“I roughly follow some kind of a process like that and there's a lot of things I've read like that over the years once in a while when I'm like you know wake up in the morning and I I'm like ah I was supposed to be exercising but like I just don't feel like it today and I'm I'm being kind of lazy you know my my my best like motivation hack is like just to type David goggin into YouTube and watch a random video that comes up and then you will you'll be working out shortly otherwise you will feel like you know total whim but you I guess your question was what do I want to improve about myself right now I mean so I'm 39 now and just going from like 29 to 39 you know I'm notic I'm starting to feel like I'm getting older right it's kind of a scary thing right like you know jet lag affects me more and like if I get injured it takes longer to recover and I think even my memory has gotten like a little bit worse I feel like I used it used to be my short-term memory was like really good if people told me like five or six things I'd be like yeah I got them all in my head right and now it's like I'm trying to say think like two minutes later I'm like what was that I don't remember what they were really talking about so I I start to write down a lot more things so I'm noticing now that yeah age age is something where I feel like hey maybe I only have another 10 20 you know 30 good years of like really productive stuff and what do I what do I want to do with that so I started to think more about longevity Health I've gotten I've gotten a lot more into like being healthy and even like started a longevity company at least it funded it helped put some money into it so we can talk more about that later if you want but trying to think what else I'm also just trying to I don't know I'd say the other thing I'm really focused on is like I've had some success and some liquidity with coinbase and so early on I think I was driven by just like doing something meaningful in the world and making some wealth and I've sort of done that and so I'm basically just driving my motivation from other things which are like what do I actually like doing you know which is like I tend to like learning new things I like to build things with technology so I'm trying to make sure that I can have like really high motivation and energy for hopefully many decades to come and keep building more and more cool stuff anything in particular you're you are taking a stab at Learning at the moment I I've re wound and watched there's a very maybe half second or one second snippet in the dock where you're packing a bag for travel and you have three books I couldn't identify the one on the bottom there was I think it was seven days to the perfect puppy on the top yeah and then another one that it was hard to hard to get a full read of but it was something like the healing brain or the healing mind and something along those lines I can't remember the exact title so that may be a dead end uh but there was a freeze frame of it it was the the second book in a stack of three anything that you're focused on learning at the moment or would like to learn in the next 6 to 12 months that's funny I actually I haven't seen the final film I saw like a rough cut of it and I think I saw that perfect puppy book and I was there I was like someone's going to ask me about that that's funny that's me on Q we were thinking about getting a dog at that point but we we ended up getting some cats and said which who knows maybe they'll make an appearance behind me here but yeah so I'm always kind of reading like books like that those two were not super memorable but I'm trying to think like what else would be helpful right now I mean I'm I'm actually I'm like trying to learn more about biology right now I started off trying to read some textbooks on this and there was a couple books out there that was kind of for like basically I never gotten a chance in college to like really study biology and I didn't have a specific reason to but now as I'm learning more about health I'm like why don't I know more about biology I kind of wish I did one thing that I did was I actually hired a biology tutor so I was trying to go through these these textbooks and you know I I was doing it but it was taking me a long time like you know a little read like five minutes every evening and it's not Light reading yeah I mean it's like it's no it's no seven days to the perfect puppy yeah you know you get really de demoralized when you read a sentence you're like five of those words I have no idea what they mean you know if it's like one word every couple sentences okay I can maybe hack through it but like five words in the first sentence you're in trouble anyway I heard grad students are like woefully underpaid and some of these people are just like brilliant teachers and so I asked a few friends of mine and instead of trying to you know weigh my way through this super dense textbook every night it's actually been way more fun I basically just for an hour on Sundays usually I meet up with this guy he's such a great teacher and he can jump around to kind of teach me like whatever I'm most interested in you know instead of having to Wade through the whole book so that's been a pretty cool hack let's Deep dive on biology what what context have you provided this tutor because biology is kind of like physics right I mean you can go in a million different directions are you starting with just the basic basic building blocks okay what's the kreb cycle what's this what's that what are the essential amuno acids how do they factor into a b and c uh what what context or direction