Dylan KawalecSep 22nd, 2025

E04 with Andrew Miller: "Your Al is Weak, Until You Add Zero Trust."

This is the Blackbox Podcast — where we peel back the hidden layers of technology, society, and the human psyche to unravel the forces shaping confidential AI.

In this episode, host Dylan Kawalec sits down with researcher and entrepreneur Andrew Miller for a deep dive into confidential computing, trusted execution environments (TEEs), and the future of private AI.

Andrew has been at the forefront of cryptography and decentralized systems, from early Bitcoin scripting experiments to Ethereum, MPC, and zero-knowledge proofs. As a key architect behind Flashbots and dstack, he’s redefining how we think about secure, verifiable computation in a world where AI is becoming ever more powerful—and ever more in need of unbreakable safeguards.

Through the lens of auctions, Andrew explains how trust models evolve, why combining TEEs and MPC strengthens guarantees, and how confidential containers may become the new smart contracts. He then connects these ideas to AI, reputation, and agent-to-agent protocols—making the case for “prove what, not who” as a guiding principle for building trustworthy systems.

Along the way, he demos sandboxed TikTok sessions inside a TEE, critiques reputation models for autonomous agents, and explores how confidential compute enables rivals to collaborate securely through projects like BuilderNet—reshaping the future of decentralized infrastructure.

Now here is E04 of the Blackbox Podcast, hosted by Dylan Kawalec and brought to you by Phala Network.

Phala Docs: docs.phala.com/

Flashbots Docs: docs.flashbots.net

YouTube - E04 with Andrew Miller: "Your Al is Weak, Until You Add Zero Trust."

Posted Aug 15th, 2026