companies find profit in going green. a deep dive into quantum computing, including a computer you can use right now. and "the wall street journal's" christopher nims shows us how amazon moves product from factory to your front door. that's this week on "press: here." good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. we're going to start the day talking about quantum computing. and as you may know, a regular computer uses simple ones and zeros in a bit. put enough of those together, and you can calculate. a quantum computer uses bits that thanks to some complicated science, could be a one and a zero simultaneously.

now, i will admit, if you are a regular viewer of "press: here," you know my favorite explanation of quantum computing comes from justin trudeau. yes, the prime minister of canada. who a reporter assumed had no idea what quantum computing was. >> very simply, normal computers work by -- no, no, no, don't interrupt me. when you walk out of here, you will know more -- no, some of you will know far less about quantum computing, but most of you -- normal computers work, either there's power going through a wire or not, it's a one or a zero. they're binary systems. what quantum states allow for is much more complex information to be encoded into a single bit. regular computer bit is either a one or a zero, on or off. a quantum state can be much more complex than that, because as we know, things can be both particle and wave at the same time and the uncertainty around quantum states allows us to

encode more information into a much smaller computer. so that's what's exciting about quantum computing. >> i will admit, i've got to that well several times. it's one of my favorite sound bites. let's bring in my first guest of the morning, it's peter chapman, the ceo of quantum computing company ieq. it's tough to follow justin trudeau, but let's do your best. let's start with the fact that none of this is theoretical. not only have you, but a number of companies have quantum computers today, right? >> that is indeed correct. and thanks for having me. you can find ionq quantum computers up on the cloud at microsoft's azure or google's gcp, or on amazon 8 ios. >> so i can think of that as back decades ago when you rented time on a frame, anyone can rent time on quantum computer?

>> if you have a credit card, you can run the whole world version of quantum. >> that's extraordinary. let's say i'm a pretty good coder. do i know a whole new set of code to run things on a quantum computer? >> if you wanted to create a really big program, you would. however, each of the cloud providers provides jupiter networks. so you can kind of play around with. which are usually kind of textbook examples in quantum. so you can follow along with those. >> i like your example of hello world. using the most powerful computers in the world to spit out print, hello, world. that would be awesome. what would i actually do with it? because there are very, very fast computers out there that are simulating atomic weapons and things, that are running on regular silicon with regular ones and zeros. what would i need a quantum computer to do? >> we tend to think of our computers as all-powerful. certainly, when i started in the

computer business 40 years ago, you know, they started off small and it seems amazing what progress we've made with more. however, there's a set of problems today that today's classical computers will just never be able to solve. even if we allowed moore's law to go for a thousand years, a million years, it just wouldn't matter. so these tend to be problems where the complexity goes exponential. one of those areas is in chemistry, the natural world. it turns out that our computers today are digital. the natural world is quantum mechanical. so a digital computer has a hell of a time actually modeling what happens in the chemistry. but with the quantum computer that's big enough, we could model these things and be able to unlock the secrets of nature. >> and that's my next question, which is, what's big enough? you've made a number of these things. the one that you have online has

11 qbits, which is incredibly powerful, but add one more qbit and it's that much more powerful. how big does my quantum computer need to be km. >> most people think at roughly 70 qbits you can take on the world's largest super computers or the cloud itself for many of these kinds of applications. as you say, you add one more qbit and it's double the number of super computers. >> you go from 70 to 71, you are talking about a computer so powerful that the world has never seen such a thing. does that put into danger things like encryption and banking and things that a computer can try to crack those codes that fast? >> yeah, on one of the -- today, our encryption uses elliptic curve or rsa and it takes a long

time to break the key. i think rsa corporation came out and said it would take 300 trillion years for today's fastest super computers to praek one email. but a quantum computer that would be sufficiently large might do it in just a few seconds. and it's that difference in computational power that we're talking about. now, the good news is that you need a lot of qbits to break encryption. so no one should -- there shouldn't be any runs on the bank this afternoon. >> not this afternoon. >> although you are ahead of zhul. i mean, you announced that you had actually gotten a year or so ahead of schedule on some of your progress. >> that's right. and that is the concern. is that maybe quantum computers actually come faster than anyone thinks. and are we really ready for it in our digital lives? because we rely on encryption, from protecting our bank

