Google Fired Him. Then He Won a Nobel Prize | John Martinis

John Martinis won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that made quantum computing possible. At 67, he retired from UC Santa Barbara to build Qolab, his quantum hardware startup. President Trump named him to the PCAST science council with Zuckerberg, Brin, and Huang — the only physicist in the room. This is the uncut Davos conversation. What we cover:— How quantum computing could replace rare earth elements with common materials— Why JPMorgan and Robinhood are already running quantum algorithms— What a Nobel physicist actually thinks about the multiverse— Why his biggest breakthroughs came from being pushed out Topics: quantum computing, Nobel Prize Physics 2025, John Martinis, Qolab, quantum computer, superconducting qubits, AI vs quantum, deep tech, Davos, career in tech. More from the Silicon Valley Girl: Follow my Newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=guest-name&utm_term=John-Martinis https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko/ X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠ https://x.com/siliconvalleymm

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:52Marina Mogilko?

  Hello everyone. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl and welcome to Davos. Today, I have an amazing guest, Professor Martinez. Could you please introduce yourself? And for everybody who doesn't know you, can you tell why they should be listening to you when it comes to quantum computing?

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Okay, well, I'm John Martinez. I'm a physicist. I'm a retired professor from UC Santa Barbara. I retired last year to do a startup company.

• 1:18Marina Mogilko?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  So that's what I'm doing is start up for my retirement. So I, you know, it's a little Silicon Valley.

• 1:25Marina Mogilko?

  It is very inspiring, you know, because some people think you should start your company before you're 25.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  Well, one of the nice things is that I've saved up money, paid off the house. I don't have to worry about, you know, long-term savings and I can just focus on this company.

• 1:42Marina Mogilko?

  The second, the second best era to start a startup.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. Although, you know, I should be enjoying myself maybe more. But I do like the startup world and running the business. And I've been doing science my whole life and I really enjoy learning about how to do business and marketing and, you know, all the things involved in doing that. It's quite interesting.

• 2:06Marina Mogilko?

  And it's much easier now with AI. So great, great time to start.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  So, so, but you want to tell a little bit more about me. So, um, so I've, I've was one of the co-inventors of what are super reducting quantum bits. This was actually my thesis experiment where we did the first experiments in nineteen eighty-five. Uh, I was awarded the Nobel Prize, uh, in twenty twenty-five, just a few months ago. And that was a really interesting singular event. Uh, one of the perks that you say is I get to come to WAF, uh, uh, in Davos because of that.

• 2:43Marina Mogilko?

  Oh, really?

• 2:44Speaker 03

  And, uh, yeah, I was invited this year and I appreciate it. And I'm really enjoying the kind of a different topics. This is a bit not like a, a physics conference. We don't have Trump getting an address at a physics conference. And it's just really interesting. I really like kind of the economic, um, uh, nature of this and learning about economics, learning about AI, AI and how that's going to play out. So, um, I'm very much enjoying the, you know, the, the unique, uh, uniqueness of this.

• 3:19Marina Mogilko?

  That, that's awesome. And I wanted to talk to you about something that you discovered. So I don't have any experience in quantum physics, but the way I understood it, if you throw a ball against the wall, it bumps, right?

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:30Marina Mogilko?

  But you discovered that an electron can pass the wall without passing it and be on both sides?

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Yes. So it's possible that the, the ball, you know, the wall can tunnel through the wall, uh, and, and not just bounce off, but every once in a while actually tunnel through it. Now this quantum mechanical tunneling is actually observed in nature. People have known about this very, uh, so for example, radioactive decay for alpha radioactive decay is a tunneling phenomenon. People have known about that years. When you make electronic devices where say it's, uh, storing a state, a lot of times that's using tunneling phenomenon in order to charge up a capacitor via tunneling to do that. So it's actually a well-known quantum phenomenon.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  What was different here is that we were showing quantum mechanics in what's called a macroscopic variable. And the way I like to say it is that, you know, people are accustomed to quantum mechanics as the physics of atoms and molecules and microscopic particles. And here we made electrical circuit about that big, and the currents and voltages in that big macroscopic electrical circuit is actually obeying quantum mechanics and showing this tundling phenomenon.

• 4:52Marina Mogilko?

  So how does it change the understanding of the world?

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Well, what's interesting is, up until that point, everyone said quantum mechanics is the physics of microscopic. And in fact, you still hear people say that all the time. It's more general than that. Quantum mechanics can be applied to basically any physical system, such as a big electrical circuits, or other circuits people have looked at. It just has to be in the right conditions to see it. Quantum mechanics is kind of fragile. But quantum mechanics is a much broader phenomenon that we had originally thought.

