32. Kevin Kane, Founder and CEO of American Binary, on Cryptography and Quantum Computers

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Security Podcast in Silicon Valley. I am here today with a very special guest, Kevin King, the co-founder and CEO of American Binary. Welcome to the show, Kevin.

Thank you for having me. Nice to meet you and nice to meet everyone in your audience. You know, it's great to have you on. We're just looking over your experience.

You go all the way back to being in the U. S. Army. I have to say thank you for your service.

After the Army, you ran for, you're a candidate for the House of Representatives in Georgia. Yes. What was that like? It was quite the experience.

I lived in Georgia and at that time I was much younger and I had just gotten out of the Army. It was during the Iraq War. I was the head of claims. I worked for JAG and I was assigned for six of my seven years to mostly infantry or line units.

And so I loved it, my experience. And when I got out, I had a number of things to say, especially having lived overseas. And while I was, when I got out, it was a sort of, I'm going to live the rest of my life kind of mentality. I can be anything.

I can do anything. Nobody can stop me. Absolutely. It's like I'm no longer in a place where I have to watch everything I say and I have to be mindful of whether or not people like me to get the assignments I want.

And I no longer had to care. At least so I thought. So I said anything I wanted. I ran for everything at once.

Yep. I had an internship at the Carter Center. I met President Carter. I worked with the former Zimbabwe colonel who was in the uprising over Rhodesia.

We hit it off. Wow. I was also in, I transferred from University of Maryland, which is the primary choice for people while they're in military to go to school. I had a free tuition at Georgia State University plus the GI Bill.

So I had money for a house and rent and for my tuition paid for. So it was easy for me financially. As a person who didn't have any financial resources or assistance, I did everything by myself. Being on couches at 18 because with nowhere to stay on my own.

So I made my way in life and I got out of the army. And when I got out, I was like, I'm going to be president of the US. I'm going to do everything I want. No one can stop me.

And I ran for state house while an intern at the Carter Center, while catching people stealing at Banana Republic and while also giving speeches, traveling. And what else am I missing that I was also doing at the same time? Oh, and I was an honor student at Georgia State University. I am in an honors program writing a thesis as an undergraduate student on democratization processes in Northeast Asia and South Korea.

And so while doing all those things and learning a lot of lessons, I learned that running for office is not one of my strong suits. I think that if you're a person of nuance and you're a person of thoughtfulness, don't run for office because the people who knock on doors are not going to be too excited about that. You were very busy. Looks like you've stayed very busy, too.

You mentioned that your connection to Korea and you actually ended up as an oil market analyst. Yes. In Seoul there shortly after you're. That's a strange series of events.

So when I realized I wasn't going to be a politician in today's very extreme politics, I was like, I don't want to participate in just lying to myself and people all the time to get elected. And so you push to do that in a way you can't have a conversation. You can't say this is complicated. And so when I was disheartened and I wanted to know what I'm going to do with my life.

And we I decided to go to South Korea. Yeah, I'd first lived there the first time when I was in the army and I could tell you all kinds of stories about this. I used to spin records and vinyl records. I played house and progressive house and trance in 2009 from 1998 to 2005.

Awesome. I used to play in my barracks spinning on two MK2s and a DGM 300. And I had a huge collection of vinyl. I was really serious into it and being mathematical about my mixes and stuff like that and proper progression, setting the mood.

And I got a gig as the first Caucasian or white guy in South Korea at one of the biggest clubs in the country. And you were a DJ? That was a DJ. I spun records.

I was a DJ and I played in big rooms in Korea. And also I did in the US and Nashville and other places in Atlanta. Usually when people have a side hustle or a night gig, like it's not quite like that, but that's spectacular. I didn't do it for the money.

I did it for the friendship and the people I meet. And I remember like meeting people from Hong Kong and Singapore and Dubai who would come up to me. And I did it for the experience. And I really loved it.

And I loved meeting that side of Korea outside of the military. And so I thought I want to go back. And it's a sprawling metropolis, almost no crime. Culture is totally different.

Everything is a challenge. And I like that. I like the fact that there's so much uncertainty. To me, that was the most attractive thing.

So you like to push yourself outside your comfort zone. Yes. It's got to be stimulating. It's a perpetual dopamine burst.

It definitely can be. It definitely can be. As long as it's not too much. And sometimes folks like, well, we'll buckle and crumble underneath the weight of all of the change.

And they're the Goldilocks zone in there. There are definitely to each and their own people should do what they're comfortable with. That's true. That's true.

And for me, it was like, I like that. I like being in that hot seat. So I went back. And I didn't know what I was going to do.

And I decided to go for a graduate degree at their top school. So it's almost all Korean national school where their ambassadors and diplomats go. And my economics professor in graduate school was the future economic minister of South Korea. And those kind of category people.

It's going to Peking University in China or Tokyo in Tokyo. So these Asian countries, the national school is the best school, not the privately owned ones. So that school I went to, I was almost the way in all my classes. It was a lot of fun.

I had arguments with the ambassadors' daughters. And we had heated. It was, it was no, my graduate school, it was really strange being in Korea. There were no people who, there was no conversation even, not one time about like being thoughtful.

It was more like just a punching match every day. And people raising their voices in my experience in class. And I remember people from Chile and we would talk about America and Latin America. And we had a lot of love for each other because we didn't pull punches.

We respected each other as people and trusted that. But we came in swinging. And I loved my graduate school experience for that. And Koreans in my experience in graduate school, I lived there 10 years and plopped more cumulative.

And I speak Korean. Yeah. And my Korean friends sometimes consider me like Korean because I can speak like it's pronouncing like Korean. If you call me on the phone, I will, sometimes they don't know that I'm not Korean.

And in that experience, like in graduate school, Koreans are very direct. I'm going to generalize. I remember I was taking an elective in petroleum engineering. And in front of one student, this other guy said, don't study with him.

He is not smart. In front of his face. I see. Well, it doesn't get more direct than that, does it?

Yes. Did you study with the guy or no? Yeah, I did. We were friends.

Oh, you did? Okay. But I did take my advice a little bit and I like double checked what he said to me with the other guy. Those were those when the people plant those seeds, they're dangerous.

But, you know, that was the experience for me. And especially when they speak English, you don't have such an emotional assignment to the words. Throwing barbs in a second language is much easier. Yeah.

And so I used to get them an English non-stop. Yeah. But you start developing like a tone deafness to the volatility that comes from hearing constantly offensive things. One time I had a job.

It was this guy had a PhD from the Energy Economic Institute from Ohio. And he said, you only got this job because of your skin color. I was like, wow. Oh, so.

I was like, worked up for two hours. And for all of our listeners, what do you identify your skin color as? I'm white. It's Northeast Asia.

So it's a different world. It's not a part of the globalized social world. It's still isolated. And they have foreign products, but it's a very isolated world.

One time I was at a, with a rock singer I met when I used to be a DJ and there was a woman standing behind a guy. And I said, why, why is she afraid? Why look like somebody on TV she doesn't like? He said, no, she never saw a white person before.

Oh, okay. In person. In person. Yeah.

Of course. They were nervous. This was in 2001. So the delta between like where our idea of globalization and then that world is like 25.

Where was that? South Korea. In Seoul. In South Korea.

In Seoul. In Seoul. Really? So people coming as tourists to Korea and in mass to teach English is a new thing.

And it didn't really start then. So there were like four Starbucks for a reference here in the whole country at that time. And so you could literally go to a nightclub and not see a person from another country for five hours. And so you're the only one.

And if you get in trouble, you're always on the losing side with the police too. So it's a very like the law applies to local people. If you're foreign, the law is a little different now. So you're not supposed to be here anyway in the country.

So it's like that. I see. You're going to just be careful. Be aware you're surrounded.

It's always, but especially in a situation like that. It's changed a lot. So the world has also changed a lot in now 23 years. At that time, there were often frequently signs that say no foreigners allowed in the nightclub or the restaurant.

And so there would be. Did you go in anywhere? No. No.

If you speak Korean, you could maybe get away with it. And then if you. So I used to. So if you want a story like that, I'll give you one.

Then we can talk about. I'm curious. Yeah, we could talk about security here in a second. But yeah.

Let's hear the story. Okay. One of my friends once asked me if he wanted to meet with me to write a book because he said it should be like HBO Max, Tokyo Vice. I don't know if you've seen that.

It's about a guy who lived in Japan that got the first American to work at a Japanese news organization. He reported on Yakuza. True story. And so they made a TV series, HBO Max series about it.

I recommend it. And so he was like, you should do something like that. I have a lot of stories. And when I was in the second infantry division, I was there during 9-11.

So that's like about 20, 40 miles from North Korea. And so when 9-11 happened, we were on lockdown because nobody knew who was to blame for a 9-11 at that moment. We had no intel. So everything was on the table.

And including the North Korean forces realizing this is their once in a 100-year chance to get the United States while it's distracted. And a lot of people in the world don't know. North Koreans still shoot South Korean soldiers. There are frequently firefights across the border still today.

In fact, I worked in the office with a guy who was shot by a North Korean right through the cast. And I asked him, like, what is that hole on yours? Like, it looks like a cigar. Nate Byrne.

And he's like, oh, that was from a North Korean. A Korean bullet, like, that went through me. Yeah, it was an American guy. And he was in my office.

