Yuval Boger
Hello Sebastian. Thank you for joining me today.

Sebastian Hassinger
Hi Eval, thanks for joining me. This is your riverside. This is your studio, I know, but uh um we'll be you know be guests on each other's podcast simultaneously.

Yuval Boger
No, no. This is a crossover episode. So so Sebastian, who are you and what do you do?

Sebastian Hassinger
I am Sebastian Hassinger, uh I'm independent consultant uh and um Jack of all trades in quantum computing. Um I have been working in quantum for almost a decade now, which uh shocked me when I realized that when I counted up the years. Um first with with first with IBM Quantum and then with AWS. And uh the beginning of 2026, I went independent and started a a company called the New Quantum Era, which is sort of a grab bag of all of the projects that I'm working on. How about yourself, Yuvol? Tell tell us a bit about yourself.

Yuval Boger
I am Juval Boger. I'm chief commercial officer of Quero Computing. We make the world's best quantum computer. And I've been doing this. I only have five years of experience in quantum, but they uh Sometimes they feel like two and sometimes they feel like twenty.

Sebastian Hassinger
Same. That I don't think that's gonna change.

Yuval Boger
So that

Sebastian Hassinger
I have bad news for you.

Yuval Boger
And you know, I I I wasn't part of uh naming the company Quera, but I think it does stand for Quantum Era. So you know maybe you should you have a new book out, right? The new Quera

Sebastian Hassinger
That's right. Yeah, the new Quantum era. So um that was originally the name of the podcast that a friend of mine and I started. um two and a half years ago, three years ago. Um and really it was just uh we were both uh um very interested in uh and just trying to get researchers to explain more about what they were doing. Kevin has a background in mathematics um but was not in the quantum industry. I was working with IBM at the time um and uh or yeah when we first met. And so the podcast was really uh an excuse to get researchers on to record an interview and ask them, you know explain to our our listeners who are not physicists, neither are we, what it is that you do in in conceptual uh understanding. And then that kind of led into uh the idea of sort of accumulating more and more of this research and turning it into a narrative. Sort of um the way I describe it is is the book that I wish I had found um when I first started working on quantum because initially it was an extremely steep learning curve, and I would have loved to have more of a background of uh the history of how quantum information science came about, um, the history of how various modalities of qubits came about and some of the basics. of conceptually how quantum computing works and what we hope it's going to do.

Yuval Boger
What do you mean you're not a physicist? You don't have a PhD from Harvard? Nothing like that

Sebastian Hassinger
No. No. No. Neither do you. I I understand. Although you do have a master's degree. So you have a graduate degree in physics.

Yuval Boger
Well I do, but you know the at CWERA they barely let me in the door.

Sebastian Hassinger
So you've got a head start on me

Yuval Boger
I mean A you don't have a a PhD and two it's not from Harvard or MIT so I guess it was my charm or my green eyes or something that made the difference.

Sebastian Hassinger
Well, you've got a long career in in in uh executive leadership of sort of deep tech though, right?

Yuval Boger
I hope they don't regret it.

Sebastian Hassinger
Or like emerging technologies.

Yuval Boger
Absolutely. I was uh CEO for about 20 years of a couple of uh deep tech companies and then served as uh Head of business, uh Chief Marketing Officer of others. Uh I have uh five years of experience in quantum computing, um a year and a half or so at uh Classic, which is a Tel Aviv based uh software company, and and then I went to the dark side to or um to the vacuum side, right, to uh Quera to work on hardware.

Sebastian Hassinger
To the very cold side.

Yuval Boger
Well to the room temperature called sign, right.

Sebastian Hassinger
Well, but the atoms themselves get very cold

Yuval Boger
So you know when when I first saw your your book Thank you very much for for sending me a copy. When I I first saw your book and and you said an outsider's introduction, I said, well if if he's an outsider then I'm a superconducting qubit. I mean You you just said you've got ten years in in quantum. What what do you mean outsiders introduction?

Sebastian Hassinger
Meaning coming from the outside. I mean I I had a lot of experience my whole career has been in emerging tech initially with, you know, the internet in the early 90s and then the web and then mobile and then open source and big data and machine learning. Um, but when I first encountered uh quantum computing, it was actually at a at a Think conference at uh uh TJ Watson at the IBM Research Center. And all the luminaries of the time, this is 2017, they were talking about the the first 53 qubit machine that IBM was going to launch uh the following year. Um and They were talking about the theory and the experimental results and the way they were building these machines and it was It w sounded like science fiction. It was just so completely it was, you know, the stereotypical mind-blowing moment, right? I mean, I I only understood twenty-five percent and I'm a pretty bright guy. I'm used to understanding most of what's going on around me. So it was just I mean it was it was very compelling, but it also felt very inaccessible. So Um, you know, I I started uh I was initially I was helping them with the open source strategy because they just open source Kiskit. So That was relatively understandable for me and accessible. I knew open source. I knew, you know, uh uh how to to manage community efforts around those things. Um But I really wanted to get more deeply involved. And it took a lot of very generous physicists, um, you know, ask answering a lot of really dumb questions for me to even start to feel like I got a grip on on what was going on. So that's what I mean by outsider. I mean, this is the book, as I said, that I wish somebody had written it and I'd found it, you know, in December 2017 after going to the Think Summit, basically.

