Nillion Gives Crypto & Data Security a Human Upgrade – Conrad Whelan : 971

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Formerly Bulletproof Radio, a state of high performance. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today is going to be a powerful show because we're going to talk about something I haven't spent a lot of a show talking about. And it is related to crypto, but not the kind of stuff you think about. Our guest today is a very well known guy, Conrad Whalen, who is a co founder of Uber. And like me, he's a Silicon Valley guy who's done software and hardware at pretty much every level of the software stack. So I'm just going to say Conrad's one of my tribe from the tech world, but he has a cooler beard than I do, if you're just wondering about that. Which is a sign of his retirement in 2016 to focus on philanthropy and personal passion projects. We got connected because he came out of retirement for a company or a crypto project called Nilian. And I'm an advisor to Nilian as well. Nilian, I believe, is as fundamental to changing the world and building the kind of world we want to live in as crypto itself. And it's different than anything that you've ever heard of. If you're like rolling your eyes going, I've had enough of crypto, there's nothing going on there. Crypto's just technology. At the end of the day. Yes, you have the ability to have basically distributed logs everywhere, all over the Internet that you know haven't been changed or you can track changes to, but we've never had compute. And the big issue is if your information is out there and you wanted to be able to pay someone to do something to it, and you didn't want them to be able to see it, you couldn't do it. So what that means we can spread visibility, but we've never spread compute cycles. And this new tech is going to allow us to distribute everything everywhere, I believe over time. And this is what's been missing. So we're going to talk about how this works, how important it is, and I'm going to ask Conrad a bunch of other stuff that is going to completely be interesting because this guy can do whatever he wants and he's doing this. I want to find out why. Konrad, I'm so happy to get a chance to connect with you.

Yeah, me too, man. Really nice to meet you.

And you're in Amsterdam as we speak.

That's correct.

All right. What is founding engineer of Uber doing? Retired in Amsterdam? It sounds like a hell of a story.

I mean I got moved to the city by Uber, launched a technical team here. This was 2015, 16. Yeah. Kind of fell in love with the city. Enjoyed the friends that I made here. I did actually move back to Canada to pursue one of my passion projects which was skiing and to be close to my family for a few years. But then I ended up moving back. You know, part of the, part of the reason to be here is travel. You know, it's like one of the world's best travel hubs. Lots of amazing places to go. I like the vibe of the city. The Dutch have that sort of Germanic mindset where engineering is actually valuable. So I like the way, I like the way the society runs the airport here. The machines they've built for everything, seem to make everything work quite efficiently. So yeah, I. A very well connected global but small and relaxed city that's got like a focus on efficiency. Sign me up.

It's a, it's a beautiful place. Was just missed you there. I didn't realize that would have, I would have interviewed you live there if I'd have put the dots together. I absolutely adore Amsterdam, all the bikes and like I said, it's a well run city. Except when the tractor owners in Holland are blocking food distribution because the government's trying to stop them from raising animals to feed people. That's a different issue. And that'll.

Yeah, that's a, that's a whole other. I don't know. I don't know if it's going to pass. Is climate change going to pass? I'm not sure. I don't know.

No, I'm not worried about. I don't think climate change is going to pass, but I'm just assuming that the protests will pass at a certain point. Either they're, they're going to have the, they're going to have farming or they're not going to have farming. But I kind of a little worried about food shortages for the short term. But we shall see.

Me too.

Now why did you come out of retirement for this?

I mean I've got a bunch of reasons. Some of them are personal, some of them are professional.

Why'd you come out of retirement for this?

I mean, I've got a bunch of reasons. Some of them are personal, some of them are professional. I mean first of all being, being sort of out of the game for five or six years, I think it was time, you know. Yeah, I was like, I was definitely a good long break. I'm, I'm 44 now. So it's. I'm still young, I'm still healthy, I've still got all my faculties about me.

So.

So it was time in that sort of sense. I had a big project finish up last year. It was a birthday party for, for a lot of my friends, which I won't really talk about here. But it was when that was all done this, that was years worth of time and effort and a lifetime of curation and collaboration with all sorts of great people to pull that together. I hit up Andrew in maybe December to ask him what he was working on because you know Andrew, he's always got his fingers into all sorts of interesting pies for sure.

This is Andrew Mosanto for listeners, who's a pretty well known guy in crypto. Only started two of the top hundred cryptocurrencies and he's been a biohacker and a friend for years as well, which is how we got connected.

