Welcome back everyone from lunch. I'm Anna Magzanyan from Los Angeles Times Media Group. As we resume our Aerospace and Defense Summit, I encourage you to take another look around this incredible Nant Studios virtual production stage. It is the perfect preview of what happens when human imagination meets tomorrow's technology. Thank you to Dr. Patrick and Michelle Yeoh and Sean for opening the doors of Nant Studios to us today. The fact that we are gathered inside one of the most advanced virtual production stages in the world surrounded by cutting-edge LED technology that can render any environment imaginable feels entirely fitting for a summit about the future. As we've discussed this morning, we're at a crossroads. Space is no longer the frontier. It is the vital infrastructure and backbone of our communications, commerce, and national security. Alongside with our title sponsor, Arizona State University, let's give a round of applause. I want to thank all of our attendees from across government and industry for being here today to tackle these consequential issues, as well as our platform platinum sponsors, Cambium. Let's put a round of applause for Cambium being here today. Millennium Space Systems and Varda Space Industries along with our gold sponsor, the city of El Segundo. To kick off our afternoon of conversation, it is my absolute privilege to introduce two remarkable leaders who don't just study the future, but actively help create it by bringing academia, industry, and government together. Please join me in welcoming the visionary whose generosity made this extraordinary event a reality, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, as well as along the side leader of one of the most innovative research universities on the planet, Arizona State University President Michael Crow.
So, to get ready for Patrick, let me stop giving me. Patrick, we're going to obviously talk about aerospace, we're going to talk about technology, we're going to talk about all kinds of things, but you are by my estimation, I went back and checked this, you're one of the most unusual professors of the last thousand years, who is a self-made problem solver who approached things in completely differentiated ways, the ways that you looked at problems from your first successful drugs when you were leaving UCLA and the way that you approached medicine, the way that you approached surgery, the way that you did all these things. And so, before we start talking about all the things that we're going to talk about so that people don't say to themselves, 'Who the hell is this guy?' What's that drive for you? So, there's very few professors that have become, you know, multi-level global technologists billionaires just from coming from a professorship. And so, what does that come from?
I look, I... Oops. Is it me? Is that better? Well, I think it's really an insatiable curiosity. That's where it comes from. And then also basically comes from my maybe my medical surgical training where one of the things that when I was so curious about is really getting deep into the biology of what we are. We as human beings are really exquisitely designed engines, if you so wish. And then I relate everything that I understand in our biology to the real world. Whether... and I think of myself almost like an astrophysicist and trying to understand biology and how that interacts with the real world. And no matter what, I keep on asking the question and asking the question because I think I have this insatiable curiosity.
So, one thing that that has led to is and something I'm very familiar with and when people talk about you and talk about what you've done, you know, they say, 'Well, you know, he just approaches it from a different oblique, you know, he's a contrarian.' So, the notion of contrarian-ness is probably not accurate. It's probably that you're an integrator and it appears as if you're a contrarian. So, you're taking the latest science in molecular biology and genetics and chip designs and all these other mathematically oriented things we were just talking about earlier that, you know, cancer is a long-standing math error in the way that our biological systems are evolving that's just accumulated over time and some species and not in other species. And so, just give me a sense of this notion about integration of knowledge between the various areas. I mean, I remember you were a science kid, medical school, practicing physician, surgeon, you know, all these other kinds of things and all of a sudden you're broadening and broadening and broadening into all these other areas. How connectable are all those things and how do you connect these kinds of knowledge? Let's address the whole contrarian issue.
Yeah. I think if you look at evolution of humanity, when we thought the world was flat and those who thought it was not flat, they were contrarians. And so, the idea is just as we evolve, it's more enlightenment what truth really is. You know, my relationship with UCLA and you used to talk to me professor there, even the dean couldn't understand me. So, I was positioned as assistant professor of surgery, but also the only doctor you see as assistant professor of medicine. And then the dean gave me this thing called the California Anesthesia Institute, which integrated electronics and everything in the entire campus called the California Anesthesia Institute, which I ran for 10 years. I think that gave me the exposure to understand not just integrative, but really the depth of information that each specialty has. The problem is we're an amazing country with regard to great specialists. Yet I believe that in South Africa and England, they have one of the best generalists in medicine. And the problem about being a specialist is you really then make assumptions, and then you live by that assumption, and you somebody assumption maybe is fundamentally wrong, and it has big implications, then you're contrarian. And I went on the Jon Stewart show to try to explain...
