🎙 Layer Zero | Dmitry Buterin

welcome to layer zero layer zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the ethereum community ethereum is built by code but it's composed by people and each individual member of the ethereum community has their own story to tell cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it and layer zero focuses on the people behind the code because ethereum is people all the way down and it always has been on the first episode of layer zero i'm excited to have a conversation with

dimitri buterin and if we're calling this layer zero i think dimitri buterin might be layer negative one uh dimitri buterin is the father of vitalik buterin the guy that kicked off this whole ethereum movement and i really wanted to have him on as the first guest because of the relationship between the dna of of the people that make up this industry and the actual things that come to manifest on it in code i think there's a relationship there uh dimitri was uh born in russia and was you know raised

in communist russia and he we go through the story of what that was like his first introduction into uh into computers his uh computer science major at university uh and then moving into the world where he's in now where he lives in canada dimitri is focused as uh focused on the world of you know meditation and mindfulness and that is a topic of conversation that i'm also very interested in as well and so we start to we talk about in addition to many other things the the relationship between

ethereum and acceptance and kindness and how the protocol is a reflection of the values of the people that built it as the introduction to this podcast just suggested and then we also talked about what it's like to be vitalik's dad and watch this kid go around the world trying to garner support for this ethereum thing even before we all knew that ethereum was going to be what it was going to be i think you're going to enjoy this conversation with dimitri buterin and i hope that you enjoy all

future podcasts with the people that you've already listened to podcast 2 before but in a different context about how the people that compose this ecosystem make up the the code that dictates our lives and so without further ado i bring you dimitri buterin but first a message from these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys not your keys not your crypto that's why so many in the bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallets which makes proper private key management a breeze

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their discord all right everyone i'm here with dimitri buterin the uh founder of vitalik i have to still steal that joke from from laura shin she was the one that made that um dimitri uh welcome to layer zero the first ever uh guest on the first ever episode of this new podcast welcome hey so uh for listeners who are trying to get a grip for what layer zero is layer zero is about the people that compose this community this fantastic community that we are all a part of and dimitri

buterin is vitalik buterin's father so technically he's like layer negative one uh whatever comes right right before right before zero and so i i think this is going to be a fantastic conversation to kick off this uh new show so dmitry i'm excited to get into some non-ethereum non-defy related subjects uh and maybe we touch on them later yeah totally and i think i i love their i love the name level zero right and uh i was just reading some articles this morning about governance and this and

that right and people again we people want safety and stability it's like you know code is law but the thing is like code is written by humans and uh code will be full of bugs humans are full of bugs and uh you know uh this is a never-ending process of uh you know it's a feedback loop so really it's really important to focus on that invisible layer because it's i mean invisible in the code right but it's an extremely important aspect of this whole ecosystem right

yeah at the end of the day if all of the humans of the world disagree with the code then the code is invalid and it doesn't matter and it's back to back to the human layer um so i i want to go all the way back and and kind of ask you what was it like to grow up in russia what was that like and and what city did you grow up i grew up in a city called grozny in a place called chechnya so that southern part of russia are close to the afghanistan border

um and you know it wasn't so much russia it was soviet union right and it was uh interesting right because end of the day uh we have all kinds of memories from our childhood some good and bad and depending on our current emotion you know some can prevail so there was all kinds of stuff in that childhood you know having fun you know i had a very curious mind and i think i still do and doing fun stuff and you know trying to blow things up and then getting interested in electronics and whatnot

having to learn some disciplines going into swimming this and that getting lots of propaganda from the state you know the state was this uh uh all-powerful benevolent force that was doing everything right and the entrepreneurship was considered to be bad and again like everything is done by the state and the state is perfect and and you know we were all standing on this uh doing these concerts and singing

hints to lenny and communism and whatnot but as you grow a little bit and you see all this uh you know discrepancy between what is what you've been taught and between what's actually happening right and nobody is really believing that everybody is just kind of playing the games like yeah yeah let's kind of do this but now let's talk about real life right so it was really fascinating environment to kind of look at all of that stuff i'm assuming there's some semblance of resonance with this but when growing up

in america there's always the question of like what you want to be when you grow up what was that question like for you in in russia what what form did that question come in well i guess it's supposed to come up pretty much for every child i don't recall that's ever really coming up for me and uh again maybe it's part of their social cultural level and uh you know socialism that uh soviet union was right but it's kind of you just feeling like you're part of

this you're a meaningless part of this huge blob of stuff and the blob is moving somewhere and you will be told what to do you you you know you will be told where to work and kind of you will be you know your the kind of money you make and will be defined for you all of this stuff and yes you will be you know the free health care and education blah blah blah so you just do what you told right and it's really interesting because it's also you can see that even in modern russia

