Web3 & the Future of Genetics: AI, Blockchain & Data Ownership with Nillion : 1271

There are so many companies now that can reconstruct facts about you purely based off your DNA. In all 50 states across the United States, all newborns are genetically sequenced by law. And the state in New York retains the newborn's DNA by law.

What if your DNA, your memories, your entire life, wasn't truly yours? What if the most intimate parts of you, your health, your history, your potential, were locked inside systems you don't control and watched by people you've never met, who sell your very essence without you even knowing? Today, you'll hear from two pioneers. Pioneers building a different future. Michael Tiffany brilliantly helped take down the biggest botnets in Internet history. He's a legendary hacker who built tools to protect millions of people from digital attacks.

Many of us feel at the mercy of the algorithm.

Now he's building Fulcra, a private vault for all of the data your life creates. Encrypted, yours, and always under your control. Vishak is the founder of Monadic DNA. It's a new way to explore your genetic code so you can have better health and longer life without ever giving up your privacy or letting someone else copy your DNA. They're not just building apps, they're building a new kind of Internet. One where your data works for you, where it's owned by you and no one can take it against your will. Powered by Nilian, a radical breakthrough in crypto that lets computers analyze private data without ever exposing it.

Even if you don't use Nilion, you'll end up reinventing Nilion.

They're not just protecting your data, they're rebuilding the Internet around you. Your identity, your biology, your future should never belong to someone else. This is the future of privacy, of health, of you owning yourself. Your data, your DNA, your rules. It's time to take it all back.

In modern life, each of us as ordinary people, now have the complexity of an enterprise. You can be a cyborg today if you can command the technology in your life in a kind of coherent swarm.

If you develop systems that are unhackable, usually guys in sunglasses in a black suit roll up to your house and have a little conversation with you before the black helicopters start following you. Am I lying about this? You couldn't do this a year ago. Technology just solved a fundamental problem. Nilian lets you take it all back. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Today's episode is live in Austin, Texas. And it's going to be nerdy, but not just biohacker nerdy. We're talking actual hacker Nerdy. And what does that mean? Well, we're going to talk about your genetics. We're going to talk about the future of data privacy and paint a world for you about where you might be able to have full control over all of this amazing data that's generated with or without your consent, about your health or just about your environment and the interaction with your health and how you get to own your data. And I say nerdy because we're going to talk about that owning of your data, which also means maybe getting value from your data. Like if some big evil pharmaceutical company, or maybe a big nice pharmaceutical company, there are some of those out there, they're just not the big ones. And also, would you like to train an AI to actually tell you what to do based on all sorts of data that you don't want to give to the AI? Well, there's a way to do that now. So if your mind is already going, what did he just say? That's cool, we're going to explain it to you. We've got Michael Tiffany, who's a cyber security guy like I used to be, but he still is one, but he focused on AI personalization and he's one of the top pioneers in botnet defense. What? What's a botnet defense? If you don't know what a botnet is, that's. Okay, let's just say that guys like the three of us in the room at one point in our careers may have taken over your computer without your knowledge and use it to attack people we didn't like or people that maybe if, depending how bad you guys were, maybe, you know, got paid to attack people that someone else didn't. Like this mindset. If I have a distributed swarm of millions of computers and I can make them do something, how different is that from cell biology? It's exactly the same algorithms. In fact, if you go back in time on the show, there's an interview with a Carnegie Mellon professor where we talk about mitochondrial voting and how it's the same as what we're doing in crypto. So there's all these cool analogues where in hermetic traditions, as above, so below, we're replicating what's going on inside ourselves in our external communication network. And it's so cool because we're all hacking that stuff right now. You are Michael, the co founder and CEO of Fulcra Dynamics for quite a while now. And what the hell's a cybernetic operating system? I want to be a cyborg, kind of. But tell me what you're working on.

I want to be a cyborg too. And I think that we often think about the gating factor of becoming a cyborg as brain computer interfaces, you got to embed the technology literally in our bodies. But you can be a cyborg today if you can command the technology in your life in a kind of coherent swarm. So can I live in a truly augmented way using my ring and my watch. And I. I'm wearing an aura ring. I'm rocking an Apple watch.

Aura, you're.

That's.

That's like driving a. Oh my God. You're going to.

You're going to wearable shame me.

Are you? It's like driving a Prius at this point. My God. So I might have been an early investor and advisor to Aura, but I also have an ultra human ring.

Nice.

Ultra human.

Yeah.

All right. So I haven't introduced you guys yet to Vishak. Vishak, high five on the ultra human cred. We're hacker shaming you right now.

Yeah, yeah, no, I feel it.

Yeah. I also took over your phone while you weren't looking.

Okay.

The fact is I'm consciously incorporating a large number of not just wearables, but other forms of instrumentation in my life. And no joke, it is giving me extra sensory perception.

Amen.

The pursuit that I'm on is that I want the self awareness of a monk while engaging with the world like a bon vivant. Surely the technology around me can raise my self awareness without me having to learn how to count every heartbeat in every moment. Right. This thing's doing that for me.

You know, if you're a woman, I might have to marry you up the extrasensory perception from tech. We'll get into that a little bit more. Yes. You gain more self awareness more quickly with feedback and data and knowledge than otherwise. It's a lot of work to think of that stuff.

Right.

Okay.

What is a cybernetic operating system? And then we've got to introduce Vishak, who's also a cool hacker with some great stuff going on.

So quickly as we were just comparing in modern life, each of us as ordinary people now have the IT complexity of an enterprise. We've got a lot of different tech from different vendors. It's a mix of on Prem, if you will, and in the cloud. But there's no such thing as an enterprise operating system for people. The enterprise can choose between Palantir or SAP. Mulesoft, there's an entire category. Whereas operating systems for ordinary people are bound to a specific device, like computing in the 80s, right. So if we want all of this tech to work together, there needs to be some common data model in an orchestration layer that actually ties it all together. And that's the gap that we filled with Fulcrum.

Oh, man, this is the coolest stuff ever. Orchestration layers. And so I. I actually don't have good data on listeners. I can tell you that 58% of my Instagram audience is. This is women versus men. I can you for the podcasts and YouTube, and we have all this data. I know that maybe 20% are practitioners of health stuff, and I know there's a huge number of tech entrepreneurs and engineers who are listening to the show. I just don't have good data on how many of them are because, you know, we're an amorphous group of, you know, the. The best, most attractive and smartest people on earth. Yeah. If I do say so myself. Our second guest on the show today, that was Michael you were just hearing from is Vishak. Vishak actually only has one name.

I am like Madonna and sure.

Wow.

Dwayne's like, wow, you're famous. And Vishak, you're founder of Monadic DNA. You're doing something that has been a dream of mine since the very first conference on Big Data, when the name Big Data was invented. I gave a talk somewhere in New York saying, you know, what would happen if you could protect your genetic data when it's in the cloud so others could pay you to use it? Like, how would that look like? And I think most people at the conference are like, this is really boring. Who cares about genetic data? We're looking at computer data, and here we are 20 years later, and you're talking about, how do you protect your genetic data?

Absolutely.

Is there extra room for a company that does this? Is there demand for it?

Yeah, I would say there's a lot of demand for it. There might not have been maybe a decade ago, but now the time is really nigh. One of the examples that I bring up with people, and it kind of surprises them in all 50 states across the United States. And, you know, I'm a resident of New York State. All newborns are sequenced, genetically sequenced by law. And the state in New York retains the newborn's DNA.

By law.

By law.

Who wrote that law? Unreasonable search and seizure? Fourth Amendment, anyone? Jesus.

There are religious exceptions, but it's an onerous process. And frankly, you know, when. When your child is born, most parents, they just kind of go with the flow. And so that data is retained for 26 years. And, and you know, there are some public health as well as R and D benefits. However, I, I don't have a citation for this, but based on the fact that when you ask them what security strategy or what defensive technologies you're using, they just basically say trust me bro.

Right. And that's not good enough saying the government says trust me bro.

