What Every Leader Should Know About Quantum Effects: Vikram Sharma on Leadership in the Quantum Era

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Loop.Com hello, I'm Bob Gourley, the Chief Technology Officer of OODA llc. Welcome to the Oodacast today. Vikram Sharma, the founding director and CEO of Quintessence Labs. Vikram, how are you doing today?

Hi, Good morning, Bob. Doing very well. Thank you very much for the opportunity to join you this morning.

Yeah, I'm so excited to talk to you again and for all of our listeners and viewers, I wanted to say that I've had the pleasure of meeting you several times and being able to talk to you about your technology and your view of the world and your view of quantum effects. And I really look forward to sharing some of your views with our community. So thanks again.

Oh, absolutely. We've really enjoyed all our interactions over the years and really looking forward to our conversation now.

Wonderful. Because one thing I never really asked you about was how you got started in this field. Let's go way back. What gave you the itch to study science?

Well, actually, since I've been a child actually Bob always had an interest around science, how things work, building things. We used to have this thing of predecessor to Lego even, or would say called Meccano. I don't know if you remember that at all. And I used to love, I think my grandparents had given me a set, used to love building things and since an early age really enjoyed disciplines around science and mathematics, particularly around 50. In fact, as a child, you know, perhaps as for many children, had dreams of being an astronaut or studying astrophysics. In fact, I remember back in high school I had a year jumping all around the world because my father was a diplomat. And so through schooling where I went to 11 schools in 12 years of schooling. One of those years was in Chicago and I had an absolutely wonderful opportunity to go to University of Iowa and spend a summer session studying astrophysics, which was designed for high school juniors. And I think that perhaps if there was one moment that really oriented my career as it was going to play out, perhaps was through that amazing experience exposure subsequently went on to finish my high school and then my father was posted to Australia where I then joined my university study.

Well, going on, I wanted to say I think there's a lesson there for all of us. And then I think these kind of programs where we introduce youth to exciting parts of science early on are extremely important.

Absolutely, Bob. I mean that was just such a remarkable experience. I'm going to say it was maybe six, seven weeks long, but it had such a Lasting and deep impact that really has in a very significant way influenced over the subsequent decades my life trajectory. And even now I think back of something which occurred so many years ago and continue to remember it very fondly. So absolutely would agree with that observation. Great, that's one. So we came to Australia and I started off my undergrad predictably almost in physics. But the field of computer science was just emerging at that stage. And much as I was enjoying the physics taking a step back and looking at career possibilities, it just appeared that computer science may offer some very interesting possibilities in terms of building a career. So second semester in to this university program I switched to computer science and went about completing that degree. In fact, as it turned out my father was posted away from Australia early. Nice tenure. He was asked, is actually given a promotion. But I elected to stay on in Australia. Those are your formative years when you're at university, make great friends, love the Australian way of life and values. So elected to stay on to finish my degree. But as I was doing that opportunity came up with the then Computer Services Bureau where we used to run all kinds of quite mundane but at that time very valuable services on accounting and payroll and HR and so on. So as I sort of transitioned out of my degree I started working here and on finishing my degree just loved being in Australia. So decided to take up equivalent of green card in Australia. It's called permanent residency and then subsequently citizenship.

Wonderful. And then would you connect some dots for me? You also went to Stanford, is that correct?

