Navigating Tomorrow's Tech Landscape with Sultan Meghji

Tech Meets Humanity: In-Depth with Sultan Meghji

In this episode of The Human Code, host Don Finley converses with tech visionary Sultan Meghji, who brings over 30 years of experience in AI and emerging technologies. They explore Sultan's personal journey and professional milestones, from early experimentation to advising governments and leading Frontier Foundry. Key topics include the transformative potential of decentralized AI and blockchain, the critical role of ethics in technology, and the tangible impact of quantum computing on various industries. Sultan also shares insights into personal health optimization using AI and prevailing trends in data privacy and cybersecurity in the quantum age. Tune in for a compelling discussion bridging the gap between advanced technology and human growth.

00:00 Introduction to The Human Code 
00:49 Meet Sultan Meghji: A Visionary in Tech 
01:47 Sultan's Early Experiments and Career 
04:15 Frontier Technologies and Real-World Applications 
05:41 The Evolution of Networking: From X.25 to TCP/IP 
09:22 AI, Crypto, and Blockchain: The Future of Tech 
13:13 Personalized AI and Data Privacy 
20:04 AI in Regulated Environments 
24:24 AI and Longevity: A Personal Journey 
35:15 The Importance of Cyber Hygiene and Quantum Readiness 
39:11 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Sponsored by FINdustries
Hosted by Don Finley

Transcript

Don Finley: 0:00

Welcome to The Human Code, the podcast where technology meets humanity, and the future is shaped by the leaders and innovators of today. I'm your host, Don Finley, inviting you on a journey through the fascinating world of tech, leadership, and personal growth. Here, we delve into the stories of visionary minds, Who are not only driving technological advancement, but also embodying the personal journeys and insights that inspire us all. Each episode, we explore the intersections where human ingenuity meets the cutting edge of technology, unpacking the experiences, challenges, and triumphs that define our era. So, whether you are a tech enthusiast, an inspiring entrepreneur, or simply curious about the human narratives behind the digital revolution, you're in the right place. Welcome to The Human Code. Today on the human code. We're thrilled to welcome Salton Meghji. A true visionary at the crossroads of technology and humanity. With over 30 years of experience in AI and emerging technologies, Salton has been at the forefront of innovation, building ventures, advising governments, and shaping the next wave of. technological progress. As the co-founder and CEO of frontier Foundry. He leads a team tackling global challenges with cutting edge solutions. In our conversation, Salton shares, captivating stories of his early experiments with frontier technologies, dives into the transformative potential of decentralized AI and blockchain and explores the critical role of ethics and alignment and creating AI that serves humanity. From the exciting world of quantum computing to his personal journey and leveraging AI for health and longevity. This episode is packed with thought provoking ideas and actionable insights. Let's dive in and learn from Sultan's unparalleled perspective on how technology can truly empower and transform our lives. I'm here with Sultan Meghji and Sultan absolutely loved our pre talk. And I think we're going to have a fantastic conversation, but what I would love to start out with is what got you interested in the intersection of humanity and technology?

Sultan Meghji: 2:02

it's a fun question and thanks for having me on. it's been a great chat. I think you and I went longer in the pre chat than we were supposed to.

Don Finley: 2:08

It works.

Sultan Meghji: 2:09

So I was really fortunate when I was a what we would call a tween. My dad was a geneticist working on the first generation of genetically modified crops and so he was You know, a very frontier scientist in his own way, but he was an African refugee basically got kicked out of Tanzania by the socialists who seized all our land and all our property because he wasn't the right color. And, And so I had the opportunity to run around Paris and Basel and Berlin and places like that, like when the wall came down, like I was literally there when they tore down checkpoint Charlie, it was hilarious.

Don Finley: 2:42

that is awesome.

Sultan Meghji: 2:44

And it was great. But what it. What I did was combine two different things in my brain at a very early and formative age. One was technology and how important it is to keep pushing on that frontier. And then the second is, because I was living in a bunch of different cultures, my mom was from the middle of a cornfield in Illinois, my dad was from East Africa, I grew up mostly, bouncing around, Illinois and Paris and Basel and places like that, that I grew up in a multicultural environment that fundamentally was focused on macro events. So the 1st, I was overseas when the 1st Gulf War happened. so when I came back to the U. S. The kind of normal high school just wasn't the right fit. And so we found a way to get me into an accelerated program in a high school that was part of major university that allowed me to do things like research projects and to go take classes at that university and to, apply for and win an NSF grant. And in all of those cases, it's, A combination of pushing the edges of frontier technology in really applicable ways, not as a theoretical experiment, not as a press release, not as something that's very shiny and pretty, but something that actually has meaning, but that also has a macroeconomic impact. And so that's really been the thesis for most of my career.

