How Patrick Hearn & Eric Dresdale Are Building the Digital Bodyguard for a Post-Quantum World

Welcome to Perceived Reality.

I'm your host Dari Atwal.

Quantum AI can pose a tremendous threat to you.

My next two guests will make sure that you are protected.

Welcome to the show, Patrick Hearn and Eric Drresdale.

I'm so happy to see you because you are game changers in this industry and you are making sure we're protected.

Yes, definitely.

All right, I want to dive a little bit first into your personal business journey.

How did you guys find each other and what motivated you to get into this specific industry?

So for my part, Nadia, it's a, it's been over the course of a couple of decades and it's been all over the world from Johannesburg to Toronto to Paris, San Francisco, Washington, and they've all had a common theme.

And that is really trying to make things more secure and better sitting behind the scenes and just making a better change for people's lives, whether it was for Thomson Reuters, whether it's for companies like IEmia, and even helping countries, for example, in Africa and in South Asia, and we've learned that there's just a common, you know, theme right across the board.

Bad guys always get better at what they do and It's up to us to figure out ways that we stay ahead of what I would call and also from the former head of the Coast Guard, stay ahead of probably some of the most entrepreneurial bad guys on the planet.

How about you?

And for me, well, this is my 3rd tech startup, and I always like tackling problems that are going to help vulnerable populations.

So my first company was a rewardable prepaid debit card for mental health and addiction.

And then I moved into biometric digital identity to stop broad there, and then through that we actually came up with a way.

How do we bring identity to the billion people around the world that don't have it?

How do we provide identity to climb to more refugees in the most secure way possible?

And one of the people that's part of this project and my previous co-founder Richard Cain, came up with a really novel idea.

Well, let's use the most chaotic or entropic natural phenomena in the universe, which is cosmic radiation.

And bring it into cube satellites and this was right around the time this was early 2018 we conceptualized this right around the time Starlink was starting to send satellites up.

So we said, well, we could use their point to point laser for global distribution and it's out of reach of adversarial nation states and bad actors.

Fast forward, I met our third co-founder and the technical CEO David Harding, who then introduced me to this lovely gentleman here, Patrick, and we spent a couple of years working on different things.

At the end of 2023, that company received that patent fully and contested. called up David.

And I said there's something here.

I'm not the technologist.

And he said, You're not selling that patent.

And we called up Patrick.

We started this company and it's been a wonderful ride.

That was February of 2024, so we're still pretty early on this journey, but it's moving it back.

We literally incorporated last year, January 30th.

Wow, very young.

Yes, we are young.

And powerful already.

That is that that is interesting.

I mean, your big thing is the quantum resistance security.

I would like to know.

What led you exactly to that and how did you combat it?

How are you tackling that?

Because this is a very complex issue that is affecting many companies, many individuals.

So how are you going about it?

So every single organization that utilizes any kind of encryption, which means everybody.

And everything and everything, they all have a foundational way of being able to send encrypted and decrypted information.

It is the combination of two things algorithms and entropy, chaos, and the strength of the both of the two of them gives you a level of safety as you communicate or encrypt data across the board.

This is what runs this stock exchange at the end of the day.

And if you're able to take this core, And move it in a way that really moves up the level without changing any infrastructure, and we mean without changing any infrastructure.

You can have a path that actually has encryption which can resist existing artificial intelligence and future direct brute force attacks.

So the beauty of it is we have taken the wonderful technology that Eric and Richard and we bolted on some additional things to it, which is a patent that took us.

No less than 83 days from filing to fully uncontested, 20 foundational points.

It is literally the first artificial intelligence software driven 100% random number generation, and it concedes any key that it has the ability to be resistant to a point where it would be AI and quantum resistant, so.

The reason why that's important is because organizations all around the world are spending hundreds and tens of billions of dollars.

We know one organization that's spending $12 billion over five years just to modify its infrastructure.

In that case, we can bring it down by over 90%, and we can start today.

Who's your typical client?

Well, government, national security is obviously one of them.

And then on the because we're a dual use company on the private side, we're looking at data centers and then obviously regulated industries.

So you're looking at banking.

We include cryptocurrency in that rocket as well, healthcare, telecom.

Logistics, anything that falls into that regulatory bucket, that's who our main target is because that is who those adversarial nation states and bad actors are going to target first.

They want to decimate our infrastructure and we're here to protect and it goes even further when you think about artists, performing artists, you know, making sure that they're Materials, their music, their books, what have you, is secure live television events.

This very one it seems right now nothing is secure in that industry.

That's exactly the point.

And the and the problem statement really has been the response by the conventional, you know, respectfully needs.

Catch up a little bit industry and they've all said the following concept.

It's going to be long.

It's going to be hard, and it's going to be really expensive to transition this industry into being quantum and AI secure.

We deny that outright.

It is not, does not take long.

It is not hard.

And in the example I just gave.

It's a lot less expensive and to piggyback on what he was saying, what we're offering, what we do.

It is an orderly tech refresh.

It is an orderly upgrade to your technology, as Patrick pointed out earlier, with no changes to your existing architecture or infrastructure.

It is seamless.

It is easy.

It is cost effective.

And they can turn that on and push back the threat of AI and quantum today by at least a decade.

And especially since AI is evolving so fast, you are evolving with it.

Well, I will tell you, well, you know, one of the things that we have built that's in the process of getting patented right now is a novel way of measuring entropy.

We created an entropy calculator, and part of what we do there is we actually use AI to find hidden patterns and hidden patterns within hidden patterns.

And so if we're capable of doing that, you know, others are.

And so if any organization has weak keys and you would get weak keys from poor entropy, right, not enough randomness, you better believe that AI is going to find those hidden patterns and exploit those vulnerabilities, and it gets even more interesting from the perspective that we can run this literally every anywhere.

I can do it on my phone.

I can run it on my phone.

I can run it inside.

A secure environment whether it's on premise or even if it's off premise, it doesn't matter to us.

And what you've done in this case, we have fundamentally changed the notion of how to operate modern post quantum cryptography.

I had not much of a clue about this before.

I was diving a little bit into it and now I find this is like As necessary as a bodyguard, you know, basically you're a digital bodyguard in many ways.

That's exactly right, protecting your crypto wallets, right, and those who have the most highly entropic source that can do this consistently and at scale across keeps adding any environment is massive.

What we have essentially done. is from a mathematical perspective replicated the chaos of the universe in a 150 megabyte software package.

Actually it's not just one universe.

We've actually done it's 15 universes.

We have literally created mathematically speaking, the you in my orbit.

I love it.

Well, I was aware of the threat, but all these details, this is so valuable, and our audience takes it all away from because it's.

Amazing.

I hope they can all absorb it and investigate a little more and check out your website because it's very informative and you're doing such important work, and I hope that you will come back.

Oh, we, and we have a 20 minute video that actually gets into the technical side of how we go at it.

So we have a lovely website.

It's very spaced.

It's a wonderful website.

I was on it, loved it, and it was a I was. able to understand it, to comprehend it, and I think that's important that people, because sometimes when people don't understand, they get scared, as you say, then they think, oh this must take long.

Oh, this must be expensive, and actually it's not, but it's a necessity and very glad that you're here.

Fantastic to have this conversation with you.

I want to continue that.

OK.

This was another episode of Perceived Reality.

Join us again next time.