206 - Decentralized Science | Brian Armstrong & Patrick Joyce

welcome to bank list where we explore the frontier of Internet money and internet Finance that's what I usually say when I start these episodes but David we're actually exploring the frontier of science today decentralized science and I still think Frontier of science yeah this is a new frontier and this is another front running of the opportunity so as usual guys I am Ryan Sean Adams I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless so the episode today science is really a consensus technology at the end of the day just like crypto the question

on our minds is can we use crypto to fix science and you'll never guess who we have on this episode Brian Armstrong on the episode to talk to us about this yes Brian Armstrong from coinbase he's joined by his co-founder and scientist Patrick Joyce that's not the co-founder of coinbase that's the co-founder of research Hub which is another company that Brian founded which is going to be subject matter for today we also talk about number one why s Science Matters number two why science is broken today number three how crypto can fix it and

number four what they are building over there at research Hub David I know you've done some dii episodes in the past and put them out on Bank lists why was this episode significant to you dii short for decentralized science is an emerging part of the crypto sphere that's pretty far adjacent to probably what we typically talk about on these episodes and what bank list listeners are used to but it is nonetheless a crypto subject matter with a ton of values and Ethos and principles that every listener of this podcast will be

uh incredibly familiar with but applied in a new sphere the sphere of science rather than this sphere of Finance as it turns out the problems that we see in the traditional Financial system the closed walls the uh the rent extraction the middlemen is not actually only a problem of the financial world it is also a problem problem of maybe the whole entire world and now we are talking about it in the context of scientific institutions the universities

the who's giving the grants who's winning the IP rights and there is a lot of middlemen in this world of science as we learned in this episode today and so I think bankas listeners who have been with bankas for a long time will be able to apply patterns and principles that we have been teaching about here on Bank list but now in a new context so take the principles of crypto take them up from the uh lens of finance and turn it over to the lens of Science and we'll be able to have an interesting episode where we learn uh a lot with the

same kind of uh foundational knowledge that we already have yeah Bank list listeners see where you can spot the me in the scientific institutions and the corruption kind of seeping in I mean man it's similar rules apply same same so guys we are going to get right to this episode but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made it possible including bankl station I'm excited to introduce you to Patrick Joyce a researcher a scientist if you will and the co-founder of research Hub Patrick welcome to bankless it's great to be here David thanks for having us and also

on the episode today we have Brian Armstrong you probably know him as the co-founder and CEO of coinbase but today he joins us as a co-founder of research Hub as well I bet you didn't know that and the powerful idea of rebuilding our modern of system of doing science uh Brian uh when we usually have you on the episode we're usually talking about crypto or coin base or you know something in the related field that we usually talk about on Bank list but today we're talking about science uh what gives what's the deal why do we need to talk about science yeah well you know many years

ago of course crypto took off as a trading use case and I started to think more and more about how can crypto be used for a variety of things in our economy how can it be used to bring communities together and so I felt like the best way to learn was to go try doing something and I was fortunate enough to meet Patrick Joyce and a few other early team members over at research Hub and I figured let's see what can happen here if you apply crypto to a community and see if you can bring something unique together so science is something I've always been passionate

about um you know in my family there're scientists I have friends who are scientists and it was funny I'd always hear them nights and weekends kind of complain about the inefficiencies of publishing getting in journals you know the University Research model and the 50% of the overhead went to the university for some reason and it took years to get in these journals and I always had this thought like wow in open source software we have such a huge advantage in terms of how people collaborate all over the world you know you put you put work in progress out sometimes some random person on the

other side of the world submits a poll request they have the other piece of the puzzle I've had that experience as a developer and you know I always had this passion for Science and felt like it could be more efficient so um when I was fortunate enough to meet the research Hub team I was like all right let's let's try doing something and we can talk about it today what they've been able to to accomplish I think it's I think it's really impressive Brian would you consider yourself a scientist you said you had scientists in your family but are you a scientist right so okay computer science computer scientist does that count well you know there's kind of this joke that if you have to put

science in the name it's not actually a scci like there's no such thing physics physics science and everything I remember my professors in um in college would say you know computer science is a real science now there's enough body of research and all this kind of stuff so I mean I did get a master's degree in computer science but I I was never um one of these people kind of who was really good at writing math proofs and Publishing papers I was always just like man I just want to build products I just want to hack on stuff so I was like more of a software engineer and like a hacker than I was a true computer scientist who