which is uh very different and went very far from the soviet union but the whole concept of uh there's a huge difference in that in in the west and especially in the states there is this uh respect for the individual and uh in in that society it's like individual means nothing you know we can easily just move a million people here we can mail we can kill you know 10 millions here and they don't matter you know just their collective matters and an

individual doesn't matter so so did you have that question answered for yourself inside of your own head or did you not even think to ask the question like what do i want to do with my life later i mean when i when i got old you know as i was growing up i was just kind of following the things that were of interest to me especially as i realized that or i don't have to just kind of follow the things that i've been pushed to by my parents and whatnot and you know i always i had a huge

library at home which was really awesome it really helped me uh grow and satisfy my curiosity about life and everything and there's lots of lots of kind of books about science and math and puzzles and stuff like that and sci-fi even though it was pretty hard to get books in the soviet union it was funny like actually to get some new books you actually have to uh submit into reciting like you know 10 kilos of old books stuff like that

um so i got interested eventually in electronics and then i got interested in cybernetics and kind of basic computer systems and diagrammable calculators so by the time i finished uh school high school if you want then i knew that okay i really want to study computers and stuff related to that and can i i chose the university and i want for that do you remember your first introduction to a computer like what was the first time you touched a computer

i probably was maybe 15 maybe 16. oh yeah probably somewhere around that age and the first my first experience was with this uh you know in school we get so we're supposed to get some kind of hands-on experience uh some you know not outside of regular learning that you get some hands-on experience with uh in a particular whatever factory organization right and in this case we're at some kind of uh

i don't even remember what the organization was but they had this uh what do you call them a mini computer right like you know when you have terminals and you have this huge computer somewhere and then you have printers and whatnot and yeah it was really exciting to kind of be being able to kind of touch that and and then they had some experience with personal computers and maybe even before that probably my first introduction was a programmable calculator right like soviet union was uh

like was not known for creativity but it was uh just uh ruthlessly copying all this stuff it could steal and copy from the west so i believe that the programmable calculator that they had it was just a copy of something that was created in the last couple of whatever decades or a decade before that and it was this uh scientific calculator which had 100 bytes of memory and uh and that memory was all that you had for data and for code and it was really cool as i kind of was reading some magazines

and trying to and it didn't have any uh it only had ram so you switch it on you have to type in their the codes and then you run it and it does their calculation and people were actually still building some little games on that right and their inventiveness of kind of building stuff you know in 100 bytes of machine codes that kind of that fascinated me and it was so cool to to kind of learn about that and try to play with that and

whatnot oh i remember doing the same thing in math class with my like ti 84 and and everyone who was bored in math class would figure out that like you could make like the different patterns by putting numbers in you press enter and you would see it scroll and you can make like yeah you make little little mazes and i don't know how many bytes of memory that ti 84s had but that was that was my introduction it was definitely just an entertainment tool for kids that were bored in math class yeah and you know also my curiosity always

kind of then pushed me to explore okay so this is how it works interesting now what happens if i press all of these buttons what happens when i do this what happens when you know it says it's like there's no more memory but then i try to put the other comment you know stuff like that so like i got really interested into the concept of what is now known as hacking right but basically trying to okay so here's a complex system that does what it's supposed to do now what can we do with it that it's not

supposed to do would you say that like computers resonated with you particularly or were you just a normal like you know teenage boy that gets fascinated by gadgets did you have any particular residents there were no gadgets around me you know yeah like in the soviet union like you know first of all so i grew up in like in their end of 70s and then the 80s right so very few gadgets again you like soviet union was extremely poor compared to the west uh and access to this kind of stuff was

extremely limited and maybe accessible to the elite so so computers were the most i mean i only got access to them when i was in my teenage years and uh they were really hard to get access to and they fascinated me with their level of complexity you know mm-hmm and so you went to school for uh computer science or cybernetics yeah yeah computer science what's something that has like a long complex name like you know software vacations for

computer systems whatever and then you what was your like first job out of school or or career path that that you got out of that the very first job i it was i was a software engineer actually in a bank in a bank huh nice and then where in this story did you uh meet vitalik's mom uh in the university yeah what was she studying same thing

same thing yeah ah ah okay so we had we had two two computer nerds meet because of computers huh yeah and you know at that age computers have fun but then also oh what about blues and sex and whatnot yeah that's fascinating too blues huh but was blue russia no booze oh booze oh i thought okay can you can you tell me that story of how you met vitale's mom

