Today we’re releasing the “A-Side” of a conversation with Vitalik Buterin, known as the creator of Ethereum and is a force behind much of the crypto movement. Vitalik shares his unique points of view on politics, crypto, Americanism, GameStop, and Wall Street Bets, Tesla, China, privacy, The Revolt of the Public, the decentralization of finance and so much more. But Vitalik is much more than just crypto. He is a close friend with a rare ability to see the present and future in a way few others do. With technology now at the forefront of society, the world is transforming faster than ever — and it’s incumbent on all of us to understand where we are, and where we’re going. Coming soon: The “B-Side” of our talk — the outtakes. The weird stuff. The good stuff you don’t get to hear when someone is on stage, on script, or in the media. Read the full NFX essay - https://www.nfx.com/post/vitalik-buterin-the-a-sides/
Morgan Beller:
For those of you who don't know, I'll keep this brief. Vitalik is the founder of Ethereum. For those of you who do know, the game of telephone usually goes Vitalik, Ethereum, cryptocurrency, but today we're going to have some fun and we're not going to talk about crypto or blockchain at all. That world would not be the same without you, Vitalik, but you're way more than that. I'm excited to show the world that side and talk about some crazier things. Crazier than cryptocurrency currency things.
Vitalik Buterin:
No, thank you very much, Morgan. It's good to be here.
Morgan Beller:
We've walked three continents together and I hope to walk many more. You're Russian, you're Canadian, you're currently walking around Singapore, and you work a lot with Americans. Americans generally seem to think in a fairly American-centric way, but at the same time, the world is becoming more Americanized in some ways. I'm curious, both from looking from the inside out, and looking from the outside in, what do you observe, if anything, in the American psyche that you don't think Americans realize about themselves?
Vitalik Buterin:
That is, again, a fascinating question. There's definitely differences between the United States and many other places in the world, though a lot of the times those differences aren't even what Americans themselves think. Just one random example of this, this could even also just be my Canadian prejudices, but I just remember growing up like 10 years ago, my view of the United States says that it's this horrible materialist, capitalist, white supremacist place where people eat burgers and fries all day. I spent some time in America, I spent some time in Europe, spent some time in China, spent some time in plenty of other places, and it does actually become more and more clear that there's a lot of places that are significantly worse than the US on each one of those dimensions. There's also other things that are very unique to the US, but the US's story of itself that really describe the US as being unique in those ways.
Vitalik Buterin:
In terms of just things where the US, or other places, in my view, are worse than the US. There's plenty of parts in the world that are more materialistic than the US is, and there is plenty of places that have like less of the, "We should try to be altruistic and kind of try to benefit humanity," and those kinds of things. You can even see some of these things in the crypto space, right? One example of this would be just comparing a US based crypto project to some of the Asian crypto projects to some of the European crypto projects. The crypto space is this strange mix of very idealistic opening to centralize the world stuff to just, "Hey, let's trade and gamble and make money."
Vitalik Buterin:
The places that dominate on the trade and gamble and make money access are not the US. The concept of just even, things like, "Let's support open source for the sake of open source," just to give one example, that's definitely one of those things where that's stronger in both the US and Europe, and a lot of other places. The reason why I say that kind of cuts across there a bit is because the US says, or maybe that maybe the US [inaudible 00:04:06] a story of the US is that the US is very big on like selfishness and individualism, and not big on hearing about other people, but like open source software
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is the exact opposite of selfishness and individualism in so many ways. In the US and Europe, but from my own observation are probably two of its strongest epicenters. That's just one example of many interesting things and contradictions.
Morgan Beller:
Maybe your insight was what Americans don't realize about themselves, or that they, the stereotypes of what they think they are?
Vitalik Buterin:
It's more like Americans think that they're different from the world in XYZ ways. Where like, XYZ contains both good things and bad things, but actually Americans are different from the rest of the world in WX ways where V and W are also contain good and bad things,
Morgan Beller:
Any examples of V and W?
Vitalik Buterin:
I did already talk about open source software culture. What else is there? Just being moralistic might be one interesting example to talk about. There's definitely a lot of kind of moralistic, enough discourse, that US culture is pushing out. There's obviously a moralistic discourse against governments that are being too dictatorial. There is discourse against the people within the US that are being too racist. There's a moralistic discourse against the corporations that are being too greedy, and all of those things. Just the extent of that just feels much more developed and deeper in the US than it does in a lot of other places. Just being more, being more or less thick in a lot of ways is a human universal, but just like the U S kind of style of it just, it just feels like it's on a next level.
Vitalik Buterin:
I guess I said I think there's both good things and bad things that come out of this. I think ultimately, if we want Asia foundation for morality that does better than a support your own family and screw other people's families, you have to rely on universal moral principles, and just push those principles as ends in themselves, and to get people all in overall excited about them to some extent, but at the same time, it does have its own failure modes. It does sometimes end up dividing people more than it unites them. That's a complicated trade off.
Morgan Beller:
We're going to keep going on there, but to start, how do you define religion? Both, what is religion, and what is the smallest unit that can still be defined as religion?
Vitalik Buterin:
Religion itself is definitely a bundle of a few things. There is a set of beliefs, there's some notion of some kind of mental and spiritual practice. There is some notion of social connections. These things all get tied together. There's also often some kind of moral code that gets attached, whether that moral code is kind of personal virtue and how you treat yourself or interpersonal virtue and how you treat other people. There's this big collection of things that are tied together and influence each other. We're definitely, I think, starting to enter a world where those things start coming apart and you start to have
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some of those pieces appearing without other pieces. Even already just the idea that there is literally a
man in the sky who created the world, and it was 6,024 years ago.
Vitalik Buterin:
Actually, no. It's 6,025 now. Sorry. It's definitely and significantly less popular than that. It was a hundred years ago, but at the same time, the demands for the not literally belief related factors is it... is still quite strong and it's still there. You have things like yoga and meditation, and this attempts to explore all of these Asian and enlightenment concepts. That's a form of spirituality without really having an epistemology attached to it. Obvious, there's just secular morality. A lot [inaudible 00:09:13] and a secular moralism that we talked about before, are people have made the case, and I'm definitely an, of too far from Christian communities to be able to confirm it in either case.
Vitalik Buterin:
People have made the case that those ideas are descended stuff, moralisms, that have been part of Christianity around loving the poor, and loving your neighbor, and loving your enemy and all of these things for thousands of years. Then as far as just creating communities between people [inaudible 00:09:49] here and the internet does supercharged that, but also change the nature of that in a lot of ways. You have fewer of these, some closer connections where you just meet people like once a week, or just regularly in person. Then more of these just very loose connections where you just know someone by their username. That that kind of connection has different properties. Then, going back to epistomology and that kind of... Political religions definitely have their epistemology as well.
Vitalik Buterin:
You have some political religions that talk really strongly about the evils of central banking and there's a long list of things that are evil up to and including plant-based food, which is just something I totally can't get on board with. As in, I can't get on board with plant-based for being evil. I can totally get on board with plant-based food. Yeah. No. Then you have all of these different kind of sects of anarcho- mutualism, anarcho-capitalism, and lots of different [inaudible 00:11:13]. Hyphen-hyphenisms. These are also epistemology as they can have their own core sets of beliefs, or arguments over which of those beliefs are correct, and which of those beliefs are not correct. I think, all of these different parts are just having their own life, I suppose. It's interesting.
Morgan Beller:
What is replacing religion for and your tribe?
Vitalik Buterin:
I think a lot of things simultaneously are replacing religion. Some of them are more healthy than others. There's definitely, again, some of these quote political religions that are starting to come out lately. There's different names for the various political religions. There's civic nationalism, there's wokeism, there's this big long list. There is internet communities, so I'm not going to go into that example. Aside from that example of which idea or not, there's all sorts of subreddits, there's all sorts of just like various things happening in various dark quarters of the internet. [inaudible 00:12:38] religion satisfy all of the functions of religion, they do provide some things. They do provide that of some kind of community aspect, though they provide it in a different form.