Yeah. So again I guess you have some of these events which are almost serendipitous. So I'd worked for almost a decade in IT and done a number of government projects in Australia. In fact, early in my career, sort of late 90s, had the opportunity to the late early 90s, I should say opportunity to spend some time in New York with an Australian company that was sort of expanding. But at the end of that I really felt that while it was, you know, I think as a career it was fine and it just supported all the basic needs when was earning well. But there was something that was missing in terms of doing something really innovative that could make a significant difference. So I thought well, let's look at expanding myself beyond just the technical realm. And there is something called the Sloan Program that was run at Stanford and again the great honor and wonderful opportunity to join that program. And it was really designed parallels to MBA but a bit different and designed for people Primarily from Fortune 500 companies going to CXO roles. But they Brought on board, I think about a half dozen entrepreneurs as well. And I was lucky to be one of those again. Amazing program, amazing year, made some fantastic friendships which continue. That was over 15 years ago now and they continue till today. But on finishing that program I thought, well I have a background in information technology. I'm sitting in the center of the universe for technology. Let me take a few months out and think about the next step career wise. As I was doing that, I said well let me indulge myself a little and go back to where I started my undergrad and sit in. Not for credit I might add, on some pre PhD classes in quantum physics at Stanford. They were taught by an amazing gentleman called Steve Chu, actually went on to become Energy Secretary under Obama I think the 2006, 2007. Somewhere around that time frame and much as the physics was interesting, what particularly piqued my interest was that we were on the cusp of, of being able to engineer quantum states that don't exist naturally. And as a result of being able to create these new quantum states, a bit like super materials, right? So you can build materials that maybe are very light but very strong. They might have anti rust properties, they may be very flexible. And as we did that in materials opened up all kinds of new applications. A little bit the same in quantum. As a result of being able to make these new quantum states there were a host of opportunities, capabilities about to come to the fore and that really piqued my interest and started my whole journey in quantum cybersecurity. Yeah.

And so that got you, it attracted you so much you decided to pursue a PhD in physics, correct?

Jebbob. I actually always sort of been a little bit of a crackpot entrepreneur at heart and was very keen at that stage to look at whether we could do a startup in this space. But it appeared to me that the science was a little bit too early at that point it was a bit premature. So sitting in Menlo park actually I was just doing a bit of research on who are some of the groups that are doing interesting work in this space. And much to my amazement, back at my doorstep in Canberra, Australia, a group at the Australian National University was about to embark in some work in the application of quantum effects to cybersecurity. I called the professor, I said look, you know, I have a working knowledge of quantum physics, but you know, by no stretch am I an expert in this, but I'm absolutely fascinated with the work that you're about to undertake with your team. He goes well look, we've Got the physicists who can do things with lasers and the theoretical physics modeling and so on. But what we're actually missing in the group is somebody with a computer science background who can take these RAW transmissions and distill out potential encryption keys from there and apply all kinds of ideas around information theory to what we're doing on the physics side of the house. So I said, well that's really interesting. We were expecting our second child. We came back to Australia and long story short, somewhat oddly mid career wound up joining this PhD program. Amazing group of people and we were very fortunate to have achieved some world firsts in the application of quantum to cybersecurity. That's where my journey in this whole field began.

This is really fascinating and I think I had another question, but you've almost already answered it for me because I was going to ask you how does someone with a PhD in physics become a CEO and understand the leadership and management skills required to do that? But in talking through this, you walked me through your journey through getting an MBA at Stanford and that must have been absolutely critical to your ability to execute as a CEO.

Would you agree, totally agree. On the sort of PhD side. I actually call myself an accidental scientist because it's something that kind of occurred along the way. But I've always been somebody from industry and certainly that Stanford experience was just transformative. Bob. I had run a company, we were doing consulting work and it was running successfully. But the ideas that were exposed through that Stanford program on a broader scale, exposure to some of the most amazing leaders in the world on a weekly basis and equally within our cohort. Bob, I think we had 48 people in my class and they were drawn from 22 countries and from a diversity of organizations. As I said, a few startups, but then some of the largest corporations in the world. We had NASA, we had General Motors, we had Ford, Motorola, Sony, Lockheed Martin. Just an incredible diversity of experiences and perspectives which I think was in one year I think you couldn't expect to gain any more from any program. We were not sleeping very much, probably three hours a night. But yes, a truly amazing year which in fact provided me with a lot of the tools which have been invaluable in our journey at Quintessence Labs.