did you give your tutor I gave him the context of I want to learn all the fundamentals so I don't I at least know the basics so I don't sound like a complete baby and the part of the context was also you know I was those babies suck at biology it's true um well this is kind of how I sound when I try to speak you know Spanish or I sound like a 5-year-old or whatever so and then I was also in the process of like funding this this biote company new limit and we can talk about that later but that was I was trying not to sound like an idiot in front of the team basically mhm and so yeah the cool thing is he's been able to not only we we went through a bunch of like Basics around cells and things like that but we've also started to get into just like how do people develop these tools in biology like like PCR or flow cytometry and like you know cuz in in a biotech context like we're trying to leverage the latest tools to of course Advance the state of the art how do you sequence these cells now and what kind of data do you get out on the latest techniques but he's also kind of helping me understand the history of a little bit of this like well previously everybody used this technique and that was considered the state-of-the-art but somebody eventually at some point had to find a way to do it like at 10 or 100 xra throughput and you know like the Human Genome Project and how did they finally sequenced this thing which seemed like an insurmountable project and so I've been getting to learn a lot about the really cool history of how people found you know something that already existed in biology in some you know heated pool somewhere and like they sort of hacked that to do our bidding and some anyway that that part has been really interesting for me to understand the history of it and how how to try to advance like put another leaf on the tree of knowledge that's kind of what our goal is with the biotech so I'm going to ask you about new limit I would strongly encourage everyone to read more on the history of science I think it it would be such an incredible Boon and gift to everyone involved if more people read up on the history of science for a lot of reasons because you can a deconstruct how thorny problems or seemingly insurmountable problems were tackled successfully which is like a reading a detective novel in and of itself a lot of the time and also I think it is a nice remedy to certain epistemological arrogance that humans tend to have like oh well n there there are a few things left to figure out but we really have nature pretty much on lock I think we've got it dialed it's like no no no no we really don't so you should read up just the the amount of confidence that people have always had at different points in history with the most ludicrous coping mechanisms for like shoddy interventions and so on there's there's no reason to think it's any different now so it's that's also another reason to read up just to give everybody a a dose of kind of Humble Pie when considering not just what we know but the possibilities moving forward what is the goal of new limit why are you involved last year coinbase went public and um you know it's a good liquidity event for everybody involved I think actually I think over like a thousand millionaires were created in that IPO just from various employees and investors who had worked on coinbase over the last 10 years so that was like incredibly fulfilling and one of the things it caused me to do is kind of to pause and think about all right what do what do I want to do you know for the next 10 years 20 years and I was like well I I want to be continue to be the CEO of coinbase like that's going to be my first priority I think we're just at the very beginning of creating the open Financial system for the world and I'm going to keep doing that but I've got some liquidity now like I want to try to do something useful with it because I think like you know we're kind of in this golden age of software where like fortunes are being made and but some of that wealth even in crypto has now being is now being directed into hard science problems like you know Adams not bits and I think that's a really good thing actually CU it'll probably create a secondary effect like a boon in these other areas so I started to host these dinners basically with friends of mine that were either other bio people like biotech experts CEOs investors or scientists and especially in this space around you know like crisper i' had read about that and like car T cells and I was like it my Spider Sense is like there's something happening in in this area in biology where it's starting to feel more like engineering not science where we have some of these tools to actually go do unique stuff so I just started hosting these dinners randomly and I basically just went around the room and asked everybody like what's the thing you're most excited about right now and one of the topics that came out came up like during these dinners was something called epigenetic programming of cells which I can try to give a brief overview of that if it's helpful yes please okay well a long story short back in 2006 sha yamanaka got the Nobel Prize for discovering that you could turn you know a skin cell back into a stem cell by exposing it to these four transcription factors which are just like proteins that you can expose a cell to and it it was kind of like a mind-blowing thing at the time which is like wow you can really we can change the cell back to a stem cell and since then people have been learned that they can change a cell into other types of cells so they for instance you could turn