---
project: Quantus
type: research / source document (cleaned transcript)
status: cleaned, speakers verified against Chris's isolated audio track
date: 2026-09-28
last_updated: 2026-09-30
source: "The Quantus Podcast #24: Colton Dillion, Qday, Quantum and the Impact on Bitcoin"
source_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXvgN8GY_NY"
---

# Building a Worldwide Quantum Computer: Quantum Computing, Bitcoin and AI with Colton Dillion

_The Quantus Podcast, episode 24, recorded in early September 2026. Chris Smith, CEO of Quantus, speaks with Colton Dillion, CEO of Postquant Labs, the development company behind Quip Network._

[Watch the episode on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXvgN8GY_NY)

## About this transcript

This transcript is lightly edited for readability. Filler words, false starts, repeated words, and caption errors have been removed or corrected where the intended wording is clear, and brief interjections such as "wow" and "that's true" are omitted. The speakers' claims are their own and have not been fact-checked here. Timestamps mark the start of each speaker turn. Where a name or term could not be confirmed from the audio, it is marked in brackets.

Speaker attribution was verified against a separate transcript of Chris Smith's own audio track.

## Transcript

**[0:00] Colton:** If somebody came out tomorrow, Satoshi's coins had been spent, and they said, "Hey, I'm Satoshi," what would you think? Would you think it was a quantum attack? How many Bitcoiners would believe it? How many people would say, "We're totally compromised. We have to upgrade everything now. We have to use proof of seed phrase, where we create a ZK proof around our seed phrase in order to recover"? Now you're going to DDoS the chain just to upgrade everybody who is vulnerable, because you have to actually reveal transactions, and you're subject to the block-size limit. Anyone without a connection to a post-quantum key has to reveal a new one in a credible way that proves they control the asset. And that's not to mention all the prep time needed to implement quantum-resistant transactions on the chain. Even if you think this is three years off, five years off, ten years off, you better get started today.

**[1:07] Chris:** Welcome back, everybody. This is the Quantus podcast. Colton, you've had a pretty interesting career. Do you want to give us a brief introduction to yourself?

**[1:13] Colton:** Sure. My name is Colton Dillion. I'm the CEO at Postquant Labs, the development company behind Quip Network, which is building the worldwide quantum computer. I got started in applied math professionally about 15 years ago. My singing coach showed up to a lesson in a Lexus, and I asked how he could afford it. He said he moonlighted trading derivatives. That introduced me to the Black-Scholes model when I was 16. I started reading about Brownian motion and calculus and decided to study it in school.

**[2:03] Chris:** At 16? He got you into that stuff at 16. All right.

**[2:08] Colton:** Yeah. I ended up hating working in finance. But in engineering school we designed products for people, and I realized I loved that. I studied electromechanical engineering and worked with Intel, Nike+, and GM. My first job after school was in finance, but I found my way into crypto around 2015 and started my own business. It was one of the first registered investment advisers in crypto, using multiparty-computation wallets. I went through the FTX boom and bust, then worked on DEGEN, in social. After that success, I started thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and memes were not what excited me. Google's Willow announcement turned me back toward quantum at the end of 2024. Since then we've worked with D-Wave, IonQ, and Quantinuum. It's remarkable how far these computers have come since the days when connecting two qubits was exciting.

**[3:43] Chris:** The bar keeps moving, and there are always going to be skeptics until you prove it. But the industry has come a long way and seems to be accelerating. Since you've got more hands-on experience with these computers than most people, how different or similar are they? Can you give us a flavor of what a D-Wave versus an IonQ looks and feels like?

**[4:14] Colton:** They're very different. A qubit is a physical system connected through subtle physical principles, and many different principles can represent one. It might be the way light passes through or reflects off a material, the behavior of electromagnetism at the femtoscale, or a simulated qubit that reproduces features of quantum behavior at a larger scale. An IonQ computer traps charged atoms with lasers and observes how the ions move relative to one another. Superconducting computers often use Josephson junctions, observing electromagnetism moving between microscopic loops and across a gap. Detecting that behavior gives you a signal for a zero or a one. So there are many ways to build a qubit, and there are also different modalities. An adiabatic computer lets physical processes evolve slowly. In theory it's equivalent to a gate-based computer if you can reach absolute zero, but there are regimes these computers can't reach in practice, because we can only get down to microkelvin temperatures.