So back to this journey around 2008, you're forming Quintessence Labs. And another thing I've noticed about you, you attracted some great people to join you there and your current staff, I know several of them and these are world class people. Mark Crowley, your president of U.S. operations. What a stand up guy. When he says he's going to do something, he does it and he builds these trust based relationships and so you attracted a guy like that. And Jane Malia, we've had her on the oodacast, Wonderful, smart woman, great explainer of technology who can really put it in the context of business operations that need to know this stuff. And John Leesboer who famous, famous world class computer scientist who's known in all circles as being a master of encryption and the right standards and how to protect data. And I think it's a credit to you that you attract these kind of people around you.

Well, thank you very much Bob. Really been blessed in that regard. And you know some of the people you touched on, absolutely critical members of our team. John Liseborg in fact was employee number one and as we were looking to get the funding together to get QLabs established, they say timing is everything or not. This was just as a GFC was unfolding, so it was quite a challenging time to raise capital but we were very fortunate. Other than the corpus of capital we raised from private savings and a consortium of investors, we were able to match it with a grant from our own Department of Industry here. And as part of that grant they said, well there is this person that we know and I don't even know that they gave me the last name for John Lizabaugh. We think his name is John. He has something to do with cybersecurity, probably located out of that state of Queensland. We think he would be a great asset to the team that you'd look to build. So I had to go and do a bit of detective work and finally through that process managed connecting with John and I went up in middle of summer, so quite warm up in Brisbane in the state of Queensland and wound up meeting with John. And you know Bob, sometimes you just form a connection with certain people you meet. I mean literally we were 10 minutes into the conversation and it was, there was just a strong bond that had formed that I'd like to say it was mutual and John absolutely was excited and believed in what we were about to undertake. And we said fine, if we do manage to successfully conclude our funding then we'd love you to join. And we did. And John joined as number employee number one and to this day, 12 years into the journey is still our CTO and provides absolutely amazing leadership, amazing alignment with what we're doing and our technology directions that we've set for ourselves as a company. Largely out of his experience and his Thinking, but coming to other folks, as you mentioned with Mark Crowley, he was actually a colleague of mine from Sloan program.

Oh, really? Another connection?

Yeah, yeah, we were great friends, but I don't think either of us ever thought that, you know, from a professional angle, professional basis, that our paths would cross and you know, as life often plays out. Mark, after outstanding career with Lockheed Martin, had gone off that, done a solar startup where he was attracted out by one of the world's largest venture capitalists. Done that for a while and just as we were looking for somebody to lead our US operation, he and I were talking and he was available. And as things sometimes turn out again, another serendipitous event. He was keen, excited, brought an amazing set of experience in working with government, a person of great integrity, and in addition to that great experience with supply chain which we built out in the United States now, and through him we got to meet Jane Miller, another outstanding person as you just described. So I think our experience has been as you get a core set of people who really are outstanding in their fields, it kind of almost acts as a magnet, Bob, and it makes your task of attracting other very good people a lot easier.

So we've been spending all this time, and we're almost up to this point where I want to ask you what Quintessence Labs does. We haven't even talked about that yet, but before getting there I wanted to ask one other thing and that is this strange world of quantum mechanics. I studied that in school at an undergraduate level and in a master's degree and I can't ever pretend to understand it. I studied and studied and it's very hard to understand, but I've heard you explain it in a very clear way that helped me take on board what some of this world of quantum effects is and why it's important to understand. And I've also heard you explain things in a way that I think would resonate with non technical CEOs. I want to ask this question from that context. How would you explain to a non technical CEO what they need to know about the world of quantum effects?

