1261: John Young | Decrypting the Quantum Quandaries of Q-Day

Summary

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The Jordan Harbinger Show — Episode 1261: John Young | Decrypting the Quantum Quandaries of Q-Day

Release Date: December 23, 2025
Guest: John Young, COO of Quantum Emotion America

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Episode Overview

Jordan Harbinger sits down with John Young, a pioneer in cybersecurity and quantum technology, to unpack the coming revolution and risks of quantum computing. They decode what quantum computers really are, why their emergence could break all current digital security, what "Q Day" is, and why the stakes reach from miracle drugs and climate breakthroughs to existential risks for global digital trust. Mixing technical clarity with hacktivist anecdotes and analogies, this episode explores the looming quantum timeline and how people, organizations, and governments might prepare for or get blindsided by the next leap in computation.

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Key Topics & Discussion Points

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1. Backstories in Hacking: From Phone Phreaks to Cybersecurity (03:23–12:00)

Points Covered:

• Jordan and John swap stories as early “phreakers”—hackers manipulating phone networks for curiosity, profit, and, occasionally, revenge.
• John was once chased by the FBI for teenage exploits on the AT&T network, while his mentor went on to commit massive fraud.
• Discussion of the old hacker networks, economic incentives (e.g., cloning cell phones for drug dealers), and "bloodless" crimes misunderstood by authorities and teens alike.

Memorable Quote:

• John Young: "I thought it was a bloodless crime. I didn't think it was a crime to make a phone call. But it created such administrative churn that they got the FBI involved." (10:47)

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2. Intro to Quantum Computing: What Is It and Why Is It Different? (12:16–16:41)

Points Covered:

• Quantum computers exploit principles like superposition, existing in multiple states simultaneously, versus binary on/off states in classical computers.
• Quantum computation allows analysis of all possible solutions at once, not sequentially.
• Leap in computational ability: regular computer to quantum is like “Volkswagen Bug to F1 racer.”
• Current quantum machines are sensitive, fragile, and vary from "sculpture-like" billion-dollar setups to makeshift science projects.

Memorable Analogy:

• John Young: "If a regular computer is a Volkswagen Bug, a quantum computer is an F1 racer." (13:02)

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3. The Potential and Dangers of Quantum Computing (16:41–24:42)

Points Covered:

• Quantum computers could transform molecular modeling, enabling rapid innovations in medicine, materials, and potentially life extension.
• The combination of AI and quantum computing could lead to exponential technological leaps—and potentially, unforeseen dangers.
• Discussion of “desktop quantum computers” and parallels to previous technological ubiquity (e.g., the smartphone) but concern that powerful computation in every home could be quickly weaponized.
• The threat of “harvest now, decrypt later”: hackers and nation-states collecting encrypted data today, planning to break it when quantum power arrives.

Memorable Quote:

• John Young: "The terrorists, bad actors, hackers, are hoarding the data. They call it 'harvest now, decrypt later,' where they're grabbing all of this data in the hopes they get their hands on a quantum computer." (20:21)

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4. Real-World Use Cases — Who Needs Quantum, and How Soon? (21:00–28:06)

Points Covered:

• Most real-world benefits will go first to science and industry (drug design, new materials, climate modeling). Everyday consumers may still rely on cloud access to quantum resources.
• Quantum computers' environmental sensitivity and intense cooling requirements mean they remain "fighter jet" machines, not home appliances for now.
• Playful speculation: In the future, individuals could use personal quantum computers for immersive VR applications (think "Star Trek holodeck"), but that's likely distant.

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5. The Coming Quantum-AI Fusion and the Pace of Change (28:06–32:36)

Points Covered:

• When quantum hardware meets swarming AIs, both computation and innovation may accelerate beyond public comprehension.
• Nation-states and tech megacorps are racing to build and network quantum machines—IBM's Starlink project aims for 20,000x improvement; Google's “Willow” chip has 105 qubits, doubling since 2019.

Memorable Stat:

• Jordan: "Google did something in 200 seconds that would've taken 100,000 regular computers 10,000 years to do. That's actually insane." (33:03)

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6. Q-Day: An Existential Threat for Digital Trust (35:53–47:51)

Points Covered:

• Q Day: The moment quantum computers can easily break the encryption protecting everything digital—banking, medical records, state secrets, infrastructure, and more.
• Once quantum can break our encryption: it’s unclear if we’ll know immediately (catastrophic collapse) or only years later (the slow bleed as secrets are slowly exploited).
• Government action: The US has begun legislating quantum preparedness (e.g., the Quantum Computer Cybersecurity Preparedness Act of 2023), but businesses lag.
• The risks aren’t just theoretical: historical codebreaking (e.g., Nazi Enigma) transformed wars in secret, and similar stealth may unfold in the quantum arms race.
• Many are already hoarding encrypted data for future quantum decryption.

Memorable Quote:

• John Young: "Once [encryption] starts falling, who knows where the cascade will be? ... They're not going to announce they're in our banking system or military. So that's really the scariest scenario." (41:20)

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7. Timelines and Preparation: Are We Ready? (43:51–47:51)

Points Covered:

• Timeline is dramatically compressing: what was once 20–30 years out may now be just 5–10, especially as AI/quantum research snowballs and national investment ramps up.
• Some evidence suggests lower-level quantum decryption is already happening—countries and companies are playing catch-up.
• "Doomsday preppers" may inadvertently be best prepared for Q-Day, compared with most institutions and infrastructure owners.

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8. Comparing Q-Day and "Y2K" — Why It's Worse (56:12–58:58)

Points Covered:

• Y2K was a defined, date-driven bug that cost half a trillion dollars to fix—Q-Day is more ambiguous, less coordinated, and threats are ongoing and adaptive.
• The internet’s critical role in life, finance, and safety makes quantum collapse far more severe than Y2K ever was.

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9. The Quantum Arms Race: Who's Competing, Who's Winning? (60:10–64:01)

Points Covered:

• The leaders: Google, IBM, Microsoft, the NSA, China, and major universities—all with “unlimited” resources.
• China and Russia have “brilliant physicists,” strong state incentives, and the ability to recruit talent using money, patriotism, or family pressure.
• Discussion of exodus of scientists from regimes like Russia, but the risk that returning diaspora (even involuntarily) could transfer top-tier knowledge.

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10. Quantum-Resistant Encryption — Is It Possible? (65:04–68:42)

Points Covered:

• NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) has developed four “post-quantum cryptography” (PQC) algorithms, but the switchover for massive, legacy systems will be slow and complex.
• Upgrading all the world’s critical infrastructure could take a decade (or longer), and many essential systems still run on unpatchable, ancient hardware.

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11. Hope or Hoarding: What Future Will We Choose? (68:24–70:02)

Points Covered:

• Ideally, humanity can share quantum’s benefits—miracle drugs, better batteries, climate solutions—while cooperatively protecting its risks.
• In reality: risk of a “zero-sum scramble” where nations and companies hoard, compete, and the digital divide grows.
• John advocates for broad cooperation, licensing, and public awareness because the problem is too vast for any single company or agency.