Vitalik Buterin:
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I don't know, there's definitely cause for concern in terms of how healthy versus how unhealthy each of these trends are. Just because one of the things that religion sometimes does is it actually brings people together in person once a week. That can be a good way for, again, of strengthening connections between people, but these, they have the virtual aspects, but without connecting people together in person. It has benefits, and there's definitely a lot of people for whom that provides connection that they would otherwise not be able to have at all. There's also a various costs and risks with that. I don't know. I think it's interesting. I almost think that religion as a category is [inaudible 00:13:49] bundles in a lot of ways.
Morgan Beller:
It's really interesting. You mentioned different new things that look like what religions used to look like or are parts of this deconstructed religious trend, and one of the words you said was subreddits. The game of broken telephone, in my mind, goes, "Subreddits, GameStop." We did establish before this call that we weren't going to talk about crypto, but we also established that GameStop is not crypto, and we would be remiss to not bring it up.
Morgan Beller:
I guess, the first question is, do you think subreddits count as religions? Is Wallstreet bets a religion of sorts? Then, also, more broadly, we talked about, last week, how there's kind of this... There's a pre- Wallstreet bets world, and there's a post-Wallstreet bets world. I think future generations will learn about last week as like a before and after watershed moment. I'm curious beyond the religious questions, if you think that counts as a religion, just what do you think are the biggest switches that were flipped last week?
Vitalik Buterin:
Are you familiar with the book Revolt of the Public by a Martin Gurri?
Morgan Beller:
You have told me to read it before and I have not read it, but I'm ordering it right now.
Vitalik Buterin:
No. It's a book by a former SAA analyst, I believe. It goes through some of the revolutions in the Middle East that we saw at 5 to 15 years ago, Barack Obama. The book was written before Donald Trump, and Donald Trump just plays into it so perfectly. It discusses what is the common theme between all of these events? The common theme is basically that the internet and social media are empowering direct and de-centralized coordination nation, and at just a much more powerful scale than what's possible before. Basically, elites that were able to maintain control during previous eras are just having a much harder time of doing that, just because of this sort of this sudden technological shock. the people who are not elites that have just various grievances with the things that the elites are doing are basically just using this new platforms to revolt.
Vitalik Buterin:
The way that I'm seeing Wallstreet bets is basically revolt of the public comes to the stock market. If you think about the stock market, one of these big defining events, and a lot of these people's lives is [inaudible 00:16:40] 2008 great financial crisis. Financial institutions, governments, and a lot of fat
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powerful actors made some very big mistakes, and mistakes is even too kind a word for it. They acted in ways that maximize their profits without much concern for the fall out that could happen, not just to them, but also to everyone else in the case of the big risks. A lot of people were then very angry about this, and I don't think anyone really forgot. A lot of people feel that basically they got off easy. That they weren't punished for what they did before 2007 hard enough.
Vitalik Buterin:
That although almost... no one, or even no one went to jail in 2009 and 2010. The banks are mostly all still intact and they're still doing really well. Lots of people feel like the financial industry hasn't learned their lesson, and they feel like they're just continuing to play all sorts of complicated games and just manipulate and participate in this rigged financial system that's just designed to screw over the little guy essentially. What happened with GameStop was basically that at the beginning when you have these Redditors and they started buying up this stock that had a lot of people shorting it, and they just thought that, "Hey, this company is... It's a nice little gaming company that deserves to survive and have a chance. Like, how dare these bankers, like, basically just try to kill it."
Vitalik Buterin:
Then as the price went up and just kind of evolved and grew stronger. It shot up on much higher than I think anyone or almost anyone even expected at the time. It just kind of turned into this, again, a much more powerful symbolic thing, that basically... It became even more powerful and symbolic once all of this kind of Robinhood stuff started happening. When that people like stopped being able to trade. Especially when some of the kind of media pieces from the Wallstreet Journal and all of these financial organizations started coming out with basically, it's blaming the kind of more Reddit market manipulators for screwing around with the market.
Vitalik Buterin:
The public response was like, "Dude, you've been screwing around with the markets since. How dare you blame us for doing the thing that you really do as your source of profit every single year?" I don't know. I think there was a lot of truth to that. I definitely don't buy the extreme story that says that short-selling is fundamentally illegitimate as a concept. I think short selling is to financial markets what criticism is to free speech. You can't have a speech ecosystem without criticism. You can't have a financial ecosystem without being able to bet against things, but at the same time it is true that there are a lot of these systems that have multiple equilibria.
Vitalik Buterin:
There was a lot of people, even in the traditional financial space, [inaudible 00:20:29] attacking these systems and using big piles of money that ordinary people would never have access to, to just force a system for one equilibrium to another and profit as a result. They've been doing this since forever, and now that a group of kind of random anonymous millennial, Redditors doing it, they're upset and nobody's buying it. I think there is a lot of things that are very beautiful about that. It's definitely just interesting because it does, and it would just bring back front and center, all of these issues about the financial system that we have a really, people have been talking about to some extent for 12 years, but now it's just all coming back. As for what will come of this, that's also a good question.
Morgan Beller:
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That was going to be my next question. You're teeing me up. You summed it up. One, there's what will come of GameStop. There's a question of is this good or bad for GameStop, because GameStop wasn't necessarily perceived to be the future, and potentially their only option was to get acquired. Now they're way more expensive than they were. Let's start there. What will come up GameStop?
Vitalik Buterin:
If I were GameStop, then my instinct would be it's just to sell it off. Just sell like 10% of the company while it was in the hundreds. Just get a really big financial war chest, and just use that to create a golden opportunity to kind of reinvent the company, and then do something great with it. The question that I don't know is what, if anything, actually prevents them from just doing a snap offering and that just pushing out 10% of their in two day's notice. I actually don't know how those securities procedures work? In the sphere that shall not be named that I spent most of my time in, it's really easy.
Vitalik Buterin:
You can just sell a million dollars of whatever you want at a moment's notice, but in a traditional finance it's like, if you're not yet set up to do it, it may well take a longer amount of time to do. That's just one of the variable, but I do still think that they are going to be able to raise more money than they did before. The question is just, can they come up with something really awesome and cool to do with the greater amount of capital that they now have. That's up to them.
Morgan Beller:
They should hire someone smart, or ask. They should ask Twitter what thy should do with it? Or Alexa? One from the Wallstreet bets community is their head of innovation.
Vitalik Buterin:
Oh, come on. They're not going to ask... They shouldn't ask Twitter. They should make a sticky on our Wallstreet bets.
Morgan Beller:
They should make a sticky on our Wallstreet bets, for sure. The other thing that's different from 2008, and the Occupy Wallstreet movement, is the Occupy Wallstreet movement was not particularly effective, both as far as the outcome, and that nothing really changed, to your point, but also people sit on the street with signs, but nothing really happened. Whereas this time, the public organized quite effectively. There was a direct impact, which say what you want to say, but... Oh, my Facebook portal just started playing a video on GameStop.
Morgan Beller:
This is creepy. I hate this. Turning that off, unplugging that. Where was I? Oh, it was kind of cool. Regardless of there's various opinions to be had on the subject, but you're like, "Wow, the Internet's pretty awesome." 2008, Occupy Wallstreet, public not effective, financial industry, not really impacted. 2021 GameStop, public, very effective. How do you think the financial industry will be impacted beyond some hedge funds lost some money? You talked about how you think GameStop will be effective, but do you think any changes will actually happen? Regulatory?