well it was just she was in my class you know like and then exactly how it unfolded you know it's really hard to remember that it was uh you know whatever 30 plus years ago yeah interesting interesting um so when one of one of the reasons why i was asking about computers is because like i would imagine when vitalik was growing up when if you plopped him in front of a computer he would just like magnet like gravitate right right towards it would you say that was true yeah totally right and you know also for

many parents we kind of we end up trying to live our dreams through our kids right you know like when we were kids there were still things that were somehow not able to do and get access to right and you know then you buy all these lego sets and it's part of you really wants to play with them it's like oh no it's for my kid because it's also hard for you to admit that big part of you just wants to play with that too right so when vidalia was growing up i'm like oh man i really when i was younger i really wish that i had access to computers uh

so then this kid seems to be really smart so let's put a computer in front of him and let's see what he does with that right so and i think like from an age of whatever it was four or five he got extremely curious and interested in playing with computers and you know you know that old ibm pc that we gave him so feel free to just not answer any question that becomes too personal but how how soon after you met vitalik's mom did you

guys have vitalik i mean we met in 89 in the university right and vitalik was born in 94. okay and so by the time vitalik was born and was actually like a functional being that could actually play with a computer where computers computers are far more accessible at that point than when you were a kid yeah sure right and so you guys just had one in the home yeah we had an old ibm pc and you know

we now had access to computers and even you know can you imagine laptops you know for personal use so then like okay but computers were still considered to be extremely valuable uh and rare and expensive uh so we just uh kind of had the an old one that we gave to him to explore and play with what what could you do on that computer like what were some of the what would you do were there games no not really um i mean very few but

excel actually there was microsoft office installed on that and he loved excel because it was such a diverse tool you know because initially he was not interested in like excel as such but in excel then you could draw circles and you can fill them with color you can draw lines i mean you can do all kinds of stuff draw and whatever but very quickly he also got interested in actual excel functions and then like okay you put because he learned about numbers very early on and

you know math was kind of obsession and joy for him right so and once he figured oh i can put a number here and then here and then for functions and stuff like that then he got really fascinated with just doing stuff within excel doing functions and whatnot and and later on when he was maybe i'm guessing maybe around seven the kind of the first programming language that are also easily accessible on that old computer that was using uh was visual basic uh for you know build

uh visual basic for applications which was built into microsoft office and uh that was kind of the first thing that i was uh teaching him a little bit that's funny because people often one of the most salient metaphors i've heard about ethereum lately came out of the uh tim ferriss podcast with naval and he illustrated ethereum as just like a global excel sheet that we all can like write to and you're telling me vitalik's first two like things about him was his obsession with math and his tinkering with excel

yeah that's that's awesome that's awesome you can just extrapolate that right right into the future so obviously everyone in ethereum holds vitalik with you know an insane amount of regard and obviously he like invented ethereum so odd there's some some history of of incredibleness about uh to vitalik but but when when in vitalik's like uh childhood did you would you say was the first inclination that this kid was different or special in any way

what was it was it obvious or was it every child is different than special right and you know in different ways and uh and every child then they have their own peculiarities and quirks and struggles but i mean his uh uh him being very smart and you know learning very easily was pretty obvious but i don't know like three years old right like i learned to read i think around three and a half years of age and i think that vitalik i i don't really recall but

he probably learned to read before that like you know maybe he was around three so kind of when you see that uh child is really taken into this abstract notions of symbols first for reading and then for math you know then it becomes kind of quite obvious that okay so it looks like his brain is really enjoying exploring those kind of concepts and you know when he was uh say six and he was playing with lego sets and uh he was not building like castles and whatnot but he was like oh i built a six

and here's a five and then there were some kind of uh animated uh some kind of special digital animals and whatnot and so it was again like he was playing with math but also not just in his head but through the physical world and uh dimitri i know you're really big into the concept of spirituality and mindfulness and meditation when did that come and become a part of your life um

the evolution of this i think it was like again i had always had this innate energy of curiosity right so for me first as a child it was expressed in my desire to learn science and math and physics and stuff and whatever and then computers right and then eventually kind of then curiosity is like okay what kind of other objects are there in the world and then okay humans obviously some of uh very common and extremely complex objects and like oh how do humans work and

i got interested in the subject of uh personal development and things like that right and then eventually psychology and then through that eventually uh it was sam harry so i know if you're familiar with the name but kind of he's the guy whose book finally kind of got me into this whole if you will spirituality direction because also i had lots of resistance to that like uh growing up uh a lot one huge aspect of uh soviet propaganda was that uh