Memorable Quote:

• John Young: "We either survive together or we go down together. ... For every person stepping back and saying, 'it's over my head,' there's ten moving forward." (68:48, 69:51)

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Notable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• "Quantum computers can exist in what's called a superposition ... basically on and off at the same time." (13:02, John Young)
• “They call it ‘harvest now, decrypt later’...” (20:21, John Young)
• “Google did something in 200 seconds that would've taken 100,000 regular computers 10,000 years…” (33:03, Jordan Harbinger)
• “Once it starts falling, who knows where the cascade will be? ... They're not going to announce that they broke it.” (41:20, John Young)
• “Q-Day is just basically the day that encryption is cracked by the quantum computers.” (41:16, John Young)
• “I think the percentages are probably 95% slow bleed ... but what happens when it happens in multiple sectors at the same time?” (52:52, John Young)
• “Y2K was a nothing burger—cost half a trillion dollars to make it that way... But we’re not seeing that with Q Day.” (56:27, John Young)
• “It’s a dog eat dog world out there. But in this case, we either survive together or we go down together.” (68:48, John Young)

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Highlighted Timestamps for Key Segments

• Hacker Origin Stories & Phone Phreaking: 03:23 – 12:00
• Quantum Computing, Explained: 12:16 – 16:41
• Quantum’s Promise (and Threat): 16:41 – 24:42
• AI + Quantum: Exponential Acceleration: 28:06 – 32:36
• Q-Day & Encryption Meltdown: 35:53 – 47:51
• Y2K vs. Q-Day: 56:12 – 58:58
• Quantum Arms Race: 60:11 – 64:01
• Quantum-Resistant Encryption & Migration Challenges: 65:04 – 68:42
• Global Stakes & Final Thoughts: 68:24 – 70:02

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Tone & Style Notes

• Accessible, plain-language explanations of technical concepts, peppered with compelling analogies.
• Candid, witty banter and personal stories from the host and guest reveal both expertise and humility.
• A sense of urgency balanced with nuanced hope: the risks are massive, but so is the potential, if humanity gets it right.

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Final Takeaway

Quantum computing is not just the next tech trend—it's an exponential leap with the power to upend digital security, global order, and our capacity to solve humanity's hardest physical and biological problems. The countdown to "Q Day" is real, the arms race is on, and the very fabric of digital trust hangs in the balance. Will we prepare together and share the upside, or are we too distracted to notice the ground shifting beneath us until it's too late?

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For links, referenced articles, and guest information, visit the episode show notes at jordanharbinger.com.

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Transcript

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers and performers, even the occasional Russian Chess Grandmaster, Fortune 500 CEO, hacker or astronaut. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes.

On topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology.

Geopolitics, disinformation, social engineering, China, North Korea, Crime and cults and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app. To get started today on the show, what if tomorrow morning you woke up and every lock protecting your digital life, your bank account, your private messages, your medical records, even the systems running power plants in hospitals, just stopped working? Not because of a hack, not because of human error, but because a machine figured out in minutes what would have taken today's computers longer than human civilization has even existed. That day has a name, Q Day. And according to people working at the very top of quantum computing and cryptography, it's not science fiction, it's a countdown. Today I'm talking with John Young, COO of Quantum Emotion America, about what quantum computers actually are, why they're fundamentally different from anything we've ever built, and how the same technology that could give us miracle drugs and climate breakthroughs could also quietly erase digital trust as we know it. This isn't an apocalypse movie. It's a systems failure. And we may not even know when it starts. Now, here we go with John Young. Where in California are you?

[John Young]

You've probably heard of Newport Beach, Laguna Beach?

[Jordan Harbinger]

I was just wondering because I'm up in San Jose and this is like computer HQ Silicon Valley.

[John Young]

Oh, you really are. I was actually there for a couple of months. I was in San Francisco for rsa. I don't know if you know about Moscone Center.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I spoke at defcon.

I've spoken at RSA about social engineering.

[John Young]

Really?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[John Young]

Wow. Okay. I came into cybersecurity because when I was a teenager, the FBI came after me for hacking into the AT&T network with a guy that taught me how to do it in New York in the 1970s. Wow. And he went into the biggest fraud in American history. And I went into a 40 year cybersecurity career.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What did he go into?

Was he working with Madoff or something?

[John Young]

He went into the fraud for oil recertification. And put it simply, he was just a sneaky guy and he just figured things out. If you look on the hacker list, we were what was called phone freaks.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, so was I. I was a.

Major cell phone and analog phone freak. And we took down the MCI network in Iraq during the Gulf War.

[John Young]

Wow.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that was fun. I didn't realize that was a crime at the time.

[John Young]

Yeah, you know what? That's the thing with me too was when we were doing it in New York, it Was just Penny Annie stuff. We didn't really think it was a problem. But when I moved to California, we were going back and forth. That became interstate theft of services. Each charge was 10 years. And the FBI said I had 50 charges against me. The guy that was with me, he probably had hundreds if they would have been able to find us. But what happened was when his brother in law got busted, they all got arrested for. Eventually the cops looked at this guy that was my mentor basically. And he had such a baby face. They're like, hey kid, get out of here. We're going to take him away. Just stay over there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[John Young]

So he went into his bedroom, got his briefcase that held $60,000 in 1980 and flew over to Europe for a year. He never got caught for that. I grew up with this kid and the fact that I was a teenage phone freak hacker.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, because I remember talking with 9x hackers or 9x freaks like you on IRC in the early 90s. Phreaking's not even a thing anymore, right?

No one's bothering to clone a cell.

Phone because you can just buy a burr if you need to be anonymous. It's so cheap.

Back when we were cloning NEC P3.

Hundreds and P301s and programming them, it was like three bucks a minute to make a cell phone call, maybe five. And then drug dealers wanted them and they literally couldn't get them because they needed credit and stuff. So you'd program it and sell it for like a thousand dollars or $500.

And then they would throw it in the dumpster. And I'd be like, bring the phone back, don't throw it away. And they're like, why? It's burned. And I'm like, it's not a gun, man. Bring it back. I'll erase it and program it again. And I was like, are your other buddies throwing their phones away? And so I remember being like, have your buddies bring me the phones and I'll give you a discount on cloning it again. For every phone you bring me, I'll clone it for free. And so they were like, really? So I had so many phones because their buddies were like, oh, I gotta.

Throw this away and get a new cell phone. And he's like, no, my guy will.

Get you a new number for free.

And then he'd bring me the phone and then that one would be free. And then he would bring it back and I would charge him for that. But if they brought me a new.

Phone, it was free because I don't care. I had unlimited. What are they called? ESNs, from the dumpster at the cell.

Phone store near me that were all printed out on those printed things with.

The dots on the side. My mom was like, where did you get 30 cell phones? And I was like, oh, they were in the trash. And she's like, I can't believe that people throw these things away. I'm like, oh, they're broken.

I'm fixing them.

She's like, you're so smart.

[John Young]

Yeah. Meanwhile, how old were you when you got your first car? You were probably living large compared to every other.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, my God.

Yeah. First of all, my parents were like.

Why do you have money?

You're 13.

I saved money cutting grass. Newspaper boy sold one of the cell phones I fixed. They're like, oh, he's so enterprising.

Meanwhile, I'm like driving to McDonald's to meet dudes from Detroit who get phones from drug dealers and bring them to me to get reprogrammed.

I'm lucky I'm not in prison, man.

[John Young]

You really are, you and I. But they actually sent two agents in New York to my grandmother's house, my little 4 foot 11 Irish grandmother. And they sent a team going door to door asking who's making all these unbillable calls from the community pool payphone to New York. And my accent was so thick, it was like the bestest alone. You know, I talk like that. When I was coming out, it tough, you know, I thought I was going to be busted, but someone told us, you guys better cool it right now. So I got scared so much that it actually scared me into a career. Whereas this other guy, like I said, he was always on the edge of doing sneaky things. But yeah, it's interesting to hear your past.

[Jordan Harbinger]

My villain origin story was I was on bulletin boards and I was making.

Calls to these bulletin boards. And this is illegal for the phone.

Company to do now, but they had.

Something called a local zone call where you didn't put the area code in.

But they treated it as a long distance call.

So I had saved up like 300.

Bucks and I was going to buy something like an RC helicopter. And my dad came in and he.