• 5:32Marina Mogilko?

  But at what scale does it stop? I'm like thinking, could it be applied to like real life? Any real life examples, or?

• 5:38Speaker 03

  So probably real life is no, because there's a certain decoherence that goes on in real life that would make it very hard to happen. But I'm not going to rule that out. Someone might, you know, figure out some way to do that. And, you know, let me give you an example. So maybe someone at some point could take a, you know, a virus particle, and shoot it through a double slit and see quantum diffraction from it. And then you would see quantum mechanics of a virus. As an example, I don't know what that's been done yet.

• 6:15Marina Mogilko?

  This is really fascinating.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  But yeah, it's quantum mechanics is more widely applicable. But of course, what really happened with this idea, and frankly, it's the reason for the Nobel Prize, is that we took this discovery, and then people built on it, built on it. And then the idea of qubits and building a quantum computer came along, which naturally, this physics naturally fit into this. So it's really kind of the

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Creation of a field of discovery and innovation and technology that these experiments got developed into and why it's important today. And, you know, it's kind of amazing to think that, you know, I was just at a, um, you know, at a, a little meeting where we're talking about quantum physics and, and the, in Davos, okay, uh, and being potentially technologically very important.

• 7:13Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, because it's driving a lot of what's happening right now.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  And, you know, of course, there's a lot of other people doing this, a lot of other systems, people are looking at that are more microscopic. It's a very interesting field because of all these things happening.

• 7:28Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Speaker 03

  But, uh, um, yeah, I would say, and then our, our results are super ducky qubit results by the whole field has driven a lot of the ideas in building a quantum computer.

• 7:38Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, when you, when you say quantum computer, a lot of people think science fiction. For people who don't know how it affects their daily lives and might affect their daily lives, can you give two or three examples where quantum computers really make a difference?

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Um, the, the idea I like to talk about is, um, for, uh, doing design of materials or molecules or chemistry. And, uh, people are, are very familiar right now how you use computers to design your kitchen, make a mechanical part, design electronic circuit, uh, you know, other things. So you can build it virtually.

• 8:20Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  And then when you go and you build it in the real world, building it virtually in the digital is a lot cheaper and better. And you can think about the trade offs. Well, a quantum computer would enable you to do that with molecules.

• 8:35Marina Mogilko?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  And, you know, certain atomic molecules, other things. Because the, the problem is, is if you try to, we know the, the physics of how electrons work in a molecule, but it's really, really complicated. And it's very computation expensive. So you take a, a big classical computer.

• 8:57Speaker 03

  Computer, one of the biggest computers on earth, you can solve molecules, but they have to be small. And that's because it's just difficult to solve quantum mechanics, the way it works. But if you have a quantum computer, you can map all that difficulty of the molecule onto a quantum computer, because in the end, it's both quantum physics. Now, it took a while to figure that out by the theorists, but they know how to do that now. And the end, the hope is, is you can design your molecules for these with these quantum properties in the way that you're designing other things. So you can make maybe better, better processes. Um, one of the examples that I think about was use this is right now people worry about rare earths.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Okay. And there's a lot of very important things you want to build out of rare earths. Well, if you had a quantum computer, you might be able to use a not so rare earth or a common earth to do the same, the same kind of function.

• 9:56Marina Mogilko?

  What about drug discovery? I feel like if we're

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Yes, and the same kind of thing with drug discovery. So if you can simulate the molecules really well, then you can maybe even just gain some insight. I mean, what I've been told is that, for example, the drug discovery, it's very expensive to do this. And if you can improve, let's just say your insight on how the drug works by one percent or a few percent, that's really valuable and could be worth a lot of money. So, so it's not like you have to totally change things. But I, I think just improvements and better insights can be quite valuable for companies.

• 10:36Marina Mogilko?

  And I've heard quantum computing is used a lot in fintech. I think companies like Robinhood and JP Morgan are already integrating quantum algorithms.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 10:45Marina Mogilko?

  Uh, can you give me more examples? And so for them, it's basically speeding up all the calculations. Is that correct?

• 10:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not an expert on the algorithms, but what they are doing is they have some optimization problems they work on, which is very complicated and hard to do classically. And they're exploring using a quantum To do that optimization work. Now, I'm not, you know, aware of of the algorithm research doing that. But a lot of people are interested in it because again, if you can just make these optimizations just a little bit better, it's really worth a lot for for these kind of financial transactions or.

• 11:29Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, for all the so right now, from what I'm hearing, it feels like quantum computing is making differences in fields where there's a lot of calculation involved. But if we go ten years forward, what do you think our life is going to look like if quantum computing is everywhere and accessible to everyone? How's it going to change?

