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

0:00GPS is very brittle. Yeah, it's also can be spoofed, right? And that's right now is what West is doing over Ukraine. It's what Arata's 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 a heart. This device is able to detect what's going on in under five minutes. That's extraordinary. Can you make money with quantum technologies? We spun out about two and a half years ago, raised around the 500 million, using LQM's large quantitative models, combining that with quantum technologies.

0:40This is a recipe for great, great success.

0:47Welcome to Moon Shots. Part two with Jack Hittery. Today, we're going to talk about quantum applications. Can you make money with quantum technologies? not just quantum computing, quantum technologies, back by popular demand, the incredible CEO of Sandbox AQ, Jack Hitory Jack, good to see you buddy. Peter, good to see you. Last time we spoke, we had quite the conversation about sort of 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.

1:36That's actually making money today. So I mean, people have asked, you know, it's quantum, the world of quantum, you know, decades away. And 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 realizes 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. And just for reference here, you know, you built Sandbox AQ out of alphabet.

2:20It 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 seed round. I mean, like, very few people in the world have half a billion dollars 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 get 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 farmer space, customers in the aerospace sector, customers in energy and batteries, really big sectors of our society.

3:10So what you see is that when you look at quantitative approaches, using LQM's 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 site quantum, IonQ and many others. Very exciting to see that. And in a number of years, we'll have scaled full tolerant quantum computers.

3:54But 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 fields or do not have one are not as habitable as ours.

4:40And one of the beautiful things about Earth is this magnetic field. We never see that. The animations, when you look at Earth from space and you see how it's protecting us from a 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, this kid's 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.

5:16When 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 turn. The Arctic turn is an amazing bird. It's a white bird that travels 24 ,000 kilometers 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. Yeah, so 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.

5:53It's one of the only piece of land that you could step on north of the Arctic Circle, and I saw an Arctic turn there on its way up. And so that was just a really appreciated the ability to see the Arctic turn in both places, but how did it do it? How does the Arctic turn and 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 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.

6:39And 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, scarring towards the water, they're not actually picking up some scent of the water or like that, it's actually using magnetic fields as well. So a lot of the animal kingdom does that. We humans have lost their ability innately to do so. So we need to use technology. And the good news is that's what sandbox aq has just done. Starting about five years ago, we realized that GPS is very brittle. GPS is a series of satellites, of course, is now four GPS systems around the world, US has launched one many years ago, Europe has one, Russia has one, and China has one.

7:24Russia in China realized that they needed their own business, EPS 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 the exact wrong direction. That's right, and that's happening right now. Very sad visaries are spoofing GPS. If you want a jam GPS, 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.

8:04And you can jam GPS for your entire neighborhood. And if you have a bigger one, you can jam it over whole city. And that's 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 is doing in and around Taiwan. It's happening right now. This is, this is, it was front page, Wall Street Journal just two weeks ago. Literally, the digital front page and the physical front page. This was this issue. It impacts both defense, national security as well as the civilian aerospace. Thousands of flights since the beginning of this year have been disrupted.

8:40Some have had to land other places. Finair as an example, one of the one of the Scandinavian airlines has had to cut routes to the Baltic regions because it simply cannot get their planes in. 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 Russia both announced capability to take satellites out. Yeah. 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 under water. Where you hear the signal gets attenuated very quickly with like, you know, just tiny, deep water.

9:21We run the water, bingo. Yeah. 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 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 that actually map this field. And it turns out we have the core field of the earth And that is a mandated field that is a result of the molten iron that's moving around around the core iron ball in the center of our earth.

10:04And that creates a homogenous 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 inatemented 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.

10:43And 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 of a region. And is it really a high enough fidelity for me to know where I am on my, you hear in Santa Monica or in a sub off the coast of Kalamata Greece? I mean, it's that level of fidelity. You just let the viewers know, Peter right now isn't a submarine off the coast of Greenland. It's wonderful technology.

11:29Great to see you, Peter. But in fact, it is. It is a ability. So just like if you 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've had some people 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.

12:10But 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 restrictions. 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 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 over time, and then you're matching the pattern.

12:56That's right. And this is a quantum sense. So what do we mean? So 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 magnetic automatry. 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.