Yeah, really interesting question, Bob. I guess going back historically, around the early 1900s, what we found was that the physics of the time, so called classical physics, while it was pretty good at explaining the world around us, how force, mass, motion interacted, acceleration, we could broadly explain how the planets move, our apple falls from a tree, and most of the effects in our world around us, but there was a small subset of problems that just wouldn't fit those rules. And Max Planck, physicist in the early 1900s, came up with a solution to this. But in doing so, he had to allow for the fact that energy would exist in discrete levels or discrete quantities, which he went on to call quantum quanta, giving rise to this field of quantum mechanics, which is quite at odds with our understanding of physics at the time, where we thought between any value between zero and infinity, you could have energy occur at any of those levels. So Planck's big contribution there was that. No, it could actually only take on very discrete values. Building on this, you had folks like Einstein and Niels Bohr and Heisenberg, amongst many others, that really added in those first sort of 20, 30 years of the 1900s or the 20th century to this body of knowledge, just an incredible period of scientific thought and development. And while the principles of quantum mechanics, as you rightly pointed out in your opening comment, completely counterintuitive, there's almost nothing at the human scale which we can relate to which would help explain quantum behavior. There just isn't. So it's almost. You have to perhaps find things which have some parallels to what bizarre behaviors occur at the quantum level and then accept it. But it's not just a leap of faith. There have been thousands of tens of thousands of experiments that have been done over the last 80, 90 years that have absolutely validated that these bizarre things that happen at the quantum level, where it's the uncertainty, so the imprecision in knowing where a quantum particle is at any point in time. This idea of entanglement whereby two particles can go off. You know, think of a single photon that splits into two, and the two got trekking off to opposite ends of the universe. And somehow, bizarrely, it appears almost instantaneously, the two are in some way communicating, almost. If you want to visualize it that way, you do something to one and you can know something about the other one, even if they're at the opposite ends of the universe. It's entanglement, the idea of superposition, which quantum computers leverage. So, so a quantum state, for example, can be both a 0 and a 1 simultaneously. Quite at odds with the idea of bits in a conventional computer where it's either a 0 or a 1 at any point in time. So what we've seen, really, is over the last 70, 80 years, that we've leveraged some of these ideas, and quantum effects have become an absolute everyday part of our lives. You know, whether you're talking about your cell phone, your laptop, gps, mri, all the technologies which are so much a part of Our everyday lives rely on us leveraging these, these quantum effects. But how we. Sorry, Bob, we go.

I just want to ask for an analogy here and I'm trying to think. If you think of some of the great industrialist of the early 1900s, let's pick Henry Ford, who he did not invent the car. He really transformed manufacturing processes and made automobiles affordable. And so I bet you he was not a chemist. He did not have to understand chemistry, but he probably had some working knowledge that if you mix gasoline with oxygen and put a spark in it and it can drive a piston. So he understood some of the physics back then. Well now what about the modern Henry Ford today who's building the new technology enabled company? If that CEO does not understand quantum effects, she or he is at a disadvantage. I think.

I think I would agree with you on that, Bob. Certainly we're now on this cusp of a second quantum revolution. So you know, we've, we've leveraged passive effects that occur in nature and so you know, all the technology that we just talked about, but we are now on the cusp of, as we said in the opening of our discussion of being able to now create quantum effects that do not exist in nature. And there's an absolute whole range of industries and transformative changes that will come to those industries as a result of this second quantum revolution. And you know, whether it's applications to computing, so to have massively increased capabilities to address some of the really challenging problems, whether it's AI and big data, for example, because the fundamental basis of great AI or ML for example, really lies upon parsing enormous volumes of data very efficiently and looking for, I suppose in a very simple way, patterns across those data sets. So quantum computing could open that up optimization problems. So just I think UPS had said that if they can cut through efficient route planning of the delivery trucks, just cut one mile per day of the path of every truck, they would straightaway add 50 million to the bottom line. One mile a day, that's it. But this is a really challenging problem. Once you get beyond, I think it's about 15 destinations. Our best supercomputers today can't actually work out all the permutations to tell you this is the best path. Quantum computer could do exactly that problem. Designing new chemicals and new materials, once we get beyond even something like a coffee molecule is beyond the capabilities of best supercomputers today to model correctly. We've just seen, I don't know if you saw, Bob, about a week ago, big announcement out of China about A new demonstration of quantum computing capability, albeit a very specific problem. But it was suggested as a demonstration of what's called quantum advantage in 2011 by a couple of physicists at MIT. It's called boson sampling. But without going into it, it's a very difficult problem to model a conventional computer and it looks like and what one of the physicists was generally called, Scott Aronson. And he said if you could actually model out this problem, that would show that a quantum computer is clearly able to do tasks which a conventional computer can't. And this recent announcement from last week, they solved in about three minutes. What is suggested is a problem, it's yet to be verified, but it's suggested it would take half the age of the earth to do on a conventional supercomputer. So enormous advances in computation coming our way. So I think CEOs need to understand that. They need to see where potentially their businesses could leverage this and start understanding how they may wish to either through you can now go on to, for example, online, IBM has something called the Q experience where you can, through the cloud, access quantum computing. I think Microsoft has set up something like that and perhaps have some exploratory programs into what that capability could mean for their businesses.