Yep. And he sent me, I was in Costa Rica and he sent me the paper, the nmc, the Nilian paper that they were working on. I had a call with Miguel and Rob. I kind of started to dig into the technology. I thought it was really interesting. Full disclosure, I'm not like the biggest, you know, crypto is everything kind of person. I definitely, I definitely think the technology is interesting. I think Token is a software tool, a very compelling one. I think the blockchain is interesting for certain, but again, I'm an engineer, so efficiency is my thing. I just saw it as very inefficient architecture, but with NetMC I saw something kind of different. So to me, if you look at a decentralized blockchain architecture, adding more nodes, more compute, more whatever to the network, all it does, it does the same things and it maybe can process more transactions, but it doesn't necessarily do it more efficiently. What I thought was very interesting when I read about NMC was here's a network that when you add more nodes, you increase the security guarantees on people's data. There's actually a functional improvement that we can get by adding more nodes into the network. Which means the decentralization story to me was quite interesting. I also, as I've gotten further, this was my thoughts on the crypto space and it's now even more confirmed. I think it's just really fascinating that if you're the age that we are, we've basically been watching all these technologies that have sort of been developed and coming along and changing our culture, whether it's like the Internet Whether it was email or cell phone, then the smartphone, like social media, like, all these things have come along and changed culture. And what's been fascinating to me about crypto is just from that cultural side, I almost feel like this is one of the first times where culture, more specifically the youth culture, is actually trying to push technology in a direction. Because like I say, these architectures are really. They're hard to work with, they're quite difficult, they're inefficient. An engineer wouldn't pick them to solve a specific problem. But the culture is pushing this. And it's been sort of fascinating to see in that sort of way. So when I read the paper, I began to think about, like, okay, well, this is a different type of decentralized network with a different functional story as you add more nodes to it. Maybe in the future there's going to be a bunch of these sort of decentralized networks. Some will be blockchains, some could be nmc, some could be other networks that haven't been discovered yet. But the cool thing is we now have this token to interact and mediate between them all. I put that together when I was reading the paper and then, of course, combine it with information, theoretic security and the privacy guarantees, which we can talk about, of course. And I thought, man, this is, you know, as far as projects going in the decentralized space, which is the most exciting space in computer engineering right now, this would be a pretty good one to try my hat back on.

So, yeah, I hear you. Okay. It makes sense from an engineering standpoint. A lot of our audience isn't engineers. So I'm going to do my best to translate this. Like CTO marketing guy. Yeah, right. And what's happening here is real engineers like Conrad and like most of my other CTO friends throughout the entire history of crypto have said, interesting, useful software tool. Really crappy transactions per second. We have been designing systems first on single computers and then as a distributed thing all over called N plus one architecture. That's what I did in the data center business. And that meant you could add another server and you could have another hundred transactions per second. Whatever it was, just keep adding servers. And that changed the world. That allowed everything we're doing today. And then someone somewhere said, well, hey, let's make a really, really inefficient thing that's burning maybe 5% of the world's electricity to spread that stuff around. Okay, that hurts my brain as an engineer. It hurts yours as well, right?

Yep, definitely.

That's what we're talking about where this maybe doesn't make sense except this idea that everyone can see what's on the blockchain. The idea of a token as a software tool. In my other life, I was one of the hundred most influential cloud computing bloggers when I was a VP of cloud security at Trend Micro. Very cool. I invented this term called ambient cloud that no one used. But the idea of the vision was that essentially most of our cloud stuff is going to move to the edge. I couldn't have told you which technologies it was going to be. Exactly. And what's happening now is we managed to move some of it in a very inefficient way to the. Just. It's on your phone, it's on your computer, it's all over the place. And that's a beautiful thing.

Yes.

What happened though, is, okay, great, now we have a record of it, but you got to go back to a data center where someone. Because if you're doing compute, you can look at it for the most part. You can still have some data encryption or whatever, but that's a secure issue and it's a privacy issue and it's a scalability issue. Because if all the servers are full, then what are you going to do? Well, it turns out if you can add additional compute and increase security when you scale, that's never been done before. And when I heard you came out of retirement for this, when Andrew, who always knows what's going on in the future, called me and said, we need to talk about this, all of a sudden this matters because it's going to get rid of this. How much less efficient is Nellium and this NMC that's behind it? We'll get into NMC in a minute. Is that versus just going and getting something on AWS on Amazon's cloud and just doing it like orders of magnitude. Where are we?