• 11:47Speaker 03

  So um, there's kind of two things involved in this. First of all, we have to build better hardware. And then we have to be, you know, think about algorithms, be smarter with the algorithms and the like. And there's just kind of a gap now. And maybe some people think there's not much of a gap and other people think there's a big gap, but we need to close the gap. And that's me building better hardware, which is what I'm doing in my company. We're trying to do that as well as many other people. And then people have to be more clever. And what's interesting is you build better hardware, you can test out the algorithms better. And then you can maybe discover exactly what's, you know, what you need to get it to work right.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  So it's a very interesting time where, you know, we're everyone's really trying to to push these things together and get it to work properly.

• 12:38Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, it feels like it's a really fast growing market. According to Quantum Insider report, it's gonna reach one trillion. Oh, it's gonna generate one trillion dollars in economic value in the next ten years.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Uh, with that's a optimistic scenario that we find useful things to do. It's quite possible that will happen. And certainly I like those kind of forecasts because when we try to raise money. But our idea is that what we're really trying to do in our company is make a general purpose, error corrected quantum computer. And not that hundreds of cube, physical qubits, what are people now, but you may need a million physical qubits operating in the way where the errors go down and and and it works properly, where I think the real value will be unlocked. And you know, the long-term value.

• 13:29Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  Uh, certainly there, you know, if people do this in the next few years, you'll get, you'll get good value. But the old, those kind of numbers you're talking about, you know, our thesis is you're going to build this big computer and make it very well.

• 13:46Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah. What, what do you think for all the entrepreneurs who are watching who want to start building something in this field? What are the most exciting markets when it comes to quantum computing? Is it building hardware or is it like applying the algorithms?

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Well, there's a lot of effort into algorithms because building software and algorithms is a relatively low cost. Uh, you don't have to buy those. So our company is doing the exact wrong thing, which is investing in building hardware really well. Now, the nice thing is, is that once you do that, you can be, and you're successful, you can be an extremely successful company. And I, I, uh, I like to think about Nvidia, although they're partnering with TSMC, but their knowledge of designing the computers and putting together the systems have made them extremely valuable company.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  And when our view on hardware is that, um, you know, it's possible for us to do that, uh, do that too. So we're taking the hard approach.

• 14:52Marina Mogilko?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  Uh, and, and focusing on the hardware. And then our particular thesis is that if you look at superconducting qubits right now and where they are, I mean, I helped invent all the things to get there. Um, and I think it's great and, but it's still kind of, um, a little bit, I'd say academic or maybe even artisanal.

• 15:14Marina Mogilko?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Uh, fabrication. And then we're trying to use much more established semiconductor, uh, tools and fabrication process and the like in order to scale up and make the qubits better.

• 15:27Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, and when it comes to markets, what do you think of the markets that are going to be transformed the most? We talked about healthcare, finance, any other markets?

• 15:35Speaker 03

  It's all of the above, and you hear people working, working on that, so that's great. I would say what I like here is I always talk about materials and chemistry, and this could be drug discovery too, is because we kind of know what the algorithms look like. In fact, about a year ago, we published, whether it was a position paper, on how to build a quantum computer. And we went from the hardware end all the way into an end application of some kind of quantum chemistry and the like, where you actually know the application, you know the algorithm, and you put everything together to build that.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  Now, I think there's a lot of other applications, and it's likely those will be smaller units that you have to do. But I like that we have very definite ideas on how to build it. So let me, I can explain this for maybe some of the Silicon Valley types. I really love Peter Thiel's book Zero to One. Okay, and that kind of, in some sense, explained my career. So I am very much a definite optimist. I want to know what to build, I want to know what to build to make it useful. And that's what that paper was all about. Now, there's a lot of people in this field who are indefinite optimists. In fact, most people in the United States are.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  And they have all the ideas like you're talking about, and I think that's great. I'm glad people are pushing that. My particular way my mind works and what's always been successful is to really focus in on something definite you have to do. However, I'm very well aware, you're in a startup company, you'll probably have to pivot. And think about different things, and we'd be happy to do that once those ideas come to fruition. But the one thing I know for sure is we have to make better qubits, and we have to make it scale.

• 17:33Marina Mogilko?

  We need the hardware.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, we need the hardware, okay, so that's what we're doing, no matter what happens.

• 17:38Marina Mogilko?

  I think, so this question has been bothering me for a while. I think you're the right person to ask, is quantum computing going to break cryptocurrencies?