13:36That 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's no distinction between, you know, you go here, then you go here, then here, then here, you could stand anywhere you want to on that, on the particular ramp. A ladder though is something that you're either on, Rung, Rung 1, Rung 2, Rung 3, Rung 4. Very discreet -tized 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 be, I could put my fingers anywhere I want to along that violin string, and I could then have a different frequency that is played once I draw the bow.

14:21A piano, on the other hand, is discreet -tized, 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 want to. The same thing with the latter. The latter 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 billion ball can exist anywhere we want to on the billion tape. Everybody wants 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.

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17:03It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. Alright, let's go back to our episode. So I brought a group of ex -price benefactors on a deep tech journey to the valley. We came to Sandbox, AQ. Yes, you can draw a lot of labs. Yes. And it's beautiful. And we saw this tech. And it is a manageable size. I will call it a black box, but the sensors themselves are relatively small. Yeah. It's a silver box. But yes, it's relatively small. And most of that box has air in it. So ultimately we'll bring it down to much smaller form factors, Peter, as you may have heard during the visit.

17:48But 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. 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 photons it comes back down and it releases a photon. Conservation of energy, it absorbs a photon, now it's got a release of photon. When a photon is released under a magnetic field, we have something called the z -mon 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.

18:31So when we take 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 600, 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 see, we're on a C17. It's a big, big cargo hold that we fly on with the Air Force.

19:09Lots of people can be there. Everyone with their cell phones. Every cell phone is a genetic field. Every watch is giving off a minute. Every heartbeat, as we'll learn. Exactly. Everything is giving off a minute. So it's a very noisy environment. If you had to physically tried 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 chat to PT, 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 and interpret that, but ignore the magnetic field.

19:59That's extraordinary. And that's what the hardest part was. The hardest part actually wasn't the quantum side, it was the AI side. Yeah. 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 spooked. 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. It doesn't need any satellites. It 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.

20:40And what we've shown in the Air Force announced this, so I can talk about it publicly, is that, But indeed, this ACU nav in combination with inertial navigation systems, IMS, as we all know, I think on this podcast. I am used inertial measurement units that are tracking their movement directionally and accelerationally moment to moment as with gyroscopes. 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 could hold it that way, you can hold it this way, it's always doing its thing.

21:23That's the principle we use in INS's and inertial navigation systems, I am used, or 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. Yes. And after an hour, two or three, and that's what's happening to these planes now, they're inside GPS denied areas for hours on end. They're not gonna get back to where they need to. No, will they reach there? Though it is amazing that Charles Lindbergh with nothing less than a rough map made it from New York to Leberje, but we won't go there. So we've got Nav, AQ, up or AQ Nav, up and running.

22:07I want to move the conversation if we could to 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 magnetic fields and having an AI that could read the sensor, look at 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.

22:45We 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 focused 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.

23:25How 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? You can't 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 your calcified plaque is actually cement on the side of the arteries. If it isn't blocking your coronary artery, denying the heart tissue oxygen, if it's stable, it's fine. It is the inflammatory, the soft plaque that can evolce, 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.

24:19So does your ACU -Med help detect that? So here's what, yes, so here's what happened. We realized that the magnetic field is something that we can now detect, not just on the earth, like we just discussed, but also on the body. And it turns out that every time you have electricity, what Faraday, 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 what it does. It's 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.

24:58But talking about the heart, we have these signals that go in. Why do we have these 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 the 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 your venous return your venous return.

25:31So 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 actually the muscle the muscle is down here, but that's okay. Yeah, I'm saying, But it's any muscle here to contract with you. And so what we can do is we can pick up 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, in the United States, is electrocardiography. And as you will know, this is really a very indirect kind of way of looking at the heart.

26:11What 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 the 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 of people can see it. but it has all the EKG symbols, the various waveforms on it, and it tells you about NSRs and Taki Kardi, Rady Kardi, PPC, A -Flether, A -Fib, Stemy.

26:52So I always keep this near me. And that's the PQRS complex. Yes, in case I have to interpret an EKG at any moment. But in fact, in fact, there's a form of heart attack that we call and stemmy. What is stemmy? Well, stemmy is ST elevated myocardial infarction, stemmy, and the S &T we give letters to, as you know, Peter to the various parts of the waveform. And so a stemmy heart attack we can see on an ECG, but end stemmy by definition, non -ST elevated myocardial infarction. We cannot see on the EKG because there is no elevation, There's no elevation of the way from, so what do we do? Well, it turns out years ago people realized that the magnetic field of the heart is richer in information.