And he was relocated to work for JAG instead of being in, like, infantry after he was shot by a North Korean. And so they shoot Americans. And it's a lot of me experiencing overseas realize what American media cover. And what happens is, like, a huge gap.

Americans get a very curated view of the world. Oh, extremely. It is universal to blame, no matter whether it is left or right. They just don't genuinely cover everything.

No, it's so true. It's so true. My morning routine is I grab my phone and there's an app called the Hourly News. And it is an app that downloads, like, the news clippings from all, like, major news outlets.

And just the clippings, just, like, headlines in, like, 20 seconds on what happened. And you can hear from NPR, from Fox News, from the CBC, which is Canadian. Yeah. From Brutavella, which is German.

From, there's a, which one is it? The Hong Kong News. Hong Kong News has the Chinese Hong Kong. I like Bloomberg Asia.

They cover very different Asia from the United States. It used to. I don't know now that China has taken over Hong Kong. I would imagine it's a little more uncomfortable for them.

Unless they're moving to somewhere that allows them to have a little bit more freedom of press, like Singapore. Although that's relative, right, in Asia. I think the Hong Kong is probably the least comfortable place to work for the press and occupy, live right now. But it was really great.

And you would learn all kinds of things about issues in smaller cities in India. And it's fascinating. You know what's incredible is, like, when you compare and contrast different news sources, you hear. No one lies.

But when something big happens, there's things that don't get reported or reported, like, slightly differently with a different tone. You notice the gaps. And you notice, hey. Yeah.

Like, it's not exactly as straightforward as someone sells it. That is the manipulation. So I always say there's a hundred truths you can talk about on a topic. And maybe the human brain can only handle four or five out of that hundred that you select.

And the one you select is either the conscious or the subconscious manipulation. We all do it. We want to persuade someone. And it's a human thing.

I think. Oh, it's superhuman. I call it drinking the Kool-Aid. And we all got, like, our own version, our own flavor of Kool-Aid that tastes good for us.

I can give an example. When I lived in South Korea in 2003, just before I was transitioning from South Korea to the U. S. to 3rd Infantry Division.

3rd Infantry Division was the first over the Burman to Iraq. So I was in the rear. I wasn't in the war. I was in the rear.

And I was head of claims. Before transitioning, South Koreans was super anti-United States at that time. It was very straight. It was like Europe just going a different track than the U.

S. and saying, we don't agree. And being a smaller country in South Korea, they felt like identified with a larger country invading the smaller ones. So they shot red, pink, white guns at American Hummers.

And it got a little ugly. They kidnapped an American soldier at Hoegi University, Kim Hidae. And it was a big issue. My office handled it.

I worked in the National Affairs Office for the United States Army in Seoul. And we had to deal with a lot of bad issues in South Korea at that time. Big change now. It's like the South Korean presidents visiting the U.

S. and singing karaoke with President Biden. It's so different. 20 years.

It's a completely different world. But at that time, that was the South Korea I was in. And I remember one time when I was getting a flower for a girl, this gentleman came up to me. And he just started putting his finger in my place, yelling, you Bush and President Bush.

And he was like jockeying for a fistfight. And it was in a crowded street in the middle of Seoul. And I usually dealt with that kind of stuff with wit. And so I pulled my mobile phone out.

We had flip phones. We didn't have smartphones. And I started pretending to dial something. All these Koreans are watching.

Who are you dialing? And I said, it's Bush. You can talk to him. He's right here for you.

You tell him. Get the fuck out of my face. And all these Koreans started laughing at this guy. The whole crowd.

It was a crowded street. And they're all laughing at him in my wit. And he just felt bullied by the crowd, which is what you want to do in that sort of situation. You flipped the crowd.

Yeah. Nice. The absurdity of holding a person accountable for the actions of people they have no control over in itself was ironic. And I wanted to basically use that absurdity to humiliate the person and neuter that so that they would discontinue the.

. . And it wasn't like I want. .

. I didn't have the patience for a 15-minute conversation with that person. Right. And I don't think they deserved that 15 minutes of my time.

Of course not. So that's how I ended it. So elegant. Super witty.

Super witty. Like, I love it. And it's a good, like, defense mechanism to just be aware of your surroundings and be aware of, like, the culture of everyone else. So, like, in that space and that that was.

. . You knew that was going to flip the crowd of people watching. Yeah, it wasn't the first time.

But I had two more others. This and other podcasts. Okay. That's for another podcast.

So do share with me, like, how did you get into the security game? Like, you're now at American Binary. You're working on some really difficult. .

. Might I say open problems of post-quantum cryptography. Which has nothing to do with, like, good bitcoins and stuff like that. This is real crypto.

As far as I'm concerned, cryptography is actually protecting your content of data. Bit smashing, as you. . .

I'll make an analogy here. When you're in high school and we're young and we're 15 or 16, everyone's talking about kissing a girl or sex, but no one actually did it. So it's like that in cryptography. If a person's talking about it a lot and that they know about it, they probably don't.

And cryptography is a lot like handling enriched uranium. It's not the kind of thing you can be an engineer and in six months just read up one and do. It's either something that is in you and you practice for 10 or 15 years of how to handle it, to be responsible for it. And all the different implementations and how you introduce it into austere environments.

And it gets to be. . . It's very niche.

It's like AMG is to Mercedes or Shelby is to Ford. The cryptography companies are the Shelbys and the AMGs, not the large ones. It's not their strong suit. So as I preface that and we talk about this niche area of expertise, the consensus among the cryptography community is that we've hit the end of the shelf life of all of the internet's encryption.

And now that is important because everything that we use on the public internet that was developed all has to be replaced. And it's the first time in world history that we're really having to do this. Because the internet, public internet is a relatively new thing in terms of the mass adoption and having millions and billions of websites and WhatsApp and Gmail and all this is new. And what happens in this very mature infrastructure for e-commerce and for communication when we have to stop and redo everything?

And a lot of people are not excited about that, understandably. And so you have this camp where they say, oh, quantum computers aren't near us. I don't have to worry about it. Something can be wrong and right at the same time.

You're right in that large-scale quantum computers are not here and they may not be here for 20 years. You're wrong in thinking that computing itself is not a risk to all the encryption even without quantum computing. And I think that is the more nuanced truth that is coming out. And that a lot of quantum computing companies are moving to classical computing research.

And taking the ability to run quantum algorithms more efficiently on a classical computer than a future quantum computer. And these sort of esoteric areas of research are happening. In fact, a lot of Chinese research coming out lately is about using today's noisy cubic quantum computer with 300 qubits and breaking encryption with it. By combining it with some pre-processing on classical computing.

So what you come to learn is that the desire to break encryption, the appetite is so large that large governments like China are pounding in billions of dollars just to breaking RSA. Because there's so much financial benefit to them to be able to do that. And of course, when they do it, they're not going to announce it. I certainly would not announce it.

The benefit is only going to be there if you keep it a secret. I think what they're going to do is export the capability for financial gain and for geopolitical influence like a Monroe Doctrine. So if you want to sway countries in like a proxy war to side with you, give them unencrypted access to every citizen they have with the tool. And I think that they will kiss your ring if you can do that because you're guaranteeing them to stay in power.

Now they can see everything and all the dissidents. If wars are fought with information, this is like the nuclear bomb. And that's what they call it. And they call it Q-Day.

Really? Yeah, they call it Q-Day. I didn't know. And it's just sort of a bigger problem because.

. . Do you think it will be like one day? Like one point in time or it will be like aggression?

Here's the worst thing that could happen. The worst thing that could happen is for some. . .

Think of K-99, the superconductive material that there was a claim around that might not have been a thing, right? We don't know yet. We don't know yet. Out of the time of this recording anyway.

Let's say somebody isn't thinking about, outside of their research, the implications of breaking RSA and releasing the code. Let's say some new approach of running quantum algorithms on a laptop or on a supercomputer. And they released the code. They just ended the internet.

At least as we know it, it's going to turn off for a couple of days because no one is going to trust anything anymore, right? Yes. So that's the worst thing that could happen is that academic researchers don't understand, like in Oppenheimer, the consequence of what they're doing. And this is a real risk.

So we run with this risk. And what is different now from 20 years ago is that all of the world's research by the hour is indexed on the internet. So unlike 20 years ago, now you can pull all of the prior art for anything you want to elaborate on to break encryption. So you can't say 20 years ago the encryption wasn't broken and it hadn't been broken for every year for 20 years.

We don't have to worry about it. That's absolutely wrong thinking. Because the keys to breaking encryption is going to be in prior art and making improvements on it in mathematics and in that algorithm research. And every day we get closer and closer from what is probably not even exponential, but double exponential innovation.

Not just, it has a drastic, has very dire implications on it. It's not like you breach a building like Equifax and you spend six and nine months staging the breach and figuring out your way in or the colonial pipeline. If you can just break RSA at will in real time, then you don't have to stage anything. You can literally bring the company to its knees and put it out of business.

Well, there goes- Because you just breach every day. There goes like every company that ever does anything on the internet. Now that I did the fear, I can talk about the reality. So the White House has signed three memos articulating a roadmap to upgrade the encryption in light of this perceived threat to corporate, private, to the economy, and to national security, and to your healthcare records.

