it came out in America was very controversial.
Books were super controversial.
They actually like people are reading all the time and it's like a disaster.
Well, yeah. The printing press I mean was highly, that was like the internet of its day and for bicycles people thought like oh your children are going to be all over town you don't know where they are engaging in licentious behavior or whatever like kind of moral panic at the time.
So I think that we have to have a little bit of memory of that. And now today it's probably social media or whatever your kids and it doesn't mean there's not some element of truth to it like maybe you should be a little cautious of what young kids are doing or whatever on the internet but I don't think it requires like a moral panic. People are very adaptable. And maybe I'll give you like an even further out thought which is that let's just say progress continues to accelerate even faster and faster and faster. I think that our current wirings of our brain and our biology are like pretty adaptable. We've gone, you know, humans have gone through all kinds of crazy things, war and pandemic and natural disasters. So we can be pretty resilient and adaptable. But I think in the future we're actually going to be able to take control of evolution biologically in the sense that we're not just doing evolution by natural selection which only optimizes for can you survive long enough to replicate yourself and then it kind of doesn't care what happens to you after that whether you're in pain or you're addicted or whatever. I think that as we start to really understand biology better in the coming decades, it's going to take some time with the assistance of AI kind of augmenting our brains. Like we'll be able to upgrade our thinking as well to be even more resilient to change. And I mean there could be like entirely different species or AI battles. It's hard to imagine what's going to happen in the future. I think that it'll be okay. I think that we might not be the top predator on the savannah anymore like the apex predator if these AIs surpass us. We can talk about that too. There's a merge opportunity and in some ways we have to accept that.
I love your comment of moral panics. It reminded me of this story I'd forgotten from my own childhood where I got a scanner for Christmas and I was so excited and my mom like after I opened it up and plugged in the computer and stuff came up to my room where the computer was set up and she was like, 'You know, Scott, I just want to make sure this isn't a temptation for you.' And I'm like, like what? You know, like it's a scanner. Like what am I going to like download licentious pictures, print them and then scan them back in? Like it was just such a gap between her understanding what the technology could do and like the actual risks and so I think it's a great frame of like now maybe a lot of us who are our age are looking at this new technology like that my mom looked at the scanner and being like you know it's amorphous and scary if you don't you know more deeply understand how it works. You know you want to make sure maybe this thing doesn't like jump out of its sandbox and start to like evolve too quickly. But I, you can probably tell from my comments like I'm a little skeptical of the real doomer scenarios around AI. Look, I think there is some plausible scenario you could imagine where AI kind of gets into this self recursive improving loop and it starts, we give it control of certain parts of government and it has human in the loop to start but eventually you kind of say no actually it's making better decisions without the human and at some point if this thing supersedes us it's not really going to care that much about our concerns and it may actually like kind of step on us accidentally or on purpose to try to further its own motives. I can't really like tell you I have some like perfect way to debunk that entire philosophy, right? Like it could happen. It's possible. It's just my hunch is that it's not going to be that simple. Like I think it's much more likely that we end up in a world where it looks more like C3PO than Terminator. We're going to have humanoid robots that are highly intelligent. They're going to, you know, humans or some augmented humans are probably going to still be like a major player in this game. And eventually we're going to have really strong AIs that are also have their own ambitions out there in the world. And I guess maybe my most contrarian thought on this is that, you know, maybe that's okay, like if the AIs take over and they do better than us, right? Like I think that we're going to have a path to merge our consciousness with AI and maybe supersede that. But if I'm imagining us like a 100 years from now and thousand years from now and you know what happened on planet Earth is spreading out across the galaxy, it's unlikely to me that our current biological life form is going to be the best suited to explore the galaxy. Like our DNA gets damaged outside the ozone layer and we have to carry this little bubble of water and oxygen around with us. Like so in some ways I'm kind of okay with the idea of like AI superseding humanity in a way like we should try to merge with that and evolve ourselves but we should also be proud to be like the birth of that if it really goes that far.
Just to say back to you, maybe it's something you're saying is like if we make the super intelligent AI and we go through what you described as sort of the gradual disempowerment scenario where we delegate more and more to it and then later it decides, hey, I'm in charge now and like I want to propagate machine intelligence through the world and like the humans are in my way. I'm going to turn off their electricity so that I can use the electricity for better purposes which are my purposes. We're in a world where like you know it's a posthuman world in the worst case of this. Like your view is obviously not that that's a good outcome, right?