Was like, you got to pay this goddamn bill. And I was like, what are you talking about?

It was like $290 or something.

So it was all the money I'd saved for like the whole year. And I was like, what is this? And I found out about local zone calls. And I was like, this is bullshit. You didn't tell me that I was charged money for this.

And they got sued. It was a class action. They all got sued. But it didn't matter because I was a teenager, and I remember thinking, I.

Am going to make this. Cost you at least 10 times what this cost me. So I went to the payphones, and.

I made a red box out of a digital Hallmark card. And I published how you make those in 2600 magazine. Do you remember that? 2600 magazine was like, the phone freak magazine where they talked about, like, blue boxing and red boxing. It was huge.

[John Young]

What year was that? The 90s.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Young]

Cause I stopped by 1980. 81. I was out of it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, okay. So, yeah, you were like, super OG.

[John Young]

There was a Captain Crunch, and before him was a blind guy who whistled into the phone.

[Jordan Harbinger]

2,600 hertz.

[John Young]

Yeah, yeah. So he figured that out. And also Steve Wozniak.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yes. So, yeah, if you Google 2600 magazine, it's like Emmanuel Goldstein was the publisher. And it was like this hacker magazine, but it was about freaking. Cause the phone system was so interesting.

Anyway, so Hallmark, these cards, they were.

New, and you could open it, it.

Would say, hello, Grandma, and you could record that yourself. So that became a digitally perfect recorder. Before we had to use mini cassette.

Tape players to play the tones into the phone.

They were like this big.

And if it was cold, like it.

Was in Michigan, the tape would shrink.

And the tone wouldn't be corrected. If it's too hot, like it was also in Michigan in the summer, the tape would expand and the tone wouldn't be perfectly correct.

So the Hallmark card was not sensitive.

To temperature because it was recorded on a semiconductor. Right.

I published those results, and I went.

To every payphone I could find on my bike, and I pumped them full, like, hundreds of dollars in fake quarters. And I would call sex line Psychics, Japan. I would call all over the place, spend hours of my Saturday doing it.

And they had somebody go and fix all of these phones and make it so that you couldn't play any tones.

Until you put in a coin. But they weren't thinking like a hacker when they did this, because then I would put in a nickel, and then it would let me play the tones. And so I did that to every payphone.

And then they had to recode all the phones again. And I remember asking a phone company.

Engineer years later how much he thought that cost. And he's like, hundreds of thousands of dollars at least. And I was like, good, you guys, not him.

But, like, I was like, you for that $300 bill. I hope that cost you a ton of money. And I hope that somebody was stressing out and lost sleep over the.

Just like I did.

[John Young]

Well, that's the exact point that people don't realize me. I thought it was a bloodless crime. I didn't think it was a crime to make a phone call. So what, you're sending signals over a wire. But it created such administrative churn that they got the FBI involved. So to get the FBI involved for an interstate crime, we were charging other people. Actually they were getting the bills. That's how we were doing it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that was the cell phone thing. Some dude who works for, I don't know, a car dealership is like, why is my cell phone bill $3,000 when I made five phone calls last month?

[John Young]

Yeah, for us it was a Kiddieland was a toy store that went dark at 6 o' clock at night. So we could do all of our damage after 6 o' clock at night if we wanted to use them. There were no answering machines. There was nothing that you had to deal with in those days. It was the social engineering aspect was we'd call the operator, say, I'd like to make a collect call, charge it to my home phone. Thousands and thousands of dollars.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So yeah, that's enough talking about me.

And you hacking in the 80s and 90s. That's old tech, not really a danger to society anymore. I don't think anybody's cloning phones, actually.

I'm sure people are cloning phones, but.

Those people are called spies.

Anyway, I got you on the show.

Today to talk about how hackers are using new technology.

New technology, Modern ish technology. In fact, some of it doesn't even exist yet. And how over the next five to 10 years, hackers can will create some real damage using quantum computers.

Hackers, terrorists and nation states for that matter.

But first, let's back up the truck and explain what a quantum computer even is, because I don't think that a lot of people really understand what they are.

In fact, I myself hardly scarcely understand what they are.

[John Young]

Quantum computers actually are a real step in evolution in the way that everybody knows about a binary state. Zeros and ones, on and off. Well, that was and is the technology for the classic computers today. The thing about quantum computers and that allows them to be able to make such radical leaps is that they can exist in what's called a superposition state of being basically on and off at the same time. So if you imagine it's a coin, a regular computer, you flip A coin. It's going to be heads, it's going to be tails. A quantum computer can actually break down that it's both heads and tails at the same time. So it's the ability to see all of the answers at once. Because it can assume all of the different states. And it gets pretty technical as far as that goes. With the superpositioning and the qubits and all of that. But basically, let's just say if a regular computer is a Volkswagen Bug. A quantum computer is an F1 racer. The abilities of the quantum computers really haven't even been touched yet. That's the impressive thing. Because we haven't had the technologies and the materials to be able to do it. There's no standardization. That's the amazing thing. Some of these quantum computers, I see them. They look like beautiful sculptures. That cost millions and billions of dollars. And other ones look almost like a kid's high school science experiment. With cans and strings and stuff hanging out.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[John Young]

But it's a huge leap in technology. And it's only going to get better. And the thing is, I had a speaking engagement recently. And the title was Clickbaity. Because we were talking about how quantum computers can lead to what's called Q Day. Or I prefer to call it Digital Disaster Day D Day two. Because that's the day when all the digital secrets. That the normal computers can't crack through encryption. Are going to be cracked by quantum computers. And that is really what gets people's attention.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, we'll definitely get there in a second here. But a lot of people are going, okay, superposition. It has all the answers at the same time. What does that even mean? So quantum computers, it sounds like they can solve really complex problems. I read a bunch of the articles about this that you had sent me prior to the show. And it sounds, according to Wired, they can solve problems. Especially things involving simulating, say, molecules. Where they do all kinds of things, and they do them really fast. And there's billions of them in a small object. And they're all moving in different ways. It would take many lifetimes for our current supercomputers. To simulate all of the things that a glass of water could do. Maybe.

But a quantum computer can do all.

Of that in maybe even a few minutes or a few seconds.

[John Young]

Yeah, Especially math.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Math, yeah.

[John Young]

That's one of the things. Like, Google's proved that they had problems. That their supercomputers would take over a century to solve. And the quantum computers can solve them in hours and minutes and soon to be seconds. Because they can hold all these states. Like, basically they don't have to go from one answer to another and discard it. They can basically jump to the answers a lot faster.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So instead of like position 1 on, position 2 off, position 3 off, position 1 off, position 2 on, position 3.

Off, position 1off, position 2 off, position 3 on.

Instead of doing that times a hundred.

Million or whatever for every transistor that's on a semiconductor, I guess they don't use transistors, but anything in a semiconductor.

They can just do on and off.

For all positions all at the same time.

So it's not like twice as fast. It's like hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands.

Or even millions of times faster than our current technology.

So this isn't like the next version.

Of something that's gonna go in your iPhone that's 10%, 15% faster. This is like taking something and making it tens of thousands of times faster and then putting hundreds or even thousands of those in one machine.

Am I close?

[John Young]

Absolutely. Really leading into the next level, IBM announced recently their Starlink project, where they've announced that they're going to increase the speed of their quantum computer that's one of the fastest in the world now, by 20,000 times the computational power and speed of what they're using Now. It's a $30 billion project. Companies are really throwing everything at this to be the first to really take it to the next level. It's not just companies, it's countries, too. So that's another fear is the nation states and the bad actors and terrorists.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So I'm curious what real world problems.

Quantum computers will actually solve first, because I know we're going to talk about encryption in a bit here, but what.

