The World-Changing Technology Everyone Is Missing w/ Jack Hidary | EP #124

GPS is very brittle.

Yeah. It's also can be spoofed. Right.

And that right now is what Russia is doing over Ukraine. It's what Iran is doing in much of the Gulf region, it's what China's doing in and around Taiwan.

So how does quantum sensing solve this problem?

Here's the bad news. We now have devices in clinical trial that allow us to pick up the magnetic field of the heart. This device is able to detect what's going on in under five minutes.

That's extraordinary. Can you make money with quantum technology?

We spun out about 2 a half years ago, raised around to 500 million using LQMs, large quantitative models. Combining that with quantum technologies, this is a recipe for great, great success.

Welcome to Moonshots Part two with Jack H. Today we're going to talk about quantum applications. Can you make money with quantum technologies? Not just quantum computing, quantum technologies. Backed by popular Demand. The incredible CEO of SandboxAQ, Jack Kittery. Jack, good to see you, buddy.

Peter, good to see you.

Last time we spoke, we had quite the conversation about sort of the, the fundamentals of quantum and how we can now simulate in silico, in classical computers, quantum equations that allow us to understand the world of atoms and molecules and ions versus the world of bits. And what you've built at Sandbox AQ is nothing less than a rocket ship that's actually making money today. So I mean, people have asked, you know, is quantum the world of quantum, you know, decades away and is it something that is actual business and you've turned into a business? So let's jump in there.

Sure, yeah. What we realize is that if we marry quantum technologies, quantum approaches with AI, specifically quantitative AI, then we can actually build products for today. We can actually deliver value today to real customers, global 1000 customers all around the world. Let's go through some examples, Peter, just.

Just for reference here, you know, you kicked, you know, you built Sandboxaq out, out of Alphabet. It was spun out of Alphabet with support of Sergey Brin. Eric Schmidt is your chairman. And out of the box you raised a half a billion dollars, which is an amazing seed round. I mean, like very few people in the world have half a billion dollar seed round and you're making revenue today. I don't know if you're able to, you know, to sort of quantify that for two years out of the gate, just to give people a sense of this being a real business and then jumping into your different products.

Sure, Peter, exactly right. We spun out about two and a half years ago, raised around the 500 million. And just fast forward two and a half years later, we built actually a very robust business with lots of really big customers. Customers in the pharma space, customers in the aerospace sector, customers in energy and batteries, really big sectors of our society. So what you see is that when you look at quantitative approaches using LQMs, large quantitative models, combining that with quantum technologies, this is a recipe for great, great success. So let's go through some examples. Let's take quantum sensors. Quantum sensors are here today. Last time we talked about, Peter, you and I, quantum computers. Quantum computers are being built right now by about three dozen very serious outfits. Both large companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, as well as startups such as SiteQuantum, IonQ and many others. Very exciting to see that. And in a number of years we'll have scaled fault tolerant quantum computers. But that's not yet today. But let's now turn to quantum sensors. Quantum sensors are here right now. These are sensors that go beyond our previous classical ability to sense the world around us. Let's take an example of the magnetic field around us. Our Earth has a magnetic field. It's not very strong, but it's got a magnetic field. And thank God it does, because without it, we'd all be fried to a crisp.

Yeah, cosmic rays suck.

Yeah. The magnetic field protects us from all kinds of harmful radiation that hits our Earth. And those planets that lost their magnetic field or do not have one are not as habitable as ours. And one of the beautiful things about Earth is its magnetic fields. We ever see that? The animations, when you look at Earth from space and you see how it's protecting us from various radiation, it's a wonderful, wonderful thing. But we can also use that magnetic field in a variety of ways. We can navigate now, all of us as kids probably had a compass. That compass pointed north and we would be in the woods and hopefully find our way out of the woods with that little compass. Well, we can go beyond that now. In fact, a good chunk of the animal kingdom uses the magnetic field every single day. When we look at the millions and millions of birds around our planet, we see them migrating north to south, south to north. In fact, I had the opportunity to see the Arctic tern. The Arctic tern is an amazing bird. It's a white bird that travels 24,000km a year because it goes from the North Pole to the South Pole.

I have beautiful photos of you and you're in your big, you know, winter gear down in the South Pole.