I think of as somebody who like write writes you know math proofs and papers and they're not like sitting there trying to get the first you know 100,000 users in their product so we we have some of those in crypto though don't we some of these mathy kind of cryptography researchers is that obviously Satoshi was like that um I mean so I knew I knew enough computer science and economics to read the Bitcoin white paper and I was like wow this is really hard to understand I had to read it like five times but I you know that's an example

of a research paper that founded an entire industry and like obviously coinbase was entirely built on that research paper um it's also very interesting that that was published anonymously because we're going to we'll come back to that maybe a little bit later in the episode how it's not really safe like to talk about um every idea in science today um that's kind of an interesting topic but um and people follow these like Trends and if you offend the wrong person it's like it's political all these kind of things which shouldn't be the way that that way because science is supposed to be about seeking truth um even if it's like you know a very difficult truth to look at

um but anyway yeah that I I I don't think I don't consider myself a scientist I I hope hope hopefully someday I'll be like an honorary scientist but I'm more of a software engineer hacker hopefully product Builder and um you know but Patrick Joyce he's got true scientist credentials um so you know he he he brings that side of the equation as we progress in this conversation I think this conversation will follow a pretty similar pattern that most crypto episodes will follow we'll start with like laying down some foundations about what is science what does science do for

Humanity how has the system evolved why has it become broken and how can crypto help rebuild it there's going to be I think a lot of patterns that will match even though we're talking about something pretty far away from crypto I think there's going to be very similar uh sentiments as as we progress in this conversation but Patrick I I want to actually learn a little bit more about you as as we get into this conversation tell us a little bit about your background and maybe um tease us with the illumination that you had about like how crypto can start to innovate with

science yeah absolutely so I'm like a huge science nerd um when I was in college I was really lucky and got to do some undergraduate research at John's Hopkins studying tumor biology uh specifically like the epigenetic signature of cancer stem cells uh the lab at Hopkins was this hhmi Howard Hughes Medical Institute funded lab that had like 30 of the brightest people I've ever worked with in an environment where they were allowed to just kind of like on their own valtion explore what they were intellectually curious about I was

like wow this is amazing you're basically just like exploring the world through a test tube um and I fell in love with benchwork so I decided to start a PhD in mro biology quickly found that not all labs are quite as lovely as a hhmi funded Hopkins lab there's a lot of issues with the way that capital is distributed in science that creates like a lot of pressure on the participants within the ecosystem that kind of erods I think the valuable or the value of the results that are produced so um I started a PhD in M your biology quickly

saw a lot of these issues that resulted in a low quality of life for the average researcher along with a low quality of accuracy of the aage average scientific result I was frustrated by this decided to leave started Medical School very interested in Psychiatry and mental health um and after spending some time in the clinic kind of found that hey like the quality of our knowledge around mental health is also not that good um we have a lot of treatments out there but they really don't work that well and actually barely better than a placebo across all the patients that they're given to for conditions like anxiety

depression PTSD some of the most common mental health disorders that exist in the world and so I was kind of frustrated with this as well and was like hey what's going on here like why don't we have better medications kind of at the end of the pipeline of academic knowledge creation and in my mind I thought it was kind of this broken way we allocate Capital within basic science so I kind of like stupidly at the time was like hey you know what I'll like try my hand at making a startup to try and fix these issues so I took a year off from medical school um built like the V1