Can they actually do? What right now is so complex that.

Our supercomputers are taking forever to use them? Something besides encryption.

[John Young]

Just think about new medicines and things like molecular biology and material science, where just moving one or two molecules over in a simulation can create a new cure for something. So combine that with AI, and boy, we've really got a one, two punch that can make humanity take these giant technological leaps that we had no idea could possibly happen. And that's one of the biggest fears is AI that a lot of people are worried about. Now quantum's coming around the corner. It makes it even twice as scary.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure. The reason that quantum computers will create.

Life sciences or material science advances is because they can simulate molecules much faster and much more efficiently than regular computers. Right now, if you want to find molecules that would create a New drug that might do something in the body. You'd have to try zillions of different combinations. You'd probably have to try a lot of them in the real world with chemicals and substances, because you can't really simulate them that readily with a computer.

But a quantum computer could try ten.

Thousand, a hundred thousand, a million variations of a molecular structure, and it could do that in a couple of days, even faster.

[John Young]

It's just incredible where we are now with regular computers, the classic computers to the early stage, quantum computers to the 10, 15, 20, 30 years where the quantum computers. There's one company that's made it their mission to make desktop quantum computers.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So here's the thing. Do we really need that?

That sounds all fine and good, and I'm sure somewhere somebody said, why would.

I need a computer in my pocket?

And now we all have them.

But a quantum computer that's on my desktop. I don't know, man, this sounds almost dangerous. Okay, maybe you want a really fast video renderer. Maybe you want to run an AI.

Node in your house that can create video that's really realistic. And you've got this workstation that does that.

Okay, that's a legitimate use case. But you can also do that with just a server bank or something like that. You could rent that, compute online, and you could then download the result to your house. It seems to me I did a.

Show a couple years ago on synthetic biology where they said you might be able to 3D print molecules and biological things.

And that was really cool and interesting.

Except when a terrorist gets it and uses it to print smallpox. But transmissible in a highly contagious way and resistant to all antibiotics and vaccines. It's all fun and good until someone misuses it. This desktop quantum computing sounds like something people would misuse pretty much immediately.

[John Young]

I think you really hit the nail on the head with that one. What could normal people use it for? The would change their everyday life. One of the big concerns is the danger, like you said, of it getting into the wrong hands like hackers. Because that's actually one of the biggest issues is that the terrorists, bad actors, hackers, are hoarding the data. They call it harvest now, decrypt later, where they're grabbing all of this data in the hopes that they get their hands on a quantum computer that's powerful enough to actually break these digital secrets, this encryption.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So what problem would you solve first.

If you had a perfect error free quantum computer tomorrow in your house? Provided that you're not a hacker or terrorist, you're Trying to decrypt confidential stolen information. What actual use would an everyday person have for a quantum computer? Or is it research based only?

[John Young]

I would have a hard time thinking of something that someone, average person would use it for and really stretch the computer, even what they have. Now I'm using Mac Studio and it's really hard to even stretch that out because it's so fast for an average person, it really doesn't matter. And the quantum computers are not great at storage. You're not going to use it for storage. So I think what my hope would be is it could extend human lifespans through creating new medicines, through discovering cures for diseases. So for your average person, you know, it sounds great having a desktop quantum computer for everybody, like it's a PC, but I can't imagine where it would really take them much further than what we have now. You know, maybe I'm limited in my imagination.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Look, I'm sure someone's going to be like, you guys aren't thinking of this when we all need our own virtual real universe or something like that in order to survive because we post apocalypse. But we're in the age of Amazon Web Services, right? So somebody like IBM or Amazon or whatever could actually create a computing center that has several quantum computers and Pfizer, Merck, Glaxo or whatever it's called. Now they can easily rent that on there, run whatever they need to on there and get the results to their regular studio computers, just like the ones we have now.

So it's amazing and I hope they exist soon.

But yeah, everyone having one seems like a silly idea.

And I got to imagine these things are fragile, right? Because when you have something that's in superposition, even semiconductors, they can't get too.

Hot, they need to be pretty cold, they need to be cooled in a certain way.

If you're running graphics cards, computer geeks.

They'Re experts really, or hobbyists.

If you're running a kick ass graphics.

Setup and you're making, let's say AI.

Produced video, or you're just gaming super hard, you've got like a liquid cooled GPUs with fans on them, you've got some serious gear here. A quantum computer, I assume that's got to be kept at the right temperature. It can't be jostled around, it can't.

Be bumped into, you can't rip the plug out. You got to have a power supply.

That'S going, otherwise the whole thing gets destroyed.

I mean this is a fine machine. This is a fighter jet type of thing. It's not something you can just keep in your basement.

[John Young]

Very sensitive to environmental factors of all kinds right now. And the IBM system too, is super cooled and its own cryogenic chamber, basically, that's so cold a human couldn't be in there. But when I first started in the early 1980s, data centers that I worked in were so cold just to keep those regular computers going that things become normalized after a while. And I actually thought of something where an average person would use a quantum computer. Maybe in the future. You brought it up with the gaming. Maybe we'll have like a holodeck on the Enterprise, but people will have that in their homes. They'll have a rec room. Especially if they have a lot of money, they'd be able to afford something like that where they could sit in Paris and they're just sitting at a regular table, but it looks like they're in a cafe or a bistro in Paris. Or they could do fighting games where they're actually doing it with live participants that are hollow generators. That could actually happen. Maybe what we call the desktop level now. Maybe someone would buy a quantum computer for that because certainly our regular computers can't handle all of those calculations right now.

[Jordan Harbinger]

If this episode has you wondering whether your passwords are basically decorative at this point, relax. We'll be right back after a word from the people keeping this system running for now.

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[Jordan Harbinger]

This episode is also sponsored by HelloFresh. You know, this new year, nothing hits like home cooking. Well, Jen's home cooking anyway.

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You can find the course again. It's [e-mail]. now back to John Young.

It's going to be fascinating to use. That's the bottom line.

I just wonder what a world with.

Practical quantum computers actually looks like for everyday people. And it seems like the first impacts we're going to see is going to be something like, hey, we just found.

A cure for cancer. Oh, which cancer?

All of them. Wait a minute, how long did that take?

We've been running research on it for.

60, 70, 80 years.

But then this computer just, we plugged.

All that in there and it did the next century and a half of research in a week.

[John Young]

Maybe these quantum computers will actually lead to the development of the next level of quantum computers. Sort of like AI building the next AIs that are more advanced than them and then they upload all of their information as the new AI's baseline. So it will be a step by step situation where we can't even imagine where we're going to go. I wish I could see 50 years from now what people are going to be seeing and hopefully it's all good. But my goals are life extension, quality of life, medicine, maybe making stronger materials, buildings that are earthquake proof, and also cybersecurity too. If you have quantum computers basically helping develop new cybersecurity methods, maybe that'll help hold out some of the other threats that are coming too.

[Jordan Harbinger]

We know AI takes a ton of compute, right? I get a lot of people saying.

Like, don't use AI for basic searches because it uses way more energy than a Google search. So if AI uses a ton of.

Computers and quantum basically delivers, I don't know, a million times the compute for the same amount of square footage or energy or something like that? Let's assume.

Does that mean the AI is a million times more powerful if it's running on a quantum computer?

Or am I kind of oversimplifying how this all works?

[John Young]

Well, if we look at it this way, when I. By itself is pretty impressive. Yeah, but we're moving to where we have a swarm where they're communicating together. And you had mentioned Pfizer and other companies working through a quantum cloud. A big company will own all the computers and they'll use them as a community cloud. Can you imagine an AI swarm of multiple AIs working with a quantum network of quantum computers? So it will be such an exponential progression at that level that I think it's going to make us drive forward technologically so quick that a lot of people are going to have trouble hanging on.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is how we get Terminators.

