Our Quantum Future

Sebastian Hassinger Hey everyone, welcome back to the new Quantum era. I'm Sebastian Hassinger and today I have a really fun conversation for you with Evan Kubes, co-founder of the Quantum Insider and its parent company Resonance. Evan is a lawyer by trade who came to quantum from a really unique place, the e-sports world, and he has a genuinely great origin story about how he and his co-founder Alex Challans built one of the Quantum industry's most influential media platforms basically from scratch. starting with a Wix website and a very clever listicle. We also talk about Our Quantum Future, a feature-length documentary he's been making over the past year that features three Nobel Prize winners, a former CIA officer, and some of the biggest names in quantum tech. It's a great conversation, and I think you're going to enjoy it. But first, I want to talk about some changes for the new quantum era. If you haven't seen it already, check out the blog post that's going live alongside this episode. I'll link it in the show notes. There I lay out all of this in more detail, but I wanted to take a few minutes to share some of it with you here. I started this podcast back in 2021 with my friend, Kevin Rooney. Kevin and I had met during COVID. He was leading a series of zoom calls, walking friends through things like Shor's algorithm and variational quantum, I can solvers. And I was working in the quantum industry first at IBM and then at AWS. I had the pipeline of guests. Kevin had the deep math foundation and together we built something that I'm really proud of. 80 episodes and 200,000 downloads later. Over the past year or so, I've shifted to more in-person interviews, faster turnaround, weekly episodes, and the show has been a solo effort for a while. At the beginning of 2026, it's entering an entirely new chapter. I'm now fully independent, working on my own projects and contributing directly to the quantum industry in the ways that I think I'm best suited. Some of those projects are in media and science communication, starting with this podcast, but also including the documentary I've been working on about the Helgeland 2025 conference, more writing, including a newsletter, which I encourage you to sign up for. It's a companion to the podcast and a book or two. Beyond media, I'm also getting more involved in efforts to build a more accessible and equitable quantum technology ecosystem. I'm a big believer in open source and open standards as a foundation for that. And on that note, I'm really excited to announce that I am now a fellow at the Unitary Foundation. I'll have more to share on that and on some of my other projects as they're ready, but I wanted to announce it here and let you all hear it first. Part of going independent also means I'm now offering sponsorships for the podcast and I want to be clear about how that works. Sponsors support the show, but they don't get editorial control over conversations. And I'm not inserting any programmatic ads, so you will not be hearing me pitch dental floss or monthly kitty litter subscriptions. That I can promise you. Which brings me to today's sponsor. This episode is brought to you by QubitsOK. That's Q-U-B-I-T-S-O-K, qubitsok.com, a dedicated job board and research digest for quantum computing. If you're building a career in quantum or hiring for one, this is the signal in the noise. Every week they send out curated job alerts filtered by over 400 specialized quantum tags, trapped ions, quantum error correction, quantum ML, you name it. No generic tech job spam. They also run a daily archive digest that surfaces the papers that actually matter to your specific research interests, something like a hundred archive authors already subscribed, which tells you a lot. I am, I've been a subscriber for a while myself and I find it invaluable for navigating the enormous volume that gets posted to the archive. It's free to sign up, head to qubitsok.com and you're set up in about 30 seconds. And if you're hiring in quantum, use the code new quantum era dash 50 for 50 % off your first job posting. That's qubitsok.com, code NEWQUANTUMERA-50. The link is in the show notes. Okay, so today's conversation with Evan Kubes. As I mentioned, we talk about his documentary, Our Quantum Future, which will be premiering at the APS March meeting in Boulder and is in talks for broader distribution. What really struck me about the conversation is how much Evan's mission with this film aligns with what I'm trying to do with the new quantum era. He's very upfront that this documentary was not made for the quantum industry alone. It was made for the person at home on a Sunday night who's curious about what quantum is and why it matters. Making this technology accessible, getting it out of the echo chamber and into broader public conversation, that's something I care really deeply about and it's at the heart of everything I'm doing. So, I hope you enjoy the conversation. If you have questions, contact me through the website. And here's my conversation with Evan Kubes. Hi, Evan. Thanks for joining me. I'm very interested to hear more about your experience. Um, both in the creation of the documentary you got coming out and also just how you sort of got into the quantum industry and how you've created this really powerful sort of uh set of of offerings