GPS is very brittle yeah it’s also can be spoofed right and that’s right now is what Russia is doing over Ukraine uh it’s what Iran is doing in much of the Gulf region it’s what China is doing uh 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 5 minutes that’s extraordinary can you make money with Quantum Tech technology we spun out about 2 and 1/2 years ago raised around the 500 million using lqm large quantitative models combining that with Quantum Technologies this is the recipe for great great success welcome to moonshots part two with Jack hitory 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 sandbox AQ Jack
[00:01:03] hit 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 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 uh is it something that is actual business and you’ve turned it into a business so let’s jump in there sure yeah what we realize is that um if we marry Quantum Technologies Quantum approaches with AI uh specifically quantitative AI uh then we
[00:02:02] can actually build products for today we can actually deliver value today to real customers Global 1000 customers all around the world uh let’s go through some examples Peter uh just and just for reference here you know you kicked you know you built sandbox AQ out of alphabet it was spun out of alphabet with support of Sergey Brin Eric Schmidt as your chairman and out of the box you raised a half a billion dollars which is an amazing round I mean 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 um just to give people a sense of this being a real business and then jumping into your different products uh sure Peter exactly right uh we spun out about two and a half years ago raised around the 500 million uh and just fast forward two and a half years later uh we built actually a very robust business with lots of really big c customers uh customers in
[00:03:01] the Pharma space customers in the Aerospace sector uh customers in energy and batteries uh really big sectors of our society so what you see is that when you look at quantitative approaches uh using lqm large quantitative models combining that with Quantum Technologies this is a recipe for great great success so let’s go through some examples uh let’s take Quantum sensors uh Quantum sensors are here today uh 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 site Quantum ionq and many others very exciting to see that and you know in a number of years uh 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
[00:04:02] 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 uh protects us um from uh all kinds of uh harmful radiation that hits our Earth and those planets that lost their magnetic field or do not have one uh are not as habitable as ours and one of the beautiful things about Earth is this magnetic field you ever see that uh the animations uh when you look at Earth from space and you see how it’s protecting us um uh from various uh radiation it’s a wonderful wonderful thing but we can also use that magnetic field in a variety of ways we can na now
[00:05:00] all of us as kids probably had a compass that Compass pointed North and we would uh 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 uh in fact I had the opportunity to see the Arctic turn the Arctic turn is an amazing bird it’s a white bird that travels 24,000 kilometers a year uh because it goes from the North Pole to the South Pole I have beautiful photos of you in your in your big uh you know winter gear down in the South Pole yes I was wasn’t at South Pole yet but I was in Antarctica I was in Antarctica and I had the opportunity to see the Arctic tur 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 step on north of the Arctic Circle and I saw an Arctic turn there on its way up
[00:06:01] and and so that was just very appreciated the um ability to see the Arctic ter in both places but how did it do it how does the arctic turn and travel these thousands of kilometers off and over water well one of the things that it’s able to do of course is to pick up the magnetic field of uh the Earth and and many many birds have that ability it’s not just Birds uh when we look at certain kinds of whales many species of whales are able to do 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 uh scurrying towards the uh the Water uh they’re not actually picking up some scent of the water or something like that it’s actually uh using magnetic fields as well so a lot of the animal kingdom does that we humans have lost that ability innately
[00:07:01] to do so so we need to use technology and the good news is that’s what sbox a has just done uh 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 uh in case that we turned off ours against them and so they have their own uh us and Europe have them but unfortunately the GPS signal is very easy to jam it’s yeah 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 um if you want to jam GPS you can you can literally go online it’s not legal so please don’t do it but uh if you go online you could find Little Boxes they
[00:08:01] look like large walkie-talkies essentially and you could Jam GPS for your entire neighborhood uh and if you have a bigger one you can jam it over a whole city and that’s right now is what Russia is doing over Ukraine uh it’s what Iran is doing in much of the Gulf region it’s what China’s doing uh in and around Taiwan it’s happening right now this is uh 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 uh it it 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 finire as an example one of the one of the Scandinavian Airlines has had to cut routes uh 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 we know this is public info China and
