#95, Simon Phillips, CTO at OQC: The Future of Quantum Computing

0:00The killer applications don't exist because people don't know how to use quantum computers. day. We need to enable access, let people play with it, learn it, understand it. That allows us as hardware developers to make the quickest decisions to make the most appropriate hardware. And it's like the one analogy was asking someone to design a website before the internet exists. You just can't do it.

0:26Quantum computing may sound like science fiction, but it's quickly becoming one of the most important topics in the tech world. With the potential to revolutionize industries from cyber to healthcare and many more, understanding quantum computing will become increasingly important for anyone hoping to stay at the cutting edge of tech innovation over the coming years. Our guest today is Simon Phillips, the CTO of Oxford Quantum Circuits. Simon's career path is somewhat unconventional for someone in this field. He dropped out of school early to pursue his dream of working in the games industry, going on to work on classics like Championship Manager and Outrun, culminating in him setting up a games development company before moving on to the field of quantum computing in 2019.

1:14In this conversation, we explore the fundamentals of quantum computing and its likely profound impact and real-world applications. We discuss things like security, energy consumption, and the likely challenges ahead in the pursuit of quantum supremacy. We also cover this, the intersection of quantum and AI and how this is quite possibly going to shape the future of computing and much, much more. Simon's a great communicator. I learned so much from this conversation. I'm sure you will too. It is Simon Phillips.

1:51Simon, thank you so much for coming on the Tech Leaders podcast. Really excited about this one. Quantum computing is a topic that I think stimulates a lot of debate and a lot of intrigue. We've had one or two people who are very well-versed in quantum, but not for quite some time. So it's great to get you on. I've been really excited about chatting to you. And also you come from a gaming background, which I love as well. So yeah, we always start with this question, Simon. What does good leadership mean to you? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question, because I think ultimately leadership is how we actually make sure that these things exist in our world and we kind of motivate people to do it.

2:27For me, I think good leadership is, it's got to come from passion initially. You know, people need to see that you're passionate. And if you're passionate, people will naturally listen and want to follow you. But I think with passion, you've got to make sure you're, you know, fully transparent and authentic about what it is you want to do. And I think if you can do that, then people will naturally want to follow you if they do want to follow you. And that will naturally make you a good leader. And I think it comes down to being passionate about something and passionate about people as well. I think, you know, people are the enablers to actually achieve things.

2:56You know, it's very hard to do things on your own. Maybe back in the day in video games, you could be a leader on your own and make something yourself and make successful. But these times you really need to motivate people to do it. And that's any people across the world that can also join in that passion as well, I think. And if you can connect on that, then yeah, I think you can be a good leader by being authentic. It's really hard to say, like to acknowledge yourself when you're a good leader. So I think it has to come naturally. But we're really keen to make sure that, as an organization, it's something I've done all the time is as a leader, it's kind of my job to take barriers down for people and enable them to do the work.

3:30They're all experts. You kind of end up in a world of working with some incredibly smart people, some incredibly motivated people, but enabling people to take any barriers they've got down, answer any questions and just show them that this is what we can do. These are the possibilities. Let's get on a journey together. So I think it's ultimately that. I don't think leadership really comes from a book or you can pick up things and there's methods for doing things. But I think deep down, you've just got to be super passionate, transparent, and authentic, I think. Yeah, and I completely agree. I think you've just got to engage with people on an empathetic and an emotional level and make them feel like you are on their team.

4:06You are there to support them and help them get the most out of their career. I know, obviously, we've had a bit of a chat beforehand. I know you come from a gaming background, but I know it's a great story how you got into that space and come from a bit of an unconventional background. Can you talk through that early part of your career, how you got into gaming and how that ultimately ended up with you setting up your own business? Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, for full transfer, I'm, you know, a typical kind of high school dropout. But all the while at school, I was really into computing and technology all the time.

4:34So there was two big passions in my life at the time. It was technology and motor racing, cars, anything with an engine. I had a couple of friends at school that were also into technology. You know, we used to go around each other's houses and play games, to play on the spectrum and kind of really get motivated to it. And that kind of came to the fore, you know, my dad bought me my first computer, which was an Atari. And we used to program it. You know, we didn't really have a lot of games. I was really interested in, you know, how can these lines of code that I'm reading in a book or a magazine translate into actually making things move on screen so you sort of, you know, learn how to program.