Yuval Boger
I uh I sympathize with a lot of what you're saying. When I interviewed at CWE and came to visit the Boston office, And they showed me, oh well, we've got this rubidium atoms, we hold them in place using tiny lasers, they're four microns apart, we shoot lasers, and then we take a photograph and see how they're doing. It's like I came back home and said, yeah, the this is, you know, it's science fiction until it isn't. And then you just see it, see it in your eyes.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
It is just incredible.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
How many times

Sebastian Hassinger
It really is.

Yuval Boger
How many times in your career, and does it get more or less over time, do people tell you that a qubit is zero and one at the same time?

Sebastian Hassinger
Um I I do I sort of in the book there's kind of a running joke uh to a certain degree of like this is the kind of explanation that will make physicists sort of turn green and that's start to have steam come out of their ears. I mean You know, there's that and also the uh that entanglement um it you know uh requires faster-than-light uh transmission of information. That's Olivia Lane's from IBM, that's her most favorite. But you know, Yuvald, the other thing was, you know, the one that always grinds my gears is the uh, you know, it tests all the possibilities at once um and then comes up with the right answer. But in uh a few years ago at the Simons Institute I I interviewed Peter Shore um and I asked him how much does that explanation bother you? And he said Well, that's kind of what it does. So I mean it's you know, this is this is, I think, I'm guessing, um, as central to your motivation for what you've written as it is to mine, which is we This quantum stuff is so weird and we really don't have good language and metaphor and uh analogy to explain it or get an intuit intuitive kind of grasp about it. That's when I was reading um Quantum Bits, your collection of comic strips and explainers of all these core uh concepts in in quantum computing. That was the overwhelming sense I got from from that too. It's like you're it's it's uh uh it felt like a product of your struggle to find ways to explain and and make these concepts, you know, uh tangible for people. Is that am I right?

Yuval Boger
Yeah, let me tell you, let me share the origin story. I mean actually on the podcast as well. So we we're both fellow podcasters. Uh how many episodes have you done to date?

Sebastian Hassinger
Uh, ninety four.

Yuval Boger
That's really good. Almost almost up to the century mark.

Sebastian Hassinger
Thank you. Yeah, I'm I we're planning something really special for the hundredth, too.

Yuval Boger
I think I did uh Ah well I I should be the one, right? Um I I think I did close to 200 now on the Superposition Guys podcast and then I had 60 or 70 when I was at Classic and the Cubid Guy podcast

Sebastian Hassinger
Wow. Right

Yuval Boger
Uh but actually I've been podcasting for probably 20 years. I I used to be the VR guy, the you know the virtual reality guy, and then I was the charge guy when we were doing I was doing wireless charging.

Sebastian Hassinger
I saw that.

Yuval Boger
uh and and it just became second nature. It's actually a way for me to do two things.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
One is to learn. You know I I I basically ask the questions that are interesting to me, hoping that they're interesting to my my audience

Sebastian Hassinger
Same

Yuval Boger
It's there's a story about Steve Jobs that Apple had uh one customer and that was Steve Jobs and he was sort of the conduit to the entire world. If if you made him happy then he had uh good sense And the other ended up being really good business development tool because once the microphone is off and we've also already created a relationship.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
Hey, what do you know about Quera?

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
you know, uh do you have forty-two million dollars lying around? I can sell you a quantum computer. You know, whatever it is at that point

Sebastian Hassinger
Do you have stripe? Do you take stripe?

Yuval Boger
A payment plan, right?

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
Um and then on the comics, I always wanted to do, I mean, I don't know what always is, but I it's it's been a long time since I wanted to do quantum comics. I think a couple years ago I came up, I was sort of brainstorming with myself and my favorite AI assistant on uh on uh character names and and ended up with this uh atomique and quantessa that I liked and I couldn't find any good quantum joke.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
'Cause I mean they're always about, oh my keys are here and there at the same time.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yuval Boger
They're either about the keys or about the cat. And it was like, okay, well I I can't do anything with that. But then at some point I said, well, actually maybe they could explain some physics. Maybe they could explain entanglement and superposition and and neutral atom and Redberg atoms and and uh ultimately you can find an explanation of what QLDPC code is and

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
Um in uh cat qubits and uh what have you.

Sebastian Hassinger
Oh, it gets really advanced.

