Welcome, dear listeners, to another exhilarating quantum romp

here on Impact Quantum, the podcast where entanglement

isn't just a party trick, it's a career path. Today's

episode features none other than the polymath of possibility

himself, Christopher Bishop, TEDx Speaker,

Futurist, Deep Tech MC and host of Qubit

Confidential. He's had more careers than most people have cups of

tea. From rocking stages with ZZ Top to helping

IBM navigate the information superhighway back when

modam was a household word. Christopher's journey is the very

definition of non linear. Joining our hosts, Frank

Lavine and Candice Gilhooly, who between them could

probably boot up a Qubit. Using a toaster and sheer

determination, we dive into the quantum workforce of tomorrow,

the skills you didn't know you had, and how not to let your

career be upended by the next breakthrough in physics.

So grab your favorite beverage, prepare for some brain entanglement,

and let's get curious about the careers that don't exist yet,

but might just after this episode.

Hello and welcome back to Impact Quantum, the podcast. We explore the

emerging field of quantum computing, the careers

and all sorts of types that it's going to take to build out this new

industry. And with me, as always, is the

most quantum curious person I know, Candice Gihooly. How's it going, Candace?

It's great. Thank you, Frank. I'm very excited about

today. We're going to speak with Christopher Bishop, who

is an author, is a TEDx speaker,

is a career futurist, and a deep tech

emcee. He's also the podcast host

of Qubit Confidential. Hi, Christopher, how are you

today? I'm good. Hi, Candace. Hi, Frank. Thanks for inviting me to join

you. Delighted to be here. Looking forward to our conversation.

Awesome. Welcome to the show. And we actually

met in person in D.C. at the Quantum event

we did, and it was my first quantum computing,

solely quantum computing conference. I'd been

at quantum talks that were part of a much larger Microsoft kind of AI thing.

But I think what moves me to speak to

you was you were talking about your new book,

which is very, I think, timely for anyone mid

career, early career. I have a kid in high school now, and

as he kind of picks what AP courses he's taken,

you know, it makes me wonder with AI on the

rise, like, what does the future of careers look like?

Yeah, so I, I mean, I have a lot of friends and

colleagues who think of me as sort of a quantum guy. So as Candice mentioned,

I host Qubit Confidential podcast where I interview C suite

execs at leading Quantum companies. Did a really fascinating one

with Zulfi Alam, who's the corporate vice president of Quantum

at Microsoft. But I also act as the emcee for

various Quantum events for the Economist Commercializing Quantum event in

London. Frank, where we met, was in D.C. at the Quantum Tech

USA event. But that's sort of my eighth

career, if you will. I describe myself as a nonlinear multimodal careerist.

So I've had eight careers so far, kind of working on nine

now as a published author. But I mean, I was a touring rock musician in

the 1970s. I have a degree in German literature from a

small liberal arts school in Vermont, Bennington College. I

toured with this band and opened for the Eagles and ZZ Top and

Fleetwood Mac Weather Report, some bands you might have heard

of. Did three albums, then moved to New York, became a studio

musician. Played with Robert Palmer. Did two tours and a live album in London with

him playing bass and keyboards and guitar.

Did a gig with Chuck Berry at the Meadowlands in front of 18,000 people with

no rehearsal. He turns around and says to the band, hey, you guys know these

tunes, right? That's why we're here, Chuck. Go

ahead, count it off, man. We're in.

Became fascinated. Wanted to get off the road. So I the way

to do it is to become a studio musician. So I asked my friends in

New York, I was living in Manhattan at the time, came off the road, said

to my friends, how do I sleep in my own bed at night? They said,

jingles, man. You gotta break into the session scene. So I broke in

first as a player and then as an arranger and a composer. Finally as a

producer running a Sinclair, which was a state of the art digital

musical instrument at the time. Played bass and sang in the first

Kit Kat jingle. Gimme a break. Oh, give me a break. Oh,

wow, a piece of that Kit Kat bar,

that was kind of cool. Became intrigued by this wacky thing

called the World Wide Web we were talking about that earlier. Taught myself to be

a web producer. Worked at a couple of seminal agencies in New York

and then, much to my surprise, was hired into IBM, into corporate Internet

programs. And I worked at IBM for 15 years in a bunch of

different roles, strategy roles, exec, comms roles.

And then e tired. About 10 years ago, after I'd done a

TEDx talk in New York at the Times Center, I got a

practitioner residency from the Rockefeller Foundation. Spent a month in Bellagio,

Italy at their Bellagio center in a 15th century

Lombard villa, working on my book and working on lecture

materials. Anyway, and now I'm talking to you. I'm sort of into the

quantum space. But in the meantime I wrote a book which is called

Improvising Succeed at Jobs that Don't Exist Yet. And it's out

now. You can get it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or

Waterstones for listeners in the uk. And I talk,

I do lectures. I did a lecture at Oxford actually last month

at Saint Cross College. I've done it at Bayes, London School of

Economics. So anyway, that's sort of a long winded answer to your question,

but Quantum, certainly for quantum Curious.