Vitalik Buterin:
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I definitely think there's going to be some kind of reforms of just how stock markets work and how trading works. Even just the whole concept of delayed settlements, where when you buy a stock, you don't actually have the stock until two days in the future. For those two days, the company basically, or whatever, broker you're trading through, provides some amount of capital ahead of time and they have to have a float that's proportional to some estimate of the volatility or whatever. That whole scheme is definitely going to be looked at again. It's time to switch to instant settlements, which [inaudible 00:25:38] estimating. I definitely hope that we see some experiments in that direction. On the other hand, I know that there's the stodgy old defenders of the [inaudible 00:25:48] through approach that talk about the benefits of capital efficiency, and just some of those having delayed settlements and [crosstalk 00:26:03] just allow-
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Vitalik Buterin:
Just allowing whatever kind of conflicting trades happen within that time period to cancel each other out, without needing to move any stock at all. But at the same time, I'm not sure that the millennials value financial efficiency that highly. Even just another example of this, right, oh, no, sorry. I wanted to bring up Uniswap, but speaking very abstractly, right, the idea is that instead of having an order book exchange, you will have this kind of automated thing that just has a curve, the famous X times Y equals K curve and you can buy and sell against this, or kind of moving along the curve and then whatever amount you move left [inaudible 00:26:49] type you'd give up. [inaudible 00:26:50] The other type that you get.
Vitalik Buterin:
And it's this fully kind of just automated and incredibly simple construct. And theoretically, there's a lot of these kind of very good reasons for why it should be much less efficient than a traditional order book exchanges. And yet it's been much more successful than traditional order book exchanges. So efficiency in a kind of idealized financial models is definitely not the only thing that [inaudible 00:27:20]. And so I do wonder, is there somebody that, you know, to hell with whatever inefficiencies it introduces because, T plus zero is right and just, I don't know. We'll see. So I do wonder if, just like in this example of Uniswap flow, we're just going to see much more examples of people trying out T plus zero instant settlements in a lot of different contexts and liking T plus zero settlements and a lot of different contexts and to hell with the financial inefficiencies that it brings, because it just makes more intuitive sense.
Vitalik Buterin:
So, okay. You know, we'll see what, whether or not that approach wins out. I think it's definitely going to be interesting. There's definitely also a kind of broader cultural trend here, I think, which definitely does feel like a kind of changing of the guard moments, right? You know, you see a VSA kind of articles from the mainstream financial media that are defending short sellers and hedge funds and talking about how terrible the, say, game GameStop law bales and, you know, comparing them to the Trump supporters that so joyfully entered your Capitol a few weeks ago. And it just, I don't think these people realize just the extent to which they're just so perfectly fitting into that kind of tired, old guard that just doesn't get the way that the world has changed, things-work-differently-now-vibe right?
Vitalik Buterin:
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It feels like the younger generation just has different ways of looking at financial markets. There was a less of this same kind of expectation is that markets are supposed to work like some kind of really well- oiled, highly efficient machine where everybody is really serious and there's these, if people follow these rules, then it does like perfect price discovery or anything like that.
Vitalik Buterin:
I think millennials are just more inclined to say, Oh, you know, financial markets are a complete joke already, so let's just get in on the joke. And I think to a large extent that's inevitable. And there is, of course, the challenging question of if financial markets are going to be more chaotic and if things like GameStop and Tesla are going to be more the norm than the exception going forward, then you know, what does that mean for the world and the economy as a whole? How should we structure different aspects of the economy to make that be a world where people who need the stability to do certain things can continue to have the stability. And there's definitely going to be kind of some interesting discussions that are coming out of that, but we'll see.
Morgan Beller:
Any predictions or any thoughts on what or how financial markets may, might, or should be restructured as a result of this?
Vitalik Buterin:
I generally am a fan of the approach that just says, well, the markets are just going to be what they are. And it's not clear that there's all that much that you can do about it without risking making things worse. And so the thing that we should focus on is making sure that people's lives are doing well regardless of where the market sits at any particular points in time. In terms of what that means in practice, there was a lot of excitement about [inaudible 00:31:18] UBIs lately. There's a renewed discussion about public options for healthcare, which I think seems really interesting. Just to kind of generally decoupling people's basic needs from employment more and more seems like a really positive and useful direction to start moving in.
Morgan Beller:
This is a global thing. I mean, as we talk the world's becoming more global, the internet is helping movements become more global instantly. And a lot of the changes and ideas that you had are global things, UBI, healthcare, et cetera, but those are still under domestic jurisdiction. So do you think that some of these challenges can be addressed top-down for all citizens of the internet? Or are you really going to vote with where you live?
Vitalik Buterin:
First of all, I don't think that governments are the only actors that can or should kind of restructure their policies in response to this sort of stuff. So, for example, I would also say that corporations are probably going to move towards just having the larger war chest or just having larger amounts of cash on their balance sheet, so they can survive the market going down and doing crazy things for up to one or two years or so. And I think that's on the whole, I'm sure there's going to be people complaining about capital efficiency, but in general that's a good thing. Something like that would be really good just for a resiliency.
Vitalik Buterin:
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Aside from that, what other kind of things... I definitely just expect all sorts of kind of vehicles to start popping up in all sorts of ways for just people to be able to have more savings and just might have their lives be designed in a way that's kind of more resilient in all sorts of ways. And globalization can even help here, to some extent, just because gives you more choices in terms of who to work for, just to give one example. And, you know, that's one of those things that I think we're starting to see more and more of already.
Morgan Beller:
One thing that is affecting the whole world, like UBI and healthcare, and other topics you mentioned, but that is currently being decided on by local jurisdictions is the COVID vaccine. And there's this interesting, or what I find interesting, concept of challenge trials. So the COVID vaccine like introduce this idea of challenge trials to most people for the first time. You know, the idea that you waive your liability rights by volunteering to get the vaccine early, and you're waiving your rights in exchange for hoping this vaccine saves your life, hoping this vaccine saves other lives, and hoping to, if you're thinking on behalf of the greater good that it expedites the testing and data collection and saves the world. What are other areas in modern life that you think we should have challenged trials for?
Vitalik Buterin:
The way that challenge trials as a concept entered the discourse as a result of COVID is definitely very interesting, and to me it definitely seems like a very positive development. I think one of the big kind of problems with medical ethics that I personally really dislike is a hundred people dying of medical experiments gone wrong is a tragedy, but a million people dying because a treatment came a year later than it otherwise would, is the statistic. And just the way that medical ethics in particular is structured, is the whole thing is basically geared around, you know, don't be like the Tuskegee experiments and don't be like Hitler and don't be like criminal. All of these are kind of nasty examples.
Vitalik Buterin:
And just because of scope insensitivity, which is a universal human fallacy, there is definitely not really this appreciation need for speed as a humanitarian end in itself, like need for speed is kind of just perceived as a yeah, you know, reckless humans or reckless Silicon Valley prejudice perhaps, but you know, the fact that things, innovation's happening earlier rather than later, just, you know, really does improve a lot of people's lives, and it was just a strong social good is still something that's underappreciated and COVID feels like it's starting to change that. Right? I definitely think that, you know, the challenge trials and the vaccines were both approved and started far later than they actually should have been. But now after this experience, I definitely think that people are going to be more willing and more inclined to just start things earlier, because COVID really does make clear that, you know, waiting has a cost, right? Every month of waiting costs 400,000 or whatever number of hundreds of thousands of lives. Every month of waiting continues debilitating the economy. Every month of waiting continues de-stabilizing political systems.
Vitalik Buterin:
That's, even the things that they say about and of lockdowns having costs and lockdowns leading to things like loneliness that lead to alienation and potentially extremism all that stuff. Like there's a lot of truth to that, right? And so if we can just solve things technologically with the vaccines, then the earlier we do that, like basically every month of earliness in the solution is just such a large, a humanitarian gain. And I'm definitely hoping that that spirit can be applied to a lot of other spheres.
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I mean, obviously there's a lot of other kinds of medical contexts that we might be thinking about in one of my other side-interests is longevity. I kind of MTh in research and this idea that if we can just, you know, reverse aging, then that will ultimately solve something, or save something like 50 million lives a year and we could be having this lovely conversation again in the year 3031. And things will just be kind of unimaginably awesome and there would just so much needless suffering that gets prevented, at 50 million lives every year. It might be a bit less than that, or [inaudible 00:38:04] but it's something like if we get rid of aging, then we save an equivalent number of lives to the entire death toll of world war two, every two years. It's huge.
