 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Saakyan. So excited to be talking about Post-Quantum IoT Security. We have Paul Klase joining us on the show. Hello. Hello. Thanks for coming on. Paul, really appreciate it. Nice to be here. I'm super excited for this. Big shout out to Steve Wait for introducing us. Yeah, great guy. Great guy. And I'm so pumped. This topic is really important as we move into the IoT era and into the security side of that and also into quantum computing. For those who don't know, Paul's background is CEO of AgilePQ, which developed IoT security that survives in a quantum computing era. And you can find the link in the bio below AgilePQ.com as well as his LinkedIn profile. Paul, let's start things off with one of our favorite questions to ask our guests. What are your thoughts on the direction of our world? The direction of our world. You know, I guess I could use the term, it's the best of times and the worst of times. So you have all of this technology that is going to help humanity, everything, all kinds of things in energy, in sensors that can be able to help our world in so many directions. But it's also used by bad actors that can use those kinds of things for clandestine purposes. We've got the best of times when prosperity is amazing, where people have money and food and happiness in a lot of ways, but there are still so many tragic situations around the world. Everything from still vast hunger in some places to children who are at risk, to human trafficking, to all kinds of things that we are grappling with in this world. And it seems like there are times when the faster we go to create good situations in the world, the faster that a negative aspect grows as well. So we've got a lot of work to do, but there's a lot of hope in this world. Yeah, that's actually a frequently reoccurring point from people on the shows. It's the best of times and in some crazy ways the worst of times. And so how do we win this wisdom race, where we have all these democratization of all these exponential technologies, where we also have to level up our wisdom, our ability to maximize prosperity, to know how to play well together. And so what would be maybe a core principle that you would recommend people to embody as we move forward? Well, look, I believe in humanity. I believe that humans are ultimately innately good. And if they perpetrate bad acts, it's because likely they were taught those bad acts in some way along their life. So the perpetuation of education, the perpetuation of ethics, the perpetuation of goodness in the world is absolutely critical from the time that a baby is born. And if we can instill those kinds of feelings in human beings right from the start, then life gets much better. It's just that there are so many disadvantaged civilizations and disadvantaged cultures that start out life in a very difficult situation. And oftentimes it can lead to difficult circumstances within the world. Yeah, this is so critical. This moment as the child is born into the world, there's so much that comes from it ancestrally. And then also those first key months as it's laying down its first inputs that it takes in to have enough love and compassion, food, water, air, shelter, the basic needs, electricity, education. Then that's the thing is that it's taught bad. Malevolence is taught. And so if there is a way to propagate more education around goodness and around ethics and morality, these types of things, then we can figure out how to cooperate and prosper more effectively. I like that a lot. Paul, let's talk about your journey. Who were you growing up? How did you get interested in the fields that you're in today? Yeah, so growing up I grew up on a very small farm in cattle ranch in Idaho. I was an adopted child, adopted when I was three days old, and grew up with an older brother and two younger sisters who were adopted. My mother could not have children biologically. But boy, you would never know it in our households. We had more love, more nurturing, more help, more strength in our home than you can ever imagine. We were as poor as we could be on the small farm. I didn't know that. It was an amazing, amazing childhood. And I grew up just knowing ethics and knowing goodness and knowing to be good to other people being awakened in the middle of the night by my father and saying, come on, our neighbor's barn is burning. We're going down to help put the fire out and keep the embers from going to his haystacks and his home and other buildings. So we grew up being neighbors. We grew up helping people. And what an amazing, amazing upbringing I had. I couldn't have had a better upbringing. It was truly amazing. And just as an interesting side note, I never did know birth family until one year ago right now. And I took a DNA test. And when I got the results back, it's a long story, but I was reading the... I took the test for a medical profile and got the medical profile back and was reading that. I was on a business trip and my wife said, are there any birth relatives? It hadn't occurred to me to look. I was just reading the medical profile and I looked. And there was a birth sister and two birth brothers listed there, half brothers and half sisters. And through that experience, without going into all of the long details, within 30 days, I had met, met online, then spoken with on the phone and then flew to meet birth family on both my father and my mother's side. And my birth father had passed away, but my birth mother is still living. She lives in Olympia, Washington. And I've met her now and seen her many times. And I thought the question, the first question she ever asked me when she got on the phone with me was this. She said, have you had a good life? Are you okay? I've worried every day of my life that I gave you away and it wasn't the right thing to do. And I was able to assure this beautiful woman that she, for whatever reason, if she couldn't raise me, that she did an amazing thing for me because I had such an incredible, impeccable early years in my life. So that's the early stage. Paul, that's such an interesting story. So when you grew up, it was on rural Miss... Idaho. Idaho, rural Idaho. Okay, rural Idaho. And you had another adopted brother and sister group. Two sisters and a brother, yes. Two sisters and a brother. So you have four total adopted children in this family. In this family. Wow. And then, wow. And from three days old. Three days old when I was adopted. And so then, as you're growing up with them, you