Yeah, yeah, they use that practices works so for anything. So I, because this is a Dave Asprey podcast, I don't need to tell you about how salient and how important genomic data is right now. Imagine a treasure trove containing millions of people's genetic sequences. It's one of the biggest prizes for hackers, for malactors everywhere. So this is one of the drivers. And you know, the cost of sequencing is going down at a Moore's Law rate. So there are so many drivers because of cost of sequencing is going down and the state is mandating sequencing. You can imagine in the most populous countries in the world like India and China, they're going to put in the same mandates and at a scale never conceived before. We're going to be collecting genomic data at unprecedented levels. So there are some benefits from this, but you can also see how this can go horribly wrong. So this is why I think it's very important for us to build this project. This is something that was impossible before with conventional technologies that we have, but because privacy enhancing technologies, you know, we use things like Nilian, which provide multi party compute, we use fully homomorphic encryption. We can actually finally build this and hopefully to a very large market.

I'm still processing the fact I didn't realize that New York State did that.

This is all very recent. So my colleague, you know, he's got a three year old, she didn't have to get sequenced, but he's also got a nine month old and he had to get sequenced. And my other colleague's child also, you know, by law had to be sequenced.

I would like to put this out there. I've been an ordained minister for 30 years and the Church of Biohacking.

Fabulous.

Which apparently just started existing 30 seconds ago. If you'd like to be a member, guys, you can sign up@hotdave.com Just kidding. That is a URL. I own it. But that's not where you would sign up. And our church, we fundamentally believe the Schrodinger's ratio of your genetic data.

That's right.

Is sacred. And therefore if you.

It's the holy penultimate and it must be it must be treated with not just religious zeal, sacred data, privacy. That's right. Oh yeah, no, but we're, we're on.

A good train here. Yes, but unironically, this, your, your, your, your, your genome is, does have sort of religious connotations, right? Spiritual connotations. It is the, in, in some way, it is one of the truest expressions of, your most intimate expressions of you. And there are so many companies now that can reconstruct facts about you purely based on your, based on, based off your DNA. So you know, a lot of people at the individual level are not so concerned about privacy, about genomic privacy. But already at the societal level there's rules and regulations that make it absolutely catastrophic if you actually breach genetic data. And that's for good reason. Right, like this. There have been congressional studies and hearings on, let's say, the sanctity of genetic data and the, so this mass awareness I think is coming and hopefully that's a strong wind in our sails.

I mean they did make a documentary on this called Gattaca. So if you're listening to this and you want to see a great show, it's an older movie called Gattaca about a world where genetics control what you're allowed to do. And I will say during the first months of the pandemic, when my kids said, dad, what do I do about this insanity in the world? We watched Gattaca, then Braveheart, then the Matrix and then we watched V for Vendetta. Mike, these are your change models for what you can do kids. And if, if you guys know these movies, I mean you guys clearly know, but for listeners, if you don't know those movies and the implications of those, well, like there's different models of changing your government and one of them hackers, we just do it the best. Am I right guys?

Absolute 100%. We're a high agency, hi to people.

But I also want to make a positive case. Besides the sort of doom mongering, we are using our genetic data for a lot of good. So recently you had a guest, Dr. Cohen, and she made a really strong positive case for using it for biohacking, for optimizing your health and just outcomes over the course of your life. And, but all of that should be done in an open manner. So once you get sequenced, you can use your data with multiple services. You're not closed off as is the case with the first generation genomics products. And it should be completely secure. Right? So using this magical encryption technology, we're able to operate on your data in an encrypted form. We never have to decrypt your data, you never have to surrender your data. And finally you know to what you would think you should be paid for your data, right? Like it's your data, get paid for it. This is some of the most important, most tailing data about you. So it should, anytime you share it, you should receive a cut of the proceeds.

The thing that's most magical here that has me as a technologist crazy excited. And if you're listening to this, you're into crypto or just into technology. It's Nilian. This is, it seems almost impossible. When I first heard about it, I said this can't be the idea that I could have my fully encrypted data, I could give it to another party while it's encrypted, they could run compute things on it and then never be able to see the data. Because in all of my training from computer science, you have scrambled data or encrypted, you give it to someone, they have a special key, they unlock it, they unencrypt it. That means they have your data and they could steal it with Nilian, which is the, the backbone for what you guys are both doing. What it means is they can't unlock it, but they can still perform compute on it, which. What? Well, so I, I'm advising Nilian now because I am still a nerd and do some, some things like that. Not because it's necessarily crypto. The blockchain in crypto is critically important because it lets you have distributed, call it storage and record keeping around. So your stuff is on many, many, many different computers. Well, problem is how do we have computing happen on many, many, many. You can't do it without giving up your data. And Nilian seems like the missing piece. And now we have storage and compute. So I'm like incredibly excited about this because finally that vision from 20 years ago going how do I let someone use my data but not see my data? It was a, it's been broken. How did you guys find out about this and realize you could build companies on it because it's cutting edge tech, right?

I have been obsessed with data sovereignty for a long time and in the pursuit of Folker's vision, we necessarily need to help people gather all of the data that their lives and things and just that gathering process is non trivially difficult. So we just spent our engineering focus there and Nillian actually heard about us working on that data gathering piece and said hey, we're working on multi party computation that is privacy preserving. And that's something that I have been, say, a fan of from a distance for really quite some time. The dream of both MPC of multiparty computation and fully homomorphic encryption is something that has captivated me for a long time because I am myself a cryptography nerd. So, so, so that got me curious.

Okay.

And, and, and then it was a question of, of where we should begin. What would be a good validating experiment and what, what we came up with together was helping people who are tracking their sleep to contribute data about their sleep into a large data pool. So we can run literally the largest study of how the world sleeps that anyone has ever orchestrated. So to, to make that happen, we have to make it easy for people to, to get that data and, and get control over it themselves. So break it out of the silos of their, their wearables or their smart beds. We want to do this for people who have a wide variety of different trackers. So this is not just about focusing on one vendor. And then we're using the Nilian compute fabric to do the aggregated analysis. So the big idea here is if we make it safe to contribute your data into this larger aggregated pool, there's so much we can learn about the world that the answers are there. They're just embedded in all these tiny devices.

Yes.

And we can't do proper data science on them until we solve this kind of, this is kind of a classically a middleware problem that we step into that breach. I think learning about the patterns of the world's sleeping habits is really just the beginning. There's a lot of things I'm curious about that I think we can finally tackle with this breakthrough.

The conditions of being human. There's so many things that aren't in the manual because we're not born with a male anyway. And one of my dreams for biohacking has been exactly that. The first heart rate from the wrist, which was a while ago. I was a co founder and CTO of the company going, we just need to get this so then we can track for millions of people what are the peak stress times of the day.

Right.

And then for you, what are your peak stress times? And let's correlate it with your calendar and you know, let's notice. Maybe Sagittarius really does matter. I have no idea. Right. Maybe those astrologers were correct. And maybe the full moon affects you more if you have, you know, an odd number of hairs on your head. I have no idea. Right. But we're going to find out all of those things. Problem is, I don't want to tell anyone all that shit because I know my stupid insurance company or even my more stupider government's probably going to take the info and use it against me, right? Well, with the very recent breakthroughs, including private compute, which is nilian and very easy to handle, data storage things for encryption, now it's possible to contribute to a project and not give up my privacy. And if a new drug was developed based on my genetics, vikash to what you're working on, I could say I want my cut of the new drug, right? Without ever having to tell someone, here's my genetic code. So you could copy it, put it into someone else's sperm and have a baby that looks like me. Which you could do, right? So this is kind of a whole new world. I'm seeing a lot of goodness coming out of this.

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We're all hackers. How would you misuse private compute?

I guess in theory anything could be misused, but I'm actually kind of struggling right now to think of a way that we can do it. But you know, about a year ago I was really jaded. I've been building in the blockchain space for the last about a decade and previously I worked in finance and I used to work at Bear Stearns under credit derivatives training economy. So that was a very seminal experience for me. And with blockchain technology I saw the possibility of a better world where one of the things that blew up the economy was there was a lot of capacity as to who owned what and what instruments contained what sludge inside them. So I saw a lot of promise building really hard. You know, like we built a lot of stuff for some of the world's biggest banks. But ultimately the vision wasn't really panning out. There was just fundamental limitations in blockchain technology that didn't let us really open up new frontiers.

This is transaction processing volume kind of stuff.