[00:09:00] Russia have both announced capability to take satellites out yeah just take them out of the sky unfortunately so we’ve built an amazing dependency on GPS um and of course the other thing is GPS doesn’t work underwater um where you where the signal gets attenuated very quickly with like you know just a tiny amount of water underwater bingo so underwater is an issue as well as well as also underneath uh in tunnels and if you’re doing uh you know you’re in caves or you’re looking for different uh minerals uh under under the Earth again no GPS uh to be have there 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 uh two decades to actually map this uh field and it turns out uh we have the core field of the earth uh 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
[00:10:02] center of our Earth uh 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 right 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 uh it has a number of minerals that are ferromagnetic ferromagnetic means that they’re not themselves cells innately magnetic but they could be magnetized right just like a paper clip iron nickel Cobalt all kinds of things and and so uh 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 and so when you actually pass over the Earth you could see different distributions and now that we’ve mapped it we can navigate with the crustal field so this is like a
[00:11:02] this is like a magnetic fingerprint of a of a region and is it really a high enough Fidelity for me to know where I am on my you here in Santa Monica or you know in a sub off the coast of camat gree I mean it’s that it’s that level of fidelity yeah just let the the viewers know Peter right now isn’t a submarine off the coast of it’s wonderful technology to to see you Peter um but uh but in in fact it is it is ability so just like if you go back to Google Earth and Google Street View when Google Earth First launched uh 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 uh 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 Museum and that’s what
[00:12:00] will happen with the magnetic uh 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 um 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 uh story so given this magnetic map and given a sensor uh 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 P pattern over time and then you’re matching that pattern that’s right and this is a Quantum sense so when me when we say Quantum s so what do we mean we mean that it’s actually uh
[00:13:02] using a Quantum effect so uh in the case of some of these sensors uh they’re called optically pumped magnetometry that means that you have an element in there uh that element has various electrons and then you pump in uh Optical uh energy which is photons essentially into the electron the electron absorbs the photon the 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 uh 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 it you can down to there there’s no distinction between you know you can go here then go here then here then here you could stand anywhere you want to uh on that on that particular ramp um a ladder though is something that you’re either on wrong wrong one wrong two rung three rung four
[00:14:00] very discreete ties in terms of where you are on that ladder to give you another analogy in music if I have a violin or guitar I could be I could put my fingers anywhere I want to along that violin um uh violin string and I could then have a different frequency uh that is played once I draw the bow a piano on the other hand is discretized right say a piano is like what Quantum is whereas a violin is like what the class iCal world is you can analog move anywhere you you want to the same thing with the ladder the ladder is like Quantum um the electron could only exist at certain rungs of energy cannot exist in between those rungs uh 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 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
[00:15:00] 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 or 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 GB of data that then go to our AIS and
[00:16:01] 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 mlife.com Peter when Tony and I wrote Our New York Times bestseller life force we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain lifee memberships if you go to Fountain life.com Peter we’ll put you to the top of the list really it’s something that is um 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 are healthy lifespans
[00:17:00] go to fountainlife docomo to you as one of my listeners all right let’s go back to our episode so I brought a group of x-prize benefactors on a on a deep Tech Journey to the valley we came to sandbox AQ yes you came Labs yes yes and uh it beautiful and we saw we saw this Tech and um you know it is a manageable size I will 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 uh it it’s uh it’s relatively small and most of that box has air in it so uh ultimately will’ll bring it down to much smaller form factors Peter as you may have heard during the visit uh but the Air Force wanted a certain form factor for you know the testing that we’ve done over the last two years um and the Air Force has indeed publicly tested it we’ll get to that in one minute but now is the
[00:18:00] 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 uh and it releases a photon conservation of energy it absorbed a photon now it’s got to release a photon when a photon is released under a magnetic field we have something called the zemon effect which allows us to back track back calculate what the strength of that magnetic field is given uh 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 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 uh great sensors means you have too much
[00:19:00] 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 uh that we fly on with the Air Force lots of people could be there everyone with their cell phones every cell phone istic field every watch is giving off field every every heart every heartbeat as we’ll learn a few minutes everything exactly everything is giving off so it’s a very noisy environment if you had to um physically try to Shield all that out that would be very very difficult and so you need an AI now a quantitative AI an AI that doesn’t think about words this is not a tattoo PT this is an AI that thinks about numbers and these numbers are the strengths from moment to moment of the magnetic fields um 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