said that you were given all love and what you needed from the parents that adopted you. And then it was hard for people to see or didn't really feel like it was an adopted family. It felt like it was a biological family. That's when, I think, so important because then the adoption feels like it's... You know, I recall in an instance when I was in grade school when, just as children sometimes naturally do, but they were really giving me a bad time because everyone knew that I was adopted in this small farming community. And I never knew a time when I didn't know that I was adopted. But to me, this was my family and my mother and my father. But some, you know, out on the playground, some kids were giving me a bad time about being adopted and that I was found on the side of the road and all the kinds of things that they can do. And I came in in the second grade and my secondary teacher looked at me and she said, are you okay? And I burst out in tears because I didn't know how to handle that. And she knelt down by me and asked me what was wrong and I told her what had been said. And she stood up and I'll never forget her telling the whole class, you guys have no idea what his parents had to go through to get him. And they love him as much as any parent would love their own child. And it was a great learning experience for the entire class. And it absolutely solidified in me that I'm okay. I'm just fine. That things happen in life, but how you build those and surmount those difficulties means everything. Yeah, and how you have a mentor or a teacher that can help you along the way and help the whole class learn that along the way. Yeah, of course. Those are pivotal moments. It helped you with who you were truly, with embodying who you were and rather than needing to bury it aside to fit in or whatever. That's so important. And then also it's interesting that your biological mother said that, that she worried about you every day and that if you were okay and had a successful life, all that type of things. And that you just recently found that out through DNA testing. You know, there's very interesting things that science is able to unveil for us and that's one of them is the ancestry. So then what about your interest in science and technology in the fields that led you to Agile PQ? How did all these things develop? Who were you? Well, I spent a period of time coming out of college involved in politics. I ran a congressional campaign and went to Washington. I was chief of staff to two congressmen in Washington and worked for the White House doing what's called advanced work, setting up details when they would travel and taking them through the events as they would travel and so forth. I was not involved in policy at the White House, but I learned an awful lot about that. And I've remained active in politics ever since, working on campaigns, being campaign chairman of people who run for the Senate and the House and Governor and various other things and sat on presidential campaign committees. That's been an active part of my life. But through all of that, after I left Washington, D.C., I wanted to get into business and I went into the investment business. And I learned corporate finance and business being involved in that. Then I wanted to move to the operating side and I had a friend, a very dear friend, a wonderful man, had started a technology company in speech recognition software and he invited me to come and join him in his company as a vice president and I did that and started running around the world trying to look for a variety of development contracts for that speech recognition. And then since then I've had the opportunity to go into different kinds of really leading edge technologies and started serving as a CEO and growing these companies and putting money behind them, putting people behind them and growing these leading edge technologies. And it's been a journey because it hasn't been only in software. It's been in software, nanotechnology, solar energy, a variety of different industries. And it's been a real ride. It's been a lot of fun taking those companies, growing them, getting them to the next stage and moving forward. Yeah, very multidisciplinary, polymathic tons of different fields of science and technology, especially politics too in D.C., to kind of learning about how that works. These are like different engines of change and to know how they work makes you more well-rounded. And also it grows your emotional intelligence skills because you have to learn how to relate to people in the political sphere in growing companies, investing in companies that are trying to make different impacts. So then what about what led to then Agile BQ? Well, I had been working in a company that I had grown and it was getting to a larger point. We hired a new CEO who had a PhD in nanotechnology. And then I started doing some consulting for investors who would say, could you come into this company and help get it commercial or in a couple of cases turn it around or find a workout for a company. So I did that for a while. And then a friend invited me to look at this company. He had had a 35-year career at Intel, had been contacted by Agile BQ to see if they could find some markets and do some things. Really good group of people who had founded Agile BQ. But I think the timing was right for maybe the board and the early investors who were more family investors, angels, family and friends to maybe look to someone who had been there and done that before, helped bring the company to the next phase of pulling it into commercial launch. So I went in at first and did some consulting, provided a report very shortly thereafter they asked me to step in as CEO and then I really looked at the markets very strongly, very much in depth and I decided to do it. This is a phenomenal technology, phenomenal opportunity. The timing is right. It's a great opportunity. So I stepped in a couple of years ago and we launched the product a year ago now and got our handful of beta customers last year and now we're in full commercial launch and doing well. So then what did you guys release that last year and where is this being deployed? So we released a technology that is a full security encryption technology with a total footprint of 2 kilobytes. So that means that total encryption security can reside on the smallest of what are called IoT devices, Internet of Things. These are very small computing devices connected to the Internet and mostly they are machine to machine communication. So