**[6:26] Chris:** It reminds me of Beff Jezos [the online name of Extropic founder Guillaume Verdon] and his thermodynamic computer. It's a similar concept, right? You set the maze up so the thermodynamics does the work.

**[6:38] Colton:** Yes. He has what he calls probabilistic-bit computers, and the claim is that they can extract these probabilistic bits at room temperature. They're similar to a D-Wave machine, which uses quantum annealing. You set up a physical system to represent a mathematical problem. An abacus isn't itself a collection of numbers, but it's a system that represents them. Quantum or thermodynamic systems can represent optimization problems the same way. What is best, fastest, or least expensive? When you need to trade off many factors to find the best combination, these systems may be useful, and we still have to see how close they can get. But quantum computing's speedup relies on complementarity, which room-temperature classical phenomena don't provide. You need quantum phenomena to get that feature.

**[8:10] Chris:** Can you double-click on that? Can you tell me more about complementarity? I haven't heard that term before.

**[8:16] Colton:** Have you heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?

**[8:21] Chris:** Sure, sure.

**[8:22] Colton:** Basically, if we know velocity, we can't know position, and if we know position, we can't know velocity. There's a tradeoff in the amount of time used to measure something. If I observe several cycles of motion, I get a good idea of velocity but not a precise location. If I take a very fast snapshot, I can estimate location but not velocity, direction, or phase. The same principle extends to whole systems. If you pin down one part, other parts become ambiguous. You can see this in experiments like the quantum eraser and the interaction-free measurement with a bomb in one path, where you can extract information about the setup from the distribution of outcomes without detonating the bomb. Complementarity is that tradeoff. Information obtained about one possible path leaves ambiguity elsewhere in the system.

**[10:48] Chris:** So it's like the uncertainty principle. The product of the two errors is bounded from below, so you can't squeeze them both to zero. If you squeeze one down, the other grows, like a balloon. It's not necessarily a conservation law, and it's not that their product is a constant. You just can't drive them both to zero simultaneously.

**[11:13] Colton:** Right.

**[11:14] Chris:** Now, can you tell me how Quip Network handles all these different machines? What's the vision, and what are the challenges you're facing in solving that problem?

**[11:26] Colton:** We believe horizontal scaling is going to be the most important factor in squeezing the most computation out of quantum computing. Right now we're in a phase called noisy intermediate-scale quantum computing, where quantum computers accumulate error really rapidly. It's hard to extract a final result from a long-running circuit because the errors add up so quickly, so usually we pair them with classical computers. It's really popular right now to talk about hybrid quantum computing, which means we take a large GPU cluster or other supercomputing cluster and pair it with the quantum computer. The classical computer does the part it's good at. The quantum computer does the part it's good at. Then the classical computer tries to extract signal from the noise and calculate away the errors that occurred in the quantum computer after the fact.

In the future, once we have fault-tolerant quantum computing where errors don't accumulate, you'll be able to run quantum programs as long as you want. Just like classical computers with error correction, the errors will be detectable, and we'll be able to reverse them or transform them out after the fact. Once you have that, you can entangle the computers together. And the cool thing about quantum computers is this. In classical computing, if you have a cluster of 2,000 GPUs, you have to double your GPUs to double the capacity of that system. With a quantum computer, you just have to find one more qubit, no matter how large the system is, and connect it to the rest of your system. That last part, connecting it, is the really hard part. But we believe we'll figure it out over the next 10, 20, or 50 years and build a quantum internet like the internet we have now. When that happens, it doesn't matter how big you build your system. You can have every quantum computer in the world connected together, and if you can find one more qubit and connect it to the rest of the system, you've doubled the power of that machine.