I wouldn't think it be orders of magnitude, but it definitely. When you think about. Yeah, if I were to explain nmc, the way it works is that you. You pull data from a network that's owned by a bunch of people and then you put that data together with math, with your personal data, and that's what creates the privacy guarantee. So the pulling of the data from the network is the key thing. So if I pull data from 10 nodes, it's going to be roughly 10 times. Maybe not. Yeah, roughly 10 times more expensive. If it's 100 nodes, it might be 100 times more. But it's. Yeah, it basically depends on the Level of security guarantees the current network that we're working with has five nodes, so it's maybe five times more. That being said, the key thing that Nilian and NMC can do is that once my data has been put into this private form, I can put it up for a computation with your data that's also been in a private form and we can start to see the output of our data together without actually finding out anything about each other's. And that is invaluable. Basically, you and I could do a computation together. My data has never left my imac. Your data has never left your imac. It's basically. And all we do is we see the results. It's very interesting.

This is the thing that got me jumping up and down when Andrew talked about it, back when big data was still, I think a term we used. Gigaom had the first big data conference somewhere in New York in the Meatpacking District. And I gave a talk saying, well, here's the problem. If you're going to share your health information, you only want to share enough of it and you don't want to give it up permanently because, you know, if you want to do a search of, I don't know, people who have herpes, let's say maybe you don't want to raise your hand and add your name to that list or people who are pregnant or whatever else. There's confidential stuff everywhere but the drug companies and frankly lots of other people who aren't drug people, like biohackers. Wouldn't it be great if we could all openly, but not openly share all of our data to figure out the actual operating system for humans and how we work? You have to have Nilium in order to do that. And that's what makes me super stoked. I don't want Apple to have all my health info. I want my health info. I want to get paid for it. But I want to contribute to the betterment of humanity. Do you think Nilian's going to be able to do that?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's obviously we need to build it. You know, it's a startup, right. We have very interesting mathematics. Building a real network is something completely. That's an order of magnitude harder challenge. But you know, we're able to hire good people now, which is great. Yeah, I think these are the types of applications that I personally am very excited about. Coming from a science background, we do talk about medical records all the time. You know, being able to do scientific studies on pools of data that Include information that might be personally, that would personally identify you is very interesting because right now you don't want to do any research study that has personally identifiable information because typically the research studies are being paid for by the insurers and you don't want insurers to find reasons to prevent you as a specific individual from getting insured for something. Right. So there's like, yeah, there's all sorts of implications for, you know, this type of scientific research. And I think like nearly an NMC really is well placed to basically capitalize on that for sure.

Talk to me about nmc. Just, just kind of. We have listeners who haven't heard of it, so they need the, the basic explanation for it.

Yeah, so it's an evolution of a programming technique or area called smpc and that stands for secure multiparty computation. So the key thing, so secure means that your data is private. Multiparty means you can also collaborate with other people's data. Both of your data remain private computing. Obvious. What makes NMC really interesting is that initial stage where you pull these things we call blinding factors from the network and you pull them to your computer, you mathematically combine them via our sort of library or application. You mathematically combine those with your data and then that goes back out onto the network. The computation that then happens. It's called nil message compute. That's where NMC comes from. The reason we call it that is because there's no messages being passed between all the computers that are participating within a computation. Now this is different than SMPC where NMC is an evolution beyond smpc. In the traditional SMPC techniques, there's a lot of communication that has to happen and the amount of communication is based on the complexity of the computation that you're doing. So if you want to basically do some, just a very complex, a bunch of additions, multiplications, sort of, you know, basically just the more, the more computation you need to do, the more communication has to happen, the slower those algorithms get to the point that even very simple things that we would think are very simple, calculating the average of like 10 numbers is actually really, really, really hard. NMC solves that via some clever mathematics and yeah, basically gets rid of all that communication. So it, in theory, we'll be able to scale much better for all sorts of applications.

It's awesome. I absolutely adore speaking with you because you can go straight to it because you're a real engineer. I realize I'm actually missing some of that from Silicon Valley. If we had a whiteboard, we'd be poking each other's eyes out and getting all excited.

I love whiteboards.

