Overview
In this special episode, host Veronica Combs is joined by Leland Miller and Mike Kuiken, members of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. They discuss the Commission’s 2025 report on US-China relations and one of the Top 10 recommendations: Quantum First by 2030. Leland and Mike share what they learned from visiting quantum labs and the strategic importance of funding a robust quantum ecosystem. The commissioners share their analysis of supply chain security, the importance of funding basic scientific research and the crucial role of government and private sector collaboration. Don’t miss this in-depth exploration into the future of quantum technology and its national security implications.
- 00:00 Introduction to The Quantum Spin Podcast
- 00:34 Meet the Guests: Leland Miller and Mike Kuiken
- 01:35 Overview of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission
- 02:55 Focus on Quantum Industry Recommendations
- 04:18 Quantum’s National Security Implications
- 05:38 The Importance of Quantum Software and Ecosystem
- 09:22 Supply Chains and Quantum Technology
- 11:49 Biotech and Quantum: Converging Technologies
- 13:52 China’s Quantum Strategy vs. US Innovation
- 27:51 Workforce Development in Quantum Technology
- 32:13 Future Investments and Policy Recommendations
- 35:49 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Mike Kuiken serves as a Commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission following nearly 23 years in the U.S. Senate. He is Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is also a member of Anthropic’s National Security and Public Sector Advisory Council, and consults with CEOs, boards, and senior leaders across investment, AI, defense, technology, and multinational firms globally.
Leland R. Miller serves as a Commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and is the co-founder and CEO of China Beige Book. A noted authority on China’s economy and financial system, he is a frequent commentator on media outlets such as CNBC, Bloomberg TV, CNN, and FOX Business. Before co-founding China Beige Book in 2010, Leland was a capital markets attorney based out of New York and Hong Kong and worked on the deal team at a major investment bank.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Veronica: Hello, and welcome to The Quantum Spin by HKA. I’m Veronica Combs. I’m a writer and an editor here at the agency. I get to talk every day with really smart people working on really fascinating subjects, everything in the Quantum industry, from hardware to software. On our podcast, we focus in on quantum communication, and by that I don’t mean making networks safe from hacking or entangling photons over long distance, but talking about the technology.
[00:00:26] How do you explain these complicated concepts to people who don’t have a background in science and engineering but want to understand all the same?
[00:00:34] Veronica: Today I am very excited to have two special guests. Leland Miller and Mike Kuiken are both members of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. This committee has been around since 2000 and produces a report every year about US and China relations.
[00:00:50] This report covers everything from space exploration, to deep technology, to biotech manufacturing and international security. This year, one of the top 10 recommendations is about the quantum industry, and I’m really looking forward to talking to Leland and Mike about what they’ve learned and what they think the US should do going forward to strengthen the country’s advantage in this industry.
[00:01:11] Veronica: Leland is the co-founder and CEO of the China Beige Book, which is the largest in-country data collection network ever developed to track what’s happening in China. Mike was for 12 years on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and now is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.
[00:01:30] Mike, thank you so much for joining us today, Leland. I’m glad to have you as well.
[00:01:33] Leland: Thanks for having us. Thank you.
[00:01:35] Veronica: So this is a bipartisan commission. It always has been. And the committee this year had 28 recommendations and they specified 10 priorities. The report comes out today, November 18th,
[00:01:50] it is in depth and detailed and very interesting. The top 10 recommendations, Leland, I don’t know if there are any ones that you want to highlight from that list there. They really are broad reaching. We’re going to focus on the quantum aspect, but is there another one that jumped out to you as really important?
[00:02:05] Leland: I think the flavor’s important. If you look at it, you’re seeing technology and, and this is something that the commission has really been trying to focus on over the past several years. More and more and more. Our mandate is broad. I mean, we’re supposed to produce materials for Congress to influence policy and to inform policy makers.
[00:02:23] There’s a lot of people doing China in Washington DC. There’s a lot of people who are doing China and Capitol Hill, so our role is a little bit different than most. We’re trying to look at the horizon. We’re trying to see what are the issues that people aren’t focusing on maybe this year or the next year, but we really need to be focusing on now in order to be able to have a good foundation of policy
[00:02:43] to compete in the future that’s usually heavily in the technology world. And of course quantum is really almost unique in the way that it is a futuristic technology, but it’s one that we have to take very seriously right now. So lots of stuff in the recommendations that we can talk about, but I think they all come around to the idea that the US China competition is something that is just getting going.
[00:03:05] It’s just ramping up and it’s heavily about what Xi Jinping calls the fourth industrial revolution, which is technological competition. So we have tried to meet that challenge by proposing ideas to Congress in ways that we could do a bigger and better job over the next couple of years.