accounts to protecting nuclear weapons, presumably. >> so would a quantum computer making an encryption key be any better than a regular computer making an encryption key? >> there's quantum encryption, which there are algorithms that quantum computers can't hack or certainly make it difficult to do it. this is kind of like one of those y2k kind of issues. we just need to replace the old code with some new code to make sure we're safe with quantum computers. >> you used to work with amazon. you are that reason. i want you to look at your tv screen. thits the guy who made your life that much possible. but how do you go from that to quantum computing? >> well one of the problems in logistics is the traveling

salesman problem. you might remember this from high school, which is, what is the optimal route for a driver to go? do you go to house "a" or "b" first? >> and that is actually a really big computational problem. and so what excited me is quantum is one of those things that might be able to solve that problem, as well. a single delivery driver for somebody like u.p.s. or fedex delivers to 120 addresses every day. and if you remember your high school math, the common tutorial is that number minus one factorial. so 119 factorial is the number of possible routes, which is a number that has 200 digits to it. so there's that many combinations with just 120 delivery addresses. if you wanted to optimize a delivery system for an entire city, the number of possible routes would be more than the

number of atoms in the universe. and this is the kind of problems where quantum computers could suddenly start to help. >> peter chapman, thank you so much for joining us. let's keep this amazon theme going. up next, "the wall street journal's" christopher mens is going to help us trace a product from its origins in a factory in asia to delivery at your front door, when "press: here" continues.

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good morning, everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. you recognize this object. it's a usb charger. you probably have several of these in your junk drawer, which is where this one came from. the path from my junk drawer, it went from a factory to a boat to a plane to an amazon warehouse to my front doorstep and probably just took a couple of days to do most of that. when you think about it, it's really a miracle. and christopher mims has thought about it. "the wall street journal" reporter and columnist has written a book called arriving today, where he examines the path of products from asian factory to our front doorstep. and christopher, you picked the usb charger as that object. you actually followed one of these things across the globe and the global economy. why'd you pick a usb charger? >> i picked a usb charger, it's kind of the transistor radio of

our day, if you think about back in the '60s when those were being made, it's the simplest technology, if you can produce that, you can produce a whole heck of a lot of different things. where these charges are made in vietnam and all sorts of southeast asia, that's the same place where most smartphones are made, air pods, most of the gadgets that we rely on, especially in our work-from-home air, they all come from there, not so much from china, believe it or not. >> ands the truly miraculous when we really stop and think about it. you wrote, explain how tapping a button on your phone yields pretty much any consumer good you could want at your doorstep within 24 hours also necessitates explaining how all of the innovations that made it possible come together in a planetary-scale clockwork mechanism whose behavior is impossible to understand without building it up from its smallest constituent parts. it is amazing the number of things that have to work right and work well.

and that have only really been developed in the last few years to have something arrive today on my doorstep. >> yeah. what i came to understand was, you know, if you take all of the biggest, most important innovations of the past 100 years, from automobile, all the way to ai, it takes every single one of those in order to get you that thing, whatever you ordered, the next day, or within two days. and it's because every part of the supply chain has been so transformed in the past ten years, you know, from the way that ports work and the nature of ships and shipping, to trucking, which has changed a surprising amount, and of course amazon. we've all seen hopefully the video from inside amazon warehouses, all of the robots that are involved. there's a tremt amount of automation that has come into this whole space that wasn't there 10, 20 years ago. it used to be, you only saw industrial robots in factories. now you see them all over the supply chain, especially in those warehouses. >> take me back to the absolute origins of the device that you

tracked. i mean, i can picture the big shipping -- the big ships that come into the oakland harbor or the trucks that take it to the amazon warehouse. what i have trouble picturing is the absolute genesis of this. is it a tiny little building? is it a major plant? >> yeah. well, you know, to quote carl sagan, if you want to talk about how to make an apple pie from scratch, you have to describe the beginning of the universe. we won't go back that far. but the absolute origin of that tiny device is absolutely ultrapure quarters sand in appalachia which goes around the world on a journey to be turned into a microchip. we're only picking it up at the mudd point, really, and that's the point where all of those little parts are transformed into a challenger or smartphone or air pods or whatever. and that happens in smallish factor in vietnam, in this case, because so much of those