it's a very small device communicating with the server, collecting data. Sometimes it can be as small as an off-on switch. Sometimes it can be a thermostat on a wall that you run from your smartphone. Sometimes it can be a sensor that's sensing something on a manufacturing floor, whether that be vibration of a motor, heat, light, any all kinds of sensors. They are now connected to the Internet which provides massive amounts of data and allows for greater quality of products greater security in some cases. But those very small devices are so small that they cannot run traditional security. There's not enough computing power, not enough memory and in fact some of them have a total of 100 kilobytes in processing power on those very small devices. Well today's encryption that's run on your smartphone, that encryption takes 3 megabytes to encode and 3 megabytes to decode a message going in and out. That can't operate on these small what are called Class 0, Class 1, Class 2 devices. So our company came along and very bright engineers created a new security for a new computing age and that new security is more secure than that legacy technology which is called AES-TLS, Advanced Encryption Standard Transport Layer System. AES-TLS technology, it's more secure, it's up to 10 times faster, it uses far less battery power, it's just a phenomenal revolutionary change in encryption and security technology. Alright, so let's break down some of the nuance. So it's packaged in 2 kilobytes as the size of the software and then that goes on IoT devices. And the IoT devices have a classification in terms of size, like Class 0's smallest. And what's the largest class size? I don't even know but a smartphone is roughly a Class 3, sometimes a Class 4 device. So got it, so 3 or 4 is on smartphone level. So Class 0 is like we're talking grain of rice. Yeah, it's very, very small chipset, less than 100 kilobytes in processing, very little memory. So it would be analogous to a chipset that's say on a nest thermostat on your wall. Okay, so then something let's say that the chipset in a nest thermostat are the chipset in any of the other sensors like you were describing earlier in the factories for machines that are constantly watching machines or any camera sensors on maybe autonomous vehicles or wherever, right? We want to make sure that what information that camera is seeing when it's looking at the road is then as the data is being transmitted to the server and which is potentially just cloud computing what the camera is seeing and then making decisions in millisecond timeframes that you need to then run that data, that camera sensing data through your encryption which only takes 2 kilobytes, your encrypting it, then you're sending it to the server which needs to then decrypt it to run the computation. Yeah, so you use a key, in essence obfuscate the data, you scramble it, send the message in an encrypted form, then there's a key on the back end that will decode the message it's received by the server and then it can continue to send messages back and forth. What those small devices are lacking today is that kind of encryption, full encryption on a very small device. There are some technologies that people believe are security like a simple authentication and authorization. The server says to an IoT device, are you the right device? The IoT device says, yep, that's me. And then it authorizes a data stream to go back and forth. That's called authorization and authorization. Sometimes small IoT devices will have that, sometimes they don't. The vast majority of the billions of IoT devices that are already deployed across the world have zero security on them, no security on them whatsoever. So if you've got a smart thermostat, in some cases smart doorbells, in some cases smart consumer goods, or sensors on a factory floor, or all kinds of IoT devices, they just simply don't have security. And in some cases there's just a lack of education about why that's even important. People say, well, it's only this amount of data, why would we ever worry about that? There's a massive number of reasons why people can be tremendously exposed and the corporate risk that goes up by having an exposed computing device connected to the internet. Yes, okay, so then the actual process of securing these data streams is extremely important. And then also that you call this slim, secure last internet mile. And then that's also for both the last internet mile, but also it's slim as in the actual tech is two kilobytes, so that's the idea. Secure last IoT mile. Although in today's world these devices are so small we sometimes joke that it's really not no longer an IoT mile, it's an IoT inch. I mean these devices are so small and they're so constrained on computing power and battery power and various other things, yeah. Okay, so the constraining aspects of these Class 0, Class 1 IoT devices, they're super small, the chipset, it's not really able to take on a whole lot of processing capacities on board itself. So it's really trying to just take in the data that it's having and then encrypting it with that key and then giving it to the server which has the other side of the key to be able to decrypt it. Yes. And does that key change? Oh, yes. The key changes every how often does it change it? Well, this is an interesting thing. So in an AES, a standard legacy security type system, they create a key at the beginning of a message, a key at the end of the message. And those keys rotate or change through a variety of messages so that even if somebody were to break one message they would have to break the code again to get to the next message. That's what's made encryption quite secure over the years. However, with our technology, we use a much larger key. Now, that doesn't seem intuitive if we have a much smaller footprint. How do you have a bigger key? Well, we reduce the size of the operating code dramatically from three megabytes down to two kilobytes. And that allows us to have two kilobytes of operating code plus a much longer key. That makes us far more secure in terms of that key, number one. Those keys, our keys are long enough that they won't be able to be broken by a quantum computer in the future as quantum computing age begins to become reality here. It's pretty much well accepted that current encryption technology will be broken by quantum computers. Ours will not, and that's one reason. The second thing is, current technology uses a key at the beginning of a message, a key at the end. We break