We're definitely in a less peaceful and less safe world than we were in 10 or 15 years ago. But 10 or 15 years ago, you were worried about banks getting bailouts and potentially dollars inflating. 15 years later, there's much worse things happening to people than just having your currency inflated. We're seeing all of these threats pop up in the cyber world, in the physical world. The vision of safety that we're competing with is basically let's trust the uncle in the sky and the uncle in the sky is going to figure everything out for us in exchange for taking away all of our privacy and all of our agency. Whether the uncle in the sky is like Palantir or some super intelligence AI company or some equivalent in like the foreign country of your choice, there is this vision of safety that's very disempowering. We want something that continues to keep us in control and continues to keep us at the center in a way where we have agency. Crypto does not have the ability to fix the dollar. Crypto has the ability to create its own thing that does not have some of the disadvantages that the dollar has. That each individual person is free to use it or free to not use it.
Today we're actually joined by Vitalik, who is the founder of Ethereum and also a super prominent thinker. And one of the big reasons is we just love some of the things that Vitalik actually talks about and shares about and through a lot of the digital artifacts that he writes. And so, this is actually an opportunity for us to unpack these digital artifacts even further. Unpack his blog posts, unpack his tweets, and get to just know who he is, who you are, Vitalik. Thank you for joining us at a deeper level. But before we jump into some of the things that we're going to talk about, I just wanted to plug the Discord and XChat that we have. So, we have an actual chat and one of the things that we really want to do, Benji and I wanted to experiment in a whole new way and actually get more user interaction and we didn't want to do just a regular interview with Vitalik. We wanted to actually unpack his advice, get to know his wisdom and then at the end we'll have an opportunity here directly from the audience about situations you're facing and see how Vitalik reacts to them and get his actual advice on them, which I'm so excited for. So, we pulled up a few questions, a few blog posts, a few tweets live from some of Vitalik's past writings and we actually have them here today. So, I'll pull this up in a second, but really excited to unpack those a bit and talk them all through with you.
Yeah. Hey Vitalik, I think we're all live now, right? Yeah, Vitalik's already live here. Welcome. How's it going? How's Nomad life been, by the way? Like, I know you're still fully nomadic, right?
Yeah, I mean fortunately I have not gone mad, so I guess you know, that part has not been living up to the name, but that's probably a good thing.
Um Yeah, yes, mad thing is for later. Awesome. So, should we pull up like I mean the whole concept here is like you've written so many interesting things across like AI, across like civilization generally and like tech obviously Ethereum what not. So, we're just like pulling up some of the stuff that you've written in your blogs with Sophia and I have had the pleasure like honestly over the past three days we've been rereading your blogs like and tweets and just trying to find nuggets out of them for this. So, yeah, we got a couple of these. Sophia, do you know Yeah, let's bring up the first one. So, this one's actually...
Curious to hear from you. A decade ago, you were at the very early stages of actually creating Ethereum, and now it's a decade later, and I'm so curious. How has your identity changed since then?
Mhm. I think when I wrote that, the thing that I was writing before, right, was sort of a rebuttal to people who argue that you know, if we develop technologies that let us live much longer, then that might actually be a bad thing because life needs to be finite to have meaning, right? And my reply basically is, well, actually, if our lives are infinite, everything around us, the situations that we're in, the people that we're around, the kind of world that we're around, like everything changes so much over the course of 10 years that you know, as much as it's a continuous process, it almost might as well be a death and a rebirth, right? And so, like the world is finite, and like actually, you know, the world is much more finite than even any of the individual people in it, right? Because any individual aspect of it is just changing so quickly. And that's something I really did not appreciate at the beginning, right? You know, as a teenager sort of growing up into the world, so many things felt permanent. And as I got age 25, and then eventually as I got to age 30, I would look back to myself 5 or 10 years ago or the world 5 or 10 years ago and I would actually have that reference points, right? Of myself being sort of fully adult, fully conscious, fully understanding what's going on in the world to at least what I thought was a pretty high level and I be able to notice I just like the large differences between then and now, right? So maybe I can give one example, right? For the long time crypto people, right? So do you remember the quote that's inside the Bitcoin Genesis block, right? It's you know 2009 January 3rd the times on brink of second bailout for banks, right? When's the last time you thought about a bank bailout? Like you know it comes up sometimes, right? But it's like definitely 10 times less than it did in 2011 2012 when it just defines how we think about crypto, right? You know like the themes that we think about in terms of what's happening in the world, in terms of technology even, in terms of the way that we relate to other people. So like you know you probably remember 10 or 15 years ago like it would be normal for people who are close friends to sometimes not talk to each other for days. Like doesn't that sound crazy? Like you would literally not talk to each other for days, right? It's like how? Don't you like get withdrawal symptoms? Doesn't like something break, right? And like well you know before we had all of these always on communication devices and like that was the life that we lived in, right? I mean 20 years ago I remember it was possible to get lost in walking around the city, right? Like even things as basic as that, right? And like so much about the world has changed. And I think the other thing that happens as you grow, right? Is like you come to take on a role in the world, right? And you know like in the first or maybe 20 years of your life you're sort of mostly, you know, you're a learner, you're a consumer, you're someone who's sort of playing games that other people set up for you. And one of the big transitions that you know you like get to as you grow up more is you know like you get into more and more of a role of actually being the one that has to create and define and contribute to the games yourself, right? And you know like these are just fundamental changes in attitude. They're fundamental changes in you know like how you think. Fundamental changes in you know like what you think the important problems are, what kinds of things keep you up at night. And it's you know if you just look back at it it really does look like you've almost moved to a different universe, right? And so I think this is you know like one of the reasons why right? Like even if you know like we lived a thousand years old like we're not going to get bored of the world, right? Like you know we're going to keep creating new worlds for ourselves. And you know like I think that's a really fascinating and you know like also definitely sometimes sad, you know, sometimes you know you lose things that you miss, but you know also like if still a beautiful feature of the world that we inhabit.