Yuval Boger
Um and

Sebastian Hassinger
I mean, at first I thought, well, this would be great for kids. I was reading the first few, and it was, you know, the very basic superposition entanglement, which are weird enough and hard enough to explain. But as you say, you get all the way into, you know, past sort of Bell's inequality into error correction and even specific types of error correction. It's really impressive.

Yuval Boger
And then I had to start calibrating. I mean on one hand I had to calibrate the humor so it's not just uh wordplay I'll tell you a story about German humor in a second on the on that. And then when when generating the explainers, I absolutely wanted to get away from the simultaneously zero and one and and try to see how can I explain that with no equations in a way that's comprehensible to

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
Uh intelligent non-physicist, right? You gotta be curious, you gotta be able to wanna read, but you don't have to have not even a graduate degree uh to get there.

Sebastian Hassinger
Exactly.

Yuval Boger
And then on the humor, um I mean some of the comics I thought were pretty funny.

Sebastian Hassinger
Are you sure?

Yuval Boger
If you can explain, I I just sent uh I just sent Scott Aronson a comic about uh uh P not equal NP. And if you can explain that in a comic that I mean he he knows that much better than I do, of course.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yes.

Yuval Boger
But um So I

Sebastian Hassinger
He's a good judge though. He's a good judge of of uh accuracy and also humor for that matter. He's a pretty funny guy.

Yuval Boger
So once I was able to start generating comics, I said, you know what, maybe I can do them in other languages. And so I generated a comic in German. uh just as a test and I send it to my German friends and they come back it's like hmm I said the German is perfect the comic is not funny okay that's The first one, if if they said the German is bad, the comic is funny, I could fix that, but how do I do it the other way around? So it took a lot of work to To be able to generate humor in multiple languages. And so I have examples on the on Quantum Bits Comics.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
I've got examples in Italian and French and German and Hebrew. And so we'll see we'll see where that takes us.

Sebastian Hassinger
That's cool. That's cool Yeah, I mean I back to entanglement. I liked uh not only did you avoid the simultaneously zero and one, but you used uh footwear to explain how how entangled particles would behave, which I thought was um Very imaginative, definitely.

Yuval Boger
How long did it take you to put the book together and and what was the most difficult part for you?

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah, um I mean so the book has its or I mean I'd been thinking about it, but then I went to O'Reilly's um sort of unconference, the uh foo camp. um it's like a a uh a retreat um O'Reilly uh books has or used to have I think they've they've gone to more virtual events since COVID Um and I met Mike Laquitas, who was the the VP of content for O'Reilly, and we were just chatting. He was asking me what I was doing and And he said, I'd sort of, I've always loved this book called The Soul of the New Machine by Tracy Kidder. It's an incredible piece of work that follows an engineering team. as they built um the mini computer sort of or they built a mini computer which is a competitor to um uh IBM and DAC back in the early 80s. It's really well written and it really gets at the the passion that the technology requires and the creativity and the discipline, which I always found fascinating. So when when Mike and I were talking, he said, oh, you should write a book and call it the soul, the new new machine. So he just like he pulled exactly the right reference out of the air to sort of inspire me of like, okay, that's a sign Um so I started working on the proposal then and you know it was it was hard because um It's a huge topic and and every every chapter could have been a book, really. Um, right? I mean, uh there's a chapter on How you know quantum physics sort of came together in the 1920s uh and and challenged the ideas of classical uh physics Um, and that obviously there's entire books written about that by people who are far more um deeply uh you know uh experienced and and have the expertise than I do. So I think that was the most difficult thing was sort of How do I span all of the parts? I really did want to give a a broad and and relatively shallow introduction so you could get a sense of the whole landscape. Um and that was that was what was the most challenging was was just researching all of the different aspects but own but then holding back from going too deep into into any of them. That was sort of the balancing act. What about yourself?

Yuval Boger
Um I think you your book is sort of the traditional route, you know, you have an editor, you have a publisher. We have a history in the family of self-publishing books. It started my my son in high school was really into investing and he uh put together this um investing for kids book and you know we learn how to self-publish and it's it's there on amazon actually also has comics but at that time he had someone had someone draw them

Sebastian Hassinger
Oh, cool.

Yuval Boger
And I published a children's book, uh a story I wrote for my kids. It's about it's about a boy who who who sort of goes through his uh father's uh wardrobe and then tries on his big pants and his suit and his tie and And so he learns about sort of big and small and wide and and uh so on.

Sebastian Hassinger
Nice.

Yuval Boger
So we had we had the experience. So I said, oh yeah, I could just publish it myself. I think the challenge uh was First calibrating the the level of explanations, right? And although uh AI certainly played a big part in helping me put the book together and putting it in the right format and the comics are AI generated. There is there's so much human supervision in this case, my supervision.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
Is that correct? Is that is that scientifically accurate

Sebastian Hassinger
Right.