that message up into much smaller byte sizes and put a key at the beginning and end of each byte, not at the beginning and end of each message, and we rotate those keys continually. That also gives us a distinct advantage in a quantum computing environment. So this becomes some things that we do that are strong competitive advantages that are built into our algorithms that allow us to operate, and will protect people as quantum computing becomes pervasive. Okay, and one more time on the two important pieces that enable you to... So size of the security key. Size of the key. And both the size of the message that's being transmitted and where the keys are placed in those messages and how often they're rotated. How often the keys are rotating and how often they're placed in the messages and how long each key is. Okay, so that's kind of some of the proprietary stuff. It is. How we do that and what we do and size of keys and how we do that with great agility and great speed is part of our proprietary technology. Okay, okay. Yeah, it's always interesting thinking about on a technical side how computer scientists and encryption specialists are figuring this stuff out. Yeah, it's sophisticated technology but things are happening. Communications are happening so fast. I mean things are going back and forth so fast. But in the future they're going to get faster and we have to be able to communicate securely and have to be able to communicate with great speed in the future to keep up with technology. I can tell you bad actors are figuring this out as fast as the white hat actors are. We have a young man on our staff who's just an absolutely brilliant cryptologist. He's one of the four best hackers, white hat hackers in the world. And he stresses all the time how critical it is that we come up with new ways, new methods and new standards to have security systems for this IoT freight train. It's an interesting fact that in 2018 the number of these small IoT devices surpassed the number of other computing form factors combined throughout the world. So all of the smartphones, laptops, desktop servers, IoT devices now make up more computers than all of those in the world. And IoT only really started in earnest about five years ago. So the technology adoption has been just vast. Well, we're not keeping up to the computing growth with security growth and with some other factors, but primarily security growth to fit those form factors. And so we've done that. And now we're coming out of obscurity telling people about what we're doing. And we launched our product last year, finished up our beta accounts, got everything going, and now we're in full commercial mode with our technology. And already we've been signed up to be on over 300 million devices in the next three years. 300 million devices. And the numbers are all over the board on IoT, but some people estimate that there's already somewhere between 15 and 20 billion devices, IoT devices in the world, and that's projected to go to 50 billion by 2021 in some projections. Go higher than that, some are lower, the projections, nobody really knows. What they do know is there's going to be a lot of devices within the next five years, 80% of the world's computers will be these small IoT devices. So we better get real about putting security on these things. It's crazy that in just the last five years that IoT devices have overcome the amount of computers and cell phones that we have. That's crazy. And now that the estimates are to be in the tens of billions in the next couple of years, it's like securing those data streams, making sure that you have the top edge people on board that can, white hat, white hat meaning white hat hackers, they're good people hacking, trying to see if they can break down the... So people hire white hat hackers all the time to go in and say, hack our system. See if you can get into it and show us where our vulnerabilities are. Because they want those hackers to be as good as the bad actors to make sure that they can find holes in the systems and plug those holes before data, critical data is stolen, or in some cases money or those kinds of things. But there are... Weekly there are news articles about hacks that have taken place because of holes in systems. So yeah, that's what a white hat hacker is. Yeah, and then it makes sense to have that on your team to constantly be seeing what you're making, how hard it is to hack into it to continue making it better and better over time. Interesting. Now, this can be used in any protocol, RFID, Bluetooth, cellular, any communications protocol we can use. Because of software we have already integrated with and ported to all kinds of protocols. We've prepared the technology for mass market by integrating with a large number of IoT chipsets already. We can operate in multiple languages. So we have a toolkit that people can get. We have 10 free seats on that toolkit. People can get that, develop it into their product, and then sign a commercial license when they're ready to go to market with their technology. We don't have to go only on new products. We can flash our technology to existing IoT devices. So it's a pretty nimble program. Okay, and then what about... You were mentioning these speeds too. So what does it mean to be like 8 to 10 times faster and to have one-tenth data? Yeah, what are those... So there is a technology called transport layer system that requires a certain amount of data to connect the transport of data from point to point, from machine to machine. It takes a certain amount of size, data code and size to connect that data. Our technology uses one-tenth the data of the standard TLS. We had to create a new transport layer system for us that just kind of tunnels right through the existing transport layer and connects with less data. Because our code is so much smaller, it's efficient. That lends to having a much faster processing speed. Because we're fast and nimble and smaller code size, we don't use nearly as much battery power. I think the estimate is that about 80% of IoT devices in the future will be battery powered, not hardwired, so they're not going to have unlimited power. You don't want to run that battery down, running a security system, because then you're going to have to change the battery or change the device regularly. You can wirelessly charge to the device? Well, some I'm sure you can, but most of them are going to be battery when the battery runs out, they'll either change it, or in most cases these are throwaway devices. You