a I don't know like a skin cell into a neuron cell or a muscle cell or something like that by exposing it to different transcription factors so just in the last five years or so several Labs have shown that you can basically you don't want to change the cell State you don't want to turn it all the way back to being a stem cell but you can basically rejuvenate right or move the cell to sort of a more functional earlier state by exposing it to some of these factors we have an existence proof of this if you will because we know that some animals in nature can regenerate right like a salamander like its arm if it's cut off it'll kind of regrow or like jellyfish some of them seem to live indefinitely and even like human beings I guess like if you you know if there's like a infant in a womb and there's like a prenatal surgery it'll come out there's like no scars right and so we're seeing Even in our own human biology there's sort of an existence proof for some amount of rejuvenation capability and so I basically realized that this could be an interesting area to pursue I talked to a bunch of my smart friends about it because obviously I'm not I'm not a scientist in this field which is always a dangerous thing to go into and so I partnered with buers on this since he's a PhD in you know he actually is a scientist and he's started a successful bio biotech company before and he as a partner at Google Ventures he invested in a bunch of Biotech companies and I basically decided all right let me try to put some some money into this with Blake and see if we can help this company get off the ground and even if I'm not you know running it or anything like that I can probably hopefully help this thing get off the ground and so yeah new limit is basically going to try to build a platform that tests a lot of different transcription factors with different cell types and uses machine learning to do that in a virtuous cycle because it's a huge search space of complexity that you could imagine the number of transcription factors and the number of combinations of it is like you know 10 to the 15 different possibilities and so you need some sort of way to kind of do a more directed search through this giant space and yeah so they've been able to build an incredible team to date there's about eight or nine people there brilliant scientists young people machine learning folks with an office in South San Francisco so if people are interested in that I'd encourage them to go check out the website and apply for for a role if they're interested in the space so new limit and to try to ensure I understand the basics of this they're looking at different sort of combinatorial cocktails of transcription factors that produce particular that are optimal for producing certain types of changes in cells are they focused on reversing cell inessence so reversing let's just say cell aging is that a primary objective or are they also looking at productizing in some fashion the conversion of one type of cell to another or are they really just creating the database that will then be used by other companies could you explain the business model a bit right I should have mentioned that earlier so yeah so the goal of of new limit is really to radically extend human health span so the the moonshot of the company is really it's a longevity company we're trying to help humans live much longer not just a a little bit longer but I think in any good moonshot company you know you want to have intermediate Milestones along the way and so the intermediate Milestones are more like could we get a specific type of cell to to be rejuvenated and be be younger and sort of you know an example would be like older people when they get the covid vaccine they don't have as strong of a response to it because their tea cells are older they're they're more exhausted so if we could in some sense rejuvenate tea cells right or you know pulmonary fibrosis is another issue that affects people maybe there's a way to rejuvenate those cells to get them to be younger so often times people get hung up on this definition of well what does it even mean aging like is a cell older or younger and we sort of you know don't worry about like some big fancy rigorous definition we're just saying we're trying to restore function in these cells to get them to behave like younger cells so hopefully we can find with this platform to test this rapidly with at a scale that hasn't really been done before an industrial scale to test this with different cell types different tissues basically we'll hopefully find hits here for different indications whether that's te- cells or prom fibrosis or others and develop therapies for that but the ultimate long-term goal of the company would be eventually you know some therapy that you could take that would actually just help humans live longer in a healthy State hypothetically what might administration of these therapies look like uh I don't know enough about the transcriptions transcription factors to speak intelligently about them but are these would these effectively end up as molecules that are synthesized and put into a capsule is it some other route of administration what might that look like the actual delivery mechanism is a little bit further down the research path in other it's not the main thing we're focused on at the moment cuz we're basically doing this with hum cells in dishes basically in vitro right mhm but you can imagine you know mRNA is now something that we have huge proof point with with the covid vaccines and I think that's a very interesting delivery mechanism people have looked at there's there's