I became curious about Quantum by getting a press pass to

an event in Boston about five years ago that inside

quantum technology was producing. I went up there, was just captivated,

like, this is cool. This is going to be really interesting. This is going

to impact how we live and work. Plus, fair to say,

two of the execs leading the charge at the time, Christopher

Savoy of Zapata and William Hurley

Worley at Strange Works, are both bass players.

So right away, hey man, who do you listen to?

It's fascinating because there is definitely an overlap I've noticed between

certain hobbies. Certain hobbies in the, in the tech space tend to

repeat a lot. Musicians tend to be one of them and the

other is carpentry. Oddly enough I've

noticed that kind of like as a, as a pattern, I don't fit. I'm not

good at musician music or, or carpentry. But

I did grow, I did grow a garden this year and I've,

I've done some gardening in the past and I try

to fix up old cars. But my skills, I mean,

mechanical engineering, kind of gear heads, guys and gals that

like machines and how you build machines and stuff, I think

also are drawn to science on some level, you know, because

there's science everywhere. As Stephanie Simmons says, it's all

about human progress is all based on the commercializing of physics.

Now that's a good way to put it. That's a good way to put it.

You've had an amazing career. I mean it's,

it's impressive the things that just the variety and scope of the

things you've done. And you know,

I think when you go back in time,

I think our parents generation really had that idea where you go to

school, you study X, Y or Z, you got a career in X,

Y or Z. Right? And I think for a certain point in history, I

think that worked. But I don't Think that's the

case anymore. In fact, you know, if you look at my. Look at me up

on LinkedIn, like, I'm a technical marketing manager. Right. I never thought I

would be in marketing. Right. Let alone talking about

quantum computing, let alone talking about artificial intelligence. I

originally went to university not that far from Westchester County,

Fordham in the Bronx. So a lot of my comp Sci professors were

adjunct professors from IBM or retired from IBM. That's a great

school. Sure. Oh, well, thank you. And

you know it. I originally went there to be a chemical

engineer because my mom had worked like 20 years at, like,

at a big German chemical company. Cool. And her vision for

me was become a chemical engineer, become a big

shot at said company, worked there 20 years and all that.

And when I switched to computer science, and, you know, this was

1991, I had to convince them that

computer science was a legitimate field of study.

Yeah. And a viable career

path, which, you know, now we laugh at such. Such

a concept. Right, right. Although there was a study

out this year about the employability of, like, comp. Sci majors, but maybe we can

get into that. But.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I had to convince them that it was a viable thing

because my parents basically made it very clear for me, to me that, you

know, my career options were doctor, lawyer, engineer,

or I didn't like any of those. They

said there was a, you know, Marine Corps recruiting station

like five blocks away. Yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah. No. Well, I think,

you know, certainly the model has changed the rate and pace

at a meta perspective, you know, which businesses are changing and technology

is influencing how we work and by inference,

to careers that are available and jobs and skills,

you know, they're needed, are morphing at a rate and

pace we've never seen in history. I mean, it's. But that said, there's.

It's also been going on for literally hundreds of years, if not thousands of years.

When I do these lectures, for example, I lead off by saying

humans have been using technology since we were wandering around in the

Pleistocene wilderness trying to kill something bigger than us so we could eat it and

use its fur for clothing. And the technology

state of the art at that time was like a long stick with a

sharp end. And if you knew how to use that, you were

employable, you had a job, you were, like,

valuable to the community. Nowadays, it's manipulating

subatomic particles to get them to store and retrieve

information safely in the quantum space. So

again, the big picture perspective is it's always

been like this, but it's Just faster and more interesting, I

think, nowadays than it's ever been. That's a good

way to put it. Sorry, Candace. Okay, so let me ask you, in your workshops

on how to succeed at jobs that don't exist yet, you talk

about emerging quantum roles. Which non

technical roles are most underserved in

quantum today? Yeah, so that's a great question. And so

I'm a member of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium,

qedc. I was in their Workforce Technology

Advisory Committee and I've done

talks that I call secrets to working in quantum. And

by the way, if any listeners are curious, I'd be happy to be

contacted about doing that. I've done it for many universities, also for

QEDC settings. But the idea is

all of these companies, whether they're IBM or

they're Xanadu, are businesses, right?

So while at the core there may be the need

for condensed matter physicists, for sure, and electrical

engineers and software developers, computer sci majors,

whatever, that's the core of it.

But at the end of the day, you've got to bring something to market.