take the device off, put a new device on, and run it for another two to three years on battery power. So you just can't have encryption and security systems that run that battery down quicker, because it becomes costly and it becomes difficult to replace those devices too often. And then that also is both the speed and the data, both on both that side. That explains both of those things. I'm so trying to understand this. I apologize, it is rather sophisticated. What takes place? Okay, so then the speed is faster because? Because we have a very small code. We're able to process that code, end code and decode, encrypt and decrypt much, much faster. Okay. Using smaller code sizes. Okay, and then the data is less because it's... Well, because of the way we've configured the algorithms. We came up with a new encryption system that can process that data much more efficiently. And then what about the post-quantum side of things? So when we have that much compute, how can you withstand? Yeah, so quantum computers are on their way. They're under development now and they're being used. There's quantum computers in the U.S. at NASA and various IBM and other places. There's quantum computers in Canada and in China and various other areas that have technological development. And a quantum computer processes data in an entirely different way than a current computer does. Our current computer uses what's called binary code, ones and zeros to do programming. A quantum computer uses a whole new programming language called qubits. In fact, it sees a one and a zero as the exact same symbol. And we don't have time to go in how quantum computers work. But in certain cases and for certain functions, it can process massive amounts of data much faster, much more streamlined, and there will be huge benefits to having quantum computing in the future. But it also presents problems like any new technology does. And one of the problems is it can process data so quickly that it's estimated it can break current computing systems. So when we built our system, we built it with larger keys. So let's say an AES key to encode a message and to decode on the back end is much smaller than ours. So a quantum computer can crunch through all of the different possibilities in those numbers to come up to crack that code of that key. They could crunch through that data so fast that they could break that. Our key space, the entire universe of possible key combinations is 429 orders of magnitude larger than the current security system because our keys are so much bigger that key space is larger. Mathematically, we can show how that kind of a key space cannot be broken by a quantum computer. Okay, so it's both a compression algorithm that enables you to make these massive keys compressed down and then it's also then how difficult it is for something with that much of a key space to be able to be penetrated by a quantum computer. Yeah, maybe just one nuance. It's not really compression technology. It's the way we use those keys and the way the algorithm processes those. Yeah, so the key space has to be a certain amount of size to be secure. So you don't want to compress that down to a smaller number of symbols or a smaller number. But the algorithm itself processes that code in a very efficient way even though our key space is larger, our processing code is much smaller. Okay, okay. Key space larger processing code smaller. Yep, smaller processing code than current, larger key space than current. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it's a lot to go through. I think one of the most friendly ways of explaining like, yeah, we get the big IoT explosion in terms of the amount of devices, okay, it makes sense that the way that they're transmitting the data from their sensor to the cloud or where it's being stored or computed is needs to be encrypted, we get that part. And then I think we get that it like currently on the phones it's about three megabytes in terms of how much storage you need for the software of encryption. But you guys brought it down to two kilobytes and it's more sophisticated. Yeah, it is. And then the sophistication, how it's actually all that side of things, the keys and the actual how often you put them in there, how often you change them. All lent to the security of the system. And the way we've done that, the brilliance in our engineers is that the way they did that is really beneficial because it can fit on those small devices. In a nutshell, that's our business model. It's so interesting that there's like humans that are so hyper-specialized that know how to do that. And then there's like humans specializing all of the fields and then there's also humans that focus on like breadth of knowledge instead of depth. Yeah, I'm super breadth and so I like whenever people go really deep like hyper-deep like level 10 or 50 depth on those fields it's hard to keep up. So I'm trying to constantly figure out how to keep up when people talk, trying to abstract a layer up to try and explain and understand usually what I'm doing. And then who are some of the companies that have come on board for Agile PQ already? So we have companies and we don't, in some cases we have non-disclosure agreements with companies so I'm a little careful about naming names but I'll give you an idea on product, some of the things that are using us. So there is a lot of IOT devices that are started to be used in retail merchandising. So going into a retail store in the future and some now instead of seeing a printed pricing tag where a clerk comes by and if they want to change the price of a bag of potato chips they print out a new tag, pull the old one off, put the new one on. Includes the price, the price per unit, a barcode, some other things on that tag, that pricing tag. Those are now being replaced with LCD screens and those LCD screens, the pricing can be changed in a business office so you can change pricing and for retail stores oftentimes they can change pricing several times during a day. A couple of examples, it starts to rain and your price on umbrellas is ten bucks an umbrella but you know you can raise that to twelve because people are going to be running in to keep their bodies dry in the rain so they can raise the price on those umbrellas when it starts to rain. Well, that small increase can mean a lot to profits of a retail store when they're working on very, very slender margins. So that kind of technology can be very, very beneficial. It can reduce the number of employees who