of a product um you know was very lucky came across Brian's blog post where he described a lot of like the similar issues in science that I was working on myself um and you know got in contact with him we've been able to build research up now for about three and a half years so it's been a great journey I feel very lucky to be working on this problem it's a it's a really cool cool story and to just build on to what David was saying I think there's some similarities with the typical Bank list podcast and in fact where where I want to uh continue this conversation maybe our first stop on the the the journey

here is back to like Basics you know uh one thing that we really ized when we started learning about um crypto is like well in order to understand crypto or Bitcoin or ethereum or anything you actually have to understand money in general and while this is a much deeper uh topic than it first appears money is just not something that is created out of thin air there's a bunch of History here there's kind of Institutions there's social coordination there's sociology there's there's other Sciences involved in in the process of of creating money so so take us to the ba

the basement level of of science so when you think about science okay this is like I I guess when did when did science emerge historically I mean can we go back to like Greek philosophers was that the beginning of science or do we go to like Isaac Newton is that really the beginning of Science and like what is it is it a way of thinking about the world is it a philosophy I've I've I've often kind of wondered going to this conversation well maybe science is is some sort of consensus technology similar to a blockchain in some ways where we're all trying to figure out what truth actually is and and the

reality of the world and so there's consensus maybe it's all of these things tell us uh Patrick from a scientist's perspective an actual molecular biologist you've not had on the bankless podcast what is science what is this thing yeah so I kind of think of science as like this way to think about the world um that is repeatable and testable that helps humans kind of uncover what is true and helps us manipulate our environment in the future um I think probably the easiest way to describe this structure is the scientific method

um you can can have an observation about the world the sky is blue ask a question why is the sky blue and then uh create a testable hypothesis that you can use experimental data in order to confirm or reject your hypothesis so yeah I think it's a way for humans to come together on what is actually true about the world okay and Bri Brian what would you add to that like it are there any ties with what we understand about crypto is it like is there some sort of different philosophy underlying science like it it

appears to be um a major reason that Humanity has has progressed through the last 400 or 500 years is it like a social consensus technology as well what would you add to this yeah I mean if you go back and look at the history of this there's kind of I think it goes back to Enlightenment values right and you can kind of read read about some of these topics Wikipedia or wherever about you know empiricism and rationalism and skepticism and I guess you know I'm not an expert on the I'm not a historian on this but my high level understanding is

that you know there was a shift in thinking at that time which was which was a breakthrough that previously people they were looking for these explanations of natural phenomenon and why did they occur in the world and it was largely being taught from you know like a like a religious or a spiritual mindset you know if if there's thunder and lightning in the sky like you know maybe God is angry at us and people would come up with these kind of philosophical or you know religious explanations and you know people were just guessing but whoever kind of had the best story it was like mimetic and it would spread throughout society and

so um this idea of empiricism or rationalism or skepticism was was a breakthrough way of saying um okay well let's come up with a testable a falsifiable hypothesis how do we even know what's true our our brains are sort of naturally evolved to deceive us right we might um come up with something just because of how we feel we feel scared or we feel angry and like you know um there's all kinds of like fallacies that your brain can can fall into and most people if you're not actively taught

this separate way of thinking it's very easy to end up believing something because it feels right or because you know you were exposed to it in a certain way or whatever so um I think this this different approach is kind of the foundation of of Science and Enlightenment values and you know sometimes you see people say things like well trust the science right um I mean maybe on the surface that's a good idea but part of science is actually questioning things from first principles and how do we even know that that's true right and so it's sort of it's an anachronism to sort of say like just

blindly trust the science that's not what science is about science is about questioning sence should be trust yeah exactly and I mean I think science is at its best when you know there can be an accepted theory that has a lot of evidence and somebody comes up with a new Theory and it's testable it's falsifiable and a very counterintuitive result is shown and suddenly everybody has to question it again okay maybe we have had the wrong model of how the actual World works but you you see that human biases creep into this all the time and people