Yes, I was Wasn't the South Pole yet, but I was in Antarctica. I was in Antarctica, and I had the opportunity to see the Arctic turn there. And then more recently, I was in Svalbard, which is north of the Arctic Circle. It's one of the only pieces of land that you could see step on north of the Arctic Circle. And I saw an Arctic turn there on its way up. And. And so that was just really appreciated, the ability to see the Arctic turn in both places. But how did it do it? How does the Arctic turn travel these thousands of kilometers, often over water? Well, one of the things that it's able to do, of course, is to pick up the magnetic field of the Earth. And, and many, many birds have that ability. It's not just birds. When we look at certain kinds of whales, many species of whales are able to do that, and they travel thousands of kilometers underwater to go from feeding places to their place where they give birth to the next cohort, the next generation. And so we see many, many kinds of animals out there. Dogs actually have some ability here as well, as do turtles. When you see those turtles scurrying towards the, the water, they're not actually picking up some scent of the water or something like that. It's actually using magnetic fields as well. So a lot of the animal kingdom does that. We humans have lost that ability innately to do so. So we need to use technology. And the good news is that's what SandboxAQ has just done. Starting about five years ago, we realized that GPS is very brittle. GPS is a series of satellites. Of course, there's now four GPS systems around the world. US has launched one many years ago. Europe has one, Russia has one, and China has one. Russia and China realized that they needed their own resilient GPS system in case that we turned off ours against them. And so they have their own. US and Europe have them. But unfortunately, the GPS signal is very easy to jam.

It's also can be spoofed, right? I mean, you can create false GPS signals and lead someone to the exact wrong direction.

That's right. And that's happening right now. Various adversaries are spoofing gps. If you want to jam gps, you can. You can literally go online. It's not legal, so please don't do it. But if you go online, you can find little boxes. They look like large walkie talkies, essentially. And you can jam GPS for your entire neighborhood. And if you have a bigger one, you could jam it over a whole city. And that right now is what Russia is doing. Over Ukraine. It's what Iran is doing in much of the Gulf region. It's what China's doing in and around Taiwan. It's happening right now. This is, this is. Was front page Wall Street Journal just two weeks ago. Literally the digital front page and the physical front page. This was. This issue impacts both defense, national security, as well as the civilian aerospace. Thousands of flights since the beginning of this year have been disrupted. Some have had to land other places. Finnair as an example. One of the. One of the Scandinavia Airlines has had to cut routes to the Baltic regions because it simply cannot get their planes there. They cannot get the planes due to lack of gps. And that's on jamming and spoofing, Peter. And of course, we know that. We know this is public info. China and Russia have both announced capability to take satellites out. Yeah, just take them out of the sky, unfortunately.

So we built an amazing dependency on gps. And of course, the other thing is, GPS doesn't work underwater, where you hear the signal gets attenuated very quickly with, like, you know, just tiny water.

Underwater. Bingo. So underwater is an issue as well, as well as also underneath in tunnels. And if you're doing, you know, you're in caves or you're looking for different minerals under. Under the Earth. Again, no GPS to be had.

So how does quantum sensing solve this problem?

So what do we do? We realize that, okay, we've got finally mapping of the world from the magnetic map point of view. Various satellites have been sent up over the past two decades to actually map this field. And it turns out we have the core field of the Earth. And that is a magnetic field that is a result of the molten iron that's moving around, around the core iron ball in the center of our Earth. And that creates a homogeneous field. So you can't really navigate with that because it's. It's the same in all directions.

It's too broad.

Yeah, it's a spherical field. It's the same in all directions. But here's what happens as that field moves through our crust. Our crust has various minerals in it, and it has a number of minerals that are ferromagnetic. Ferromagnetic means that they're not themselves innately magnetic, but they could be magnetized. Right. Just like a paperclip.

Iron, nickel, cobalt, all kinds of things.

And so magnetite, hematite, these are two of the minerals that we find randomly distributed in our crust. And that random distribution is very helpful because it warps the core field into a local signature. And so when you actually pass over the Earth, you can see different distributions. And now that we've mapped it, we can navigate with the crustal field.

So this is like a magnetic fingerprint.

That's right.

Of a region. And is it really of high enough fidelity for me to know where I am here in Santa Monica or in a sub off the coast of Kalamata, Greece? I mean, it's that, it's that level of fidelity.