[00:03:21] Veronica: And Mike, on The Quantum Spin by HKA, we don’t talk a lot about national security, but obviously quantum has an enormous impact on that. What is your perspective on this, on the commission’s top 10 list?
[00:03:32] Mike: In addition to these the quantum recommendations, the one that I would spend a second just looking at is the economic statecraft recommendation where we recommend the consolidation of several entities [00:03:41] to make sure we have a single point of contact and a single leader that is in command of sort of the economic statecraft game. There are several entities that do this now. Right now, the State Department, the Bureau of Industry and Security, Treasury Department, Department of Defense. Going to Leland’s point about this sort of next round of the industrial revolution that Xi Jinping sees coming.
[00:04:01] I think it’s vital that we have a consolidated and single-minded entity working on economic state craft issues.
[00:04:07] Veronica: Yeah, that one did catch my eye too. It made me think about some of the increased emphasis on collaboration after 9/11 that all the security agencies need to work together more closely. And certainly that makes a lot of sense. So as I mentioned, the commission has a total of 28 recommendations with 10 priorities, and the quantum one really caught my eye.
[00:04:27] The commission recommended that Congress establish a Quantum First by 2030 national goal with a focus on quantum computational advantage in cryptography, drug discovery and material science. Those are very familiar topics for us here at HKA. A lot of our clients are working on all of those issues.
[00:04:47] Mike, I would ask you what pushed quantum into the top 10 this year?
[00:04:51] Mike: The recommendation last year was to sort of set as a national objective vertical integration in the quantum industry. It did not make it into the top 10, but it was in the list of recommendations for last year.
[00:05:02] This year’s recommendation is trying to build on that. The objective is quantum first by 2030. And the reason we said that is just to basically give members of Congress sort of a north star in terms of what we should be driving towards and what the ideal timeline should be.
[00:05:15] Then there are three sort of elements, and again, these are all sort of building on the vertical integration theory from last year.
[00:05:20] One is that we just need to dramatically increase the amount of funding that’s in this space. And that doesn’t mean just, let’s just spend money on quantum. It means we need to do foundational science and material science and some other areas. We need to do the the science that then takes that foundational research and builds on it, and we need to do some work
[00:05:36] in the commercialization space as well. Then there’s this entire enabling ecosystem that needs to exist. These are cryogenic laboratories, quantum engineering centers, and other things that allow all of the people that are in universities and in industry to make sure that they have the tools available to them to build on.
[00:05:52] The third one, and this is something that we actually heard more about than I expected when we visited a lot of the quantum companies early this year is while
[00:05:59] quantum computers are an entirely new ecosystem, and the software industry and ecosystem just doesn’t exist yet. And so this is an area where we had a recommendation as well to basically say folks, we can’t just build the hardware, we got to build the software too, and we need to start thinking about that now.
[00:06:14] When Leland and I led the trip to talk to a number of these companies, it was something that just kept coming up over and over again and was a surprise to both of us. Leland, anything you want to add on that one?
[00:06:23] Leland: Just piggybacking off your last comment, one of the reasons we focused on quantum so much this year is that we actually went and investigated quantum ourselves. So one of the aspects of what we do is we’re not just going to sit in DC and we’re going to ask questions into the wind and hope we get smarter.
[00:06:38] We went out and visited the labs. We went out and visited some of the most important companies in this space and we asked questions, but most importantly, we let them tell us we what we didn’t know. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. And so now we know a little bit more than we did before.
[00:06:52] We’re able to understand that and transfer that to the policy space and instruct policy makers. Here’s the best way to think about it because quantum is particularly difficult to think about. It’s a futuristic technology that’s only just now as, just, just now starting to come to real applicability.
[00:07:09] There’s different kinds of quantum and, you could get yourself tied up in a knot thinking like, what are we talking about? Communications or sensing or, are we talking about some branch of quantum? There’s a whole bunch of them. You know, and there’s also many approaches to quantum.
[00:07:21] And one of the things we got particularly smart on these trips is understanding the various approaches that our companies were going at. And they’re all different. So I think that by doing this in-person investigation, a group of us from the commission and staff went over there and spent days with people who are in the nuts and bolts of this, understanding the landscape a lot better.
[00:07:41] So we’re hoping that this is the model for how the commission works in the future. We’re not just going to sit on Capitol Hill and ask questions and hope someone comes and testifies in front of us or answers a question. We want to go out in the field and understand these technologies even better.
[00:07:53] And I, that’s what we’re in the process of doing right now.
[00:07:55] Veronica: Yes, I was very excited to hear that the commission had been to, I think, Southern California to talk to the companies there. But certainly the industry is not limited to that part of the country. Chicago, Denver lots of places have some really exciting work going on.
