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

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0:40It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 Sponsored Job Credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. 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? Okay, well, I'm John Martinez.

1:16I'm a physicist. I'm a retired professor from UC Santa Barbara. I retired last year to do a startup company. Oh, wow. So that's what I'm doing is start up for my retirement. So, you know, it's a little Silicon Valley kind of thing. It is very inspiring, you know, because some people think you should start your company before you're 25. 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. It's the second best era to start a startup once you've made up your house. Although, you know, I should be enjoying myself maybe more.

1:56But 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. And it's much easier now with AI. So great, great time to start. So, but you want to tell a little bit more about me. So I 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 1985. I was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2025, just a few months ago. And that was a really interesting singular event.

2:41One of the perks that you say is I get to come to WAF in Davos because of that. Oh, really? And yeah, I was invited this year and I appreciate it. And I'm really enjoying the kind of a different topics. This is not like 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 nature of this and learning about economics, learning about AI and how that's going to play out. So I'm very much enjoying, you know, the unique uniqueness of this. That's awesome. And I wanted to talk to you about something that you discovered.

3:29So 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? But you discovered that an electron can pass the wall without passing it and be on both sides?

3:42John Martinis:Yes. So it's possible that the wall can tunnel through the wall 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. 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 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.

4:26What 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 to physics of atoms and molecules and microscopic particles. In here, we made an 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. So how does it change the understanding of the world?

5:03John Martinis: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. But at what scale does it stop? I'm like thinking, can it be applied to like real life?

5:43Any real life examples? 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. This is fascinating. As an example. I don't know what that's been done yet. This is really fascinating. But, yeah, it's quantum mechanics is more widely applicable.

6:26But, 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 physics naturally fit into this. So it's really kind of the 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, you know, at a little meeting where we're talking about quantum physics and in Davos.

7:16OK. And being potentially technologically very important. Yeah, because it's driving a lot of what's happening right now. 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. But, yeah, I would say and then our results are super deducting qubit results by the whole field has driven a lot of the ideas in building a quantum computer. Yeah. 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?

7:56John Martinis:The idea I like to talk about is for doing design of materials or molecules or chemistry. And people are very familiar right now how you use computers to design your kitchen, make a mechanical part, design electronic circuit, you know, other things. So you can build it virtually. 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 tradeoffs. Well, a quantum computer would enable you to do that with molecules and, you know, certain atomic molecules. So many moving parts? Because the problem is, is if you try to, we know the physics of how electrons work in a molecule, but it's really, really complicated and it's very computation expensive.

9:00So you take a big classical 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 a 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. In the end, the hope is, is you can design your molecules with these quantum properties in the way that you're designing other things. So you can make maybe better processes.

9:42one of the examples that I think about was use this is right now people worry about rare earths 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 what about drug discovery I feel like if we're yes And the same kind of thing with drug discovery. So if you can simulate molecules really well, then you can maybe even just gain some insight. I mean, what I've been told is that, for example, drug discovery, it's very expensive to do this.

10:22And 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 it's not like we have to totally change things, but I think just improvements and better insights can be quite valuable for companies. 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. That's right. Can you give me more examples? So for them, it's basically speeding up all the calculations. Is that correct?

10:57John Martinis: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 computer to do that optimization work. Now, I'm not, you know, aware 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 these kind of financial transactions. 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.

11:44But if we go 10 years forward, what do you think our life is going to look like if quantum computing is everywhere and accessible to everyone? How is it going to change?

11:54John Martinis:So 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 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.

12:31And then you can maybe discover exactly what's, you know, what you need to get it to work right. So it's a very interesting time where, you know, everyone's really trying to push these things together and get it to work properly. Yeah, it feels like it's a really fast growing market. According to Quantum Insider report, it's going to reach one trillion. Oh, it's going to generate one trillion dollars in economic value in the next 10 years.

12:56John Martinis:That's an 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 physical qubits, what are people now, but you may need a million physical qubits operating the way where the errors go down and it works properly, where I think the real value will be unlocked. and, you know, the long-term value. Yeah. Certainly there, you know, if people do this in the next few years, you'll get good value.