Don Finley: 4:01

You and I have so much in common on this because I've also been at that forefront of like, how do we actually apply this technology? How do we bring it to helping somebody out? What have been some of your favorite, applications of this frontier tech?

Sultan Meghji: 4:15

Oh, there are some really cool ones. very early on, I think I was 15. I was at NCSA at the University of Illinois, and I got to do two things that I didn't think I should have been allowed to do. The first one was, Get administrative access to a supercomputer so that I could upgrade a bunch of the libraries on it because that vendor wasn't keeping up with all of the advances of the internet age, So we were trying to do things like have a, connect to the internet more efficiently and, eventually put a web server on it. So I was the one, actually trying to make that. The work that guys on the Mosaic project and CERN were trying to do. I actually build a bunch of that on supercomputers, which I didn't think they should have let a 15 year old do it, but they did, That was awesome.

Don Finley: 5:01

It's honestly probably the best person for the job as well.

Sultan Meghji: 5:04

it's interesting. I'm far older than that. I have to say, going through and figuring out, reading all the news groups and learning how GNU Autoconf worked and then trying to, grab the CVS repository and do this and do that and just whack away at this early stage code to make it work was absolutely fascinating. But what it did do, and it was something that I very quickly picked up is. Understanding what we call the full stack now, everything from the CPU to the network device, all the way up to what we call layer seven, where the applications live and protocols and all of that kind of stuff. And once you understand that whole stack, it makes it really easy for you to, kind of disassemble. What's a good project and what's a bad project. So one of the very first commercial projects I worked on was removing an old networking technology called X. 25 and replacing it with TCP IP. You might not have heard of X. 25, but I'm sure you've heard of TCP IP,

Don Finley: 5:53

Absolutely.

Sultan Meghji: 5:54

So X. 25 was one of the first computer networks and it first. you would know it if I showed you a video of all those grainy pictures from a hundred years ago about people plugging in the, to connect phone calls, they'd plug in the cords into different holes.

Don Finley: 6:08

Yeah,

Sultan Meghji: 6:09

that was the original idea of X25 was to automate that. And so we pulled that out and got TCP IP to work in its place for a bunch of the market systems, which was really, super interesting.

Don Finley: 6:20

absolutely fascinating because I remember reading about some of that transition from the old telephone systems into TCP IP and how most networks actually fought that for a bit.

Sultan Meghji: 6:30

Oh yeah, we had these modems and we were using these Sun, the Sun pizza boxes, if you're old enough to remember

Don Finley: 6:37

Oh, yeah.

Sultan Meghji: 6:37

and the X. 25 driver only worked up to a certain version of the operating system. And the current versions, the, going from Sun OS to Solaris, which happened I think in the mid nineties. We wanted to buy Solaris boxes because they were infinitely faster and you could actually buy parts instead of going to a garage sale and things like that. And so we bought the Solaris boxes, but then we couldn't figure out how to get the libraries to move over. And we were getting no support from the modem vendors. The guys at Sun were like, they really wanted us to be successful. It was great. I got to know a bunch of them and they were like, we don't know how to do this. and so I got access to a bunch of like internal development stuff. It was great. that was really fun. And it took the better part of a year. to get a SunPizza box with a modem attached to it that could do about a hundred transactions per second on the New York Stock Exchange to replace it with a modern Solaris box at that era, which is basically a four CPU device. And it was well north of the, I want to say it was 15, 000 transactions per second or something like that, and it took up three times as much space. So 300 versus 15, 000. I think that was a good win.

Don Finley: 7:45

That's a nice little win there. And I think one of the things about the previous systems of connectivity with the X25 was there was very little resiliency. If you lost the wire, you lost the whole communication where the main benefit of TCP IP is that it just finds its way home.

Sultan Meghji: 8:01

Yeah, x. 25 is prescriptive. I'm trying to get from point A to point Z. I have to lay out B, C, D, E, all the way down. And if any one of those goes down, you just get an error message, TCPIP, you just point it at the destination and assuming the routing and BGP and everything works.

Don Finley: 8:16

Routing gets you there. It finds out how to go closer. It's like the old days of when we'd print out stuff from MapQuest, if you ran into a road that was closed, X25, you would not get to your destination. TCP IP will find you a alternative route to get you there.

