Michio Kaku Went Viral On Diary of a CEO; I Had To Fact-Check

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**Michio Kaku** (1:00)
Capitalism would vanish. Society would come to a halt. There'd be civil war. This is a quantum computer.
It's a computer that computes not on transistors, which is old-fashioned, it computes on atoms.

**Brian Keating** (1:16)
Welcome back to Into the Impossible. This is a special sub-series called Keating's Razors.
Trying to understand which bold claims that are out there actually make the cut and which don't survive the close shave. Today's episode features past guest and physicist extraordinaire, Michio Kaku, a man not known for lack of hyperbole or humility when it comes to the physical universe. He was recently on Diary of a CEO, a business podcast. But Michio got a ton of attention for some of his claims. The very first thing that really got my undies in a bundle was his discussion of quantum computing. So I'll play the clip for you now.

**Michio Kaku** (1:59)
The ultimate object beyond the transistors that you can compute with is the atom. So these are called quantum computers.
Why are they powerful? Because they compute not on transistors, they compute on atoms. And you can't get much smaller than an atom and have stable matter. But that's what quantum computers can do. And they exist. This is not science fiction, they already exist.

**Brian Keating** (2:23)
So what Michio is saying is that a quantum computer, which is a real technology, I just talked with John Martinez, who's working on a quantum computing company called Colabs. And he won the Nobel Prize just last year for his work on macroscopic quantum phenomena, namely in Josephson junctions and qubits and superconducting circuits, which we use in all sorts of telescopes like the Simons Observatory. But real quantum computing is both a long way off, according to John and many others, but it's far from doing what Michio just claimed it's going to do. His takeaway is that quantum computing is going to directly lead to the abolishment and vanishing of capitalism, and therefore society would come to a halt.
So that's the chain, Michio. Quantum computer breaks encryption, and therefore, capitalism is gone. That's the first thing. There's nothing in between. We have to migrate to post-quantum cryptography. We have to go beyond that now. So what does that mean? Governments have to do this, banks have to do this. They would have a five-alarm fire, according to Michio. Not that there would be a challenging and possibly expensive transition, just capitalism gone overnight.
Credits roll, and your bank account vanishes. You know what else could theoretically break RSA encryption? A sufficiently powerful classical computer, and a motivated group of white hat or black hat hackers. We know about this. They could also run Shor's algorithm. We've known about this since the 1990s.
The global financial system has been responding in a measured way. We'll deal with it when it's relevant. And by the way, NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology, has already standardized a post quantum cryptographic algorithm to deal with just this. It's not a problem. It's not a five alarm problem. It's not gonna cause society collapse, let alone all of capitalism. Can you mention if economic systems depended on quantum computing or any other physical laws? Like, oh no, we can't do this. The second law of thermodynamics prevents you from accessing your kids piggy bank, okay? It's not gonna happen. And, you know, maybe if you watch Live Free or Die Hard too many times, you might come away with that impression. That's maybe just a crime, but don't present it as physics. Please don't present it as physics.

**Michio Kaku** (4:40)