Well, I don't think it'll be that simple of just they turn off electricity for all humanity. I think that like we already exist in a world today where there's people that are smarter than me, there's people that are more powerful than me. There's people that are implementing policies that are against some of my interests. And you know, I go out there and I try to advocate for the things I think are better and there are certain parts of the world that might be more aligned to me or not. And so, I think it'll be complicated. I don't think it'll be that simple where it's just AI wakes up and decides to step on us as a to get more energy or something. I think it'll be more complex and we'll partly be, we'll partly be AI ourselves.
It's basically like what would be theGattaca stack if you're familiar with that movie. Yeah. And it's like okay in vitro gamogenesis allows you to take skin cells turn them into eggs. So you don't have, you know, women don't have to go through this invasive procedure with IVF. You could have not just selecting the best embryos which is called pre-implementation genetic testing but actually starting to make some edits on the best ones to like what if you could get, you know, APOE4 is like a single base pair edit that is protective of Alzheimer's, right? Like these would be amazing and then you know artificial wombs and you can kind of go on down the stack and like that could get us to a place where actually more and more people in the world eventually are born with like better freedom from like these genetic diseases and you blurs the line into enhancement and you can have like much longer longevity because of that and other benefits. One of the things I thought was surprising when I was reading about this was that like a lot of you might think that it's a trade-off where like you either get to be an Olympic swimmer or a brilliant mathematician, but actually these positive traits are correlated with each other. And so like making an improvement in one area where you're treating a vision degradation condition or something actually also tends to reduce heart disease risk and like other types of problems. So you actually end up just moving strictly in a positive direction.
Yeah, totally. I think that's a counterintuitive thing most people don't realize. They assume everything's a trade-off. And there's a couple things that are trade-off.
Society, too. It's like a microcosm in the body. So, isn't it's not zero sum. But something about the positive sum nature of emergence takes us into a weird place that we talked about earlier which is like if you imagine that you and I can share thoughts or share memories and we do an economic exchange where I offer you some memories, you offer me some memories, we both get richer and like when you play that game over multiple iterations, everyone has everyone's memories and we end in a place where you're walking around with, you know, most of humanity, most of the internet, most of everyone's experiences in your head. How much do you still feel like a you?
So, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants, you know, and we're benefiting from like whatever 100,000 years of evolution all from stone tools and fire to like now we can read about quantum computing or something in our textbook in college. But our brains are getting increasingly more connected like a hive mind, right? Like part the internet was a huge step in that direction. Brain machine interfaces will accelerate that. And then like what would it look like to sort of Neuralink your brain like more permanently with your partner, your spouse or your or like a whole bunch of... Yeah, we will start to feel a little bit more disconnected from our bodies, right? In a sense like you know you might actually have whatever hundred bodies that different things running around. And so in many ways like our body is like this kind of meat puppet for our brain. And like one of our friends loves to talk about how you know should we just have be like a brain in a vat? It would really suck if our pancreas took us out. Yeah. You know, or something like that. It is interesting the more and more like humanity connects its brain and AI connects. We're becoming like a hive mind. It's almost like more like at a planetary scale. We are some sort of loosely connected big organism. It's like are ants in one, is the ant colony an organism or is it the individual ant? The individual ant can't live by itself. So, it's some hybrid like that.
Brian isn't worried about whether that future is coming. He's more worried about whether America still knows how to build it. The vision you gave at the beginning was awesome. I want to live in that vision. That sounds great. How do we make sure that that's the most likely version of the future versus some other, you know, of the darker ones?