and and presence in the industry. I think that that you know quantum insider and resonance are are really unique at this stage of the industry. And did you like How did you have the foresight to to land where you are? I guess is one of the questions I have for you. Evan Kubes So first, by way of background, I don't have any engineering degree. I don't have any physics whatsoever. Um, I'm actually a lawyer by trade, of all things. So my start was really in the esports business of all things. So I started one of the world's first law firms and marketing agencies dedicated exclusively really to influencers. as a as a whole. So so that was back in 2018. I ended up selling that business in 2021. And around about a year before that, in I think it was early 2019, um I started kind of looking at um, you know, what what's other kind of new tech that that's going on? Um and I I remember really It was like a Friday afternoon and and I came across an article, um, kind of thinking back, I think it was a press release about Amazon, particularly AWS. and how they were investing, I think, quite heavily into quantum. Um, quantum tech as a whole. Something that was, you know, I've heard about it in science fiction and movies, but really had no you know, fundamental understanding what it was. Sebastian Hassinger You may know it from Ant-Man. Evan Kubes Yeah, exactly, right? So um started doing some digging and, you know, quickly found out that, you know, one, there was a whole lot of capital Flowing into the space. Number two, Quantum Tech held the secrets of the universe. Everything from, you know, teleportation to curing cancer and all these very kind of sci-fi things, right? So I started doing more research, but the problem that I had was nothing was really accessible. And what I mean by that is on the one hand you had press releases kind of announcing, you know, largely company developments related to capital raises or technology updates. But then just kind of deep academic journals, which for me, having no kind of background in science, were highly gay-kept, um, didn't understand anything that I was reading at all. So happened to be, you know, a couple days later, funny enough, and and this is where it gets a little interesting. I was actually at a family dinner Um and uh this was the first time I had met my now business partner and CEO of the Quantum Insider, Alex Challenge. So a lot of people know him. He's kind of, you know, one of the more you know, we'll say influencer types in the quantum industry. Yeah. So to speak. Sebastian Hassinger Um he's quite quite smart. And I can't wait to see his dance. Evan Kubes Yes. Absolutely. No, he's actually a pretty good dancer. He's quite slender. Is he okay So we're we're sitting at dinner um and he had asked me, you know, how I kind of came up with this idea for for esports. He at the time was working in private equity, you know, kinda had the golden shackles and you know, like most people in the corporate r world are looking at entrepreneurship of this very glamorous thing and how do I kind of escape this kind of, you know, world to go do something that, you know, I myself own. So he asked me if I saw any other industries that, you know, were maybe interesting or were growing, similar to how I kind of saw esports. And I said, you know, I've been reading a lot about this quantum thing. I don't really know what it's about. Um, but that could be an area. It seems to be a lot of kind of capital flowing in. Um so he um instantly knew a lot about it. He said he had been reading about it too. So the idea was, okay, how do you you know, how do you start a business in this, right? So this is where, you know, going back to the earlier point of not really understanding anything I was reading, we kind of took a couple of days, you know, I remember just trying to do more research, and then that's where it hit me. It was kind of connecting, you know, my background in East Foreton, translating, you know, you know, brand messaging for the Lex of Coca-Cola, Victoria's Secret, Aston Martin, all these kind of consumer brands, to saying, okay, here's this industry where you have a lot of capital that's flowing into it. But if I'm not understanding it, you know, and I'm at least decently educated, I'm sure there's a lot of other people that under s are understanding it too well. Sebastian Hassinger Most people don't have a PhD in quantum physics. Evan Kubes Exactly. So how can we translate this information maybe in such a way that a broader community can, you know, make it accessible? You know, for any industry to succeed, you kinda gotta get, you know, the venture capitalists and the capital markets around it, and you gotta get the end users excited So maybe there's something there where we can start just, you know, providing a platform for these companies to just share their message, right? In in in kind of a, I don't want to say a dumbed down way, but more of an accessible way. Yeah. And that's what it was all about. So What we did was we're like, okay, let's kind of you know create a website. We'll put a whole bunch of articles on it, and you know, we'll try to influence some companies in the space to use us to, you know, promote their products and services. Alex, funny enough, saw that was a really good idea, but he had recently acquired a company called Jane's