So we want to be the network that helps find those qubits, makes them available, connects them to the rest of the system, and makes it possible to trust the person on the other side who has to run your program. If they do something funky on their side, it changes the way your system behaves. So how do you punish that person, or how do you enforce good behavior? How do you detect when that intervention occurs? We want to build all of that. So when we say worldwide quantum computer, we mean that literally.

**[14:30] Chris:** Wow. That's cool.

**[14:32] Colton:** Thanks. We think it's super cool.

**[14:37] Chris:** You've got to be a little crazy to do a startup in quantum computing. But I've never heard it said like this, that as long as you can network and entangle with one more qubit, you get an exponential increase in your compute space, in the number of quantum states you can represent simultaneously.

**[15:02] Colton:** Exactly.

**[15:03] Chris:** It's like a familiar cryptographic principle, where you add a bit and it doubles the key space. Wow. So there are a lot of quantum skeptics out there, and most of them seem to be Bitcoiners. What do you think their strongest points are? Let's steelman them. What are their strongest points, and then let's shoot them down.

**[15:33] Colton:** The strongest point is that this isn't going to happen overnight. If we look at the best computers out there right now, the best commercial computer is in an academic lab somewhere with around 5,000 neutral-atom qubits, and that's roughly the state of the art. They don't have very good performance properties, so if you want to run a circuit as long as Shor's algorithm, which can have up to millions of operations, you just won't be able to. The classic dig is, "We haven't even factored the number 15. What makes you think we're going to factor RSA-2048?"

The counterpoint is that these machines behave exponentially, as we were just talking about. If I want to run a simulation with 32 fully connected qubits, I can do that on my laptop. But if I get up to, say, 56 qubits, I can't simulate that program on the largest computers in the world. That's the power of exponential behavior. It's a very short leap from where we are today. If you have a Moore's law where the number of logical qubits on a chip doubles every year, it doesn't take many doublings to get to a really relevant computer that does things classical computers cannot.

If you go back to March this year, Google and [company name unclear] released two papers on the same day that advanced the state of the art for breaking cryptography. Google said it had gotten the requirement down to 500,000 physical qubits, and that with 500,000 physical qubits it could break a 256-bit elliptic-curve private key within 9 minutes. That's within the time it takes to get to the next Bitcoin block, which means that as soon as you reveal your transaction on chain, in theory a quantum computer could break your key. Is that going to happen next year? Almost certainly not. 500,000 qubits is about 1,000 times larger than what we can do today. But how many doublings does it take to get 1,000 times larger? Only eight.

**[18:33] Chris:** I'm sure you're familiar with ecdsa.fail. To me this is an absolute masterpiece of AI, quantum, and blockchain interacting. They made this open research platform where anybody can use their AI to improve on the state of the art for Shor's algorithm, and they caught up to Google in three days. And that was after Google got this gag order from the government, like, "Hey, don't talk about this. This is dangerous. Our adversaries might get it." And shortly after that, Trump did that executive order shortening the government's own timeline. They basically cut the timeline in half. They didn't explicitly mention it, but I think this had something to do with it. So if I zoom out, AI is accelerating everything, including quantum, and the rate at which it was doing so surprised even the intel agencies. And if we look over at the hardware, which you're closer to than I am, I think we have to assume AI is going to accelerate hardware development as well. There are probably gag orders in those companies too, where they're not allowed to talk about the state of the art. So I think we're in a real pickle here.

**[20:07] Colton:** Absolutely. When has the government ever been behind what's commercially available? There are some theoretically very simple quantum computers you can make where you're just shining lasers through mirrors, and we've been making lasers and mirrors of very high precision for a very long time. So what are the odds that there isn't a lab somewhere with highly advanced quantum computers compared to what's commercially available? I mentioned [company name unclear]. They claim that with their architecture it would take only 10,000 qubits to run Shor's algorithm over a 22-day cycle, with a 50% success rate, so on average you'd extract a key every 44 days. That means there are some significantly vulnerable institutions out there that are essentially within one doubling of our capacity today, and those are the computers we know about. If you want to gamble that these are the best computers there are, then sure, that's maybe one or two years out. But it means you've got to start planning your migration today, especially if you're doing something complicated like the lift and shift for Bitcoin, or if you're JPMorgan doing the lift and shift for your bank, with 500 other banks in your network who also have to be secure because they can make requests of your system.