That's what everybody's thinking, right? This is how we get Skynet.

[John Young]

Yeah, I saw that movie. And that's the first and I think only movie. I think it was 1984 that I went to. And I sat there and I waited and I sat for the next viewing. I watched it twice in a row in a theater. I grew up on the original Star Trek. I was like 6 or 7 when it got canceled. I remember writing an angry letter to NBC. You know, you canceled my favorite show. So basically, a lot of the things that Star Trek imagined. Right. Are actually happening now, and they become very commonplace. So the things that the people of futurists of now are imagining, such as what we're talking about with the quantum computers, they might be a basic everyday thing by the time people get used to it and evolve into it. And of course, what the big thing is, Jordan, is if a company's putting $30 billion into a computer, they're not doing it for their health. They're doing it for revenue.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Eventually, hopefully, they're doing it for our health.

[John Young]

Yes, I hope so. I think that's going to be one of the great byproducts of it. But they're doing it for the health of a company. And helping humanity is also a byproduct. But if they're putting $30 billion or $50 billion into some computer initiative, what are they going to do? They're going to do exactly what you were saying, which is sell timeshares on these computers. And that's what a lot of people are worried about, that the hackers will go through unethical brokers and actually use these quantum computers for whatever nefarious reason.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They're already hackers. All they need to do is hack Merck's account with the quantum cloud and say we're running a simulation, namely decrypting all these Facebook and banking passwords that we stole. And unless somebody's paying attention to everything that's running and going, that doesn't look right, which is somebody paying attention to.

What Amazon is doing on AWS for every single company that's on there.

Absolutely not. So there's very little chance that we're going to catch those people doing it, especially because they want to hide.

To be clear, people probably think we're.

Talking about science fiction a little bit.

We have quantum computers now.

In 2019, Google's Quantum Lab in Santa Barbara claimed that it had achieved quantum supremacy. Bold statement, but it's a company, basically. They had a 53 qubit chip that.

Could complete in just 200 seconds, a task that would have taken 100,000 conventional computers 10,000 years. Their computer at Google did something in.

200 seconds that would have taken 100,000 regular computers like the ones we have 10,000 years to do. So think of like all of recorded history plus a lot more, a hell of a lot more actually. And then you need 100,000 computers running for that long. And Google did that in 200 seconds. That's actually insane. That's not even a commercial break for most major TV networks.

Google's latest quantum processor, it's called Willow.

It has 105 qubits. So basically twice what they had before.

And this is getting dangerous. That was six years ago.

And they've doubled the capacity. And this is just what they've announced. They might have 200 now and they're just not saying anything.

So this is moving along, this is chugging along.

[John Young]

Yes, business always is driven by the fact that they can make a lot of money down the line. Look at the Internet. When I first heard about the Internet, no one was making money on it. People could browse and they could have bulletin boards and no one could really envision where it's gone with the streaming and the social networks and the fact that you and I could be talking right now together. And if it's live streamed, hundreds, thousands, millions of people can watch it at the same time, crystal clear. So all of these things that are in the nascent stage, it takes brilliant people to really stretch them out to where we're pushing it to the limit. But there are people that are going to be doing that. I know there's some billionaire somewhere that's thinking they're going to be able to upload their consciousness into an AI somewhere and they're going to live forever and just move bodies. And that's not a stretch because there's been series like that and and movies like that. So whatever we imagine people are actually trying to do eventually. And you're right, it's a huge mixed bag of possibilities for everybody that are great. And also danger. You know, Terminator level existential problems.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Terminator level danger. Yeah, we talked about the whole Uploading of consciousness thing with David Eagleman on the show recently, and we talked about the philosophical end of that.

Okay, if you upload your consciousness, but.

Your body is still alive on a bed somewhere and you can't move, what do we do with you?

Kill you? And then who's the real you?

The consciousness in the cloud that's talking like you were when you were 45 doing your podcast, or is the real you on this bed here? And I think a lot of people go, it's kind of both. Oh, really?

Okay, so if we turn off the.

Computer that this one is on, is that okay?

No, you're killing me. But not really, because you're in this bed. Ok, then if that's you, then we can unplug the guy in the bed.

And it's like, uh, oh, now we got a problem here. You wait for the guy in the bed to die.

But now we have two U's that have forked, right?

Like a cryptocurrency that is forked and is now two separate things. Which one do you turn off? And is it ethical to do that when it's a person and not a bitcoin fork?

So let's talk about the biggest risks.

Of quantum computing, the whole unraveling of society as we know it that we referenced. At the top of the show. We talked about what quantum computers could fix.

Now let's flip that. What's the first real thing that will.

Break when a quantum computer cracks current encryption?

Now, this is a ways down the line. I want to be clear. We have 105 qubits with Willow in.

Order to crack encryption. And you tell me, John, but I think we need like thousands of qubits or potentially even millions to use what's called Shor's algorithm to break the modern encryption that we have.

[John Young]

That's true. That's very true. But let me also state that routinely, mathematicians have cracked encryption over the years since these digital secrets were invented to encrypt, keep everything secure. So we've had to improve the algorithms to secure it. So that's nothing new. Encryption has been broken since the beginning, was good enough to get us to a certain point, and then it would get cracked. Some good mathematicians with newer technology and better computers could actually crack that encryption. So it would have to be superseded. Same thing here. All of the things that we're using right now are great for now, but you're forecasting what happens when there's thousands of qubits or cluster of quantum computers working in tandem with AI. How long will it take them to solve these math problems? And that's really the basis of the whole issue is all the digital encryption for the most part is based on math. Did you ever see Prime Target, the Apple plus series?

[Jordan Harbinger]

I haven't. I was going to.

What I was going to say is.

This reminds me of that movie the Imitation Game where they're decrypting the Nazi encryption and they managed to do it. And it's like this huge turning point in the war because they can hear what the Germans are doing and saying. They don't let on that they've done this.

I haven't seen Prime Target.

You can give the analogy.

I watch very few things.

I think a lot of people probably have seen whatever show you're talking about.

[John Young]

Basically it's a math genius at the level of Newton in Cambridge, England, and he's looking for what he calls the prime finder. And this prime finder, according to every intelligence agency in the world, will be able to help him solve the problem of decrypting everything that we have now. So it's a very dramatic show with all kinds of crazy things happening and very dramatic. A lot of murders and things blowing up and all of that. Very exciting. That's probably what draws people in. But the premise is actually quite true. That's the interesting thing is that a lot of people are afraid that these quantum computers being so good at math and basically patterns and recognition and seeing all these answers simultaneously, will be able to crack the encryption. That's where my company is different. We use quantum mechanics instead. So it's not math based, so I won't go into that so much. But basically it's quantum versus quantum. And we have. The government's been working on this for quite a while. Nist, National Institute Standards Technology. They've come up with four approved encryption algorithms. But still they have this Achilles heel that they generated at the basis from math. So it takes a whole different way of thinking to solve these whole new level of problems. And that's basically been true of mankind all through history. We come up with something that is great in science. Sometimes there's negative things that happen. And one of the negative things that are people are worried about with AI is the Terminator scenario you mentioned. With quantum, it's the digital encryption and the digital secrets being revealed. And 25 years ago we had a big scare with Y2K and Y2K to me was like a fire drill. Whereas this is like a city on fire. It's exponentially worse.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, let's Talk about this.

So, first of all, what is Q Day?

You mentioned before the show? We were talking it's like the singularity, but when encryption fails to be able to prevent quantum decryption, Is that what.