[00:08:08] Mike: The Quantum Tech Hub is in Colorado and it’s an incredible ecosystem out there as well.
[00:08:13] And we didn’t get a chance to go to all the places we wanted to go to, but you’re absolutely right. There’s a very sort of rich history in quantum across the country, even in New York. So I used to work with Majority Leader Schumer for a number of years, and IBM’s quantum operations are right there in Yorktown.
[00:08:27] Veronica: Yep. Yep. One of the commission’s recommendations was to establish a Quantum Software Engineering Institute focusing on developing the software foundations for scalable, secure, and interoperable quantum computing. So yes, we definitely need more people who know how to write software for quantum computers, but then that interoperable part is really important too, because there’s a lot of quantum languages out there.
[00:08:48] Not quite as many as qubit modalities, but still quite a few. That’s definitely a big need within the industry. I was glad to see that in the list. Going back to the other top 10 priorities, there’s a lot of crossover into some of the quantum issues. One of the recommendations was to establish a resilient bio economy industrial base.
[00:09:06] And also there’s a mention of pharma supply chain resilience. Leland, I’m curious about your perspective on how this quantum piece connects back to several of the other recommendations, particularly given your view into the Chinese economy.
[00:09:22] Leland: Well, one of the things that we as a commission, and I personally spend a lot of time on is supply chains right now. I don’t think there’s a more important issue. You referenced the pharmaceutical supply chains. This is something that we really need to get on top of because for a long time we have looked at these supply chains, which we have almost no visibility into in the pharma space and said, this is too complex.
[00:09:41] Leland: This fixing is going to be too costly. We didn’t want to do anything about it, but one of the things that we have brought to light along with many others is the fact that by giving our competitors and our adversaries choke points over our economy by controlling these supply chains we are putting ourselves in an awful position in the future.
[00:09:59] In pharmaceuticals in particular, China controls all the APIs, the active pharmaceutical ingredients that go into these drugs, China provides the vast majority of these. In addition, the key starting materials that go into the APIs, China is the source of many of these key starting materials.
[00:10:14] Not just ones that go into Chinese drugs, but also ones that go into India and then India shipped us . We call it a supply chain from India, but it really starts in China.
[00:10:23] You used to say supply chains on a podcast, people would just doze off immediately. There’s no sleep-inducing word more powerful than supply chains. But I think that’s changing right now, partly because it’s affected the way US-China policy can be conducted and the way US-China trade negotiations are conducted. So there’s an appreciation that supply chains are, a, if not the most important, a part of the relationship that need to be watched and we need transparency into and the reason, then that, that is important to quantum is that of all the supply chains to try to figure out in the future, quantum is the most difficult and it’s the most difficult because we don’t have a path forward, a single path forward for quantum.
[00:11:04] So the technologies for quantum are being developed as we speak, but in addition, there’s all these different pathways. There’s a lot of companies that are focusing on super conduction. There’s also topological and there’s also spinning qubits and all kinds of other pathways here.
[00:11:19] Each of them have different supply chains, so in addition to running faster, which everyone agrees we need to do, we’re also trying to figure out the supply chain angle. But I think the most important thing here is there is an appreciation that these supply chains are critical.
[00:11:31] And because these supply chains are critical, then we can realize that we have to be laser focused in understanding as these technologies become more viable in one pathway versus another. We have to really look closely at the supply chains to make sure that no one’s going to have leverage over, over our ability to build these things.
[00:11:49] Mike: Veronica, I didn’t know you were going to let us talk about biotech too. This is absolutely fantastic. Let me just give you a couple seconds on the biotech recommendation because when I was on the Hill anytime I said the word biotech, Veronica, everyone assumed that I was saying pharma.
[00:12:03] And the reality is, the bio economy is actually a much bigger story to tell. There are all kinds of opportunities in biotech.
[00:12:09] There’s also huge opportunities in the agricultural space in biomanufacturing and the circular bio economy. And these are areas where we all know this is where the future is, but the investment that the US is making is just not significant. This is the second year the commission has done something on biotech, and it’s an area where I think we’re going to continue to invest sort of energy and our sort of intellectual resources to make sure that we understand this ecosystem pretty well.
[00:12:32] Now just connecting it to quantum, like Leland did. There’s this thing that we know is going to happen and it’s playing out in front of it, but it’s fairly nascent at the moment, which is the convergence of a lot of these things. Okay, so we’re already seeing the early convergence of biotechnology and artificial intelligence.
[00:12:49] There’s also going to be a convergence as these quantum computers get better. And so as you think about convergence in this space, if we already have artificial intelligence in solving some problems, there are harder problems that quantum computers will allow us to accelerate the research in some of these key areas.