Defense. So Jane's Defense sells data and intelligence on the military. So and he sat on the board there. So he's like, okay. So on the one hand we do this media, but on the other hand what we do is we sell SaaS subscription Right. We collect all this data that we're collecting in the market through the media that we're doing. We build a taxonomy around it and we make it accessible to, you know, large corporates, et cetera, so they can, you know, effectively interrogate the market. And that was the general idea of of how we kind of came up with it. So it gets a little bit funny in the sense that now the idea is, okay, trying to put your entrepreneursh ha entrepreneur hat on. How do you actually build this thing and get people to start listening to it? Or start reading it, so to speak. So we did two we did two, I think, interesting things. We spent the weekend, I remember, and we built the website on Wix. You know, it was pretty terrible when it launched. But whatever, it launched. And then we outsourced, um, I think we paid at the time it was like $500 or $1,000 to, you know, a a a company in India to just publish a bunch of articles. um effectively on quantum so we can populate the website. Articles came back, they were complete shit and we couldn't use them, frankly. So that was idea one. Now the second idea was Okay, how do we now actually get people to start reading it since you know we don't really have any articles on the website, we don't have any meaningful content. So we came up with an idea to kind of play to people's vanity, so to speak. And I don't want to embarrass anyone in the community here, but what we did was we created a list, uh basically a listicle. saying called the top twenty most influential people in quantum. Sebastian Hassinger The buzzfeed strategy for quantum. Evan Kubes We had no readers, you know, nothing on the website at all, but effectively what we did was we emailed 20 people in the quantum industry. Um I won't name names, but you can go back on our website and look. You know, huge corporates, you know, across, you know, the Microsoft's of the world, Google's of the world. you know, uh at the time Cambridge Quantum, Atom Computing, Ion Q, et cetera. And we basically were just like, Congratulations, you made the quantum insiders list of the most twenty influential people in quantum and we send this to you, CEOs and executives at these companies. Every single person responded to us and agreed to do an interview. So we were able to populate our website by doing these individual interviews with each of these people. as well as publish this article. And the best part of it was every single one of them then published on their LinkedIn about how grateful they are to uh be named in the quantum insiders list of the, you know, the top twenty most influential people in quantum. So we went from zero figures to, you know, at least a few in the industry. And that's what opened the thing. Sebastian Hassinger That's fantastic. And I don't think there's any shame in that approach whatsoever because uh you know, the as you said, for for the m for the industry to find its market, right, it needs that kind of of marketing and amplification of message and accessibility. If it's if it's only PhDs talking to each other, then it's gonna be a very limited market. And as you said, the capital inflows are suggesting that everybody believes this is gonna be a much larger market. So I think You know, it's a very clever way of bootstrapping kind of that that uh that platform. I that's really a a great story. Evan Kubes No, you're totally right. And the one thing I just want to add to that was Sebastian Hassinger Yeah. Evan Kubes Kind of going back to a conversation that you and I had offhand, you know, a bit ago was this idea of translating these complex topics, right? Because Most of the companies that we were dealing with were academically led, right? So they didn't necessarily understand how best to position themselves from a brand equity or brand awareness standpoint. So it was very easy for us in a sense to bring that education component when we're speaking to some of these, you know, university spin-outs or companies to kind of walk them through how best to position themselves in the market and kind of get in front of the people who they're really are their prospective clients or partners, which are again capital market players as well as end user customers. Sebastian Hassinger Great. That's great. And so, I mean that that's the origin story of Quantum Insider. And now of course you've you've got this sort of broader play with resonance of of finding other uh sort of deep tech for lack of a better term, uh topics that that had that same kind of barrier to entry of like This is deeply scientific, deeply technical, deeply specialized, and and needs that kind of translation bridge for for entry into building an understanding to drive investment or drive uh um purchasing of services or products. It's the same sort of model uh uh applied to other uh verticals essentially right? Evan Kubes Yeah that's absolutely right. So we we achieved you know a a nominal level success the first year that we launched, we were profitable. Um, I think we had hired by the end of a year one, we were a team of eight. Um, so it kind of scaled quite quickly. And this was very much a side business. for both