Sultan Meghji: 8:32

Now, comparatively there is a challenge. It is slower, TCP IP is, and that's why we use UDP so much. So the video that you and I are talking over is not being transmitted on TCP IP. It's been transmitted on UDP, and it's fundamentally because TCP IP will guarantee that it will get you there as long as the physical wires are there and that the network is configured. UDP is the, Pray and spray kind of idea. It just shoots it out there. And so I always love it when like the wifi gets wonky at home or something. And one of my girls is like, Oh, why is it all blurry and everything? And I started explaining it. I get about 30 seconds into it. And then I realized I just bought myself a trip to Sephora to make up for nervousness.

Don Finley: 9:11

That is absolutely fantastic because I've seen the, for some of my friends, the eyes glaze over when you get into these conversations as well. Now, I know we've been spending some time in the network stack onto today. I know you're a big proponent of crypto and blockchain as well. And then also an expert in AI too. how do you see those playing into, our technology stacks of today and the future?

Sultan Meghji: 9:34

this is such an interesting question because most people don't combine those three topics into one.

Don Finley: 9:39

Oh, they have to be.

Sultan Meghji: 9:41

you and I understand this. There's probably, small millions of people who feel the same way. But, if you go back to the early days of the Internet, the computer that you were browsing the web on also was running a web server. And you would run both of them. And that's how it worked. It was decentralized, And so to me, one of the things about the crypto discussion and the current iteration of the blockchain technologies, it's a modern way to get back to that by moving things that were historically at the network layer up to the application layer. The problem is, the use case set is so broad and the economics of it of the current version of the internet are so tied to these highly centralized environments that's where so much of the friction and the angst comes from. So, think about it like this in the eighties and into the nineties, every business had a mainframe. Or maybe two or three, And they would have their terminals and they'd have their things scattered, whatever. And then they would put PCs on people's desks where they would work on, Lotus 1 2 3 or WordPerfect. I'm digging deep on old,

Don Finley: 10:41

You got some old tech going on there.

Sultan Meghji: 10:43

Like on the PS2, IBM devices, we call it IBM. That's the, the first, the second computer I run was one of those. And, and then we moved forward 15 ish, 20 years. And now guess what? Every company has clouds. All the devices have these endpoints and guess what? People are still using Excel and Word and you're still fundamentally trying to put things in instead of a physical centralized data store. It's a logical centralized data store. And guess what? IBM is still making a lot of money. And the fundamental thesis of having a highly centralized. Enterprise technology base is there. The thing about AI and crypto right now is that it removes a huge percentage of the use cases and needs of those highly centralized environments. And so I have a fairly modern MacBook Pro. It's what I'm talking to you now on. I use this machine for exactly three things and in any other point in my life I would have needed multiple devices and a variety of other technologies that I couldn't put in my backpack, get on a plane and still be as effective on. Number one is I have a fully internet capable device. I can do all of my collaboration tools. I can do any email. I can watch a movie. I can do all the normal stuff we do with technology. Okay. That's great. Second thing is I can run an entire artificial intelligence stack. Not connected to the internet. And that's what I don't think a lot of people realize. I think a lot of people think you have to go to the name brand AI firms to get access to this technology. The fact is you don't, not at all. I am running, as we speak right now, a analysis of a bunch of bank regulatory data. On a high quality generative AI platform that doesn't have to be connected to the internet. It's entirely secure and it's just running on my laptop and you and I are still having a very straightforward conversation. I'm not glitching on you. Okay, so that's the second thing I can do with this device. The third is the hard drive is big enough that if I pick a domain, I don't know, market regimes or bioinformatics data or bank regulatory data like I was just talking about, or any of these others. There is enough hard drive space that I can put everything I need on that hard drive. You can put me on a plane without wifi for eight hours, leave me alone. And no matter what your skill set with nominal preparation, you can go from zero to a fully running application that will replace a huge percentage of what's out there in terms of the existing application set. The challenge that people have is the economics of our society, as you and I were talking about before, aren't really wired for that. And this is one of the reasons where, the crypto conversation becomes so dangerous because by me doing all of this on my laptop. No big venture firm is making a dollar off of me. No big enterprise tech company except Apple is making any money off me. And it was a single capital expense, I'm not paying tens, hundreds of dollars a month, thousands of dollars a month for this technology. Now I'm unique because I'm still able to do this myself, But COVID in particular, the last five years, we have seen a radical improvement in the tooling people can use to build applications. Whether it's the simplest thing in the world or taking an existing code base like Wolfenstein or Doom or Tetris and porting it onto something ridiculous like your watch or whatever. All of that is readily available at your fingertips. And so the third thing that kind of the little cherry on top that I don't think a lot of people realize is that the confluence of everything you and I are talking about is around open source and open source technology. And I am on GitHub on a daily basis, literally a daily basis. There are projects I sponsor. There are some projects that I try to contribute to, but more it's, thoughtfulness versus code, probably safer for everyone. but the reality is, if you look at what AI is giving us, where hardware has come in the last 25 years and the thesis behind crypto, I could run an entire central bank on a laptop if I so chose.