Yuval Boger
Do I have too many terms or do I have not enough terms? I mean I could make this a 500 um page book or or we we could make it a shorter one. I actually did make a neutral anime version that we give away at uh at trade shows.

Sebastian Hassinger
Right. That's great.

Yuval Boger
And then also the sequence, you know, am I referring to a term that I didn't define yet?

Sebastian Hassinger
Mm-hmm.

Yuval Boger
That was a challenge. Uh but overall I think it took me, and obviously this is not my my real job. This is more of a nights and weekend weekends project.

Sebastian Hassinger
Right. Yeah, same.

Yuval Boger
I think it took me about two months to put that together, start to finish.

Sebastian Hassinger
Wow. Wow, that's very fast, actually. I would have thought it was quite a bit longer. It took me almost two years to write, so I'm obviously slower than you I did most of my writing on planes too. I found that was the most because I could just block out, you know, don't get on the Wi-Fi, ignore email, and get like three or four or five hours of writing done.

Yuval Boger
And the interesting thing is now that um you know initially I started publishing comics on uh quantum bits comics. It's uh it's a small website and then putting them Hey, this is Sunday comics. I'm gonna put them on LinkedIn every Sunday and you know medium and Substack and so on. And after a while I said, you know, I I should actually make a book out of it. So it didn't start as a book, it just started as a collection of a few comics and then I got a couple of requests to make um semi-custom or or offshoots uh versions of this not not exactly the movie rights not not yet But um there was a uh there is a professor of education who asked to collaborate with me on creating a version for high school kids.

Sebastian Hassinger
Oh, that's great.

Yuval Boger
uh which would be a lot of fun. There's a quantum summer camp and hopefully we'll get to use it there.

Sebastian Hassinger
Excellent.

Yuval Boger
And then a uh European uh physics professor that wants to teach quantum at business schools says oh you know could we do this other thing so uh I've got the the next couple weekends uh fully planned out

Sebastian Hassinger
Oh, good. That's great. I mean, that's my hope too, is that um, you know, you you got tangible evidence that your work is is going to lead to, you know, more people being introduced to the topic and and having an easier path into it and potentially finding, you know, a career even in some some aspect of quantum. And that's That's I mean I haven't because the book just got uh released on on the weekend um you know I haven't had that that kind of validation yet but I'm certainly hoping that that will be the case that'll be something that helps people, you know, um find their way in.

Yuval Boger
You know, you mentioned that history rhymes with the early internet Do you feel that quantum is progressing faster, slower? How are you thinking about that?

Sebastian Hassinger
That's a really good question. Um I I think I mean I tend to think more in terms of um the earliest days of of classical computing, right? So the late forties, early fifties. You've got uh von Neumann at Princeton and Eniak at Penn, and and there have been some you know Colossus and and Z1, there'd been some previous sort of examples, but it really starts to get traction post-war and you know, to turn into the something that resembles the industry that we recognize today, it's really like forty years. Right? It's sometime in the early 80s, basically, maybe mid 80s. Um so from that perspective, I think quantum is pretty much on the same track because You know, uh, you know, we've got sort of the the the the uh the starter's pistol at Endicott in nineteen eighty one, um and you know the uh the sort of beginnings of machines that look like they might be able to do something really interesting in sort of the 2015 to 2020 kind of of range. So From that perspective, I think we're we're moving along about the same pace as classical computing did. I think that w there's a very strong chance we're gonna see acceleration soon. I think that Um, you know, the fact that we have the internet and open source software and GPUs and massive amounts of compute um in the cloud and storage in the cloud, all of those tools are bound to accelerate the progress overall once once it's you know, I wouldn't say fully, but once it has emerged. from the physics lab and starts turning into a production technology. It's more of an engineering, um, you know, design and engineering kind of challenge. I think the the thing that holds us back right now holds us back. The challenge that we're still facing is that there's fundamental science that we need for all of these modalities to you know, get better fidelities or get better scale or get faster operations or whatever their particular challenges are. That there's still real real physics breakthroughs required. Um so yeah, I mean I think from from your perspective, I mean you've been now five years in in the industry QR's actually moved pretty quickly in in that period of time. Is that I mean that's certainly how I feel from the outside. Is that what it it matches your experience on the inside?

Yuval Boger
Yeah, I think uh a lot of what you describe is absolutely true and in my experience as well. Sometimes I I talk with customers and and we talk about ChatGPT and ChatGPT being sort of an uh overnight sensation that was 30 years of the making, right?

Sebastian Hassinger
Right.

Yuval Boger
Because everyone was working on AI and then there was the AI winter.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
and then no one cared about it and then and then all of a sudden oh I can actually do this thing and now it's i it's exploding.