Alex and myself who were still I was still working in esports at the time, he was still working in private equity. Um but, you know, we we did establish a a general proof of concept. So The idea was um can we effectively rinse and repeat this model uh you know of media and data across anciliary tech verticals? that share similar characteristics to quantum, you know, highly nascent, you know, complex, poorly understood, with effectively tons of government funding. Right. Right. Which is, you know, one of the critical pieces. So, you know, we we had tried that. The first one we went into was actually the metaverse. Um, if you remember that was like kind of you know, a very big popular one. Remember those days? Yeah. industry as opposed to B2B. Um but then we kind of, you know, we drop that, reverse it to digital twin, and then we found success in space, AI, uh, and climate tech. Sebastian Hassinger Right, right. That's fantastic. Okay, so let's shift gears to the thing I really want to talk about. It's great context. I find that all really fascinating. It's a terrific story. But um on March 2nd, you're premiering uh a documentary called Our Quantum Future on the exact topic that Quantum Insider has been covering. Tell me about the so this is your first your co-director on the film. This is your first uh you know experience making a film. What was the sort of the the the trigger for for and you know uh taking on uh to undertaking this and and what's the sort of goal for the film? Evan Kubes Yeah, so As you know, 2025 um you know was labeled the uh International Year of Quantum. Um effectively you had UNESCO um and APS, the American Physical Society, kind of come out and say you know, this is the hundred year anniversary of the discover since the discovery of quantum mechanics. So we should use this as a time to, you know, effectively bring quantum from the periphery more to mainstream, you know, tech discourse. Right. AI's had its like time in the spotlight. Uh you know, we're hearing a lot about robotics, fusion, etcetera. But you know, all of these technologies for them to reach their potential really need quantum tech um to also reach it its potential for all these to be fully realized. So they came to us and were like, hey, can you guys kind of help us? Um, so this is APS and UNESCO, uh, market the International Year of Quantum. Can you guys do some thought leadership articles, do some general banner ads, maybe some w webinars, et cetera. So we started helping them kind of plan out, you know, a marketing scheme or marketing plan for 2025. And then on the side of that, um I think it was Alex mostly to give him credit was like, what's something Evan more ambitious that we can maybe be doing here? This is obviously a very big year. There's a lot of eyes going into quantum. How can we one really help facilitate eyeballs onto the space right now, onto you know the quantum space? So we had previously done or we do do a lot of video work for our clients. I mean, it's like handshake videos, evergreen content for their websites, you know, very corporate style stuff. Um during COVID, we did release a mini documentary. It was like 10 minutes long, filmed like almost entirely on Zoom, you know, fairly low quality on quantum ethics, but it was highly well received. So the idea was could we, you know, why don't we just come out with like maybe a longer documentary, like, you know, twenty minutes, something for YouTube, so to speak. that is just kind of more of an overview of the quantum industry. So like, okay, that's a pretty good idea. Sebastian Hassinger That's snowballed. Evan Kubes Yeah. Okay, yeah, we, you know, we we can reach out to some of our clients, our customers, you know, I'm sure they'll want to like take part in this. Yeah, it it just snowballed. Once kind of, you know, what started as effectively let's go create a twenty minute documental quantum, turn to what's now an hour twenty minute feature length premiere um you know that were in talks with the likes uh Disney and and and Rakuten uh for distribution. So the the real genesis going back to was How do we create something that really pushes again quantum from this echo chamber, so to speak, where I think a lot of the industry still sits in, especially if you go to a lot of the conferences. But how do we now get it in front of the eyes of the layman? Uh you know, I don't want to be terse on your podcast, but you know, the individual who's sitting at home on a Sunday night, You know, they just smoked a joint. They want to watch something smart. You know, they want to watch, you know, maybe they've seen documentary in black holes, maybe they've seen some other tech documentary, and they just want to learn something new, so to speak, that's fun and engaging and interesting. And that was really the genesis of it. So, you know, we started, you know, effectively me, uh, putting a storyboard together of what this would look like. And, you know, given that 2025 was the International General Quantum, we decided to follow this general theme of let's just, you know, focus on where we were, you know, where we are now and where we're going. Hence our quantum future and and and the winter itself is really split up into those three acts of, you know, the history of of quantum mechanics as a whole. you know, from the influence of the likes of