Vitalik Buterin:
And one corollary of that huge-ness is that if aging can be solved in the year 2028, instead of year 2030, then that's 50 million lives saved. Right? And, so there is this the kind of strong, ethical imperative to, you know, solving this problem sooner rather than later, and how people are going to meet that challenge is something that's sort of interesting. And we'll see.
Vitalik Buterin:
Going outside of kind of the medical examples, one other thing that would be interesting to just consider is the idea of kind of more experimental jurisdictions. So basically places where, you know, if you go on Lyft to that place, that's considered as explicitly signing a contract that says that you're okay with basically living in a place where a lot of new stuff gets tried, and there's a certain kinds of higher risks. And, you know, you have to be pretty much vigilant by yourself to some extent, but the benefit is that you just get to try out all of these technologies much more quickly, and to speed up the rate at which they kind of reach the rest of humanity.
Vitalik Buterin:
So, you know, one example of this might be drone food delivery, which is something that, you know, if it can be made to work for just a- it will solve so many issues. It could get rid of traffic jams or at least significantly alleviate traffic jams. It would significantly alleviate a lot of environmental issues, just reduce costs to make life better for poor people in a lot of ways. Self-driving cars might be another one of those examples, you know, just a thousand little things and just trying to more rapidly kind of iterate and experiment on the urban environment. So, you know, can we have a city where if you move to the city, then you know, you are basically human challenge, trialing self-driving cars and delivery. That would be really cool.
Morgan Beller:
I cannot wait to live in an experimental jurisdiction in 3021 with you where biology is our president, and we are eating plant-based diets that will be delivered to us by drones. Or I guess we won't be eating by then, who knows there'll be tubes in us or something like that. I know that longevity is one of your growing interests. So for those of us who want to learn more wish we knew more, or if you were having dinner with your friend's parents, and you wanted to leave them with one thing about longevity and anti-aging that they probably don't know about, what's that one thing?
Vitalik Buterin:
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I still recommend Aubrey de Grey's book: Ending Aging. It was written in, I think, 2007, and that was the book that kind of originally indoctrinated me into life extensionism. When I talked to Aubrey more recently, like he still recommended that book to me, I think even as recently as two or three years ago. And he basically said that, you know, yes, they still basically are the seven categories of aging that are by far the most significant, so that's a good primer if he wants to kind of somewhat understands the basic concepts. And then I'm sure he can just like follow the organizations and follow their websites and do some of the more recent articles that they're pushing out. There's also a sub Reddit, reddit.com/artist/longevity. So that's one that I follow and go to from time to time.
Morgan Beller:
Is there any longevity challenge trial that has recently been published or that you've read about that you wish you could participate in?
Vitalik Buterin:
I think right now things are still five years too early to be doing really serious stuff. So there's a list of things that longevity-people think have small effects and people are kind of debating back and forth and having studies back and forth about. So ashwagandha is one of those examples, metformin is one example, and then there is this kind of longer list that goes on.
Vitalik Buterin:
What else was there? There were some interesting recent results around kind of parabiosis. So this was this idea that kind of got reported on a few times because it just plays so perfectly into the kind of evil Silicon Valley like vampire stereotypes. The idea a few years ago was basically that if you had taken an older person or this works with animals too, and you basically just kind of connect their bloodstream to the younger person, then the older person would be kind of, you know, quote 'rejuvenated' with the kind of younger person's blood to some extent. And like, there were some sub-experiments on this. There are some kind of results and it was somewhat inconclusive, but of course, you know, it really captured the imagination, just, you know, because of the bloody optics of the thing.
Vitalik Buterin:
But then there was this interesting study from a year ago that I think, or somewhere close to a year ago, that kind of really changed the narrative on this basically. It turns out that you don't need young blood for this. Like, it turns out that if you just replace part of a person's blood with, I think it was water and with saline, and albumin. And I'm like, Oh, like basically just water with a couple of other dumb things, then you can have basically all the same positive effects, right? So it turns out that the gains from that procedure don't come from younger people having good ingredients, they come from older people having damaged ingredients. And if you can flush those damaged ingredients out, then you can potentially reduce the level of damage in a person's body.
Vitalik Buterin:
So that was interesting. Once again, this is the sort of thing that's still significantly too early to be really doing, but it's the sort of thing that, you know, is definitely worth kind of doing more research and looking into more. But there are communities that are starting to do more research and we'll answer, we'll look into this sort of stuff more. So, and then at the same time, there's also more radical therapies, like there's people trying to come up with drugs that target very explicit categories of damage, trying to deal with, in essence cells, which are essentially cells that turn into zombies and start screwing around
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and doing bad stuff in your body. There's drugs and go after just various kinds of, kind of protein related damage. And so far, it's still kind of in early stages, but it's kind of all slowly progressing. So there's a lot of interesting things happening and I definitely encourage people to kind of look into it and follow along this base.
Morgan Beller:
There's definitely a fine line between waiting has a cost and too early, especially when it has to do with things you're putting inside human bodies. So we'll see if anyone cracks the code there. What is something that you think is truly widely accepted today that people will either realize is wrong or will be less widely accepted in two years, in five years in 20 years and in a hundred years? And I think the different timescales like eliminate different factors.
Vitalik Buterin:
I mean, I guess speaking of believing in God, apparently in 2021, the really cool thing is believing in dog. Like, have you seen the Dogecoin prices? Oh, right, right. We're not supposed to be talking about that. So things that are here today that, or things that we believe in today that we're going to believe in less over the next hundred years, it's hard to predict these things because if you had a correct answer then, or whatever person or community had correct answer could just usually make a big leap by just like moving to believing those things immediately.
Vitalik Buterin:
I think our relationship to a kind of physical location is definitely going to continue to change. Our relationship to nationality is going to considerably change as a result of this as well. Just the concept of, you know, if you're not happy in a place, or you feel like your rights are being infringed in a particular place, then, you know, wifi dead just like go to a place that's satisfies your values better, you know, is one of those things that I think we're going to start seeing more and more of.
Vitalik Buterin:
This is a scary one. Our relationship to privacy is going to change significantly. And is going to vary drastically just because in some spheres the ability to communicate privately still exists, right? You have all of these encrypted chats and encrypted texts and all of these, but the level of in-person privacy that we have is lower than it has been in pretty much any point in history, right? Like in a few decades, we're going to be like forget about China being able to surveil the movements of its own people or the U.S. Being able to surveil the movements of its own people. You'll be able to have China be able to surveil the movements of U.S. people and the U.S. be able to surveil the movements of Chinese people, just because, you know, a resolution from satellites is going to be best is going to be powerful enough to do that sort of thing.
Vitalik Buterin:
So, what will geopolitics look like in that kind of world is one of those challenging questions that is going to be interesting. Our relationship to just the concept of how we form groups and tribes is definitely going to just change massively though. I'm not exactly sure how. Another fascinating one, I think is that there's the concept of immutable, right? Even up to this mindset where there's this thing which is human nature and human nature is immutable. And then there's kind of layers that you're going to wrap around some nature, whether it's education, whether it's tools, whether it's, you know, having a phone that you can use to Google stuff, whether it's like ideology is and all of these things, but over the next
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hundreds of years, or the next hundred years, we are going to have to figure out how to basically
reprogram or self storage degree.
Vitalik Buterin:
And that is just going to break a lot of philosophical concepts, even the philosophical conception of human equality, right? Some wanting to be challenged [inaudible 00:49:45] Much more explicitly kind of differentiated between, you know, the idea of a moral equality in that everyone has a worth and everyone, the ability to have good experiences is something that's inherently valuable for humanity to shoot for, from, you know, claims about kind of like specific kind of physical or mental similarity between different people and just send it philosophically, navigating that well and creating a world that kind of gets, you know, the good properties out of all that while I don't know, at the same time, just preserving this a really important idea that we're trying to create a world where everyone can feel empowered and feel good, essentially still continues. So that will be interesting. One thing that I'm not worried about is - or, well, one thing that I think will happen but that I'm not worried about is the second order, social and cultural effects of longevity.