Yeah. So transaction processing also you can't really easily put data anywhere and it's very hard to maintain privacy, which is a very limiting factor. And of course how do you actually handle the encryption decryption of data? So we didn't really have anything that was truly revolutionary. Some stuff like decentralized finance and stuff, but very jaded. So about a year ago with my team, we were at a hackathon we saw there was something called Nilian and it said that they offer a blank computation platform. I've heard this before. We've heard about fully homorph encryption, multi Party compute. But it's always been slow, it's been super slow and it's just really hard to use. So I also have a comp bio background. I've done computational biology in the past and I'm really frustrated with the state of genomic data sharing, genomic services, personal genomics. So I said why not, let's give this a try. So we built something for the hackathon and I was shocked it actually worked. So when we put data on Nilian it actually held fully encrypted data. We were able to do all the Same traits analysis as 23andMe in a really performant manner.

And it was private the whole time.

It was private the whole time. It just blew my mind. In theory, I know how it works. But to see it actually work in practice on my computer in real time, that was quite mind blowing because you know, this stuff has been promised for a long time but no one's really scaled it. So naturally, you know, we won the hackathon. Not to toot my own Arnie, so it was nice to win but a lot of people said why don't you actually build this out? So we looked into it, we did our legal diligence and it cost a lot of money. We also did some technical diligence but the unlock, you know a lot of people say 0 to 1. It's almost a cliche term but this is one of the zero to one moments for us because anything that we wanted to do, privacy preserving entailed in the real world some form of decryption so you would be pwned at some point in the process.

By the way, that's a hacker verb or someone's going to steal your data. Yeah.

So to do stuff without bonage was actually a very world shattering moment in a good way. And the Nulian team, they reached out to us, they've offered us a lot of support, very responsive to our needs. So what's really working out compared to other options is the storage and compute live together. We just take some data, we don't have to know too much about it. We just plunk it on the platform, we know it's encrypted, no one can take it and we can run computations goes back to the user and most importantly users. Let's say they're sick of us, they can just delete their data and then.

There'S nothing else that you could do with it.

Yeah.

Do you guys own Nilian tokens?

I personally don't own Nilian tokens. I know a Lot of people out there are getting their token allocations. But our company is part of the Nilian Nucleus Builders program. So in theory, if we built a successful app and it does well over four years, we will have Nilion tokens.

Those don't write tokens for you.

So we will only get million tokens if we do a good job.

We see ourselves as facilitators of what our users want to do. So we are trying to keep our, let's say attachments small, but we follow user requests and honestly it's that ground up initiative that actually led us to Niling in the first place.

I have a pretty good track record at this point of, of being a good futurist first e commerce on the planet with one of those. And if you're listening to this and you haven't heard me brag about that, not really bragging, but the first product sold was a T shirt that said caffeine, my drug of choice with the molecule that's on my bicep today. And I sold it over something called Usenet which is now dad, you guys remember Usenet?

Oh yes.

I learned a lot from Google.

Google destroy the archive. I'm afraid so. We had actually the original stuff from Alt Drugs Caffeine. At the time we called it flaming because trolling wasn't the right word yet. But I trolled a Rutgers professor who said no one's ever going to make money on the Internet. I'm like, well look at you Mr. Ivy League. I already am. That was how people found out that I was doing this. This was pre and reason, pre web browser and all. And like I look at the transition of technology from back then, it was so just funky right to how we got now.

People mail you checks?

Yes.

Yeah, that is, that's how checkout worked.

People mailed me checks and then they started faxing checks to me. Freaking faxes. I had old fax card in my PC. Fabulous. And then the first, the first online payment processor was called First Virtual. And Lee Stein has become a friend and was the founder of it back then. I met him 25 years later. Just saw him last week and it was, it was a bizarre time. Philip Zimmerman ran from pgp. The encryption we all use today was getting prosecuted for letting people see encryption.

The original Crypto wars.

I had a T shirt that had a barcode implementation of RSA encryption. And on the back it's a warning. This T shirt is a munition. And letting someone see me wearing that T shirt who was not a US born citizen was the same crime as sending, you know, munitions to an enemy. So I committed a felony every day by wearing my T shirt in airports. All the cool shit that we've built over the past, geez, 30 years of my career, like the, the Web 1.0 stuff. Every single thing where I'm like, there's so much good that we can do, right? They turned this beautiful information sharing platform into a surveillance platform. Everything that can be misused by a government or maybe a large pharmaceutical company will be. How would I break this hat on? And I'm not finding a good way to break Nilian or distributed private compute other than maybe to let a bad actor, criminal organization or government, or maybe one combined, they could do bad things I couldn't see, but I could do bad or good things they couldn't see.

That's right.

I don't, I'm not seeing the bad use of this for the first time in any tech, but maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough having thought about this.

Like here's the formalism I'll present. The crimes that this would uniquely empower are crimes that are somehow otherwise CPU bound.

Right?

Because you have free private, you have this distributed computation platform that people are for their own self interested reasons wanting to participate in in.

Right?

But I can't think of a crime that's like that. Right? Like a classic CPU bound problem is password cracking. But what is the universe where you're enhanced criminally by using the distributed multiparty computation platform instead of just getting a bunch of GPUs yourself?

I guess it could give you scalable access to more compute nodes than you would get.

Right, but, but like that turns out to basically be an economic argument. Right? And the it is unlikely that MPC is going to somehow be sustainably cheaper as your crime platform than other forms of compute.

Right?

So crime platform.

Yeah, right.

Here we get. Sorry, you mean like the irs?

I guess a central insight of my last company in human was that the right way to fight cybercrime is economically right. The only way our enemies are rationally motivated actors that are trying to make money. And so the way to bring the fight to them is to decrease the profits and increase the cost and risks of doing the crime. So, so, so once you start thinking about the economic landscape and sustainable asymmetries, then I think you can provide sustainable defenses. So my instinct is also that even, you know, if we just extrapolate into the future where multi party compute is broadly available, it doesn't look like it's a unique Crime enabler. Right.

Because the any more so than buying a bunch of computers and having a criminal data center.

That's right, right.

In a volcano. Yeah.

And then this only applies to that subset of crimes that are, you know, quote unquote, like CPU bound. Right. Which is probably a small number of crimes.

So maybe the worst thing you could do with something like Nilian is you're a criminal mastermind and you want to do make some sort of genetic virus or something that would have required huge amounts of compute.

Right.

So then you could get access to huge amounts of compute, a distributed private platform versus just getting some racks in a data center or doing on AWS and encrypt like. Like it's not a thing.

Right.

It wouldn't enable it in a way that's new.

Right. Thinking of life imitating cyberpunk fiction. There is some diamond age sort of future where there's some kind of crazy multi party computation that might be bio computation that leads to a surprising result at the very, very end.

Okay, so now we're getting to Neal Stephenson's work.

But it's still cheaper to do it with regular compute, right? Yeah. Unless you're mission.

Yeah.

I mean there might be some out there scenarios where you're kind of a bunch of mal actors are coordinating across the planet and they don't want anyone to know. Regular computing also in theory you could take bad data, evil data and put it on the platform. But you know, you could put it on any platform. So there's nothing like you said, there's nothing uniquely enabled or different.

Oh, right, right. There is that problem of like the undo button.

Yeah.

So on, on a platform that preserves privacy in this way that you do decrease the ability of anyone to delete things. But I think that's just a, a fact of the future that we have to live with.

It's hard to delete things anyway.

Exactly.

These days.

That's right.

Years ago I went to dinner with the former CTO of a computer security company called rsa. You guys know rsa? And some listeners might have heard of them. If you're outside of the tech industry, rsa, if you log into your bank, it probably runs the encryption behind that. So very big central computer company. And we had the most amazing conversation. And it's like I was, you know, I just taken my job and we got notified that a three letter agency, I think it was the CIA, if I'm remembering right, had gone in and they had contaminated the salt. And what does that mean? This is not about iodine. Guys. So when you're doing encryption, you need a random number to salt the encryption where it all starts. So the government had gone in and made the random number non random so that they could decrypt anything encrypted with RSA in, in a way that broke the whole system. So it gave the US government an advantage because then they could spy on their own citizens or on other people, which, well, let's hope their goal was to spy on other people, although their behavior has been otherwise since then. So rsa, when they found this out, they had to go through and replace hundreds of millions of little RSA computer security tokens. And it, it was a bad thing. And since then, if you develop systems that are unhackable, usually guys in sunglasses and black suits roll up to your house and have a little conversation with you before the black helicopters start following you. Am I lying about this?

