1261: John Young | Decrypting the Quantum Quandaries of Q-Day
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
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 slash 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 and 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.
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (68 minutes, 12,628 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.