Vitalik Buterin:
So like basically, you know, just imagine the concept of your grandmother dying, just kind of slowly and imperceptibly disappearing from the public consciousness over the course of around 40 years in basically the same way as, let's say being lost in the middle of the city disappeared from the public consciousness, right. 40 years ago, that was a big deal. And now it's like, yeah, whatever, take out your phone and you've got Uber and that'll just happen kind of slowly. But by the end of that 40 year time span, you know, we'll just be on the other side of that transition and at first it'll look like nothing happens. And then we'll see the first crisis that was kind of somehow closely connected to this transition. Or we'll have some kind of moment that makes us realize that like, Oh, wait, there actually have been really big changes to the world.
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:52:04]
Vitalik Buterin:
It makes us realize that like, "oh wait, there actually have been really big changes to the world." But the longevity in particular, I think is one of those things that it will cause changes and that it will lead to the world population just totally not fitting in with standard development experts' predictions. And they'll be like, "Wait, WTF why are there 17 billion people in the world in 2100? Our charts showed that there should have been 7 billion." But... Look, the reality is that the change is just going to happen slowly enough, just because people already age at a maximum of one year per year, that we will be able to adapt.
Vitalik Buterin:
Whereas some of the things that happen for other reasons, or some of the other [inaudible 00:52:53] is that we're seeing are just inherently happening much more quickly and they just kind of change the structure of things in deeper ways that make it more difficult to react to them. So basically a lot of different kind of technology induced changes to a civilization, structure, and particularly changes to a kind of empirical concepts that are closely tied up to philosophical categories that we really care about and where, because [inaudible 00:53:25] kind of the facts on the ground change or philosophical categories will have to change. It will be really interesting.
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This transcript was exported on Feb 16, 2021 - view latest version here. Morgan Beller:
I can't wait for the meme army to take on "people age at an average of one year per year" and see what they do with that. Longevity, we could talk about that for hours. The fact that you're not worried about it and the second order social and cultural effects is encouraging. There has to be something that worries you about longevity. What is the risk, if anything, socially, culturally, biologically, economically?
Vitalik Buterin:
I think the things that worry me are probably around human enhancements in ways other than longevity. Some people being much stronger and much smarter than others is a definitely one risk. And just being elitist, kind of making sure that these enhancements that we end up creating actually are kind of available to everyone. But then even if available to everyone and different people may well end up choosing different enhancements. And so we may end up having kind of more differences between each other a century from now than we do today. And that could also be a source of really interesting new ways for us to compliment each other. That definitely worries me a bit more than longevity itself does.
Vitalik Buterin:
So one thing I'm not worried about is, there's no such thing as a gene for obedience to the communist party. Now there might be genes that correlate with obedience in general, but if you give someone that gene, then there is no way to be sure that they're going to be more obedience to you instead of being more obedience to the first cult that reaches out to them on the internet, whose goal may well be to overthrow you.
Morgan Beller:
You mentioned the P word, privacy, one of my favorite and most troubling topics. And you said that our relationship with privacy is going to change, and that's a scary one. Scary is a very polite way of saying how terrifying it is. And that's why I had to stop watching Black Mirror, because it became too real. And unfortunately, I wish I was more optimistic, but it does seem like the object is in motion and it's going to stay in motion. Do you see any ways to combat that momentum? Like any ways that we won't be living in this privacy Black Mirror episode?
Vitalik Buterin:
So two possibilities. One possibility is that more of our life moves into the virtual sphere. And thanks to things like encryption and zero-knowledge proofs and all of these cryptographic technologies, the virtual sphere will continue to be fairly free of snooping or at least have significantly less snooping than the physical world does. So that would be a kind of short and medium term mitigation to not having any privacy at all. I mean the other possibility of course, is that society as a whole becomes much wiser and we [crosstalk 00:56:41] stop caring about or stop reacting in stupid ways to things that other people do that are completely harmless. But that second one, I'm definitely less optimistic on in the short and medium term, but in the long-term, if we engineer ourselves up to IQs, as of 250, it might happen. We'll see.
Morgan Beller:
I now have a pretty good idea of what your life and 3021 is going to look like, and it sounds pretty great. And again, I hope to, I plan on being there with you. Between now and then, the near future, what do
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you think of the next one to ten years? And what specifically, what do you think, or what do you have
confidence in that most people would say is crazy?
Vitalik Buterin:
Okay. So I think in the medium-term future, 2020 will be remembered as a nadir so as a bottom point for probably U.S. and global political culture and people's ability to get along with each other at large scales. And basically from here, things are only slowly going to start to improve. I expect that we're going to see a lot of different positive trends that are going to start coming out and getting stronger over the next decade or so. One of the trends that I'm personally excited about that a lot of people aren't following well is this notion of the techno progressive political conscience. And this idea that the large humanitarian gains that can come from things like longevity of research and drones and building better cities and space travel, and all of these things really can do a lot to uplift people's lives and make people's lives much better.
Vitalik Buterin:
And this is something that we could have a little bit more moralism and to get people excited about as a kind of great fight for progress of the first half of the 21st century. And I think there's definitely people that have been starting to be really strong exponents of this viewpoints. You mentioned biology, there is Ellie Dorado as one other person, I follow. The George Mason crew to some extent. And then there was a lot of people who I think are closely aligns to the movements in principle, but that just don't realize that techno-progressivism exists as a thing that they can identify. [inaudible 00:59:32]
Vitalik Buterin:
So that's something that I expect to be a strong force for progress and optimism over the next couple of decades to come. What other things to be optimistic about? The rise of the thing that economists call it a brew competition, or however they pronounce the person's name, just this idea that, you know, if you, if you're not happy with the jurisdiction you're in, you actually can go and move to another one. We've been seeing the rise of that in 2020 and 2021 kind of slowly. So there's already more and more of these governments that are just issuing ahead of digital nomad visas. There's a lot of people just even within [inaudible 01:00:35] dual country [inaudible 01:00:36] is like France is [inaudible 01:00:40] be the city of cool tech. And if you want to come here, then you should come here and just like essentially jurisdictions, this somewhat market-like actor. And they're kind of hopefully pushing each other, competing with each other too and making each other better. This is one of those things that I'm definitely cautiously optimistic about, that good things come out of this. What else?
Vitalik Buterin:
In general, people who are stuck in bad jurisdictions should not be stuck. And then this is one of those things that I hope we can find a way to get past. Global poverty reduction, I think that mainstream narratives really don't properly appreciate the extent to which places like Africa are just continuing to have quickly growing economies. And I've been following more and more people from Africa on Twitter.
Vitalik Buterin:
And there's like a theory kind of strong and positive, optimistic feeling among the online community that I really like and among other kinds of culture, generally cultural figures that I really like. Africa doesn't really have that much of a recent past, it's basically just a lot of colonization and slavery. The present tense being better, but still far from perfect. So let's just go and do a good job of [inaudible 01:02:35]
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kind of vibe that I've been getting. And there's just a lot of people who are very kind of pragmatic about their [inaudible 01:02:47]. Like we should kind of build up the good things and solve the problems. So that's eight continents that I am bullish on over the next few decades.
Vitalik Buterin:
Another thing also small countries. So small countries are a category that I think did really well in 2020, right? I think maybe in 2019, the way that it seems was that we were just kind of moving toward more and more domination by this large powers and like basically being the US and China and maybe the E.U. sort of having a larger and larger influence on the world to the exception of everyone else. But in 2020, we were seeing a lot of small countries did really a really good job handling COVID. A lot of small countries are doing a really good job of just having healthy internal political cultures. A lot of small countries are doing a good job of having better policies. So that's interesting. I think a world with more empowered small countries is a world with more choice and more experimentation.