No, you're absolutely right.

This actually happens. Right?

Yeah. And this speculation. So one of the cryptographic legs that Bitcoin is built on, it was done outside of the purview of the usual standards process. And there's some speculation that there might have been a TLA hand in it.

And in fact there's some speculation TLA made crypto, right?

Yeah, there is some speculation.

You believe that?

I don't have a strong opinion. I'm very agnostic about this. Most people would be very. For one position or the other, but I'm pretty agnostic. I can absolutely see it happen, but at the same time, the amount of value that's stored on some of these chains is absolutely astronomical. And since it hasn't been compromised, perhaps the TLAs are not directly involved, but maybe someone who worked for them is hard to say.

There's a lot of effective paranoia about nothing up my sleeve numbers and other cryptographic primitives. I, I'm long term optimistic about humans and long term skeptical of any particular technology component for the following simple reason. The we as designers do our best to design good systems that are resistant to hackers. But we are, we're competing not just with everything, all of the skills of every hacker today, but if you're building systems that are going to endure, you're competing against the skills of hackers 10 years from now as well.

Right.

And when I look at my own life, am I better, more knowledgeable and more skillful today than I was 10 years ago? Yes. Right. So to a certain extent you have to model the adversary as having knowledge and creativity that you don't have access to today. Right. We're not just fighting today's enemies, we're fighting the enemies of the future. So I think that there is no, let's call it defensive security singularity. It's an arms race. And the reason why the arms race runs the way that it does, and broadly the world has not been destroyed, is that most human beings are actually good to a certain extent. It's easier to, it's literally easier to destroy than to create. So the relatively small number of destructive people kind of punch above their weight. But on balance, humans are good. So the people willing to fight the good fight work harder because they're working for ideals, not just for profit. And there's more of us. So I'm long term optimistic, not because I think that any one particular thing that exists today will save us, but rather that collectively we save ourselves.

And even with pessimistic assumptions, with some of these newer technologies that are run over multiple nodes or multiple computers, as long as a single node or a single operator, or it depends. Sometimes it could be 2 or 5 or 17 of 100, but it could go down to a single honest operator. On a network of multiple nodes. As long as they stay honest, they run correct software. Your data cannot be compromised. So that's a big difference between the centralized platforms that let's say Amazon runs versus the kind of sense that we're building on platforms like Nilian. All you need is that that little cohort of one or whatever the number is to stay honest and your data is safe.

And the idea is mind blowing that, you know, I need a data center that's going to be running my cloud stuff and with blockchain and something like Nilian, you don't really need a data center because everyone's computer or even phone can be a part of that compute cloud in the vision. So all of a sudden we're kind of changing the way we think about all this. As long as, like you said, there's one honest operator. When I did the last podcast about crypto, which was with Carnegie Mellon professor, we were talking about establishing trust. And your mitochondria vote to figure out like, what's the state of the organism because there's, you know, trillions of these little stupid compute nodes that are all voting with each other and it's called quorum sensing and it's real. So like, okay, how do they establish trust? And there's an algorithm that says if a third of them are trustworthy. And with Nilian, we're down to a single trustworthy node is all it takes.

Yeah, it just depends on how you configure it. But I could configure it to be that resilient. Everything comes with trade offs. But you're exactly right. I've actually worked a little bit on quorum sensing and it's remarkable how much overlap there is between the two algorithms. And in a colony of bacteria, or even an ant colony, you could think about a certain proportion turning bad to just kind of co opt the colony or gain an advantage. And like you pointed out, even in nature we see, as long as, and we see this everywhere, not just in nature, in theology, philosophy, all across the spectrum. As long as certain number of actors remain honest, the integrity of the collective is maintained. So in some ways this is nothing new. It's just a re. Encapsulation of something that we've been observing with our own eyes for millennia.

Right, right. I think a lot of the phenomena that we deal with in reality are emergent phenomena. So in one view, those patterns and those fundamentals are, are ancient. But, but the math of understanding emergent phenomena is still relatively recent, you know, but most of the, the founders of the Santa Fe Institute are still like working.

Right.

Like we haven't even gone through one generation of the development of this mathematics. It's still super fresh.

Absolutely.

The idea of emergent phenomenon has been at the core of what led me even to my most recent book called Heavily meditated. Right. It's just coming out starting in data center design. I ran the program at UC Santa Cruz extension. And you guys wouldn't know this unless you're a Bay Area people, but UC Santa Cruz educates most of the working people in Silicon Valley. So if you're working out there and you want to expand your skills, I ran the web and Internet engineering program there for about five years in the late 90s, early 2000s, which was a phenomenal way to learn about these things. And what I was finding was there's emergent behaviors in data centers as we move to doing horizontally scale, let's add another server. Because before that it was, you had to like reinstall everything on a new server and they wouldn't talk to each other. So we started seeing things like router flapping, which still takes down Google every few years, which is an emergent phenomenon. No one can plan it. It's like a storm happens in packets on the Internet and all of a sudden everything collapses. I'm like, oh, that was weird. A basic example of emergent phenomena.

Right.

So this led me to, and I'm sharing this with you guys, because you have great hacker brains and I want you to shoot holes in this or go, oh, that's cool. And listeners, you guys have heard me say this before, but I don't know if these guys have heard it. Look at each mitochondria as an environmental sensor and a compute node. Really stupid computers, but very fast. They have to process reality as if they're just a bacteria. First algorithmic thing, fear. If it's scary, respond right away. Right? Right. And you can run away, hide, kill, whatever. Next thing, if it's food, eat it. Right? Because there might be a famine. You know how much more food's coming. You don't even sense time. You're a dumb little bacteria. So fear food then. Okay. Have to reproduce. Right? Okay. Have either of you done anything you're ashamed of that wasn't one of those three.

Am I guilty of philosophy crimes?

Yeah, I might have insecurely stored my encryption keys.

That's a good one. Oh, and damn, you're the first person. Stupid hackers. I would argue that that was probably about food. So pure food. Fucking. Okay. The next thing, and this is to your point that people are good. It's friend. All life on Earth, if you're a bacteria or a skunk or a politician, which is like a skunk, any of those things, you support life around you, Right. You support your species and you support the ecosystem. And you do it without thinking because bacteria don't have a lot of thinking. They just have compute but not consciousness that we, we think of.

Right?

So fear, food, friend. And the final one is for humans. I call it forgiveness. In all life, it's evolved like they improve themselves over time and energy flows in the top of the system. And oh, if you get stuck in fear because there's a threat, you're not going to worry about eating because everything's about tacos when there's something trying to eat you.

Right.

Okay. And if you have enough nutrients and you're not scared, well, okay, those are nice legs, right? Right. But then you, you always go into community. That's where all the good stuff happens, Right? Right. And if you take this behavior pattern and you multiply it times, trillions of ancient bacteria embedded throughout most of the cells in your body.

Yeah.

You get emergent behavior that looks a lot like ego and it also looks like service to others. Yeah.

I think that forgiveness exists at this very, very low level.

It's more evolution, to be honest. For humans, forgiveness is going back and editing out stupid fears so that you don't your Threat detection network gets lowered so energy can flow further down the system.

But also consider that that gets group selection, right? So the organisms that optimize towards forgiveness therefore optimize towards community outcomes.

There you go.

So that explains altruism. Yeah, yeah. An obscure American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, actually wrote about this in the 1800s. This idea that evolution produces love, which I thought was just awesome.