they don't want to believe that new thing even in the face of new evidence and of course there's famous examples of this like um you know I think Cernic's kind of came up with this heliocentric version of the UN of the world um that the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around and you know people like Galileo were actually kind of um convicted I guess of uh hair heresy or whatever you know they called it back then and I think some people might have even been put to death for like proposing these heliocentric versions of the universe right so you

know we see like much more moderate or minor versions of that in in modern society where there's a belief that somebody has about the way the world works and someone proposes an alternative and it's there's not actually a safe Forum to go and propose that um in science because you might offend it's like not a you know you might offend somebody or like you might harm your career because like these very famous scientists have been proposing an alternative Theory their entire way their entire career and to go against them you know puts your own career at risk so anyway that's a bit about the

history of science um I do think crypto has a unique role to play here and it's actually become a its own thing kind of like defi now this is called DSI right decentralized science and um this is still in its infancy research Hub is one of a number of really cool companies that are playing in this space but you know incentives matter and crypto is is in a way for to align people's incentives to bring them together to try to accomplish better outcomes um in science and again make it a little bit more like open

source software there's different roles people can play some people are doing breakthrough science itself other people are going to be more like trying to replicate that science other people might be more like editors um to that science other people might be sort of like science Educators you know trying to translate it to a lay audience um how do we go if you have some breakthrough in science how do you go commercialize that and make it so that products can come from that that actually benefit people right so I think crypto if you zoom out to the 20,000 foot view it's it's just a tool to align incentives and

the incentives in science are kind of broken right there's not a true economy where if you come up with some breakthrough like crisper you know they you know the people who did that Jennifer dodna and others they should probably be billionaires from that you know it's created so much value for the world and it and it will in the future but that's not how it works currently um science often exists in sort of a false economy of based on citations and tenure and so you get all kinds of kind of inefficient outcomes where people are publishing something which is really not a breakthrough they're dressing it up in

all kinds of fancy language to try to you know get their PHD or approve you know like 10 other people in their field will read it at some Journal but it actually does nothing for the world and of the two to three million papers that are published every year most of them are never read they don't replicate they don't have any kind of real breakthrough they're just trying someone trying to get their PHD with a bunch of fan fancy language and so I think if we can align science back to real incentives maybe crypto can help and we can get more breakthrough inov real like we can accelerate science that's actually the

mission of research Hub and have that eventually translated to real products for real people yeah fascinating and we're circling in on kind of some of the problems and the solutions here in a in a roundabout way and uh P Patrick I'm wondering what what did you think of Brian's definition of uh you know science and why it's important yeah I think it it makes a lot of sense it is kind of ironic that sort of the the catchphrase of the last few years has been trust the science when the motto of the first scientific journal was actually nullis and verba which means take no one's word for it so basically

like this inherent skepticism where there are theories about the world that we only believe if they've been tested you know multiple multiple times and the strongest ones are the theories that are able to be resilient to these tests for instance like uh the acceleration of gravity 9.81 m/s squared like you can drop a rock 100,000 times and you're going to get the same measure for acceleration of gravity so yeah I think what we want to build with research Hub is kind of a new system that helps to

make it easy to test hypotheses um using objective data and then allows the world to have a better understanding of what's going on around us rather than uh you know just inherently trusting the science or trusting the experts who are kind of the people behind the dissemination of scientific knowledge at the moment C can can we just reinforce again the value of of science here for for our audience because I don't think people think about kind of the basement level principles very much so we had kind of this Enlightenment where we discovered sort of uh the effectiveness

of the uh scientific method that was in the 1600s and most listeners learn the scientific method in grade school right which you have a hypothesis you test it and see if you can kind of like know the hypoth hypothesis and repeat the experiment that sort of thing it's it's quite amazing that such a very simple primitive and it does sound very simple the face value it's just like a series of steps right uh with a kind of a measurable outcome at the end it's it it's it's sort of deceptively simple that such a protocol could like absolutely transform humanity and indeed