Healthcare is a strange one that there are perpetual breaches at hospitals. That's like the most malicious hack imaginable. They are trying to get information on who is ill so that they can basically offer their family members cash in exchange for secrets. Oh, that's really malicious.

It's malicious and dark. And also, if you have psychiatric and other records and you have them of S&P 500 executives, it gets even darker. Yep. And those are the kind of things our adversaries want.

Blackmail material. Yes. Blackmail material, manipulation material. Somebody can say, and I love this question, the U.

S. does this and that. Well, yes, but you know what? I'm a U.

S. citizen and I don't think that- I think that when China does it, it's a little bit different because it adversely affects me. So you have to have a little bit of selfishness there and be prejudiced against things that target you in particular. And you have the right to defend yourself no matter what the U.

S. government does. I have the right to survive as do you. No, I appreciate that.

Yeah. I think that I wanted to parse that our way of life is under threat and it's completely irrelevant about U. S. having done that in the past.

It's now about in the moment being present. Do you want to survive now? Yes or no. It's a binary question, actually.

And if we want to survive now and we want to not be in the abstract, we want to be material in the present here thinking physically, biological bodies, I want to survive. If we want to survive, then we are taking steps to do that. It reminds me of the self-defense mantra. A, it can happen to you.

B, it can happen today. C, like you know what to do about it. And D, you've already decided to do that. Like if you accept those, it's very difficult to take advantage of you.

It's very difficult to turn you into a victim. Right. Absolutely. I won't go on this podcast, but I've had horrible experiences like a lot of people in life and I understand what it is like to feel helpless.

I've averted very likely like knife attacks and this kind of stuff overseas. And I understand that things happen and our lives can be lost at any minute. I think there is value for people who decide. It also changes like all martial arts or any kind of sense of vigilance over your body and defending it.

It changes your confidence in psychology. Totally. A hundred percent. There is, it's not when you're in a restaurant and you have a spider sense and maybe there are three people who join the room and you can tell that these people can handle themselves.

That they're not living their life in one mile for their entire life proximity and not doing anything uninteresting. You know, right. Maybe their hands are a little bit rougher and usually muscular in their finger sizes. And you, maybe they got even a knife scratch down their cheek.

Right. Okay. Your spider sense is up. This person is potentially a dangerous guy.

And if you at least know how to handle yourself enough, not, you're not going to win the fight, but you just can defend yourself and you have a shot. And then you're going to go back to eating your lunch and not care that they're sitting next to you. And that who doesn't want that feeling? Yeah, exactly.

That's confidence right there. That's peace. Right. It is peace and it puts you in control to be calm when you have conflict and to be able to talk out of it because you don't have any of your adrenaline running your focus.

And you like in the experience with the mobile phone and that gentleman, had I been less physically confident, maybe I would have lashed out in like an impulse control problem rather than being in control of my impulses because I have nothing to worry about. Right. It's mindset. I would love for everyone to have that feeling.

Right. So you have to want it, though. It's not something that you can gift to somebody else. It has to come from some sort of internal drive or a decision that one makes or like an experience that you go through that leads you to see like the value in that.

So I think it's easier to be calm and patient with people who are unpleasant when you feel like you don't really have a whole lot of things to worry about. That's true. Yeah. So for me, it helps me to be a better person.

And that's good. And I'm really happy to hear that you use this as a tool to be a better person and lead a better life because that makes the world a better place. And I do want to live in a better world. And I'll do my part to make that a better place as well by using the tools that are right for me to help make myself a better person.

So we're in the same boat there. And I'm not sure that's the right tool for everybody out there because everyone is like in a different place. But whatever tool people use to help make themselves better, I'm happy for them, regardless of what that tool is, as long as they don't go off the deep end. As long as it actually results in them being a better person.

There might be a religious discussion in there somewhere. I am wondering if this was coming up. My only comment that sort of scoots around the religious discussion is my own personal philosophy is whether or not I am religious. Are you religious?

Before I get to that part, I don't want to put my faith in any idea, in any value, in any belief system. I'm not going to put my life, my immediate life, in the hands of that. I won't. Good for you.

Yeah. And that's where my philosophy for it, my philosophy on personal physical security comes from, is that you can believe in all those things, but it's unnecessary to put your life in their hands when you can do more yourself. And so I'm a person of believing of doing full throttle everything all the time. Amazing.

Excellent. Okay. I love it. There you go.

I skewed it around. You dodged that question with such voice. Full throttle everything all the time. Yeah.

All right. So in that spirit, so what do you do better than everyone else in the world at American? Okay. I don't know.

Better than anyone else all the time. I would say we probably have some of the most experience in austere environment deployment of post-quantum cryptography. That's a mouthful. So austere environment means like IoT edge devices, pucks for hotspots, things that get to be more difficult.

Raspberry Pis, for example. Edge devices for the military and this kind of stuff. All of these are different hardware, different systems, different network protocols, a lot of complicated computer science. So when you're transitioning to new cryptography, you have to learn a lot about a lot of things.

And we have a lot of experience developing this austere environment and deployment. We're easily two years ahead of everyone else who's going to be heading down that space. First, you've got to build a team. Secondly, you've got to learn about the new cryptographic primitives and the construction.

You've got to then you got to figure out what you want to be in the network layer. Are you going to be data link layer two? Are you doing something in the web browser? And if you're doing it at like layer three, what are you using for a network protocol is the ICO2.

If you're doing a VPN like WireGuard, you're going to obviously throw out the stuff in WireGuard because it's not post-clonum. You're going to replace it. I want it in all of those layers. Yeah.

Yeah. This was a bad VC pitch for me years ago. And the guy asked me, like, how are you going to post-clonum the internet? And I was thinking to myself, have you ever invested in a computer security company?

Because I'm a little confused by this question. This was a potential investor? Yes. And it was, I was not equipped how to handle that question.

I should have started off with the OSI model and the different layers of the internet and said, this is our market. And it's like strange. Sometimes people, it's hard. This is really niche.

And for me, I'm learning fine. Someone compared us to a cloud computing competitor and they are a TLS layer four. And I said to somebody, they're not even in my market. And they're like, what are you talking about?

They do post-clonum crucial. Yeah, but their market is layer four TLS. We're at layer three. So we don't compete.

And so when you're talking about this stuff. They don't understand what that means. Like the difference between layer three and layer two and layer four. And I started a crypto company at layer seven.

That's Peacemaker. It was application layer. Yeah. It's fascinating to learn this.

I'm learning too. I learned it all from my co-founder, Andrew McElroy. He was the president of Linux user group in Nashville. He used to run Freaknik.

He was on the board. And the editor to Defcon. He was at Defcon or Black Hat. And he really much knows what he's doing.

And I have the luxury of working with someone who understands how everything works. We were on a call today talking about bass band off the phone. And he was explaining how you would utilize that for certain things. And the other people on the other side had never even heard of some of the stuff he was talking about.

So I have this awesome co-founder, Andrew McElroy, that I get to give mention to on your podcast. Yeah. Because he's a national treasure. Amazing.

It's always like spectacular when we get to work with the best and the brightest. And it's really an honor to build things with other people like that. And the person that stops learning and growing, I might as well just be dead as far as I'm concerned. It is a marathon, right?

It's not a race. I have something some of your audience will laugh about and some are going to feel uncomfortable, but I'm going to say it. So I get to do something controversial, right? A place, yes.

Having worked in quantitative finance. Oh, yeah. You were a high-speed trader or an analyst. I did both.

I did high-frequency trading at a desk in South Korea at an investment firm, investment banks. They don't have the same rules in the United States and their investment banks are allowed to trade for profit on HFT. And so I ran a desk there doing that. And then I started a small emerging offshore manager for weekly horizon trading using machine learning for decision making.

We did what they call a mean reversion, long short, U. S. equity. And we did a weekly mean reversion using an online learning algorithm at that time.

And my colleague went on to be an executive director at GoodAI in Czech Republic. And so I had good people around me at that time. And I had a lot of experience working with the very idolized in popular culture and media PhD. And a PhD is a really wonderful—I have an ad master's.

And if you want to be immersed in a topic, go for a PhD. Right. If you want to get a PhD to get a job, you're going to be a lousy employee. It's my experience.

It's not going to work out. Because being the marathon and the race, for some people, it's a race to finish the PhD and then they're done. And that's just the beginning. You just got past the first corner of the race.

You just started. Right. And that's my thing. If the biggest thing you've ever accomplished in your life is a PhD, then that's all you ever are going to accomplish, no matter where you go in the private sector.

And I've worked with a lot of people with advanced degrees and PhDs from places like MIT and University of Nottingham, UK astrophysicists, Cambridge. And some of them are wonderful and some of them are totally useless. And by useless, like in a whole year of work, nothing is accomplished. And that is because for some people, if your goal is to get a degree to then say you had a degree, when you hit the workforce, you're not going to be very useful.

If you got a degree because you're passionate about that topic and you bring that passionate topic to the workplace, you're going to go to the top. Yes, this is the drive. If you don't have passion about your topic such that there is nobody left in the competition, it's an empty wrestling match, just you left, then you will get everything you want in life. But if you did it for the status and to be able to tell mom and dad that you got a PhD and to show off when you go back to school, you're going to be useless in the workplace.

