Reading an interview with Gavin Wood, I couldn’t help but wonder what goes on in this person’s mind. Gavin Wood—the author of Polkadot and also a co-founder of Ethereum—has recently spent 3 hours talking about his career and his blockchain philosophy, and the content is truly fascinating.

It starts with stories from his childhood: he was raised in a single-parent household, and his father was violent, which apparently formed a strong sense of “a safe environment.” However, he hasn’t undergone psychotherapy. Instead, he seems to prefer self-analysis and avoids putting labels on himself. While he advocates a “free spirit,” he says he’s aware that his childhood experiences significantly influence the way he thinks today.

What makes Gavin Wood especially interesting is how he thinks about the process of creation. He says, “Ideas just show up on their own.” It isn’t the Elon Musk-style method of setting a goal like “go to Mars” and then working backward; rather, he describes a feeling like puzzle pieces naturally coming together on their own while walking or taking a shower. It also seems that the ideas for EVM and Polkadot emerged in the same way—through natural, spontaneous occurrence.

This is an approach that could be called incremental innovation, with an emphasis on combining existing elements in new ways. From Gavin Wood’s perspective, a true “idea” is a state where you can see the path to achieving something. Even if you don’t know all the details, it’s a state where you know it could be positive and helpful.

That said, Gavin Wood himself also acknowledges the “problem of being too far ahead of its time.” Just as, when the internet was first used for sending emails, disruptive inventions often begin with very simple use cases. You have to explain things using words people already understand. The same misunderstanding seems to be happening with the JAM protocol currently under development. Since it’s too complex, it doesn’t seem easy for people to understand how it differs from existing approaches or why it’s superior.

Gavin Wood stresses the importance of “deep intellectual understanding.” Between things that seem immediately practical and things that appear purely theoretical, there’s actually a spectrum—and he sees himself right in the middle. He’s trying to come up with a new understanding of engineering, aiming not for something that increases tomorrow’s transaction volume by 10%, but for an understanding that could serve as the foundation of the next-generation system and potentially increase transaction volume by 1,000% or more.

His attachment to Japanese culture is also interesting. While drinking Yamazaki 12-year-old whiskey, he highly praises Japan’s spirit of service and its attention to detail. At the same time, he also says he likes traditional British pubs, fish & chips, and Sunday roasts. When it comes to humor, he defines it as a culturally dependent “shared cryptic interpretation.”

Polkadot’s biggest achievement is “a secure sharding implementation,” yet it’s also, in a way, its biggest current challenge—an element of irony there. Regarding Ethereum, he evaluates it with a touch of sarcasm, saying it’s the project that created the most billionaires. As for meme coins, he dismisses them outright as “nonsense.”

Gavin Wood’s way of thinking is different from that of many entrepreneurs. Rather than deciding on outcomes first, he emphasizes analyzing and reconfiguring existing elements starting from the current situation. This is the source of his creativity, and it may also be why he’s misunderstood as having “been too far ahead of his time.”