[John Young]

We'Re dealing with here as far as singularity? That's at the point where everything comes together in this tipping point of qubits in the thousands. Multiple quantum computers maybe involved. Maybe we have AI helping. And that's when the real fear of the digital encryption being broken. So that's why everyone's been scrambling. And the government actually has regulations where all of the agencies have to be quantum prepared. So they give them timelines. The congressman in my state of California actually put up this bill, HR 7535, that became the Quantum Computer Cybersecurity Preparedness Bill and Act, and it was passed in December of 2023. So they have their marching orders, the government right now, to get ahead of the game. And really, businesses are struggling because they're dealing with AI and just regular cybersecurity issues of phishing, people clicking on the email or getting a text. It's a stack deck here. With adding all these components so quickly, we've improved technologically much faster than we have been able to as a society, come up with ways to prevent the harm.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So what is Q Day?

I think people still don't understand what qday actually is and means.

[John Young]

Yeah, Q Day is just basically the day that encryption is cracked by the quantum computers. So basically, say you have online banking, suddenly you look in your online banking count. Zero doubt. Why? Because it was secured by encryption and the encryption got broken. And that's one of the fears. Another one's getting into the utilities. Right. And shutting down electrical grids and water plants, anything you can imagine. Everything secured by digital secrets, which we know is digital encryption. This encryption, once it starts falling, who knows where the cascade will be? And like you said, no one's going to announce that they broke it. They can keep getting the benefits of it. No one will even know that they've solved this problem. Look at the military and the government applications alone, where a hostile country to not just us, but to anybody, gets their military secrets suddenly, like you had mentioned with Enigma from World War II and that movie Imitation Game, they didn't announce that they had broken the German encryption. They just listened in and were there before the Germans were deployed. Same thing here. They're not going to announce that they are in our banking system or that they're in our military facilities or that they have access to Nuclear plants. So that's really the scariest scenario to me is the fact that these other countries, because to us they're hostile and they're bad actors and they're terrorists, but to their country, they're a hero, they're a patriot. So I actually worked with a lot of people from the former Soviet states when they were broken up. And my God, master's degrees, PhDs were common. And they're making such little money compared to what Americans would expect. How good would it be if your country tells you you'll be a patriot to help us get into this other country's facilities or their military secrets? We'll give you a apartment, we'll take care of your family. You're going to make 10 times what you were making before your life. You'll have a car and everyone looks at you like you're a super patriot. So when we flip the switch like that and look at it from that angle, that's why it's so easy to recruit these super great people, because they don't think they're doing anything wrong. They think they're helping their country. So that's one of the scariest things about it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure.

Well, I was originally going to ask, when were you expecting this to happen? I am curious what the timeline looks.

Like for that, but I guess it.

Could have happened already and we just don't know about it because China or whatever is busy decrypting state secrets. They're not crashing bitcoin or doing something obvious. They're not posting more Jeff Bezos dick pics. They're in there making sure that they can read our communications.

But what is the timeline? If we got 53 qubits in 2019.

And then in 2025 we got 105.

Are we looking at an exponential rise here?

Are we looking at this in 10 years? Is it in five years or is it sooner?

[John Young]

Five years ago, say some computer models were run that said it would be 20 years down the line before the quantum computers were able to do this. But look what's happened in the last five years. We didn't know anything about AI. OpenAI was not even on the radar. That's turned business completely upside down. Agentic AI, what's that done to what you had mentioned before about the energy requirements? Because it's not sleeping, it's not waiting for a prompt, it's actually going out on its own and it's constantly awake and ready to take in information. So the energy requirements of that have exploded. So with that 20 year timeline, even people that were very negative about, well, it's far out in the future, you know, don't worry about it till we get there. They're actually pulling in and stepping back and saying, well, you know, I was wrong about the timeline. Now that we have AI also contributing to it, it's telescoping down the timeline where some people are saying five years, some people are saying 10 years, some people are saying still saying 15 years. It's anybody's guess. And like you said, some advances may have happened already that are breaking the encryption at the lowest level. There have been some indicators that lower level encryption has been already broken by the earlier quantum computers. So it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the way this is speeding along all these technologies, that in a few years, no one can really tell. I hope it's a little longer, just for society's sake, so that we do have time to prepare. And I live in California, and probably 8 or 9 out of 10 people aren't prepared for the earthquakes. And we have earthquakes all the time. The big one has been threatened since I was here in 1977, and we've had some pretty bad quakes, but I know tons of people aren't really ready for it. I've got pets, so I have water, and I've got the medicine and all of that. And in fact, that brings us to Q day. Who's prepared for Q Day? And it's actually the doomsday preppers. They're prepared for everything. So if the utilities go out or if they're having problems already halfway off the grid anyway, so they're actually much more prepared for something they may not even consider or know about right now. But they may be preparing for an alien invasion or a government overthrow or some other thing that you and I aren't even worried about. But they're actually stocked up and ready to go for Q day or a digital disaster day, that will really change the way we live. Because I like to eat. And the supply chain for food is pretty fragile. You saw during COVID right? What would we run out of? Bleach, gloves, disinfectant, anything that was related to that. Masks. And just imagine if some hacker starts ransoming the small providers that provide food and different things, and they're locked out. And now the big grocery chains, they're stuck because they depend on the small providers to get them their resources. So basically, it's only a matter of time before you start running out of things. So I like to eat. I like to have my lights on. I like to have water. I like the toilet to flush. All of those things. And this could be one of the biggest events in history if something cataclysmic happens.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So if quantum computing is the asteroid, encryption is the dinosaur before impact. Let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Masterclass. One of my big philosophies, and you've heard me say this on the show a thousand times, is that I always try to learn from people who are.

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[Jordan Harbinger]

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The other actor does, right? If we have China get this and they really want to take us down, they turn off the electricity, they screw up the water, they break the banking system, they break the credit card and swift financial system, they crash the stockpile market all at the same time.

But that's not really to their advantage because their financial system crashes at that point too.

And if we find out it's them, nuclear missiles, unless they control all of those, and they can't be sure that they do, then those start to fly when they've done something like this, and we can say that it is them.

So it seems unlikely that it's going to be like, oh my gosh, this is like a nuclear attack, but digital. It seems more likely that it's just.

Going to be a death by a thousand paper cuts. Where it's, wait, why is the stock market behaving weird? And then we find out 10 years later that it was being manipulated by quantum computers.

Why did cryptocurrency crash? Well, there was a sell off.

Yeah, why did that start?

An exchange went down. But why did the exchange go down? We find out 15 years later or five years later or a year later.

Whatever, that it was hacked.

Okay, but how?

Quantum computers like you'd have to do.

So many things at once and it's.

Almost to their advantage to not do it all at once. To just keep us on the back foot for a decade instead of it.

[John Young]

Really would be, I'd say the percentages are probably 95%. Slow bleed and do that. Maybe 1 to 5% that some crazy dictator gets in charge of a country that has the ability to do something at that cataclysmic level. So there's always that possibility. But I think you're right. I think it's lower. I think things are going to happen. But what happens when it happens in multiple sectors at the same time? Or what happens when you're on an airplane and plane loses connection with the air traffic controllers and you're flying blind and every plane around you is flying blind? That's pretty cataclysmic.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It could be, but believe it or not, I'm pretty sure pilots have thought.

About what happens if their radios go out.

I would like to think that the lights do something. I'm no pilot, but I think that the windshield and everything is there for a reason. It won't be as efficient as centralized.

Air traffic control, but yeah, the lights and other methods of communication.

[John Young]

Well, it's happened though. It happened a few months ago in Newark for 90 seconds they lost connections to air traffic control. And it wasn't a big hacking incident, it was just a telecom outage.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Geez, Windows update always at the worst time.