Feynman, Schrdinger, you know, Heisenberg, et cetera, um, all the way to, you know, where we are, you know, now in terms of going from the lab into the corporate, so to speak. Um, and then where are we actually going in the future with this technology? Um, so it's uh, you know, it's been an amazing journey over this last year kind of learning more and more about, you know, filmmaking and storytelling as a whole. But what it really comes down to is it's the genesis or the thesis of of why we built Quantum Insider in the first place, which is make complex technologies accessible for the everyday person. Um and and that's kind of what we've been trying to do over the last year. Sebastian Hassinger Yeah, that's fantastic. I mean the the communication challenges around quantum technologies are rooted in the fact that quantum physics itself is incredibly abstruse, right? I mean it there's there's debate within the physics community about how to interpret uh quantum physics it and quantum mechanics that originates a hundred years ago and still rages today. There's no consensus really. I mean there's sort of a working consensus around Copenhagen interpretation, but a lot of debate around the edges. Were there were there lessons you learned in this process about what what tricks or what tools, what metaphors sort of resonate with a more uh broader audience or making those entry points into into into the field? Evan Kubes Yeah, so uh I think for us um and and hopefully we do a good job of this and people think that we do a good job of this in the documentary is really trying to explain those complex topics in very simple ways. in ways that people can really understand them through the use of things like animation, um, uh metaphors, analogies, etcetera Um, but for me it's it's it's been a very, you know, I don't tend to speak this way, but it's been a blessed experience in the sense that every single day um I am always the dumbest person in the room. Um and I'm grateful for that. Um, you know, three different Nobel Prize winners, um, all who've influenced quantum mechanics quite heavily, um such as Eric Cornell, Elaine S. Bay, Dr. , you know, Bill Phillips, to some of the world's largest corporates, like we have Microsoft, Fujitsu. On Q, Google, the CIA takes part in the documentary from a national security perspective. Biggest challenge when it came to actually putting this whole thing together was again that kind of storytelling and narrative. Typically when you watch a documentary Follows the traditional arc of um you know you're following a certain thing that has like almost an end. So take a crime documentary as an example. who killed Jane Doe, right? And you know, you follow kind of the narrative and in the end you kind of get that payoff. Where here we're not really, you know, we weren't necessarily following, let's say, Google for the last, you know, ten years on their journey for quantum supremacy. Here we're following the journey of an industry and that kind of central narrative is the quantum computer itself. Um and it's told by the thought leaders who are developing this industry as a whole. So what turned into like what was, you know. a story about technology, I think at the beginning, has morphed into more of a story about humanity. Um and what I mean by that is the philosophy and engagement that humans have with technology and the humans behind that growth. Both from again an entrepreneurial perspective. from you know the trials and tribulations of basically failure, you know, going back and over and over again, trying again and again and what that looks like showing up every single day. And there's a couple interesting scenes on that. Um, all the way to, you know, the ethics component. Uh sometimes the development of the technology comes first. Ethics comes later. Right. Quantum present uh you know an opportunity for us to maybe reverse that um and kind of think about, you know, the democratization of the technology beforehand, unlike how we kind of treat other things. So hopefully that answers your question like a little bit. Sure. Sebastian Hassinger Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned you mentioned the short uh that you did on quantum ethics as well. So you've revisited ethics in the context of the of the larger film. Were there things about the the ethics conversation or the community that's looking at ethics that were that surprised you in in how they developed between the original short and and when you were shooting the this this feature length. Evan Kubes I think so. So there's this interesting um One of the interesting things that came about when we were filming this documentary was, you know, effectively just asking that question to everyone that we spoke to. Um, and we spoke to I think we had something like 39 interviews. We went to um, I don't know, 40 countries or something like that. Um, but we always ask the question of, you know, what are their thoughts on ethics? You know, very broad. And you kind of had an interesting dichotomy, particularly between academics and then between the engineers So there's this often parallel that was used when we spoke to people about um Oppenheimer and the creation of, you know, the Atomball. Sebastian Hassinger Yeah. The first quantum technology, in a way. Evan Kubes So there was this concept of um A lot of people, you