Just let the viewers know. Peter, right now isn't a submarine off the coast of Greece. It's wonderful technology. Great to see you, Peter. But, but in, in fact it is, it is a billion. So just like if we go back to Google Earth and Google Street View, when Google Earth first launched more than a decade ago, it was a bit rough around the edges. The resolution wasn't great in all areas. And then over time, Google filled in these spaces with higher and higher resolution images, ultimately getting down to Street View. And now even they had sent people into inside museums and you can now navigate inside a museum. And that's what will happen with the magnetic field maps of our Earth. We have very, very good maps today because of many satellites that have taken these magnetic images over a two decade period. But of course, if people have an area of interest, they can drag a magnetometer, a magnetic sensor over that area of interest and get even higher resolution. We'll see that happening over the coming years. But back to the main story. So given this magnetic map and given a sensor, a quantum sensor, you can actually detect where that magnetic field is and how it's looking square meter by square meter by square meter. Today we don't have to go down to the square meter level to help a, a plane navigate. But ultimately that will be the resolution that people start to.

So you've got a box in your airplane, in your sub, in your car, and it's picking up the variations of the field and it's creating this pattern pattern over time. And then you're matching that pattern.

That's right. And this is a quantum sensor. What it means, when we say quantum sensor, what do we mean? We mean that it's actually using a quantum effect. So in the case of some of these sensors, they're called optically pumped magnetometry. That means that you have an element in there, that element has various electrons. And then you pump in optical energy, which is photons, essentially into the electron. The electron absorbs the photon. The electron now moves to the higher quantum state. As we know, the core idea of quantum. What does quantum mean in the first place? To Quantize something means to make it move in discrete ways. That is, if you think about a ramp versus a ladder, a ramp is the kind of thing that you can go up and down on and you could stand on any part you can down to there. There's no distinction between, you know, you go here, then go here, then here, then here. You could stand anywhere you want to on that, on that particular ramp. A ladder, though, is something that you're either on rung one, rung two rung three, rung four, very discrete ties in terms of where you are on that ladder. To give you another analogy in music, if I have a violin or a guitar, I could put my fingers anywhere I want to along that violin, violin string, and I could then have a different frequency that is played once I draw the bow. A piano, on the other hand, is discretized, right? You'd say a piano is like what quantum is, whereas a violin is like what the classical world is. You can analog move anywhere you you want to. The same thing with the ladder. The ladder is like quantum. The electron could only exist at certain rungs of energy, cannot exist in between those rungs. And the ramp is more like how we understood the classical world, where the billiard ball can exist anywhere we want to on the billiard table.

Everybody want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life, and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on and you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic Centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body mri, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. You might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com Peter When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter will put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode.

So I brought a group of XPRIZE benefactors on a. On a deep tech journey to the Valley. We came to Sandbox Box aq.

Yes. You came from Palo Alto Labs.

Yes, yes. And it's beautiful. And we saw, we saw this tech. And, you know, it is a manageable size. I won't call it a black box, but the, the, the sensors themselves are, are relatively small.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a silver box, but yes, it's, it's relatively small. And most of that box has air in it, so ultimately will bring it down to much smaller form factors. Peter as you may have heard during the visit, but the Air Force wanted a certain form factor for the testing that we've done over the last two years. And the Air Force has indeed publicly tested it. We'll get to that in one minute. But now is the question. Now you've got a great quantum sensor. You're pumping this electron up. And now, of course, after you stop pumping it up with, with photons, it comes back down and it releases a photon. Conservation of energy. It absorbs a photon. Now it's got to release a photon. When a photon is released under a magnetic field, we have something called the Zon effect, which allows us to backtrack back, calculate what the strength of that magnetic field is given the pathway and given the characteristics of that photon. So when we detect that photon we can see indeed there was a magnetic field of this particular strength at that particular moment. And then we can use that to calculate what the pattern of magnetic field is right underneath us. So let's say we're flying at 6, 700 miles an hour in a plane, or, you know, on other vehicles as well. Now the question is, okay, you've got a great sensor. That's the good news. Here's the bad news. You've got a great sensor, great sensors, means you have too much information. That means that if Peter, you and I are on that plane, let's say we're on a C17, it's a big, big cargo hold that we fly on with the Air Force. Lots of people can be there. Everyone with their cell phones, every cell phone is magnetic field. Every watch is giving off magnetic field, every.

Every heart, every heartbeat, as we'll learn.

Exactly everything is giving off manifest. So it's a very noisy environment. If you had to physically try to shield all that out, that would be very, very difficult. And, and so you need an AI now, a quantitative AI, an AI that doesn't think about words. This is not a chatgpt. This is an AI that thinks about numbers. And these numbers are the strengths from moment to moment of the magnetic fields below it and then around it. And what we've done over the years is train an AI successfully to look at the magnetic field of the Earth, interpret that, but ignore the magnetic field.

That's extraordinary.