Yeah, that's how you do it for listeners. I'm going to do my best to translate to non technical people, though. We do have a lot of technical people. There's investment bankers and doctors and whatever else. Some of them are going, I don't care. But many of them are going, wait a minute. This actually is going to change my life if it works. What NMC stands for is Nil Message Compute. And I want you to imagine you're listening to this if for you to get something done, you had to tell everyone what you were doing before you could do it, right? And you have to tell them each individually. So pretty soon, if everyone's like, hey, I'm about to raise my dinner fork. And so everyone's just talking all the time, telling everyone everything they're going to do. At a certain point, no one can get anything done because we're all too busy talking about stuff and hearing what everyone else says. It's like having not just your own notifications on your phone turned off. Everyone else is going, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. All around you. That's actually what a compute environment is like until you solve it with NMC and specifically Nilian. So because of that problem of just too much chatter, we've been unable to accomplish this really important task of letting you own and protect your data and still make it useful for the world. What's happening now is earlier we talked about global warming. There's all sorts of information there about the state of the environment. There's information about the state of your biology, the state of your company, the state of all kinds of things. With this tech, we're going to be able to share it with, or to at least compute, to be able to calculate things without actually sharing the data itself. So if you wanted an aggregate of a bunch of things, you could do an aggregate of a bunch of things. You could have real economic calculations of what's happening, because companies can share things by computing them together without actually sharing the root of what it is. So when you look at saying, how do I get an accurate measurement of reality? It turns out you need a technology like this so that you don't run into that problem of everyone yelling the current status of everything all the time, which would be absurd. And so this gets a little bit esoteric, but I am genuinely excited. This is only the second crypto project I've been involved with. The other one was through Andrew Masanto as well, which was hashgraph they were establishing trust the same way that our mitochondria actually vote to do something called quorum sensing. So what I think is happening here starting to look a little bit mystical. Are you a mystical guy? I know you and Andrew met at Burning man, which is where all the cool tech projects start, but I mean, are you like, they're rolling on mushrooms and doing crazy stuff or are you more of a traditional engineer? Or are you more of a traditional engineer?

I'm not, no, I wouldn't say I was a traditional engineer. I don't know if I would call my mystical, but there is a magic in mathematics and there is a magic in numbers that is impossible to catch. You know, it's just, it's a different magic than the magic in trees. Maybe it all comes from the same place. But no, I think, I think it's this, this is just the continuing evolution of like computation as part of the human experience. These are just still like tools, you know, if you think about where we came from, it's like what separated us from animals, like language and tools, you know, and we are continuing to build very fascinating and interesting tools. And you know, one thing I really like about NMC almost even more than blockchain. If I think about a blockchain and a token, that's a financial asset. Well, guess what? Humans will trade financial assets, but so will robots. But when I think about nmc, when I think about data that needs to be private, that's almost always going to be like human. It's, it's a very human centered aspect of our system that I think is really good. I'm sure there's going to be robots that also have private data as well. But like, it fundamentally comes back to things about us. Right.

What do you think about the old, oh, geez, who said this information wants to be free? Wasn't that Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired magazine? Or Bruce, Bruce Neal Stevenson or Bruce Gibson or somebody? Do you remember who said that?

I can't remember who said that. But that's not like Malcolm, what's. No, that's the media.

Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell maybe. But it's one of those things that as a computer science guy in the early 90s when I was studying that, yes, the Internet's going to set all this free. And there's another class of person who says, well, if you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have anything to hide. But here it is, we're both talking about security and privacy. Talk to me about your fundamental beliefs about privacy. Is it a, is it a human right? Is it something that's dangerous? Like, where are you on that spectrum?

It's very interesting. I mean, I think it's, it's incredibly important and it is a human rights. But I do think that, you know, I do always worry building technologies like this, you know, about people being able to fund like nefarious activities that we all agree are not good. Like whether it's a bioterrorism lab, you know, there might be a, there might be some point in the future where we're like, oh, fully anonymous currencies. Maybe that wasn't actually a great idea. But you know, that being said, I think like there's definitely a certain level of privacy that is incredibly important. It is a human rights. And especially in, you know, this day and age with, you know, the tech companies out there and the advertising driven world that we have, like that, that data clearly has value, you know, so the other side of it is I think people deserve their privacy. But I also think, you know, getting some of that value back is like part of it. That's like the important evolution that's like going on here.

Getting some of the data or some of the value from your own information. Just because you're a member of society. If you can share that information without giving up a fundamental right, that's part of giving back. But it's not a, you know, 52% marginal tax rate giving back kind of thing. It doesn't actually cost you anything. Right?

Yeah.

It's almost a charitable thing.

Yeah, yeah, kind of.

Yeah. And when you get into the realm of quantum computing.

Yes.

You start overlapping with the realm of quantum biology. And I don't mean like the woo woo, like let's do a quantum meditation at Burning Man. And I'm down for that, by the way, but I'm talking about like real hardcore. Like we don't understand this quantum tunneling effect within a cell membrane. But we're starting to figure it out and you can get a PhD in it. Kind of real hard science. Do you think that we're approaching something when we have enough scale, enough of a, I'll call it a global brain, that something different will shift? I mean, we have the first AI hiring an attorney at Google. We have distributed memory systems across the planet. We have, you know, fiber everywhere. Are we building a giant brain on the planet?