This is the difference between an internal motivator and an external motivator. If you're driven for those external motivators, you're going to get there. It just, they have a tendency to kill creativity. If you have an internal drive, and this is how I describe my interest in security, I can't articulate it.

And so I just tell people it's an irrational passion. And it's the best way for me to describe my relationship to this topic of security. I just love it. And I can't explain it.

Like, it's just always been there. I've either volunteered with police in high school to hit that passion button or in computer science, like focus on security. I'm with you. It is a privilege to be a person who can have passion for things.

It's, I have a lot of very smart or capable or just capable friends, and they lack a passion about something. And I'm not sure there's a whole lot that can be done about it. It's sort of sad to break my heart because you see where it's going to go. And for those people, there is a lot to be done in society, but it's certainly not going to be at the front of new things, right?

That's right. Because when you're in new things, and you're early on, like even in crypto, seven years ago, it's a very lonely place to be when you're new. And no one's, everyone's against you. And in post-quantum cryptography, we've been down this path for quite a while.

And we, you know, I saw this email of a competitor and they said, we were the first to deploy in Starlink with post-quantum encryption. And I was like, man, we did this in 2021 in a warfighter on a stealth naval ship. And, but the thing about it is we're not doing press releases about our quiet professional work. We're just doing it.

And when you're deeply passionate about a topic, you end up being two years ahead of everyone else on it. But it's a lonely place. I showed up, we showed up to warfighters and no one knew what post-quantum encryption was. And then in 24 months, it's coming down from the White House, the DHS and OMB and all these offices are looking into it.

Wells Fargo hired a team and people call me up and they were like, you were right. And you saw way ahead of the curve. It's not anything about me. It's just passion.

And I found it was a really cool mix between cryptography and geopolitics in the world. They go together. It comes in. They do.

Yes. And not just for surveillance, but let me explain. The world economy is probably going to be a fraction of its size without encryption. Right.

Because commerce, transactions, stock exchange markets, PayPal. We'd be lucky to have any globalization if there was no encryption. No encryption, no globalization. That's right.

Right. And when you're ending end of the shelf life of encryption for all finance, you run the risk of regressing everything all the way back if we don't get out ahead of it with solutions. Mm-hmm. And that is when I saw that this was the case.

I was like, wait a second. I get to be in the hot seat for the end of globalization and trying to prevent that from happening. That's not hubris. That's the position of the NSA.

Right. That this is an urgent thing. NSA has new guidelines out. There are guidelines for encryption that they put out for private companies that want to sell to the U.

S. government. It's called CNSA 2. 0.

CNSA. It's like commercial or something algorithm suite. And CNSA 2. 0 removed all elliptic curve cryptography.

You're not allowed to use it in 16 months. Really? No, you're not supposed to be using it when you sell it to the U. S.

government. In other words, it's deemed unsafe. So does that affect the Fed RAM certification protocols? It's all going to be changing.

So FIPS 140-3 is going to be updated, too. I believe, to include several post-colonial options. I think some of the NSA is the most strict. So they've removed RSA as well.

At any level, you can't use it. It doesn't matter. And American Binary has implementations of the algorithms that are suggested. Yes.

So there are three digital signatures and one general purpose post-quantum encryption cipher. Okay. And the general purpose is called Kyber, like in Crystal's Kyber from Star Wars. And that was developed by cryptographers from the Netherlands, Switzerland's office for IBM and Stanford Research SRI and ARM processor.

And a collection of cryptographers had developed it. It went through standardization and review. With NIST, it's going to be standardized. People like DJ Bernstein's, a popular cryptographer, they all are betting on post-quantum cryptography.

And they recognize the end of the shelf life of encryption. That's why guys like DJ Bernstein participate in the post-quantum challenge as a cryptographer. And I want to go back. The NSA has a new category of device they call cryptographically relevant quantum computer.

That is not the quantum computer you hear about on Bloomberg News. It's basically like a special design piece of hardware that will be special designed to leverage like 500 qubits with classical computing and preprocessing and the most advanced math to just break encryption full time. And that's what people are building. And that is a near-term device than a quantum computer.

That's the sense of urgency. And there's another important point. If I could use a little bit harsh language, people who are naive, who take for granted everything they have, who can't think like a bad guy. They would say, why would anyone use that?

I'll put it on my. . . Put it bluntly.

Simple for you. Yeah. Financially really beneficial to do that. Think of all the money they would make if you had the key to the kingdom.

What are you talking about, I would say? And then people would say, people shouldn't be like that. Get in line of the what should be. It's not going to change the reality.

And there are people like that. And in fact, those people like that are going to be the first to have it because they have the incentives. This is not about novel science research making the world a better place. Study encryption is for doing bad things.

And that's where the money. . . Yeah, it changes your relationship to power.

Right. Yeah. But Boston Consulting Group, I think it was them, they did some research on where the spending within the quantum computing space is going. China is number one for a lot of the spending.

The government is. And guess what their top area is, meaning they don't spend any more in any other area in quantum computing than factoring large integers. I remember when flash memory was just coming out, like state full flash memory. It was before it wasn't reliable.

People were like, oh, we won't see that. All the iPods still had like spinning hard drives inside them. And the very first couple of devices that made it onto the market were hybrid devices, just like this quantum concern that the NSA is pointing out. There will be hybrid devices.

There will be custom designed devices leveraging quantum mechanics in some non-traditional compute method. And how do I know this? We worked with other top IP holding quantum computing companies and written papers that have gone to important places in Washington on, if we were to design this machine, this is what it would look like. Now, that particular compute company we worked with for the purpose of social proofs with your audience.

Chinese researchers, like 20, which means if it's 20 researchers publishing breaking encryption research, they got approval from the Platorobo in Beijing. Otherwise, you're going to end up and shoved in the trunk of a car in China. You don't do that in places like that. And so they published a paper talking about that approach to break RSA 2048.

Number one, they started off with the goal of breaking a higher level. That's sending warning signals to the world. We want to hurt people. The second thing was they piggybacked on research that came out of the United States about five years ago.

I know the specific paper. That paper was called Variational Quantum Factoring, developed by Zabata Computing. And they have the fourth largest IP portfolio in quantum algorithms in the world. They're backed by Honeywell, BASF.

The CEO is one of the founders of CRE from Apple. That is Christopher Savoy. These guys are very smart. And the Chinese paper is a derivative of theirs.

I'm not going to go into any more detail, but they are years behind the United States. And I will also say research and making something better than Shores is much more farther along than not only the public may know, but also many governments. Because if you work at a quantum algorithm company and you do develop something better than Shores, and you went to ROTC in high school, and you have a little bit of a lean in your perspective of the world, you're going to say, holy shit, I can't tell anyone I did this. And I think that those instances are more than one.

So the things that we all know and the things that actually exist, there may be a bit of a gap. I think this is a concern for companies and for the U. S. government and South Korean and other governments around the world is the art of the unknown.

And it's if you developed. I was surprised with the superconductor at room temperature release. And I was thinking like, wow, he gave it away. He could have reshaped the entire world in his image.

And they chose not to do that. But not everyone will be that way. And it's, I think. Different people optimize for different things.

Yeah. So sometimes, sometimes fame and like getting your name out there is more important than the money. And some people want to build Blackstones and Black Rocks and Facebooks and Googles. Yes.

And so I think this uncertainty of what is the personality types of the people who get it first is like a bit of interest, especially out of China, right? Are they going to be publishing it for good faith? Or are they going to use it for taking the rest of the South China Sea by decrypting everything that comes across South Asia? And it's unclear to people.

It's pretty clear that like ever since World War II, probably even before the two, the wars will are won and lost with the control of information. Yeah. Yeah. The information advantage, right?

That, that is where, that is how it is done. Do you have a favorite book or a favorite movie that you watched and just really just left a deep impression or a mark or help you change the way that you see the world? Two, the book and a movie totally orthogonal in why. I like it.

I love it. Right. I'll start with the beautiful one. So I, my favorite movie, number one, all time is Arrival.

Yes. That is my favorite movie of all because I have a fascination with the future and I have a fascination. I'm not very good at other languages, but I have a fascination with that. And speaking Korean for, at an elementary level for a long time and pronouncing it like Korean.

Yep. But my vocabulary is not so impressive, but it, you, I wonder sometimes if you process problems differently in life when you're speaking that other language. Like in Korean, for example, I wouldn't say to you like you and I are going to drive to the ocean where the most important thing is the ocean at the end of the sentence in Korean, you would say the ocean is the place that we are going to drive. So the subject verb agreements are inverted and every aspect of your language is like that.

And also Koreans do not use pronouns. So they don't even identify your gender. It's just the language is missing it altogether. And so.

I love that. It is very strange. It changes the way that you think about things because the tools that we use to form those thoughts, language. Yes.

Have a different structure. And not being political in the United States, when I see all these debates, all I see is people who've never lived overseas. Oh, it's everything is perspective. Right.

And one of the beautiful things about traveling and experiencing other cultures or other cuisines or other like value systems is perspective. Korean is a contextual language, meaning that if you're not following the conversation from the beginning to the end, if you jump in the middle, you would be totally lost because they start omitting information. They don't keep repeating it. So.