different viral delivery mechanisms that people have used more historically you could even imagine there may be some cases where uh kind of like dialysis or something like people actually get you know cells taken out of their body they could be then rejuvenated put back in there there's various things like that which could be attempted but obviously for like again the moonshot the long-term goal it would ideally be something even like it could be a pill or like a shot that you get at something that's more mass market so I encourage people to check it out beautiful website very nicely designed new limit.com yeah so easy to remember so I encourage people to check that out would you like to describe for people research Hub uh because I think this is related or at least overlapping in in some respects yeah well okay so thanks for asking I mean this is another project by the way you can see the theme in all these which is I'm really passionate about basically improving the world with science and technology that's kind of like the overarching theme here and I feel like cryptocurrency was a great breakthrough for that to create more economic freedom and some of the dollars I mentioned now that are flowing from that industry into these other areas are helping I think accelerate scientific research and it even ties into what we talked about in the beginning with Ray Doo's book you know he talks about the changing World Order like the root of a of progress is basically education which leads to Science and Technology Innovation which leads to Unique Products which leads to economic growth and then that's how societies Prosper they have higher GDP they they have Surplus that they can invest in the Arts and you know culture and you know defense or whatever they want to invest in so more universities or education so anyway I I really think that a lot of people today this is sort of a tangent but a lot of people today are thinking like how do I improve the world like they're in you know aspiring young person and there's a temptation to say hey like we should you know advocate for different government policies we should go become an activist or a protester and like I don't know my my message to people this is part of why I created the documentary as well coin is I wanted to show people like if you want to try to impact the world I think one of the best ways to do it is to build a company that's based around science and technology and so anyway I'm this all ties back to research Hub which is another company that I funded and and try to help tried to help get off the ground so the team there is doing really awesome stuff around trying to make scientific research more like open source software like like GitHub or something and you can see all the different challenges that are out there in the scientific research space today there's kind of there's a replication crisis where a lot of times people are publishing papers it turns out later nobody can reproduce it a lot of scientific research is done in Academia where it it's done in a silo in isolation because you know they're not actually getting like the material benefits from these technologies that are when like if you invented crisper you should been able to help commercialize it make you know become a billionaire at such a big breakthrough but they're not doing that they're basically they're basically only able to get citations and Publications and tenure and so they're living in this kind of artificial I don't know academic environment and so you get people more siloed it takes a long time to publish a paper they're basically writing it these small small Innovations are written up in some big flowery language that's inaccessible to the average person so with research Hub yeah we're trying to make it easy for people to sort through all of the you know millions of papers that are published every year to what are the most impactful we're trying to help get things like peer review you know Q&A comments feedback around research to be more collaborative with people and we're trying to get like data sets and the code to be published alongside the papers so it's not just reading some static PDF and we're trying to help with things like fundraising for for science in in the future so there's actually a coin associated with this research coin which is a reward coin that was created that help and a governance token that helps the community sort of get rewarded as they contribute more and more to that site and that community so it has like a really passionate small nent community that's that's helping grow a lot of the content on the site today and I think the road map for it is really exciting to hopefully just get rid of a lot of like the barriers to scientific innovation you know we saw a small example of this during Co where like everything went warp speed during Co to find a vaccine people were publishing their papers on Twitter instead of going through like a two-year Journal process that had all these pay walls and stuff like that and everything just went faster that's how it should be all the time and that's how we can advance civilization I think so we're trying to help do that with research Hub as well yeah I'm looking at the website right now this is quite cool I'm looking at the front page I have some some questions about the front page but just to look at a few things that are seemingly popular you've got long-term health effects of anti-depressant use you've got alcohol impact on sports performance and recovery of male athletes you have greater Effects by performing a small number of Ecentric contractions daily than a large