[00:13:06] And so that’s also an area where quantum and biotech and artificial intelligence sort of converge. And we’re really building this plane while we’re flying, and so we don’t know what it’s going to look like, but we need to continue to make sure that we know and understand what this conversion looks like and where the opportunities are.
[00:13:22] Veronica: Yes, yes. I hope that’s the direction that we’ll go in. Here at HKA, we track the news. We have a competitive news analysis we provide to clients each week. And, a lot of times there’ll be a report out of China and, oh, they’re so far along and they’ve got a thousand qubits and they’re all logical.
[00:13:41] And a lot of times we will respond, the press will respond or we will advise our clients a certain way. But then, the response is, it’s China. You can’t verify, you don’t know if it’s true. It’s all state controlled. Leland, how do you go about analyzing a particular claim or, what is your approach to claims from China in terms of scientific progress that you can’t necessarily verify independently?
[00:14:03] Leland: Well, we do the best we can. Obviously, there’s often a slightly clearer picture through the classified lens. Maybe, maybe not. But the reality is that as these technologies develop, the Chinese are going to be less transparent over time. This is the way it works.
[00:14:16] There, there is no advantage for them to advertise. Beyond the marketing value of saying, look, we’re a global leader in this technology,
[00:14:23] by and large. It is a very difficult area to assess.
[00:14:26] Very difficult to see through, through some of this, but this is again, the reason that we visit the labs.
[00:14:31] The reason we visit the private companies who are leaders in this. When we went in, we were asking, what about this model China’s doing and what about this number of qubits they’re claiming? A lot of the time we could get smart just by being instructed by industry and saying, look, it’s not all about the number of qubits.
[00:14:46] You got to factor an error correction. And a lot of these articles don’t do that. They want a headline number. They’re talking about some development, but it’s completely devoid from any type of real progress. Because it didn’t factor in the error correction side of this, or it didn’t factor in something else that was technically relevant and, and important.
[00:15:02] So again there’s no magic wand to get inside China and understand what they’re doing. But what is interesting, what China’s doing in quantum is it’s pretty clear they’re approaching this completely different than we are. And it’s because they think they have certain strengths and we think we have certain strengths.
[00:15:16] And so we’re running in different directions. And what I mean by that is, the strength of America is an innovation ecosystem. We’ve got these amazing private companies. They compete against each other. They’re sometimes working with the government, they’re working with each other or against each other, but it’s this vibrant sort of private ecosystem.
[00:15:32] And the government has a role. And one of the things that we try to do is say, the government does have a role, and here’s how we think the government should play in this sandbox. But it’s really the, the, the, the genius of these companies that’s driving the progress forward. In China, it’s sort of turned upside down.
[00:15:46] You know, it’s a top-down approach. Doesn’t mean they don’t have innovative private companies, they do, but the state has essentially decided here’s what we want to have done and we’re going to direct this from on top. And sometimes this is very helpful.
[00:15:58] So for instance, if you’re an authoritarian system, and you have a couple of priorities, you can brute force those priorities with enormous amount of attention and resources. And that’s what they’re trying to do with a lot of the made in China 2025 technology sectors. It’s interesting in quantum because, whereas we have American firms and, and other Western firms that are going in, five, six different directions in terms of potential pathways for quantum, China’s essentially settled
[00:16:22] on superconductivity as the pathway forward. They’re trying to brute force it. We don’t know how much they’re brute forcing how successful they’ve been. We think we know, but we don’t really know. If this is the pathway, then maybe they have an advantage because they focus in the beginning.
[00:16:37] But most of the times when you have this top-down approach, they’re ignoring these other limbs of the tree that are potential pathways to success. If it turns out that super conduction, maybe it develops as the first technology in quantum or the third, but maybe it’s not the way to the fifth or the seventh, then all of a sudden, they’re going to have to pivot.
[00:16:51] So the approaches are very different, and it’s not at all clear which one’s better, but I certainly prefer ours because I think that we’re covering the ground better. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a role for government. It just means that the government’s sitting on top and having an emperor saying, you shall do this, is not necessarily the most thoughtful way of approaching this.
[00:17:09] But we’ll see. We don’t know yet. Right.
[00:17:11] Mike: The other thing that I’ve found to be true with China is that they hold a lot of things back.
[00:17:17] I assume we’re not seeing behind the black curtain and I assume there’s a lot more going on. I think that’s why this recommendation was able to get into the top 10 is that we see this as an urgent issue.
[00:17:26] It’s something where the United States needs to put an incredible amount of focus and attention on, and we need to do an “all of the above” approach. And it’s something where I think it’s vital, right?
[00:17:34] This is an incredible area of opportunity and it’s an area where I think we say in the report, first mover advantage–especially when it really comes to cryptography–is going to be an incredibly important issue.