So the high context. High context is required. Very high context communication style. Yes.

Yes. And that allows you to delete a lot of things though. And so that's why, for example, they don't have that. So when you first meet someone, coffee or whatever, you may address a gender and other things, but never again the rest of the day.

Right. And so it's just deleted from the language, that part. And it's really fascinating. That was an interesting one.

Not to be sensitive, but I want to show the real depth of the difference here. And it's a big deal. And then also the subject verb agreements are inverted. So when I watched that movie, I was like, wow, this is so cool because there is a truth to it.

How you process, how you treat people is also impacted by your language. You use language to dehumanize people. Right. So when we want to hurt them, we use labels other than them being a person.

Right. And you even see we dehumanize people also when they do things that do not make sense. Like when a person is not being reasonable, we get angry, we yell at them, we call them stupid. And we don't realize that they're operating at the peak efficiency of their biological brain, that the consciousness is not some imaginary cloud with ideas that are more powerful than the biological brain will permit.

That's all bullshit. And like when we see it that way, it makes me very patient with people. Okay. This person's brain is not permitting them to be a reasonable person.

And I'm just going to sit and be calm till they can get to a level they can understand what is wrong here. And even if it takes me 10 minutes, I will wait. Right. And you're very patient.

Also, like Korean requires you to be sometimes very patient too in the language. Because if you come into a conversation mid-context, you're going to wait minutes to catch up. You can't just grab onto the sentence sometimes and see what's happening. And also when you're learning a second language and you want to communicate in your language to people who don't know your language, patience better be who you are.

Absolutely. Another way to phrase that is that idea of being patient with people because they're at the peak operating capability of wherever it is that they are. One of the things that I will always remind myself of or afford people is that the answer to the question, is that the right thing to do? In their minds, it's always, yes, that's the right thing to do.

And now as a listener, it's my job. I put this onus on me as a listener to try to figure out what are those things that are driving you? What are your values? What are your experiences?

What have you been through? What are the chemicals in your brain that are setting it up? So that's the right thing to do. And then from that perspective, like you can have a lot of compassion for almost anything that someone might say.

No matter how far out there they are. I'm going to guess you and I are in the journey. Phase one in that compassion is to become compassionate. And phase two is to learn to mix that with boundaries.

Yes, boundaries are good. Compassion and no boundaries is how you end up and seeing a psychiatrist in five years for damage. But it's true because you can end up in a codependent relationship or kind of host of problems. You can let people into your head and abuse you, choose what you don't want to focus on, or let people walk all over you in the name of being nice.

And those boundaries are what allow you to be in a defensible position, then be helpful. In this particular spiritual conversation, I think my favorite quote comes from Alfred Hitchcock on his speech about wanting a clear horizon. And in his vision of a clear horizon is going through a day without people seeing hurtful things so that our energy can be put towards more useful things. So Arrival is your favorite movie because of the connection to language and you're fascinated by language.

And it being the connecting glue that we have to each other and how it can shape the way that we think about the world or even ourselves. Well, it's also in physics really deep. So like someone asked me, do they not die? Because it's like they're in a phase, right?

So like in physics and it's permanent. So it's in the movie, there are some things that are really deep that are assumed. That the future is already told and that the future is no different from the past. So you're immortal, but you're not.

And that's getting into like heavy in physics, right? That's very heavy. Is that like fate and deterministic universe or is it multiverse? Or maybe it's both like operate it seemed.

Yes, because if you can always, if she's, she lives forever, right? Because she can always be a part of the past and remembering that past. And she can always, she can go to the future. And so she's think of it like a moving average for the stock market, right?

And you can go back to any time. And when you go back to it, you're present and that present is now. And it's just frozen in time and everything has already happened. And that's what it's like.

So it's like repaying, playing a tape and you can replay it as much as you like. Like your tape has a dead end and you can't see beyond when your tape ends. And you can fast forward and rewind and play. Yeah, I'm not 100% sure if she could rewind.

I guess that's an important part, but I would imagine if she could, if she can go to the future, she can come back to the present. Right. Right. And so someone asked me, what does this mean?

And I was like, this is too heavy to explain to you in a movie theater. So I'll just talk to you this after. Like in a podcast where he said. I should bring in some theoretical physicists to, right, to talk about this.

I think our notion of time is all messed up. It is not an era as we've evolved to understand it. Like maybe it's the right way to phrase that. And I think that there will be some very interesting things that we discover around time travel.

Yeah, one of my. We'll have a huge impact actually on how we compute things. Because I believe that the first thing that will time travel will be information. Yeah, from what I understand in physics and quantum mechanics is that there are certain experiments that are totally legit that give you some advantage of seeing a little bit ahead in certain environments into the future.

But they don't call it the future and they say you're saying it wrong. So that's fine. Okay. You can have some like privileged information from.

A hundred milliseconds into the future. Yes. And so it's so cool. And then we have to ask all kinds of questions about God and religion then.

Because if you're saying that there is certainty around the future in some controlled experiments, like not it's not a regression here. It's not statistics. It's like a fact, a fucking fact of the future. That's rather than being scared by that.

Like, I think that's the coolest thing. We should just march right towards that future. Yeah. I want to see what that is.

Same. And I thought you wanted to avoid the likes of religion discussions. This is such that so elegantly earlier. I also, I was born Catholic to Catholics when we're older.

We tend not to want to talk about it a lot. Oh, that's okay. I understand that completely. Religion.

I actually grew up in a survivalist call. Wow. So, I know, I have a friend who grew up in a nudist college. In a what?

In a nudist colony. In a nudist colony. Oh, that's really different. No, mine was conservative.

Okay. So, sex was taboo. As a whole. But like America as a whole, yes.

But too big stream. And what else? Like, we believe like those, World War III was coming in. So, there was fallout shelters.

We had in Montana. Wow. What was that park? Yellowstone National Park.

It had 50, 000 acre ranch. And the theology in that cult was like a mixture of all of the world's religions. Wow. Super different.

And so, growing up, I had a sampling of Christianity and Buddhism and Taoism, Judaism, lots of different stuff, like in that mix. But it was also, it also borrowed a lot of things from like metaphysics. So, there's like Elohim over the seven rays. So, I've gone through a full spectrum of different religious experiences.

And personally, I see religion. So, there's a difference. I make an important distinction between religion and spirituality. Yeah.

You know, religion being institutions that are formed by people. And we come together. We go to church. And there's a physical place we go.

And there's a set of doctrines. And then spirituality, which is like, what is it that you actually believe? I have a quantum mechanics view or superposition view of traditional religion. Oh, of religion.

Of religion or karma or beliefs. Spirituality. Religion, like beliefs in karma. There's a Catholic version of karma, the Christian, like these consequences.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And being ordained and fate and all this. And I have a simple principle that's guided me really well in life. It's that if you're going to look for those things, they're never going to come. Just if you look at the Schrodinger's cat, the states are all collapsed.

That's right. And you lose your superposition. Yes. Right.

So I always say, if there is any of those things, there is no benefit to you to look for it. You don't. There you go. So if you don't control it and you're going to look for it, the process of looking for it is energy lost on doing something about it.

Doing something that making the world a better place, perhaps. Yes. Like working on ourselves. I found a really cool way to spin in quantum mechanics with religion.

So I think it's just in both, right? It's my politically correct answer. I can recognize it. But my caveat is if you stare at it, then everything runs from you.

It's like if you're stuck on a problem, you have to take a break. You have to go do something else. Refresh your context. And then when you're not even thinking about it, the answer will come to you.

This is knowledge we all have when people say, when we're young, say, I don't want to jinx myself or I don't want to. We all know this. And whether or not that's true, at least we have peace of mind, right? Sleeping better at night if we don't.

And I think like the way to destroy yourself is to wait for karma. A way to destroy your peace is to wait for those things to happen. You got to just let go and not in a way that your life is much better. And I found that it took me a lot of growth to do that.

I used to pray a lot and I used to bet on this stuff and you just find yourself miserable. Yeah. Right. Wanting something to happen, you have no control over.

So what I've learned is that just don't look at it and it was going to happen. It was going to happen. So don't worry about it. Acceptance.

Acceptance for the things that we don't control is things we don't control. That's such a deep meaning. I don't think I wish they wrote a little bit more like two more chapters on the psychological impact of that. Okay.

Okay. So what's your favorite book then? My favorite book is probably, this one's going to come across strange, but it's a tragedy of great power politics by John Mearsheimer. Why is this one your favorite book?

Actually, I want to have two. I want to cheat. Oh, you want to have two favorite books. Okay.

This is a hundred percent allowed. Okay. So I like, because everything I was raised to believe at the tail end of the cold war, he casts water on the cold. And what he suggested was he predicted the invasion of Ukraine and he predicts the looming conflict with China.

And for him, it was a very modelable, simple analysis that wasn't hard to see. And when things are very elegant and simple, and then they work out over and over again, I want to look in what is that. And what he simply suggested is that there is no difference between people today and a hundred years ago when it comes to war. And there's nothing different.

Yeah. And how he lays out, of course, he doesn't say that, but that's the implication from my perspective. And he lays out these very methodical hypothesis and why Russia and what he suggested was, so this, I don't want to get into IR theory too much. We have three levels of analysis.

