Get Known podcast: Get inside the journalists’ mindset.
Recently, 14000 physicists showed up in Denver, Colorado, for the APS, American Physical Society’s combined March and April meeting for 2026. Among them was the 2025 Nobel Prize winner in physics, John Martinis, who is also now CTO and co-founder of a quantum computing company called Qolab.
As you might remember, Get Known interviewed Doug Finke from Quantum Computing Report a couple of episodes ago. So as the story goes, Myself, and George Schwartz from Quantum Computing Report, who was covering APS this year, were wandering the halls of the Colorado Convention Center, we ran into Dr. Martinis.
After a short chat, he agreed to meet us the next day for an interview. (As happens at these kinds of things, one just runs into a Nobel Laureate and strikes up a conversation. While many of us are still getting used to the computers on our desks, John Martinis has spent his career building a completely different kind of machine that uses the laws of quantum mechanics to process information. He, John Clarke, and Michel Devoret were awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize for proving that these “quantum computers” could finally solve problems that would take a traditional supercomputer thousands of years to finish. Their work marks the moment science fiction officially became scientific reality because these breakthroughs in “quantum supremacy” are set to transform everything from how we discover new medicines to how we secure our digital lives.
Today’s podcast is a mix of getting down into some of the technical details of quantum computing and the possibilities, along with the stories from John about how his life has changed with so much press attention and selfies. John is so good at interviewing and switching between the technical descriptions and stories about his journey that I think everyone who is a technical person who needs to talk to the press has an amazing chance to see how this is done in practice.
There are things that go way over my head, and you are also going to hear some stories about the human side of being a Nobel Prize winner. So whether you are technical or not or into quantum or not, please listen through and learn from the tips and tricks John and George bring to the table in this interview.
Enjoy!