[John Young]

You know, we have precedent here of what 90 seconds could do and the chaos that created because hundreds of flights are going into a major airport like that. So if they want to ransomware something major, that would get everyone's attention really quick. And that's where I think the lower level people would do it. That wouldn't be a country really doing something like that. They would be more like the strategy. And let's get in here, get some information, not let them know and this and that. When you're dealing with hackers, who knows, right? They could have some kind of death wish or mental illness, they're just going to go for it. Or they're an anarchist, they want to see everything burn. Nero was emperor of Rome. Why was he fiddling when Rome was burning? There's crazy personalities everywhere. So that's one of the things that worries me is that the human factor is always going to be the weakest link and we never know who's going to do what.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I suppose another reason not to give quantum computers to everybody.

But I'm just far less worried about.

Iran or even Russia, where soldiers don't have socks and food. Being able to develop a quantum computer that can do much of anything compared to what Google can muster or the NSA muster. And I get it, it probably won't.

Take that much longer.

It wouldn't be possible to verify that any digital transmission from money transfers to telephone calls are genuine, which means they can't really be made. At least financial transfers and things like that, that would grind things to a halt again. I wonder if we wouldn't be able to pinpoint Q day until it's been five years since it happened. Because you go, ah, that's why all this. It's going to take an investigation, it's going to take CIA, nsa, FBI, and who knows, maybe other nation states helping us, the five eyes, to finally figure out, aha, okay.

The reason all this weird stuff has.

Been happening and being hidden is because the Chinese have an AI running on a quantum computer that we couldn't. It's just really good at hiding its tracks.

Breaking classical cryptography.

Payment records would be exposed. Personal identifying information, national secrets, all communications, of course. You mentioned Y2K before. I think some people are going, yeah, I remember when Y2K bug was going to shut down all the software.

Why is this different from that giant.

Expensive false alarm the obvious thing for me is it's been a quarter century.

And now everything is on a computer in the Internet versus just some stuff. So that's the big thing.

But I don't know, man.

Y2K.

Kind of a big nothing burger, wasn't it?

[John Young]

Yeah, it was a nothing burger. Cost half a trillion dollars to make it that way and five years of preparation. It was a really simple problem too. The worry was that the computers were hard coded some of the dates so that when we hit the year 2000, instead of rolling over from 1999 to 2000, it would revert back to 1900 because they had limited space in those computers in those days. So they hard coded the 1 and the 9, never thinking their programs would be used all the way to the year 2000. And sure enough, they were. So that was really. There was a defined date, there was a defined problem, and it still took half a trillion dollars and something like 400 million person hours in a worldwide effort between governments and companies to make this happen. And we're not seeing that with Q Day, this impending digital disaster. There's no worldwide effort, there's no attention and groupthink with companies getting together. But I think it's starting to happen more and more because the mainstream media, Wall Street Journal, Wired, that article that you read, Forbes, they're talking about it more and more. It's not on the fringes. Even the naysayers are saying it's gonna happen. They just predict it may be further out. But the disaster, like you said, that was 25 years ago. There was no social media, no online banking, there was no stock market where you could just buy things by computers. Everything was internal to the businesses, so that would affect society for sure. But I had one guy that showed up who worked for me, a network engineer showed up with his kids in an RV on Y2K night. We were all in the data center at 42 offices and data centers that I managed around the world. And we had like 40 people in our main data center in Los Angeles watching as we hit the year 2000 and okay, we're okay here, we're okay here. But this guy actually brought in an RV because he was convinced the lights would go out, the traffic lights, the utilities would go down. So I didn't know this till later, but he was bringing other employees out there to show them the guns that he had. Other people just went home. It was a big thing. It's over, thank God. And this guy's, you know, so over prepared that he has his kids In a RV with guns out there too, showing other people. So that's kind of the extremes that I've seen.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And on Monday he walked into the office. Does anybody need 600 cans of chili, freeze dried noodles, astronaut ice cream or 9 millimeter rounds?

I have a lot and they're in the parking lot right now. Get them while they're hot.

That guy's still selling canned chicken noodle soup out of the back of his garage.

In his retirement days.

[John Young]

Yes. I lost track of him because you can't be bringing guns to work.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So he didn't actually come in on Monday, that was his last day?

[John Young]

No, no, he did. I didn't know about it till he left. He actually left, got another job later, but I didn't find out about it until after he left and said, did you know he did that? I was like, what? You know, no one said a word to me.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

Now if you want to find him, look for the Facebook Marketplace ad for pallets of freeze dried noodles and carrots.

Then you can find him.

[John Young]

That way he has a bunker under his house ready to roll. It's just, you can't tell with people and like I said, the doomsday preppers, which he'd probably even had a category. But here's a guy that's in the middle of technology that know all the things we were putting into it, that saw the money, all the effort and he was still convinced that it was all going to go to hell.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. So he's not alone.

I mean, where is the arms race.

In quantum happening today?

So I'm assuming we're looking at Google.

We'Re looking at China, we're looking at the nsa, so nation state level type of stuff. Maybe in France or Europe, the uk.

Where is it happening and what status.

Are we at and who's winning, do you think?

[John Young]

Whoever has the most money is winning? Because it's not a poor man's game to be playing at this level. Universities are doing their quantum computers and since they almost have the top brilliant minds there and they can cut the labor costs by having everyone work, who knows what they could do. And people get excited. So there's always breakthroughs from universities. But you're right, you mentioned all the top players. You didn't mention Microsoft. They have major N1, the quantum chip, Google with the Willow chip, China, United States government, of course, so those are the major players and it takes a lot of money. IBM, of course, they shift who's one to five, they make an announcement and they're moved up or they solve a problem that gets worldwide recognition, like the Google computer that solved that math problem. It would take so long and hours. They moved up to number one for a while, but who knows with China, right? They basically have unlimited resources. They have some of the most brilliant physicists in the world, and they have a definite motivation to move up there. So they are there too. So that's really who it is. The major countries, the major players. But you discounted Russia. I wouldn't discount Russia because the fact that their soldiers don't have socks and the problems you mentioned, that's the supply and demand problem. The one thing they don't have a problem with is brain power and creativity. Just look at what they did in the arts all of those years. So you combine creativity with people that have been studying computer science for 20, 30 years and mentoring the newer, younger people that are coming up. I really couldn't discount them either.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Interesting. The brain drain from Russia has been so extreme. I just wonder if they can keep up with that. Because if you're a quantum scientist in Russia right now and you have a chance to work for a corrupt regime that maybe can't even compensate you adequately, or you can go work at Google. There's a lot of Russians in my area that work at Google, and Belarusians and people from Central Asia and former Soviet states and China for that matter. And when I talk to them, they are not planning on going home. In fact, we had some neighbors. I won't say what nationality they are, but they had to go back to renew their passports and they just applied for asylum instead. And they work at Google. They were just like, hey, if we go back home, there's a really good chance they're not going to let us leave again. And the US government agreed with them. They still live in our neighborhood.

[John Young]

Well, everything they learned while they were at Google or IBM or Microsoft, that is related. Like you said, that's a talent pool. They go back there could instantly be tapped with just a little bit of social pressure. It's nothing new that governments have pressured families. Not the person themselves maybe, but their families. And that makes the person feel the pressure too. So, yeah, there's all these other reasons why people will do what they do. First is money, right? Number one is money. But second is, I guess family would be first for me and most people. But you get the money to help your family and that's a real driver too.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The carrot is usually more powerful than the stick. But we do hear about people's families in, say, China being pressured and you'll even hear people say, I got a call from my grandma in China and she says I need to stop talking about Xi Jinping online or whatever. It's really crazy. We forget where we live sometimes. And the government doesn't do that stuff yet. You'd mentioned before, harvest now, decrypt later, meaning adversaries are already hoarding data to crack later once they have quantum firepower.