We international state and individual level. And those are universal no matter what kind of view of theories you have. Constructivism, international liberalism, or realism. All three classes of study use the same three principles, international, innate state.

And what international realism, he's a father of mere realism. He said that international norms, becoming closer to other countries and developing laws in the United Nations is not going to stop war. And that this is all fiction in our mind and it has no power and no authority. That's essentially what he says.

The average American person will find that sometimes offensive, unsettling, and not something they want to believe true because it casts a dark shadow on the future. But I want to know their future. I don't want to know what makes me feel good. And then Putin invaded Ukraine and walked right over norms and threatening pulling walking right over norms.

China's threatening. I want walking right over norms. And then the U. S.

invaded Iraq, violating all the norms. So the statistical reality is to me, he's right. Now, do I like that? Does that make me feel good?

No. But is it important to study these things like it is whether you're left or right to study everything and read everything? Whether you believe in critical race theory, whatever, you want to read everything. You want to know, like the general said.

And what I want to read these dark things too, because if they have predictive power, then they're going to inform our national policy. They're going to inform the kind of people we elect. Right. And we want people elected who are sober and not people who are counting on karma and counting on things to happen because it's what we believe is right.

Our enemies don't care what we believe is right. Right. John Mearsheimer woke me up to from these dreams and these illusions that when the U. S.

won the Cold War, it wasn't just that we had a better system to offer. Clearly we did. But that's spurious correlation. Also, there is distribution of power, resources, and a whole bunch of other things.

I like the mantra of something can be right and wrong at the same time. That's called dualism. That's totally true. Demonstrated by like Stroganius Kent.

Yes. And so John Mearsheimer, he ripped the umbilical cord off and had me see the world from a more sobering view. Wow. And I wanted that view so that the world's more understandable to me.

And he wrote a long time ago things that suggested that Ukraine was going to roll. I was so surprised. They're like, we're so shocked he invaded. And I was like, yeah, but anyone who studies international realism knows that this was no surprise at all.

Right. And you were counting on the humanism part stuff to matter. And I think that developed countries in particular, a certain economic level, at least in the West, right? We think we change with it.

We become less attuned towards violence and this kind of stuff. But I'm not sure that this is true. What if we're just on a moving average? We just moved a couple standard deviation from the mean and we're bouncing back now.

I mean, we have the largest sustaining military in the world, right? Right. Yes. The U.

S. is also on its heels and blood is in the water and sharks are circling as a consequence of some of the principles of a new world order, right? But I got news from American people, though. They have to care about our power projection.

They have to care about our power as a country, not as one people of the world, because the rest of the world is not down with women's rights. I don't know if most people know liberalism and democracy as we define it. We're a super minority. If the whole world had one, we elected one president for the whole world, there would never be another liberal president in the history of the future.

Again, we don't have the numbers. And when you look at it like that, whether you're left or right in the United States, whatever it is you're fighting for, if the United States doesn't survive, it's all over for all of them. And then some people will say the U. S.

will always survive. And that's total nonsense. It's fought for every day. And I don't know that.

I won't say just go talk to people in our forces. Go talk to people who do more serious stuff like counterterrorism. Go talk to people who work for special groups out of DHS that do human trafficking. And behind human trafficking is a lot of other really dark and dirty stuff.

And so you realize that the average, I'm going to say something a little cold, the average person who's just a good person going into their office every day is not in the fight. And they have no idea that they are not contributing anything to their own security. Well, they pay their taxes, maybe. Okay.

You're right about all of that. When we're not in the fight, we. . .

But they're definitely not from Liny Dent. I'm not knocking them. It's a very. .

. I always say those are my favorite people to be around because you just don't want to hear about the dark stuff. I would say that a lot more is in the balance than people realize. Oh, yeah.

I think this world has come very close to some very dark moments. Like people don't. . .

You generally don't want to hear it. Cuban Missile Crisis incidents. Well, somebody has to hear it because. .

. This brings in my other favorite book. This is what? Actually, this is great, man.

And you're a great interviewer. So here's the other book that changed my life. I've never worked for the intelligence community in the US. I've never done any of that.

But I read. . . Yeah, they all say that.

They all say that. No, I never did. But I do recommend a book about the birth of the CIA. And it's not what people think.

It's a beautiful book. Because at the time, the US didn't have an intelligence community. We didn't collect intelligence. We didn't do it well.

And the US wasn't going to win World War II or survive any of the Cold War if we didn't get good at it. That's right. And one of the pioneers was William Colby. And he wrote the book, Honorable Men.

And the book is amazing because he tells you about his missions. So his first assignment, one of them was in Italy right after the collapse of Mussolini and the Nazis. And they were going to join the Soviet bloc. It was predetermined.

Italy was going to join the Soviet bloc. Think of all of the immigrants to the United States from Italy since then. Think of the mathematicians. Think of their contribution to art, to wine, to food.

We never got any of that. Right? Think of all the people alive today from Italy who many of them would never have been born. So the implications are really dark.

You know, you meet people from Eastern Europe who grew up in that time and they still have wounds from it. So they're still recovering from the trauma. This is generational trauma. So averting that is worth all costs.

And he was a CIA officer in Italy and he saw an opportunity to interfere in their elections. And it was the right thing to do. So he funneled money to a Catholic church who funneled money to a campaign person who got elected and Italy did not go to Soviet bloc. One person did that.

One person turned the tilt. Of course, there were other people involved. But if he didn't have the passion and the initiative, no one else would have been on the team. Or if he didn't see like what was happening.

So think of yourself, whoever you are in the podcast. You're from Ohio. You're an undergrad studying computer science. And somewhere in the world is someone waiting for you to turn the history for 50 years with one place.

It is really like that. One thing that a lot of the public don't get is they think that the government's a big system of people with big meetings. Sometimes it's just a guy in Iran who makes the whole difference. Right.

And sometimes they swing wrong and bad things happen. The game's still got to be played. So just on human rights in the United States, whatever position, the game's still got to be played, even if there's a blowback and a consequence. You still got to play the game.

You got to play it. Yeah. You got to try. You have to be the change that you want to see in the world.

You have to play an active role in that. I guess you could just sit back and be part of the scenery, but he might just be part of the problem. In fact, he helped shape it. And then they see I had a lot of overstretched and a lot of things that they weren't supposed to do.

He got before Congress and he said, we're a democracy. If you don't like what I've done over my career in the end, then regulate it. And get involved. He said, I'm not here to tell you how to run the country.

I'm here to execute on the authority you give me. And if you want to change that authority, you do that. And he was a really beautiful guy and he impacted the world single-handedly on several instances. And he was not necessarily remarkable from her perspective.

You just read his monologue. He's just a person talking to himself. What do you think he should be doing? Right.

And so here you had a person his entire life who was introspecting, trying to figure out clawing for the best for everyone. And I really liked that book because we live in a time where people don't have self-esteem and they don't believe in themselves and they don't believe they can have impact. And it's absolutely untrue. And the fastest way to impact is to believe in yourself irrationally at times and just go.

And even if you fall and fail, you're going to learn, you're going to iterate. Now, look, if you don't have that fortitude and it's not for you, then that's fine. Get behind someone who does. It's not everything is not for everyone.

Right. I have a friend who has a phobia of being in the woods where the brush is thick and there's nothing they can do. Being in the woods with a what? Thick brush.

Oh, just like thickets. Like a person who has a phobia around darkness or spiders and they have a phobia for that, right? And some people, we just have things we just can't get over. And that brings me to another point on social politics in the U.

S. which really saddens me. Sure. Is that I see the United States as a portfolio and the best portfolio is what kind of portfolio?

What is the word? Diverse. Diversified portfolio. Yes.

Diverse portfolio. Yes. We need the hunters. We need the human rights lawyers.

We need the activists. We need the soldiers and killers. We need the first responders. We need the civil rights.

We need the people who don't want change. Right. It's a portfolio. And everyone has their time up to back.

The people who don't want change. Those people might be really bad for liberalism, but really good at stopping China from intrusion on our rights. They don't want change. Right.

That's right. Oh, they don't want to change the good thing that we all have going for themselves. And so I look as a portfolio strategy. And if we all could just see it that way, our patience and our philosophy about how we engage each other will change a lot.

This is one of the things that gets me really excited. And I don't really fit into any particular box very well. But I will, in a non-monogamous sense, in a non-monogamous political sense, adopt different views across the spectrum where I think it makes sense. And I don't identify as one thing or another thing.

And I don't really fit into any one box very well because of that. And it confuses people because I break rules. I think what I'm just doing with my identity, what you just described is really healthy for our nation. Trying to do that.

And it's a journey. It's not a destination. It's always changing. I think one of the things that has clutched the individual American soul is a desire to establish self-esteem through political identities.

And I think nothing healthy comes from this at all. Zero. There's nothing good there. Like, why are you going to attach your self-worth, your self-esteem, your self-acceptance to something external that you have to cling to that may not make sense?

Yeah. I think if a person's going to a bar wondering how a person votes, the person they're hurting the most is himself. Yes. Right?

Because they could be looking for people who are funny. They could be looking for people who like to ride bicycles. And these are conversations that are not necessary in your entire life cycle of a relationship with someone. And the more we make politics a conversation for people, the worse they're going to become as human beings, in my opinion.