Yeah, and that's what, that's what the hardest part was. The hardest part actually wasn't the quantum side, it was the AI side. And so that's why we call it AQ nav. It's AI and quantum coming together to create a navigational platform. And this platform, Peter, cannot be jammed or spoofed. It is air gapped. There's no way to connect to it. It's not on the Internet. It doesn't communicate with any satellites, doesn't need any satellites, doesn't communicate with any radio frequencies. It's simply listening to the Earth. It's one way. Listening to the Earth and understanding the way that birds do, understanding the field right below it and navigating with that and what we've shown, and the Air Force announced this so I can talk about it publicly, is that indeed, you know, this AQNAV in combination with inertial navigation systems, INS, as we all know, I think on this podcast, IMU's inertial.

Measurement units that are tracking their movement directionally and accelerationally, moment to moment, that's with gyroscopes.

So from the earliest days of the Apollo missions to today flying, there are gyroscopes in planes and in rockets as well. And we all recall pulling that string of a gyroscope and how it precesses, it moves in its ways. And you could hold it this way, you can hold it that way, you can hold it this way. It's always doing its thing. That's the principle we use in INS's and inertial navigation systems. IMUs are example of that. And so the INS is wonderful. The problem is drift. After just 10 minutes, flying at 700 miles an hour, you have drifted significantly. And after an hour or two or three, and that's what's happening to these planes now. They're inside GPS denied areas for hours, hours on end. They're not going to get back to where they need to, nor will they.

Reach there though it, though it is amazing that Charles Lindberg, with nothing less than a rough map made it from New York to le.

But.

But we won't go there. So we've got nav AQ up or aq NAV up and running. I. I want to move the conversation, if we could, to another, another quantum sensor in the magnetic field space, which is what you're doing in the field of medicine, which a lot of folks are sincerely interested in. Would you go there?

Sure. So the same principle of detecting the magnetic fields and having an AI that could read the sensor, look at the signal and ignore the noise, that's the critical signal to noise ratio that we always talk about. We can bring this right back to earth. In hospitals, in clinics, at the bedside, in ambulances, and in preventative, and also even in sports and performance medicine. We can bring it to one of the key medical challenges of our time, which is cardiac care, as we all know. Peter, I think all our listeners know here, heart attacks, cardiac disease, generally speaking, is the number one killer in the.

United States for both men and women. For both men and women. Just to be clear, this is not a male hocus disease.

That's right. It's absolutely both for men and women. And what's absolutely clear is that around the world it is the leading killer. It is a silent killer, very often coming out with almost no warning signs well ahead of time. And we know that our current diagnostic tools fall short. How many times do we know in our experiences with friends, family, colleagues that unfortunately we hear about somebody that had a great physical, was given an A plus in their physical, three months later.

Heart attack can I double down on this. The numbers which I know are 70% of all heart attacks have no precedence, no symptoms, no shortness of breath, no pain. In fact, you can have a zero calcium score, where, you know, your calcified plaque is actually sort of like cement on the side of the arteries, but isn't blocking your coronary artery, denying the heart tissue oxygen. If it's stable, it's fine. It is the inflammatory. The. The soft plaque that can evolve, can break out in the middle of the night and block the supply of blood and oxygen glucose to the heart and give you a heart attack. So does your AQ med help detect that?

So here's what. Yeah, so here's what happened. We realized that the magnetic field is something that we can now detect not just of the Earth, like we just discussed, but also of the body. And it turns out that every time you have electricity, what Michael Faraday taught us back in the 1800s is that every time you have an electric field, you have a magnetic field. That's physics works. And so we know that we have electric pulses in our heart. Most of us still have our natural electric pulses. Those who lose that capability, of course, have a pacemaker, and a pacemaker artificially makes that happen. But talking about the heart, we have these signals that go in. Why do we have this electric signal? So that we can contract the heart. The heart is a muscle. Like any muscle in our body, it contracts when it contracts, of course, it's spurting the blood out. And we go around and hopefully people are also thinking about their second heart. Their second heart are our calf muscles. I hope people are working out their calf muscles because we need the muscles to get that blood back up. So please work out your calf muscles to get that blood back up from.

Not pooling in your venous return, your Venus return.

So we have muscles in our body. When I'm moving my finger right now, my brain is sending a signal to this muscle to contract.

That's actually the muscle. The muscle is down here. But that's. Okay.

Yeah, I'm saying, but sending muscle here. But to contract.

Yes.