I mean, I definitely, we're definitely building a giant chatterbox which could be the beginning of a brain. Will that brain be the same as our brain where it's like A independent thing which, you know, has an agenda and wants to go a certain direction. My worry is that we're not like, kind of building that in some ways, you know, we're basically. We are. We're creating so much chatter and we all have our own agendas, but, like, the world is like, the planet is in trouble and we're not able to come together to do it. And. And we're building these technologies and thinking it's bringing us together more, but it's actually helping us stay apart and argue more and be, like, separated more, you know. As to the quantum aspect and are we approaching some sort of thing, I was tend to think it's easy as we get older, you know, to think nostalgia. Things were better when we were younger. Stuff's getting crazier as I get older that, you know, people like 100 years ago were probably thinking the same thing we are now. And we're just sort of a spectrum of, you know, our children, if you have them or their children, are going to have a different set of problems and a different set of, like, technological transitions happening. We're on the path as to. Are we approaching something that would be some sort of either endgame or, like, full transformation? I'm never really fully convinced of that. I think the human element is pretty magical and it's always going to be there.

That's. That's a good perspective. I worry for my grandkids that they're going to get repetitive motion injury from twerking. The way we're doing the Internet.

Too much TikTok. Yeah.

Are you sort of sad at where tech has gone? I remember the sense of liberation from when we were first building the modern Internet, the first web servers you could anonymously email anyone. It was possible to have conversations you would never have in person on Usenet. And it's just like, privacy and all that has just been just destroyed. You can't get a Gmail account without a cell phone number. So they know exactly who you are and where you've been driving and all that. And all these algorithms making people, you know, using our precious computer science knowledge to make people twerk. Like, does that sort of sit with you sometimes? You go, oh, my God.

I mean, I kind of. Yeah. When Google changed its name to Alphabet, and I was like, that's actually like a very scary thing. You know, like, what does that mean? They want. They're basically. They're the. You know, am I watching Blade Runner? And they're basically going to be, you know, like, are they the corporation that wants to have their fingers into everything. So there's part of that where I'm like, man, this, this kind of is sad but you know, there's obviously the connectivity is just like, it's also such a special thing. I live a very international life. I live far away from my home. There were from my family, they're back in Canada. It's very easy to do. It's not like, you know, like all my friends I can stay connected with. It's like those things are actually good. I think I'm less disappointed about tech than I am that are economic style of like political capitalism has not been able to keep up with it. I'm more sad about us because we're still, you know, we're still the monkeys with the paper and we're still fighting over all sorts of things and we have, we have cool technologies that we can apply in all sorts of good ways, but we're still stuck in like an old way of like running a society. So I think I'm more sad about that and think we, we need to have a dose of evolution there more so than in the tech world, I think. Will the tech world be able to drive that? I don't actually know, but I kind.

Of feel the tech world won't be able to do that because humanity itself needs an upgrade. That's the mission statement for my portfolio companies. Like we're upgrading humanity and it's mostly operating system level stuff. It's not our conscious thoughts. It's the stuff that happens in the 350 milliseconds where your body's doing stuff that you can't be aware of because your brain hasn't started wiggling yet. So we have all these urges and we do these things, then we take credit for them and think that was why. So there's, there's some core tweaks to our operating system that I think are necessary. And it doesn't matter if we have, you know, robotic attack dogs, machine guns or stones and pitchforks. Like the behaviors will be the same until we fix ourselves. And so I'm working on that. But I want the tools to get visibility into that because once you see what your body is doing without your permission and making you believe, then you can change it. And I think we actually need this type of massive data visibility which includes privacy. And so that's why when this project came up with Andrew, I'm like, all right, I'm all in on Nilian, where it's going to be a big thing. And you guys are maybe A little bit more magical than you think. Tell me about how Harry Potter is.

Involved with Nillian, how Harry Potter is involved with Nilian.

Oh, cruxing.

Oh, Horcruxing. Yeah, of course. I should have known that. My fiance love that we use that term. So Horcruxing is the creation of this thing we call a particle. It's like a new term that we've come up with, although we should just call it a Horcrux, really. And this is the operation, the clever mathematics that we use to basically combine with the network data with your personal secrets before you can then put them out onto the network. That's the hor. Cruxing. That's the core operation that happens on your computer. So when you interact with the NMC network, with your computer, let's say you want to upload your passport into nmc. The passport never actually leaves your computer in plaintext. The only thing that leaves is this Horcruxed particle. And that particle could go anywhere in the world. You know, it's like, it could be public. It could be available to anyone. For somebody to figure out what was in that Horcrux particle, they would need to either hack or control at least a third of the network that, like, produced it. Right.