Looking like a portfolio, there are people who love knocking on doors. I just don't think that it would be good if everyone did it. I don't think it would be good if everyone was a sociopath at war making decisions on bombing runs. Yeah.

And I think that we have to relax a little bit and realize that we can't draw everyone into our wars because- We are different. We are all so different. And those differences are not a bad thing. They are strength.

Yes. Absolutely. And they're human beings. And human beings have limitations of what kind of information they can process, what they can understand.

And if we're these people at the lines of change, then I just ask us to also understand that in front of you is a human being. And that means to me that not just like some UN human rights charter, it means that they're fallible. It means that they're shit. They're just not going to understand.

Like they bring camp process. And so it might take a year. Like therapy, like if we all want to change and we have some problem, it takes 10 years of therapy sometimes to change. That person in front of you whose views you don't like, even if you're sure they are wrong, it's 10 years.

And so we have to, I don't mean to be political, but we have to accept that there's nowhere to go with each other. And we got to get used to being patient and doing that. Right now, our patience with each other seems to be zero. I don't feel that at all with you.

You and I are not. It looks like not on Twitter and social media when I read the headlines. I deleted all my social media accounts. I did too.

I will post dinner parties and I only let people over because it's a lot. It's when you have a synchronous conversation with someone in person, you get all of the juicy body language that comes up that we're constantly reading and the communication channel is much more rich. I think that when the human brain writes through social media, there is like the whole kind and thoughtful part of them is just deleted. I mean, it's so easy to forget that there are other human beings that are reading like what you write.

And then even then, like when you read text, you have none of the communication channels that our brains have evolved to cook up. Like you are reading my body language. This is why I have the camera on. So you can read my body language and I can read yours.

We have a more fluid, intricate, deep conversation that way. But if we were just sending text back and forth to each other, it'd be very dry because we're just not. The 90% of the communication is gone. Maybe even 95%.

It's just gone. This reminds me of there's a comparison. There's a book I'll share with. Oh, please.

The book is called by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman. And it's called On Killing. On Killing. On Killing.

Okay. The psychological cost of learning to kill in a war in society. Wow. And before leading up to World War Wars and the Korean War and Vietnam War, there was apparently a lot of people who just didn't engage in any combat because they couldn't.

And so even in the battlefield, a lot of people never fired anything. And so the argument is that movies romanticize everyone's hero in fighting. A lot of people just couldn't bring themselves to pull the trigger in the middle of the battle, which is why maybe casualties were much higher too at that time. And so what happened was they learned that if you make like a silhouette shape for a range, you're muscle memorying the shoot.

So you get the round off before you process it. Right. Now, here's my thing. Right.

So same thing with social media. When you're arguing and saying horrible things, you're firing off before you process that that's a person. Right. It's the same thing.

And so I was talking with a friend of mine who left the intelligence community today, and we were joking. He's like, how do you make the world a better place to get rid of social media? It's not that it's very valuable. It changes lives.

But it also brings out this dark side where we're firing shots before we realize that's a person. And it doesn't help that their monetization strategy in those companies is to produce engagement. And the thing that happens to produce the most engagement is rage. It's so those things that they're showing you and the things that pop up on your stream and you're scrolling is like simply designed to produce a response, elicit more screen time.

That's it. It's the balls that those companies care about. They don't care about your psychological well-being. They don't care about you forming like real relationships with the people on that platform.

It's fucked. That's why I deleted those accounts. I have a request for Facebook's and someone your podcast. And it's a legit simple one.

So being libertarian, I'm open to however people practice their sexuality, whatever they want to do. I'm more of I want to make money and run business and build dreams. And then of course, that's done. I'm not that's what I want to spend my time with in person.

I'm not also a very social person. I'm just obsessed with the future and building companies. So I have this tolerance. So fine, let's go.

Let's get on the ruck march. Let's start walking. And so that's my attitude towards life and people. And it just that's I'm in that portfolio and the world has to have people like me that I'm just hyper focused on some things.

And in that process, however, well, even overseas on this particular topic, I've always felt sad that people who are different by their sexuality, whatever they get it really bad in Asia. And when Facebook was introduced to the rest of the world, I used to manage a group called Addicted to International Politics. We had 100 nationalities. I did a survey and 100 nationalities from most of the world's countries.

I had Taliban on there looking for women who were in the Taliban so they could go find them and have them express this. So we had people reach out to me. Hey, I'm a woman in Afghanistan. Can I use this fake profile as a man?

Because we don't have we have no fake profile. I said, go ahead. So we made exceptions and I learned. And it was like and I had some one of my friends who works in the Pentagon used to be an admin with me there.

It was like a serious thing. We there was a woman who escaped Sri Lanka. She married one of my admins because she was going to be killed because she was like raped. But it was like an honor killing or something.

And so I was reaching out to human rights lawyers. Hey, I had this person contact me on social media and I want to do something about this. They're like on the run. And so we had this experience and I had to deal with people who were gay and all kinds of things like that.

Yeah. What I realized, though, is when you add a friend, it recommends the friend you added to other people, even if you block your friend list. Oh, so if you and I are there's loopholes. Yes.

So if you and I are in Iraq or you and I are in Indonesia in an Islamic area and I add three gay people, but I block my friend list. The cleric or my father is going to see a recommendation to friend that person. Dangerous. And they know immediately because they'll go to me and see that if they add them, then it'll show up somehow to see a like or something.

Right. So when I was invited as an admin of this group, right, which was in the middle of one or two interesting things in the world. And I went to Facebook and I was very serious and I asked about that feature and can you turn it all so that you don't recommend to people you add it? Because for most of the world, this is untenable.

And I did. I got shut down every one I talked. Really? Yeah.

That's frustrating. That's really frustrating. And that's just like a small ask too. But that's key to their growth.

Yeah. After I saw a movie on HBO, I think it was called From Chechnya with Love. And it was about an underground railroad for LGBTQ folks that were in Chechnya, which is a very dangerous place to be gay. And they were trying to help them get out of it.

And that movie, it was like a documentary. Or docudrama, like undercover filming. And oh, it just made me so upset. And I was like, okay, like I can be part of the change I want to see in the world.

Here's the darker part. Tell me. The future must be responsible for people being dead. Yes.

Because they. . . I said that.

They just. . . I wasn't talking to the right people.

And I was like, listen, I'm coming from this place from experience. And I'm telling you, people are getting hurt. But as technology leaders, we do have the ability to bring into this world new things that can make the world a better place. And I think when we do that and we do that in a way that enables safe connections or privacy preserving technologies, I'm all for that.

I'm all for that. And that's one of the really cool things about Starlink, right? Is that hopefully places like North Korea will have internet access. Hope he makes it free for everyone for that part of the world.

Just beam it down. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I know that China is developing tech to block it because they immediately got caught on to what this is about.

And I think that when I first returned to the United States in 2019, 2016, I came from that world and I had been to Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore. I had been extorted, blackmailed, threatened, overcoat, all kinds of stuff. I had some wounds to lick when I returned to the United States. It's such a better place.

There are criminals here and there are thieves here, but we respond with shock and surprise. There are racists and bigots, but we respond with shock and surprise. In most of the world, they don't respond with shock and surprise. And that's the difference.

And when you come from a world where people don't respond to shock and surprise from that, it's very isolating. It's very sad. And it's you want to do something about it when you return. And when I would pitch doing something about it, I noticed a lot of people didn't want to touch it.

Next time you pitch something to do something about it, pull the end. So at that time, it had to do with China. No one wanted to touch it. And it's changed, though.

It's changed a lot. And I noticed that there is discussions about our tech leaders about how we can delicately help Hong Kong or this kind of things. And in my generation, it's strange. When were you born?

79. 79. Okay. I'm 84.

Okay. So we're very close. We're very close. Yeah.

And in our generation, it wasn't that there was one people of the world. It was that there was one community of free people in the world. And it was our responsibility for anybody who says we want to be like you to do something about it. The U.

S. has fell short of it many times. But it was something we strive for. And I've noticed from the right and the left, they just threw it out in the last two elections.

And so for people from our generation, it's not about ideology. It's that these people I know who are acting this way have never lived there. Right. You haven't experienced a first-hand thing and you don't really understand it.

Yeah. We're super lucky. Six billion people out of the, was it eight now? They live in just, we often talk about, activists often talk about their labor conditions and exploitation.

But they all, what they don't talk about and what the cryptognitive doesn't talk about is how they treat each other in their culture. Making a woman stay with her boss at eight o'clock drinking three times a week or she's going to get fired because that's the culture. That's wrong. And I don't care what the cult you say about.

There are some things we shouldn't be open-minded about. Right. Treating a woman being like that is not excusable by culture. Absolutely not.

That's a person who's going to suffer trauma and that trauma is going to transfer to their children. And so we still have this better world to make, but of course we got to do it within some resource limits. Tech is interesting because you can reach far and wide with little resource. That's right.

And I feel like from that cold war mentality, our work's still not the best. It's a journey, not a destination. Yeah. And I really wish that the people here would get a second win for that work because there's another book that I was recommended that I admittedly haven't really got to in depth called The Jungle Grows Back.

I recommend for your audience. The Jungle Grows Back by Robert Kagan basically suggests that if the U. S. pulls back from the world, the jungle of the pre-colonial era is going to grow back.