religion is uh is bad that bad and uh so anything in that whole space you know religion and spirituality for me i consider that to be in this whole space and i was like oh no this is kind of bad stupid you know useless stuff so let's kind of not go there and kind of sam harris uh he read his book and then that kind of really helped me to find a different perspective on that do you know when you wrote uh read that book yeah i well i mean approximately

it was probably when i was about maybe 40 years old so like let's say nine years ago nine or seven years ago maybe yeah okay so i mean i wrote a bunch of stuff before that so you know and i tried you know i love reading and i still do uh and i always read a lot of stuff uh and i tried reading stuff about you know meditation and buddhism and whatnot and uh and back you know before his book

most of the stuff was kind of really hard for me to read but then eventually when i overcame this you know now i can talk to anybody about any kind of religion about god about whatever you want to talk to me right because i can kind of map the concepts that they use to my own understanding of the universe if you will so would you say that like when you discovered mindfulness uh and meditation and this realm of the universe which i find particularly fascinating and i also credit sam harris is kind of like being my guide into this world as as well

uh would you say that like you were already inclined uh to be a mindful person like maybe you are already mindful even though you didn't really hadn't yet been introduced to the concept or would you say that this was like a brand new concept that you found fascinating that you had to like start from scratch with well mindfulness is just like one of their aspects branches of that whole space if you will so mindfulness specifically was not

not a huge aspect of that space for me and i would not call myself a mindful person i was really very much in my thinking had in my analytical brain you know thinking about stuff and whatnot okay so so here here's what i've been trying to weave together for like the past like 50 minutes is because like this podcast is called layer zero uh we these these crypto economic networks are made up of humans uh you you raised the

human that made this ethereum thing that we all are a community a part of and and you know sorry to interrupt right but he has not made it by himself right yes and i have absolutely made vitalik on my own right yeah really important aspect of this right because again vitalik is who he is because of so many aspects and humans and other factors right and you know and then ethereum is also is uh where is because of so many other people collaborating on that yeah

absolutely yeah and i i and just to that's 100 right is like nothing is made in a silo but what i find what i find fascinating is that like generally the ethereum community at large i think it would be accurate to say is largely a uh it's a very inclusive community very friendly and i think as you get closer and closer to the core of the ethereum developers the people that are actually writing the code you find that to become more and

more true uh and so like uh i i know people like carl flores who i just talked to from optimism and uh just another other agreement the circle of people that i think vitalik kind of like associates and hangs out with all kind of share the same sort of inclusion um zen-ness mindfulness about the world and i see that like instantiated in ethereum and so i've always been fascinated and one of the reasons why i wanted to to lead layer zero with you is that there's this relationship between

some mindfulness in my in my opinion which in promotes inclusivity which actually dictates uh some of how we actually build this system uh because the ethereum is what maybe maybe the word mindfulness is not the best label for this yeah maybe mindfulness for me is kind of like is really about being uh deeply immersed in your perceptions connected with them and whatnot including new emotions your perceptions and vitalik is not quite

that and you know i and i'm i'm not that too you know to some degree but i would call the energy that you're describing differently you know and the most simplistic term for this is kindness but also you can talk about acceptance and compassion right and i do know that when this whole ethereum thing was story and a bunch of people who are not even usually named as a official co-founders right but i know that what they were talking about is that uh they wanted to create a community that would be that would be inclusive

that you know would be built on the foundation of like being open and having a dialogue and stuff like that right and again like people who have met vitalik who has spoken to him they can sense that energy of kindness and acceptance in him right and you know that's that's kind of uh this is a very powerful energy can we all all of us humans we're really drawn to that a hundred percent and i think the reason why i was using the term the word mindfulness is because to me if you practice mindfulness you become kind right you become

uh or and you can appreciate the perspective of others like you get more empathy uh you become more inclusive and so maybe that's why i was using using the word mindfulness right right well and you know what that energy of you will kindness and compassion i know that in my human being that always has been a very strong energy and kind of being mindful or you know different mindfulness methods and practices that kind of help me or you know they probably contributed then to that energy being developed

right and again vitalik because of uh the unique uh combination of attributes and him as a human being again their intellect for sure right but then also again he's a very sensitive person he's also very kind and compassionate person right and you know those kind of things like you know they are some of the important energies that you can sense on him absolutely absolutely um one thing i'd like to ask you is how would you define spirituality

because to me everyone kind of defines it differently yeah exactly right like you know the work doesn't mean that much but but what does it mean to you like in general you know i like labels don't mean much to me right but for me uh spirituality is uh if you will investigation and sensitivity to well investigation of uh