Explain Like I’m Five: Quantum from a Kid’s Point of View
Overview
Kids ask the best questions: simple, direct and sometimes painfully honest. Science communicator Katia Moskvitch, MPHIL, uses this approach in the podcast she hosts with her young son Kai. The co-hosts of “The Quantum Kid” channel Kai’s curiosity and enthusiasm for STEM into an educational show about quantum tech. Katia also shares her experiences working with IBM, the importance of effective science communication, and plans for her new company, Tesseract Quantum. Katia is also the director of communications at Quantum Machines.
00:00 Introduction to The Quantum Spin
00:34 Meet Katia Moskvitch: The Quantum Kid
00:51 Kai’s Journey into STEM
06:02 The Quantum Kid Podcast: Format and Guests
08:06 Challenges in Quantum Communication
13:08 Educational Initiatives in Quantum
17:14 Katia’s Experience with IBM and Quantum Communication
22:57 Advice for Quantum CEOs and Future Plans
24:32 Conclusion and Farewell
Katia Moskvitch is a theoretical physicist, science communicator, founder and president of Tesseract Quantum and director of communications at Quantum Machines. She also co-hosts The Quantum Kid podcast with her son Kai. Katia worked in science journalism for 20+ years of experience turning complex technologies into compelling stories and strategies as a business editor at WIRED and at IBM Research.
Today her work is all about explaining quantum technologies to a general audience, educating developers, CEOs, and the next generation about quantum, and helping to ensure the technology truly matters. She is passionate about quantum and focused on expanding access to quantum education — through university partnerships, public content, and corporate upskilling. She helps learners and leaders understand not just how quantum works, but why it matters.
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] Today I’m talking with Katia Moskvitch, who is the founder of “The Quantum Kid” podcast. She is a STEM communicator and a physicist. Thank you so much for joining us today, Katia.
[00:00:44] Katia: Of course, pleasure to be here.
[00:00:47] Veronica: I appreciate you taking time for another podcast since you’ve got your own production schedule that you’re running.
[00:00:51] You do The Quantum Kid with your son Kai, and he is a full co-host in the podcast, and it’s super fun to watch him ask questions with all of your guests. How did you get started with that project?
[00:01:04] Katia: Yeah, it just happened. He has been interested in STEM, in math and engineering and technology in general, ever since he was, I don’t know, about six years old, he started programming in Python all, all on his own. Actually, even before that, he was asking me to find him a coding school when he was five, and I was absolutely unable to find him a coding school at the age of five because nobody would even accept him at that time.
[00:01:29] And then, so he had to wait a little bit longer, and at six they finally accepted him into a coding camp first, and then like a proper after school class. So yeah, it kind of started from there. He started watching CrunchLabs on YouTube, which is this engineering show for kids. Then he begged me to subscribe him to CrunchLabs.
[00:01:51] So he actually gets the parcels in, in the mail and he asks for programmable Lego as well so that he could program it on his computer. And then he asked for a 3D printer. So anyway, all of this kind of over the past three years and got me thinking, you know, maybe we could channel all that curiosity into something more and like kind of open it up for other people as well because he’s asking all these questions and I can answer them to some extent, but sometimes his questions are quite complicated. And I’ve been talking about quantum quite a lot at home.
[00:02:23] And so he started asking about quantum computing too. And then I thought, okay, since I work in that area, why don’t I ask him whether he would like to have a show together. And he said
[00:02:35] absolutely. So he was super thrilled because he loves YouTube. He is a chatterbox anyway, he talks a lot all the time.
[00:02:42] So we tried it out and he was a little bit shy at first because of course he doesn’t know those grownups that pop up on the screen. And he’s not used to virtual meetings or anything like that. But it worked out fine. The first two guests were actually his uncle, my brother.
[00:02:59] And so that made it easier. And the second guest was on the same show. It was a really, really lovely professor at ETH Zurich University who just explained everything in a very engaging manner, and Kai was super interested and that particular episode proved to be the most popular one to date.
[00:03:18] We got something like 50,000 plus views and I don’t know, 50,000 subscribers just from that one episode. And it just shows if the person explains such complex science in a very engaging way, and it’s interesting and accessible to even nine year olds, and clearly also to the wider world.
[00:03:39] And Kai loves it. He was like, oh, I’m a YouTube influencer now.
[00:03:42] Veronica: Every kid’s dream.
[00:03:44] Katia: really. Exactly. So he’s happy.
[00:03:46] Veronica: Yeah, you can tell that he is really into it. I mean, you can’t fake enthusiasm and he’s, his questions are so good and you describe him this way. Kai asked questions in a way, only a kid can, without overthinking it and without the worry of having to look smart and knowledgeable.