Sebastian Hassinger
Many of them

Yuval Boger
So the same is is with quantum absolutely you know it uh if you look at the Quera computer they're easily um I think at least five Nobel Prizes in Physics incited not by Quaratine, but you know whether lasers or tweezers or

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
or other things. So so it does take time to develop. But it is accelerating at really an amazing uh pace. And when when I look at the Quera Um I I sincerely believe that the future is closer than most people think.

Sebastian Hassinger
Mm-hmm.

Yuval Boger
That uh in in that uh sort of the million or the billion, maybe trillion dollar question is, you know, when can you do when can you run this or that algorithm? And what we're seeing is on the other hand one hand the hardware gets better you know used to be oh I have a five qubit machine or a fifty or an and you know now Quera and Harvard maybe in reverse order have demonstrated a 3000 qubit uh system And then the algorithms are requiring fewer resources than before.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
You know, when Professor Shore created his algorithm, he thought it would need a million qubits.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
Give or take, and now you can say actually I I can run it on 30,000 qubits or something of that nature.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah. Yeah.

Yuval Boger
So the gap is really narrowing. And the other thing I agree with what you said is that

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
The focus is shifting. It used to be that Cueras work was probably 95% science and then 5% everything else.

Sebastian Hassinger
Right.

Yuval Boger
And now there's so much more engineering and how do we build it

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah

Yuval Boger
um re in a repeatable way, how do we serve a system? What does the software look like? It's not enough to have a lab demo that works for five minutes on a Tuesday morning.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
Um you know, and you are at at Brackett.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
We we are have been really fortunate to partner with uh Amazon and our initial machine uh qu um aquila is now three and a half years on amazon running 130 hours a week that's quite an achievement and I can tell you I joined Quera a week uh a month before the Aquila launched

Sebastian Hassinger
Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Yuval Boger
And uh and so I I go to the CEO and said, okay, reporting for duty, you know, what do you want me to do?

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
And he says, I'm really busy the next month. We gotta launch this thing. Why why don't you go to Pedro and he'll tell you what to do? And And that that's how I started my uh my career at uh at Quera.

Sebastian Hassinger
Well, you can't go too far wrong with with Pedro's advice. He was actually one of the technical reviewers in the book, so he very graciously read through uh an early draft and and spotted all the uh the mistakes I was making and helped me correct them. So he's very generous with his time too.

Yuval Boger
So do you really think that neutral atoms are going to win and then they're going to be overtaken by other modalities?

Sebastian Hassinger
I mean, so you're referring to the coda. I I felt compelled to sort of at the end. I mean the most of the book is history uh and context um for for creating you know a basis for understanding But I felt like everybody I was telling about the book who read was like uh read you know early drafts wanted me to tell them so so what's gonna happen basically. So I had to add a you know a section at the end It's my best guess based on where the strengths and weaknesses are today. So when I look at neutral atoms It is clear to me that um there's there's an advantage that is uh accumulating for neutral items right now. around scale and and implementation of error correction, right? The incredible um experiment that uh that Vladin Vulitic and and Misha uh and and the rest of their collaborators published. for, you know, forty eight demonstrating forty-eight logical qubits. I mean that was not just logical qubits, but a lot of them. Right? Really impressive. And it was, you know, it was just a uh it wasn't a um uh a full life cycle of error correction, but this is now two years ago. So um, you know, uh two and a half years ago. So uh there's been progress since then. So so I think there's a lot of strengths in the platform, but At least at the moment the biggest weakness is is wall clock speed, right? Like the speed of operations. It's Tie it takes a lot of time to prepare and move the atoms in place and then move them around, shuttle them around with the lasers. That's a time-consuming set of operations. Now, uh it can that be accelerated? Maybe. I don't I don't know because I'm not inside your RD labs looking at your secret stuff. If it can, and it can be competitive with, you know, superconducting qubits are a thousand times or more faster in terms of their operations, if you can get competitive with that, then maybe that advantage has even more legs. But that's That's my read of the moment. And then ultimately, you know, the the story that gets us to millions or billions of qubits. feels like it has to ultimately rely on either CMOS um uh techniques of fabrication at scale or or photonics because of the you know, the the sort of the the scale of photons themselves. You can you can get a a ton of photons and the fact that they're less uh um sensitive to l uh heat and other other environmental factors. So that was kind of the way I staged it is sort of Neutral atoms or atom-based qubits, short-term advantage, superconducting, mid-term advantage, and then um spin and and photons in the long term. But I'm sure you see that differently.

Yuval Boger
Well, yeah, let me let me put on my Clara hat just for a second.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yes, please

Yuval Boger
Um I mean if you think uh neutral atoms are slow you should look at trapped ions. Now that's really slow Uh but um a a couple of things. First, I mean you mentioned Vladin, Professor Vladin Vuletic, who's who's one of the co-founders of Quera and our CTO today. We had a partner meeting a year and a half ago. We call it the Quare Quantum Alliance. We have these partners that work with us and go to market that believe in neutral atoms. And Vladin was giving a guest lecture and I asked him, hey Vladin, this sounds great what you're telling about query and about neutral atoms. Do you think this is really the winning modality? And at that time, he said, for the next five years, I am very confident that neutral atoms is the winning modality. And later, beyond that, I don't know. So this was a year and a half ago. Six months ago, I asked him that question again because we have the annual meeting. So he said, okay, well, Vladin, last time you told me this, what do you think?