have to put pricing tags out and you can repurpose those employees to greet customers and show them where the goods are that they're trying to buy. So an IoT sensor on every retail item and that can... There can be. That can dynamically change the price on that retail item from a code deployment rather than manual process. Yeah, and it automatically changes it on that what are called ESL tag, electronic shelf labeling tags. Well, those tags typically have our class zero devices, very small computing power and no security on them. So we went to market with that and signed a couple of contracts where we are now providing security on those electronic shelf labeling tags. That's one application. Another application where we've signed a customer is they have developed asset tracking devices that can track by GPS and a lot of different factors. They can track, let's say, a shipping container on a ship or a box that's going on an air freight or another very interesting application they have is they've developed a really tremendous sophisticated program, asset tracking program for police evidence going into police departments so that evidence isn't lost or misplaced or when it's moved they know where it is if it's put in a wrong place. Those are high value assets. And so they need the data going back and forth to be secured so that people can't intercept information about where a box of high value evidence is in a criminal trial. So they need security on those kinds of things. There is physical security. So there's all kinds of sensors now that can increase physical security. Everything from heat sensors, motion sensors, visual sensors, gunshot sensors that could alert a system to lock certain things down. And say in a school if there's an unfortunate incident like happened in Gilroy, they could lock certain things down so that people can't pass from area to area. Physical security, you don't want to be intercepted so that bad actors could either shut that off or know who's being alerted where. Consumer devices, there's lots and lots and lots of consumer devices now that are being connected to the internet but they're very small computing platforms. And oftentimes transactions are being developed on those small computing platforms and sent to a server for the manufacturer of the device but you don't want that information exposed to the world. You need to secure that data transmission. Or what about for a child's toy? If it's connected to the internet so that there's learning and there's all kinds of things that can happen on a child's toy, do you really want somebody to have access to your child's toy that could put up inappropriate information on a screen? Could make a connection with the child somehow? Those kinds of communications need to be secured. So those are some of the kinds of things that we are doing already. Smart cities, there are sensors all around cities like here in San Francisco where there might be sensors that count people as they go by or count cars or see how fast people are going or detect all kinds of weather changes, humidity changes that may affect road conditions or sidewalk conditions. All of those kinds of things become smart cities applications. We have smart cities contracts now. Those are some of the kinds of things that we're securing the data that's being collected. Damn, that list of applications is so long already. It's huge, it's huge. Everything from the smart cities that you're describing all the way to just putting a massive code deployment out to a bunch of IoT connected devices that can then instantly make a change in the environment. Do you ever concern yourself with that our direction? Is that making us more safe or is that making us... How do you feel about that? IoT? Right now it doesn't necessarily make us more safe but it can make our world much, much better. Just think of medical technology for one. You have implantable devices. Plantable devices can be connected to the internet and can be monitored by a server so that if there is a medical condition that could be life-threatening to someone, it can be detected very quickly and medical help could be on the way very, very quickly. That's a big one. This monitoring of biometric states for predicting pathologies, that's a big one. But what if a bad actor in a nation state is an example who didn't like the United States, wanted to figure out a way to hack a bunch of devices and let's say there were 10 million devices implanted in people around the country and they could literally either shut them off or cause malfunctions that could cause serious health problems or in some cases death. Predictive crime analytics is also an interesting one but it also makes it seem a little bit like Big Brother as well. It does, but I gotta tell you, Alan, a while back somebody asked me, what do you think of Big Brother? Should we even be doing this? Should the United States be looking? I gotta tell you, everybody else is. China is watching you. Doesn't that kind of get us to the point of does everyone need to be watching everyone or can we more ethically or morally evolve ourselves? I don't think it's a question of whether they should be. It's a question that they are. How do you shut that off? So what we need are people with ethics and understanding and securing of data in an appropriate way to be able to better our world. You won't be able to turn off the mass proliferation of collection of data that's going on in today's world. It's only gonna grow exponentially. Yeah, there's no way that one that feels like this definitely feels like one of those impossible but who knows, we could possibly kick it off. But one person to try and take on 8 billion people that are all using all the devices and the data proliferation and all that stuff. So then, yeah, the companies are watching, the governments are watching. How do you do it in a way that's in a benevolent way instead of a malevolent way? There's a major question to ask and could we evolve ourselves spiritually so that we don't necessarily need so much oversight and need so much regulation on all these things. So that's probably the broad answer there is to create people who have a greater spiritual connection or a greater ethical connection. But bad actors are always gonna be there. We often joke that the IoT world is amazing but there's a lot of machines having a lot of unprotected text in today's world and we've got to find ways to secure data in a way that it can't just be proliferated and used for clandestine purposes. So