Morgan Beller:
I asked you to explain the future and I did not specifically ask you to be optimistic or pessimistic and all your responses were optimistic. So the fact that optimism was your default for what the future looks like gives me hope and puts a smile on my face. Another riff on the future question. A lot of people are trying to think about how has COVID pressed fast forward or pause. And generally there's the question of what has COVID pulled faster into the future? Like e-commerce and Netflix and all of these trends that have been accelerated. And what has COVID permanently reset? Are there any facets that have either been pulled forward faster or that have been permanently reset that you believe that you think others don't believe or aren't talked about as much?
Vitalik Buterin:
One thing that's been kind of tilted 60 degrees in a complicated way is basically the relationship between nationalism and globalism, right? The big thing that happened in 2020 is that on the one hand, travel went from all-time highs in 2019, I believe, to a multi-decade all-time lows essentially in 2020. And in terms of your experience in physical space, like which country you're in and which governments you have has more importance than it has been in a long time, right? Like normally, [inaudible 01:05:44] are way too much difference. But now, it's just obvious that they're taking very different approaches to handling the very different, like really they're basically all taking one approach. They're just taking it with a different levels of competence.
Vitalik Buterin:
But the results of these different levels of competence is that you've been seeing very different kind of experiences in different cities, right? Things like, can you go to restaurants? Can you have meetups? Can you travel between one place and another place? How many people is it possible to talk to? Is it the government that's preventing you from meeting with people or is the government not preventing you, but there's it gets too dangerous. Or do you decide that you're just going to brave the danger? The kinds of choices and [inaudible 01:06:50] experiences that you have in the physical world are very different depending on kind of which country you're in. It's kind of fitting that you're interviewing me from San Francisco here and I'm in Singapore, right? Because those two places have definitely had very different COVID experiences.
Vitalik Buterin:
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But then at the same time, the digital world has gotten super powered and the digital world and looks much more similar from different countries, right? So, as someone who is currently in Singapore, I have the ability to look at Google or look at Twitter or looking at Reddit, look at Netflix, look at the set of all of the kind of same services that you would have if you're in the United States. So the digital world has just simultaneously become more important. And also it's more globalized, despite some people's attempts to go in the opposite direction, right? Like we have seen India ban some like 50 applications from China and seeing Trump try to ban some things. But to me, that stuff still feels somewhat reactionary things that are going to have a limited effect that best.
Vitalik Buterin:
So I definitely expect this kind of divide between how things work in a physical space and how things work in a digital space to persist for some amount of time. Now, how that's going to work in the long term is of course kind of more difficult to say, right? Like COVID travel restrictions are not going to last forever. Or in a few years, at most, we will be back to normal and then 30 years from now, or maybe longer, I have no idea how long this will take, we're going to have rockets from, for points to points travel and you'll be able to go from San Francisco to Singapore in 45 minutes.
Vitalik Buterin:
But that's going to be another one of those interesting game changers. Or maybe it won't even be that much of a game changer because more things will happen on the internet and being physically present for a couple of days is going to be less important. So we'll see. So this divide where globalization has been an accelerated and cyberspace significantly decelerated in meet space is one of those curve balls that COVID has definitely given to us.
Morgan Beller:
There is some irony with COVID highlighting the increasing importance of the internet. It's hard to imagine quarantine without the internet while people are also fleeing San Francisco and with you in Singapore and me in San Francisco, you're so mainstream. And I feel so contrary. And even though I'm looking at my window and the sun is shining and the sky is blue, it's not so bad here. So here we are. And I think this is the longest I've ever gone without talking about China. So the time has come.
Morgan Beller:
The geopolitical climate is both increasingly and decreasingly, affecting and affected by the tech world. And China is playing an increasing role every day, as we've discussed many times. One specific example of where this power and China power struggle and physical and digital technologies is emphasizes with Taiwan and the semiconductor industry. Generally curious for your thoughts on how important from a geopolitical perspective, is it for Taiwan to remain Taiwan and what happens from a technology perspective, from a privacy perspective, from an economic perspective, if China gets their way with Taiwan. I mean, there's so many geopolitical repercussions of that, but mostly from the physical digital hardware, ASIC semiconductor worlds, curious for your thoughts there.
Vitalik Buterin:
I had to admit, I don't understand the semiconductor and ASIC space really well so I don't think I would be able to speak too well to what would happen to the world if the TSMC and other facilities that are in Taiwan stay as they are versus get captured by China versus get blown up in a war or whatever else might happen. I don't know. I think my general moral view of course is that the focus of those kinds of
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questions should be the welfare of people in Taiwan and not bigger power games between much larger forces that have whatever and have security or political interests. And Taiwan itself has been doing really well.
Vitalik Buterin:
Like I've visited it many times. It's got a very nice democratic political culture. It's got Audrey Tang. She is very amazing. Nice crypto community as well. I have to say this because unfortunately it is my window to every single part of the world. And I think I definitely very much wish that Taiwan does well, but in terms of how that will intersect with all of these kind of geopolitical things, I guess, I don't know. This is one of those areas that's very hard to predict. I have a feeling... I have this kind of optimistic feeling that nothing very terrible is going to happen there just because I feel like as the world becomes more interconnected, there's going to be too many people that realize any kind of really serious conflict. There's just a negative sum game for everyone. We'll see and fingers crossed.
Morgan Beller:
And it seems like there is a growing skepticism or mainstream skepticism of China are concerned that they're going to do X, Y, and Z. What do you think people are underestimating in regards to China? And what do you think people are overestimating in regards to China? Because, I mean, for context, you've spent a lot of time there. I think you speak Mandarin. I think you have a different perspective on it.
Vitalik Buterin:
I do think that people in the US overestimate the extent to which they can accomplish what they think their objectives are by going after Chinese tech companies specifically. Basically, I think that if your strategy for the scary things that you're worried about a Chinese tech company is doing is specifically to go after Chinese. First of all, you're going to be very vulnerable to any non-Chinese tech company, or anyone from any other part of the world that's trying to do exactly the same thing.
Vitalik Buterin:
And essentially, I think my philosophy for a cyber civic space specifically is that we need less going after lions and more armoring the sheep. The problem with going after lions is that when you go after lions, it's hard to credibly convinc the world that you're the one going after the lions, and you're not the one being the lion. And the problem is that the sort of entity and culture you need to become in order to properly attack Chinese tech companies as many have has other disadvantages.
Vitalik Buterin:
So I don't know. I mean, this could also be the libertarian in me speaking, where I just keep wanting to think that the important thing is not America versus China. The important thing is tech companies versus statism everywhere essentially. But I don't know. Basically, I think in general, the tech companies are broadly, a lot of them are innocent people. And I don't really want to go around attacking tech entrepreneurs. Though at the same time, in practice, these trends do exist. And this is where that thing that we can't talk about comes in because a decentralization is the one way that you can credibly convince people that you actually are [crosstalk 01:16:28]
Morgan Beller:
And we've avoided this topic and I'm happy to continue avoiding this topic but...
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This transcript was exported on Feb 16, 2021 - view latest version here. Vitalik Buterin:
But I don't know, these are all fairly and have low confidence opinion. So for all this fairly chaotic and it's complicated. Yeah. And sorry, I forgot to end.
Morgan Beller:
Another one for the meme army. If you're listening, we need less going after lions and more armoring the sheep. I love that.
Vitalik Buterin:
I mean, we need less going after lions and more armoring the sheeps, because if he spends too much time going after lions, it gets harder to convince other people that it's not you that's the lion.
Morgan Beller:
Another way to look at that. I mean that's good. That's good. I will let everyone sit on that for a second. Another way to look at that though, is maybe it's okay to let people go after the lions because it distracts people from caring about the sheep and lets the sheep rise.