factories have been built out. some of them are duplicates about the origin in china. people were worried, what if there was a trade war. now they're just worried about, how do we get things out of china because of all of the shipping blockages because ports get shut down because of covid. that's the absolute origin. then it gets put into a carboard box, gets trucked to a shipping container, it's picked up by a miniature crane and put on a barge, believe it or not. that barge takes all of those objects downriver on an eight-hour journey to a giant port that faces the ocean and there it's put on to a giant containerized ship. these things are literally as big as the empire state building lady on its side and they can carry 10,000 shipping containers apiece. >> i always wonder when i see a kids meal toy at mcdonald's or some novelty item, you know, the

chotskis you see around, some guy is probably making this thinking, i don't even know what this is. some guy is making the chattering teeth you wind up and has got to be wondering, what is this and what am i doing? >> i happen to live in baltimore, they used to make everything from bottle caps to umbrellas. now all of that gets made in asia. it's the workshop of the world. it doesn't matter where you live outside of asia or southeast asia, that's where all of that stuff pretty much gets made. >> you mentioned covid. i think as i mentioned, the miracle of hitting a button on our phone and getting something very quickly. we did begin to appreciate that with covid. >> yes, because we had so many supply chain difficulties. which, by the way, do your christmas shopping early this year. it's only going to hit us again. right now, there are 60

container ships in a queue at the long beach of los angeles. that is totally unprecedented. they're doing record volume through that port every month and yet they have 60 in a line. normally there's maybe three queued up. when i went to the port of los angeles, there were three or four waiting at anchor to get a berth. and every single one of those ships needs thousands of containers pulled off of it. there are a ton of things that we are not going to be able to get, because there's just not enough capacity in our global supply chains right now, largely because of covid. >> you write, we're all living inside a factory. what did you mean by that? >> in the old days, things, raw materials went into a factory and the goods got shipped to you and maybe the factory was in the same country you were in. but now, especially with ecommerce and delivery to your door, it's really like, we are at the end of the conveyer belt. you know, which starts with raw materials, and just kind of ping-pongs across the world, as different places that specialize in different types of manufacturing, build up the

components of whatever object we're going to buy. if you buy a smartphone, there are 300 different components in that smartphone. every single one of those components has a supply chain that's so complicated that it cease the goods that go into it, just crisscrossing the world. and then it comes to you and you're at the end, you're the consumer, your demand for that object has been predicted in advance. that's why you can get it the next day. it took two months for it to come to you from across the ocean. >> but i only asked for it yesterday and it arrives today. >> because predictive algorithms, machine learning, ai, as we call it, predicted that you will want that object. >> and they were right. that's a miracle, indeed. >> christopher mims is the author of "arriving today." thank you for being here with us and "press: here" will be right back.

welcome back to "press: here." last week, ford announced 40% of its new cars will be electric by 2020. to get there, it's going to invest billions of dollars and hire more than 11,000 people. now, whether that's because ford wants to be green or is taken aback by the fact that investors value tesla, a much, much smaller company, at 13 times ford's value, only the board at ford knows. venture capitalist todd klein has been thinking a lot about green lately. both the money and the environment. todd is a partner at revolution

growth. he's been involved in financing of more than 150 companies. writing recently in an op-ed in tech crunch, quote, even without regulation as a stick, consumer demand is now serving as a kor carrot to increase sustainability and impact company's jpds. and you're talking about more than just a green company, right, todd? there are companies like tesla, impossible foods that we would define as green companies. but you mean all companies going green? >> that's right. it's an agenda that pretty much every company is adopting, and it extends well beyond those that originally have a mission or a product that is necessarily sustainable, but it's far broader than that. >> but there are companies like stripe, for instance. they process credit cards. how does stripe grow green other than, you know, recyclable coffee cups or what not in the office. >> well, yes, they can do things inside their own operations,