Yes, I believe it does. And I have these great philosophical discussions when I give talks, like, what's the opposite of fear? And some people will say it's love. I believe it's peace. Because when you have a sense of peace, you have no fear. Right? Right, right. And that means, okay, no energy is going to flow into fear. So then now I go into food and, oh, I have nourishment because I got enough, you know, minerals and I got enough calories and all that. Okay, I got no energy flowing there. So then it comes down to reproduction. And if you have a connection with your partner that is maybe more than about, you know, porn and lust, like, oh, that became a sense of nourishment as well. And then all the energy flows into service to others, and it flows into evolving yourself. And so from an emergent behavior perspective, I'm like, how do I increase the net number of electrons into my system? That's mitochondrial improvement. And then how do I drop any kind of alert that's inappropriate for my fear system? Right. And you guys know what excessive alerts on your phones do. And because we're all hackers, we know what excessive logging in the data center does. It fills up your storage and gives you no data.

That's right.

So turn off all the alerts and then, oh my gosh, turn off all the food alerts and then turn off all the loneliness alerts. And what's left is blissful silence and peace. Right. And my community. Right? And like, this is the model. And that's why I think humans are generally good. But how do we explain sociopaths and narcissists and how do we use all this distributed compute to hunt them down and put them in wood chippers?

All right, I'll take this on your bottom up model, I think, is also really compatible with some cutting edge neuroscience with the idea of predictive process. The mind is a predictive process. And the Bayesian brain hypothesis, and one of the almost consequences of the Bayesian brain hypothesis and this idea that our minds are mostly doing prediction is that you're mostly living in your head. One thing that's not happening is that you're processing all of your sensory input and your brain is this supercomputer that can deal with all of it and then respond instead. What's happening is mostly you're modeling reality. You're getting these ground up inputs, but your brain, in order to basically conserve energy, it's just building a model and then checking in on the body. Like, is my model right? Is my model right? Is my model right? And, and, and, and meditation can kind of break that process and, and get you more directly in touch with your body. I think if, if, if you'll grammy. Then this model explains, you know, sociopathy as just bad model building. Like, it's clearly the case that you train the brain in this possibly Bayesian way and then its training affects your perception, right? So consider the asshole hypothesis, which is if everyone in your day is an asshole, maybe you're the asshole, right? But trying to transfer yourself into the asshole mind, like it's not just about actively being an asshole, it's actually perceiving the world as full of assholes, right?

So.

It'S like you've altered the structure of your brain perceptually and that is what creates the sociopathic behaviors.

There's also a lot of parallels with distributed and decentralized computing. So what you said about the mitochondria, right. It reflects very well what's happening in decentralized and distributed domains. By the way, just a quick aside, if anyone out there is an ultra nerd, there's a book called Go to Lescher Bach.

Yes, I have it talks about a.

Lot of this stuff, but that's only for ultra nerds. But yeah, you know, we've seen in recent years that if you have mitochondrial damage, that leads to a lot of health dysfunctions, but also it also leads to, you know, like emotional dysregulation. Right?

Like autism and Asperger's, which I used to have. Yeah, yeah.

And we see that there's also, you know, the, we sort of have a brain of sorts in our gut. So this, this diffusion of, let's say, control through our bodies, it just, I, it must have influenced the design of decentralized systems because once again, what you have is you have this network which could be spread all across the world. Right. It's kind of reflecting the incentive, the, the observations of nodes in so many different countries. And at the end of the day, on an immersion level, you want something that's functional, something that's honest. But you also have to account for, just as in the human body, certain cancers are just out of control cell growth or from damaged mitochondria, you can have very dysfunctional outcomes in life, both emotionally and medically. In these distributed systems, there's a lot of thought put into what if certain nodes go corrupt? Or what if nodes go offline, or what if nodes start colluding? How do you still build a system that has integrity and still does its job in a performant way, in an honest way? And we've seen that with a little bit of math, we can go really far. But also contrary wise, if a, if a certain number of underlying nodes go bad, then the whole network goes down. I think going back to what you were saying about psychopathy, about maladaptive behaviors of all kinds. Yeah. If just the fundamental constitution of your body is compromised or corrupt in some way, then it does lead at the human level to really bad outcomes. Perhaps someone who's bad is not intrinsically bad. They just have sort of corrupted architecture.

I, I believe that so much. Mo Gao Dat was on the show recently. We talked about this as well. Do you guys know Mo or his work?

Yes.

He was the former head of Google's advanced R and D division and wrote a really cool book on AI called Scary Smart. He also runs the one Billion Happy initiative. Just an incredibly enlightened human is becoming a friend. Saw him this last weekend. What we're all seeing here is, is that when you have the system that will automatically allocate available energy to fear and the data. I've always said fear gets 10 times more energy retention than it probably really needs. The latest data, Steven Kotler was sharing this with me. It may actually be nine times more. And people meditate. It only gets six times more. So you can turn down the energy that goes into fear, but this is going to happen before you can think. And Right, because we all understand latency in this room, there's a 350 millisecond latency between when your body gets a signal and when your brain gets the first electrical input from that signal.

Right.

And it's about a quarter Second if you're 18 years old or a race car driver. So there's a bit of a very. Or if you meditate a lot, you can have a lower latency on reality. But during that time, this is when your mitochondria do the stuff that Jeff Hawkins, the creator of Palm Pilot, who is probably the father of this predictive consciousness model we talked about. Anyhow, all that's going on in there, okay, so if you have a very small amount of energy because your mitochondria are fucked. Like mine were I was growing up. Okay. If you have any fear in there, it's going to soak up all the electricity and what's left is, I'm so hungry. Right. And then because you're probably malnourished because your mitochondria broken, all of your other energy is going to go into. Can I just find some sugar? Can I just get some energy? Right. And if there's anything left over, you're like, I would love to get laid and you're dead. And you probably have energy for that half the time. And then to care about your community, there is nothing left electrically to do that. Right. You know, to your point, Vikash. And much less to improve yourself. Right. So you become very self, self centered and just from a personal perspective, your mind, if this is happening in early childhood because the electricity is so low, it actually turns off or just never trains a lot of the sensory inputs that are possible. This is why you see light sensitivity, sound sensitivity, weird taste sensitivity and all these other weird things in kids with Asperger's or autism. Right. Well, low powered system and static on all the inputs. The thing that's changing the world is if you take someone whose brain grew up to be hyper efficient algorithmically because there's no power and there's too many scary and irritating things like other humans. Right. Well, if you can fix the mitochondrial power and then you can retrain the system, now you have a hyper efficient processor with enough power. And this is why you see people who were high functioning autistics who get their health back are like, what the hell are they doing? I think that fixing our hardware by fixing our environment is the path to creating happy, healthy human to support each other. Right. You guys agree with that?

Yeah. You know, I've had the. I've had the privilege or the misfortune of having grown up in very, very, incredibly different places of. You know, I've grown up, up in like tribal regions in India, you know, that used to be proper jungle. I've grown up in the Himalay Mountains.

Wow.

I used to live in California, now I live in New York and so on. So just big cities, middle of nowhere. Just very, very diverse circumstances growing up and you know, everywhere has its own dysfunction. So I know mold is something that you talk about a lot. I've grown up in tropical areas where, you know, there's inherently a lot of mold. But also the way people live, the construction, there's just so much mold out there. So one thing I've observed is that there is tremendous human potential everywhere, but for different reasons. In every set of circumstances, people are sort of dysregulated. There's the particular shortcomings of every environment that we live in and human outcomes are different. People in New York, for example, are doing a lot better than some of the other places I've lived in. Just the environment, the legacy that it has on your body, it can be such a powerful force, three year old lifespan. And you know, we're all, many of us here, many people that listen to you, you know, they're trying to figure out their bodies, they're trying to kind of undo some of the damage from the past. The legacies of our environment, they leave such an imprint. And any way we can, if we're able to kind of undo that damage, it just makes us more functional, better, arguably even more ethical. Human beings, more intelligent. For sure.

Yeah. Your model suggest that individual empowerment results in more community benefit.

Right.

And that is my experience as well. The, the through line of my life is as a hacker in cyberpunk and I, I feel like our whole community has been working on broadly two different things. I did a lot of cybercrime fighting and, and what that was about was taking out super predators. It was making the expected value of being a predator less and less.

Yeah.

Other friends of mine, you know, especially those working in cryptography and, and Internet privacy, are pushing on the other end of the seesaw, which is about making people literally more powerful. So I'm trying to take the would be predators power down. You can also lift people up. When you lift people up, they become harder to compromise.

Right.