[00:04:03] And he reminded me, as I was watching the podcast and listening to him converse with your guests, of that person in the meeting who, everyone’s wanting to ask this one question, but no one is willing to ask it. But then someone finally gets the courage to just say, well, what does this mean?
[00:04:16] Or why are we doing it this way? So, how do you prepare for an episode with him? Do you let him pick the topics or is it a collaboration?
[00:04:23] Katia: It depends. For example, the first two topics, I suggested them, simply because he is very new to quantum, right? And so for him, even the word optimization, I had to explain what optimization is.
[00:04:38] And manufacturing is the same, right? He didn’t know what manufacturing meant. That’s our second topic. So I had to explain it, whatever is being made at factories. Like you can put it in plain English, right? And then he gets it. But then he comes up with questions as we go along and I mean the only bit of preparation that is needed really, actually two bits.
[00:04:55] One, we usually rehearse the intro a little bit because that has to be engaging and we usually get it from the second or third take. And secondly, I typically need to give super clear instructions to the guests because they’re, even though there is a kid in front of them on the screen, they really need to be in the mindset that they’re talking to a child and shouldn’t forget that that’s a small child listening to them, because otherwise he’ll just drift off and he won’t be engaged or, or listening or asking more questions.
[00:05:26] So then what’s the point? Right? But to some extent they all engage with him specifically. So they address him and they talk to him. And then of course, if they’re talking to him and they’re explaining it to him, then he’s much more keen to continue asking questions and actually listening and understanding.
[00:05:42] Veronica: Yeah, you could tell. I think it was, maybe it was that first episode where you were talking about, I think space and you could tell he had worked out this scenario of, I have a spaceship and I want us to do this, and it’s going to land here and it’s going to collect this data.
[00:05:54] And you could tell that he’s building products and prototypes in his mind, obviously, as he goes along.
[00:06:01] Katia: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:06:02] Veronica: So the format of the show is really compelling. I found I think, when you say the quantum kid, you think, oh, it’s going to be over here in the States or Sesame Street, which is, the letter of the day, the number of the day and things like that.
[00:06:12] But each show you have a quantum expert and a business leader. And as you mentioned, you’re talking about complex topics, not just physics, but manufacturing and production. Your own professional network seems to be pretty deep and you’ve found pretty, pretty cool people to talk with. How do you pick your guests?
[00:06:30] Katia: The idea of the podcast is to have a quantum expert, and that could be either somebody, a professor from academia or somebody from the industry, a researcher from the industry like IBM or Google, doesn’t matter, as long as they know the topic, and I tend to research a little bit. Either I know that they’re a good speaker or they’ve, had presentations before that are online and I can see that they could be really, really great. Of course we try to get fairly well-known people. For example, one of our next shows, we’re going to have Peter Shor with us, so he’s
[00:07:05] Veronica: oh my gosh. Wow.
[00:07:07] Katia: A really huge name in quantum computing and I’m really thrilled that he agreed to be on the show. So, hopefully that will go well, and will be interesting. In terms of the second guest business leader, that is really more difficult actually, because my network is in, in quantum, and here we need to get somebody
[00:07:28] from a field where quantum is expected to make quite a huge impact, but not necessarily somebody who’s already working with quantum because the idea of the show is that that person, the second person, is also asking questions and is also kind of learning from the quantum experts through the answers that the quantum expert is giving to a child.
[00:07:51] Because that’s kind of a lot more accessible and easier to understand for that particular person on the line, plus hopefully to all the other business leaders trying to learn about the benefits of quantum computing for this particular industry field. So that is not easy for a variety of reasons because people who are not in quantum, it’s notoriously difficult to get them excited,
[00:08:15] get them to understand why quantum computing would be of use to them. So we got my brother on the line and he is super far from quantum computing, but he’s very excited about innovation in general. He’s a patent lawyer and so one would think that for a patent lawyer, quantum computing wouldn’t be a thing at all, but actually it will impact that as well.
[00:08:37] And he was asking questions like, for example, he likes to invest in promising technologies. Would quantum computing be something that he could invest in already today? And so our guest then answered those questions, so that was great.
[00:08:53] We spoke to a guy, an owner of quite a large baking business in Eastern Europe and he’s got several factories. So one might think that quantum computing definitely will be of use to his business because of the supply chain optimization and picking the right ingredients or playing with different ingredients and so on.
