Quantum Book Launch with Yuval Boger

Why This Episode Matters Yuval has a rare profile in the quantum industry: an M.Sc. in physics from Tel Aviv University, an MBA from Kellogg, two decades as a CEO and CMO in deep tech before quantum, and now the commercial lead at QuEra — the company whose neutral-atom architecture is colocated with NVIDIA H100s inside Japan's ABCI-Q supercomputer and just demonstrated 96 logical qubits from 448 physical atoms in Nature . He also hosts The Superposition Guy's Podcast and has just published Quantum Bits , a comic-book guide to quantum computing. This is a crossover conversation — Sebastian's book A New Quantum Era came out the same week — so the episode reads as two practitioners comparing their explanatory strategies, their reading of the modality race, and their honest forecasts for when a quantum computer becomes genuinely non-simulatable. If you want a candid look at how the commercial side of quantum thinks about hardware timelines, error-correction overhead, and the work of translating physics into procurement, this is the episode. Sponsor This episode is brought to you by Outshift , Cisco 's incubation engine. The need for computational power is rapidly increasing in every sector. From drug discovery to material innovation to complex financial modeling, classical systems are reaching their absolute limits. It's time for a paradigm shift. The answer is a scalable quantum network, built on open standards and vendor-agnostic architecture. By uniting distributed quantum devices, you unlock limitless computational power. Learn more about the Cisco Universal Quantum Switch at Outshift.com . Go deeper with the blog post The switch that quantum networking has been waiting for . What We Get Into Why Vladan Vuletić's confidence horizon for neutral atoms expanded from 5 years to 10 years in a single 18-month window — and what changed The honest case for neutral atoms when wall-clock speed is the obvious weakness: parallelism, algorithmic fault tolerance, and a 2:1 physical-to-logical ratio for quantum memory Why "time to solution" — not gate speed — is the metric Yuval thinks the industry should be arguing about How Shor's algorithm went from requiring a million qubits to roughly 30,000, and what that compression means for cryptographically relevant timelines The craft problem of explaining quantum without saying "zero and one at the same time" — and why both Yuval and Sebastian refused to use it What it took to make a quantum comic funny in German (the German is perfect, the joke is not) Sebastian's read on the modality race: neutral atoms short-term, superconducting mid-term, spin and photonics long-term — and Yuval's pushback Why Yuval thinks Sebastian's five-year forecast for a non-simulatable machine is pessimistic The shift inside QuEra from "95% science, 5% everything else" to a company that has to ship serviceable systems and uptime How podcasting becomes a business development tool once the microphone is off Resources & Links Guest Links The Superposition Guy's Podcast — Yuval's interview show with quantum CEOs and technical leaders across computing, sensing, and communications.</