Sebastian Hassinger
Right.

Yuval Boger
And he says now, based on the recent developments, I I feel comfortable about a 10-year timescale. And of course, to your questions, so first

Sebastian Hassinger
Excellent.

Yuval Boger
Obviously what matters is time to solution and not clock speed, right?

Sebastian Hassinger
Yes.

Yuval Boger
And one of the things you see with neutral atoms, you see parallelism, you see super efficient quantum error correction. I mean there was a paper from the Harvard team uh not too long ago that showed that for quantum memory, not yet computation. The ratio between physical qubits and logical qubits is not a thousand to one, it's two to one.

Sebastian Hassinger
Wow, yeah, I read that.

Yuval Boger
And so you don't need a million qubits, right?

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
You don't need a million qubits.

Sebastian Hassinger
Right.

Yuval Boger
You just need to use the right technology and write error correction code.

Sebastian Hassinger
Right.

Yuval Boger
So you you get into that obviously.

Sebastian Hassinger
Is that still I forgot you about is that still LDPC codes or yeah, okay.

Yuval Boger
Yeah, yes. Now it I I simplified a little bit.

Sebastian Hassinger
Okay.

Yuval Boger
It's not two to one. It's it's like two thousand to one thousand, so it's a little bit more complex.

Sebastian Hassinger
Okay, okay.

Yuval Boger
Then then that um so d these sort of overcome uh or compensate. There was also uh algorithmic fault tolerance that showed that you don't need to make the syndrome measurements every operation, but every algorithmic blocks. So there are all these ways that essentially compress the time to solution by orders of magnitude.

Sebastian Hassinger
Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yuval Boger
And then there are the inherent advantages of neutral atoms. You know, all the atoms are identical, room temperature operation, easy to scale.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
um bill of material that's reasonable and doesn't feel like a a B2 bomber in terms of the cost for size, right?

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah. Yeah. Or an entire data center for just one machine.

Yuval Boger
Or entire yeah, yeah, I did you see these uh LinkedIn posts that uh someone is converting Central Park into a big big data center? That'll go really well, right?

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah, that'll uh

Yuval Boger
So tell me tell me sort of the some um you know just between us right the the inside story so how far is the book from your first draft Yeah, what what did the editor say when he saw the first draft?

Sebastian Hassinger
Oh I I'm a weird writer in that I procrastinate and I'm slow and then what I produce is is pretty close to a final draft. I I do a lot of painful interior work when I'm writing and that goes all the way back to high school. I've I've always been like that. I don't know why exactly Um so it it I what I did was I wrote I think I wrote uh two or three full proposals and then scrapped them. Um and because that was what I was describing at the beginning or earlier on about the trying to come up with the right structure that had enough breadth and not so much depth that it got bogged down. Um, so I kind of, you know, I felt like the I was going down rabbit holes in the first um two or three proposals and then and then eventually hit on the structure that that's almost exactly what it is now. Um and then pretty methodically kicked out sort of first drafts that only needed light revision, no giant rewrites, no um no uh big structural changes. So I mean Like I said, I for for whatever reason I front load the the effort and I do a lot of sort of you know hand-wringing and I would tear up my hair if I had any left. um maybe that's where I went I don't know um and then and then produce something that's pretty close to final when I when I do actually manage to get get the words on the on the screen. How about yourself? Is do you have a very like an uh an iterative process? You talked about sort of trying to refine especially the explanation and the humor. That seems like a very delicate balance.

Yuval Boger
Um I like to ship stuff. Um when I was in uh when I was running a virtual reality company, one of the models was There's a lab I think in Canada, if I I hope I'm I I still remember the name correctly. It's a professor Stephen Finer. And he had a rule for his uh postdocs. Every week you're gonna complete an experiment and do something or else you're gone. So what have you what do we shift this week?

Sebastian Hassinger
Wow.

Yuval Boger
What have we shipped this week?

Sebastian Hassinger
Wow.

Yuval Boger
So I work fast, I I do work pretty intensely. Um I do rely on intuition. So I mean even at CWA, you know, I remember seeing on the internet these uh Uh AI generated Lego models of quantum computers and said, you know what?

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
Why don't we just actually make one? And so we made it.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
And then

Sebastian Hassinger
That was cool.

Yuval Boger
Uh what else could we do that's cool on swag? Oh uh I we use optical tweezers. Let's make uh physical tweezers and do that. So I think Uh yes, Quara is gonna win the quantum race, but I definitely think we are winning the Swag race. No one has anything that's even close, right, to that.