machines having unprotected text needs to be stopped because there are potentially malevolent actors and so that by itself, the proliferation of machines is gonna keep happening, the proliferation of data is gonna keep happening. So we find security methods that truly secure it. Yeah and spiritually evolve ourselves to not need to even worry as much about malevolent actors. This is an interesting dilemma that we find ourselves in. It is. It's like we're compensating for our lack of spiritual development with securing, with security, with data security and encryption and yeah. Well, it's the reason people in the Middle Ages built fortresses with walls that are very, very high. Yeah that's another way to look at it. I mean it's been going on since probably the day the earth cooled. I mean it's been going on where the vast majority of people are just good human beings. People want to be good, they want to be ethical, they want to be good human beings, but there are those who take advantage of that goodness and it always has been and always will be. So we won't stop and in my view we shouldn't stop the development of technology and the proliferation of technology to better our lives, to reduce hunger, to grow crops better, to help monitor where children are, to help monitor bad actors that seek to harm people. Those are all very good uses of technology. But they come at a price and that price, so we're constantly trying to find the medieval wall if you will to protect against the development of these kinds of technologies. That's what we're involved in. And if we go back in time to Idaho Paul, you know back as a kid, you know with family and with your neighbors and just that purity and innocence of just being there, that world that doesn't need the massive stone walls or moats and it doesn't need all of the insane amounts of encryption and big brotherness. How does that feel? Well, I tell my wife all the time, let's sell our house in the city and just move out to the country. And I was respectful today. I didn't wear my cowboy boots, but normally I've got cowboy boots and jeans on and you know there's a great appeal to that kind of thing. But it complicates our lives for me to be traveling a much greater distance to get to the office and all those kinds of things. So you protect your family and you do what you need to to make sure that you reduce stress in other ways in your life. But there's a great appeal to living in the land and off the land and it's a beautiful lifestyle. And you were born in South Dakota. You know, your roots go back there. You know, the founder of our company who developed the core technology lives in North Dakota and still lives there and doesn't want to move. So he commutes in to be with us periodically. There is a, you know, the hustle and bustle, the commotion that is around us can lead to a lot of stress and in some cases can lead to clandestine activities. We see a lot of homeless problem here in San Francisco and all around the country in major cities and so forth. It leads to a lot of problems. But we're not going to stop it. People congregate together for jobs and for, hopefully for support and being with neighbors and those kinds of things too. Yeah, the rush of the billions of people to metropolises that have yet to really graduate from spiritual kindergarten and many ways causing, exacerbating further this disconnection from each other, this disconnection from nature, this propagation of garbages that we have now in oceans and in landfills and the lack of spiritual development just seems to be so evidently the reason why we find so much mental health issues, so much distrust in each other and having to spy on each other to secure and encrypt things. It's funny, some people say that we are exactly where we're supposed to be like in terms of our origin story and creation. This is exactly where we're supposed to be right now. And that we're on the Dow, that we're on the path. And others say that we're way the fuck off of the Dow, we're way off of the path. That the path is what we were just describing a little bit ago, this young Paul on the farm in Idaho and just having more innocence and more purity and more spiritual development where we don't need all the big brotherness pointed at all these different countries that have all evolved on the same rock. How do you feel about that? So you mentioned earlier the concept of, I think it was emotional intelligence that you talked about, there are so many forms of intelligence. One of those forms of intelligence is existential intelligence, the intelligence of understanding the spiritual. I'm very much a believer in that. I am not a believer that we should say to children I'm not going to help you nurture your existential intelligence or other types of intelligence in you and you can decide as you grow up on your own whether there is such a thing as a spiritual realm or whether there is such a thing as God. I am a believer that by making that decision you decided to not have the spiritual training in a child's life. So yes, a child can grow up and decide to believe a different way. That's fine, that's their agency to do that. They have that personal agency to do that. So not inhibiting the existential intelligence of every child that's born to you? I completely believe that. They ought to be exposed to that. They ought to be taught from the time they're very small. I was and I know I'm biased because of that but I was taught that and it has blessed my life and I taught my children that. Not all of my children believe the exact same thing. They're not robots, they have their own mind but I believe they're good ethical people. Do you believe that we come from that single source or that single origin? I believe that we are, yes, that we have an origin. I believe in God. I believe we are children of God. I believe that there is a higher being and that we have a purpose in life and that we're meant to fulfill that purpose in a mortal life. I believe that life itself is the combination of an eternal spirit and a physical mortal body and I believe that those are very real things and because of that eternal spiritual part of us we seek, we want to be connected with communication and we want to be connected with the spiritual. If we'll let ourselves develop our spiritual existential intelligence we can get there. Very much a part of my life. It's beautiful hearing you talk about it and it's actually really important that more and more of the tech and science leaders in Silicon Valley and