Powerful people are literally unruly, as in hard to rule. And you might think that leads to chaos, but it doesn't. Right? And as we saw starting right in medieval times, it turns out that free people become more community minded, they generate more innovation, they create more wealth. How can that be the case? I think you put your finger on it, which is that altruism and community mindedness is deeply programmed into us, but it needs a certain activation energy. So that's why the back half of my life is about empowering people individually. Because I think that that will bring the world to a better place.

That makes me so happy.

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Part of the reason it's called biohacking and not something else that was a carefully chosen term is because hackers are about gaining control of systems, including their own. So a good hacker runs their own computer well. And you do that first because if not, another hacker will take over your system. Because we like to do that. And the idea here is, is by helping people gain control over their system first with a hardware component. Vikash, do your thing like let's get my tissues working right. Let's get my brain working right. That leads to having a person who's impossible to program, right? And that means impossible to trigger. And it's funny because my very latest book heavily meditated. It was like, here's the technology to go in and turn off any trigger you have is just incredibly hard to do that if you're running at half power.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. And I love referring to meditation as technology. I've had a 30 year meditation practice and in my experience of it, it is 100% about skill building. I've literally added tools and procedures into my brain that are first and foremost super useful. It's not about like transcending reality, it's actually about being more practically alive while I'm alive.

It's sort of, oh, you can do a handstand, that's cool, you can do splits, that's cool. But can you do it in your mind? What kind of meditation do you do?

Oh, I started in, in, in what I think of now is very severe concentrative practices or just classic Theravada kind of Vipassana. Only in recent years I was really skeptical of Vajrayana. I was really skeptical of some of the, let's call it later innovations. I was very much interested. That's right. So I was like, I'm going to get into the OG Buddha's original ip, right. I'm just going to master that. I don't know about this other stuff. And I only in the past few years realized how like close minded that was. So, so now I've been learning you're just open awareness, so meditative states that have no concentration object that just rest in the vastness of awareness. And that's super useful. Like I should have done that like you know, far earlier though I also like absorptive states. So like many people like me, you know, I've been doing genre hacking, you know, can, can I enter, you know, states very deliberately that are amplifying, you know, good feelings and, and that's super fun. I, I, I have just very much a playful attitude. I'm, I'm just playing with my mind.

If I'd have known this, I would have asked you to read an advanced copy of my book before, you know, before I was put out there because as I said, same thing. You haven't read it. You probably know about heavily meditated yet. But I talk about meditation as a technology. Excellent. And one of the problems we have is that our lineages were the old intellectual property protection. It's like, well, we're not going to tell you this is great unless you live in our monastery for 10 years. And there was a reason for that. And now all the lineage knowledge, it's already in whatever AI model you're looking at. Like it, it's out there.

Right.

Which means these are all capabilities humans have had. They're just poorly documented. Right, right. And they're things that hackers have used for A long time. You know, Merlin or whoever the heck it was or you know, any of the old Vedic guys, if you want to go to India, who could do, you know, magical things using stuff that's not documented. These are what we would call them back doors.

Yes.

Well, in human consciousness. Right.

Just supposed to be a little bit of a wet blanket as a, as a hacker, as a kind of biohacker. You know, one of the things I used to do was I used to mess with my computer a lot when I was a kid.

Yeah.

And inevitably I would break it and then I would like, I'd reduce myself to tears and then I'd have to like slowly figure it out and put it back together and would boot up again. And with meditation it is possible to mess up your mind. The mind is a wonderful and powerful thing. And just like putting reassembling a PC, if you resembling your mind, you do have to. A certain degree of caution is warranted. So I think in the past that's why a lot of this knowledge was closed off, perhaps to guide people who were doing this in a proper way. But now everything is open source, everything is democratic. We're taking all these technologies into our hands. But with power also comes responsibility. So I think with these powerful technologies that we have to better our minds, better ourselves. You know, don't do what I did when I was messing with my computer when I was a kid. There are ways to mess things up badly.

But has it happened to you?

It hasn't happened to me, but I have encountered a lot of people for.

Whom that's from meditation or psychedelics from.

From, from both, but definitely meditation. And there are resources out there that do help if you manage to put yourself in an invalid in an error state.

Thank you like 10,000% for saying that. If you look at the, the Buddhist stuff that, that Michael, you and I both have, they warn you if you get on the fast path, you might get in line, but you might go crazy. It's in the literature. So meditation is relatively safe. And most of the common forms are safe. And for certain people it's probably not safe. And some of the advanced forms, when I went to a monastery for my first 10 day thing in this is in Nepal, I'm like, why is the back half of the library locked? And they're like, that's only for advanced students. And I'm like, that is a crime. Like the same as locking up the Vatican archives. Like bullshit. This is human knowledge. And they're like, might have been younger. And so I do Think though that, that we need to know that kind of thing.

Absolutely.

One of the books I've read, and I won't say the name here because I don't want to harm people, it came shrink wrapped and it said warning, like a shrink wrap warning on software says, you know, if you open this, you're green. This his warning was one third of the people who participated in this research are either dead or clinically insane. Like, please do not do this at home. Do it Whiskey. It's trained. Do it with a trained facilitator or like, great harm can come to you. Yet this is human knowledge. So hackers like us were like, that's crack. We have to read it.

And that's why I said it, because in the biohacking community, you know, we are so inquisitive and we're willing to go the extra mile. And honestly, some people have no restraint. You know, whether it's supplements, whether it's meditation, you can do a bad job. So you just, but with the architecture of your mind, one has to be careful. You know, it's like you have a very evolved, 30 year mature process towards meditation and you gain so much from that. I think we should all follow that example. Well, one of the things that I.

Love about the hacker community and, and we also see this in the biohacker community is a strong culture of show and tell.

Yes.

Like you, you, you might think, you know, this is, this is like a bunch of cowboys. And cowboys do not get together in conferences with PowerPoints.

They're called rodeos.

Well, but rodeos are very competitive and hacker culture is actually a gift culture. Right. You gain status by what knowledge you give away. Honestly, I think that's because no one is going to save us. There is no authority that is coming to rescue us. We have to save ourselves. And so you, you need a community of knowledge sharers that are not just sharing what works, but are also like generously trying to guide others. And that's how we've survived as, as a hacker community, I think. And that's the way out as we, as we're on the edge of biohacking as well.

Yeah.

It's also why I didn't trademark the term biohacker, because I totally could have. I know this is a community thing, it's not a Dave thing. Right. Because it wouldn't be doing what it's doing in the world. And it's that sharing culture or the gift culture, as you put it. Maybe that was my Burning man experience. So there, there's More to be said about this, and I'm really grateful you talked about the downside of this, because anytime when I was in my 20s, I'm like, we're working on the groundbreaking technology. It's going to change the world. I'm like, no engineer would ever do something evil with this. The engineers will protect us from the bad corporate people. I was naive. So, like, there's always an engineer willing to code something evil, right? So we have to look at, you know, what could we do to ourselves. So I started doing very primitive neurofeedback, sometimes in the mid-90s at a chiropractor's office. I was like, I think I'm noticing a difference. It was kind of a faster way to gain awareness of the internal states. I never learned as a baby because I was too busy reading instead of crawling and weird shit like that. Like, okay, I'm getting something. So I bought an EEG machine.

Cool.

And I started hacking my brain. And I'm like, maybe doing brain surgery on yourself is a bad idea, because who's going to help you if you cut a nerve to your hand?

Right?

Right. So I've been fortunate to have many teachers and both on the tech guru side and on the esoteric side. On the tech side, one of the biggest things that helped me early on was using data coming off my body in real time to know the state of my autonomic nervous system. So am I in fight or flight? I'm like, son of a bitch. I'm riding around in this meat suit, and hundreds of times a day, it's going into fight or flight without my knowledge or permission. And I didn't even know it was doing that. Like, what a horrible design. So I used a sensor clipped to my ear to first learn the feeling of shifting from one state to another. That was not documented. We should have a console that we can see that's like, you're in red or green.

Yes.