That's very Atlas Shrugged. Yes. But you see the evidence of it. So the U.

S. has been rather weak around defending Eastern Europe. So they see that as an imitation. So they invade it.

And talks about the fall of the U. S. world order. So you're going to have to pay mercenaries and companies to securely ship.

If the U. S. pulls back patrolling the sea lanes, you're going to see pirates again. And that's the one thing that American people concern me about is they have this delusion with no foundation that the future is just better.

And there's no. There's no set future. There's nothing. There's nothing.

It is what we make of it. This world is what we make of the world. What if the last 80 years are just a deviation from the mean and we're being pulled back to darkness? So we have to be serious about this.

If you could go back in time, meet your younger self, would you have any advice for your younger self? I would say don't make too much meaning of conflicts in the present. Don't be too emotional about that stuff because it's all going to pass. Focus on getting out of the situation everything you can.

Be as many people as you can. If you have enemies, don't show them your teeth. Let them be in the dark of what you can do. Yeah.

If you're going to make a joke about President Bush invading Iraq, at least don't tell them you're going to do it so they can prepare. Right. And you're just giving people a way to manipulate and control you. If you show them everything about your emotion, hide it, develop it.

Do something about it and get more control over yourself. And that's what I would tell my younger. So I spend more time on that. I have ADHD, right?

Symptoms. So impulse control and emotions and hyper-focus. They get you really far, but they also create a lot of self-inflicted. If I put my investor hat on real quick and I ask you the question, okay, American binary, you sound like an amazing leader, but you're building a business.

There's clear opportunity. There's going to be a clear need for all of this, even today, even right now. Not just because of the things we don't know, but because people that care can be recording everything and just break historical content as soon as it does become available in terms of cryptography. How do you monetize cryptography?

So cryptography is bad business from monetization. I think a lot of investors know that what is valuable is if you build whole IT products that are agile for encryption that needs to be transitioned and you have a real thorough vetted expertise in that new encryption that everyone's scared of. And what we do is we roll out SASE and other solutions that leverage more software defined firewalls and so on to lower IT costs. There are always people that say SDNs are out of fashion and SASE.

And honestly, this is all mumbling noise to me. There is, it's an IT product that costs less than people can use it and it's vetted. That's all it really is. And so rather than getting caught up in the Gartner buzzwords and stuff, let's just talk about the first principles.

And so we have use case deployed with a company owned by S&P 500 Humana, healthcare company, network management. And our solution Fortress is a network infrastructure in a box. And think about like an app store, we can deploy firewall, we can deploy VPN, we can deploy several other features in the IT network in a software fashion. In one use case, we modeled reducing hardware firewalls from 500 to one, but with the same throughput and performance and network integrity.

So smaller tax surface, well, that's expensive. So the company strategy, how we monetize it is we're going to reduce company IT costs at scale by more than 70% while transitioning to post-quantum encryption for free. So our implementations have been used in Ukraine. We have done a lot of work in warfighters.

We probably have the most beaten and tried implementation of post-quantum encryption in the world. That much I can say. We've been through a long vetting process and we continue to expand to lightweight cryptography. And we figure out how to bring this into the transition to new IT equipment that's lighter, faster, and better.

So you actually deliberate a product. Because I see cryptography as a tool. And instead of deliver a tool to the market, which never works, like you're delivering a full-on product, which is the SDM. That cuts IT costs and reduces the attack surface and makes it easier for the IT and madmen to operate the network.

So the implementations of this new quantum-resistant cryptography that you guys are super good at and laser-focused on and you drop into your products, is that proprietary? Are those proprietary implementations? No, it's more trade graphs and then some of the proprietary way that the software is integrated into the network protocols and that stuff. Sure.

Look, if someone's offering proprietary cryptography, it's usually snake oil unless they're serving the NSA or the CIA. And it's not cryptography. Yes. Yes.

A scalable solution is to use standardized stuff, right? This is easier, more interoperable, less education for the customer. Kyber is being standardized and so are a couple of other ciphers that we use that are not elliptic curve and not RSA. We can talk about that.

There's also some real interesting solutions and also in lightweight cryptography that may fall under soon post-clinic cryptography. So 160 kilobytes, key size, post-clinic solution. There's a lot happening in encryption. So we figure out, how do I get that into a network?

We offer the network solution at a fraction of the cost so that when you're upgrading with us, you can use today's encryption. And in two years, you can say, I want to postpone. And we do an API call. It's all turned to work.

Ah, so you have crypto agility built into your products. Yes, and we define crypto agility as it's no good if it's increasing the attack surface. So if you're jamming crypto in there, that's not good. So what we do is we have one cryptographic construction per network protocol, and we swap the network protocols out in whole with an API call.

So we don't increase the attack surface despite being crypto agile. There's a lot of tiny little deep tech details that are really important to do this. This is why TLS is such a horrible system, because it's got so much jammed in there that it's always being breached. Because the attack surface is just ginormous.

If we're going to speak TLS, and I'm an attacker, and I'm going to initiate a connection to a server, and that server is willing to downgrade the version of the protocol or use an insecure cypress suite, that's what you're talking about, right? Yes. So like people will say, how do you not use TLS? There's a lot of places where you can do it, not using it for your core parts, your VPN, your encrypted communications.

Even do it without email if you wanted to. At the network layer, you have quite a few options. And so you want to minimize the dependence on that stuff as much as possible. But this is what we do.

We have traction in healthcare, and we also have traction in defense. In fact, we had a really big call today with people from the special operations community on a project with the telco. And so we continue to be at the tip of the condensation or the tip of the spear in this topic. In 16 months, its standardization is fully authorized for post-quantum encryption for all federal products.

So you can have a post-quantum AWS cloud, and the federal government will buy it. There are no barriers to entry at that point. So how's Amazon going to do that? Because they have that ramp environment.

Yeah. Two ways of looking. A lot of encryption is complicated. There are two important parts.

In transit, at rest. Kyber is a stream cipher at rest. So you can pair it with AEF or something like that. Or you can even pair it with ASCON and Lightroom Cotography, which is an AEAD.

And that's a much smaller. So you have a lot of options now, sexy options, that are standardizing in the next 18 months. So you will develop construction. You'll get it vetted, tested.

There are no NIAD profiles to evaluate software implementation. They're going to be around, in fact, 18 months. So it's all happening. And look at it like this.

So people say, what is the transition to post-quantum encryption market size? And all the market research is wrong. Because they're valuing the encryption as a value add only. But if you're fitting all the products, then you're about market sizes, post-quantum VPN, post-quantum firewall, post-quantum whole product.

That means- Post-quantum application later encryption. Post-quantum email. So the market size is every single piece of hardware that is encrypted in the product as well. Because you're going to sell the whole new thing all over again.

You don't think that the incumbents who sell hardware are going to sell you upgrades. They're going to make you buy the whole damn thing over because there's more revenue. But the market research is factoring in its whole products, only as value adds. So I say the market research is wrong.

So the SAM and the TAMs are ginormous. Basically, the entire internet. By 2030, it's over a trillion. Everything will be post-quantum encrypted.

And if not, then at our peril, right? That's the risk we take as entrepreneurs. We see the future and we skate to where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is. So the real trick in my business is to make sure you're around in the market for the next 16 months before the demand blows up when the federal gate's all open because it's all authorized.

And people don't understand how big federal is. Almost every big tech company has federal. They just don't market it. It's so much money for them.

AWS, someone told me, is like 40% revenue from defense. So AWS would probably not be a profitable company if it weren't for the U. S. government.

Oh, absolutely not. They'd be missing 40% of their income. The single biggest spending customer in the world, U. S.

government. So that's why I like when they authorize this encryption, it's such a big deal. Well, thank you so much for all of the generous time that you've shared with me and all of our listeners. Would you like to leave our listeners with any words of wisdom?

I would say we need all the help we can get. I don't have all the answers. And so please feel free to reach out to me. My website is ambit.

inc. Would you like to make a plug for anything? Someone wants to try out like post-quantum? If you want to try out a post-quantum enterprise VPN or other product, you can reach out to us and we can support you in that department.

Are you hiring any rules of the. . . Yeah, I'm looking for sales professionals for enterprise.

And I'm also looking for two senior engineers to support some products that we have coming. So we have one we're deploying in an all-steer environment that's really tight. And the code has to be tight. And we have a couple of things like IoT applications.

Amazing. I'm looking for supporters who can help us see our vision. I want help in scaling my company. Excellent.

And Kevin, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. This is spectacular. I wanted to give you my best and I wanted to be useful for your audience.

And so I tried to do that. I hope I did. You did. Absolutely.

You went way above and beyond. And thank you for all the vulnerable moments that you shared as well. No problem. You should have seen my other interviews.

Four hours. Really? I did one on Robert Hanson's a famous hacker. He had a death threat.

He hackslam North Korean op or something. And he sold the company recently for 45 million cash. He wears the hacker like whole thing. Like his clothes are dark and it's got a leather thing that vips silver.

Oh. Character. You got to meet him. He's like from the Matrix.

Cool. Cool. So thank you very much. No, thank you.

Thank you. This is amazing. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in for another episode of the Security Podcast in Silicon Valley.