[00:09:16] So there are. Definitely benefits that one may think of, but that particular person just said, no, I don’t think it’s for me, it’s definitely not something I would consider even talking about. So that discussion went nowhere and we had to look for different guests. So it’s not so easy to find people right now who are outside of my immediate quantum bubble where everybody’s super excited and everybody goes to the same conference and everybody knows everybody. But once you’re out of that bubble and like even at my kids’ parents meetings at schools, people are professionals. People are super clever and knowledgeable, but they just don’t know the first thing about quantum.
[00:09:56] Not yet.
[00:09:56] Veronica: Yes. We found too that, there is some that, some hesitancy. There is the, there’s only a small group of people outside of quantum, as you said, that know about the technology or that are willing to talk about it. But even the ones doing some experimenting seem a little hesitant.
[00:10:09] And I’m hoping that all this money that’s flowing into the industry and this higher profile, maybe will help more people be willing to learn about it and talk about it. Yeah, sure. But there’s so much going on in Europe right now. You’re based in Zurich, is that right?
[00:10:22] Katia: That’s right.
[00:10:23] Veronica: I’ve talked to some folks from QuantumBasel and the University of Basel and there’s just so many startups all over the place.
[00:10:30]
[00:10:30] Veronica: So you are a STEM communicator, as I mentioned, and you’ve worked for Wired Magazine.
[00:10:34] You worked for IBM, I think you worked for the World Economic Forum for a little while. So you are obviously a practiced communicator and know how to explain complex topics. What are the communications best practices that you’ve learned over the years?
[00:10:48] Katia: Well, in journalism what they teach you from the beginning is you have to know how to ask questions and you have to show the utmost respect to whoever you’re talking to, that if you don’t understand the question.
[00:11:04] Then you should just ask the question again and again in different ways, in subtle ways, so that you finally get what the answer is. Because especially in science it’s super important. If I don’t understand the explanation, how, even if I record it, how am I going to explain it to my audience? So I need to be
[00:11:23] clear and the explanation should be super, free of jargon even for me at that first instance of just recording the interview. So I ask the question a little bit differently and then a little bit differently until I finally get it, but in a way so that the person doesn’t feel like I’m a dumb, dumb sitting in front of them, and why am I wasting their time?
[00:11:44] So that would probably be the number one thing.
[00:11:47] Yeah, that’s a good skill to have.
[00:11:49] Veronica: Yes.
[00:11:49] So, “The Quantum Kid” podcast is certainly educational for everyone and it’s a fun format. It’s very dynamic. You have your son there asking really good questions. We are always encouraging here at the agency, at HKA Marketing Communications, we’re always encouraging companies to do educational content because the learning curve can be steep for quantum and there’s just not a lot out there comparing modalities, explaining some of the basic concepts.
[00:12:16] Have you had any luck persuading companies that educational content is valuable at this point in the industry?
[00:12:24] Katia: Are you talking about quantum companies or just any companies trying to learn quantum?
[00:12:30] Veronica: Any companies trying to explain a difficult topic?
[00:12:33] Katia: When we talk about quantum computing hardware developers, there are several companies I would say several.
[00:12:41] I would say, a few, probably, that do have educational content, which is pretty good. IBM is probably number one in that they have really good educational content in quantum. Then there are a few others like IonQ. They also have really nice documentation. There’s Google of course. And a few others.
[00:12:58] Quantinuum has some, but yeah, not everybody has good educational content for sure. And I agree with you that in terms of resources, there should be way more. So this is actually why, for example, me personally when I started the podcast, that’s just the first stepping stone to a larger educational initiative.
[00:13:18] The second thing that we are launching right now will be educational webinars on how to program a quantum computer. That’s part of our kind of broader educational initiative called Tesseract Quantum.
[00:13:30] And the webinars will also be monthly and for now hosted on the same YouTube channel where we have The Quantum Kid. And we’ll go from there because I agree with you that there is just not much out there and I’m talking to universities. I’m also thinking how to, probably in the future even create, better educational material like that, maybe even courses or something, because I think we definitely need online courses for professionals that wouldn’t be a fullblown, master’s or PhD degree, where you would have to spend, two years, three years, four years of your life full time. If you’re like 30, 40, 50 years old and you would like to dive deeper into quantum, you definitely don’t want to spend four years of your life again and then go back to university. So what we need is those flexible online courses that you can just do over six months or so but not every day. For instance, I did a course at LSC, London School of Economics, on management and leadership.
[00:14:29] And there are plenty of courses like that and that’s great. So I think we need to do something similar in quantum that doesn’t exist yet. There are a few courses for professionals available, MIT xPRO offers a course and, but again, it’s only four weeks, so that one is actually, probably better than others, but a few other courses I’ve come across, they’re all either two days long or one week long.