So that was with a company called HeartMath. I ended up being an advisor to them years ago, and they still make stuff for that today. If you wake up in the morning and you look your aura ring or your ultra human or any of these other things, your readiness score is, how much time at night were you in one state or another? But it was a trainable state for me. And then I kept doing neurofeedback. I said, I'm gonna have to work with experts instead of doing it myself, even though I can be an expert. It's like, if you change the mirror, you're looking at, you're not gonna know that you're not seeing an accurate representation of yourself. It's kind of scary because meditation does that without the tech. And I ended up. That's why 40 years of Zen exists, which is my neuroscience thing, where I'm proper neuroscientists and many, many years of data. But what I found is more than a thousand high performing people, including a lot of hackers and entrepreneurs and tech nerds and all that. If people go through a structured forgiveness process to turn down that fear word, well, what are the results? Six months later, after the brain's had a chance to fully integrate the new network settings. Right, Right, right. And 91.7% of people report improvements in relationships. Right. Which supports that idea that it's going to go down to friend. Right. And I guess that would be fucking and friend, depending on what you do with your friends. But I mean it's a, it's a really big deal. And then all the other metrics for happiness go up. Right? Right. But I did one time with one of our clinical grade systems, like I was kind of lazy and one of the electrodes wouldn't properly get on my forehead. I'm like, who cares? I'm just going to do my advanced training protocols that are customized for my brain. I broke my brain. I literally, for the next two days I'm like, I cannot get out of this brain fog. Brain fog has been a part of my life for most of it. I don't have brain fog anymore. It's gone. But it came back and it nothing Modafinil coffee, nothing would fix it. And fortunately I have resources. So I'm like, okay. So we went and looked at my brainwaves and then created a protocol to undo what I did. But if I had done that with meditation or if I had done that with all, you know, I'm a cowboy with clinical grade neuro gear, I would have been disabled. Maybe not disabled, I just would have run at 50% of my capacity. So I'm deeply grateful that you're bringing up. This stuff isn't for the faint of heart. And also this is what community is for. So if you're in a community of consciousness people, I don't care if you're just dealing with computers, with sensors, with Internet of things. Well, number one, your community is going to help you right there. Number two, let's use Nilian, let's use Volca, let's use these distributed platforms. So now you know what you did, because everyone shared everything anonymously. It's like, oh, that turns out everyone who sets it up like that has this effect. Or only people with this genetic who also looked at a blinking green light three times today had this problem, right? We don't know. But I think the two of you are solving this for humanity. And am I getting, am I overstating this?

A few things come to mind. So the first is. So based on FMRI studies, it seems there is some kind of, some kind of default network and an active network in our brains. And with meditation, you can see it at work. But wouldn't it be really nice if you could actually visualize it on the screen and just be able to train it? So I really hopeful for a future where we have live telemetrics from our brain, you know, like a Grafana dashboard, if you will. And that just makes the whole process more transparent and hopeful. The second thing is community is really at the core of what we do. As biohackers, as technologists, as biohackers, we are building a common corpus of knowledge that hopefully will benefit everybody, right? Like we're the vanguard that's bringing adoption to all these techniques and hopefully also to this more secure way of examining ourselves and improving our lives. And these are things that will go downstream to the rest of the human population and just lead to better outcomes, a reduction in fear, a larger consciousness. And the name for our product, monadic DNA, it's not necessarily a programmer thing, it actually comes from philosophy. It comes from the concept of a monad, right? Where so the way we think about it is the, the data or the genes coming in, they're all the little monads in the philosophical formulation. And then there's like the one grand monad, which is the collective outcome from securely and effectively examining all our genetic data, our structured health data, and coming up with insights that helps the world organism. It's a bit out there, but that's a real basis for our project's name. We're going to be doing so many interesting things, not just with, you know, all the data that you're gathering, but, you know, in our, in our case, with genetic insights, just being able to control our gene expression, being able to look at our methylation and improve our inner age without, you know, linking it to others and. But these are powerful, powerful things. There are extremely positive outcomes, but in the process, if we do it alone, we can really mess ourselves up. So by facilitating all this in a, you know, even a decentralized system, at the end of the day, it's a community of people there's no central authority running the whole thing. It's a bunch of people around the world that have to make the decision to participate in something that implicitly is bigger than themselves. So, like, that, I dearly hope, is going to be the paradigm by which we operate. You know, if you're on the threshold of doing really, really powerful things with ourselves beyond just uploading stuff to ChatGPT, because all kinds of really powerful insights are going to emerge on your platform with all the other things that we're doing, we're going to be composing over each other's data. So this community aspect is really important. Otherwise, in an isolated way, right? Like that, consciousness isn't going to arise and we can badly mess ourselves up, as you mentioned, with your missing electrode and I did with some meditation experiments.

It's so cool because at one level, biohacking was to make longevity and consciousness cool for young people. If I'd have just known this stuff when I was 19, right? Because the stuff that makes old people young makes young people powerful.

Nice.

Right? And I, in my 20s, I was so sick. I learned from people in their 80s. I'm like, Whoa, you mean I could live way longer than I'm supposed to. And our sister organization to the non profit longevity Group was the Institute for Noetic Sciences, which is a very advanced consciousness group in Silicon Valley studying the most esoteric consciousness things we can do. So I'm like, oh my God, I, I guess I have to pay attention. And I normally wouldn't have got that till I was 40. I just got punched in the face when I was 20, so I had to learn it. The other thing biohacking did is it's, it's restating epigenetics.

Right?

Right. And you look at Bruce Lipton, who I've been honored to have on the show and to call a friend who's, you know, a cell biologist who became a consciousness researcher from what he saw in petri dishes. So what's happening here is we have the genome and not just one human genome, you have. Well, okay, with monadic DNA, we're going to get a picture of all the genetic stuff with appropriate privacy, which is necessary so you don't do both big evil things. So once we have that, okay, now we know for each person and for society at large, what are the genes that can be turned on or off, because it doesn't matter if you don't have it or it's always on. You should know that. And what controls that? The exposome, which is a set of Everything you're exposed to over the course of your life. Oh, and Fulcra is collecting as much of the exposome for every person as possible. That's right. And so if you go back to when I started writing about this stuff, I'm like, if one of my earlier blog posts introducing your exposomes where nobody knows. Well, the thought that I'm going to be able to measure all of this stuff, like we know Internet of things and we'll have environmental sensors and all that. We're still capturing less than 1% of everything we're exposed to.

That's right.

But you're saying that I would be able to log all of this in your system for my entire life and, and predictively understand what was the interaction between my environment. All the weird variables.

Right.

Including the ones that were just for me and ones that affect the whole planet, like gravity waves or something. Throw those in there.

Right.

And now I have not just my genome, but I have my genome compared to everyone else. We put that stuff together. Did we just unlock stuff for humans that no one's ever done before?

I think so. We really have built the Grafana for life. And this is appealing to a certain kind of data driven person who wants that dashboard, just see their life, they want that almost video game experience where you can bring up your character sheet, how am I doing? But there's this other just passive benefit that we get when we can gather that data for ourselves, make it unambiguously our own, stored in a way that is designed to last the rest of your life. There are so many secrets buried in your life because our brains are not good at collecting discrete data and noticing small changes over time. Computers are great at that. If you harness the computers in your life to capture that longitudinal data, then you can discover incredible things about yourself. But then when we add the ability to share, you see, you don't really own something if you can't play with it. If you can't share it.

Yes.

When you own your own data, then you can make an informed decision. Like I'm actually going to contribute some of this data for longitudinal studies against an entire population groups. That is is the curiosity that I'm pursuing right now. You know, how does the world sleep? How are are GLP1 agonists affecting behaviors beyond just your weight loss? How has Covid affected people long term? If you can reach back and pick up some of these tiny little bits of detail which are buried in your step count, it's buried in a bunch of trivialities, but they can be desiloed and then aggregated. Then we can find the hidden patterns that show causal relationships that are today just mysteries. And I'm really excited about that. There's a tremendous amount of value to unlock there that just comes from picking up all of these threads.

Wow, that's the vision, man. I think we're very aligned on that.