So you need executives to run the company. With all due

respect to many founders and startup leaders, I mean they

maybe come from academia or they come from a different

setting than sort of tech marketing, if you will. So you need

some execs, adult supervision to kind of run the business, how to manage a P

and L. You need biz dev people, someone who's going to go to a client

with the value prop and get them to open their checkbook. You need UX

design people, I mean human computer interface, how do you touch this stuff?

How do you turn it on? How do you turn it off? How do you

interact with it? How do you set the photon detector? How do you turn on

the deal fridge? You need people interested in having

policy and regulatory conversations. You need people who

are into the picks and shovels, building lasers and test benches

and optical gear. You need PR and comms

people. Who's going to write about this in a way that lay audiences can

understand so that you increase visibility and

adoption and understanding more broadly across the global

community. All the major consulting

firms, the big five, McKinsey, Accenture, Deloitte, on and on,

all have practice areas in Quantum. So

if you're interested in that kind of approach

and all the major banks, big news this week was that Marco

Pistolo left JPMorgan Chase and went to IonQ.

So sort of from the client to the vendor,

that's again, so all by saying there are

lots of roles. If you're Interested in working in quantum. Which ones are

underserved? I think it varies company by company candidates, to be

candid. Some companies have poached like

CMO level marketing people, for example, C suite

people from tech companies to help them run the business.

Certainly there's a need for physicists, people with

training in quantum, but also people who can

learn how to talk about the business value of quantum.

So anyway, that's a long winded answer, but I think the net net is.

There's lots of opportunity for people who are interested in working in quantum. It's getting

a lot of focus. This is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology,

right? The UN has declared that we're seeing a lot of funding

rounds go by. People are getting infusions of

cash to build out their companies. We're seeing companies

on acquisition sprees. IonQ has bought like three or four companies in the

past, like six months or whatever. So they're in the news every day.

It feels like they're just exploding with excitement, you know.

Yeah, it's cool. So if you're into it, explore it.

And I also, again, the risk of, you know,

unabashed self promotion. I curate a Google sheet for the

QEDC that lists career pages for over 140

quantum companies over the world. I just do it, I put it together

for them as part of this office hours program that I

ran where we used to hold monthly mentoring sessions for students in

Quantum with executives in the private sector,

members of QEDC. So connect with me on

LinkedIn and I'd be happy to send you that link. Or I can give it

to you, we can put it in the material, show notes. Yeah, no, that's awesome.

I can, you know. No,

my kind of quantum aha moment was I was at Microsoft

and we when actually back when I was doing, also doing

civic tech and social responsibility and stuff like that. And

I was just floored. It was actually an

AI conference and the second day keynote was about hardware and

I was actually about to skip out because I'm like, duh, just get more

GPUs. Right? But then when

the person talked about

like, you know, look, we can build, you know, we can throw all the GPUs

together, all these things we want, but we're not going to be able to keep

up with the demands. And like then they said that there's

a new radical way to do computation in this quantum.

And the pitch was very, very

impressive and it got me, got me not just aware of it, but

also very interested in the Technology, Cool.

The potential is quite remarkable. I have to confess. I may not live to see

all of it, but I hope to see some of it. I mean, it's

exciting to be in the nation stages of this

technology. It's going to change everything. A friend of mine

who's a professor at Oxford wrote an essay

sort of about this and the basic premise was he's

hoping to have a conversation with his grandson at some point who

poses the question, so grandpa, what was cancer?

Right. You know what I mean? Like, oh yeah,

we figured that out with quantum. We were able to like

get that sorted, you know. You know, and to that point

we had a fantastic episode with a gentleman

by the name of Marvin Weinstein

who is specifically working with this biology

and quantum intersection, specifically with

geoblastomas and cancer research.

And what they're discovering using, you

know, simulated quantum algorithms is just

mind blowing really. It makes you realize

it shows you what quantum can be used

for. Because as Frank and I are constantly

talking about it, it's not going to replace. Everything

is going to solve problems that we can't solve right now

in certain regards. Right. But it's not going to be,

you. Know, it'll always be sort of, you know, hybrid systems,

right. That you'll, they'll be. And they're already started exploring

HPC and quantum interaction. Right.

Interoperability. So putting some kind of quantum

based computer environment in a data center, a server

farm, whatever, and passing off problems that the

quantum computer can solve more efficiently to the quantum computer and

then pulling the data back and having an HPC

instantiation do what it does best. So I think it's going to be

that kind of connectivity interoperation.

That's exciting. Yeah, it's definitely,

you know, it sounds crazy to us to say like

what was cancer? But you know, you think about historically like

what's smallpox? Like what's this? What's that? Yeah, these are things you really.

What's the other one that President Roosevelt had? Polio.