5:03And I didn't really think much more of it apart from as I started going through school and you start moving into your IT lessons, and the IT lessons suddenly like, we're going to learn how to write a document. And I'm like, I want to know how to write program that lets you write the document rather than, you know, learn how to use the computer. I want to know how to make it work and what all the chips do and how they connect to each other and things like that. It's always had that kind of real big passion there. So I used to basically program my computer, stay up all night, program it, and thought I was better than the school system.

5:30And I, you know, really wanted to do it. And my dad was my biggest motivator, actually. He was just like, well, you know, you're under danger of flunking out of school. But if you're going to do that, make sure you do what you say you're going to do. Make sure you do make a career in games industry. Because I was kind of writing stuff. I'm thinking this feels as good as the stuff that we're playing, the stuff that you're getting on magazines and stuff like that, and really understanding how the hardware worked. So from there, he kind of writes some demos. He writes some code, made a few games.

5:57There was an advert in my local computer shop window. Basically just sort of said in a handwritten note, as they were stuck in the window back then, graphic artists wanted to call Roy on this number. So I kind of called him up. We met in a pub. I didn't tell him I was kind of 14, 15 years old at the time. We met in a pub, had a couple of beers, went back to his house. he's got his amiga was there and he's like well show me what you can do and sort of tinker away on it and then he sort of came back half an hour later and when i spoke to him in later years he was expecting this thing to be a disaster you know got this young kid around it and we kind of zoomed out and i'd drawn all these sprites and gridded them up ready to be you know absorbed by the the sprite editor and stuff like that so we and and we ended up kind of knocking around we say working together but we didn't really have any money or we didn't make any money or anything but we're making games sending them off to publishers getting responses back and just really deeply learning how how it worked and how the industry worked and things like that and then as that was kind of coming to a natural close that's when i saw this advert at a company called anco to work on a product called kickoff which was uh oh right i remember it yeah and they were they were based in dartford in kent so not too far from where i was yeah the rest they say is history so then we're working on games like kickoff and this is this is in an era where hey i'm young and naive i don't really understand what's going on the industry is not that big at this point yeah there were no there were no recruitment agencies they were they were a thing to turn up soon.

7:11I know we mentioned that earlier, but, and it was only when I was at Anco for a few years, I got a call from someone that a friend that was working there had recommended. It was the first recruitment agent I'd ever heard of. Yeah. And I had no idea how this is going to work. It's like, where do you want to work in the industry? You've clearly got a talent for this. And I'm thinking, how much is this going to cost me? You know, I don't, I don't know. And in the end, you sort of work out how the business works. Then the next thing you know, you're going to another company, another company. And then the industry is picking up, you know, playstation's come out by now and stuff like that i moved from anko when i was 17 i hadn't turned 18 yet when i'd moved up to oxfordshire to get a job up here with a new studio which was a um a kind of spin out from us gold with jeff brown back in the day and still speak to jeff quite a lot uh on on email and we're kind of in this world where it's like wow i've i've heard of us gold i've heard of this company and i've heard of their publishers and it was a you know such an amazing experience this world was kind of growing around me yeah and we did that for a few years and as as is the game industry quite a lot it goes through these kind of cycles and we were there through ps2 ps3 i think just about and that that company grew quite big it's i think at one point it was europe's largest independent game development studio and i'd kind of got up into the sort of management sex at the time i was the art manager for the for the studio and then when it started going into administration that's when a few of us got together and said which typical phrase might like how hard can it be let's let's do our own thing yeah sure and then we started their own company and i think i was yeah 20 22 21 22 something like that cool you were young then and then yeah yeah and then we kind of went alone and it was fantastic and that was gusto games then you set up around that's right yeah gusto games so i wanted to ask you specifically about a game that i knew you were heavily involved in creating which is championship manager yeah um i think there may be um i myself personally is this is certainly the case but i'm sure that there are listeners who will remember championship manager i believe management games still exist but they were very popular in the early 2000s and i know many a school boy spent hours up way later than they should be playing championship manager trying to get into the premier league or whatever talk us through how that how your involvement with that game came about and give us a bit of if you could give us a bit of a story about how that played out championship manager always played a huge thing in my life and we used to we used to play it a lot on the amigo when we were younger and it existed in a certain form.