[00:20:00] that’s what that’s what the hardest part was the hardest part actually wasn’t the quantum side it was the AI side uh and so that’s why we call it AQ naav 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 uh 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 uh so I can talk about it publicly is that indeed uh you know this AQ naav in combination with uh inertial navigation systems inss as we all know I think on this uh podcast IM imuse inertial measurement units that are tracking their movement directionally and
[00:21:00] acceleration moment to moment yes with gyroscopes so from the earliest days of the Apollo missions to today uh flying there are gyroscopes in Planes uh 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 inss in inertial navigation systems I use our an example of that and so the ins is wonderful the problem is drift um after just 10 minutes flying at 700 miles an hour you have drifted significantly and after an hour or two or three uh and that’s what’s happening to these planes now they’re they’re inside GPS denied areas for hours on end um they’re not going to get back to where they need to uh nor will they reach the though it though it is amazing that Charles Lindberg with nothing less than a rough map made it from New York to Leber but but we won’t
[00:22:01] go there so we’ve got nav AQ up or AQ nav up and running um 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 are sincerely interested in would you go there sure so the same principle of detecting magnetic fields and having an AI that could read the sensor look at get the signal and ignore the noise right 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 uh key medical challenges of our time which is Cardiac Care uh as we all know Peter um I think all our listeners know here uh heart attacks cardiac disease generally speaking is the number one killer in the United States for both men and women for both
[00:23:02] men and women just to be clear this is not a male Focus disease that’s right it’s absolutely both for men and women and uh what’s absolutely clear is that uh around the world it is the the leading killer uh it is a silent killer very often coming out with almost uh no warning signs you know well ahead of time and we know that our current diagnostic tools fall short how many times do we know in our experiences um with with friends family colleagues that unfortunately we hear about somebody that had a great uh physical was given an A+ in their physical three months later heart attack can I 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 um where you know your calcified plaque is actually sort of like cement on the side the arteries if it isn’t blocking your coronary artery denying
[00:24:02] the heart tissue oxygen if it’s stable it’s fine it is the inflammatory the the soft plaque that can evulse can break out in the middle of the night um and and block the supply of of blood and oxygen glucose to the heart and give you a heart attack so does does your aqm help detect that so here’s what yeah so here’s what happened we realize that the magnetic field uh 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 Faraday what Michael Faraday taught us uh 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 paac maker and a paac maker artificially makes that happen but um talking about the heart uh
[00:25:00] we have these uh signals that go in why do we have this electric signals 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 those calf 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 your Venus return your Venus return Yes exact so we have muscles in our body and when I’m moving my finger right now my brain is sending a signal uh to this muscle to contract that’s actually actually the muscle the muscle is found here but that’s okay yeah I’m say but sending muscle here but to contract over here yes um and and so uh what we can do is we can pick up with the magnetic field associated with the electricity of the heart and in fact we can go beyond ECG EK ECG as it’s called Uh in most of the
[00:26:00] world EKG is what we call it in America in the United States is electrocardiography and as you will know um uh 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 chest we’re looking skin conductance okay uh right so skin conductance uh but now we’re really interested in an organ that is inside the body cavity Beyond bone and tissue of of the skin beyond that and in fact uh it is a very poor indicator of exactly what’s going on inside the heart you can tell some things of course uh and actually I have a glass right here I don’t if people can see it but it has all the EKG symbols uh the various waveforms on it and it tells you about nsrs and Tachi cardia brat cardia P PVC a flutter aib stemi so I always keep this near me the pqrs complex yes in case I have to um uh interpreted a EKG at any moment um but uh but in fact in
[00:27:02] fact there there’s a form of heart attack that we call an stemi what does n stemi mean well stemi is St elevated myocardial infarction stemi and the S&T we give letters to as you know Peter to the various parts of the waveform and so a stemi heart attack we can see on an ECG but in stemi by definition non St elevated myocardial infarction we cannot see on the EKG because 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 can 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 hearts 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
[00:28:01] indirect skin conductance of the EKG and that’s actually what’s now happened at mountai 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 magnetic noisy problems here was our first problem we had our prototype out of our pal Alto Labs we’re all excited first hospital we went to was UCSF Hospital wielded in uh and started taking readings and realized that the Elevator Shaft was 20 ft away from our device was going up and down and of course there electromagnetism involved in those big weights that go up and down and the magnets that that