And so what we can do is we can pick up with a magnetic field associated with the electricity of the heart. And in fact, we can go beyond ecg. Ekg. Ecg, as it's called in most of the world. EKG is what we call it in America and in the United States is electrocardiography. And as you well know, this is really a very indirect kind of way of looking at the heart. What are we looking at? We're putting pads with wires on people's chests. We're looking at skin conductance. Okay, right. So skin conductance. But now we're really interested in an organ that is inside the body cavity, beyond bone and tissue of the skin, beyond that. And in fact, it is a very poor indicator of exactly what's going on inside the heart. You can tell some things, of course. And actually, I have a glass right here. I don't know if people can see it, but it has all the EKG symbols, the various waveforms on it, and it tells you about NSRs and tachycardia, bradycardia, PVC aflutter, afib, STEMI. So I always keep this near me.

That's the PQRS complex.

Yes. In case I have to interpret a EKG at any moment. But in fact, there's a form of heart attack that we call nstemi. What does NSTEMI mean? Well, STEMI is st, elevated myocardial infarction. Stemi and the S and T. We give letters, as you know, Peter, to the various parts of the waveform. And so a STEMI heart attack, we can see on an ecg, but nstemi, by definition, non. St, elevated myocardial infarction, we cannot see on the EKG because there is no elevation. There's no elevation of the waveform. So what do we do? Well, it turns out years ago, people realized that the magnetic field of the heart is richer in information. It comes out intact. Just like you talked about, Peter, during our AQ NAV conversation, that the magnetic field goes through the oceans. We could detect it underwater, above water, here, there in the earth, above the earth, inside the earth. It is. It is everywhere. The same thing with our heart's magnetic field as well. And so if we can pick up the magnetic field of the heart, we can actually detect far more than the indirect skin conductance of the ekg. And that's actually what's now happened at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. We now have devices in clinical trial, not approved yet, but in clinical trial, that allow us to pick up the magnetic field of the heart using these sensors. But again, just like the navigation, the hardest part, Peter, was not the sensing. The hardest part was the quantitative AI that could find that signal and ignore the noise. The hospital environment, Peter, as you all know, so noisy.

So noisy.

Noisy Problems. Here was our first problem. We had our prototype out of our Palo Alto labs. We're all excited. First hospital we went to is UCSF hospital. Wheeled it in and started taking readings and realized that the elevator shaft was 20ft away from our device, was going up and down. And of course there's electromagnetism involved in those big weights that go up and down. And the magnets that, that they're used in an elevator to go up and down was destroying our ability to find the signal in the heart. And so we literally, when people say go back to the lab, we literally wheeled it back to our lab and redesigned it so that we would have more of a robust ability to look at the heart and ignore the noise. In fact, that's what happened. We're now on our seventh iteration of this device and I'm happy to report that the trials are going quite well with real patients in emergency rooms. This is not. Once in a while someone stops by to kind of check this thing out. This is inside an emergency room.

Mscg, magnetocardiology.

That's right.

And so I. Is it faster? Is it more accurate? What is it that differentiates it from what is now, you know, decades?

Yeah. So gold standard today is troponin levels, which as many of our listeners will know is a blood draw has to be taken to a lab inside the hospital in red. And troponin levels are not specific to the heart. It indicates muscle breakdown, muscle weakness, but it is not specific to the heart. Lots of false positives, false negatives, really not the greatest thing in the world, but that's what we've got today. And so it often takes at least one blood draw, that's a two plus hour cycle to find out what's happening with this person. 8 million chest pain presentations to emergency rooms a year just in the us Only a fraction of them are having a heart attack at that moment. Need to triage very quickly to find out what's happening. But it takes one blood draw in more than half the cases, takes at least two troponin blood draws. Now we're talking four or five, six hours after they've entered into the emergency room. Not only are they not getting treated well, also they're taking up resources in the ed, in the emergency department. And we're not treating others, you know, that need treating as well. And so this device is able to detect what's going on in under five minutes. Non invasive, no rays coming out of it, keep your clothes on, no wires, no crazy pads.

This is Star Trek technology. You sort of step in, did you have a heart attack? Is your heart in good health or not?

Yeah, exactly. That's amazing indication, Peter, that we're going for is this Triage application. Over time, we'll add more capabilities to this device and to the AI looking at afib, looking at lots of other things. But initially we're going for this emergency department issue. And that's why we're right now inside the Mount Sinai Hospital, inside the Mayo Clinic Cardiac Hospital, and that's giving us the data that we'll need to then seek approval for this device.

Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. Company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists until that day when you have a pain in your side. You go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on and you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today, and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body mri, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a grail blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup, and it's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. You might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com Peter When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller LifeForce, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com Peter we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things. I offer my Entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com Peter it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode.

All right, next topic, a big one, drug discovery. You're already working with Sanofi and ucsf. Can you use the models, the equations of quantum physics that the greats gave us a century ago to help me help you help everybody find this specific drug that's going to work for them?

Yeah. So this is a critical, critical challenge, as we all know, 8 to 10 years on average preclinical work before you get a molecule into phase one trials.

It's insane, by the way. Insane amount of time and money.

Absolutely crazy. And then you get into trials, as we all know, you got to do phase one, phase two, phase three. And what is the percentage of failure in these trials as we're moving through all phases? The answer we talked about last time, 90% failure. 90% failure. I mean, what other industry works this way? If you and I had the construction industry, the Peter, wonderful construction industry. We're going to build people hotels and buildings. We said, hi, by the way, 90% chance it's going to fall down in 30 days. But please use us, use the construction.

Industry, and we'll charge, we'll charge you billions per building.

Billions. That, by the way, you can't recoup. Okay, yes. But anyway, I mean, no other industry works with these kind of failure rates. And that's why that 10% success that actually gets out to market, the pharma companies have to charge so much for it because it's got to pay for the 90% of failure. People are like, why is everything so expensive? You. It's because of this core dynamic. The dynamic is broken.

And I want to remind people, even after the FDA has approved this drug and you're buying it at a sometimes hundreds of dollars per, per pill, sometimes thousands of dollars per injection, it still doesn't work for everybody. It's, you know, prescribed to the success rate per individual is in the order of 10, 20, 30%, because it has to be just good enough for the FDA to give its approvals and not do harm, doesn't guarantee it's actually going to work.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, again, people are doing their best under the current dynamic. I actually believe that, you know, the biopharma companies are one of the most positive things on this planet and that they're trying their best, but they don't have the right tools. And so what we realize at Sandbox AQ is we can actually build that tool. We can build software that would embody the molecular dynamics, the actual equations that under that help us understand whether this molecule would fit into that target in the body. And that means, yes, it means going down to that electron level. Just like people watch movies where they shrink themselves down. Not really possible. But anyway, it's a movie, it's fun. But we have to, in our minds, get ourselves down to that electron level. Because that valence electron, that outer electron on that edge of that atom of that molecule that we call it a treatment, it's got a lock in, like lock and key into one of the electrons that is on the outer edge of the receptor. And there's got to be binding. If there's no binding, we're not going to have efficacy. And by the way, if we also start binding to other things, what we call off target effects, that is things we don't want to bind to, we could have toxic side effects. And so we've got to look at both. We've got to check what is going to bind to that we want it to bind to and what's going to bind to that we don't want it to bind to. And so this becomes a very complicated set of equations and calculations. And the conventional wisdom, Peter, was if we go back, roll back seven, seven, six, seven years, oh, this is not possible on conventional computers. This is not possible. And you won't be able to do this. In fact, fast forward, what we've shown is actually we can do was a lot of collaboration with folks who are designing chips at Alphabet, and then of course now with Nvidia. We've announced several times various partnerships with Nvidia that allowed us to expand the Cuda language that is inside, embedded inside the chip and give ourselves the ability to go into this large quantitative models, quantitative AI that embodies with it the ability to calculate the quantum equations on a scale basis, use that as a generated data set. So people talk about what data drives your AI model, and normally what they're thinking of in their head is what data from the outside world drives your model. In the case of large language models, that is all the words on the Internet, they just read it and suck in X and Instagram posts and things like that and social media comments and that becomes their data set. In here, we're actually generating the data set, Peter, from the equations themselves because they don't exist.

Out there. They can't be found on the Internet. You need to create the data set and interpolate from there.

That's right, exactly right, yeah. So that allows us to have this big leap forward. We're now already with real molecules for, you know, various neurodegenerative diseases. From ucsf, a Nobel Prize winning laboratory, we've been able to really help them refine the molecules that they started with and help them cut the time, cut the cost and get them into clinic much, much faster. And so this is a very, very exciting moment in the history of humanity and our ability to create treatments. And when we think about the number of approved drugs every year, listeners may think that hundreds or thousands of new drugs are approved a year. In fact, it's on average about 48 to 50 new drugs a year. And most of those three quarters of those, Peter, are not first in human drugs. They're me too drugs where somebody has a patient on a theme. And so there's only about a dozen or so first in human novel drugs approved a year. For the world. For the world.