So in Harry Potter, for people who aren't fans, Horcrux is something that, like a wizard or a witch would use dark magic to create this object that could then go do stuff. And Horcruxes are a way you achieve immortality by splitting a dark wizard's soul into separate pieces. So they're all over the place. And it's an interesting idea. It's not dark magic in Nilian, but the idea is there's this particle that's not your data, but is representative enough that you can do things with it that goes out there. And for a human brain, it actually is kind of almost impossible to visualize that. Like, well, how can it go without going? And like you said, complex math. That's how.

Yeah, math. Math is magic. Yeah, it is.

And that came from Miguel de Veta, who did the original paper on this esoteric. Sort of. Most people don't even know what NMC is. Nil Message Compute. And figured out the math behind this. And that's how all the cool stuff that happens in tech, like some math guy somewhere says, I woke up and I had a dream and I made up this kind of math, and no one even knows what it's for. And then five years later, you realize, oh, that lets us solve this problem. That no one even knew could be solved. And I think he was focused on this.

Yeah. Or he works on the math for a while and tells other people and they're like, okay, this is great. Then, you know, finally get involved with someone like Andrew Vasanto. And then, you know, you know, Andrew gets into it and it's like, okay, sure. And then gets further into it and he's like, wait a minute, we gotta look deeper at this math. Is this for real? And then eventually, you know, get it validated like by, by, you know, PhDs in mathematics. They're like, yeah, this is pretty legit. It's like, it's amazing. It's very magical. But, you know, building, like I said earlier, building the actual real thing out, that's the challenge. That's going to be a really, really hard lift for sure.

Well, given the team you guys have, if anyone can do this, I think you can do it. Do you mind if I ask you a question or two about technology at Uber?

Yes, of course. Please ask. Yeah.

Okay, so scaling tech, and this is what I asked Eric Schmidt, the old CEO of Google and chairman. Okay. Scaling tech is relatively easy unless you're doing something like Nilian, where, okay, there's new math and all this stuff, but at Uber you were taking existing things that we knew how to do, basically add more servers, and you were solving some algorithmic things. But it wasn't the hardest thing to solve on the planet. But getting an engineering team to work together at the scale of Uber seems much harder than actually doing the tech itself. So how did you spot narcissists and sociopaths, which are probably overrepresented in high end engineers? How did you identify them? How did you get them out of the organization? How did you allow them to stay? How did you manage the team to build the engineering part of Uber?

Very interesting.

Yeah.

The way we joke about this is that computers are easy, humans are hard. That's kind of the standard joke in the tech industry.

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Yeah, the way we joke about this is that computers are easy, humans are hard. That's kind of the standard joke in the tech industry, I think. It's really, really, really tough when you're a company that's growing as fast as Uber is and scaling as fast as scaling the team out as fast as Uber is. I think at one point in 2012 or 2013, I can't remember, we were doubling the size of our engineering team every six months.

I think it's so frustrating, right, because you can't even qualify people.

Yeah, it was, in a way, it was amazing, though, because we. You could feel everybody in the Valley wanted to get to be with us, so that was an amazing feeling. But where it becomes really difficult and, and, yeah, I'll just be for sure say that Uber struggled with it. Is that managing people, bringing people in, that sort of onboarding thing, it's really hard to build the skills and expertise for that because, a, it takes time. So you need to hire people that have that experience. And just because you have the. You hire the people that have that experience, some of those more nefarious, like, narcissistic traits or those things only come out over time as well. And it's like if you're basically, I don't know how many tiers of management and everybody's been there for maybe, maybe one guy's been there or one girl's been there for like, 12 months, but everybody else been there for like, one month or four months or three, it becomes very, very difficult to spot, you know. But I would say, like, for me, this is very important for me, and Nillian is making sure that the people we hire are smart, fun, get things done. Yeah, I think, like, integrity and honesty are just, like, massively huge for me. And I'm. Yeah, I'm Kind of. You know, from what I've learned at you, at my time at Uber, is that it's really important when you see that those things, those sorts of values are not being honored, that you really have to, like, fix it. So, I mean, in a way, I hope that Nilian could become so successful that we need to scale like Uber. But in another way, I know that it's really, really hard on people. And if we have. And if we have this incredible patented mathematical system and we keep it simple, we don't add too much complexity for ourselves, and we build the network so that other people can participate in it, I think it's going to be. Yeah, I think it's going to be an interesting ride that way. I don't know if I answered that question. It's a really hard one.

Oh, it is a really hard one. I can tell you what Eric Schmidt said. He said that at Uber when he took over, that they identified that there were.

At Google when he took over. Right?

