The Quantum Computing Moment: The Last Tech Frontier

**Josh** (0:00)
I came across this post that asked the question, what comes after AI? And I was thinking to myself, AI has been my entire universe for a long time, what does actually come afterwards? And I thought robotics, we have space, we also have this thing called quantum computing. And I was like, huh, it's been a while since we've talked about quantum computing, what's going on there? It turns out the answer is quite a bit, starting with the president of the United States, who just signed two executive orders, accelerating the rate of progress that we have around quantum computing, as well as personally taking the balance sheet of the United States of America and using it to invest privately in a few of these quantum companies. So this episode, we're going to unpack the quantum opportunity, what's going on, give you an update on the state of things, as well as where you can find optimal places to put your money in the case that you are bullish on quantum as a category and you think it is going to be one of the next upcoming trends. This, of course, none of this will be financial advice, although if you've been copy trading the president of the United States for a while, you've known pretty damn good. So that's what compelled us to want to make this episode. We were personally curious and hopefully this curiosity can be shared with you guys who are listening and you can get something pretty positive out of it.

**Ejaaz** (0:58)
It's so interesting. I've always thought of the United States government as being a customer of innovation. So they buy the rockets, they buy the weapons, they invest in the labs, but they never actually take an equity upside in any of these companies. Recently, they've been doing that with AI and now they're doing it with a new technology which is not technically new, but it's coming into its ChatGPT type moment, which is quantum technology itself. They signed two executive orders yesterday. One is focusing or directing federal agencies to work very closely with the companies that are building this new quantum technology, work with the academics and understand how this works with the sole goal of building a quantum computer by 2028, which supposedly is going to solve all our problems. And then order number two is directing all the agencies, the governments, the companies that exist and run the world today and the country of the United States of America to harden their systems against potential quantum attacks, quantum computers, as we're going to explain in a short second, could be used very maliciously if placed in the wrong hands. Now, Josh, I know you've been looking into how these quantum computers work and how they're different from classic computers, but the way I understand it is it's very different from a classic computer. Typically, a classic computer operates in bits. So it's either zero or it's either one, and it's a bunch of zero and ones, and this computes a bunch of different algorithms, which run on the AI chips that we speak about all the time on this show or any kind of software that you run on your app or on your phone or whatever that might be. Now, the difference here is with the quantum computers, they have this thing called qubits, which means that they could be a zero and a one at the same time. So it's this weird thing called superposition. I don't know, can you explain this?

**Josh** (2:39)
Yeah, and every state in between. So it's basically not any state until it's observed, and that state exists in this thing called the superposition, which means it's both of them at the same time and both of them not at all. It's this very weird concept, drop your head around, but applied to a practical sense.
We are trying to create as many qubits as possible, which you could think of as the modern day equivalent of a bit, but the futurized version. And the thing that that unlocks because they exist in the superposition is the interesting part. When you think about encryption, the thing that underlines all of the Internet, everything digital, it's the way that we have privacy, it's the way that we have security that relies on this thing called prime number factorization. And basically, it exists by multiplying two very large numbers together, but then reversing the process to figure out the numbers that were multiplied to get that large number is really difficult. And traditional computers have to spend millions to billions of years trying to decrypt that, and because it takes so long to do that, they're incapable of decrypting standard login information, for example. When you type in your password, it's encrypted using this prime factorization. Well, quantum decryption can do, because it has these cubits that exist in all these positions at once, it can do this factorization math very quick, and it can reverse the process of, let's say, a password that's been encrypted in a matter of seconds, maybe even less. So it kind of breaks down the underlying security of the internet, I guess we could say. And that is one of many second order effects that happens from encryption. I think we have a lot of kind of progress to be made around biology, taking these large spots of data like we have with our DNA makeup and making sense of it. There's a lot of really interesting use cases and applications. It's just been difficult because we haven't been able to figure out these things called fault tolerant cubits, basically bits on a computer that work. We're measuring these by the tens and the dozens. We're not talking about terabytes, which are trillions of bits, but we are on our way. So it very much feels like that very early stage of the exponential where we're back in the day, we used to measure bits before we even got to a kilobit of information. And then we got to a megabit and then terabit and then petabit. And then we does the whole thing. We're at the bit stage where we can measure them individually instead of by the dozens or hundreds. And that is where we're getting in now with this executive order in President Trump. He's buying real early into this exponential curve here.