I think I may have more faith in humanity than like maybe the average person because if you just look historically like the people who go and try to build a lot of these things, they have good intentions and that doesn't always mean that they know exactly what the outcomes are going to be, but they have good intentions. If people have bad intentions, society tends to tamp them down, right? They lose reputation. They lose resources to go pursue that. Society, our tribe does not really reward people that they feel like have bad motives. And so I'm more okay with like the free market of ideas, lots of people trying different things to improve the world. And then like our society will get some sort of sense of like are they overall are they doing better or worse? People who are doing better will accumulate more resources, more power. The people who aren't will not. I think the alternative is often to sit there with some sort of high power in the government or whatever and say we're gonna dictate on high that you cannot do this and you can do this and you cannot do this and here's all the... I don't believe in that centralized control I think it leads to worst outcomes and so I'm more interested in like the free market of ideas will allow the best ideas to come to the top and to the extent that there's bad people doing something there will be a product or service by a good person to combat it over here, you know. So that tends to have worked well historically. My bias in these situations is if a technology is new and we don't quite understand where it's going. Leave it unregulated, right? Until we start to see material harm because otherwise you're trying to prevent a harm which is it's sort of amorphous. It may never happen. It's sort of like it could be a boogeyman, right? And I think that a lot of harm has been done. Part of the reason like you think about why was the internet kind of the biggest growth area of the economy over the last couple decades. It's largely because it was mostly unregulated, right? And we saw a high growth rate there. If you look at education or healthcare or like some of the most regulated industries, they had slower growth, their prices went up. Think about like the cell phone you have now or the TV you have versus 20 years ago versus the education or the healthcare you're getting. Look, I'm not like saying there should be zero regulation, but I think in general we in society bias toward too much. The best regulation I've seen actually is choice. It's like competition in a market, right? Because I think people don't give customers enough credit. Like if you have a couple of different products they can choose from and relatively low switching costs, that can do far more good than a government bureaucrat trying to choose what's best for everybody, right? Like humans can understand that product, I don't like it for some reason. Maybe the societal impact that it's having or the risk that it's taking and I'm going to choose a different one. I want to vote with my dollars and cents. And that tends to be a good regulator as well.
What you're describing are how do we construct parallel institutions that like open a door that we didn't realize was there and like prediction markets is one, crypto like as an economic system is like an alternative parallel institution that you're creating. AI certainly feels like a parallel institution now where we can create digital people and they can have wallets and like can transact and like participate in exchange and like as you imagine the playing forward of the creation of parallel institutions what are the ones that get made? What are the ones that become irrelevant? Like what do you think happens?
Yeah. Well, okay. So, I actually do think it's really important to create new institutions. A lot of people want to try to reform the existing institutions, whether it's the universities or the traditional media companies. I think that it's okay for some people to try to do that, but you're not truly going to get reform unless you allow new ones to come in and compete with them. It's kind of like would you have rather tried to reform Microsoft or do you want Google to come in? It's voice versus exit. You know, our friend Balaji might say. I think that that's very important and like actually maybe one of the biggest ones would be what is the alternative to the United States of America like if it falls because it's currently the bastion of freedom and rule of law where you can actually go build things and it's under threat. I mean we're seeing Mamdani in New York and you know AOC and Gavin and Elizabeth Warren are trying to do a whole bunch of socialist things or whatever or like other people would say like Trump and their view of the attack of rule of law and there's ongoing, you know, the American debate, the American experiment is certainly in the most fragile state it's been it seems like in a really long time.
And to be clear I really want the American experiment to continue and I think it has a good shot at doing that especially if we can get deficit spending under control and all kinds of things, rule of law, whatever, you know, but how do we build a parallel institution, how do we build a backup plan and I think like special economic zones are an interesting topic that's underexplored. Like there actually are large ones like Shenzhen, Dubai, Singapore, these are all arguably special economic zones that have unlocked a lot of value and I would love to see some of those exist in the US. I mean there's been some proposals for this. I think people calling them like acceleration zones or whatever, but they might be pieces of federal land in the US with congressional approval or you could do it through an interstate compact or maybe even Native American reservation. There's ways you, but the goal would be to get outside of federal law and have a sandbox for innovation within these certain acceleration zones. And there you could do clinical trials, you could do nuclear energy, you could do space, you could do crypto. You could have a sandbox for innovation to really accelerate the future and try to make an American Shenzhen or Wakanda or some kind of very inspiring vision of the future.
Well, I also like, so that's another strategy you didn't list that I thought was surprising or interesting was like don't reform the FDA or maybe try but you should also create the FDB. Yeah. You know what I mean? And maybe the FDC and the FDD and like have these as parallel paths that compete against each other for some objective function or whatever. The way we set up our institutions now is we give all the monopoly on the thing they regulate. Rather than fighting the battle one at a time to try and create, you know, alternative regulatory agencies and, you know, it's a turf war. The FDA people don't want there to be an FDB. Is there some like higher level action that could be taken that set a framework in place for all of the agencies? You know, by necessity having like some, you know, market of ideas or like some set of competing principles where alternative hypotheses for efficiency could be tested.