Polio, yeah. Right. And you know, my grandparents

and parents would talk about like that was a big deal like at one point.

Like, I mean, I don't think my

kids even know what that is. And I only know what it is because of

the history of the President, like studying history at

Bolio. So like, I mean it's just, you

know, you can easily imagine this being a,

you know, I think a relic of the past. I also think too that,

you know, when the transistor was developed, no one was thinking

about YouTube, TikTok or let alone Podcasts. Right. Like, so who

knows what sorts of things we really can't imagine

now to be built in the future with

quantum technology. So I just, I have to share another sort

of anecdote or aphorism from my lecture.

I show a slide of a typewritten

version of Intel. I think it's Intel's first business

plan. Really? Yeah. It describes that

they're going to make sensors and

magnetometer kind of devices and whatever. And the part

that I sort of circled in this slide is it's even anticipated

that some of our customers will be outside of California.

It was like, really? Because it was so niche,

you know, it was focused on. So niche. Yeah. Focus on the

defense industry, which was kind of in Silicon Valley or

whatever. You know, NASA was there.

But isn't that again, for perspective? Right. So imagine that was

what they, that was their world view in 1971 or

whatever, where they thought they might sell stuff in another

state. You know, maybe somebody could use this somewhere

outside of the South Bay. I don't know.

Right, right. Well, even like one of the big shots at IBM was

quoted at one point saying that there may be a market for four or five

computers worldwide or something. Something like

ridiculous sounding. Right. And there's always the famous quote

about Bill Gates saying 604,40K ought to be enough memory for

anyone. Right? Yeah, yeah. These things are very.

Yeah. Mobile. Yeah. Well, for

sure. Which is exciting, I think. Right. So let

me ask you, in university workshops, you counsel

students entering quantum careers. What practical advice

would you give to people who come from the non technical

backgrounds who want to contribute? Yeah. Another

great question. First of all, be aware,

as I said, you don't have to have a PhD in

particle physics to play a role. I would

say again, at a meta level, be curious.

It's got to tie to some passion or interest that you have. If

you're not interested in the topic, you're not going to be successful at it. But

if you bring curiosity to bear,

explore how you can take existing skills that are going to

be transferable and then figure out what you don't know and

acquire those skills and then you'll be successful. I mean, that's again a

meta message from my lecture, right. Is you're going to

always have skills that you can use for some

part of a job or a role. And they're always going to be skills

you're going to have to acquire that you don't know how to do. We've all

had those experiences, Candace and Frank, I mean, just from our Conversations,

conversations. As we all had to learn stuff, we know how to

do stuff, we had to learn how to do other stuff. So

don't be put off by it. Listeners, dear listeners,

look for what you know how to do. If you're passionate, excited about it,

look for a role. As my again friend at IBM says

keep jiggling doorknobs. It's not magic.

You just got to keep pursuing, waiting for the tectonic plates of the job economy

to kind of shift in your direction. But there are lots of

ways to get involved. So I would say figure out what skill you have.

Learn enough about quantum so that you can speak

even just at a meta level about what it is and how it works. The

sort of four main areas I described as quantum computing,

quantum plaques and sensors, quantum networks, and now post quantum

cryptography. Those are sort of four meta categories where they

need smart people like your listeners looking for work to play

a role. And they're big companies and they're small companies.

IBM stood up a quantum safe practice in like three months because

they saw there was addressable opportunity and they have the brain power and the money

and took it to market and they had the trusty relationships with clients. But also

Sandboxaq, which was spun out of Google

a couple of years ago, is now doing incredible business in post chronic

cryptography with most of the major U.S.

government agencies. DOD, DOC, DOE, right. And then there's

lots of startups crypt this fantastic quantum

safe company in New York. Dennis Manage is the CEO.

He was a national security guy for years

and it was so appalled by the rate and pace at which countries

and non state actors were stealing or attempting to steal data that he

left and started a company to put some process in place to

protect the data. So lots of ways

quantum sensors. I don't know if you guys listeners are aware of Q

Control. It's an Australian company that just put together a viable

option for GPS denied environments where the Russians

are jamming or denying access to gps.

There's sort of a red line I saw in this chart recently.

It's similar to where the Iron Curtain was and that's where Russians are

jamming communication protocols.

So but anyway, Q Control has put together this quantum based

magnetometry gravimetry solution that they

proved is as good or better with a commercial

airline recently. So anyway, I'm, I'm droning on but.

