Vitalik Buterin on Human Agency in the AI Era

**Vitalik Buterin** (0:00)
One of the challenges of the world right now is that we're definitely in a less peaceful and less safe world than 10 or 15 years ago.
The vision of safety that we're competing with is basically, oh, you know, 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. 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, and each individual person is free to use it or free to not use it. I think in general, there's this uttering where you just have to force yourself to do things manually, at least sometimes, even though you don't have to, just to make sure that your brain stays on. Learning actively is just 10 times more effective than learning passively, even for the same amount of time spent.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:56)
For years, the internet promised more openness, more freedom, and more agency. But as systems become more centralized, and AI becomes more capable, those questions start to look different. Vitalik Buterin has spent much of the last decade thinking about how technology can protect individual agency instead of replacing it. Not by trying to control the entire world, but by creating spaces, what he calls sanctuary technologies, where people can coordinate, create, and think freely.
At the same time, AI is changing how people learn, work, and even reason. The challenge is not just building more powerful systems, but making sure humans remain active participants, rather than passive users. Sophia Dew and Binji Pande speak with Vitalik Buterin about technology, freedom, and the future of human agency.

**Sophia Dew** (1:51)
Today, we're actually joined by Vitalik, who is the founder of Ethereum and also a super prominent thinker. 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. 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. We have an actual chat, and one of the things that we really want to do, Binji and I wanted to experiment in a whole new way and actually get more user interaction. 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 to hear 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. 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.
I'll pull this up in a second, but I'm really excited to unpack those a bit and talk them more through the video.
Yeah.

**Binji Pande** (3:19)
Hey Vitalik. I think we're all live now, right?

**Sophia Dew** (3:21)
Yeah, Vitalik's already live here. Welcome.

**Binji Pande** (3:25)
How's it going?
How's Nomad life been, by the way?
I know you're still fully nomadic, right?

**Vitalik Buterin** (3:32)
Yeah. Unfortunately, I have not gone mad, so I guess that part has not been living up to the name, but that's probably a good thing.

**Binji Pande** (3:41)
Yeah, yes, nomading is for later.

**Vitalik Buterin** (3:44)
Awesome.

**Binji Pande** (3:44)
So, should we pull up? 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, whatnot.
So, we're just like pulling up some of the stuff that you've written in your blogs, which 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 Dew** (4:08)
Yeah, 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?

**Vitalik Buterin** (4:20)
I think when I wrote that, the thing that I was writing before, right, was sort of a rebuttal to people who argued that, you know, if we develop technology, it's don't let us live much longer than that. That might actually be a bad thing because life needs to be finite to have meaning, right? And my reply basically as well, actually, if our lives are infinite, like everything around us, the situations that we're in, the people that we're around, the kind of world that we're around, everything changes so much over the course of 10 years that as much as it's a continuous process, it almost might as well be a death and a rebirth, right? And so the world is finite and like actually 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? As a teenager sort of growing up into the world, so many things felt permanent. And as I got to age 25, and then eventually as I got to age 30, I would look back to myself five or 10 years ago or the world five or 10 years ago, and I would actually have that reference point, right? Of myself being a 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'd be able to notice just like the large differences between then and now, right? So maybe I could give one example, right, for the long time crypto people, right? So do you remember the quote that's inside the Bitcoin Genesis blog, right? It's 2009, January 3rd, the times on brink of second bailout for banks, right? When's the last time you thought about a bank bailout?