Yeah. Right. So they basically said that there were knights or no, pirates and knaves. And so a pirate is actually someone who's looking to do harm. Right. And these are the people they needed to find. And Knaves were basically those odd engineers, usually the most gifted ones, who don't follow rules. They hate the HR department. You know, they won't shower, and they only eat pizza and we'll jolt cola if we want to go way back in the day.

But they do amazing. Yeah, but they do amazing things.

Yeah, right, right. And they're not. They're okay. They're. But they're not to harm other people. They're just assholes because that's how they work. Right. And. And you and I both know some people like that who are gifted. Right. So the idea is somehow he said, well, we had to sort them out. And he said when we found the people who were pirates versus Knaves, you know, these. These kind of unusual people, he said, well, we would take the pirates and we would publicly and traumatically fire them. So everyone saw what happened. And he said after he did enough of those that people stopped either taking jobs or they stopped behaving that way, and it solved the problem.

Interesting.

I was shocked at that answer. It was a really. It was just like a few months ago when he said that. And so I wanted to ask you, because you're managing a type of human being, us engineers, who are just unusual neurologically and probably harder to manage that way, yet you scaled an engineering team in a very admirable way. To solve what ultimately is a really big transportation problem globally. That is not to be laughed at from a technical perspective, but just the people side. I would have torn my hair out and probably booked an Uber to a hotel somewhere and got lost.

Uber, get me out of this job. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the other part you have to consider about Uber that's very fascinating is that we not only were scaling our technology, but some of the most amazing things that we were able to do, and the amazing growth that we were able to have was because we were also scaling the operations team. So those were like, people that were with our driver, driver operations people, our community managers, like the general managers for the cities. And we, you know, the approach that we took, which I thought was one of the smartest things that Travis did, although eventually we had to stop it, is we basically, as an engineering team, instead of us building this product that was like, this is how it's supposed to work. This is how we say it's going to work. Instead, we in effect, decentralized the startupness. So we basically created tools so that all of these independent city teams could then hire really smart people. They could use our tools. And then. And then basically, if they could show us that they could grow those businesses using the tools we gave them, then they would basically get the features that they might want to be developed for those. Those tools to make them better. Right. So. So we had all these cities that were kind of, in fact, competing with each other, you know.

Wow.

Yeah, it was. Yes, I think it was incredibly smart. I think it eventually. It eventually was not the best thing for the company because, you know, you had different cultures. The French team did something with Uber Angels, I remember, and, like, it just was not well received in the United States. But this, like, cultural difference and obviously it wasn't really a great idea. But then that started to happen. Then it was like, oh, maybe we actually need to rein that sort of in a little bit. But, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's really tough because the culture was to allow people to be independent and, like, have ideas and sort of go. So sometimes the pirates would thrive in that sort of environment. Right. Because they were just like, in a cutthroat way, just looking out for their ship and, you know, they didn't really, you know, they might not have cared for the other ones, but for the growth of the business and getting Uber to as many people in the world as possible, I think it was like. It was a very. Yeah, it was a very interesting strategy.

What are you going to do? Different at Nilian. Like, you're one of the few people on Earth where like, yeah, I was the founding engineer and I stuck it out because usually after a few years, the founding engineers are all gone and it's taken over by someone who's done it before. So you, you stuck it out for a very long, high growth period of time. So you've seen stuff that probably only 10 people on the planet really have seen that from zero to the scale you've done. What are you going to do different at Nilon? Because you're starting from ground zero, you have the ability to build a team, and frankly, let's face it, you made more than $6 at Uber, so you guys really could hire whoever you want and you have a name to do that as well. So what's going to be different? You have your pick of the litter for all engineers. This is your second time through.

What am I going to do different? It's kind of interesting because I don't, I don't think there's going to be many things I would want to do different from the stuff that I learned at Uber. We're, you know, we're going to make sure we hire the best people we can. Like on the technical side, I, maybe I might not want to hire as fast just because I saw sort of the mess and the difficulty it creates and the personality stuff it creates. I think we used to always say it was like Travis was trying to push an engineering team that would have more velocity at the expense of momentum, meaning he would maybe change his mind. And all of a sudden we just like have to all get jerked to one side and like build. Whereas I, I would maybe, hopefully the CEO doesn't, doesn't, doesn't dislike me for this one, but like, maybe sacrifice a little bit of velocity to build momentum. Because I know a network as complex as nmc, we're going to be working on it for years. It's not like, you know, we're going to launch the product and it's like, oh, great. We're, you know, we're going to be working on the finding the right markets, that we're going to get this technology into the right places that people are going to respond to it so that we can push for that growth. Scaling it out is going to be a challenge. We just have like years of work and I think, you know, sometimes, you know, pushing for that, being able to move fast is like, really good. But I just like, think momentum is like such an important thing. If you, if you get the Right. People in place. And then you could build up that momentum development momentum. You don't really have to do major changes. You kind of like stay on top of what needs to be done. Yeah, I think a momentum based approach versus a velocity appraised approach might be how I would, how I would be approaching this one differently.