know, I think John Doyle, who you know, professor of quantum at Harvard and president of APS, he made this really interesting point. Where he said that when Oppenheimer and, you know, the the the most brilliant minds in the world were developing the atom, you had a large group of them who didn't really understand what they were building. Um, in the sense that they were just trying to solve a very difficult engineering and physics problem. Like that was it. But then you had this other group of people who were working on it that knew exactly what they were doing. Right? They were building a bomb. Right? So using that parallel to today's quantum technology, and I'm not saying it's this world-ending thing, and you know, you sure all technologies can be used for good or good for bad, but I'm not here to meet that judgment. But we use that that as almost a thematic question to ask a lot of people in the documentary once we spoke to John. So We posed it to a few of the engineers, one at Google, for instance, and we said, do you ever think about what you're building and the potential consequences of it? They said, absolutely not. I'm just here trying to solve a very difficult engineering problem, which very much paralleled, you know. obviously I wasn't there, but this kind of idea of what was going on during the development of the atom bomb. So I thought that was quite compelling in a sense, because then we spoke to people at, for example, you'll see in the documentary um Ingovernant, um, at the CIA, um and some of the corporates. who are very much focused on ethics and being like we need to be very careful on how this is being developed, um who has access to it Um, and the reason why the US government is investing so much is because they want to get there before the bad guys do, right? Russia and China, um, which was very often quoted from people that we spoke to. So it was a very interesting parallel from that perspective on the ethics front in the sense that you have a lot of people who do think about it, but then you have a lot of people who don't necessarily think about it, which is again totally okay. I'm not here to judge on that. Sebastian Hassinger Yeah. Evan Kubes It's interesting to think about. Sebastian Hassinger Yeah. And and what about you mentioned democratization. What about that sort of aspect of of you know more equitable access and uh more egalitarian sort of distribution of the value that gets created from this technology because that historically has been very concentrated as well. Um did that was that another sort of theme that was that came up in the ethics discussion? Evan Kubes It was very much a big theme and it's very much in line with um uh Exact conversation and the general consensus, right? And this is always, I think, you know, the hopeful view is you want to put the technology in the hands of of those that are going to be creative with it um and use it for a force for good. Um and obviously that is a very subjective thing to say you know and and to kind of put it out there so to speak. speak. Um but what are the safeguards? Um Ilias Kahn, for example, he's in the documentary, former CEO of Quantineum He makes an interesting parallel and documentary to, you know, this idea that in basically any field that you work in, there are rules. You can't fly an airplane um without a pilot's license. Right. You can't, you know, in the UK um drive a taxi without a license. So the view is should we have the same sort of you know educational license kind of rule guide component? to quantum technology, but in such a way that it's accessible to people, right? Because a lot of you know these sorts of things can be very much inaccessible. Um, you know, there's this whole debate within the quantum computing now, as I'm sure you know, is do you really need a a PhD in quantum to work in the quantum company? Right? I don't know. I don't think that you do, right? It really depends what what you're kind of facilitating. So do we need to create this whole so kind of rule book and kind of ethical guidelines as it relates to who can actually have access to using it if and when it is fully realized? Sebastian Hassinger Yeah, that's really interesting. And the the national security angle is also interesting. uh, I think growing awareness of whether it's it's literally national security or it's economic um pos positioning on a global basis. The the imperative is to make sure that the US is in the forefront of of this um this effort to develop this technology for for you know, a variety of reasons. But was there was there anything surprising about that aspect of it? Did the the level of urgency or it or the risks cons surprise you? Evan Kubes He there i i it's funny, so Nicholas Agler is the c former CIA operative um who who speaks you know extremely well is in the documentary, um, and is one of the most quota people I I've ever worked with. He got a fascinating perspective on this compared to what I was generally used to hearing, I think in the quantum industry and and you as well In the sense that he he kind of gave the definition of quantum advantage in the sense that, you know, there's all this arguments going on in the quantum community about quantum advantage and the efficacy of results from certain companies. Um, you know, quantum advantage, you know, can I do something better on