I think that's good advice. And one of the things I'm going to do is capture in show notes links to those sites. I played with those sites myself. So I was able to go in and read IBM's description and then actually write a program designed to run on a quantum computer and execute it. Now they're building the front end interface and teaching people how to program it. And there's a lot more work to be done on the actual systems. But they have a language in place that made it very easy for you to prove that you can write programs.

Absolutely. This is the exciting thing, Bob, is that, you know, this is no longer a theoretical possibility, but we're actually seeing real advancements, real outcomes start to occur. And I think, you know, as you said, if we had to be visionary CEOs who are, you know, not only contending with all the challenges of today, but positioning organizations, as Jerry Porras book goes, not just to be good, but to be great organizations, I think it would behoove CEOs to familiarize themselves with the capabilities that are going to come out of this second quantum revolution and start some programs within their organizations to assess applicability and also how they may leverage this to competitive advantage. Great.

I think that's absolutely spot on advice, it really is. But now let's come back to Quintessence Labs because I know for a fact you have built some incredible capabilities that leverage quantum effects. And can I ask, in your words, what is Quintessence Labs?

Yeah, Bob, so Quintessence Labs was really founded with the, if you like, founding idea of using unique quantum capabilities and synthesizing those with advanced cybersecurity software stack to deliver very strong data protection. And, you know, I guess we see our problem space that we seek to address as tools. One is to enable high quality enterprise scale encryption. So as we move to this idea of layered defense with multiple layers of cybersecurity working in concert to give you a strong security posture, one of the strongest layers you can implement is enterprise scale encryption. Anything that's sensitive, let's look to protect that. So if the bad guys are able to breach our boundaries, you have some assurance that they will get limited value. If they have malware sitting inside of our networks, that's a here and now problem. But as we look out to the midterm, one of the things quantum computers will do is that they will have an ability to compromise some of the technologies we use today to safeguard valuable data, in particular something called asymmetric key exchange. And so what, what we've done is come up with a suite of technologies, Bob, today to help address today's problem of enterprise scale encryption. But doing it in such a way that it prepares you for a world where we might see a quantum enabled adversary threatening some of the mechanisms we use today. And essentially there's three pieces to the solution set that we propose. Three foundational pieces. One is true random number generation. Oddly, for security applications, random numbers are a fundamental ingredient, and to date we've largely been doing that through software. But anything that comes out of software, or a sausage machine, if you like, will in the end have some paternality to it. And if you can crack or reverse engineer the algorithm, you might expose yourself to security risks as a result of that. So it's imperative that we start to move towards using true random numbers, which in the end can only be derived by measuring a physical phenomenon of some sort. In our case, we leverage an effect called quantum tunneling. And we, out of our flagship device today, which is a PCIe card about the size of a cell phone, put out a billion random numbers per second. From that second piece is the glue that brings it together, Bob, which is really advanced key management. And this is where John Liesborg, who we talked about previously, used to be the global technical director for rsa for the key manager product. So with great subject matter expertise over the last decade, we've been able to build a very capable key manager which addresses a critical problem that many enterprises face in terms of trying to deliver enterprise scale encryption across a heterogeneous IT environment. Where you might have IBM, Hewlett Packard, emc, Oracle, SAP, so on and so forth, it's non trivial to implement key management across that. And the final piece is an emergent technology which we've been refining over the past decade, almost called quantum key distribution, which kind of changes the paradigm, Bob. So instead of using mathematics to protect me sending you an encryption key securely, we use the laws of physics and this idea that if you look at something at the quantum level, you change it. So if I'm in our case, we imprint encryption keys on a laser and if I'm sending them to you and somebody tries to intercept them in flight, you now will know and we can discard those keys.