[00:14:51] What can you possibly learn? You cannot become a quantum algorithm designer, for example in a week, right? So you need something more substantial. And I think we have a long way to go, but one way to achieve it would be to get policy makers to do something on a national strategy level.
[00:15:08] And then they could change the high school curricula, introduce quantum early. They could incentivize companies to actually do what you just mentioned. Actually think about their workforce development and upskilling much more carefully. But without governments stepping in and doing something I think it’ll be very difficult.
[00:15:27] Veronica: And I think there’s that end of the educational spectrum, but there’s also just catching people’s attention. And that’s why The Quantum Kid is such a great addition to the podcast world because people are so overloaded with information and you need a hook to
[00:15:41] help them understand how powerful quantum hopefully will be and just how fascinating the subject is and how many people are working on it around the world. So, hopefully The Quantum Kid podcast could be that initial hook and then draw them into the more specific educational projects like you mentioned.
[00:15:58] Katia: If you want to see Kai, I can get him here as well.
[00:16:03] Veronica: Oh yeah, sure. It’d be great.
[00:16:03] [00:16:04] Hello. Hello, Kai. It’s very nice to meet you, podcast host. You ask really good questions. I have to say. I’ve been asking questions for a job for a long time, and you’re very good at it.
[00:16:15] Kai: Thank you.
[00:16:16] Veronica: Is it fun to do with your mom most of the time?
[00:16:19] Kai: Yeah.
[00:16:23] Katia: Why quantum? Quantum? Why do you like it?
[00:16:26] Kai: It does because it can do so many things.
[00:16:31] Katia: Do stuff fast.
[00:16:32] Kai: Do stuff fast.
[00:16:34] Veronica: And you’re coding, right? Yeah. Python is the language to know, man, you’re getting a jump on everybody. I was talking to a person who hires quantum engineers or mechanical engineers for a quantum company and she said, Python, Rust, C++,
[00:16:49] those are the languages to know. So getting a jump on things.
[00:16:52] Katia: Yeah.
[00:16:53] Veronica: Thank you for saying hi. I have kids myself and I think it’s very cool that you’re doing this with your mom. Thanks for saying hi. I appreciate it.
[00:16:59] Kai: Okay. Thank you. Bye bye.
[00:17:04] Veronica: My kids are 16 and 21, so I miss the 9-year-old days.
[00:17:08] Katia: Oh yeah. It’s not always that cute, huh?
[00:17:10] Veronica: Yeah. This is true. Those days have faded. So, you were the head of communications in Europe for IBM Research and you’re an IBM Quantum Ambassador. What was it like to work with such a big company doing such amazing work in quantum?
[00:17:25] Katia: Yeah, it was great. My work was not fully on quantum all the time, because communications, of course, especially at IBM, it’s also AI. I worked at IBM Research, it was very exciting because it was all about the new research that is coming out of the lab. And we had to talk about it to the media and do media events and amplify it and, and so on and so forth.
[00:17:49] But specifically quantum was super exciting. We had a lot of really interesting projects like, launching the first European data center, for example, in Germany and just working in general with super smart quantum researchers and talking to them, getting the story out, understanding how to tell that story to a wider audience through log writing or even, while talking to the media.
[00:18:12] So that was, that was great. IBM is doing some really great stuff and I am really pleased that they are pushing ahead with the milestones in quantum computing. And I think it takes a lot of self-awareness and trust in yourself and in your company, your team to publicly declare the roadmap.
[00:18:32] And IBM has done it. And they’re hitting those milestones pretty consistently on the quantum roadmap. They said that they’re going to achieve quantum advantage by 2029, I believe. And so that’s like four years from now. So it’s very, very soon. And yeah, that’s super exciting.
[00:18:49] Veronica: Yes, I do really like their roadmap because they do spell things out and set goals, but then they also have an asterisk too, where we’re still working on this. It’s a way to be sort of honest about the challenges. It’s not easy to, build these machines and but it is good to, to get a date out there and to
[00:19:06] show your work. I use that roadmap a lot when talking with clients in terms of: you don’t want too much detail, but you want enough and you want to look ambitious, but not impossible.
[00:19:15] So one other communication challenge that we have a lot is getting people to think beyond just words. Obviously words are very important. and you need to, when you’re writing a scientific paper, you have to be precise and, explain and explain your work.
[00:19:29] But sometimes you do need something more informal, a blog post or a podcast. Did you have much experience in getting people to try a new format? It’s a little intimidating to get in front of the camera. Was that part of your work at IBM getting people to tell their stories in different ways?