This is a, this is a huge area. There are companies like in silicone medicine and others that have been working in this area. You're bringing a different set of, of technical tools, but the future here is the ability. We also spoke last time about the work that DeepMind is doing in AlphaFold, AlphaFold 3, Alpha Proteo and such. But again, this is a brand new set of tools to help model drugs in silico. But it's a future as well where you're going to be able to, to create, if you would virtualize clinical trials to make sure before it goes into humans, we know it works with a high probability.

That's correct. We still need those clinical trials. The FDA still requires that. Understood. But we can basically run through a scenario of what that clinical trial is going to actually yield before we go into the actual human clinical trial. So this is complementary to tools. For example, you mentioned in silicone medicine. Great company. And we're finding ourselves bringing a complementary and powerful new set of tools to the table. And hopefully all working together, we can really have a lot of breakthroughs. So that's just in the biopharma space. And of course, Peter, you know, molecules are molecules, atoms are atoms, electrons chemistry for batteries.

For my favorite, I still want you to help me solve temperature superconducting. That's a big one.

Real quick.

I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is I use a lotion every morning. And every night. Religiously. Called One Skin, it was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. Let's go to one last subject here, because I know a lot of the folks listening and watching are bitcoin holders, crypto holders. And the. The scary boogeyman out there is once we have quantum computing, we can crack every code. And my wallet. And your wallet is open to anyone with a good quantum computer. So there's a last one, maybe it's one of many, but one that we've discussed, which is your active guard. So tell me, how are you protecting my bitcoin wallet?

So active guard, which is a Q T I V E active guard. Again, bringing the AI and quantum aspects together here is critical because what's happening now is a very big moment in the safeguarding of our data and of our digital currencies. The last time a major security protocol was rolled out to the world, Peter, was in the late 70s and early 80s. Three individuals, Rsna Revest, Shamir Adelman, developed an incredible idea that we could actually exchange information over the wild and woolly west of the Internet without having to meet first in a bunker. Prior to that, we'd have to meet in a bunker. We'd have to exchange keypads. We'd have to say, on Monday, we're going to use the following key and we're going to scramble information with that, and then you'll descramble with that key. So that's symmetric key encryption. Symmetric. We're both using the same key to encrypt and to decrypt. Right. And that's how we did things in World War I and World War II, and that's how Caesar did it.

With the Caesar cipher code and all.

Yes, yeah, all that stuff. Symmetric key. But we know the limitations of that because if we had to pay for everything on Amazon that way, we'd have to fly to Seattle every time we want to do something, exchange the keys, go back, then use our credit card with that, and then somebody might find that key and go from there. But what RSA gave us is asymmetric keys. And so the private key is different than the public key. And so by doing that, I could find Amazon's public key. I can, my browser can grab it. It encrypts my credit card with Amazon's public key. I send it to Amazon and they use their private key to now decrypt it and charge my credit card, which makes me very, very happy. So what we now have is a beautiful system, and that's the bedrock, Peter, of our multi, multitrillion dollar economy around the world without disability. Yes, e commerce is part of, but also ach wire transfers, also the ability to share information and have private patient data in your hospital. All this is encrypted and stored and protected by asymmetric key cryptography. And RSA is an example. Another example is ECC elliptic curve cryptography. It was initially thought years ago that elliptic curve would form a bulwark, would be resistant to the quantum attack. But it turns out it's just as amenable to attack as rsa. And what we now know and what Peter Shor showed in his 1994 paper when he was at Bell Labs, Peter Shor is now respected scientist at MIT. And what he showed in his 94 paper is that ultimately quantum computers will crack, will bring down rsa, ECC and the other asymmetric key protocols that we use every single day in our phones. When you use WhatsApp and it says encrypted end to end, what is that encryption? That is this asymmetric key encryption we're talking about here right now. And so as quantum computer companies, the people building the hardware, there's a few dozen of them out there getting better and better at scale, scale and fault tolerant. We're getting closer to Q day, we're getting closer to that day when quantum computers will crack RSA and ecc. So the world, thank God in this case, actually has been preparing the governments of the world, those of us in industry, academia, have been collaborating for eight years now and to find a new set of protocols that would resist this quantum attack. We call it pqc. Post Quantum cryptography, of course. Assume quantum is here in the post quantum world, how do we encrypt? And I'm happy to say that on August 13th this year, 2024, just a bit, just about two months ago, in fact, the governments of the world announced that we now have standardized a set of PQC protocols. These are ways of encrypting using asymmetric keys, also private, public, but in a way that is not using the number theoretic frameworks that we had back from RSA and ecc. In fact, they're doing in such a way that is not amenable to quantum attack. There are also other ways of protecting your data using QKD quantum key distribution. Maybe in another podcast we'll go into that. But bottom line is what we had to do with Active guard. We at SandboxAQ realized that the world, every bank, every government, every telco, every individual ultimately needed to look at their encryption on their phones, in their servers, in the cloud, on premises, inventory it in a scaled way and start creating a triage and then a roadmap of migration to the new protocols. For a bank that typically takes seven to 10 years. A typical migration takes seven to 10 years. Now let's get back to Bitcoin. So Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Why do we call it cryptocurrencies? Because these are based on encryption, right? That's the cryptography in cryptocurrencies. And the encryption they're based on unfortunately is RSA and ecc, Bitcoin, Ethereum. Each one is based on either RSA or ECC or variations thereof. And so ultimately we've got to redo the foundations of blockchain itself. And of course everything then built on blockchain will then be helped, be it cryptocurrencies or other blockchain types of applications, digital contracts and so on, so forth. And so that's going to be work to be done over the next five years I'm hoping, and I put out an invitation now to the blockchain community, let's start working together to start migrating these applications over time. Because what we don't want is for someone to have a real time quantum computer in the future, be able to see that your transaction is about to go through of your spend of your transfer of Bitcoin and then be able to spoof in at that moment and double spend that particular coin that that could happen in the future. The quantum computers do not exist today to do that. But that's why look how long it took to fork Bitcoin in terms of the kind of forks we've had to do over the years. This takes time, we've got to start now.

