Quantum Everything Explained - EP 81 Prineha Narang

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
Okay, we are heading off into the quantum realm. We're gonna talk quantum computing, we're gonna talk quantum encryption, sensing, quantum versus AI, all the quantum stuff. It's fascinating area, science, technology to explore. It's always a bit daunting to understand, but we have a great guide with us today. Prineha Narang is a professor at UCLA. She is an incredibly accomplished scientist and academic. She has done her studies at Caltech. She's worked at MIT and Harvard and now obviously UCLA. She advises the government on quantum policy. She's also a venture capitalist at DCVC, where again, she's helping out on their strategy around quantum technology in this episode. I'm always curious what's real about quantum. Even though it's come so far, it still feels like as time goes on, it's unclear if there are tons of things where it's useful or if we're getting quite far on our own. So we get in all that. We obviously get into where quantum and AI competes or complement with each other and on this quantum sensing stuff which is an area of extreme expertise for Prineha. It's just fascinating, the idea of being able to use these quantum properties to detect things out in the world beyond being an incredibly impressive overachiever in her academic and professional career. Prineha is also a competitive marathoner, ultra runner, mountaineer, everything she does, she does with maximum effort and she's a wonderful guest.
Hi, I'm Ashlee Vance. This is Core Memory. Off into the Quantum Realm we go.
Pri, thank you for coming.

**Prineha Narang** (2:16)
Thank you for having me here.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:17)
How are you doing? You're always traveling all around.

**Prineha Narang** (2:21)
Well, it's just been a very, very exciting few weeks for Quantum.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:25)
It has been, yeah. So we've got some news items that I was gonna jump into, and then obviously we're gonna do all sorts of Quantum things. I was gonna start us off a little more on you because just some of your background, I tend to cover fairly exceptional people with rather extraordinary backgrounds. What I noticed with yours is a, I mean, you're fast forwarding life. You've accomplished rather large, remarkable things in a short period of time, both professionally and then I noticed last time you were here, we were just hanging out having lunch, you had this bag that I think you take on these ultra hikes or camping.
And then if anyone digs in to your background, there's so much about you were going to be perhaps a professional athlete, you're deeply in to running and I noticed you strike me as somebody who does just about everything you're into quite intensely and this made me curious about, when I see those, it always makes me curious about somebody's background. Just sometimes these things just happen and then sometimes there's forces.

**Prineha Narang** (3:42)
Well, not a professional athlete. I wanted to be one, realized you have to be really, really fast as a runner to even sort of make it.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:52)
Yeah, you wanted to be a marathon runner.

**Prineha Narang** (3:55)
You know, I ran track and I didn't know that marathons are where most track athletes end up, but I thought I'd be a fast track athlete and it's just all going to work out and then I realized, wait, could I do this physics thing too?

**Ashlee Vance** (4:12)
Right, yeah, well, and I saw there's an anecdote about all this, but before we get to that, so where did you grow up?

**Prineha Narang** (4:17)
I grew up in the East Coast. I don't normally talk about my early life too, too much outside of athletics and the fact that I think I've always been obsessed with physics, always been obsessed with science, and for a very short amount of time, I thought I'd be a mathematician. I realized proof-based math is its own thing.
So that was my how did I get to this part of science story.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:47)
I'll ask this delicately then. Is there a reason you don't talk too much about your background?

**Prineha Narang** (4:52)
It's just a little complicated and I don't have family anymore, so I try not to talk about that publicly. It's nothing, nothing nefarious, nothing too exciting. It's just, yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (5:07)
Yeah, and so you, were you... Okay, so clearly you were in the athletics as a kid and then obviously math and science. I mean, were you a...
Like this picture I was portraying, were you quite a driven teenager? And you were feeling compelled that you were gonna go into math or science or were you...

**Prineha Narang** (5:28)
I think competitive, the typical athletic competitive kid, I wanted to be first and I cared about that for some reason. And with science, it was always, okay, there's this thing called the physics Olympiad, which is basically track and field for physicists. And so I was like, well, I wanna be good at that. I wanna win that.