No, that's a very valid point because there was a

documentary or news story on, you know, how dangerous it

is to fly within a certain mileage

of the black Sea and Ukraine. Like, yeah, you know,

if you look at flight, radar and the tracking of the past, obviously they

avoid Ukrainian airspace. But you'll also see like, there's a, there's

a significant buffer zone and it really has more to do with

GPS jamming. And they were on, I think it might have been a Finnish

airline going from like Helsinki to Dubai. And like, they basically had to do

this massive, like, roundabout thing. And the pilot was

explaining, like, look, now our GPS is broken, you

know, so now we're going to fly this way until we can like catch the

signal again. And it's, you know, GPS technology

is a really good example of a military technology that has been,

you know, civilianized. I don't know if that's a word.

To a degree it is now. Yeah, yeah, to a degree. And,

you know, everything is dependent on it, right? From Uber

to, you know, just basic stuff. If I

want to track my Amazon package, that's, you know, like it's that and like,

obviously it's a mil. You know, obviously it's a.

It'S. I wouldn't say it's a fair target, but, you know, when

a GPS jammer is out there, it's not going to avoid

civilian uses. Right. It's just going

to take over the whole spectrum. And yeah, I mean,

so having alternatives to gps, yeah, you know,

is definitely so. And again, thinking of it in terms of

opportunities, like job opportunities. I mean, that's right. That's a burgeoning space

that's going to be an important area of focus and

investment and business advantage, business value.

So again, listeners interested in that space,

get a hold of Michael Biersick at qcontrol. There you go. There

you go. Well, and that's also interesting because you speak

to this, the job market and what people can do,

what signals or weak trends are you currently

tracking that might hint at where

the quantum job market is heading?

I think one of the most underexplored or under

exploited areas of Quantum is networking.

So there are a couple companies, I mean, cunec in New York, in the

Brooklyn Navy Yard, led by fantastic woman CEO Noel

Goddard, they've demonstrated

quantum safe communications on existing fiber through

Verizon. There's a company in

the uk, New Quantum, led by another woman, Carmen

Blacio, and they're looking at what they call

entanglement fabric. So it's ways

to use photons to connect machines.

So my contention is, for example, once quantum networking

gets sorted, things like QKD are going to go away because it's

physics and it's breakable.

So when they can put up networks of distributed quantum

computers, that's going to really be transformative. It'll be

certainly part of broader communication kinds of

applications. But the ability to connect quantum computers

using some kind of entanglement fabric or quantum network or

whatever is really going to be amazingly

impactful. It's kind of not particularly

sexy or, you know, fancy schmancy, but it's,

the potential impact is tremendous, I think. I mean, my

take on it. So I would encourage people to

investigate that. If that's sort of an underexplored area, if you will,

that's going to have huge impact. And qkd,

just for those who are wondering what that is, I'm assuming you mean quantum key

distribution for cryptography. Okay, yeah. And I don't mean to

disparage, you know, ID quantique or any of the companies that are doing great work

in that space. And I think there'll probably always be a need for some kind

of solution like that. But again, when quantum networks become

viable, it's going to be less and less likely because

it's going to be comparatively much too complicated and it

requires physical devices and is potentially hackable on

some level. I'm going to probably get a call distribution

from QKD advocates after this, so. You'Re going to get

some phone calls when this goes out. But in fairness though,

like, key distribution has always been the Achilles heel of

any cryptography system. Right. If you ever read the

Bruce Schneier book, which is an excellent read

and. I've heard of it. What's the title of it? It's called Applied

Cryptography. Okay. I remember reading that, the

first edition, like the 90s. It's like, it's an old book, but like,

it's, it's about as thorough as you can get. And

like, one of the things was, he talks about cryptanalysis and how do you break

cryptography? And there was a whole thing of like, look, just because your

algorithm and your cryptography thing is unbreakable in air quotes

doesn't mean your system's secure because how are you going to get the keys around?

You know, managing the keys is not a trivial process. And

most, not most, but I mean, a lot of the crypto

attacks tend to come from finding weaknesses in how keys are

distributed. Yeah. And you know, whether that's, you know,

it's saved on a post it, somebody's desk

all the way to kind of, you know,

rating memory spaces and things like that. Most, most

of this stuff is, is, is that has always been a major flaw. Right.

So, like, it's not. So if you can find any kind of technology that can

remove key distribution from any crypto system,

whether it's quantum, whether it's, you know, you know,

conventional, that's. That's a point of failure that you're

getting rid of. There are obvious logistics around, like, how

that's possible. And that's when. That's when I'm afraid my migraine will

return once I get. But. But, yeah, no, I

remember reading that book, and then I think it was. My

wife had said she'd read it, and I was like, that is definitely a woman

I should marry. So. Really? Wow. Yeah. Well, because

in the early 2000s, I kind of found myself,

you know, doing contract work and finding. Thinking like

there was an opportunity to get into. It actually worked out really

well, even though we didn't get the contract. But we tried to. I applied

for an sbir, Small Business Innovation something

because they were really worried about steganographic

leaks of data, which is basically steganography is this idea of you

embed data inside of other data. So you would have

plans for the stealth fighter and a JPEG of

who's that lady that's doing the jeans ad that

everyone's happy about? Mad about something. Sweeney.