What's the range of that laser?

So I beg your pardon, Bob, what's.

The range of that laser? You put it over fiber optics, Go anywhere?

Yeah. So it's over fiber optics today because these signals are so very small, they're down at the quantum level. As they traverse over optic fiber, they do degrade. So typically the distances that such technology can work from point to point at the moment are off the order of 50, 60 miles presently. So the two solutions to that, one is to build regular repeaters, much like telecoms networks even today have. Or the other option, which is some of the really exciting work that we're in fact moving into, is looking to effectively relay these quantum signals off satellite. So moving out of fiber into free space. And in fact, at Quintessas Labs we've just begun some early work in this space.

So three core capabilities you bring leveraging, really quantum effects to improve enterprise cybersecurity. This is needed now, not at some future date. Because I know for a fact adversaries, high end adversaries, are stealing encrypted information with current keys, these asymmetric encryption keys, because in the future they hope to have quantum computers that can break that. So we need very strong quantum proof encryption today. I think more people need to understand that if you think your information will be secure forever with just asymmetric keys, that's not right. You need to build up your ability to defend today.

Would you agree? I absolutely agree with that, Bob. I think there's two factors towards being quantum safe. First is, as you said, we at risk today from these so called Data harvesting attacks, which is store away and wait appropriate computational capability to decrypt. And especially when you have long lived data, many sorts of data, even through regulation, have a period of sensitivity of 10, 20 or more years than that. That kind of data is potentially at risk today. The other is, I think if we look at implementation of cybersecurity technologies and indeed frameworks, they do take time till you identify a technology, assess it, maybe do a poc, build it into your technology, roadmap, test it out and then implement. That's a multi year journey. So we really think, and in fact we're seeing evidence of it, Bob, that CEOs and boards of directors, chief information security officers are turning their attention part of the multitude of considerations that they're looking at in adding quantum safe to that. In fact, some of the work we've been doing with World Economic Forum has been very much in this area.

Then there's a couple use cases for you guys that I'm hearing. One, get quantum safe now using Quintessence Labs, but also if you just have a large security problem where you need to generate a lot of keys fast, you also solve that problem.

That's exactly right, Bob. So in fact, one of the world's largest financial institutions is using us exactly in that manner. Because on board our flagship product which we call the Trusted Security foundation, which is a 19 inch rack mod of clients, it has this true random number generator putting out a billion random numbers per second. So what we can do is take those random numbers and in fact we've got a software daemon which can run on all of their security servers around the around the planet in fact, and whenever the entropy pool or the random number pool on those servers drops below a threshold, it issues a network call out to our TSF appliance says please provide me some more true random. And using its quantum random number generation capability, we insert those true random directly into the operating system kernel. So now you have high quality, virtually inexhaustible supply of true random which can be used for encryption key generation, PIN number generation or any other security credential that requires true random numbers. Right.

So what kind of organization is adopting that solution now?

Today, Bob, our focus has been around those organizations that have had a strong focus and an early focus around quantum cybersecurity. So if we look at organizations within the banking and financial services sector, we've been working with a few cloud providers, with government, and of course with the defense and intelligence community. But we are starting to see that many of the issues which are Evident, for example, in the banking sector really apply to almost any large enterprise. The problem set is very common across that group of companies.

Great, thanks. This has been great. I have a couple other questions for you, if that's okay.

Certainly.

I'm wondering if you have any recommended reading. You can give us a book or pointing us to other references or maybe I should ask it this way. What are you reading now?