9:27And it's been going pretty much every year since. And it's still going under the guise of Football Manager now, which turns out to be the very original developers of Championship Manager. So the game we were always really fond of. And throughout my career, up until we got involved with Championship Manager, we'd always kind of made stocker games as well. So we kind of knew football, football engines and things like that. We worked on Kickoff, we worked on the UEFA Champions League, Michael Owen's licensed game. We did a load of different football games. the point when we started our own company there was a point in the industry where the publisher eidos owned the championship manager brand and they were looking to expand it and put it on more formats and and take it forwards and a few of us at the time before we started gusto went down there for for an interview to go and work on the on the product uh in its current guise and they were setting up a new team to to work on it and we kind of got to the point where and you know we were like well we could all go and get this job we've got this opportunity to start our own company let's see if we can negotiate with them and say well look rather than us work for you why don't we take on the contract championship manager and make it ourselves within within our company which we did we took all the uh you know the console versions and and we started developing that ourselves using knowledge that we'd got the guy that was setting up the studio used to be my old housemate back in the day you're sort of the industry was so small there's always a connection so we're sort of talking to someone who's quite friendly anyway we then started speaking to some executive producers at the publisher and trying to negotiate the deal and for me actually that was the first time where i'm finding myself negotiating like publishing and development contracts which i've never done before as my company we're negotiating a contract for championship manager multi-year deal for championship manager which was like oh my god this is fantastic and then yeah we went on to um we went on to make championship manager for quite a few years but what a fantastic product and yeah it was incredible we we had to do some interesting things i mean we did i don't know if you remember the sony psp when that came out we were tasked with making a version of of championship manager on the PSP, which was a real challenge, right?

11:16And the thing I loved about Championship Manager was the – and I think the reason it's been popular for so many years is it's not about flashy graphics or different rendering techniques. It was an immersive experience, which is why it worked early on, right? It's like reading a book compared to watching a movie. You could really imagine what it is you're playing. And I used to play with Margate. Being from the Southeast, I used to play as Margate in Championship Manager a lot. And it was great when you could play these weird teams like Bite to Jerusalem. you can imagine it in your head you know the away game in jerusalem what does the stadium like probably isn't a stadium it's dust kicking everywhere but you can imagine it and i think it was kind of a shame when the early graphics came in to try and you know tick the boxes for 3d graphics and you couldn't really get the same immersive experience but um yeah we had we had a lot of fun with that brand and it's it's so nice that it still continues as sports interactive as football manager today um you know i'm pretty pretty good friends with miles who who runs that and we sort of see each other.

12:10Yeah. Yeah, it's fantastic. What a great game. I think it must be one of the longest running series of games now, I think. I just wanted to ask you from a technology engineering standpoint, what is your proudest achievement from your entire gaming career? Oh gosh, I think it probably isn't so much the technology, it's probably actually going into the leadership point of view. So I think it's when we started our own company, Gusto. I think that first time we did an actual contract, I remember being quite nervous going into the negotiations, And then suddenly you're having to learn new terminologies around cost per person per month, how you're doing your overheads, what's OPEX, what's CAPEX, how much do the machines cost, how do you write them down and things like that.

12:50And so for me, that learning moment was like, right, just slow down, so you're 21 years old or something. And actually, we did the deal for one of our first games. I'm going to point because it's just over the road from where I am now. So I'm in a pub in a village. My wife runs our local pub. Another pub in a village over the road. we did our first deal for our first independent company in the garden of that pub um which is you know 100 meters from where i'm sat and yeah uh one of my co-founders giles uh we turned up we're wearing shorts and t-shirts and things like that not knowing what we're doing we're young guys and these guys turn up in suits with contracts and we're just sat there going we're doing you know again how hard can it be right so we signed the contracts there and then kind of went back and told the boys that you know we're in business and we've signed a deal but um so that was that was a real big pivotal moment for me from going from you know saying that you can do something yeah how hard can it be to set up a company and blah blah but to actually sign a deal and then send someone an invoice for a payment and go right you know we're going to work on this product now that was yeah that was mega you know that was so inspiring you know absolutely quantum computing yes where did you first hear that term and how where did that come from in your life simon it's interesting actually so it wasn't really a thing in the games world i remember kind of big data and machine learning and the quantum word would get thrown around yeah yeah back in probably the you know early 2000 2010 2015 something like that you know these words are kind of starting to kick around i didn't really know that you kind of keep it on the peripheral but it was and i think it's still you know kind of in people's minds at the moment something that didn't really exist it was like a you know it was the the quantum leap program was where quantum was or you know it was just this word that would end up on lastly on toilet rolls and deodorants and things like that When someone says quantum computer, I do actually think of quantum leap, bizarrely.

