When I woke up on Friday, September 27th, the first thing I did was put on an out-of-office notification on my email. That felt so damn good. It meant that for the next twelve days, I was dialing work down to the bare minimum and going away with The Gotham Gal to recharge and refresh.

We spent five days/nights in Seoul and another five days/nights in Tokyo. It was the first time for us in Seoul and the third time in Tokyo (and more broadly Japan). We did no work meetings and largely spent time together just the two of us. We walked more than 150,000 steps, took dozens of subway rides, and saw lots of both cities. We shopped, ate, drank, and soaked up the people and the culture as much as we could.

We are not "hire a driver/guide" tourists. I appreciate that approach to travel and have done it a few times with friends who prefer to travel that way. But when the Gotham Gal and I travel by ourselves, we do a ton of research and then get on our walking shoes and throw ourselves at the city. I particularly like taking the subway because that is where you see the people going about their daily routines. It gives you a sense of the people and the culture.

We ate in the food markets, the lunch spots with people on their lunch break, and also in some of the best restaurants in Seoul and Tokyo. I had a full Japanese breakfast (see the photo above) every morning in Tokyo. There is nothing like a Japanese breakfast to start your day off right.

We really like to shop in Korea and Japan. Many of our favorite designers are from there and they are creative without impacting the comfort and wearability of the clothes. So we did a ton of shopping and came back with lots of great stuff to wear this fall and winter.

It's a long flight there and back. The time difference from NYC is thirteen hours so the jet lag is no joke. But it is a great trip, the people are amazing, and the culture is quite different from what we have in the west and very compelling to us.

We had a great time and hope to go back soon.

When you think of founders who have been massively successful in bringing new and novel technologies and companies to market, you don't normally think of a nomad who has been living out of a single backpack for over a decade. You don't think of someone who talks like a modern-day Peter Kropotkin. You don't think of someone who walks through life with a childlike wonder for bugs, plants, and animals.

But that is exactly who Vitalik Buterin is.

I had the pleasure of attending the premier of Vitalik: An Ethereum Story on Wednesday night at the Angelika Film Center in NYC.

This film is nominally about the Ethereum blockchain and developer ecosystem. But it is actually an opportunity to spend just under ninety minutes with Vitalik learning about him and how he lives, thinks, and how he became who he is.

I have been in and around the blockchain sector for almost fifteen years. I am a fan and a holder of Bitcoin. I am a fan and a holder of Solana. I am a fan and a holder of Ethereum. I am a fan and a holder of many other protocols, tokens, and communities. I am all in on all of this.

But I will say that Vitalik has a special place in my head and heart. He doesn't just talk a good game. He lives his beliefs and leads from there. He is a very special human. And this film does a great job of showcasing that.

This film was funded by an Ethereum crowdfund on Mirror.xyz and is now being streamed onchain at ethereumfilm.xyz. If you want to stream it, you go there, mint an NFT for $20, and can stream it on your computer or on your TV if you connect an HDMI cable or airplay to AppleTV. The proceeds of the NFT sales will go towards getting a distribution deal with a major streamer so that this film can reach the general public.

Here's a trailer if you want to try before you buy:

I think the general public needs to know about Vitalik. The narrative around crypto, blockchains, and web3 is mostly about speculation and scamming. Vitalik is the opposite of all of that and his story can help the mainstream understand this sector and the potential of it.

So if you want to meet a very special human being, take some time this weekend and stream Vitalik: An Ethereum story. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Code is a mobile app built onchain that allows anyone to send anyone else money anywhere in the world and it is entirely self custodial. Code uses the Kin token that came out of the Kik mobile messaging app. The Code team are the same folks that built Kik and Kin. I've been working with them for almost a decade and a half and it has been a wild and fun ride.

You need the Code app to do anything with Code but once you have it, it is slick. You can download Code here or by scanning this QR code:

One of my favorite features of Code is the tip card. Here is mine:

If you have Code on your phone, you can also go to https://tipcard.getcode.com/X/fredwilson

Anyone who has the Code app can scan that card and tip. Everyone who has Code has a tip card. Your tip card can go in your social profile on TikTok, Twitch, etc. You can send it via a messaging app. Or, like I just did, you can put in in a blog post.

Micropayments has always been one of the most exciting onchain use cases for me. And as we are seeing all over web3 now, tipping is leading the charge for micropayments. I think that's awesome.