In many ways, this is what the founding fathers contemplated with federalism. Like we have 50 states. Arguably, the United States is 50 special economic zones. The problem though is that while the states have some power, I don't think it goes quite far enough, right? I mean, if you want to build a supersonic aircraft, like you can't do it because the FAA blocks it, at least until recently there was an executive order, right? Or if you want to build a nuclear power plant in that state, you actually still need the approval of the nuclear regulatory commission or the FDA, right? So these federal regulators, it gives you a benefit in one sense, which is you have one regulator for all 50 states. You don't have to get 50 licenses. But if they're blocking innovation at the federal level, then we can't go further enough. So anyway I hope that we get a chance to see federal land that could be designated as these special zones that would actually be exempt from federal law and within that zone you could try anything in that sandbox and people can opt into it if you want to live there and there's sonic booms happening like that's up to you like you don't have to live there.
I like that idea a lot. Okay. So, when you think about the manifestation of those like special economic zones or the manifestation of sort of like a backup plan for America, does it even need to start with land? Like Balaji is really into network states and that as like a future direction. Do you think that, you know, you didn't articulate it as part of your 2035, which I thought was interesting. Is it because it's low P or is it, you know, something you think is a natural evolution? Like is land really the central organizing principle of human tribes and it's kind of hard to break out of that? How do you think about that?
Balaji would probably agree. It's like you could start in the cloud but you're going to have to get into land at some point where you know in a very practical sense like where are you going to put the data centers, right? And so yeah, I do think it's important to get land. I mean, you know, Mars is another option here that's a little ways off, but I think it's hard to live there. Yeah, for now. And but I think it will get, yeah the more likely path is to do something in the US that would be under kind of a at least you'd have some sort of sense of rule of law, right? I mean people like Próspera are doing a special economic zone in Honduras which I think is a great kind of V1 prototype.
Did they make it through the, there was some legal issues right where it was going to get taken away. Did that end up being resolved?
It's in a decent place. I don't know if I'd call it resolved, but my understanding is that yeah, so the constitution in Honduras actually did allow for these zones as sometimes happens in these South American countries. There was a little bit of a I'll call it like a banana republic or kangaroo court type thing. It happened where the Supreme Court kind of ruled that that law in the Constitution didn't apply and some that doesn't really make sense because they can't overrule the Constitution. It just had to do with like the current government.
The Constitution is unconstitutional.
Yeah. Got it. Yeah. And so anyway, that current socialist government that got elected was trying to tamp down on these zones, but it was more words than action and the zone still exists and it's still there and I'm optimistic on it. But let's just say that I would consider Honduras to be kind of a nice V1 prototype. But I'd feel a lot better if there were these zones in the US.
In a lot of ways, like right now America has an autoimmune condition or maybe humanity does where we like we've started to recognize the self as the other. And so like we're attacking instead of attacking problems, you know, we attack other cells that are differentiated and are performing a vital function. How do you treat the autoimmune conditions so that we can produce like a more forget aligning AI, like how do we align each other?
One contrarian thought that I've had is that I actually think people are really worried about like competition with China. And it might actually be good in a sense that America was leading the world for so long, we kind of got a little complacent, right? Yeah. And you don't want complacency, but you also don't want conflict that's violent and kinetic. But competition is good. Like competition breeds excellence. So anyway, I hope that in this competition with China, it actually gets the US to get back to like back to growth, back to excellence, back to building, believing we can manufacture things like having more kids like whatever whatever it is. So I hope it continues on, but there should be that kind of competition and pressure all throughout the micro level, the macro level, maybe someday with other species. We'll see. So, this is like a big difference I've noticed in some Chinese companies versus like American companies. I even imagine Coinbase is like I've seen the org structure of Chinese companies where like literally it's two competing divisions working on identical things and like if this one...
Builds it first, everyone's fired on this one. It's like an extreme cutthroat marketplace of ideas. Where is Coinbase as an organization between socialism and a free market internally?
I actually think there's some merit to that of having internal competition. Like within Coinbase, we have the main retail app. Most people know it's a custodial wallet. We also have a self-custodial wallet, right? And some of the features between them are similar, like you can do trading on both. You can do payments, but they have kind of different stacks underneath. It changes all kinds of things you can offer in the product. It's actually great because sometimes I'll be pushing on something in one of the apps and I'm like, man, why isn't it easier to do X and Y? And then the other team will show me a new feature. I'm like, that's cool, that's better. Then I'm like, okay, why don't you guys copy it better? And then the next month it'll happen the other way around.