13:42But those kind of numbers you're talking about,

13:46John Martinis:you know, our thesis is you're going to build this big computer and make it very well. Yeah. 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? Well, there's a lot of effort into algorithms because building software and algorithms is a relatively low cost. You don't have to buy it. 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.

14:33And 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.

14:47John Martinis:And our view on hardware is that it's possible for us to do that too. So we're taking the hard approach 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. And I think it's great, but it's still kind of a little bit, I'd say, academic or maybe even artisanal fabrication. And then we're trying to use much more established semiconductor tools and fabrication process and the like in order to scale up and make the qubits better. Yeah. And when it comes to markets, what do you think are the markets that are going to be transformed the most?

15:38We talked about health care, finance, any other.

15:42John Martinis:It's all of the above. And you hear people 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 what 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 we you know you actually know the application you know the algorithm and you put everything together to build that 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.

16:35John Martinis: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 and 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. 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.

17:24John Martinis: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. We need the hardware. We need the hardware. OK, so that's what we're doing no matter what happens. Yeah, 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? cryptocurrencies? So the CEO of my company is an expert here, and I'm going to hopefully

18:05John Martinis:represent it well enough. My understanding is if you have some of the older cryptocurrency, that was encoded in a way that could be broken. But some of the newer versions, it's a little bit stiffer encryption. Is that Bitcoin, the oldest? I think this is Bitcoin, as I recall. So that one's... And then you can take your old Bitcoin and pull it out and then re-encrypt it to make it better. So you can make it safe. But there's a lot of Bitcoin that's kind of unclaimed, that's old. And it's a lot of money. Oh, interesting. So quantum computing breaks into that. So that is a market for a quantum computer.

18:52Business idea.

18:53John Martinis:Well, so we're aware of that. OK, and that's fine. Now, what my CEO is doing, which I think is very responsible, is talking to the U.S. Treasury about this. Because the U.S. Treasury is going to be concerned that if other companies or, you know, criminal organizations get a hold of that money. it's a lot of money yeah it is that um you know that's a real issue and you probably want to set up laws in some system in order to uh you know do that yeah because it's still very unregulated there's so much crypto ledgers or yeah and that's the problem is you have something very unregulated which people really like but in some sense that's the achilles heel yeah that because it's unregulated if some technology can overcome it.

19:45John Martinis:And so you may, you know, there may need to be some thought on how to, how to, now I'm not an expert here, but I think I'm getting this kind of directionally correct. What is the timeline that you think? So what I like to say is, um, uh, it's possible in five to 10 years to build this, a big enough quantum computer to do that. 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.

20:30John Martinis:Yeah. 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 saying three to five years. Ah, he's trying to push things. Well, I think he's pushing because if you're a CEO and you're making a prediction, you want to have a lower number because you don't want to be caught without that. But for example, Google already has quantum resistant protocols on at least some of their traffic. I don't know the details, But, you know, these big companies already know about it and are protecting their data or will be protecting their data.

21:12John Martinis:But there's things like crypto that, you know, that's beyond that and other kinds of private systems that you might have to worry about. That was very interesting. So basically we're working on quantum computing, but then we also need to work on the algorithms that protect existing systems. Yeah. And what happened is actually the idea that you can break it, break it with this. It was invented in the 1990s. People understood that. Oh, Peter Shore. And then, you know, in the early, early 1990s. And then the government, you know, really has understood this for a long time. And I'm going to say about 10, maybe 12 years ago, the government got very serious about this.

21:55John Martinis: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. And that's been 10 years. They have nice algorithms. People, you know, you can download essentially the algorithm and code and people are building systems to do this. So people have been responding to this. Well, you can buy solutions here. And, you know, so I think we're in pretty good state. I think people are still, you know, investigate. 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.

22:46John Martinis:I mean, people don't know that RSA is unbreakable. RSA? For sure. But they know from practice that, you know, and the way that everything's operating, that they don't think anyone has broken it. So it needs time to do this. Yeah. But it looks like we are going to witness, we're going to be witnessing 10 exciting years with the rise of quantum. Yeah, that's right. Thank you so much. It was great having you. Thank you. I've enjoyed it.

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