And the, the post quantum encryption protocols that have been been adopted, are governments and institutions beginning to roll those out today?

They're, they're beginning to make that migration. So the first step, like just like we talked about when you feel like, hey, I don't feel exactly right, I've got some symptoms, you go to a hospital, you go to a clinic, you get diagnosed. So the first step in the migration from RSA ECC to the new post quantum protocols is diagnostics. Yes. We have to take a inventory continuously of all the files and the applications and the network sockets in a large organization. And that's what Active Guard does. It does so on a scalable basis. Using some smarts. It goes into the network, finds all the encryption that's being used in a large bank, a large telco, a large organization, and then inventories it, gives the ciso, the chief Information Security Officer and their entire team a report, a continuous report, a dashboard, here's what's good, here's what's not good, and then gives them a roadmap to say, this is really important data. Let's migrate this first over to the new protocols. Here's something you probably could wait on, maybe you can wait two years on that because given resources, you have to make choices. So that's what Active Guard is about, Peter. It's about this huge global migration that we're undertaking now. But it's not just a one time thing. This is not just like Y2K. Okay, we did it. This is something that we always have to guard against because what happens is coders are writing new applications all the time and they could also be using bad encryption. And two examples of bad encryption. Please, listeners, ask your CISOs, ask your cyber people if they're using that in your organization. MD5 and SHA1 are two examples of hashing protocols that are used throughout our government and banking systems today. Nobody wants to be using them, but these are ways of protecting passwords that have been broken. Back in 2008-2009, these two particular ways of protecting your passwords have been already broken. But unfortunately, organizations got so big and their IT systems got so big, it's hard to ferret all these out. That's what Active Guard does. It ferrets it out, alerts the cyber team, and then we'll fix it. If the cyber team wants the software to indeed fix it. So there's all kinds of things we must guard against in the encryption area. But this, Peter, is the new emerging space in cyber. Of course, there are many tools already for antiviral, antiviruses, malware, firewalls, all good tools. We need all those tools. The emerging part of cyber now is modern encryption management. Modern encryption management.

Jack, Hillary, I'm always re energized. You are a nuclear power source, a fusion power source in the world.

Thank you for an incredible work.

Where do folks find you on social media?

Where do they go?

Learn more about sandboxaq sure On X.

Formerly known as Twitter Jack H My name J A C K H I D a r y ackhitory on Twitter LinkedIn very active on LinkedIn. Please find me Jack H on LinkedIn. And of course we have a lot of social media and blog posts and papers and peer reviewed science papers coming coming out and have come out on our website sandboxaq.com Remember the AQ, AI.

And Quantum Amazing Jack Love you buddy. Look forward to seeing you soon. Thank you for the support you give to all these incredible areas. Thank you for your support of xprize and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Great. Peter thanks so much. Take care.

Sam.