number of them once a week I will probably read that in the next two hours because that's very of great interest to me especially for connective tissue repair uh with tendonosis in the elbow now there are I'm noticing open bounties could you uh just explain what these open bounties mean to the people who are posting them and for anyone who might be a bounty hunter so this one of the things that we're testing out with basically adding a crypto asset onto this platform to try to see if it improves the collaboration of people there and so what we did was we allowed anybody who had basically a question a scientific question or anybody who wanted like a peer review or maybe they want a video summary of their paper a task that people often have even in Private Industry or in scientific research is they'll say I want a summary of the literature I want someone to go out there read the 20 or 50 most relevant papers on a certain scientific question and give me kind of a meta study aggregate that information and we're sort of building the tools for people to do that as well so people can do that with research coin it's it's a way to the people who are kind of contributing the most are earning it that's improving their reputation on the site but it's also a way for people to kind of get recognized and you know I always tell people imagine if like the early hosts on arbnb or the early drivers in Uber had gotten a chance to like participate in the the network that they helped create and that's kind of what's coming together here on Research Hub is the method of redemption or I guess let me phrase it a different way the value of research coin at the moment is one social credibility and two with the research coin that you earn you can then post your own bounties and make requests of the community are those the sort of two main values to an individual contributor who is acre research coin yeah that's correct okay got it what has you most excited so let's pretend that you're at one of these dinners you were hosting and I said look I know you're not a biologist I understand that however you've you've crossed the you know speaking like a 5-year-old point you seem to have a good grasp of the basics you also have an engineer's mind which I would argue is more similar to topend Scientific Minds than one might think I I I think the disciplines are different but the mental Frameworks the ability to ask questions attempting to replicate Etc transfer quite well what are you most excited about in the world of science if I just think about all the biggest challenges that we have in the world today I think Science and Technology are like pretty good hammers to swing at those Nails you know it's like okay we've got climate change right everyone's talking about climate change so I mean I think Fusion Energy is super exciting I think people working on carbon sequestration is pretty interesting interesting you've got you know again Elon is kind of working on that with with Tesla and solar panels and electric vehicles and Asar rivan and all these other companies to me those are like the most promising Solutions we have to that are using technology right if you look at education it's like KH Academy stuff like that gets me really excited it's like okay let's make a free world-class education available to everyone that's really cool right if you look at why don't we have you know better economic you know Financial infrastructure in all the countries of the world and why do we have big inflation problems and why does it cost 2% every time you swipe your credit card you know it takes forever to move money around the world and like crypto is is a really important solution to that which is basically a science and technology breakthrough right so I kind of feel like I don't know if this is exactly what you were asking but I I just feel like science and technology and building commercializing it is like the thing that is really the most exciting thing there there's another thought I've had is like there's kind of two very different worlds so there's one world of scientists and academics and there's another world of entrepreneurs and they actually very rarely do they cross pollinate most people who are entrepreneurs they're making something that's like mostly based around marketing it's like a new tequila with a celebrity or whatever or like you know and then most scientists are building things which never get commercialized like because they're living in a pure AC academic world but if you think about a lot of the most valuable companies in the whole world Genentech right SpaceX X even coinbase which was based on a research paper the Bitcoin research paper right it's basically even Google was came out of like a basically a research project at Stanford with Larry and Sergey right and like so the most valuable companies in the world are when we cross-pollinate a true scientific innovation with someone who can go commercialize it and the problem is these two groups of people are like sometimes oil and water like the scientists don't like people who make money and they think it's like kind of low integrity and you know the business people don't have any understanding of science whatever and they basically get caught up in pseudo science and all these things and so anyway I think the more you can cross-pollinate and get those two areas to talk to each other the the few the few people in the world who can speak both languages like a translator they they know enough business to be dangerous and enough science to be dangerous those are going to be really valuable things that get created for all Humanity sounds