14:35That's right. Yeah, exactly. It was something that we were aware that was kind of very deep in academic research and things like that. So it was actually quite an interesting learning curve when I first got involved with it. So I knew someone that was connected with the start of OQC. So I was kind of there or thereabouts. And when OQC was started, well, a year or two after, I have to look at my timelines now. I was basically asked, could I offer some advice to someone that was running OQC? So Alana was running OQC. And she basically said, I don't know much about business. I've got a PhD in quantum physics.

15:08Can you help me come in and understand how we work with the board, how we do X, Y, and Z? So I actually started as a commercial consultant with OQC. And at that point, I remember cramming hard, I think, of the detail of quantum. So I sort of understood at the point, like, what a quantum computer could potentially do, but didn't really understand what a qubit was, how it really worked. I could probably put superposition in a sentence but not really understand it. So it was kind of an interesting journey into it, not really knowing, but I knew about business, finance, strategy, technology, strategy.

15:38And that's kind of how I got into it, actually. So it was really fortuitous. And then it basically goes back to that point we spoke about earlier about just being really kind of authentic and transparent with people and talking to the engineers that were in the company at the time and going, well, you need to explain it to me in a way I can understand it so we can really get on. And they were very respectful about going, okay, this guy knows a lot about technology but doesn't understand it. So there was this rapid learning point of this is how quantum computers work. And then suddenly you're like, this is actually what you're saying.

16:07There's a new technology, but computers work how computers have always worked and business works how business has always worked. We kind of coined this phrase of basically saying like not all problems are quantum problems. You know, it's very much a lot of very smart academic people coming together to try and build this thing. and like over-engineering how it's going to work. Like the world has done a lot of this before. We can take analogies from the semiconductor world, from the video games world, from general business and strategy. And then we just concentrate really heavily on how do we make our quantum technology the best?

16:35And we've got such a lot of very passionate people that the job actually became quite easy. And then it became about, okay, let's look at the industry and work out what our strategy is to make sure our technology is the best it can be, our access is the best it can be, you know, our trajectory and our roadmaps are really strong and just, you know, kind of really take the business from this kind of heads-down academic thing to, no, actually, we want to be a commercial superpower. That's where we want to go with this company. And then actually a lot of it came down to leaning on experience that I got before about taking or working in an industry where you could make a game on your own in your bedroom and sell it for something that's bigger than movies and music combined for, you know, some financial output.

17:11One of the things I used to say quite a lot, actually, in video games, a lot of our pitches, we would say, we're going to make this game and it's going to change the world. and that was literally some of the things we'd come out and say sometime you know we're gonna create something that's so fascinating to play with it's going to change the world but actually it was only when you sort of really understand quantum physics and quantum computing like you start understanding the potential of it that's how we're going to change the world and that was really kind of empowering for me to do something that's that's bigger bigger than games by a long stretch in terms of its impact on you know humanity and its impact on technology generally but the impact we can have with quantum computing on humanity is is extraordinary you We've just got to point it in the right direction.

17:50Absolutely. And I just wanted to maybe put your teacher's hat, and maybe if you can, in layman's terms, lay out exactly. Well, let me actually have a stab at this myself, and then you can tear it apart. So qubits, which form quantum computing, is based on. It was explained to me as if a classical computer is like a coin, you'd flip it up and it'd land on heads or tails or zero or one. But with quantum computing, it lands on both every time. it has more forms than just zero and one. It can have multiple forms. And that's what makes it so powerful, basically. Yeah, that's kind of it. It's incredibly complicated.

18:29Even when you dive into it with some of the smartest people, actually, it's really quite complicated. But we're starting to understand it, which is really great. So a classic computer, room temperature computer, whatever you want to call it, stores its information in bits, so a one or a zero. So you've got two states per bit. So it can be a one, it can be a zero. A qubit, a quantum bit, you've got what's called superposition. So you can be one, you can be zero, or you can be one and zero at the same time in a superposition. And then I guess the curious thing with quantum computing is you don't really know what state you're in until you observe it or you measure it, and then it will be a one or a zero at the back end.