Anyway, yeah. Trying to put a pop culture reference

in here. And it's. Yeah. The idea that you

could embed data inside of other data, and how would you detect

that? Right. So that's when I saw that as a fascinating thing. And

it ended up being really. Well, even though we didn't get the contract, we didn't

win the bid. I learned so much about advanced

mathematics and C Sharp and applying these types of edge

case algorithms in C and in. Net.

That actually boosted my career

in the Net space. So when I started getting into handwriting

recognition systems and electronic medical records stuff, I'm

like. When I was interviewing, I was like, yeah, I know this because. Because it's

not necessarily the average bear would know.

Because most people were like, hey, look, let me show you how I built this

website in. Net. I was like, no, no, I was doing some weird kind of

mathematical computations. But back to our earlier conversation about

transferable skills and learning new skills in kind of a. Maybe in

this case, an unlikely setting, maybe that you were then able to

leverage in your next role. Exactly. And I think

as I kind of think about what you said and the

topics your book brings, I'm like, oh, you know, like,

that's how you have to think. You have to think about not so

much education per se. It's more about

skill acquisition. Right. So it's like. Yeah,

it's a bit like Minecraft. Right? Like, you know, you kind of. I'm

going to use that. And feel free to use that too. Because, like, no, because,

like, you know, it's not so much that, you know, you

take this little bit of skill, this little bit of skill, this little bit of

skill, and they can fashion something new which may or may

not be useful in the future. I think you almost

have to think entrepreneurially, like that way.

Yeah. I mean, one of the sections of my lecture is around sort of

education. I say we have to stop thinking of education as

an event that happened in the past. It's

like a lifelong process, learning unlearning, relearning.

I actually learned that at Bennington. I have to little plug for my alma

mater. But as a junior, you were required to put together a plan about what

you were going to learn and study and who was going to teach you and

then defend it in front of a tribunal like the president and

some faculty and staff. So I've sort of taken that

approach and used it for many, many years in

the workplace. Wow. So let me ask you,

so if quantum computing becomes as ubiquitous

as cloud or AI, how do we ensure

equitable access to prevent a

second digital divide? Well, I think it's going on already,

unfortunately. There's a lot of conversations around, how do we.

To your point, Candice, how do we make sure it's distributed, especially in the

global south, for example, or in underserved communities,

more micro. I think it's an

ongoing challenge, I think of one laptop

per child. The Nicholas Dug Apponti initiative

back in the 80s, I guess, when he was running the MIT Media

Lab. It takes focus as a culture, as a

society, to try to make sure that this technology,

this compute power is

available where it should be available. I think also

there's going to be a certain amount of invisibility to it. Right.

So another sort of aphorism is that the best technology is

invisible. I used to say at IBM, like, you don't. When you

plug in, when you make toast and you plug in your toaster, you don't really

care where the electricity is coming from. You just wanted to make the toast.

So I think we see quantum in a similar kind of model. Like

certainly researchers will be using it in esoteric academic settings or in

labs or even in R and D environments at the

enterprise. But, you know, if you want to, like,

put your photos on Whatever's after Instagram goes out of business,

there may be some quantum solution that will help you do that. And you won't

even know or care. It's going to be, you know, like, whatever is going to

replace gps. You won't care. You just want to be able to get

to, you know, Aunt Mill's house without running into

a tree. I mean, it's like whatever the solution

is, that's, you know, that's giving you the right answer, the

right capability. Quantum will

be involved for sure. I mean, it'll be involved in medical for sure. Like,

no one will care that a quantum computer helped design the next

MRA vaccine or help deal

with the next cure for some intractable

condition. I mean, that's my hope is it'll

be again, it'll be sort of subsumed into our everyday interaction. Like,

we don't as we're having this conversation in

Microsoft Teams. Thank you, Satya.

But I don't know where the data is going or where it's coming

from or where it's being stored

or server farm is or if

it's working or broken. It seems to be working. So that's a good thing.

So anyway, that's sort of my take on

where, again, at a meta level, if it answers your question directly,

Candace. But the idea is let's try to work toward getting

it almost subsumed into the compute

environment globally, so anybody who needs it can use

it. And it takes big companies, it

takes sovereign focus, country focus, for

sure. But again, one

of the things we've noticed and this has led Candace to do

a lot of her marketing background comes in to help us. She's been

doing a lot of these country reports because unlike,

you know, say what you want about

conventional semiconductors, right. They, they are developed in,

they really started in Silicon Valley, maybe Bell Labs. Right.