[00:17:45] Now, the other thing that Leland talks about is pathways, right? The American innovation ecosystem is so strong that we can actually decide we’re going to pursue all the pathways. That is a pretty incredible statement to the sort of breadth of knowledge that resides in the American innovation ecosystem.
[00:18:00] And it’s something that was really helpful for me to hear from all these academics and companies when we visited them. And Leland touched on this, and I just want to put a little crisper point on it, which is, superconducting may be the pathway that gets us there first, but it may be a topological or a trapped ion or some other pathway that we figure out over time produces a more efficient or more effective or faster or, whatever quantum computer.
[00:18:24] And so, what that looks like in the future, I think sets up the United States very well when it comes to competition in the quantum space over the coming decades.
[00:18:33] Veronica: Yes. Another issue that I wanted to bring up in terms of investment is, is some of the cuts to research funding that are maybe happening, maybe not happening on pause, already enrolled.
[00:18:44] Some of these advancements in quantum technology have been in the works since the forties and the fifties, and it’s that reliable government funding to give researchers freedom to explore these problems. Like you said, maybe it’s photonics, maybe it’s trapped ion, maybe it’s superconducting, maybe it’s a different modality for a different use case.
[00:19:02] But I know some folks in the industry are worried about these cuts that will hurt our long-term competitiveness. Do either of you have any ideas about that impact?
[00:19:10] Mike: Yeah, listen, Veronica, one of the things that I worked on when I worked for Majority Leader Schumer was what became the Chips and Science Act.
[00:19:17] You may remember that it actually started as the Endless Frontier Act, and I’m not sure how familiar your listeners are with Vannevar Bush and the origin story of the National Science Foundation, but it was essentially Vannevar Bush recognizing as we approached the end of World War II, that we had employed an incredible amount of scientists and researchers to do vital work that allowed us to win the war.
[00:19:38] And as the end of the war approached, there was sort of a realization that we had a lot of people that we were going to need to figure out how to employ. As the war machine turned down, we stood up the National Science Foundation and these researchers went all over the country and landed in universities from, as you said, Colorado to Wisconsin, to California, to Massachusetts, to Florida, to Texas, and have really been the feedstock for 80 years of American leadership and innovation in science.
[00:20:04] And so the way I always think about science funding is trend lines. Okay. If you look at the sort of trend line of US funding, and you look at the trend line of Chinese funding, we know that the trend lines have been going up quite dramatically. And the Chinese will continue to do that.
[00:20:19] They obviously don’t have an appropriations process that they have to work through, so that makes their system slightly less complicated. But at the same time, what we’ve essentially done is we’ve taken a weight on the line, on the chart, and hung it at the end of our American trend line.
[00:20:33] And I think we’re going to see it either plateau or go down in the coming years at the same time where we’re seeing the Chinese deciding they’re going to continue to grow their trend over the coming years. I think I heard 7 to 8% recently, year over year. Wow. And that is a dramatic amount of funding.
[00:20:45] The impact of this, I think in the immediate term, is not that bad. But if you think about trends and you evaluate this over an 18 month, five year, or 10 year window, I think we are in a lot of trouble here in the US without a real conversation about where this funding should go and how we should be using it.
[00:21:03] Leland: Let me just,
[00:21:04] Mike: Leland you want to pile on?
[00:21:05] Leland: Yeah, let me just piggyback on that for a second too because, there are a lot of political debates right now on, on what universities should and should not be doing and, and we don’t have, as a commission have a mandate to talk about that. One of the things we do have a mandate to talk about and we want to continue to stress is if there are issues that are important national security priorities,
[00:21:24] then let’s keep them as much as possible out of the political debate and focus on how to win those technologies. And so one of the things we’re doing when we look at this is trying to stress the importance of having an ecosystem, but also a strategy, an employment pipeline and, everything related to the ecosystem in terms of quantum and, and some of these other important priorities.
[00:21:43] You can talk about the role of universities, just like you can talk about the role of governments, but if we identify this, we can all come around to the idea that this is an urgent national security priority that shouldn’t become, you know, a, chit in some sort of a political face off.
[00:21:57] Then you start to look at this in a, in a more top down way and say, we’ve got to get this right and we can argue about how to get this right, but one thing we shouldn’t do is let this fall victim to politics. And that’s one of the things we’re hoping to elevate. The fact that we’re a bipartisan commission addressing this issue, I think is very helpful in this.
[00:22:14] But the more that we can stress that we’ve got to get everything in a row in terms of these critical, advanced technologies, that’s something we’re really hammering home right now.
[00:22:22] Veronica: Yes, yes. The National Quantum Initiative hasn’t been renewed quite yet, so hopefully this will help it get over the finish line once Congress is back in session.