Don Finley: 14:39

Oh, that's a sexy argument.

Sultan Meghji: 14:41

And that is one of the reasons, and I can tell you because I was a former financial regulator, there are a lot of concerns about where transactions exist and where they go and the visibility of them, et cetera, et cetera. And. there are a lot of arguments about bad people. crypto is mostly criminals and terrorists and stuff like that. and yeah, absolutely. They use them. there's no doubt there. Is it 90 percent or is it 20%? There's a lot of arguments on that. And I've yet to see good data giving me, saying anything other than a floor of about 20%. but it pales in comparison by, zeros, at least. Toothpaper, US money, most of which exists outside of the United States. Most of which is used for not the best reasons, The other day, I'm not sure if you saw the news, one of the Israeli bombing strikes blew up 1. 4 billion in cash and gold.

Don Finley: 15:30

Damn. Okay.

Sultan Meghji: 15:32

that's a couple of cryptocurrencies entire AUM right there. It's

Don Finley: 15:38

interesting in the crypto space that you're talking about the criminal side of the activity. And I think you're hitting on a number of good points around this. But the main thing is the amount of criminal activity that is happening in crypto today Like you're saying a small percentage of the overall criminal activity that we just can't even track Because of the cash basis of it

Sultan Meghji: 15:58

Absolutely. if you were to just remove North Korea's criminal activity from Bitcoin, you'd see a non trivial decrease in Bitcoin transactions. no question whatsoever. If you got them away from the Yuan and the US dollar, which they use for all their gray market and black market acquisitions of technology, cars, products, et cetera, et cetera, you're still talking many zeros more in, in, in fiat currency versus in digital assets.

Don Finley: 16:25

so playing off of this we're now at a point where you can actually host a You know the llm on whether it's Llama, Mistral, whichever one of the open source ones that you're actually going after,

Sultan Meghji: 16:35

Or ours. We have a nice one too. I have to put a

Don Finley: 16:37

Oh yeah,

Sultan Meghji: 16:38

here at Foundry has a really nice one too.

Don Finley: 16:41

And I do love the fact that you're actually doing the work of many people on your laptop, running it right now. We are having no lag in this conversation. I personally run, local LLMs as well, mostly for the standpoint of training it to be Carl Young. And then I got a nice local therapist cause I'm definitely not putting that stuff out onto the web as well. and that's the privacy, the, my ownership of data and not getting it out.

Sultan Meghji: 17:07

this is a, this is where I think, if you and I were to go down the vein of talking about kind of the beltway and kind of the struggles on regulatory, on regulation, on utilization around this, just a few years ago, everyone was up in arms about personal data around social media, Especially with children. And we seem to have forgotten that argument entirely. And we're letting so many of these big public cloud AI companies just run the mark. Grabbing all of this data, absorbing all the questions from everyone. And then using it to train their models, most of on the frontier founders that most of our customers live in regulated environments, there's some sort of external stakeholder they have to be beholden to. And in every single case, we got that deal. When I fundamentally pointed out that. I have no idea what you are using our technology for. It is on your computers. It is in your four walls. It does not call home. It does not need to be connected to the internet. I will sign in blood and you can take it to any court in the universe that we have absolutely no visibility. You can find the best hackers in the world and they will be able to demonstrate that there is no, Data leaving their four walls. And the fact is a lot of companies out there won't say that they'll hand wave, they'll use 800 different ways to say it, but the fact is I don't trust them any more than I trust a social media or a internet search company, not to take my searches and use it to then serve me advertising, because that is the only economic model that's. a couple of these big tech companies has that actually works.