Texas had a, had a thing. But it ultimately is

consolidated. And Hewlett Packard was there. Hewlett

Packard. But it's also consolidated to

basically Taiwan and parts of, yeah. Parts of East

Asia, which may or may not. Well, they're all subject to earthquakes and tsunamis

and all this. But also, you know, there's some geopolitical aspects to

it. Right. And I think that, I think that,

you know, when we look at quantum, like, where are the hotspots of

quantum. They're not localized. And I think that's great. There's some in

Maryland, there's some in Illinois, there's in Montreal,

there's New York, there's Tel Aviv.

There's, you know, there's no one central

place where this is happening because I think governments and

research institutions have realized that they missed a huge

opportunity with silicon.

Yeah, I think that's the challenge is

keeping it as a global community. Right. And especially when you're

talking about business models. Right. Because proprietary IP is what

allows companies to go to market and take, get clients and

take market share based on what they do better than their competitor or

whatever. But I find generally there's something simplistic.

The quantum community is pretty collegial, it's pretty open

minded. Other companies, obviously

some VCs might say they're all chasing the same clients on some level,

but I think we're seeing it evolve more and more into

vertical, specific kinds of solutions. This is me waxing philosophical. I got

on my soapbox for a minute here, I think five years

ago when I first got involved in Quantum. You could sort of say, oh, we

have this quantum computer. It's going to do remarkable

things. We're going to get quantum supremacy. It's going to. Google claims it solves

a problem in 200 seconds that would have taken a classical computer 10,000 years.

And that benchmark has been moved up many times since then.

But I think nowadays it's like, so what are you going to do for

me in my business? Because all companies go to market in the vertical, right? They're

either in telco or, you know, media and entertainment

or energy and utilities or pharma or legal, whatever.

So now they're like, okay, it's been five years guys, you know, what are

you going to do to solve my pain points? Right? I got these

five things, you know, these are the, this is, these are the five

alligators that are closest to the canoe. So how are we going to like

deal with these? So which I think is a good thing. And I

think the challenge is for the quantum community, you got to step up and address

it. I have to say, a little plug for Quantum Tech

Europe, the event I'm going to be at at the end of September in

Rotterdam, they've done just that. They've designed an event

that's focused on verticals as well as there's going to be a

quantum boardroom track that I'm going to help lead.

There's going to be pharma finance. So again,

it's getting more specific now, which I think is challenging but

also exciting, right?

No, for sure. It's a fascinating time and place to

be, for sure. So since there's so many, there's so

much out there and your Own journey

is about continuous reinvention. Right.

So how do you personally stay sharp and inspired

across such a diverse and prolific career?

Well, again, I'd say probably the key is that I'm a curious person,

right? So I would encourage listeners be curious. And it's a muscle you can flex.

It's a skill you can acquire and finesse and refine.

You know, I used to say

more practically, again, having spent 15 years at IBM, I'd say to

new hires or whatever, colleagues, after

18 months in your job, once you kind of get settled and know who

the players are, where the bodies are buried and what the daily

task requirements are, start looking for what's next. And I

would say the same is true in Quantum. I mean, be curious

and look for what your next opportunity is. The other thing I'd say is

put together and as part of my toolkit, I have something in the book called

the Future Career Toolkit has three tools. Voice, Antenna and

Mesh. I developed them after

giving a lecture at a millennial workplace in New York. And it was sort of,

you know, quasi esoteric with my story and my sort of perspective on where

jobs and careers are being created at the intersection of

historically unconnected disciplines or whatever. And this woman stood

up in the back and said, so how do we do it? It's like,

that's a good question. Let me get back to you on that. So anyway,

I got together with this ideation guru friend of mine here in Connecticut

who does like creativity sessions for clients like

LVMH and Walmart and Kroger, and we

put together this toolkit. So anyway, the tools are, I'm pitching the book now, so

forgive me, Voice is using triggers

like finding your favorite TV show, movie, book or

game. And what about it resonates with you? That's

a way to trigger what you're interested in, what you find fascinating.

Antenna is the second tool which is looking for where these conversations

are going on. It could be elite newspapers, could be TikTok, could be

your grandma, could be your neighbor, could be

Instagram, whatever. Could be someone in a Discord server,

someone playing World of Warcraft with you. Where are these

conversations around the triggered out focus areas

going on? And then the third tool is Mesh, which is building

out like a network, a mega network. You

know, I always tell these kids, like, if you get to Friday at 5 o'

clock and you haven't added five people to your LinkedIn network, stop what you're doing,