• 17:49Speaker 03

  So my, the CEO of my company is an expert here and I'm gonna hopefully re-re

• 17:59Speaker 03

  represent it well enough. My understanding is if you have some of the older cryptos currency, that was encoded in a way that could be broken. But some of the, if the newer versions, it's, it's a little bit stiffer encryption.

• 18:17Marina Mogilko?

  Is that Bitcoin, the oldest?

• 18:18Speaker 03

  I, I think this is Bitcoin, as I recall.

• 18:21Marina Mogilko?

  So that one's...

• 18:22Speaker 03

  And then you can take your old Bitcoin and, you know, pull it out and then re-encrypt it to make it, make it better.

• 18:30Marina Mogilko?

  Oh.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  So you can make it safe.

• 18:32Marina Mogilko?

  Okay.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  But there's a lot of Bitcoin that's kind of unclaimed, that's old. And it's a lot of money.

• 18:38Marina Mogilko?

  Oh, interesting. So quantum computer computing breaks into that.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  So that is a market for a quantum computer.

• 18:45Marina Mogilko?

  Business idea.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Well, so we're aware of that, okay? And that's fine. Now, what my CEO is doing, which I think is very responsible, is talking to the US Treasury about this. Because the US Treasury is gonna be concerned that if other companies or, you know, criminal organizations get, get a hold of that money. It's a lot of money.

• 19:12Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, it is.

• 19:13Speaker 03

  That, you know, that's a real issue and you probably wanna set up laws and some system in order to, you know, do that.

• 19:22Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, cuz it's still very unregulated. There's so much crypto ledgers or...

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and that's the problem is you have something very unregulated, which people really like, but in some sense, that's the Achilles' heel.

• 19:34Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  That because it's unregulated, if some technology can overcome it. And so you may, you know, there may need to be some plot on how to, how to... Now, I'm not an expert here.

• 19:44Marina Mogilko?

  But no, it's, it's good to hear your perspective.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  But I think I'm getting this kind of directionally correct.

• 19:49Marina Mogilko?

  What, what is the timeline that you think?

• 19:52Speaker 03

  So what I like to say is it's possible in five to 10 years to build this a big enough quantum computer to do that.

• 20:01Marina Mogilko?

  Hmm.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  And partly I just say that that's kind of an optimistic scenario. And partly I say that is to warn people that, you know, this may be coming and you want to protect, you know, every not just Bitcoin, but you know, the whole internet needs to switch over in this kind of time period.

• 20:23Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  Now, what's interesting, and just I was at a, at a meeting where the IBM kind of quoted similar numbers. This is all very reasonable. It's funny that at Google, the CEO is, is saying three to five years.

• 20:38Marina Mogilko?

  Ah, trying to push things.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Well, I think he's pushing because if you're a CEO and you're making a prediction, you want to, you want to have a lower number because you don't want to be caught.

• 20:49Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  You know, without that. But for example, Google already has quantum resistant protocols on at least some of their, their traffic. I don't know the details, but you know, these big companies already know about it and are protecting, protecting their data or will be protecting their data.

• 21:05Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  But, but there's things like crypto that, you know, that's beyond, beyond that and other kind of private systems that you might have to worry about.

• 21:14Marina Mogilko?

  That was very interesting. So basically we're working in quantum computing, but then we also need to work on the algorithms that protect existing systems.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and what happened is actually the idea that you can break it, break it with this, it was invented at the 1990s. People understood that. Oh, Peter Schorr and then, you know, in the early, early 1990s. And then, um, uh, the government, you know, really has understood this for a long time. And I'm going to say about 10, maybe 12 years ago, uh, the government got very serious about this. And they saw that, yeah, okay, the technology maybe, you know, could make this happen. And for example, at NIST, they have a big program that they're looking at what they called quantum. Safe cryptography, other ways to encode it.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  And that's, that's been ten years. They have a nice algorithms. Uh, people, you know, you can download essentially the algorithm and code. And people are, are building systems to do this. So, uh, people have been responding to this well. You can buy solutions here. Uh, and, uh, you know, so I think we're in, in, in pretty good state. I think people are still, you know, investigating, you know, part of the thing about the crypto security is people have to try to break it for a long time to make sure that it's really safe. I mean, people don't know that RSA is unbreakable.

• 22:44Marina Mogilko?

  RSA?

• 22:45Speaker 03

  For sure, but they know from practice that, you know, uh, and, and the way that the, everything's operating that they don't think anyone has, has broken it.

• 22:53Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  So, so it needs time to do this.

• 22:56Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, but it looks like we are gonna witness, we're gonna be witnessing ten exciting years with the rise of quantum.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 23:04Marina Mogilko?