Citibank almost had a $3 trillion transaction go through its wire system before six different layers of compliance caught it. They didn't catch it on the first pass. It was news because it got deep into the compliance life cycle before anyone recognized the transaction had been requested incorrectly, several orders of magnitude off. So there are a lot of vulnerabilities in the system that can't be swept under the rug with "let's upgrade our system." You have to upgrade everyone you're connected to, and all of those connections are vulnerable choke points.

**[22:40] Chris:** I agree. We've seen this AI-induced cyber apocalypse in DeFi. For a couple of months it seemed like every day millions of dollars were being lost, not to a quantum attack, just to classical attacks finding new vulnerabilities. There was the Coldcard incident, which I think is actually a great test run for quantum, because it was basically a math-level break. It didn't break the elliptic curves, it broke the random number generator. Symptomatically it's pretty similar, because it touched a lot of different people, and those people didn't lose their money because they met the wrong person, or got kidnapped, or had their device targeted in a specific way. You don't have to know where the person is.

So when Q-Day comes, or the first quantum attack happens, I don't think we'll be able to tell that it happened. We might be able to infer it from the absence of other evidence, and if the attacker is clever and motivated to hide their capability, they might manufacture a parallel explanation. This is a high-stakes game. Crypto is not all about meme coins. It's on the geopolitical field, and nation-states care about this. The US is going all in on stablecoins, and maybe not everybody wants stablecoins to be the new world reserve currency. And those stablecoins are currently all pre-quantum. They're 100% dependent on elliptic-curve cryptography being secure. So I want to ask you, Colton, what if you were CEO of Bitcoin? Let me just make you CEO of Bitcoin. What would you do?

**[24:36] Colton:** I would certainly be paying a lot of attention to BIP 360, all the work Hunter Beast is doing, and the coalition of people supporting migration to quantum-resistant algorithms. The thing is, if somebody came out tomorrow, Satoshi's coins had been spent, and they said, "Hey, I'm Satoshi," what would you think? Would you think it was a quantum attack? How many Bitcoiners would believe it? How many people would actually say, "We're totally compromised. We have to upgrade everything now. We have to use proof of seed phrase, where we create a ZK proof around our seed phrase in order to recover"?

If you wanted to do that, you're now going to DDoS the chain just to upgrade everybody who's vulnerable, because you have to actually reveal transactions, and you're subject to the block-size limit. To get everyone who's vulnerable migrated, including all the people who haven't registered a post-quantum key in the Project Eleven database or used a post-quantum key on our solution, anyone without a connection to a post-quantum key now has to reveal a new one in a credible way that proves they control that asset. If you want to do that, it's going to take months and months and months of blocks, not to mention all the prep time to implement quantum-resistant transactions on the chain. So even if you think this is three years off, five years off, ten years off, you better get started today. If I'm the king of Bitcoin, absolutely, I'm paying attention to that stuff.

**[26:33] Chris:** It's a trillion-dollar asset. Would you bet a trillion dollars on it? It's become a short-quantum asset. If you're managing a trillion dollars of somebody else's money, maybe you'd want some insurance. You wouldn't want a catastrophic loss of even [0.1% or 1.1%, unclear in audio]; that would be something you'd address. You mentioned the proof-of-seed-phrase approach. I think the Sui cryptographer was maybe the first to identify it, for the Edwards curve. And I think you can also do it in Bitcoin if you used an HD wallet, which is probably most people, but not all. So that's another layer of complexity, a political challenge, around making these decisions. If there is a CEO of Bitcoin out there somewhere, I don't envy their position.

**[27:46] Colton:** It takes some humility, because ultimately the field of math is wide open. I can't tell you the name of the algorithm right now, but there's a specific algorithm for reduced entropy in the total key. Say you set the top three, five, or six bits to zero. There's a separate algorithm that lets you extract some of that advantage and return some of your qubit space to your pocket. You don't have to use it to run all of Shor's algorithm, only the bare overhead plus whatever additional qubits you have certainty on.