Vitalik Buterin:
No, this is definitely very possible. It's definitely true that a lot of the conflict and even if it's a negative sum for humanity overall is good for crypto. It's interesting how conflicts can often end up actually being good for the third party, right? I remember when I was still in high school, there was this interesting puzzle, about three people in a duel. It's basically three people in a shooting duel that have like different levels of accuracy.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:18:04]
Vitalik Buterin:
[inaudible 01:18:00] three people in a shooting duel that have different levels of accuracy, A is more accurate than B is, and B is more accurate than C, and the question is who's the most likely to win the duel? And under a lot of choices for rules and parameters, the answer is C. And in fact, the answer is C to such an extent that if the rule says that C shoots first, then C's optimal first shot is to shoot in the air to make sure he does not hit A or B the first time. And the reason why this is true is because A and B both know that A and B are each other's greatest threat, and so they're just going to basically kill each other, and so C's the most likely to emerge as the winner. Anybody could see most of the mechanics like this a lot of the time, right?
Vitalik Buterin:
So one fun political example is that as of 2021, Vietnam has won two wars with the United States. The first war is the one in the 1960s and the 70s. And then the second example is that Vietnam is the winner of the [HB 01:18:55] war between the US and China. And crypto is definitely one of those things that's well positioned to be again C, that's the winner of a great conflict between whether it's one state versus another state or states versus corporations.
Vitalik Buterin:
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And I don't know, small countries are also very well positioned to be winners in a lot of ways. As I mentioned, this access of innovative government competence, I mentioned Estonia, I mentioned Taiwan, I mean, we've been talking about Singapore the whole time. [inaudible 01:19:40] sub national entities, I think Miami, and Colorado, and some other ones that are interesting. So this may well be a time that precisely favors the bottom dog because the two top dogs they're too busy looking at each other.
Morgan Beller:
To make sure I'm following, are the lions now dogs?
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah sorry. The lions are top dogs and... Okay, I know the lions are more like cats than dogs, but I mean, we're mixing metaphors here and I'm-
Morgan Beller:
Animal Farm with Vitalik. Well, I mean, I'm still on the sheep and lion thing and where we're big Star Wars fans at NFX, so I'm just thinking about where we go from here, like The Sheep Awakens, Attack of the Sheep, Sheep Strike Back. Actually what you're saying triggers me to think of something I've been thinking about, which is January 2021, I think has been an unintentional ad for decentralization, which is something we've talked about. I know I'm going to use the C word, and that the first half of the month was an ad for decentralized communication apps with Trump getting kicked off everywhere, Signal and Telegram seeing record numbers, WhatsApp changing their privacy settings. And the second half of the month, I think, or I think last week could not have been a better advertisement for decentralized finance. You're like, wow.
Morgan Beller:
And as far as the sheep and lion analogy, I'm almost scared to say this out loud, because I hope regulators aren't listening and get the idea, but I feel like everyone is going to be focused on the wrong thing. Not only was last week the perfect advertisement for DeFi, but it was also a head fake in that you see AOC, you see Ted Cruz all agreeing and getting riled up and you're just like, "Wow, everyone's going to be so focused on the wrong thing right now. Everyone's going to be focused on the Lion of Robin Hood, the financial systems, hedge funds, and DeFi is the sheep here."
Vitalik Buterin:
January 21 was definitely a very interesting curve ball bag bouncing back and forth month, especially in terms of just the narrative around censorship, right? And will pick up the- social media responses to the lovely viking war that you guys had over in DC [BHM 01:22:04]. Basically a lot of people were booted off of social media and there was this big uproar around hate speech and all of these things. And it was definitely in a lot of ways, the most pro censorship moments in the culture for at least the last couple of decades, and in a lot of ways that really worried me. And you even saw the response from outside... The response from outside the US was very worried, like you saw Alexei Nvalny, the Russian opposition politician basically said like, "Hey guys, you're making a bad precedence here."
Vitalik Buterin:
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And given that people from Europe were concerned... Well, places in Europe do you have a government imposed restrictions on free speech. Germany has the anti Nazism laws and all that, but they're very concerned about this idea of basically a private corporation enforcing speech restrictions for, and ultimately bigger than the country, just the world in some sense. But at the same time within the US, there was definitely this dominant mood I thought that these things are necessary and actually the free speech thing is overrated. And then two weeks later the WallStreetBets Discord server got taken down for hate speech, and it's like, "Well wait a minute, this stuff can actually get abused."
Vitalik Buterin:
So, yeah that was an interesting one punch, two punch curve ball that everyone got. And in terms of what I think will happen, I think the cat is definitely out of the bag in terms of centralized entities being pressured to censor people, and just generally pick people off of their platforms if they're doing things that they don't like. So I see the trend going forward as just dealing both the centralized services end up needing to, or being pressured to go after people and people trying to create some alternatives to centralized services on the other hand, and there just being a complicated interplay between these two things. And that's going to be one of the big dynamics of the next couple of decades, so we'll see.
Morgan Beller:
What is illegal, either should be legal, and or will become legal just because laws of physics, it's silly over the next, let's say five to 20 year-
Vitalik Buterin:
One big category that I think we already talked about is just that participating in experiments at earlier stages of a product's life cycle, whether that's medical or whether that's drones or whether that's self- driving cars or whatever else. I definitely hope to see more movements in the trend of people who wants to try things early having ways to try things early, and I definitely expect, as I mentioned, and if COVID would give a nice push in that direction. What other things? Oh, here's a fun one. It looks like it's becoming more and more legal to build actually reasonable amounts of housing in California. And it looks like the EMB movements are finally making some progress, and [inaudible 01:26:07] whether there's parking minimums got struck down in a lot of places, and there's more and more movements toward upzonings.
Vitalik Buterin:
So that to me, it's a very positive movement, but all of these really severe restrictions and then basically things that you can build on your own property. There's all of these stories about externalities that are usually used to justify them, but in reality... First of all, there's also positive externalities and benefits to people who are not yet living in the city that are never taken into account, or not yet living in some particular district. Second, if you actually trace back a lot of those claims about negative externality of some they get, and suppose that the original negative externality, it turns out to be racist crap, like the horrors of living beside Chinese people or whatever. And so that's not the preference that public policy should be actively humoring.
Vitalik Buterin:
And then the end result of this of course is that you have... Really San Francisco should be as big as Hong Kong, right? San Francisco should have a population of seven million people and it should have the skyscrapers and all of that. But instead it's barely one million. And it does feel like San Francisco and
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California policy existentially suicided to some extent by just giving into existing residents demands to just not building anything else. And it feels like the political winds behind those original pressures are finally crumbling, at least to some extent. And that's something I'm happy with, and it'll lead to lower rents for people, it'll lead some more people being able to live where they want to live.
Morgan Beller:
Do you think San Francisco is dead?
Vitalik Buterin:
I definitely think that San Francisco is never again going to be considered a necessary place for anyone to be at the way that it was up until around 2015 or so. I expect it to continue to have a strong community with a lot of people there. But I would not be surprised too if 30 years from now San Francisco was widely viewed as an establishment boomer town, basically... Well, I guess the millennials will be the new boomers by then, but you know what I mean right? Yeah, just like you have your Apple and your Facebook and all of these old world companies that just have to base there, because it has too many capital investments, and all the cool stuff is happening in the next Silicon Valley, which is well the set of interesting and innovative small countries is I think one very powerful candidate for that. And then just generally it will be much more distributed.
Morgan Beller:
One of my favorite moments of last year, pre-pandemic was we were in Israel together and I feel very lucky that we not only had the opportunity to visit Palestine last year, but we had the opportunity to visit Palestine together. And for me, this was a really eyeopening experience having visited Israel several times, but never crossing the border. So for you, I know you work with a lot of Israelis, you had been to Israel before, you had never been to Palestine before either. How did visiting the other side of the wall change your views on Israel at all if at all?
Vitalik Buterin:
I don't know. That definitely seems like a very far from optimal situation on so many levels, right? Even if you just notice the facts that falafels cost 15 shekels on the Israeli side of the border and a five to 10 shekels on the other side of the border. You just know which side of that whole situation is a better place to be at the moment, and just which side has just more unfairness stacked against it.