Yeah, between sort of, I guess just keeping up to date with what's happening in our field and then Quintessence Labs keeps him fairly occupied. Unfortunately I've had less time than I would like to really go into other reading. But I've had the opportunity to read a couple of fascinating. Well read one and in the mid, halfway through the second one, a gentleman called Yuval Harari and he had this book and it was called Homo Deus so Man God. And it really talked about, you know, as we address some of the basic needs that we have for survival, where do we move to as a species? And it had somewhat contentious, perhaps controversial sort of conclusions at the end where it talks about the proposition that are all organisms really just algorithms and is life data processing at the end Also an observation that he makes is that intelligence is perhaps decoupling from, however we may define it from consciousness. So we've always thought that some of intelligence requires conscious thought. But I think he sets out quite an interesting and convincing argument why this decoupling might be occurring. And then finally sort of leaves us with a sobering thought and a question which is as these non conscious algorithms might know us better than ourselves. And you know, you're already seeing it well with maps or playlists on your music or potential collections of pictures which might be of interest to you. And you go, oh yeah, that's a really interesting collection of pictures or advanced decision systems. I guess if you come to the corporate world, they're starting to outperform humans. So the question he leaves us with is, well, what would happen to our society, to our personal lives in such a world? So that was certainly sort of quite eye opening and bringing a different perspective. It kind of touches on this whole idea of the fourth industrial revolution. Bob, I don't know if you've come across it, which the World Economic Forum suggests we're in the midst of this confluence of AI, robotics, 5G, other forms of miniaturization and of course quantum, which dramatically over the coming decades going to reshape our existence. So this has been a. That was quite an interesting book. And its follow on is something which I'm halfway through called 21 lessons for the 21st century. And in it he talks about what might be a post work world as many of our tasks are getting automated and over the next decade or two we might see massive displacement of jobs. And so I'm sort of only partway through to it, but I mean he then talks about this idea of universal basic support, which could either be on income or universal basic services. So that might take care of our fundamental needs as human beings. But I think the question, and this is, I think the interesting part that I'm at is that we as a human species then may struggle for relevance. You know, what is our role in this world? How do we contribute? How do we find meaning in our lives? So that's sort of been some of the recent reading, albeit very halting and slow, but fascinating from my perspective.

Thanks, that is fascinating. It really is. And I'll have links to both of those in our show notes too. And it brings to mind some of the other interviews we've been doing this year. We just recorded one with Juan Enriquez writing about the ethics of technology. He has a new book out called Right Wrong and his point is that technology is accelerating at exponential rates in all these areas you just mentioned. He also makes the point that technology has always influenced and ethics and our many times interpretations of what's right and wrong. So if technology is accelerating at exponential rates, will our changes to ethics be changing at exponential rates? And how will humanity deal with that?

I think that absolutely a very prescient observation. And I think this is a whole area, if you look at AI, you even look at, you know, the ethical application of emerging technologies like Quantum, a lot of debate going on on that and indeed that in turn will have implications for the way we handle governance across a lot of these technologies. We impose regulations. Do we move towards isolationist, self interested world where we protect some of these key technologies for our own use, or do we move towards a collaborative, more cooperative, very interesting, very important, very topical big questions, I think, which we're grappling with at the moment and to bring.

It back to security and even Quintessence Labs. If you violate my genetic privacy and steal my DNA, you've not just violated my privacy, but the privacy of all my relatives and all my descendants down into the future. So we need to think through protecting this.

Absolutely. More than ever as we start to understand ourselves and our world around us. There are elements of that which just. I think it's a fundamental right to have privacy around some of those elements of our life and we need to develop the right capabilities to give us an assurance that that fundamental right is is well protected. Right?

Well, Vikram thanks you. Thank you very much for all this. This is very insightful and I really appreciate the time and the very clear language explanation of why CEOs need to understand this world of quantum effects. So thank you.

Absolute pleasure, Bob. Really enjoyed the conversation and look forward to talking again.

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