that that's kind of what it did right it brought us out of kind of the the Dark Ages when when we think about technology most listeners to this podcast will be probably Tech accelerationists uh I I would guess they are definitely uh they're in crypto right they're technophiles they love technology you think about how does technology actually get created well it's on the basis of this public good of this recipe of this protocol called science the uh scientific method and that's absolutely wild and like we can't have technology we can't have accelerationism we can't

have the civilization all the good stuff that we want without science that's the kind of the bottom layer of all of these things and the process from turning science into like technology is is something interesting to talk about but I just want to reinforce the value proposition here like look around you like this conversation everything you see and appreciate about um like humanity and all of the uh fantastic things that we've done in in human civilization are because science it's like that's the one thing that is propelling US forward and it's kind of a

simple truth I'm sure you guys are both nodding your heads and especially you Patrick like is that why you're here is there is there kind of like some Mission orientation with like a true scientist is a truth Seeker trying to propel uh Humanity forward is that why scientists do what they do yeah absolutely I mean I think it's about like reducing suffering in the world in general so kind of what I mentioned before when I was into Psychiatry and mental health like there are a lot of issues in the world that a lot of people struggle with on a daily basis and having like a repeatable process through which we can understand

what reality is allows us to like manipulate our environment to our own Advantage um create you know drugs and like small molecules that can actually like change how you feel and like uh like make better your perception of life and so I think that like all technology is based on scientific underpinings which are based on the process of uh observing what is true asking questions about it and then creating experiments to test hypotheses uh that underly the theories of how the world works yeah and

I can just add to that I mean if you look at all the countries of the world and they're all kind of trying to think about you know how do we grow our economy how do we have more budget you know how do we improve healthare and like all these things so Matt Ridley and kind of others have written about this but if you sort of trace it back to the root cause right and it's like okay well how do countries grow their economy so that they have more resources to do more things I mean well you have to have some sort of product that is unique that your

country produces that has some unique Advantage like it's like hard for people to get it from other countries right it's it's it's distinct and so how do you get products that have some advant AG right whether it's like the best car or the best rocket or the open AI or whatever like well it usually comes from some technological breakthrough right okay so how do you get a technological breakthrough in your product even going back to like the you know the Dutch Empire like they had the best ships the caravels or you know all these kind you can kind of go back and back um well the

way you get the best technological breakthrough is you need to have some sort of scientific breakthrough right how do you get scientific breakthroughs well you could probably Trace that back to you know having great education or having a great immigration program like to attract the best and brightest people all over the world and so you know essentially like good education produces good science good science produces technological breakthroughs those get commercialized into products which produce the prosperity of entire Empires

and you know sometimes when people think I I think Patrick I don't want to speak for Patrick but you know I think we're both techno optimists in in that sense and um you know I think it's important in a country that you celebrate science and celebrate technological breakthroughs because I think sometimes it technology gets a bad name there's like this techlash thing right people think of oh technology is like Instagram aren't people like addicted to that and it's kind of frivolous and it's like no technology is much more than that like technology is the shoes on your feet right technology is like fire humans

inventing fire um which led to the internal combustion engine and cars and like you know eyeg glass es that or contact lenses on our face and you know if without technology we would literally just be like freezing and Starving in the wilderness like as primitive beings right and so you know once technology has been around a little while people don't like they don't think of eyeglasses and cars as technology they think of like open Ai and and Instagram but like they're all part of one chain of discoveries being built upon another

and I think it's worth celebrating that like Yuri Milner um and a bunch of people they they put on this breakthrough prize and they try to actually make scientists like celebrities because they've had this observation that if you look at like the top followed accounts on Twitter and Instagram and stuff or X like something like 95% of them are musicians and um athletes right and so that kind of is like an it's sort of an example of what our society celebrates and if you ask like young people what do you want to be right A lot of them say like I want to be an a social media influencer or