Don Finley: 18:32

We give similar advice to our clients as well, and we walk it into three different buckets. One is. You don't care. And so we say, Hey, go right to open AI. if you don't care, fantastic. The second one, or on the other side that you're talking about as well, is that you want to have control over your data. You don't want to be handing it out. And we recommend local implementations as well. So that for the exact same reasons that you're talking about, but we also offer like a middle of the road option where you're like, you know what, you care about it, but you're actually okay with a legal framework. That is beholden. And so open AI does have contractual obligations. Their license basically says that they're not going to use your data. If you call it through the API, you can flip off some things, but there's a trust factor that goes into that. So we usually recommend that people go to Microsoft because Microsoft has more to lose by violating your trust than open AI does, and you'll get the same models.

Sultan Meghji: 19:26

it's really interesting you say that because we have the exact same three deployment methodologies. We have fully local, it's used for, a variety of people who maybe aren't connected to the internet because they're in places that doesn't have it or whatever. We have a bunch of people who just run it inside their own data centers or a closet in their office or whatever. And then the third for us, though, actually us running something for them. and could it be hosted on, Azure? Sure. No problem. Could it be hosted on AWS? Sure. No problem. The challenge, and here might be the difference between the two companies, which is this is a fascinating tangent for us to go on, is we're quantitatively focused and deterministic. We find that the vast majority of LLMs out there are just too probabilistic and 2 plus 2 equaling for 99 percent of the time is usually okay if you're doing the equivalent of a Google search, which is what most people use, chat GPT for the minute you do something that goes into a regulated context and you have to go to, let's say the SEC or Congress and say, the AI did the following work came to this decision. We took its advice and did the following things. Two plus two equaling Kumquat, one out of every thousand times was really bad,

Don Finley: 20:35

It's not good.

Sultan Meghji: 20:36

right? And so we've spent two and a half years basically building highly quantitative, oriented, high accuracy technologies, and that's why we don't compete with any of the companies we've really talked about because our customers have very narrow use cases that they want very specific solutions for, but they have to be accurate. every single time you run it, and no matter how often you run it, you need to get the same exact answer. And that really does shape how you use them. And so we only use the LLMs for human communication. It's the thing you interact with. We use entirely different technologies for everything behind it because LLMs don't think.

Don Finley: 21:15

No, there are probabilistic machines. And basically, even if you have the temperature turned way down, you can't get a deterministic solution from them, but they can help communicate, summarize, translate for the most part. and I agree with you that when you're in a regulated environment, you need that deterministic approach. Plus the side of it, where you want to understand how it came to that conclusion. The LLM isn't the solution for that, but more narrow focused AI is in that

Sultan Meghji: 21:44

Well, the example I give a lot of people is let's just say you are a hedge fund, And you're using a bunch of this technology and you make a fairly radical investment two years ago and it maxes you out for the month. You can take the rest of the month out and just sit on your rear end and go to Barbados or whatever, You need to, at that moment, be able to capture the data you used, the code that was used against that data to generate it, the things that you gave it. All that entire process all the way down to, and this is why I hit buy or sell or whatever, And to print that as a PDF because, I'm young enough that I know what a PDF is. And then hand it to the appropriate regulatory body or internal chief risk officer or your internal control mechanism, And you might not need to do it for every transaction, but at any moment you're using any of these transit, any of these technologies in a regulated environment, I tell everyone. It doesn't matter who wins the presidency. It doesn't matter what control of Congress looks like. At some point between now and five or 10 years in the future, there will be some new rule in place, even if Chevron deference isn't overturned, or even if it is, you're right. You will have to go back and there will be someone antagonistic to you who will take your action and want to know why you did it. do you want to be in a situation of saying, Oh, it was a magic black box and I asked it this and it told me that. Or do you want to be able to say here's 137 pages that explains exactly why we made the decision we made. Thank you. Now I'm going to go get a coffee and you guys come back in two weeks once you've read it. I like the latter.

Don Finley: 23:09

I think, the latter is a much safer opportunity, and also, it's grounded in some truth. And so we understand that LLMs being probabilistic machines that are basically just picking the next word that makes sense, yet do have some emerging qualities of finding the truthiness of things. it's not guaranteed.

Sultan Meghji: 23:28

I want to be careful here because I'm not criticizing LLMs or any of because they're doing great stuff. this is foundational movement. This market has exploded. I started working on backprop neural nets in like the early nineties and I got to tell you, we've seen more in the last, movement in the last five years than anything else, And it's great. It's absolutely fantastic that people are actually embracing it versus being afraid of it. in most quarters, anyway. The challenge though is it's not one, it's like Lord of the Rings, right? It's not one AI to fit them all, we will all be touching hundreds of different AIs every day, and it will be entirely transparent to us. We're just starting to see that, and it will, and my thesis, at least for the next few years, is that it will be highly verticalized solutions with security compliance and explainability knobs. Based on the comfort of the end user, the comfort of the person paying for it and the regulatory or lack thereof environment they operate.