around the world find some sort of a spiritual, philosophical, moral, existential grounding as well because then you can see how it becomes easier to develop the world that we all want to see whereas if it's just lack of spiritual development that's developing the world it leads to catastrophe more easily. This last portion has been nice diving deeper into the spiritual side of things with you. I enjoy that. Any time I can engage in these kinds of discussions it's a real treat for me. It's part of what lights me up in my life. I love that, I love that. And then out of the spirituality that you've developed and that you're also having with your children that is coming forth, that if we are all then from that same origin if we are all then from that these children of God or these nerve endings of God experiencing itself and creating that do you think that our disconnection from that knowledge is the reason why we have so many of the issues? I do think that there's a great deal of truth to that. I believe, so I always told my children I taught them to believe in God but I told them if you don't believe in God as you grow up find something that's bigger than you because when we don't have something bigger than us in life then all we have is either money, fame, power, greed and ethics and values that go out the door. They disappear. We have to have something bigger than us that we pursue. If something bigger than us is working to alleviate hunger among children around the world, great. If something bigger than you is belief in God and that drives you to help make the world a better place, great. But we've got to have something that's bigger than us because that's when life gets really worth living it's when we work for something bigger than us. That's so beautifully said that when we have some sort of a meaning we can find any how to get there behind this why and that we're just doing our best to achieve that then that North Star that transcends us it transcends our own timelines it transcends our own money, greed, corruption, fame all these things that you listed because we're doing something that's beyond us and that ultimately that it makes it totally feels like that coming from that single origin and all expressing ourselves that the more that we're expressing ourselves selflessly for the benefit of our families, our communities, for others in the world that it just feels a lot more meaningful. Yeah so in our company we're full of programmers and tech types and so forth and so we have a great work environment and a great culture I mean we have unlimited vacation policies we have all of these things that make life easier to work for but there are a couple of rules that we have one of the rules that we have is that everybody must engage in time every month in a charitable cause they must and they have to report what charity they worked for and what they did and we organize company events to all go work at times for some sort of charity or days when people can all disperse and we'll let people off for an afternoon or a day and they just go work for something bigger than them more important than writing another line of code or making one more sales call or raising one more dollar. Yeah you would love the last people we just interviewed from fast forward the non-profit tech companies that are specifically for social impact around the world so that could be something interesting to fund a lot of people's towns. I haven't seen that episode I'll have to go look into that one. Yeah that's a great one and I'm glad you said that that's a critical policy and community principle at work Do you think we're in a simulation? I believe we're in reality I believe that we are real, literal and physical because I have a belief in God and I believe we are God's children I believe that we are, that it's not a simulation it's real and it's physical. And then what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? A newborn child, a newborn animal birth and human beings I believe that's the most beautiful thing in the world the most magical thing I've ever experienced is watching my kids be born most magical thing I've ever experienced is watching my wife birth that child and seeing the love on her face and the instant love I thought I understood love when I had a girlfriend in high school I thought I understood love when I got married I thought I understood love when I realized how much my parents had done for me but none of that compared to when I had a child and the love that increased for my wife and for that child I mean that is the most beautiful thing in the world to me just hands down no question Oh wow, I love that and we can almost also be birthed every moment of existence over and over again especially when you gain new knowledge and it sinks in that almost feels like you're being born again when you see the world in a new way and like you said also that when a partner gives birth to a child that the unconditional love that they have for that child another way to understand love, that first sight that's so beautiful It exists in many animal species and so forth we used to, you know, we had a lot of cattle on the ranch and we would see those born all the time and chickens hatched and so forth I mean we, to see the nesting and the love and the care there's something bigger than us that drives that kind of level of spirituality and love Yes Paul, this has been such a pleasure Thank you Thank you so much for coming on our show Of course What a pleasure for me Thank you Thank you Keep up the great work We'll keep working at it Love it Thanks Thank you Thank you everyone for tuning in We greatly appreciate it We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode and what you're thinking Have more conversations with your friends, families, coworkers, people online and social media about post-quantum IoT security about our own spiritual development as well how those two things interplay and all the nuance that we described in the episode check out agilepq.com link in the bio below also Paul's LinkedIn profile and support the artists, the entrepreneurs the spiritual leaders, the organizations around the world that you believe in support simulation, our links are below Patreon, cryptocurrency, PayPal and Cool Merchant get paid linked, those are all below and also thank you Ori Shapiro for producing the show greatly appreciate it and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world we greatly appreciate you tuning in thank you and we'll see you soon Much love