Vance: Quantum and fusion founders often overconvince themselves of their progress
Ashlee Vance · Ashlee Vance: Stories from Elon, Palmer Luckey, Bryan Johnson & Priscilla Chan · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Sep 8, 2025 · at 27:38
Biographer and journalist Ashlee Vance explains why reporting on and evaluating progress in quantum computing and nuclear fusion is unusually difficult.
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“They're probably like the two areas where I feel the least comfortable trying to tell what's real from what's not real, because everybody's raised a ton of money, and it seems like serious people that are doing it, and they're smart people, and then you just can't tell if they've all convinced them. You can't tell, like, who's Shady versus who's super smart, but have kind of, like, convinced themselves that their life's pursuit science project is probably, like, realer than it actually is.”
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