Don Finley: 24:20

so this cause he just gave me the perfect transition. There's an industry that I think we're both passionate about longevity

Sultan Meghji: 24:29

Yeah,

Don Finley: 24:30

how the technology can play into the longevity aspect of this. And really what I see is, we have centralized repositories, we have centralized corporations, social media companies are selling our attention. And so therefore they want our attention. And my big focus for AI and LLMs right now is how do we get the AI to be aligned with the individual instead of aligned with the corporate interest? And maybe there is an alignment between everybody, but at the same time, I want the AI that I'm working with to want to see me achieve my goals in comparison. And I'm wondering how that plays into longevity or like where you're focused in that

Sultan Meghji: 25:09

Well, you're hitting on a really cool thing that I don't talk about incredibly publicly, but over the last Two and a half, three and a half years, I've lost basically 50 pounds. I'm, I am the healthiest I have been since I was probably 15, 16 years old, something like that. And IU did a whole bunch of different stuff, but the anchor of it was having access on my laptop. Not connect, not calling home to some corporate overlords or an insurance company that would try to raise my rates or aim me at a drug that they got a special deal on or all this kind of stuff where I don't know what their motivations are because their motivations most of the time aren't actually having us live longer healthily. They're not focused on healthspan. They're focused on just pure length of life. And the sooner you have a chronic issue that requires a prescription, the better off they are. And so I have done every genetic test imaginable. I've done exome, whole genome. I've done all of that. And a decade ago, I worked at a little biotech company and it took us a, like a baby cluster. to analyze a single exome in 45 minutes. With the same computer I'm talking to you on again, I can take my whole genome, do the entire analysis if I so choose. It might not be done in 45 minutes but definitely be done in a day. And I can go in and I can say, oh, I have my own opinion about this database of genetic data because I know something about that university or I know something about that research group or hey, I already know that I'm genetically predisposed for X. And it allows me to be an informed consumer of that medical ecosystem. And so I've built a program that I've run myself through and I'm still running myself through that. I'm eventually just going to start posting on Substack or something, but it's a combination of molecular diagnostics. Nutrition, Exercise, and Supplements. And I've probably put 40 people through this. None of it is clinical, don't think for a second that I'm a doctor or anything insane like that. But everything is over the counter, everything is something you can buy retail. And every single one of them is something that as long as you are compliant with what it is telling you. You'll see a positive impact. So before we started recording, you and I were both talking about how we both have, we were both fans of acupuncture, in no place in this program would I have tried acupuncture and unless and until I had data supporting its use. guess what? If you have inflammation, one of the few things that's actually proven about acupuncture is that it really releases nitrogen in the blood, in the essential nervous system. which makes room for white blood cells.

Don Finley: 27:41

okay.

Sultan Meghji: 27:42

no matter what, it's actually not a bad thing because you're always producing white blood cells. And that's the first thing to rush into a gaping hole in, in part of your bloodstream because that's how it, how you scab and stuff like that. but it's a, I'm not one of these crazy people who spends like millions of dollars a year and 47 pills a day or anything like that. I literally, between a combination of three different genetic tests, including I did whole genome, I did an exome, and I did a couple of different microarray panels. I did a whole bunch of different blood work. And basically, I looked at how my body was responding to food, what kind of athlete I was, I've been doing all this really long distance running and bicycling. And I learned through my genetics that I'm actually not wired for that at all. Like not at all. I'm a burst athlete. I used to play tennis. I should be boxing. I should be weightlifting, stuff like that. Weightlifting is great. Everybody should do it anyway. But like I'm especially wired for that. but that's me, I've probably invested, let's call it rough order of magnitude, 20, 000 over the last four years getting educated, understood, building the program and all of that. And I can tell you at least half of this, the result of this is because of modern artificial intelligence built on top of open source technology.