19:02But it can be one and zero at the same time in this kind of weird superposition state. So you can already start imagining how you can start encoding more data on qubits than you can bits. So you've got more capacity to encode data on it. The next stretch that really gives quantum computing its kind of superpowers, if you like, is entanglement. So that is then when I've got two qubits that are entangled, and the state of one qubit is correlated to the state of another. So straight away, there was a good analogy the other day around a pair of gloves. So if I've got a pair of gloves, and you and I know we've got a pair of gloves, we put them in a box, we shuffle them around, I give you one glove, I take the other, you open your glove in Cardiff, you've got the left hand, you instantly know that I've got the right hand.

19:43so they're correlated right okay yeah straight away you can start encoding more information and know the result of another qubit by measuring one because they're correlated the spooky thing is when you start manipulating one of those entangled qubits it will ultimately affect the state of the other even though they can be anywhere in the universe that's really okay that's what einstein described as spooky actions at a distance as in you when you open your glove and you can sit around and you know I've got the left hand, but you can do something to manipulate your glove to be the left hand, and mine instantly becomes the right hand.

20:16That's weird. And that's how you start then getting these correlated kind of two to the n power of computation. So I can encode more data and I can encode exponentially more data on entangled superposition qubits is kind of fundamentally it. So it's all about the exponential gains that you can get. Not all problems benefit from exponential gains. I think that's kind of not a misunderstood thing about quantum computing, but it can very easily get caught up in everything's going to be better because of quantum computing and that's that's just not the case you know we've not quantum computers can't add numbers you've got probabilities of being one and zero based on various environmental parameters noise and and things like that um it's not it's not a dead cert that you can say well i set this qubit to the one state and this to the zero state and i'm going to add them together and get the right number that it's not going to happen you need classical computers to do things like that yeah if you move into problem classes that a require simulation of quantum mechanics so you know sort of chemistry catalyst design or anything that the universe has decided is basically quantum by nature so we can start simulating that it works in a similar kind of way or things that require kind of exponential optimizations or you know like a machine learning so quantum machine learning is a good case of being able to do bigger data sets and search through them quicker than conventional kind of organized search so it's all unstructured searches and things like that there are a number of big problem classes that quantum computers can definitely have a huge amount of power in and And there'll be things like, I mean, the classic one that's been around the longest, I think the one that we've all heard of a lot, was we can break RSA encryption with a quantum computer.

21:46So there's Shores algorithm way back when, which is basically prime number factoring, which is how encryption is based. So, you know, give me a big number. One of the two numbers that I had to multiply together, the prime factors to get that number. Classically, you'd have to search through each combination and try and work out what the pair is. but by using this kind of Shores algorithm, this quantum algorithm, you could do something that would take billions of years of classical compute time. We'd call it impossible and you could do that in handfuls of seconds or minutes. The computers to do it are still quite far away.

22:16We need a lot of qubits. That's not achievable right now then, no? Not in the hardware now, no, but the algorithm exists, the theory exists and it's something that will exist in the future. So we should. Will it exist in your lifetime, do you think, Simon? Yeah, I think it will. Yeah, I think it will. I think I always say this saying a lot and you'll spot it everyone going to it we always say within the decade we've been saying it for five years but you know these things are coming quicker and the rate of development is getting much much quicker actually just to sort of jump down a slight rabbit hole with it and the big analogy I've got with my career growing up people ask like what are the killer applications for quantum computer and by and large outside of the theory they don't exist the hardware isn't powerful enough today to do really meaningful things we can start extrapolating and breaking down problems to offer some value today but they're They're not really in a position where we're going to offer the world's biggest banks, the biggest portfolio optimizations, or the chemistry company simulation.

23:04But we can definitely see a world where they're getting there. The thing that's accelerating that, even in my career in quantum at the moment, is access to quantum hardware and the computers themselves. So the killer applications don't exist because people don't know how to use quantum computers. We need to enable access, let people play with it, learn it, understand it. That allows us as hardware developers to make the quickest decisions to make the most appropriate hardware. and it's like the one analogy was asking someone to design a website before the internet exists you just can't do it you know the internet was existed for passing bits of information around and yet here we are doing a podcast over 200 miles with high quality audio no one could have predicted that back when the first internet protocol ever existed so similarly with quantum computers the more we can give people access to them the quicker that they can work out how to map their problems for the quantum information space which isn't easy this episode was brought to you by BDigital.