[00:22:32] I was really glad to see that emphasis on, the future and research and also the emphasis on national security in terms of this technology, because in the current environment certainly making money and, and giving private companies room to run has been really important, but
[00:22:46] you can’t get away from the national security implications of quantum technology. Leland or Mike, do you have any thoughts on how we balance national security against some of these other forces?
[00:22:55]
[00:22:55] Mike: First of all, listen, we’re, we’re a market-based economy and it’s been one of the reasons that we’ve been successful.
[00:23:00] No matter how you think about a market economy, there is always a role for the government and the role for the government is in that early stage research in all that sort of what, what the Department of Defense would call 6.1 foundational research, 6.2 and 6.3, where you move up the application chain and there is a role for the government and it does involve the Department of Defense. It does involve the intelligence community, and it does involve the civilian elements of our government. Listen, NASA is going to be an incredible beneficiary of anything that happens in the quantum ecosystem.
[00:23:27] The Department of Energy will be a benefactor of anything that happens in the quantum ecosystem. The role of the government here is very clear and is making sure that all of the feedstock that you, that the private sector needs, whether it’s workforce material science or other sort of developments are funded.
[00:23:43] Funded robustly and at least in the view of the commission and that we think about this in a very strategic way. But you’re absolutely right. The national security implications for quantum are stark. And that’s why I said earlier, this is an area where first mover advantage is vital.
[00:23:57] Leland: And let me just again, piggyback onto Mike’s comments.
[00:23:59] Mike’s at 30,000 feet, let me take this to 40,000. This is a debate that sort of transcends quantum. It’s more about the role, the role of the government in national security vectors. China has a two-speed economy. On the one hand you’ve got this broadly slowing macro economy with a lot of problems and you’ve got weak domestic demand.
[00:24:17] You’ve got a property bubble deflating, lots of pressures on, on the broader Chinese economy. But within that economy you’ve got a subset of it, and that is Xi Jinping’s favorite economy. It is advanced technology, it’s advanced manufacturing. It’s things that have a national security nexus, military nexus, et cetera.
[00:24:35] Those parts of the economy are doing really well. They’re really well resourced. There’s enormous policy support, there’s enormous attention.
[00:24:43] What the emphasis is for Xi Jinping is this subset of the economy that’s focused on advanced technology. And I think when we’re looking at developing US China policy, and this is a me thing, this is not a commission thing, but this is one way to, one lens to look at this.
[00:24:55] When you’re looking at the economy, you could say, we can absolutely look at China’s economy and say we should be interacting. If the Chinese middle class wants to get richer across the country and import more US goods, fine.
[00:25:07] We have no problem with that. There’s no national security interest in that. But there are national security priorities we should be focusing on in the subset of the economy that has to do with the military and has to do with beating us technologically in the future. And I think that a lot of the debate in DC goes back and forth between saying, but aren’t we being a little bit too provocative about export controls?
[00:25:27] Aren’t we going to make the Chinese mad? Investment restrictions, outbound investment? Aren’t we going to make the Chinese mad? We have to really, we have to really watch ourselves. I think it’ll be much smoother with US China relations if we just. Let things be. Don’t provoke them. Don’t push. Here’s the problem with that.
[00:25:42] Right now, the Chinese technological machine is moving ahead at a thousand miles an hour. They’re a very, very sophisticated competitor of ours, and we’re going to wake up one day if we’re not careful, and China’s going to have cured cancer. Or China’s going to have broken quantum cryptography or, or, or China’s going to have done something with another one of these technologies.
[00:25:59] If we’re not doing things to particularly address and compete with those areas of the economy. Those areas of the economy that we’re worried about that have a national security nexus, that we’re going to wake up one day and China’s going to have beaten us in a lot of these technologies.
[00:26:11] And I think what comes from that is going to be a Sputnik moment. You’re going to have a moment where everybody wakes up and says, oh my goodness.
[00:26:17] So I think that if we’re not very targeted in what we do with China right now, meaning smart national security rules and restrictions related to technology related to investment flows, then we’re going to end up waking up one day. China will have beaten us in some of these technologies.
[00:26:32] It’s worth looking at the way that we approach the US technology competition. It’s not just run faster. We have to understand where China is brute forcing it, and we need to respond to that.
[00:26:42] Mike: I hate the term Sputnik moment. It was appropriate when we used it for Sputnik.
[00:26:47] Here’s what’s actually happening today though. DeepSeek was not a Sputnik moment. What China has been doing has been persistently investing in vital areas of strategic competition for the last 20 years.
[00:26:59] They are boiling the frog on the United States day in and day out in the innovation ecosystem, and we need to be clear-eyed about this. The areas where the commission made recommendations this year, especially quantum and biotech, I think, are areas where it is happening to us or it will happen very soon.