Don Finley: 28:54

that is fascinating. And so basically the open source technology that you're talking about that you've been using has helped you to process all of this information and put it into a form that is actionable for you. You

Sultan Meghji: 29:08

year there's a certain battery of tests. I get every quarter, there's a certain battery of tests. I get, some stuff is really straightforward. like a lot of people who don't know this. and you'll notice it in people, who they have, deficiency. and it's, you'll notice it when somebody perks up after they eat a steak. and their color gets like better if they eat a steak. That's a B12 deficiency. and especially if you're, vegan or vegetarian, it can be really hard to make sure you get all the B12. So take a B12 supplement. Nothing wrong with taking too much. Your body will get rid of any excess. but that's, there are genetic markers for that. There are a lot of genetic markers that are in the gray area. We don't yet know What they come with. So just eliminate those, there are certain research institutions that I'm not the biggest fan of. I just, I don't, there are certain researchers who I'm just like, your research is never repeatable. if you write a research paper and you don't put all the data up there and the code up there and show somebody how to duplicate the exact result you got, especially if it's government funded, It's hard for me to take you seriously and there's an entire cohort of people who do that and because they're trying to protect IP and they want to launch a company and they want to be You know, the next George Church or someone like that, which is fine, but I don't think that's useful. I'm very strongly on the side of the, if the government pays for the research, that information should be made public.

Don Finley: 30:21

and I share the same opinion on this. I am a huge proponent of any government funded research needs to be reproducible, but also that we have an entire reproducibility problem across the sciences and that we don't promote that aspect of it. So

Sultan Meghji: 30:37

it's slow moving, before we started recording, we were talking about. how long it takes legislation to pass, how long it takes regulatory change to pass. And, I think NSF, FDA, NIH, Department of Energy, DOD, those are the biggest research funders out there. I do think that they should all demand of all research that It is at minimum given back to the funder and then the funder can make that decision. for example, if the DoD is funding you how to make UFOs, maybe don't post that on the internet. Maybe, but like the DoD should be able to take that, drop it in Area 51 and show the other aliens and know that it's okay.

Don Finley: 31:16

that's a great example.

Sultan Meghji: 31:18

The topicalness of UAPs is just hilarious, isn't it?

Don Finley: 31:22

I ended up becoming really spiritual after 2018. Kind of went from full agnostic to the other side of the spectrum and dove in. And one thing that I was always really surprised about is how the spiritual community in itself was very accepting of any bit of information that kind of validated their ideas. Yet at the same time, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's out

Sultan Meghji: 31:44

Well, we live in an infinite universe, Like the basic physics of what we know is that we live in an infinite universe. So it is almost impossible to prove anything, but it is impossible to disprove everything. I grew up in a household that had every variety of Christian you can imagine, from Catholic to waving generally on Easter, I have Muslim in my family, I have Jain in my family, I have Jewish in my family, I have Wiccan in my family. you just,

Don Finley: 32:14

cover the

Sultan Meghji: 32:15

Yeah. And guess what? 99 percent of the time, it comes down to being a better person, Use the stuff that's helpful that makes you a better person than not. And I'm certainly a person who, in some cases, it took me longer to get down that journey than I should have. But I gotta say especially once kids enter the conversation, which is a trite way to say, but also in the face of what we see every day around us, see that the more extreme behaviors are getting a lot of airtime. They're getting a lot of time on the social media platforms. And frankly, I just don't. Want any of that, I actually started watching the evening news again, not too long ago, and I got to tell you, it was soothing because it's 22 minutes once you exclude all the idiotic political commercials and it's really just, Hey, this is what's happening around you, all this kind of stuff. I'm sure you've got some app on your phone that tells you the global, international, important stuff, oh, there's this, there's this festival happening this weekend or this road is being closed or something just like the stuff so that your daily life is a little easier. And so like watching the evening news and I like watching, and this is a total name drop. I really like watching CBS Sunday morning, which is probably a code that I should retire soon.

Don Finley: 33:24

You're moving towards that

Sultan Meghji: 33:25

I'm getting there. I'm getting

Don Finley: 33:26

But I do love that because I think what you're hinting at is the evening news is definitely more local, Like you are getting to the point where you're in a sphere of control that you have more access to than when we talk about the global nature of things and which are of the extremes.

Sultan Meghji: 33:43

if I am a critical thinker who has access to the internet, am I going to learn fundamentally anything differently about current crisis in the Middle East by watching any of the major media groups? No, because it'll be 5 percent news, 25 percent people talking about it, and then a bunch of, corporate viewpoints on it or specific political brand. Viewpoints on it, most of which are silly, And so it's really challenging, I think, in your mind, to separate out, here are the facts of what's going on in the world that I need to pay attention to. And for me, it's entirely macroeconomically relative to my business, relative to the safety of my family, things like that. Then there's the other one, which is what's the stuff I actually need to know? Because as soon as I hang up with you, I'm going to do school pickup. And Is the main road I'm going to drive down going to be closed or not? Now can I open up an app and see that? Yes, but guess what? I was watching the news yesterday and heard that this one road was closed, so I'm going to go the other way.