There are also certain preimage attacks becoming possible. We haven't completely broken hashing, but hashing has been weakened a little by the existence of quantum computers. For Bitcoin's proof of work, we're essentially optimizing for a certain number on the other side of the hash. So in theory, if you can set up the entire hash function inside an adiabatic quantum computer, you should be able to solve that optimization problem, getting a value on the other side of the function that's below the target, by applying quantum penalties to select for it. Maybe my sampler gets fast enough that I'm destroying all the other hash power out there. These things are possibilities. We don't have certainty that we'll find these solutions or that they'll be relevant, but at the end of the day it's a possibility you have to plan for. It's not enough to pray that this thing isn't real. You have to prepare for it.

**[29:52] Chris:** And the institutions are preparing for it. Fortunately, we're in a situation where it's easier to build the defense than it is to build the offense.

**[30:06] Colton:** We're very fortunate that we have optionality. There are algorithms that exist today that you can use. They're off the shelf, and people have already built fairly efficient implementations of them. We chose SPHINCS+ for our implementation, because you can't run a quantum-compute network if you're vulnerable to quantum computers. For our account-based transactions, we took an evolution of the SPHINCS+ algorithm, which is very big and unwieldy but fast, and built a version that lets you shave off quite a lot of space for the majority of your transactions. If you make a mistake, which is possible any time you have a one-time signature scheme, you at least have a fallback. That turns out to be pretty efficient. On most networks you're not spending tens of dollars per transaction. You're back in the $2 to $5 range for a normal transaction, and it's only going to get better from here. We've set a floor.

Unfortunately, we don't have anything with the really nice properties of elliptic-curve algorithms, being fast and needing little storage. You have to make tradeoffs, and that's why you might not want to make that migration right away. But at least you have an option right now, and there are a lot of things coming down the pipe that we think will be much better once more eyes have been on them and the cryptographic community has been able to evaluate them.

**[31:55] Chris:** AI is accelerating both the attackers and the defenders, and it's exciting to see it take on cryptanalysis. There was that post-quantum algorithm, HAWK, whose security level got cut in half by, I think, Astra [model name unclear] or one of the models. It's an exciting time to be involved in this stuff. If I could wave a wand, I wish AI would prove that P doesn't equal NP, the Millennium Prize problem. Proving that would give us a foundation to finally know with certainty whether certain cryptosystems are secure. Right now it's always, "We know these algorithms can attack it, and here's how long they take." But what if there's another one? That specter hangs behind all of these systems, including the post-quantum ones. There could be a classical attack against elliptic curves that AI finds, and that would be a disaster. It would even be worse, because anybody could use it.

**[33:12] Colton:** BQP, the complexity class associated with quantum computing, is not one-to-one with P or NP. As I understand it, it sits outside both, above the polynomial hierarchy. So even if we prove P equals NP, BQP could still have attacks outside NP that compromise an algorithm. There are a lot of caveats in the underlying mathematics. Cheap, highly knowledgeable assistants can connect ideas across domains, and new computing modalities open new categories of mathematics. We should approach it with humility. Things we don't expect to be possible may become possible within 5 or 10 years, or sooner.

**[34:39] Chris:** What's your take on AI and quantum? Google doesn't have a separate quantum department. It's called Google Quantum AI. Why did they fuse the two so closely? At first glance it can look like buzzword salad, but maybe there's something deeper.