[00:27:17] It’s something that we need to be focused on like a laser. And from the commission’s perspective, it’s something that we’re going to keep beating the drum on and make sure that there’s a persistent drum beat because it is happening.
[00:27:27] Right in front of our eyes.
[00:27:29] Veronica: I was really glad to hear that the commission took a trip to actually talk to people in the quantum industry and get their perspective. It sounds like it was a very good education on the industry. Mike, what jumped out at you?
[00:27:41] What was your biggest takeaway from talking to the folks doing the work?
[00:27:45] Mike: The thing that I learned in Washington is I didn’t do a lot of learning. So you have to get out.
[00:27:49] You have to get out of DC to do that. The biggest takeaway for me was, we need to think about workforce issues and we need to think about workforce issues both in the academic sense, but also in the sort of vocational trade space when we think about the quantum industry.
[00:28:03] Thing two, and Leland touched on this, but I’ll just throw this back out there, which is we had one witness, I think he was from Rand, who said. Oh, well we, we haven’t picked a pathway yet to quantum, and that was the moment where I was like, oh my gosh. We’re pursuing an all-of-the-above approach right now on the various pathways to a quantum computer.
[00:28:18] I thought that was really helpful to put some meat on the bone on that topic and understand how these different communities are working, where the overlap is, and where there’s a lattice sort of work and where there’s unique and parallel ecosystems that are being built.
[00:28:31] That was really helpful to learn. And then the other thing just to see is the scale and scope of these things. Whether it was at Amazon or at Google, just seeing how much they have put into these programs to really advance this science was very exciting to see firsthand.
[00:28:45] And then honestly, just meeting and talking to people and having conversations everyone says there’s no dumb questions. I’m confident that Leland and I asked at least 50 each and we had a hell of a time doing it.
[00:28:54] So it was also a big takeaway for me.
[00:28:56] Leland: Yeah, and I, a lot of, so my takeaways overlap with Mike’s, but, I, one of the things that, that was, was, was remarkable. It just opened my eyes to, to the, to the way this field works is how multidisciplinary it was. When I was always thinking traditionally about quantum.
[00:29:10] I was thinking about a bunch of physicists in a room, poking a machine to make some qubit spin or merge or whatever, whatever it might be. But, seeing the importance of chemists and the importance of material science. The Chinese have remarkable developments in material science that we haven’t kept up with.
[00:29:27] So understanding how important other scientists, other engineers are in this process beyond just physicists was extremely important. Understanding that headline numbers, headline metrics are often deceiving. I mentioned earlier about the, the number of qubits. You could have as many qubits as you want, but if they’re not functioning the way they’re supposed to, then they’re not worth a damn.
[00:29:49] And that was why understanding error correction, really getting some really technical understanding of that was extremely helpful. And I think the number one takeaway was exactly what Mike said, it’s workforce. Caltech was very good to us.
[00:30:02] UCLA was good to us. UCLA spent an enormous amount of time just hammering home, just how important this educational foundation is for developing the quantum field. So it was about not just developing a bunch of super genius level intellects to, to do the last stage of this, but you need an entire ecosystem and you need to be training an entire ecosystem of people for this quantum field that is developing.
[00:30:25] Understanding out how much of that’s actually under the master’s level in graduate, how much of it’s an undergraduate degree, how much of it’s broader because it’s not just physicists. You need engineers, you need chemists. When we started to understand that, I think that the universities we spoke to did a particularly good job of just hammering home how important these workforce issues are.
[00:30:44] We need to develop a workforce of the future, and we can’t do that by snapping our fingers. We’re going to have to create the programs and also the incentives for creating the programs to have this thing. So we’re ready to go prime time on this technology as it develops.
[00:30:56] Veronica: Yes, yes. We have a client who has a plan to hire 100 people in the next year. And more than half of the positions don’t require a degree in physics. So I think that’s the other part that would bring everyone forward with the quantum revolution is the technicians in the welders and the people who are experienced in manufacturing.
[00:31:13] Mm-hmm. Yeah, I definitely, definitely see the workforce issue as well from, the very highest degrees down to on the job training. What were you going to say, Mike? Go ahead.
[00:31:22] Mike: Let me just do two things. One, workforce issues
[00:31:24] is one of these places where there is a very sort of important dance that happens between the government and the private sector. And it’s something as we think about the innovation economy that I think we’re going to have to spend more time focusing on, both from a sort of academic piece of it and the vocational piece of it.
[00:31:39] Mike: The other thing I was going to say, just going back to Leland’s chemistry thing. I think both of us one night when we were just reflecting on the day, talked about the importance of material science in this space. The other thing that really jumped out at me is it’s not just the materials in that sort of fridge with the quantum computer, it’s also
[00:31:54] the cords that go out and have a conversation with a non-quantum computer and there’s material science that has to happen in there. And just the layers and layers of science that are going to be required to fund and fuel this really vital technology is going to be a very interesting conversation in the coming years.