which are environmentally responsible. but a lot of the decision making that occurs around sustainability in organizations is cultural, and it has to do with, for example, the partners that you work with. you have choices now in the energy you buy. does it come from sustainable sources? and culturally, speaking to those things, attracting employees that support them and choosing your partners carefully is an element of it. >> in fact, you wrote in your supply chain, quote, in a diagram of your partnerships and supplier relationships was printed on the front page of the "new york times," would you be comfortable with what it showed the world? you know, you wouldn't have thought, well, maybe a few years ago, we would have thought suppliers as far as the way they treated workers, but now employees and customers actually really care how the supply chain works for a major company and whether all of those partners are green. >> that's true. and i don't know if you've had this experience or not, but a lot of us who have been

homebound during the pandemic have ordered many things to our houses that otherwise we might have gone to the store to purchase. that includes hard goods and food and medicines and other things. and for the first time, people are starting to notice the packaging that their food comes in. and they are aware, you know, when they see those boxes stacking up, that there is a consequence for these decisions. and so it's influencing the way consumers are thinking about their product. they're thinking about products holistically. it's not just any organic food that's delivered to my home, but what form does it arrive in and what are the consequences for the form it arrives in. >> a lot of companies can get feedback. a lot of green policies start at the consumer level and work their way up to the company. >> that's right. and when we think about investing, part of the decision process we go through is how talented is the prospective company at listening to their

consumers? do they have the tools in place to survey them, to identify their preferences, to do a/b testing on the types of relationships that they want to develop with their consumers. and does it influence the way those consumers buy? we think a lot about that as investors and we think very much about how in tune a company is with its customer base. and how responsive they are to those needs. >> and how transparent. companies like apple will issue not only a diversity report, but also a sustainability report. and sometimes, you know, it's not complimentary. there are parts in which an apple sustainability report will admit, you know what, we're still depending on this mineral or this way of mining and we're trying our best. >> yeah, i think companies that recognize what the challenges are and have set goals they're working towards and communicating their progress on those goals get a lot of credit for that. the expectations, of course, are

high in them. and a company like apple with its scale and wealth, the expectations are necessarily higher than perhaps they might be on a start-up. but nevertheless, in all cases, being transparent about it, showing your process, and also, frankly, talking about what the challenges are and how you're trying to innovate your way towards these goals is crucial. >> now, it's best to start out early, because you wrote once in the harvard business review, and this was a few years ago, i understand if you can't totally recall it. but you wrote, start-up founders tend to be bad at changing their own companies. this is something that you need to -- you can't pivot to sustainability. >> i think it is much harder. and we've talked about partners a moment ago. so for example, let's say you've got a start-up, you've got a key supplier. and it turns out that supplier is supplying you with the material that you harvest through very unsustainable or environmentally unfriendly practices. yet you've built that into your business model and your cost

structure. changing that on the fly once you realize that, in fact, it's not consistent with your values, with your employee's values or with your customer values, that gets much harder once you're embedded in that relationship. >> now, if you were faced with two investment opportunities, one that had bigger growth, bigger roi, the other more dedicated to green, but otherwise were identical, and i realize this is a theoretical, fictional idea, would you really pick the one that was less profitable. >> i think what we would spend a lot of time determining is whether we could intervate our way forward into one that had a greater priority toward green. in other words, these are not static things. and earlier in my career, i worked for a firm that focused in the environmental area. and i commissioned a survey, a national survey to ask one question. the question was, all other things being equal, how much

more would you be willing to pay if you knew your power came from renewable sources. back then, the answer was around 4%. i think the number is higher now, probably closer to 8 to 10%. but scott, this notion that people will self-tax to a certain degree to pay more for something that, in fact is more environmentally friendly has its limits. so our answer to that question ultimately, scott, is not to try and invest in the company that's more environmentally friendly and then chain a customer into using it. our job as investors and entrepreneurs is to innovate our way to make that better. >> makes sense to me. todd klein is partner at revolution growth. thanks for being with us this morning. one of today's areas of expertise is also media and todd and i talked about the future of media on our podcast, sand hill road. you can find that episode and dozens of other interviews with venture wherever you find your podcasts. "press: here" will be right back.

that's our show for this week. my thanks to my guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning. show "sunday

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