**[35:00] Colton:** All of the tools we use in AI actually come to us from quantum. We started formalizing linear spaces, vector spaces, and tensor algebras about 100 years ago, so this is pretty old math. When you tweak the temperature on your AI model, you're literally referring to a physics model, where increasing the temperature increases the possibilities that can come out of a physical system. It's been believed for a long time that quantum would unlock better AI, and that's why Google invested in quantum computing: they wanted to improve the AI they were developing for search and all their other computation. They're the same math and the same technology. Ultimately, quantum can accelerate every stage of the life cycle, from data curation, to choosing which labels will influence the model, to the training steps, to post-training optimization. Quantum computers can help with all of these steps, usually with less energy and faster, assuming that you have a large enough quantum computer. That's a big hand-wave, because we're at around 5,000 qubits, and we're talking about multi-trillion-parameter models that need terabytes of RAM to train. We're a ways off from fitting those onto quantum computers. But once we can entangle these processors and scale them arbitrarily, anything becomes possible on the AI side. I bet we've only scratched the surface of quantum machine learning algorithms, variational autoencoders, and what becomes possible with these computers.

**[37:20] Chris:** I don't know if you want to go philosophical for a moment, but the word quantum gets used when people are trying to explain things that are difficult to explain, like the problem of consciousness, or what's really going on in the brain. And there's a similar question about AI. Is it really conscious? Is it really thinking? Is there a person in there, or is it just an autonomous process? There's an overlap there, and I'm curious what you think. Do we have quantum computers between our ears? Are we entangled right now? What's going on?

**[38:05] Colton:** It depends on what you mean by a quantum computer. In theory, a quantum computer is just a reversible system where we never delete any of the data that comes in, so you could reverse back out to the original input even after doing all the computation, which you can't do in a classical computer. But AI is pretty good at replicating logic without quantum phenomena. So is quantum behavior part and parcel of what makes us logical creatures? Probably not, because we've gotten really good results with classical phenomena alone. Do we need that complementarity to coexist with each other? Maybe there's something about being in relation to each other, and all the subatomic motions that create reality for us, where quantum is really important. Almost certainly we operate on quantum phenomena. The chemicals traveling along your neurons involve quantum effects that power those electrical signals, and at the very least, quantum phenomena influence the light that strikes your retina. So we are absolutely creatures that interact with the quantum universe. But is that part and parcel of creating logic? Maybe not.

**[39:53] Chris:** I want to double-click on something you said about reversibility. Years ago I read a book called _The End of Certainty_ by Ilya Prigogine. I believe he was a Nobel chemist. A lot of it was about the apparent incompatibility between the quantum equations, in which time is reversible, and our experience. In quantum computing the gates always have to be reversible. They don't lose information, so you could run it backward or forward. But in the thermodynamic world we experience irreversibility. I burned the paper, now I can't read what's on it, and there doesn't seem to be any feasible way of reconstructing it. Do you have any ideas about how these things fit together? It also mirrors the P versus NP question. Are hash functions reversible? It seems like not.

**[40:40] Colton:** This is pretty esoteric territory, because nobody knows. At the end of the day, humans seem to have an arrow of time that we can't reverse, but if we look at our math, everything is symmetric. In theory the arrow of time doesn't matter, but for some reason we choose that arrow.

If you want to get into the crazy territory, this is my personal metaphysics. Say you're born into a random universe where everything is absolutely random, so you extract signal from that noise. You basically invent signal, and depending on the way you invent it, you travel through time, because there's only so much order you can impose on that signal. Maybe there's consensus reality in there. Patterns recognize other patterns and come together to reinforce them, and over time a pattern has to fall apart because it encounters new entities that destroy it. Say we live in an entropic universe, slowly traveling toward a state with fewer alternatives, where whichever alternative you take, you get closer to a final order. As you approach that final order, there's no more order to extract from the system, so you actually have more optionality by extracting chaos from it. Information is symmetric, so at some point you can extract more information by looking at the chaotic portion than at the ordered portion. Maybe there's another kind of intelligence that extracts that chaos, and these things coexist.

When we talk about dimensions, you can look at the difference between a Fourier transform counting the frequency of something and the solid object that transform represents. It's a mathematical artifice, but they're two completely different ways to look at the same phenomenon: what's the distance between two things, or what's their phase and how often does it change? So you can imagine a creature that lives in frequency land instead of solid land. It's a really dumb thought experiment.