[00:19:44] Katia: We usually knew who would be more comfortable on camera or for example, presenting in front of journalists for say, a media event or something like that. So there is also media training is very important and I think anyone can really get media trained if they really want to.
[00:20:00] Leadership is usually more experienced than researchers. But sometimes researchers also need to be out there a little bit more. One example that stands out is about a very specific researcher whom I met when I started working at IBM.
[00:20:15] And. I knew that whenever he would give a talk, he would give super technical talks. And so whenever we would have media coming to the lab, his talks also would tend to be a little bit more on the technical side, simply because he was so used to it.
[00:20:31] But journalists, of course, very often, can be completely clueless, right? Because they may be covering business and to them the actual underlying science in quantum is something that they don’t normally talk about because they just talk about the business side, or, they may cover policy. It’s difficult for them to understand super technical topics and so on.
[00:20:50] So that particular person, it was difficult to get him to change the way he was presenting. But once he had a conversation with my kid, my older son, who is now 17, and at the time he was I think 11 or 12, and he had one of those, we had one of those bring your kid to work days. He came with me and he loves math, so he really wanted to talk to a researcher about mathematics and career in mathematics. And so I thought about this guy, so I asked, would you please sit down with my son over lunch for half an hour?
[00:21:20] And talk to him because yeah, he wants to know what career path to choose in the future. He loves maths, but he’s not sure. And the guy said, yeah, of course. And then I went to get a coffee or something and I’m coming back five minutes later, and I see them talking to each other.
[00:21:35] My older son, he’s the complete opposite from Kai. He’s actually more of an introvert. He doesn’t engage so easily with people, not straight away anyway, and he’s there sitting with this guy, with this researcher, and the researcher is talking to him about complex mathematics in such an engaging way that my kid is like all, his face lit up, he was asking questions, he was interested.
[00:21:58] It was unbelievable. And so both of them really enjoyed it, and it continued for way more than half an hour. After that I spoke to the researcher and I said, look, could you maybe use some of that enthusiasm in how you talk to my son when you talk to journalists? Because they are just on the same level as my kid here.
[00:22:18] And he thought about it and he was like, oh yeah, that’s a good idea. And so he changed the way he was approaching presentations whenever media would be around, and his presentations naturally became super different from before. Wow. And that was like, it wasn’t even media training, right?
[00:22:34] It was just kind of getting him to understand and to relate to specific experiences that he lived through. And it really, really worked. So I think it can work with anybody really.
[00:22:44] Veronica: Wow, that’s a great story. So your kids have been helping scientists communicate for, for several years now in format,
[00:22:51] Katia: I guess.
[00:22:52] I guess so. I never thought about connecting these to episodes, but yeah, I guess you’re right.
[00:22:57] Veronica: Do you have any advice for quantum CEOs who want to raise the profile of their company and get more people aware of their work?
[00:23:03] Katia: Of course communications and marketing, these are the two things that are super important, but it depends how you do them.
[00:23:10] I think in marketing one shouldn’t over hype and only talk about their own product. I think we are still at the stage in quantum computing where yes, it’s about the business, it’s about selling products for sure. But if we want the world to be ready for quantum advantage specifically, then we need to also talk about education and as you said, spark that curiosity as well.
[00:23:33] So I think that should be one big part of the outreach agenda of companies. So to go a little bit beyond just selling the product, but actually exciting people about quantum and teaching them how to use, how to get those quantum computing skills, and just understanding what it is all about, understanding the benefits.
[00:23:54] Veronica: So you said you have Tesseract Quantum coming up a new show on your YouTube channel and the podcast is brand new, but you’ve already got lots of subscribers, so that’s amazing.
[00:24:04] And do you do two a month or one a month? Is that your schedule? Do you have that sorted out yet?
[00:24:09] Katia: For now, we do one a month simply because I don’t want to overload Kai. I don’t think he would be super happy to do two a month. That’s why we are starting the webinars. And the webinars will be kind of in addition to, to the podcast.
[00:24:22] And that will be the second thing per month.
[00:24:25] Veronica: Yes. Well, It’s a lot of work to put a show together and to, to make it good and so yeah, gotta pace yourself for sure.
[00:24:31] Katia: Absolutely.
[00:24:32] Veronica: Well, thank you so much for talking with us today. Your show is “The Quantum Kid” and you and your son Kai host it, and we will certainly join your subscribers and encourage all of our listeners to do the same. So thanks so much for your time today.
[00:24:45] Katia: Great. All right. Well, Thank you.
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.
January 13, 2026