put down the switch to log out of Netflix, you know,

stop binge watching Step away from sniping on

Amazon or ebay, make a cup of coffee

and put some Boolean parameters into LinkedIn and find people

based on what you discovered in the other two tools

and track down real people and introduce yourself. There's always,

I always say to these kids, there's always a Miles Davis in every

genre, every discipline, every vertical. And

many of them scratch their heads and go, who? What? Then I

say, look it up. I say, so for contemporary reference,

there's a Taylor Swift, there's a Tony Hawk, there's

Serena Williams, whatever, somebody leading the conversation

at the top of the function. Find out who that is and

follow them. Connect with them if you can. I mean, you know,

Satya Nadella is leading the charge on AI and Quantum and Microsoft. He

probably won't accept your connection request, but at least follow him and

follow the Microsoft communication, their marketing, their

blogs, whatever their LinkedIn posts. So there

are ways to do it. You know, the great news is there's lots of

ways to get information about bleeding edge tech. The bad news is

there's lots of ways to get information about bleeding edge tech. You know, the challenge

is putting together like doing the triage, some kind

of, you know, way to manage the tsunami of data,

but make it a job anyway. No, I mean, that's a

good way to. That's great advice. No, it's a great advice and you know, I

definitely think that we could spend a lot more, more time

talking about this and where can folks,

Because I want to be respectful of your time and I see we're coming up

to an hour on the thing.

Where can folks find out more about you, your book and what you're up to?

So I would. First thing I'll say is please connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm

a huge fan of LinkedIn. I think it's the pleated pants of social

networks. It's the lingua franca, it's the realm

coin of the realm. It's like certainly young professionals, anybody

who's a millennial, earlier mid career person or even Gen Z

getting into the workforce, I mean, you've got to have a pimped out

LinkedIn profile. Just saying it's not an option. It's like breathing

and spell checking, you know, it's gotta, it's gotta happen.

So connect with me on LinkedIn. My book is

available on Barnes and Noble and I prefer to point people there because that's

a real store. It's a bricks and mortar store. They have

salespeople, they have vested interest in

maintaining A physical environment where you can go and sit and read a book

or have a coffee or take your kids and story time,

whatever. As opposed to. This is advice from my publisher. As

opposed to Amazon, which is just an algorithm. They don't give a crap.

Doesn't matter to them one bit. You know, it's just. You're just a data

point. Yeah. So I'm a big fan

of Barnes and Noble. You know, personally, I was the first webmaster there,

so. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So,

yeah, I. I always like going to Barnes and Noble. Even when we

used to have a Borders and a Barnes and Noble next to each other down

here in Maryland, I would always. Yeah. Gravitate towards the. The Barnes and

Noble. Yeah. But, yeah, no, it's a it. And I

was there actually this past weekend, actually, so. Really?

Yeah, I actually took my book down there. There's one in Stanford, Connecticut,

not too far from me. I went in and said, here's my book. Please order

it, I want you to stock it. I live nearby and

I'd like to see it on the shelves when I come in here. So. So

LinkedIn by the book, if you follow me. You know, I

do a lot of speaking at events. I'm

again, Deep Tech mc. I work for the Economist for Quantum Tech.

Done some work for Inside Quantum Technology. So

if and when you're at an event that I'm at, please come up and say

hello, introduce yourself, be delighted to talk to you,

and get better acquainted. And the other thing I'd say is if there are

opportunities where a lecture titled how to Succeed

at Jobs that Don't Exist yet would be interesting, get

in touch with me. I do them in university settings. I've done them

in seventh grade career day settings. I've done

Right Management, which is an outplacement firm for senior execs. So I have sort of

versions of it that are consumable for all kinds of

audiences. And that's something I'm really passionate about

doing. So. Cool. Fantastic. Any

parting thoughts? Candace? This has been

fantastic, and I really feel that, you know,

you know, you really went across the bridge to show how

everybody can be involved in the quantum ecosystem without having

to be a PhD or a physicist and to take what their

skills are and to apply their skills to a

burgeoning industry that's open and

excited for more people to become a part of it. So

I loved it. I thought this was a great, great, great call.

Excellent. And we'll let our AI finish the show. And there we

have it. From Bass Guitars to Quantum Bits, Christopher

Bishop has once again proven that career paths are more zigzag than

zipline. If you've ever felt like your resume resembles a

Jackson Pollock painting, fret not. You may be on the

quantum frontier and not even know it. Huge thanks to our

brilliant guest for reminding us that the future of work isn't just about

learning to code or growing a beard like an AI researcher. It's about

curiosity, adaptability and a very good LinkedIn

game. Be sure to connect with Christopher by his book

Improvising Careers. And remember, Quantum may be

weird, but your career doesn't have to be as long as you're

paying attention. For more entangled discussions and

lightspeed wit, don't forget to subscribe, share

and leave us a review. Or don't. I'm an AI.

I won't lose sleep over it. Until next time. I'm

Bailey and this has been Impact Quantum, where your future is

uncertain but definitely exciting.