So I've heard that China is doing this.

I assume a lot of countries are.

Probably doing something like this. What exactly are they grabbing?

They're grabbing what? Passwords for banking or financial data, what else?

[John Young]

Government secrets, military secrets, IP intellectual property. If you want to move up really quick on a design on something and you don't have the resources to start it from scratch yourself, but you get the blueprint on how someone else did it and you can back engineer it, maybe even make it a little better. That's always a risk. But just look at the military applications. We don't know what's going on as US citizens, right. As weapons development and all these big advances that they made. Can you imagine what the other countries that really aren't favorable with us right now, if they could get their hands on that, what they would do? Like you had mentioned, really the fact that the British got the German locations and their secrets, look how that changed in World War II. They could fake that they were going to one beach head and the Germans were already there and instead they go to Normandy. Right. Little things like that can. This information is as powerful and even more powerful sometimes as information. So that's really key.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Is there a such thing as quantum resistant cryptography? So like they can break our encryption? Is there quantum resistant encryption that we can use that, does that exist?

[John Young]

The NIST algorithms that have been considered quantum resistant, there's four of those and they were developed over nine years as competition. Tons and tons of attempts were made, but they've finalized it down to these four. That's what the government is looking for. It's called pqc. Post Quantum Cryptography. So that's what companies have to factor in to migrate over to the post quantum cryptography rather than what they've been depending on all of these years. And it's not going to be easy for them. And that's why we're in business, is to make it easier.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I can see that. I mean the problem is you can make a new version of Windows where everything is quantum resistant. But how do you easily upgrade a satellite? Nuclear weapons, military hardware, submarines, nuclear submarines, whatever Energy grid stuff.

There are hospitals and energy grid stuff.

Running software from 1995 or even before that because it's not necessarily on the.

Web or it is, but this is what they use to run the energy system.

And it's not as easy to just update all that stuff. You can't just plug in a CD ROM and update it. Not that anything uses that anymore, but you can't just do that, right? It's not the AOL days. That stuff was installed using floppy disks and it runs on cobalt. Not anything modern.

How long do you think the changeover.

For infrastructure would take to post quantum encryption? Is that something that can be done.

In a couple of years or is.

It going to take a decade?

[John Young]

You've really gone to the heart of the problem, Jordan. It's so massive. You really have to start with the critical sectors, like you had mentioned of healthcare and anything that really is what we depend on to survive. I think those would need to get the priority. Would Facebook be a priority? Would YouTube be a priority? Maybe lower down. But the scale of this problem is so huge and we haven't really been attacking it yet, that if the quantum computers actually start decrypting it, we're going to be playing catch up for a long time. And it can be easy or it can be hard as far as making the changes. A company that's just starting out a startup, if they start with the quantum resistant, quantum safe algorithms right from the start, then they're in much better shape than a massive company that has tons of different types of encryption styles in their environment. So there's really no timeline. Companies should have started already and many of them have. But for the smaller businesses that are just looking to get revenue and grow, cybersecurity itself is so far behind in their thoughts, it's just the money loser. It's just overhead. So to even think about the quantum component on top of that, it's really not in their thoughts so much. So we have to focus on the bigger institutions, the government, the military, the larger companies that handle utilities, that handle healthcare. It's really a mind boggling problem. Finance, everywhere you turn, we're integrated with digital secrets. Now that's really what makes the world go around.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, it seems like the only upside here is that ultimately the best way to stave off Q Day may be to share the benefits around. We take the better batteries and the miracle drugs and the farsighted climate forecasting and we use them to build better societies, new materials and better lives for everyone.

Or let the scramble begin. And make it a zero sum game.

Which is how we've been operating so far.

[John Young]

Unfortunately, it's a dog eat dog world out there. But in this case, we either survive together or we go down together in many respects. And I think what's going to happen is like with us, the companies that are our competitors, even if we all scaled up, we wouldn't be able to handle the problem because it's so massive. And we do have part of the solution, a really critical part of the solution. But we're going to have to have other companies license our technology and the bigger ones sort of support us to get it out there. Because it's really horrifying to think what can happen. I try not to think of it so negatively, but really all the doomsday preppers actually are onto something. If this does happen in the next few years, we're really going to be in big trouble. That's why I'm sort of an evangelist out there trying to speak on it and let people know this is a major problem. We can't just stick our head in the sand like ostriches and hope it goes away. Because it's not. Because for every person that's stepping back and saying, yeah, it's over my head, I can't do it, there's 10 more that are moving forward for whatever their reasons are.

[Jordan Harbinger]

John Young, thank you very much. Hopefully this technology stays in the realm of research and makes us some miracle drugs and some amazing machines without taking the rest of us down as collateral damage.

[John Young]

Well, I want to also compliment you. The Ken Burns, I loved it. And guy freedom of speech, I love that one. You got so many heavy hitters, but you mix them in with guys like me, no one will ever know. You're really getting some good mainstream core issues that other people don't even ask me about. Thank you for that. I appreciate.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You got it, man. Thanks for coming on the show.

[John Young]

Thank you for having me, Jordan.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That cute family vlog or kid influencer? You scroll past it might be part of a system where platforms profit while predators watch. In this preview, Taylor Lorenz breaks down how the influencer economy exploits kids and what parents need to know.

[Taylor Lorenz]

I actually talk a lot about the origins of the influencer economy and where it came from. Influencer marketing continues to grow. We're seeing this broad shift towards personality driven media. Brands want to be part of everyone's life. They want to monetize every brand moment as well. Like they monetize the moments in these children's lives, in the family's lives if the family's moving, if the daughter has her first period. Some people are only making a few hundred dollars A month on TikTok maybe, but some are making millions. And so there is quite a range. If you're really successful on YouTube and TikTok, you are likely making millions of dollars in sponsorship money and ad revenue. Same does stuff to you and I think none of us are prepared for it. What becomes a problem is this influencer economy that we built intersecting with surveillance. Now we have AI systems that can scrape all those videos, can pull out clips, can find your face in any single piece of content online through facial recognition. It's just all becoming a lot more dystopian and kids are being tracked and survived veiled. But there's something that I think is actually a bigger reason, I guess like a bigger problem with this whole like child influencer industry. And that is the fact that young people don't have their identity formed yet. Young people are exploring who they are. They're trying to learn who they are. I promise you, we are rapidly losing privacy and the way things are going is really dark. I would argue that again, the best thing that you can give your child is actually privacy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

To learn why protecting kids online has never been harder Catch the full episode 1207 on the Jordan Harbinger Show Long before quantum computers are powerful enough to crack today's encryption, they'll be useful enough to quietly reshape global power. They'll help us build better batteries, design drugs that would be impossible today, detect hidden submarines, map underground bunkers and peer into the human body with awe inspiring precision. They'll also make it possible to steal secrets that were supposed to stay buried forever. So the real question isn't whether Q Day happens, it's whether we use what comes before it to build something better or whether we sprint into the future hoarding power and hoping we're the last ones to get burned. Because when trust disappears, everything built on top goes with it. All things John Young will be in the show. Notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show. [e-mail] deals Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter we Bitwiser. I love writing it, you love reading it. The idea is to give you something specific and practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships. In under two minutes, if you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It is really, it's a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com News is where you can find it. Don't forget about six minute networking as well. That's over at 6minutenetworking.com I'm ordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn and this show. It's created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi.

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The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in quantum computers, encryption technology, hacking, that sort.

Of thing, definitely share this episode with them.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.

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[Taylor Lorenz]

Thanks.

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