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That's amazing. I think one of the things is like that general piece of like as you get older these moments like cumulatively grow into your whole self and sense of self and that like defines you is a fascinating that's just true for everyone in the world. In your case right like it's like what keeps you up at night and what you push for like you built Ethereum when you were 19 years old right like you were fairly young so for you it was like this almost this speed run of responsibility in a way and like I like just like this thing that birthed itself. Um and I think one of the things that's really interesting is like how your thinking around it evolves with you and how the community evolves with you and how a lot of like what this whole thing is also grows up and I think there's definitely like interesting parallels across like everyone who's had an involvement in anything that they have brought into the world or just like a community that they're part of.
Yeah and I think the biggest transition for me over the last 10 years was basically going from where I was at the beginning where I really felt like I was living like most of my life on autopilot to like sometimes actually having the scary realization that like wait some this moment there is no other pilot and wait like there are individual situations that like actually require me to be a pilot and to go and like actually make big consequential decisions. And you know going back to even when I created Ethereum and even before right like I remember the process of myself dropping out of university and actually even that felt autopilot right like basically what happens was that first I signed up for this co-op program where basically you're in university but you get to alternate between university terms and going to work for a startup. And I decided that the startup I worked for would be a crypto startup because, you know, I was already into Bitcoin. And so, I signed up to take an off term working at Ripple. And then, you know, thanks to the wonders of US immigration law, it turns out that for the category of visa I needed, the company needed to have existed for a year, and Ripple had only existed for 9 months. And so, they tried hard to find a way around it. Eventually, they give up, right? And so, instead, I had an off term. And so, on my off term, well, I was also a Bitcoin Magazine writer. And so, I figured I would go around the world and just visit a couple of Bitcoin communities. Then, I got into programming, and I realized that, well, hey, I've actually There's like actually a lot of communities I need to see and things I need to do. So, I'm going to go and extend my off term to three off terms. And then, a few months later, Ethereum started. And actually, yeah, at the very beginning, if I the original form of Ethereum was a project that well or well was a proposal to the developers of this project called Mastercoin for how they could make their protocol more general purpose. And I sent it to them, and they basically said like, 'Hey, you know, well, it'll take a long time before we get to this.' And I just realized, 'Okay, I'm not going to waste so long. I'll just do the thing myself.' Right? And then, I started doing it. And even then, I still thought, 'Okay, I'm only going to do this for a few months, then we'll be done, and then I'll go back to university.' Right? And then, only in January, when I saw just how big the crowds were, just how much of a huge amount of interest Ethereum had gotten, did I realize like, 'Wait, this is my new thing. I'm not going back, am I?' Right? And you know, I kept auto-piloting for I think a very long time, right? And in a lot of ways like the autopilot really comes at every level, right? I think the level of ideology is also a big one, right? Like when I was younger, I would be yeah, kind of going off of these ideas from that other people wrote, you know, 20 years ago. Ideas like how cryptography could protect freedom on the internet, for example. That's a very big one. Also, the importance of decentralized networks, you know, things like BitTorrent, the importance of open source software. Ideas that seemed appealing to me, but ideas that I was sort of gulping down from other people. And there was a moment in kind of the early to mid 2020s when I realized that I felt many of the scripts that, you know, we were running on were just so outdated. And I needed to like actually step up and like sort of be in the position that the 1990s cypherpunks were in when they started, like originally wrote those words that I was passively gulping down when I was a teenager. And like actually really understand from first principles, you know, like the place of crypto in the world, the future of technology, the challenges that we have, and kind of develop a philosophy from there.
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Now, 100% I think this is a open question that's been very interesting these days as well. Mhm. Yeah, and you even mentioned like the change from being on autopilot when you were maybe younger to now just being a lot more active. And I feel like it's almost the more challenging the world gets, the more our own want to just operate on autopilot. And I think that's one of the craziest things of this transition from childhood to adult is you start to realize, 'Wait, there's not this magic person who's going to come save you.' It's up to us to not be operating on autopilot and actually take agency and actually act. And so, I know this is like really prevalent now. Um I'm here in San Francisco. That's like one of the reasons that I got to do a little bit of the recording in person. And these conversations around like autopilot, around 'Hey, technology is moving really fast.' Around 'Do I just let it shape me and kind of like let it go or where it's going?' Or how do I actually get involved? And you give really practical advice around the future of technology, especially around the future of AI, around the future of Ethereum. And what I love about your writing is you coin specific terms. And one of them is sanctuary technology. I have this quote here that you have around Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building sanctuary technologies. I love this word sanctuary. And I would love to just unpack a bit more deeper. Why sanctuary? Why not open source? Why not decentralize? Sanctuary is, you know, stands for this place that protects you, protects you from danger. What ultimately was the reason that you picked this word to describe the technology that we're building?