  Thank you so much. Uh, it was great having you.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Hey Spotify listeners. When you travel with American Airlines, you'll enjoy comfort and convenience at every altitude. Before takeoff, unwind in the Admiral's Club Lounge with curated self-serve offerings of hearty bites and refreshments. In flight, stay connected with high-speed Wi-Fi, sponsored by AT&T. Your journey is designed to feel easy from the moment you check in to the moment you arrive. No matter where you're going, American gets you there. Book now at aa.com.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a fifty-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required. Compatibility and availability varies. Eighteen plus.

• 26:23Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, yeah.

• 26:25Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, really weird question. I read this, oh, sorry.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  You're piquing my interest. This is great.

• 26:34Marina Mogilko?

  So I read this book, which is an amazing book by Vadim Zaland. It's called Reality Transurfing. And basically, it talks about that we exist in parallel universes at the same time.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:48Marina Mogilko?

  And we're basically, everything has already happened. And we just jump from one reality to another based on how we feel.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 26:59Marina Mogilko?

  And he referred, a lot of his theory refers back to quantum mechanics.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:04Marina Mogilko?

  What would you say?

• 27:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is called the multiverse kind of theory.

• 27:07Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Speaker 03

  And I like it. It's very Trumpian because it's all about this gigantic real estate.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  But I really kind of dislike the multiverse theory. I think it's very nice conceptually and the like. But I'm kind of a more down-to-earth realist. And I see there's ways in quantum physics that I understand where you can explain the physics, which is sometimes why people introduce the multiverse theory in terms of quantum measurement.

• 27:51Marina Mogilko?

  What you discovered when electron is here and there, but it's not passing the wall. Is it similar to what I just said or not?

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I would say it's not like when you throw the ball in the wall, you have two universes where one it's bounced back and one it doesn't. It's just that the way that the physics works, nature kind of decides which one it's gonna do, kind of a probabilistic and random way. But, you know, it's just kind of how nature works is the way I do it. And one can go deep into quantum mechanics to try to explain that. It's not universally accepted the way I think about it. It's still something that physicists debate. And, you know, one of the things they do is talk about the multiverse as a way to drive.

• 28:44Speaker 03

  But to me, that doesn't feel right. But I have no experimental proof. That's part of the problem here is you don't know how to test that.

• 28:58Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, all right.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  But that's okay. I'm glad that this strange physics can get people to imagine different kind of worlds.

• 29:07Marina Mogilko?

  Absolutely. And my last question is that, you know, you're observing extremely rare events and you're building something that is completely new. Has that changed how you think about luck, black swan moments? Because you're observing them basically in your work.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  What's kind of strange in my career is I've been developing a series of experiments and how I've gone from, you know, one project to the other. And what's kind of funny in my career is I do a project and then somehow it doesn't work out in some way. And then I'm, you know, stuck wondering, well, I have to do something else. And then I figure out what else to do. That's really interesting. So.

• 30:06Speaker 03

  Changing all the different topics and projects is has always come through some strange event, often kind of a negative event. And just to give you an example, I was I went to Google, they paid me well, we did this quantum supremacy experiment. And but then at some point, after the quantum supremacy, they wanted to change the way they manage the group. And essentially, I was not googly enough to stay at Google, and I had to leave, which was, you know, kind of difficult to essentially leave a project you started

• 30:45Speaker 03

  way back in graduate school. However, by leaving Google, I was then free to think very creatively, and free to think, well, we're building in a certain way. And how do I really want to build this to make it scalable and better and whatever. And by starting my own company and through think thinking freely and, you know, starting it with a co founders, we were able to come with a bunch of ideas, how to make it better.

• 31:15Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  And it could be that although that was a very, let's say, traumatic thing, I'm sure other people have gone through this, that may be the best thing for me and the field, that I was able to do something, something new out of it.

• 31:30Marina Mogilko?

  Absolutely.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  So, so, you know, that's one thing. And this has happened to me over and over again. And you I kind of have to accept that, you know, that's, you know, sometimes these setbacks in life are actually very good for you.

• 31:44Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  It's not obvious that they are.

• 31:46Marina Mogilko?

  Because you discover something new. That's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing everything. I'm wishing you the best luck with your company.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 31:53Marina Mogilko?

  Hoping that in 10 years, maybe everyone has a little quantum computer.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  That's our job. That's what we're trying to do. Thank you.

• 31:59Marina Mogilko?

  Thank you so much. In my newsletter this week, I mapped out which industries are most exposed right now, and what people in those fields are actually doing about it. And how can you start adjusting your career for what's to come? My newsletter is called Future Proof. The link is in.

• 32:16Speaker 04

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