It went very well because I couldn't stop laughing because I could really explain what I was trying to explain. But I was trying to explain to him how we as a nation led the world in treating patients with cancer. And it all started with the nude mouse. And he said, 'A nude mouse?' I said, 'Yes, a nude mouse.' I asked him, 'Do you know what a nude mouse is?' He said, 'It's a mouse without morals.' And then, you know, the conversation then went off the rails after that. But the truth of the matter is the National Cancer Institute then started actually from the Department of War. So, we looked at cancer from that perspective using mustard gas and everything else. And then they needed to grow human tissue. And they found the nude mouse and they put human tissue into the nude mouse so it could grow. And they would then bound it with chemotherapy and with radiation and the tumor would shrink and say, 'Voilà, we have now treated cancer.' Forgetting that a nude mouse is nude because it has no immune system. So, they ignore the immune system. So, now the assumptions of the world is everybody, farmer, every major NCI cancer center is we got to give as much chemo as we can reduce the tumor temporarily and we win the battle but lose the war because in the same instance we wipe out the immune system. So, in the last 10 years I came to conclude that most of our diseases, whether it is autoimmune disease, diabetes, MS, Alzheimer's, cardiac disease or cancer as disease is either one way the yin and yang of the immune system. And in fact, cancer is actually the collapse of the immune system and cancer is a symptom. And if you actually treat the immune system, your body's immune system will treat the cancer. But think about this assumption where I'm a contrarian. So, let's give chemotherapy and wipe out the immune system. And that is where I'm at today as part of my contrarian nation.
To build up to aeronautics and space but it's important to go through this next step. So, you're one of the very, very rare scientists capable of thinking in three dimensions at the same time. So, one dimension is what we would call basically reductionistic science. Let's go down and figure out as best we can how nature works. And then that's sort of screwing down to the finest particle, the smallest particle, the smallest system. And then at the same time, thinking at a systems level, going out and increasing the aperture at the same time. And then using the two to inform each other without becoming enslaved by the pursuit of perfection. The enemy of progress is the pursuit of perfection, the reductionistic to the finest point, and then knowing how to build things from those two things at the same time. Reductionistic knowledge and then systems level knowledge. So just for the audience, like what are a few of the things that you've built in the 15, 16 years that I've known you? The things that you've just built. Let's no details, just rattle them off.
Well, I built a broad scene which I'm most proud of. I understood how heparin actually worked which to save the United States from the toxic issues of heparin. I've built a chip called the WiGig chip. So now this surgeon is building chips? I mean, like crazy. Keep going. It's not the chip, but it's the idea that the name of Nant, people ask me what is Nant, and I think of all of us as a transmitting energy towards each other. Of course, you do. And how do... Well, you ask the question, how do ants work? Why do they always in a line? Because there's what I call the neural ant. So we built that. I ran the national lambda rail which interconnected the Large Hadron Collider. Which we worked on together, yes. Yeah, for the astrophysicists. Back when computers were only called supercomputers. Right. I deconstructed albumin as part of the NASA space shuttle. We developed stem cells with creating horizontal centrifugation rather than vertical centrifugation for no gravity on Earth so we can actually generate organoids. Have you ever heard of a laser? We are now working on lasers. Oh, really? There's a thing called you'll sort of see a laser communication system that's actually in space right now. The beauty of a laser is that the bandwidth of the sun and the bandwidth of light moving data at the speed of light and we're now building what we're going to reveal today because Michael's here. I remember the conversation we had how long ago? 10 years? 15 years ago? You called me Batman. And we've been spending 15 years stealthily developing a magical material called lithium niobate which is a crystal to move data in at the speed of light. And then now I'm involved with...
Slow that down for a second. A lot of people in the audience think that data is moving at the speed of light, speed of light. No, data right now is moving in your radio, Wi-Fi, it's radio waves versus light waves.
Right. So, there's a light wave and there's a radio wave and... And when Michael talks about three dimensions, I think in four dimensions because I think at the end of the day when I coined this term quantum oncotherapeutics in our body, we have a cell that has multiple states at the same time. We have a T cell that kills, we have T cell that actually suppresses, we have NK cell that kills, NK cell that suppresses. And if you understand these quantum states as you talk about and try and develop therapies in this quantum state it gets very complicated because you have to change the process of how you actually treat patients. You have to understand... So, it affects...
So, that's where we're more reductionistic understanding, you know, quantum field effect, understanding particle and wave differentials and then going up to the systems level. So, what is it about science that doesn't allow us to easily move in these two systems together? The systems level thinking and the reductionistic level thinking.