All right, I, I love that answer. I know I'm putting you on the spot and these are really hard questions. And part of what I'm inferring in what you're saying is I think that some of what you're doing, you're doing in your unique operating system level that's hidden from the application. That is your conscious thinking. And yes, I'm using terms that you and I both know what they mean. Maybe not everyone knows the difference between those, but it feels like I was kind of watching your eyes, watching your body language when you answered that. And there's some part of you that's saying, I just know how to do it. But you don't necessarily have a cognitive framework for it, even though us engineers tend to build cognitive frameworks for everything. I think there might be some intuitive stuff in there. Is that a fair sense?

Oh, yeah, for sure. If I'm like when I did my Myers Briggs, I remember as either INTJ or intp, but like big N. So that's always like, I kind of feel my. It's weird. I'm an engineer, but I'm not a analytical type person. I mean, I know how to look at the diverse and the data, but like, I like doing that with other people. I'm better with building teams and like, you know, the emotional side of things. And yeah, I can get into really thorny hard problems, of course, but I'm like, I can have fun when I'm like doing that. And those are the kinds of people that I sense are like really good to work with. And then I think because of that I'm really excited about the team I'm going to be able to build, like to take on this like really challenging problem.

If I was a younger engineer and not doing biohacking all the stuff I do now, I would be attracted, as super attracted to Nilian. Just because you've already lived that life at Uber and to be able to build the team you're building now with all of the basically the algorithmic and pattern matching things you have to have had from doing that kind of growth and all, I would imagine that the engineering culture at Nilian is going to be second to none because most people look, you didn't have to do this. You just because you wanted to do it. Right. And so with all that knowledge and to put together a team to solve a new problem, I don't know that that seems like one of those. One of those things where, you know, you're. You're graduating when you've got your computer science degree. Like, this is the. The top of the top of places to learn.

Oh, yeah, right. We. We have to be good at so many different things to build something like this. That. Yeah, it is. These types of projects are, you know, they're super exciting places to learn. I think, like, decentralized architectures are probably going to be the future. You know, as inefficient as they are, I think, you know, this is. This is definitely, as an engineer, the place you want to be, even though it's like you can't necessarily move as fast as you would be able to build a product in a centralized way. I think it's just for the future. This is, this is a good place to learn for, for sure. To me, this is also one of the most exciting things about Nilian is that we're not building this to be like, oh, Nilian's going to be like the Facebook of private computation. We're going to capture all that value. Instead, we're going to eventually become a protocol. And the protocol will be run by a dao. And who will earn off the protocol is going to be all the people participating. So Nilian will have some of those nodes. You might be able to put a computer on there. All your audience members might someday be able to put a computer into this network. I think it's like, that idea as well just really appeals to me, especially thinking about your question about, like, the tech industry and how disappointing it is. It's like when I said culture might be pushing technology. I think, like, the decentralized story is a very, very, very compelling thing for.

That reason, 100% with you. And if people are listening and still saying, how the heck do you spell it? It's like million. Like, I'm going to have a million bucks, but with an N instead of an M at the beginning, which makes it easy to do. Do you have like a Twitter handle?

Yeah, I think we have a. We definitely have our Twitter. I think our discord is quite active. We're building a lot of community in there. That's where I did an AMA two weeks ago. Miguel will do an AMA there, if he hasn't already. Like, we're. We're very active with our community development within our discord. So I think that would be a great place for people to go if they want to know more or ask more questions or get to know other people that are excited about this technology as well.

I feel like we shared some real excitement about Nilian, about how this idea that what would happen if you could send a little smoky signal out that didn't have your data in it but allowed people to work with your data, that is actually magic from a real math perspective and I think it is going to change the world. And thank you for stepping out of retirement and taking all of that DNA from high scale, high complexity stuff you did at Uber and saying, all right, let's do something that really is transformative. And I think you're, you're a high integrity guy from everything I've seen and we need high integrity people doing this so it doesn't get co opted with a, you know, NSA backdoor and stuff like that. And I don't think.

Yeah, of course.

Doing that here.

No, definitely not. But thanks for, thanks for your support. This has been a really, really great conversation. Thanks for having me, Conrad.

Been an honor to have you on and I look forward to working with you as an advisor.

Yeah, can't wait till our next conversation.

Thanks. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.

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