Yeah. And Dave, I don't know if you agree, but perhaps one of the good things that happened to me was I got a really bummed deal with my, with my health, with the brain fog and other issues, long term chronic health issues. So on the one hand we were kind of left to dry by the conventional medical system, the healthcare system, educational system and so on. But on the other hand we were forced to kind of figure out, we were forced to figure out what was wrong with us and address it and make a better life for ourselves. And in the process, because we just happen to have sort of bent towards technology, towards hacking, that kind of thing, we've been fortunate to be able to create breadcrumbs along the way that other people can use. And when all this is compounded, when so many people in a bottom up way are able to, even without a lot of technological facilitation, just kind of experiment on themselves, make little tweaks and create wisdom for everyone else, it's a really powerful thing. But when you bring in the ability to gather data to facilitate this bottom up movement where the suffering or the pain of thousands, it could be rare disease, community, it could just be people suffering from me, CFS or whatever, it doesn't matter. But all that is put to good productive use. And I'm really especially optimistic about composing all this data. You're going to be collecting data sort of for the examined cells where collecting data that is very sort of catered towards structured medical data genomics. But just imagine enabling people with this kind of ability. So that gives me a lot of hope and it really adds a very positive aftertaste to like all the suffering that I had to go in my life.

My co founder Diana calls herself a biohacker of necessity.

Well, me too, dude. I'd be disabled right now, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. She didn't set out to do that. She just had weird symptoms and, and had to figure it out.

Right?

UX DESIGNER HEAL thyself How do you answer questions like when did those symptoms begin? Right. Like you need to, you need to instrument yourself in special ways if you're going to solve a special problem.

One of the most profound things and there's been a lot of them that happened since starting the biohacking movement. So I was at, I think a book signing that I did for one of the books maybe eight or so years ago, and this family walked up and they said, Dave, we got you a present. And it was a bag, it had a couple of grass fed steaks hollow in it and there was a card and it just said, you know, our whole family has been changed. We started doing what you talked about. And there's a photo and it was of a 16 year old girl and she was very inflamed, pimples, overweight, substantially a lot like me when I was a teenager. And then a picture three months later and she was a clear skin, normal body weight, shining eyes, like you wouldn't even know it was the same teenager.

Wow.

And I was like, wow, like if someone had done this for me.

Right.

It would have saved me a hell of a lot of suffering. Right, right. And I've been motivated to share this stuff. I just want anyone to go through this and I do my best to write so that, you know, young adults will say, oh, I can do something about this. I'm not just, you know, it's not just this way. It feels like, you know, you've gone through this, Vikash, for sure. And Michael, did you have the health issues or you just. Well, lucky.

I've been trying to rescue my wife for, for a long time. Which major motivator for me and, and, and probably a major motivator for, for many of us in the biohacker community. Like in this, when you, when you go in this extreme direction, it, it, it's not just about yourself.

Right?

Yeah.

Like, like we all have people in our lives with chronic health issues and, and a medical care system that is not well situated to help them. So by self experimenting, I think we're also almost inoculating our communities with self knowledge that empowers us to heal others.

One biohack you're working on now that you're really excited about. You want to go first, Vikash?

Oh, I am really excited about combining my genetic traits with my methylation data and just see where I stand. I have gotten true age or inner age metrics from multiple services, but I really want to see at the genetic level what the, what the real deal is, both the genes and the expression and just kind of go from there. Like that's key data that will help me drive decisions. Now, now that I'm 41, I'm now really actively looking forward to using it rather than losing it.

So methylation. Got it. And there's about 20 other variants like sulfation and all those. You're getting into all that stuff. And because you're on the genetic side, I think people over estimate the importance of methylation. Okay. Which is critically important. I have methylation issues and I manage it very carefully. But if you just focus on that and you don't look at all the other common things and you know all that. So you're super into that stuff. My little hack was calling you Vikash instead of Vishak to see if I could trigger your autonomic nervous system. And you never even blicked and just used. So that's what's the deal. I like trying to piss you off. My apology, I just realized doing that backwards because I've worked with way more of Vikashas than Vishaks. So my apologies.

But you know, no one mispronounces my name more than other Indians. So if you were Indian then maybe I would get a little bit offended. But since you're not, you're actually. Yeah, like people do absolutely incredible things with my name within India because they feel that. Right. To just kind of mangle my name. So this is, this is actually pretty good. And Vikasha Rasu was a really good soccer player that I really was a big fan. So I don't mind.

I agree in the good deal.

All right.

All right. I'm going to go in a weird direction. I'm really proud of this and I would love people to try replicating this. We spoke about the default mode network and I've been instrumenting my default mode network. This is one of my weirdest self experiments which is to set up stochastic polling. So I randomly sample myself with Fullcrest software.

Of course.

So I'm randomly sampling myself with a very simple question which is who or what were you just thinking about?

Ah, meta awareness. Okay, that's right.

To. To catch myself in those times of default mode network activation. Right. Which is when you're not doing anything in particular.

You're.

You're doing the dishes or what have you. Right. Who do your thoughts turn to? Right. That's your default mode network.

It is.

Right. So, so there, there is a way to instrument it. The way to do that is asking. And the way to do the asking and this is really important is with random sampling because you can't remember to remember to document your ruminations.

Right.

That's not going to work.

Why not?

Oh, because that requires a different part of your Brain. There's tremendous intelligence that can happen from sampling on giant data streams, since you repeat yourself if you merely do random sampling. So you don't want to bother yourself too much. Just do this a little bit. But over the course of a month, and you'll literally see the patterns of who you're thinking about or what you're thinking about, but especially the who. So I've been instrumenting the people in my mind. It's my current favorite, little biohack.

What a great answer. So sometime this is back when I was working at the first data center company there. I read a book, I don't remember its name, and it talked about something like. I think they called it brain spotting. But brain spotting is a technique now for trauma resolution. More like emdr and it. It's a technique from advanced meditation, which is just passively noticing your thoughts when you're not thinking about anything very similar. And I would just do this and be like, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm just thinking about my thinking. And we know, we used to believe back then that you were either an active mode network or default mode network, and that it was binary. But since then, we've learned studying Oxford, that it's actually a slider switch. So there's always some default and always some active, which means it follows you can develop a continuous monitoring process of your default mode network. And I think I've done that. Not continuous all the time, but it's most of the time. And I believe intuition sits there. And the default mode network is picking up signals from the mitochondrial networks, right? So what that means is you become more intuitive the more you develop that. And that first few months when I would just make a really conscious, curious practice, like, what's going on in there, right? I mean, there are all sorts of weird shit, right? And then over time, I managed to clean out most of the weird because that was all trauma. And I did that with the reset process, which I given away in the book, right. So where I ended up finally was if I think about a person, not consciously think about them, but if my brain is thinking about it without my consciousness, right. I probably should text them a column, especially if it comes up multiple times. And my closest friends in the world, they will. If something's going on with me, they're. They'll just suddenly start thinking about me and then they'll call me. And this is how humans are connected.

That's right. I bet you you've densified your insula, your. Your little insular Cortices are probably literally more neuronally dense as a result of that. Yeah, right. Yeah. That the, you should you, I, I, I do think that periodic scans of yourself should, should go into your data collection kind of process.

So I'm on the board of Amen Clinics. I mean we're talking about a SPECT scan. I know I can get it electrically from 40 years is in, but what kind of a scan would you think of that?

Oh yeah, great question. Probably CT scans would get the job done. There's an availability problem. So, so, so at actually higher resolution. Yeah, higher resolution MRIs are, are becoming increasingly accessible to, to ordinary people. And, and, and so that, that's probably where you want to go.

Yeah.

Maybe pre nouveau could do it.

Right?

Yeah.

Okay, super cool. Well guys, let's share some info. So we talked about Nilian and this is a crypto thing. Do you guys remember this? The symbol for it?

Nilian. Nil.

Nil. I think I should remember that as an advisor. So if you're interested in the underlying platform for distributed compute, that's private. I think this is as important as distributed ledger. It's a big deal. So look at Nil. And then we've got. I'll see your URL for Fulcra.

Yeah, so visit us at fulcra.AI f u l C R A. Yeah.

All right. And from monadic DNA, monaticdna.com and we're also on the social, so you can find what we're up to.

Okay. And I'll put all this in the show, notes and all. And guys, thank you for profoundly awesome hacker consciousness fun interview.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks, Dava. It was great to talk both hacker and biohacker.

See you next time on the Human Upgrade podcast.

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