**[43:42] Chris:** That reminds me of the book _Flatland_.

**[43:45] Colton:** Yeah. So how many different ways are there to slice reality? We just happen to live in the slice where we latch on to these features of signal in the environment. It's entirely possible that coexisting entities latch on to different types of signal, and we can't interact with them because the signals are orthogonal. They form a completely different basis in vector space.

**[44:17] Chris:** That's a really fascinating way to think about it. I don't think I've ever heard anybody put it that way. We're coming up on time, but tell me about Quip. What's the vision if everything goes great? When can I just log in to Quip and use a quantum computer? Give us your roadmap.

**[44:46] Colton:** You can download a node today if you want to validate the outputs of D-Wave quantum computers. D-Wave is already on the network. We're in the process of getting some gate-based platforms onto the network as well, and we expect that before the end of the year. We should also release our virtual machine before the end of the year, so you'll be able to write your own programs and deploy them to the network, people will be able to request those programs, and you'll get paid every time your program runs.

In terms of the vision, we hope we can do for quantum computing what open source has done for classical computing, where anyone can build on top of what anyone else has created and anyone can request that software. Right now the operators are dying for people to use their machines, because they're so complicated to use. Hopefully they can reach a larger audience that's less savvy about quantum computing and still put product into people's hands and help them solve problems that can't be solved otherwise. That's the whole reason we're in this business. We want to break through computational bottlenecks and solve problems that were impossible on any other machine. It's in our tagline. We hope people can think fast and think together.

There's also this whole unexplored space of quantum game theory, where new things become possible because you can mutually hold quantum information that produces results classical game theory can't. There's a whole space of quantum auctions and quantum cooperation games we haven't scratched the surface of. That's what I'm really excited about, creating new ways for society to operate because you have new ways to commit to each other and create new possibilities.

**[47:01] Chris:** When you started talking about quantum game theory, it got me thinking. The aha moment I had with quantum was learning about quantum key distribution and realizing that somebody measuring it could pop the thing back into superposition, almost uncollapse it. That blew my mind. I thought, what a fun game you could play, where I'm trying to get it into this state and you're trying to get it into that state, but I can pop your qubits back into superposition and you can pop mine. You can see this with information warfare, with all the reframing people are constantly doing online. There's this crazy mass of information, more than all your ancestors put together ever experienced in their lifetimes, right there in your little black mirror, and you get to pick which part of it you look at, how you interpret it, and how you frame it for other people. It's quite an elaborate game, and somehow it has more to do with the framing or the context. I'm not sure whether the qubit is zero or one, but the fact that I asked if it was zero or one is actually the important thing. I see why people get all woo-woo about quantum, because it's so interesting. There are so many unknowns to explore.

**[48:40] Colton:** It's going to be a really fun time, and that's what we hope to get people excited about: exploring, being involved, and trying it out. We want to make it accessible, so it doesn't feel like this thing people have been telling you for a hundred years is so impossible that the smartest people in the world don't understand it. There are a lot of things we don't understand. That shouldn't stop you from playing with it, from putting your hands in the ooze and asking what it is. That's the component I'm really excited about, that it's an opportunity for people to learn and to play.

**[49:18] Chris:** I'm excited. I'm going to go try out Quip Network and do some weird quantum magic with the D-Wave. Any final words before you go? This has been super interesting. I feel like we could talk for quite a while.

**[49:34] Colton:** Absolutely. I think a good thing to end on is don't let quantum scare you. It's just another form of linear algebra. If you ever took linear algebra in college, or worked with matrices, vectors, or arrays in computer science, you just have to go a little further and you can understand it too. And if you never did any of that, great. You don't have to understand it. Just try to get in with some people who do understand it, and ask questions. That's always been the way you learn. Don't be afraid, get your hands dirty, and put yourself next to other smart people who are interested.

**[50:26] Chris:** That's a great way to sum it up. Like my old teacher used to say, the secret ingredients are patience and courage. So just get your hands dirty. Thank you so much for coming on the show. You're a visionary, and it's exciting to see where Quip is going to go. Let's hop off here.

**[50:46] Colton:** Excellent. Thank you, Yuvi.