[00:29:01] they’re used uh in an elevator uh 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 wield it back to our lab and redesigned it so that we would have more of a robust um uh ability to look at the heart and ignore the noise in fact that’s what happened uh we’re now on our seventh iteration of this uh device and I’m happy to report that the trials are going quite well uh 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 MCG Magneto cardiography right and so I is it faster is it more accurate what is it that differentiates it from what is now you know gold standard yes so gold standard today is troponin levels uh which as many of our listeners will know is a blood draw has to be taken to a lab
[00:30:00] inside the hospital and 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 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 not invasive no Rays coming out of it keep your clothes on no
[00:31:02] wires no no crazy pads this is start this is startrek technology you sort of Step In did you have a heart attack is your heart in good health or not yeah exactly first indication Peter that we’re going for is this triage application over time will add more capabilities to this uh device and to the AI looking at aib 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 saana Hospital inside the Mayo Clinic um 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 body we’re all optimists until that day when you have a
[00:32:01] pain in your side you go to the physician or 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 a dexa scan a Grail blood cancer test a full executive blood workup it’s the most advanced workup you’ll ever receive 150 gigabyt 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
[00:33:00] 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 decomp when Tony and I wrote Our New York Times bestseller life force we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain life memberships if you go to Fountain life.com back/ Peter will’ll put you to the top of the list really it’s something that is um 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 decomp 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 uh a big
[00:34:00] one drug Discovery you’re already working with Santa 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 uh 8 to 10 years on average pre-clinical work before you get a mo molecule into phase one uh trials it’s insane By the Way Insane matter of time and money absolutely crazy uh 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 and uh wonderful construction industry we going to build people hotels and buildings we said by
[00:35:00] the way 90% chance it’s going to fall down in 30 days but please use us use the construction industry and we’ll and we’ll Char 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 like why is everything so expensive it’s because of this core Dynamic the dynamic is broken in 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 Subs 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
[00:36:00] 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 um I actually believe that you know the biofarma 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 d dyamics 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 uh is not really possible but anyway it’s a movie it’s fun but uh we have to in our minds get ourselves down to that electron level because that veence electron that outer electron on that edge of that atom of that molecule that we call it a treatment it’s to lock in like lock in key into one of the electrons uh that is
[00:37:03] on the outer edge of the receptor and there 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 s six seven years oh this is not possible on conventional computers this is not possible and you you won’t be able to do this in fact fast forward what we’ve shown is actually we can do it uh it it it was a lot of collaboration uh with folks who are designing chips at alphabet and then of course now with Nvidia we’ve announced several times uh various part Partnerships with Nvidia that allowed it us allowed us to expand uh the Cuda uh
[00:38:03] 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 credit and suck in X and Instagram uh posts and things like that and social media comments and that becomes their data set and 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
[00:39:02] now already with real molecules for uh you know various neurod degenerative diseases from UCSF a Nobel prizewinning laboratory uh 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 uh get them into Clinic much much faster and so this is a very very exciting moment uh in the history of humanity our ability to create treatments and when we think about the number of approved drugs every year um 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 uh drugs a year approved and most of those three qus of those Peter are not burs in human drugs they’re me too drugs where somebody has a variation on a theme and so there’s only about a dozen or so first inhuman novel drugs approved a year for the world yeah for the world this is a this is a huge area
[00:40:02] um there are companies like in silico 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 we also spoke last time about um about the work that deep mind is doing in Alpha fold Alpha fold 3 Alpha prodeo and such but again this is a brand new set of of tools to help um model uh drugs in in silico but it’s a future as well where you’re going to be able to uh to create if you would virtualized 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 uh actual human clinical trials so um this is complementary to