Regulators. Regulators, what else? Culture. Regulators. No, but really it is. It's regulators and culture and bureaucracy.
Yeah. And really an absence of the understanding and then perverse incentives. Because, you know, what's one person's innovation is another person's destruction. People think right now with AI we're all going to lose our jobs. Maybe some people will, but maybe we'll actually convert into others. History says we will probably move forward in new ways, yes.
Yeah, and hopefully in good ways. But really the obstructionist with regard to progress, I really think as you stuck in your system number one, you're bureaucratically unenlightened. This way to be polite about it. And I get into trouble because I get warning letters when I say stuff. I'm sure you lose lots of sleep over those. Yeah. And then I think overcoming the motivation of why that's been prevented is a greater capitalism part of it rather than a common good. That sounds Pollyannaish, right? But really it could block a lot of progress. I think humanity now is at the point where the technology has reached stage where you can make tremendous progress for all of mankind.
So let's talk about that. So there's a lot of people that are concerned about the applications of what I still call augmented intelligence systems as opposed to artificial intelligence because they're not really artificial anything. They're just augmentations of us. They are complete manifestations of us just at faster speed and broader context. And so what is your guess of 15 years from now, 20 years from now, assuming accelerated speed in artificial intelligence, what's your guess of the kinds of things that your brain tells us is going to happen? And then, we're going to sequence from that into space and aeronautics.
You completely right about augmented intelligence. So, we developed 10 years ago this thing called Nanomobile, if you remember the... where we actually had machine vision and I think is in the audience where we actually wanted the blind to see. And if you go on to nanomobile.com, you can see 10 years ago we built the phone that could actually visualize any object on the planet. And that wasn't adopted then because I was told, believe it not, by then in 2012 I had an owner of the Daily Times. The editorial board said to me, 'Who'd be so crazy to look through a camera of a phone?' And so that is now evolved where I believe...
Those guys are probably gone by now.
You put me in a tough position now. They probably are. They've all retired gently. What we have now is for example in true form of augmented intelligence, we've developed an FDA approved app that monitors your cardiac status, your heart rate, and actually takes the EKG form and actually can predict hours before a cardiac decompensation occurs that it's going to occur. And hundreds of lives are now saved as a result of that, I'm proud to say. That's in hands of 10,000 physicians on their mobile devices in over 600 hospitals. So, there's real value in this AI, what we call AI. We haven't even scratched the surface of the possibilities of this opportunity for a really good... then we'll get to quantum computing, right? I mean, I think quantum computing right now is in its infancy because I think they used... Yeah, I'm now going way beyond in our conversation, but I think they're using the wrong infrastructure in the quantum computer. And imagine you could have a quantum computer well without this massive helium cold...
There's some people moving in that direction. Yeah. I'm part of a board that's invested in some of those companies that don't use the cryo technology to do quantum computing. So, you'll have a quantum computing in a room like this and...
So, these are the things I say the future is very close. It's not as far as we think it is.
Right. Right. So, then when you... I mean, you've had you have these communication systems in space, you have these chips that you thought up in your head and you and others have then built these things. I mean, what is your general thinking about the potential in space? I mean, you've thought a little bit about that, but just trying to get your creative energies going here.
Well, I'm going to reveal today we thought more than a little about that. We actually have chips in space for the last 3 years. He's telling you things that people don't know, so... Yeah. Well, it's called Aerospace and Defense Summit. And I thought what opportunity to real... What are they they're just like floating around up there? What are they doing? No, so we'll... Let me first describe it and then I'll put one or two slides. I'll put a little video. Only if that's okay, right? Yeah, let's do that. But let me describe it first. So, the idea would be imagine if you could take the laser and actually create them into wavelengths. And there's multiple wavelengths. Whatever is in nature we do, right? Right. You would write the different colors, right? The way to think about red, green, blue. Right. And then what you call modulate, no? Use the light to transmit data and then convert it into electrical signals using energy or power. And that is what you do today with regard to chips. That's called modulation. And then use a material that actually can do that. Today there's a thing called silicon photonics where they use silicon and silicon is in all your chips. But there's a magical material called lithium niobate which is a crystal structure that could be space... really stand the rigors of space. In space you have radiation, you have temperature changes, and everything else. So you need a space certified chip that would communicate. So DARPA has put out a challenge that they want something out at 100 W, meaning a basically a light bulb at 100 gigabits per second for $100,000. That will last 100 years. That will last 100 years. We think we've met that challenge. So let me just announce if you put the first slide up.