Vitalik Buterin:
So also the way that the wall says exit, when you go from Israel into Palestine, but doesn't say exit when you go from Palestine to Israel, I found that strange and maybe symbolic of something. So many signs that there's something strange and wrong, and you know which direction the wrongness is going. But the other interesting thing about my last trip to Israel is how when I went out of the country, just once on my flight from Israel to, I forget what my other destination was I got in this big, long, 80 minute interrogation at the border. Basically the person who was checking my passport, first called me aside and then started asking questions, and then started basically asking for my entire travel history from about five months before that time, up until that time, which of course at that time my five months travel history had 30 items in it.
Vitalik Buterin:
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And he asked to see the emails for flight bookings and what I was doing in some of those places. And eventually they're like, "Okay, so let's start from the [inaudible 01:31:50]." "Well I just know them from these other people met. And I like- $100,000 to them a while back." [inaudible 01:31:55] "Are there any other people you've donated your money to?" I'm like, "Oh, I gave $2.3 million to [Cents 01:32:00]." And then after that conversation hit its 20 minute mark it was just obvious that the guy was like it's you and me interrogation, just primarily out of his own curios- [inaudible 01:32:13] questions later I would say.
Morgan Beller:
The other night I was listening to Elon Musk, talked about how sometimes it is the ironic thing that wins, and it's the thing that isn't trying that wins. And that would mean that there's a world where Dogecoin becomes the currency that people use. Yes, no, maybe?
Vitalik Buterin:
Remember what I said to you about 40 or 50 minutes ago about the weakest of the three participants being the most likely to win a duel? Yeah, it's that.
Morgan Beller:
So let's do some rapid fire questions, some this or that questions to end on something quick and fun and see where this goes. Deep ocean or space?
Vitalik Buterin:
Space, though Antarctica's also underrated.
Morgan Beller:
White or dark chocolate?
Vitalik Buterin:
Dark chocolate. I usually prefer 90%, though lately I've been getting more comfortable with some of these-
Morgan Beller:
Robing Hood [crosstalk 01:33:13]. So Vitalik tracks every percentage of dark chocolate that he has ever tried?
Vitalik Buterin:
Yeah. So I have this a long-term dream of eventually trying every integer from 80 to 100 and so far I've had, let's see if I remember it. I've had 80, 83, I think 85, 86, 88, 90, 92, 95, 99, and 100. I believe those are the ones that I've tried. So there's still about 10 integers that I need to go through at some point.
Morgan Beller:
And we have to find those other ones. So we'll find a way to send them to you. This one, I know you've got Blue Origin or SpaceX?
Vitalik Buterin:
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SpaceX has been doing amazing work. Blue Origin, I think the problem is they haven't really released as much. So it's just harder to judge them so far, but I hope they do great things. And maybe with Bezos finally getting out of Amazon, so he might end up focusing on space. They're doing some great things there, but we'll see.
Morgan Beller: Mars or the moon?
Vitalik Buterin:
I feel like Mars and the moon have some different value propositions. The moon is interesting because first of all, it's pretty close to the earth. If you have a conversation with someone on the moon, the round trip latency as we've established is only about 2.3 seconds, so it's not going to be worse than this conversation, but Mars on the other hand, something like five to 15 minutes away, I forgot the exact number.
Vitalik Buterin:
So with Mars, you have a much more asynchronous experience interacting with humanities [inaudible 01:34:53]. So that's one difference, and I think it definitely makes the moon more convenient. The other interesting thing about the moon is the low gravity is interesting. I was just like really looking forward to running a marathon in one sixth gravity. I just want to feel what it's like. [inaudible 01:35:15] Mars, so it goes up to something like 40% of the earth or whatever, so it's interesting too but less extreme.
Vitalik Buterin:
But, Mars the fact that it's further away, is also a interesting value proposition. Besides trope of Mars declaring independence is a much more realistic than the moon declaring independence. Well, okay I guess there was one Robert Heinlein novel about that, then there's just way more scifi novels about Mars becoming its own thing. But yeah scifi narrative evidence, that's just more likely. In terms of what we could do in both places, I don't know. It ends up depending on just what people want out of space travel. And do they just want a different experience, do they want to be in a place disconnected from earthly concerns? Do they have some industrial mining, is it else entirely? I don't know, we'll see.
Morgan Beller:
This isn't a this is this or that question, but since clearly I have space on my mind, and a lot of my questions are space related what's something that you think will happen in space that seems so scifi today? So I personally believe a lot of the next trillion dollar industries will happen on space, space farming, space manufacturing, space drug development. You could think I'm crazy, which is fine. Or you can agree with me and say something that you think will be outsourced to space at some point in the next, let's say 100 years that seems crazy today.
Vitalik Buterin:
The one really boring example is using space as a method for points of travel from earth to earth. I mean- then you go up and just be much faster than an airplane can be, like the energy expenditures are pretty comparable and so forth. So no, that would be interesting. I'm definitely excited about San Francisco to Singapore in 55 minutes or whatever the number ends up being. Aside from that, I definitely- space to be a combination of mainly a tourist thing together with some industries happening
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and just stuff being built in zero gravity. I'm not sure exactly what kinds of things it makes sense to be a built in zero gravity. I'm just like, not that much of an expert on those topics, but it could be interesting things.
Morgan Beller:
San Francisco or Miami or Austin, because those are the places where people seem to be being sucked out of here too.
Vitalik Buterin:
There's also the quieter options, like Denver is one, that'd be... Yeah Ethereum Foundation has been viably setting up a base that has more and more people in Denver. Denver's cool, and I met the governor, I met Jared Polis, and he was a willing to read a crypto themed children's book with me on stage, which I thought was really nice and amazing. And I follow him on Twitter, he just seems like a lovely pragmatic chap. And then the Colorado was right beside Wyoming and Wyoming has all of that crypto friendly regulation. So I think that's the pool that neither the old guard nor the self-styled leaders of the new guard talk about that much, but I don't know, it was lovely.
Vitalik Buterin:
The aspect of being 1600 meters above ground is interesting. I need to properly try doing a run there. We'll see how that goes. And then what else? Miami, I've been to Miami a few times. It seems interesting, though I don't understand it well enough. So I definitely want to try to understand Miami more. [inaudible 01:39:11] other interesting thing about Miami is that Miami is a de facto gateway to Central America, right? All the flights going from random US and Canadian cities to far Central and South America places, unless they're direct- the hub. And you have a lot of Cuban immigrants that are going to Florida, a lot of our other Latin Americans in Florida. So I definitely think that Latin America as a region is a region that the US is going to start learning to care more about. I mean, it may just take China trying to put up a couple of Belt and Road projects or whatever they call them in the couple of South American countries.
Vitalik Buterin:
And then you watch people will get scared, or realize that they need to compete somehow, or it could just happen on its own. I don't know. But, generally, it feels like Latin America does feel like one of these slightly forgotten places that probably the US needs to do more interfacing with. And I say this as someone who has done far less Latin Americaing than I wanted to. Unfortunately South America in particular is still the one continent I've never been to yet. Though that's going to change with the next Devcon in Columbia when it happens. So this is another one of those we'll see situations, but basically if US Latin America relations go well then Miami will be very well-poised to benefit from that.
Morgan Beller:
I agree. We should all start learning Spanish. Oh, how many languages do you speak?
Vitalik Buterin:
This is complicated because it depends how I need to speak them. We're speaking English, I can speak Russian well, I can speak Chinese reasonably well. French and German I can understand decently, but I don't really have enough practice speaking either of them. Spanish, I know a little bit of, and I can make
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my way through some blog articles, but I definitely want to really improve it. Aside from that not too much. I did study Latin and ancient Greek in high school, but I regrettably do not remember too much of either.
Morgan Beller:
That's something else I'll also never forget is being in Bethlehem with you. And we're all taking selfies and you're translating the Latin on the side of the church.
Vitalik Buterin:
It was my one opportunity to read Latin in my [inaudible 01:42:12].
Morgan Beller:
Vitalik, you make me laugh, you make me smile, you expand my brain. Thank you. This has been so fun.
Vitalik Buterin:
Thank you Morgan, this has been fun.