Sebastian Hassinger (The New Quantum Era): why neutral atoms lead the qubit race for now

Yuval Boger interviews Sebastian Hassinger, host of The New Quantum Era podcast, and author of a new book by the same name. Sebastian and I have many things in common beyond our jobs in quantum. We are both podcasters, neither of us has a PhD, and we are both authors of new books – Sebastian’s The New Quantum Era, and my Quantum Bits, the Comic Book Guide to Quantum Computing. In a conversation that is more symmetric than the typical episode, we compare notes about the motivation and process of writing these books, explaining quantum computing for non-physicists, debate Sebastian’s modality forecast, speak about our hypothetical dinner guests and much more.

Transcript

Yuval: Hello, Sebastian. Thank you for joining me today.

Sebastian: Hi, Yuval. Thanks for joining me. This is your Riverside. This is your studio, I know, but we’ll be guests on each other’s podcast simultaneously. This is a crossover episode.

Yuval: So, Sebastian, who are you and what do you do?

Sebastian: I am Sebastian Hassinger. I’m an independent consultant and jack of all trades in quantum. I have been working in quantum for almost a decade now, which shocked me when I realized that when I counted up the years. First with IBM Quantum and then with AWS. And the beginning of 2026, I went independent and started a company called The New Quantum Era, which is sort of a grab bag of all of the projects that I’m working on. How about yourself, Yuval? Tell us a bit about yourself.