something um and so you know I think it's fine to have some percentage of society be allocated to entertainment like music and sports and like entertainment is great but maybe it should be like 20% or 30% of our societal you know Heroes and like some percent more than like 1% should be the scientists that are achieving these breakthroughs um and so anyway we want to we want to have like leaderboards um one it's like there's a lot we want to do on Research Hub it's still very early days but you know we want to recognize the people who had the best breakthrough

in computer science or physics this month this year and like actually give out the research Hub prize you know kind of like the the Nobel Prize or something like that kind of all Community oriented and and crowdsourced and voted on um anyway lots of lots of stuff there but um yeah science is important we're really passionate about it I want to add one last Dimension to this conversation before we get into some of the details about like what the current modern system of science is and the ways that it is broken or failing us or needs Improvement this last Dimension I want to add is um the rate of science

which is just like how much science are we doing like units of science per time and I would guess over the Arc of humanity that we've been able to do more science over time and that has been part of the growth and we have this thing called the scientific method which I think is just like the first principles of Science and then we have the system of doing science that we've built on top of the scientific method and that system itself has developed and grown and become more sophis ticated over time

that system is a science and so we're kind of talking about the science of science I think and I think what we're saying is hey we are in a phase in Humanity's Arc where we actually can maybe make a newer system of science because our current system of science isn't doing so well uh Brian you used the terms of just a chain of discoveries and if we're going to put these into blockchain terms I kind of think of science maybe a little bit like a blockchain where we have growing complexity of State being layered on previous knowledge we have more

knowledge being layered on on previous knowledge and then there's like instability in consensus at the tip of the chain whereas the new knowledge is contested but over time the we have replication we have more studies and Things become embedded in knowledge and that just becomes truth and the system of science the consensus mechanism that we have really determines the rate of science that we are doing as a species and I think what we're talking about here is hey with crypto protocol calls we have newer tools in the tool belt for

producing a different system of doing science we can do more science uh Patrick does this like metaphor kind of resonates with what you're doing and aspiring to do at research Hub how how would you react to that yeah absolutely so uh this like the science of science is referred to as metascience and there are a lot of people who have spent like uh the last 30 or 40 years kind of understanding how like uh you know scientific Capital turns into new knowledge and sort of the inefficiencies that have existed um within an old system in an internet age so yeah the uh

key Innovation that I think we bring to the table with research Hub is the ability to have modular incentives for creating new scientific research kind of traditionally uh one of the core problems that's existed in science is if you have capital and you want to give it to a scientist like how do you decide who to give it to um if you think of it from the terms of like a like a VC investing in startups like there are pretty objective metrics that you can use as a VC to determine which startup is the best uh company to give your

money to in hopes of like seeing return on that investment in science it's a lot harder often times like the true value of research isn't known for like decades after the initial Discovery um like Brian said I think crisper wasn't truly recognized for its like actual like utility as a product for maybe like 10 to 12 years after the initial Discovery was made and so um Trad Al what uh people with capital have used is this concept of Biblia metrics or citation-based metrics the idea is if

you publish a lot in scientific journals and those papers are cited by your scientific peers then you're likely a good scientist um unfortunately uh sort of this system of using citations as a metric for scientific quality has gained a lot of adoption over the last 20 years and scientists have begun to sort of optimize their research outputs to uh game the system in order to generate more Publications and more citations um the goal here is to make themselves more

eligible for funding in the future and so in the last like 20 years we've seen I think like a reduction in the efficacy of our ability to uh like produce new technologies because we have scientists who are more worried about uh publishing a lot and getting their papers cited a lot than they are with creating verifiable new knowledge and so research Hub we want to do is create a new way to financially reward scientists for creating high quality knowledge um and using like sort of the principles of

blockchain we can come together as a community and democratically decide uh together what we actually perceive to be like high value knowledge and set up a reward structure to algorithmically uh financially compensate people for producing that so yeah I think traditionally we've sort of relied on these like journal-based mechanisms to decide like what is quality science and the internet and specifically blockchain gives us new tools to uh get more granular and actually reward people for doing high quality research rather than