[00:41:02] tools for example you mentioned in silicone medicine great company uh and we’re finding ourselves bringing a complimentary 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 elect chemistry for batteries for my my favorite I still want you to help me solve room temperature super conducting 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 10 amino acid sequence that is a cytic that kills scile cells in your skin and this literally reverses the age of your skin and I think it’s one of the most incredible products I use it all the time time uh if you’re interested check out the show notes I’ve
[00:42:00] 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 uh 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 we’ve discussed which is your active guard so tell me how are you protecting my my Bitcoin wallet so active guard which is AQ TI active guard again um bringing the AI and Quantum aspects together here uh is critical because what’s happening now um is is a very big moment in the safeguarding of our data and of our digital currencies uh the last time a major security protocol was rolled out to the world Peter was in the late 70s and early 80s three individuals R sna
[00:43:01] reest 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 a keypads we’d have to say on Monday we’re GNA 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 in encryption symmetri because we’re both using the same key to encrypt and to decrypt right and that’s how we did things in World War I in World War II and that’s how Caesar did it with the Caesar cyma 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 wanted to do exchange uh 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
[00:44:00] 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 uh charge my credit card which makes me very very happy uh so what we now have is a beautiful system and that’s the Bedrock Peter of our multi- multi-trillion dollar economy around the world without this ability yes e-commerce is part of but also AC 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 was initially thought years ago that elliptic curve would form a bullwark
[00:45:01] would be resistant to the quantum attack but it turns out it’s just as amable to attack as RSA and what we now know and what Peter Shore showed in his 1994 paper when he was at Bell Labs Peter Shaw 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 ke 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 and scale and scale and fault tolerant we’re getting closer to Q day we’re getting closer to that day when quantum computers will crack rscc so the world thank God in this case actually has been preparing um the governments of the world those of us in
[00:46:01] Industry Academia have been collaborating for eight years now and uh to find a new set of protocols that would resist this Quantum attack we call it pqc postquantum cryptography words assume Quantum is here in the postquantum world how do we encrypt and I’m happy to say that on August 13th this year 2024 uh 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 uh these are ways of encrypting using asymmetric Keys also private public but in a way that is not using the number theoretic um Frameworks that we had back from RSA and ECC in fact they’re doing in such a way that is not amable 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 well we had to do with active guard we at sandbox AQ realized
[00:47:00] 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 and start creating a triage and then a road map 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 uh Bitcoin uh 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
[00:48:02] other blockchain types of applications digital contracts uh and and so and 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 uh these applications over time because what we don’t want is for someone to have a realtime quantum computer in the future 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 uh that particular coin um 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 uh the kind of forks we’ve had to do over the years this takes time we’ve got to start now and the the postquantum encryption protocols that have been uh been adopted are governments and institutions
[00:49:01] 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 postquantum protocols is Diagnostics yes we have to take a inventory continuously of all 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 road map to say this is really important data let’s
[00:50:00] migrate this first over to the new protocols here’s something you probably can 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 the one time thing this is not just like y 2K okay we did it um this is something that we always have to guard against because what happen 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 cesos ask your cyber people if they’re using that in your organization md5 and shaan 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 200 8 to 2009 these two particular ways of protecting
[00:51:00] your passwords have been already broken but unfortunately organizations got so big and their it systems got so big it’s hard to feret all these out that’s what active guard does it fets 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 ready for antiviral uh antiviruses uh malware uh firewalls all good tools we need all those tools the emerging part of cyber now is modern encryption management modern encryption management Jack hit I’m always re-energized you are a nuclear power source a fusion power source in the world thank you for the incredible work where to folks find you on social media where do they go learn more about sandbox AQ sure uh uh on X formerly known as twt Twitter Jack hit my name j c k h d a r y jackit on Twitter LinkedIn
[00:52:03] very active on LinkedIn please find me Jack hit on LinkedIn and of course uh we have a lot of uh social media and blog posts and papers and peer reviewed uh science papers coming coming out and have come out on our website sambox aq.com remember the AQ Ai and Quantum amazing Jack love your buddy uh look forward to seeing thank you for the support you give to all these incredible areas thank you for support of xise and I look forward to seeing you soon great Peter thanks so much take care [Music]