Sebastian Hassinger
More importantly.

Yuval Boger
Um I did have a a a good number of iterations on the actually on the physical aspect. I didn't want it to feel like a textbook.

Sebastian Hassinger
Mm-hmm.

Yuval Boger
I didn't want to feel like a newspaper. But then you have comics and text and I d I didn't want it to be a thousand page missive into how do you so I experimented with different book sizes and you know, printed it out, read it, oh my god, this is so bad. Uh and this is cringe and this is not and and then of course with a closed network of um Family, uh my family uh probably are are my worst crit critics, maybe they know me the best. You know, my son, for instance Anytime he I said, well, you know, yes, I used AI here and here and here, and this is a really human review. He says, no, no, no, no, that doesn't work. If it's not if it's not worth time writing your on your own, then it's not worth time reading Oh, okay. Uh so if it passes my family, then yeah.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah. There's a lot of truth in that. There's a lot of truth in that.

Yuval Boger
If it passes my family, then

Sebastian Hassinger
I I feel like we're heading towards a future where, you know, AI will generate the majority of the text. that we send back and forth and will ingest and summarize the majority of the text that we send back and forth. And maybe it'll just leave us to write the stuff that we really care about instead of uh, you know, empty fluff. But uh we can hope

Yuval Boger
Yeah, it used to be have your

Sebastian Hassinger
I used um sorry, go ahead

Yuval Boger
It used to be uh have your lawyer talk to my lawyer and now have your AI talk to my AI, right?

Sebastian Hassinger
Totally. Totally. Absolutely. Yeah, and I was just gonna say I I used AI to a certain degree, but mostly as a research tool. Um, because I I I was this is I started writing it four years ago, so it was very early on. Um and uh what I would refer to as is is like having a conversation with Wikipedia basically. Um because it was it was well and and the archive for that matter. I would I would ask it for you know examples of X or what's a good paper for explaining Y or whatever. And it would it would do a sort of shortcutting Google search essentially and uh and then you know having summarized results with sources that then I could trace back because that was the thing from the very early on uh stage I I knew that Um A, the language that would generate would be um, you know, the kind of stuff that nobody wants to read, really, because you can tell it's a machine, even the best of it. Um you can still tell it's a machine. And B, the biggest risk is hallucination, right? I mean um coming up with some physicist who doesn't exist or a theory that doesn't exist or whatever would have been embarrassing. So I definitely wanted to avoid that.

Yuval Boger
Let me ask a question that I ask my my team, the commercial team. You know, when they produce a document or an event or something. You know, I always ask them about the outcome. What do you want the customer to do when they read that? Or how do you want the customer to feel?

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
That's probably the best question.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah. Yeah.

Yuval Boger
So what's your answer? So what do you want people to walk away after reading your book?

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah, it's a really good question. Um because You know, I I referenced sort of the feeling I had at Think Summit 2017. Um, it was exhilarating, right? I mean As bizarre as this stuff is, as hard as it is to wrap your head around it, it's also so exciting that we're, you know, not only you know, building a better understanding of how the universe works and what is reality and and, you know, what's the operating system of the universe, but we're harnessing it to calculate things for us. It's it's like when you when you really dig into the the deeper sort of profundity of of what we're doing, we're engineering the raw material of the universe or f raw energy of the universe into these Instantiations that are like the Oracle of Delphi, right? It's asking the universe for answers and it tells us. Like that's just It I can't think of anything more exciting, but I understand how intimidating and confusing and bewildering it can be from the outside. So feeling like that sense of that scale of wonder and excitement is accessible even if you're not a physicist, even if you're not in one of these labs or able to do the extremely complex math in your head on around a whiteboard, it's still something you can uh access and experience um, you know. uh even at at this early stage, the you know, before it really gets uh solved and distilled and packaged and and sort of um uh you know productized for us, it's uh it's still in this raw exploratory stage that that anybody can actually you know get uh involved in and participate in

Yuval Boger
For me, um, so obviously I wanted it to be accessible, you know, uh Quera deals with sophisticated high-end clients and uh we we don't usually target the um uh more the entry level. So this book this is a personal project. I wanted to go a little bit more on the masses. I think the takeaway is that quantum is is magical, but it's not magic.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah. That's a good way to put it.

Yuval Boger
And I I hope one of the things that I did in the book is in the back of the book there's actually a glossary. So if you say to yourself, what is a quantum radar? What is a quantum phase estimation? then you actually say, okay, here's the page. Let me read, you know, half a page of an explainer and see this comic and maybe I'll get just a little bit better sense of uh of what's going on. So so what's the sequel, Sebastian

Sebastian Hassinger
Well, the original idea was um something along the lines of new the soul of the new machine.