like you might be one of those people I'm trying look forward that's why I'm uh doing the biology tutoring yeah I might have to pick up on this biology tutoring idea yeah I could also use some some basic groundwork lest I get myself into trouble so last question or second to last question and this may be a dead end I'll take the blame if it is but I like to ask this one the metaphorical billboard question so if you could put a a message or a quote image anything non-commercial on a billboard to get the message out to let's just say billions of people assuming they speak whatever language is on the billboard uh what might you put on that billboard I guess there was one we said earlier which was like action produces information I like that one a lot but if I had to pick a second one since we already said that one of my favorite sayings is the greatest risk is not taking one and I feel like a lot of people they have ideas they just debate it endlessly they never take that first step and there's really a scarcity of risk tolerance and I don't I don't mean like doing anything that's like actually that risky in fact I think you put out like a great framework um a while back about sort of imagining what is really the worst thing that's going to happen and could you actually live with that right it's like starting a company I mean okay so you went and raised some money and what's the worst thing that happens I means basically the company fails you shut it down maybe you go get another job you know and if you raised a little bit of seed Capital you can probably pay yourself during that time period so like is it really that big of a deal I mean if you know if that's truly the worst case scenario then like what's stopping you right so you know everybody has their own unique personal situations maybe it's harder for them than others like so I don't I don't mean to belittle any of that but often times the fears that people have it's it's greater in their own mind that it is in reality so yeah greatest risk is not taking one maybe I'd put that out there I dig it well Mr Armstrong maybe someday drct Armstrong biologist PhD astrophysicist uh is there anything else you would like to add before we wind this to a close any any closing comments requests of my audience things to point attention to public complaints you'd like to Lodge anything at all no I mean I guess mostly just want to say thank you I think you're one of the group of people out there that you're really celebrating Builders which is people who are trying to do ambitious stuff in the world you know they don't always succeed but at least they're trying and I think frankly there's like too much too many people out there want to be a Critic and and everything and it's easy to be a Critic it's actually easy way to sound smart but it's hard to do difficult things and I think you're encouraging people to do that you've done that yourself and I I I'm just glad that there is like New Media out there you know which I consider you to be part of that podcast and blogs and YouTube and kind of like this documentary coin as well that we're trying to participate in this new media movement to sort of let's go celebrate Builders you know let's tell the behindth scenes stories of the ups and the Downs the good bad and the ugly and so I appreciate you being a part of that and uh yeah I hope people go check out the documentary it's called coin and I I partly I created it because I wanted to show people what it's like to try to create something new in the world going from your laptop you know to being a public company and sort of demystify it and hopefully more people will watch it and say hey you know what I could do that I want I want people to go create more companies in the world so hopefully that'll happen well thanks thanks for the kind words man I really appreciate it and coin can be found on Amazon iTunes vimeu on demand and other platforms one final question related to the documentary what's the story with are they dinosaur pajamas what is I saw it come up multiple times like the onesie pajamas yeah what is the background there oh man you know sometimes when you I when I made this documentary I was like so I'm either going to look like an idiot or this is going to be great but either either way I'm going to try it um so that's one of those moments where I probably look idiot but yeah that in the early days building coinbase I mean it was literally just like 12 hours a day kind of like you know try to write some code talk to customers and I was for whatever reason I thought this this onesie was just hilarious I had it around the house so it was kind it kind of became uh like I I never thought it would turn up in a documentary I'll guarantee you that but um I think I wore it to a couple hackathons we had at the coinbase office too so you know you got you got to keep it fun have fun while you're uh trying to do crazy stuff yeah the coinbase team mascot uniform dug it I just I had to ask I wasn't sure if that was like a formal attire for board meetings or something else well Brian thank you so much for making the time and for being so game for the conversation people can find you on Twitter at Brian Armstrong and we will link to everything including the new documentary and all the books resources names companies Etc that we've discussed people can find in the show notes at tim. Blog podcast and until till next time everybody be a little Kinder than it's necessary and remember the greatest risk is not taking one be safe out there”
Relentless Focus, Full-Contact Entrepreneurship, Epigenetic Reprogramming, and More · The Tim Ferriss Show