a or faster on a quantum computer than I can normally achieve on a classical system? Right. And His view was like, sure, but it's a very kind of narrow view because when we're looking at it from the government perspective, um takes like weapons systems or weapons manufacturing or encryption, etc. To us, he said, in the CIA and to the government, quantum advantage is simply is there a increase in output over a certain period? Um That can compound over a period of time. So I said that very poorly. What he meant by that, and this is quoted from the documentary, is like, quantum advantage to me is simply if this If I can do a certain task 1% better every single year for a certain number of years, that compounds quite heavily for us. Which give, let's say, a country a huge advantage over another country in that particular area. So let's say I can use quantum technology in any form to improve my ability for radar detection at a half a percent optimization per year for five years better than another country can, I have a massive advantage over that country when it comes to radar detection. So and I don't think people think about it necessarily that granular. They tend to think about it like Simply is this like so much better than I can do it once, right? Sebastian Hassinger Or or they focus z they just zero in on shores and the the idea of encryption and breaking breaking the the Um the keys uh and that's a very, very narrow view. Evan Kubes As you said, it's it's literally anything where they look at it much a much broader view. So it does make Quantas feel much more real even today. Sebastian Hassinger Yeah. Yeah, I mean I guess that's my final question. Did you did you adjust your sort of uh expectation for the time horizon for broadly speaking quantum advantage? uh in the process of making the film. Evan Kubes So interestingly there's uh there's a scene in the dock where uh Dr. Bill Phillips talks about how he is a bet with Carl Williams, who's I think a lot of people know in the industry, former physicist, Natinist, etc. Very well known. um where they have a bet on will quantum technologies um you know have quantum advantage over the next um five years. You know? Sebastian Hassinger Will it be within five years or will When did they make the bet? Evan Kubes They made the bet apparently like two years ago or something like that. Okay. He says that when he speaks to people he tends to land on, you know, fifty fifty. I kind of feel the same way, um, after filming this documentary. As you might imagine, you know, when we speak to a lot of the corporates, they're like, We're it's here now. Right. We are already servicing customers, you know, which is true in in large part, but are they servicing them in the way that you know everyone envisions them? Or are we servicing them also in the way that maybe Nick Zagler at the CIA is envisioning them, which then to me does make quantum feel a lot more today. Right. But when you talk about it from the academic standpoint, the intend to be much more reserved as it relates to, you know, um when quantum will be fully realized. compared to corporates on the other hand, which are much more um ambitious um in terms of uh, you know, it's here now, that sort of thing. Sebastian Hassinger Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. All right, so we mentioned your premiering March second in Boulder Um are there still seats available? Evan Kubes Well, so it is invite only, but I encourage, you know, if anyone listening to want to tend to reach out. It should be A great time, really excited for it. Um and you know, the general hope is following this, you know, hopefully we'll be in a home near you, right? Right You know, you can sit at home on that Sunday night after doing, you know, any kind of libations that you like, and that's something interesting is my hope Sebastian Hassinger That's great. I saw on the website you've got a a way to sign up basically for updates so that when you do sign that distribution deal, you'll blast it out to everybody's mailboxes. Evan Kubes Yeah, and and look and and the one thing I do want to add, and you know, as as people, you know, people in the Quan ministry, Sebastian, I'm sure you know this, tend to be the most critical of everything else going on within the quantum industry, right? We're very protected and we're very safeguarded. This documentary, as much as I hate to say it, was not made for the quantum industry. It was made for them in a sense to elevate all of the work that they're doing. But this documentary was really made for Joe Blow and Cindy Blow at home who've never heard of this industry. in a way to elevate and highlight all this great and fascinating work that we're doing. We're not here to dig deep into the technical details, benchmark companies against each other. Nothing like that. We're just trying to make quantum technologies uh front and center. Um, so we can do our part as the quantum insider again of making this technology more accessible. Sebastian Hassinger Well, and what a fitting sort of capstone to the International Year of Quantum. I think it's really great. So I'm really looking forward to seeing it. And thank you so much for your time today, Evan. It's been a really uh Pleasant conversation as always. Evan Kubes Well thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, Sebastian.