Don Finley: 34:40

It's actionable. Now, I know we haven't touched on quantum, but I got to wrap it up. And I think what we're going to end up having to do is bringing you back. So for the audience, let me know if we should have Salton come back and we'll make that happen so we can dive into the world of quantum and what's going on there. cause you're also an expert in that space, but in the meantime, what would you recommend that our viewers do to be. On top of all the change that's coming about in our environment based on what's happening with AI, what's happening with quantum, how can they prepare themselves?

Sultan Meghji: 35:10

it's a great question and we could probably have an, like you said, there's probably an entire, episode on that. But the basics of cyber hygiene that are well known, don't reuse passwords, use multi factor authentication, all that, get those systems in place. And if your parents get your kids to have those systems in place, because at some point in the next few years, the entire encryption infrastructure that we're using is going to get replaced. Okay, all of it. It's called RSA currently. And it's not because it's bad. It's because quantum computers will have industrialized how to break it and bad guys will have access to those technologies or people with who come from nation states that are in competition at minimum with us and want all of our data. And there are examples but you don't need me to tell you what And so just know that it's coming. and just the other day, a paper was released by a bunch of researchers that showed that a quantum computer connected to one of the big cloud providers was able to actually break RSA mathematically. they didn't actually do it, but they showed that there was a way to do it. And it's actually on a kind of a slower, older version. Quantum computer. the ones that are out there in the real world and that, the Chinese have put in orbit and stuff like that because they've had them up there for a few years are far in a way more advanced than this. And so that the article that came out the other day really just made me focus and be, yeah, you've got to be quantum ready. And in doing so, you've got to take care of what you've got right now. And if you're a corporate person listening to this, the easiest way to think about this is if you have a piece of hardware in your shop, that's older than 2018, you're going to have to replace it because that machine won't be fast enough to run the new math. That's the easy answer because lattice encryption, let's say you decide to go down that one, which is one of the potential replacements, 10 to the fourth, more computational needs. if you're running it on an I3 Intel or something like that, you might as well cook an egg on that. It's

Don Finley: 36:58

Yeah. Yeah. you're not moving very fast on that

Sultan Meghji: 37:01

Yeah. and the cloud may or may not be the right solution for you, depending on what you're trying to do, because there are going to be places where the regulators are going to say you can't use the public cloud environments, or you have to use such a restricted version of them that they become cost prohibitive. And it's just easier for you to buy a 3, 000 server and put it in the closet in your office. So I would say. Being ready for quantum is first entirely about cyber hygiene. Second, it's about knowing the inventory of your technology and what's old and what's needing to be replaced and all that kind of stuff. And the third is fundamentally around making sure your people are trained for good habits. And, this isn't like retraining a workforce. this is all stuff we've been talking about for well over five years, as many as 10 years, the companies that struggled to get people virtual on COVID are the companies I worry about. If one of the one things I've got is a little, baby investment book. And I went back and actually found that list of all the companies that got bad press during COVID because they had trouble getting people virtual. And I've gone in and had an AI look at their 8Ks and look at their 10Ks and start to see if I'm seeing an uptick in cybersecurity spend to replace all their legacy technology. and there are a bunch of markets where that hasn't happened yet. Financial services, there's a bunch. Healthcare, there's a bunch. Energy, there's a bunch. And those are all companies that I would be, if I were to work with them. Or if I was a customer of theirs,

Don Finley: 38:21

Oh, that's a great analysis. And I love the use of AI to help you put that together because those are usually research jobs that we would put, a young analyst on.

Sultan Meghji: 38:31

that, that kind of 101 to 201 level primary analysis of something is something that I used to have two or three analysts working for me at any one time. Now I'm on the treadmill at the gym and I'm using my phone to call into my private LLM environment. And I'm asking it questions. And each time I'm like, Hey, be an analyst, analyze this for me, be an analyst, analyze this for me. And then it reads it back to me.

Don Finley: 38:58

And at the same time, you're getting responses in minutes compared to what could have been like days long projects for an analyst as

Sultan Meghji: 39:05

sometimes seconds even. sometimes it'll interrupt me, which I think is funny.

Don Finley: 39:09

That's awesome. All right, Sultan, it has been an absolute blast. I really appreciate having you on today. Thank you so much.

Sultan Meghji: 39:16

Thanks for having me. This has been a lot of fun.

Don Finley: 39:19

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