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24:40Obviously, if we crack this, then I think it's going to dramatically increase the efficacy of computational power. and what i mean is we're going to need less computers to solve problems which obviously has an environmental effect and you know an esg effect so is that something that's on your radar as well is that sort of a driver for you like you know just having doing more with less basically 100 i think we um there's a couple of interesting points and this is where i think the the education of where we are sort of comes into play so for our type of modality of quantum computer which is superconducting type of quantum computer we have to have uh cryogenic so we run at cryogenic temperatures so about 15 millikelvin that increases the cost a lot though i suppose doesn't it it doesn't it doesn't when you compare it to what the computational output is so actually when we first started and this is actually one of the big experiences of okie when we first started we had a dilution refrigerator cryostat in the lab we're like oh this thing uses 20 kilowatts of power that's loads but actually when you look at what you're using in classical computation yeah sure in the real world it's it powers into insignificance yeah it's like it's like it's like bitcoin versus the banking system, isn't it?

25:47You know, Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, but look at the entire international banking system uses way more, but you know. That's right. And we can kind of see with our power consumption, which, you know, bolt a few of the other bits to it. You know, let's call it 35, 40 kilowatts of power for a quantum computer today. Most of that is in the dilution unit. So we can scale those processes from, you know, our current commercial offering is Toshico, which is a 32 qubit system. We could potentially scale that up into thousands of qubits for the same power consumption. And then we're in thousands of qubits.

26:14Suddenly we're outperforming some of the world's largest supercomputers at certain tasks. And those things are using megawatts and megawatts of power. The world's largest supercomputers today can simulate around 55, 56 qubits with all the different states they can be in. And we're talking world-leading top five global supercomputers. They'll be using 20 megawatts of power to simulate 55 qubits. If you add another qubit, 56 qubits, you need to double that computer. So every time you add a qubit, you have to double the power consumption. Now that's slightly unfair because why would you bother simulating a quantum system on a classical computer?

26:49You'd use something else to it. But in terms of the ESG angle, suddenly we can get to a world where if we can do 20 % of the computational power for 5 % of the physical power consumption, that's a really nice place to be in. So actually we can see a world where even if we weren't offering a quantum advantage, like a polynomial speed up or an exponential speed up in something, to do the same job for a fraction of the power is a very useful thing for the world as we know it. Yeah, there's a lot to unpick there and unpack there, Simon, but I really want to draw you back into real world applications, okay?

27:23Which real world applications are you most excited about in the context of quantum computing capability being realized in terms of what we've talked about? For me, I think there's kind of, I'm excited for anything that's quite near term. So by near term, I think we're talking, you know, more early quantum simulation or quantum machine learning application. The great thing about machine learning is you can apply it to many different things. I think most, most excited is quantum simulation. That's when we're going to get the things we've never been able to do before, when we can start simulating interactions between molecules.

27:57So things like drug discovery, which we know is a huge lead time for generating new drugs. It can be 10 years and cost billions of dollars. In theory, we can start stimulating that from a quantum world to a world where actually we can imagine we could just simulate something and send it straight to manufacturer because it's an accurate quantum simulation so i think advances there are going to be absolutely staggering i think in the early days yeah things like catalyst designs and you know new types of battery materials and things like that we'll see quite quickly there's a lot of stuff that i'm like nerdily interested in in optimization but most of it's the banking sector there's definitely gains there's always gains for the banks um all this stuff but there's some really unique things you could do there around matching for things like increased fraud detection and things like that.

28:39And they're actually starting to come together now. There's proof of concept happening on the quantum computers today where we can kind of see that within the next few years, we'll start seeing these real applications that will exist. But it's important to stress the technology is really early. And I think I'd love to stand up and just be – I mean, I'm confident it's going to change the world, but empirically, we're still early in that journey. We need to kind of increase fidelity, increase qubits, decrease errors, and all the things that we've got world experts solving at the moment. So you mentioned, obviously, cyber and security a couple of times.

29:10I think, what is a concern for you with quantum computing capability in the wrong hands? Does this cause an enormous security issue? It has the potential to. I think we're seeing this quantum safe encryption become a reality, and I think that's wise. I think there is a world where, at some point in the not-too-distant future, we'll make a machine that can unlock today's files. So we've got to be mindful of that. It's very easy to get caught in a bubble where, you know, we're very fortunate and privileged to be in the UK and there's, you know, a lot of security alliances with other kind of governments and regions.