Yuval Boger
Well,

Sebastian Hassinger
And so we're in this stage Where sometime in the next five years, I feel there's a very high probability that somebody ships a quantum computer that's simply not simulatable by classical means. um because it's on the order of you know 50 logical qubits that can all be entangled with one another and and two to the 50 is too many states to be able to directly represent. So There is going to be some moment where a machine exists that is, you know, the beginning in reality of a new era of quantum information technology. And that's what I I want to actually sort of um you know in journalistically explore the team and the effort and the competition and the marketplace and the landscape. and the public sector efforts and the private sector efforts and the global efforts, you know, that that are the landscape right now um and are going to produce that moment when when this machine exists, maybe a Quero machine.

Yuval Boger
Five years?

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
I think you're pessimistic. You know, I I do think the the future is is much closer than than you think.

Sebastian Hassinger
Good.

Yuval Boger
I I believe

Sebastian Hassinger
That's great. That's great. I mean I'm going off of uh public roadmaps, so I know there's private forecasts as well that could be uh could be more more aggressive. So um but we should uh you know we should plan to get together when the the sequel to each of our books is out. You've got your uh your customization and your um you know sort of broadening out for other educational audiences and I've got my part two which uh working title is one perfect qubit by the way

Yuval Boger
One perfect hub, but yeah. I I I think building habits is a good thing. So podcasting, for instance, has been a habit of mine. So if I haven't done anything in two weeks, I'm like, ah, something's wrong.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
Uh uh and so actually publishing a comic every week is is uh building a habit. I don't know about books yet. Sebastian, when I uh usually when I end my podcast, I ask people a hypothetical. Um, if you could have dinner with one of the quantum greats, dead or alive, who who would that be

Sebastian Hassinger
That's a great question. I mean the The first impulse is Feynman, just because uh I've read his books. Um he seems like a a very original thinker and somebody who is um you know, brilliant and also brilliant at at explaining. Um and so I I think I would go with Feynman. How about yourself?

Yuval Boger
So, you know, Feynman, I I published statistics, a histogram, a histogram of answers, and Feynman, of course, is the lead.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah, I know.

Yuval Boger
The other Feynman story is that um I was chatting with uh Professor John Prescott and I asked him that question and he said and I told him everyone says Feynman and you know uh

Sebastian Hassinger
Mm-hmm.

Yuval Boger
Professor Presco was a student of Feynman. So he's like, oh no, I have plenty of dinners with Feynman.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
And and and then he said, oh actually I I would love to have even one more because to see how he thinks.

Sebastian Hassinger
Oh, that's nice.

Yuval Boger
how he thinks about that. But not to avoid the question, um for me I think it was it probably Einstein.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
And it took many many episodes until I heard someone say Einstein. I think you know that um When I was really young and and uh even stupider, I thought I I was playing the violin and I was studying physics and I said, you know, uh I liked physics in uh very much in high school. I said, you know, maybe I can be the best violinist out of the physicist and uh best physicist out of the violinist and then Einstein. You know, he he was a great he was a ver he very, very good violin player and of course

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
His physics degrees are uh pretty good at physics too.

Sebastian Hassinger
Pretty good at physics.

Yuval Boger
So that kind of completely ruined my plan. I had to go to to a plenty.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah. You could have switched to like French horn or something.

Yuval Boger
You know, when uh when I speak with quantum uh CEOs and they tell me about their modality and how great it is, sometimes you ask them, well, okay, if if this is so great, why is not everyone doing it? And I think and you know I I think it was the CEO of The Rock that told me, you know, I I spent 20 years getting to this point and you know sort of I have forgotten things that most people haven't even learned yet. And you speak about the French horn, so I still play the violin and I know the notes But if you ask me to switch to a French horn, that's not gonna work. Yeah, it is completely different way, diff completely different modality.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah, I know. Right, right.

Yuval Boger
So switching modalities for me is not gonna work in this case.

Sebastian Hassinger
Yeah.

Yuval Boger
Well, Sebastian, thank you so much for spending time with me today.

Sebastian Hassinger
I Absolutely. Thanks to you, Yvala. I I'm looking forward to hearing the episode of your podcast that I'm appearing on, and then you can hear the episode of my podcast that you're appearing on.

Yuval Boger
And where do I get your book?

Sebastian Hassinger
So newquantamera. com, the podcast, the newsletter, the book, and Amazon and anywhere else that you buy your books. How about yours? Say the name of the website again.

Yuval Boger
So you can certainly buy it on Amazon, Quantum Bits, a comic book guide to quantum computing, under my name. You can also go to quantum bitscomics. com slash buy and see both some of the custom editions as well as uh a link to buying that book.

Sebastian Hassinger
Excellent. Thank you, Yuval.

Yuval Boger
Thanks again.

Sebastian Hassinger
Talk to you again soon.

Yuval Boger
Bye bye.