[00:32:12] Veronica: Certainly. Certainly. Quantum is very forward-looking. It’s very futuristic, but it’s also as both of you have described, has a lot of requirements now so we can get to that future. What investments do we need to make now to make sure that we maintain that edge?
[00:32:25] Leland I’ll ask you first.
[00:32:27] Leland: I think that the major investment is non-monetary. I think what we would like to see is that quantum be talked about in the same way that AI is talked about now. Five years ago, AI was not dominating every conversation about markets, about stocks, about geopolitical competition.
[00:32:43] But it is now we’re just starting the conversation on quantum. So I think if we’re doing our job, what we’d like to see is, is the conversation in Congress, outside of Congress, anything involving geopolitics or, or advanced technology to have quantum as, as one of the major starting points on that. Mike, you may have a monetary direction.
[00:33:03] Mike: No, listen, I have this thing, I always say Veronica, which people are probably sick of hearing, but these ecosystems don’t run on fairy dust. They run on money. So money is a vital piece of this. I would also say that whether it’s in bi, the sort of biotech space, the quantum space or anything that’s in a deep tech space, we always need to think about what are the tools.
[00:33:21] What are the fabrication requirements for this industry? And so I think if there’s things to invest in now it’s making sure, and the commission’s recommendation this year and last year touched on this, which is how do we think about the, the technology area and what tools do we have
[00:33:37] that we are using today? Do we have enough of them? Do we have the supply chain to maintain and manage them? I think the answer right now is no. I don’t even think the government’s done really an effective job to date of understanding what the tools are.
[00:33:49] So there’s a bit of a supply chain intelligence exercise that needs to go on here, just not to trigger Leland on supply chains again, but it is a, it is a critical area. And then once we have that mapped out and we need to do this urgently, we need to think about what are the requirements that we need right now, and how do we build them?
[00:34:06] Veronica: Yes. Yes. Are there signs of success that either of you are looking out for, if you can look ahead into the future oh, we did that right, or we won that argument, or we convinced people to, to make this investment, whether it’s in the workforce or funding research?
[00:34:20] Leland: Step one is, is that when we
[00:34:22] are speaking to members of Congress that they’re asking us about quantum, that they’re interested in quantum, that they see the relevance in their daily work to a future that involves US leadership of, of quantum across all these disciplines. So the first thing we need to do is what was done
[00:34:38] as we got smarter on this: we need to help make Congress smarter, make other policy makers smarter on this and get the focus right. And I think that’s the starting point. We need to be discussing quantum all the time, not as a futuristic technology, but as one that we need to be investing in yesterday.
[00:34:52] Mike: We haven’t talked much about quantum communications and quantum sensing over the conversation. Quantum compute is obviously the sexy thing that I think everybody believes is the closest and, and most available to us. The opportunities on quantum sensing are also something that are incredible.
[00:35:06] I don’t think I ever had a conversation with a single company about quantum sensing until I left the government. And that’s an area where I think we need to make sure we mature a sort of literacy of members in this space.
[00:35:17] Mike: It’s like, what is a quantum computer? What is a quantum sensor? What is a quantum communications device? And so making sure that people have language that is accessible to them who are, not physicists, not chemists,
[00:35:28] and how do you help them understand the import of, of the innovation sort of cycle in that industry is something else that the commission is hoping to do this year with the recommendations.
[00:35:37] Veronica: Yes, I would agree with both of you a hundred percent on both of those points. We definitely want to open up quantum to more people just in terms of understanding the business implications, but also workforce and investment and, and all of that.
[00:35:49] So, the report is out now. We will link to it in the show notes so you can find it and understand the scope and all the work that has gone into this report and its impact on politics and policy and business going forward. So Mike, thank you so much for joining me today. And Leland, I really appreciate your time too.
[00:36:04] We’ll look forward to talking with you in the future.
[00:36:07] Mike: Thanks for having us, Veronica. We’ve enjoyed it.
Host Veronica Combs is a quantum tech editor, writer and PR professional. She manages public relations for quantum computing and tech clients as an account manager with HKA Marketing Communications, the #1 agency in quantum tech PR. You can find them on X, formerly known as Twitter, @HKA_PR. Veronica joined HKA from TechRepublic, where she was a senior writer. She has covered technology, healthcare and business strategy for more than 10 years. If you’d like to be on the podcast yourself, you can reach her on LinkedIn, Veronica Combs, or you can go to the HKA website and share your suggestion via the Contact Us page.
November 19, 2025
