Vitalik Buterin on Human Agency in the AI Era

One of the challenges of the world right now is that we're definitely in a less peaceful and less safe world than ten or fifteen 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. You know, each individual person is free to use it or free to not use it. I think in general, there is this pattern where you just have to force 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. 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 could 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 Du and Binji Pande speak with Vitalik Buterin about technology, freedom, and the future of human agency. 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 gonna talk about, I just wanted to plug the Discord and X chat that we have. So we have an actual chat, and one of the things that we really wanna do, Binji and I wanted to experiment in a whole new way and actually get more, user interaction. And we didn't wanna 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 …