Follow The Brand Podcast with Host Grant McGaugh

Beyond the Binary: The Quantum Mindset with Farai Mazhandu and Grant McGaugh

• Grant McGaugh CEO 5 STAR BDM • Season 5 • Episode 35

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Imagine if your computer could explore a landscape of possibilities all at once, using the same rules that make electrons behave in surprising ways. That’s the mental pivot Farai, a quantum physicist and teacher, helps us make as we break down what quantum computing really is and where it actually wins. We trade hype for clarity, showing how superposition, entanglement, and interference become practical tools when classical methods hit walls.

We walk through the real stakes: modeling complex materials to build safer batteries and corrosion-resistant coatings, accelerating drug discovery by simulating chemistry where properties emerge, and tackling massive optimization problems that govern airport gates, delivery routes, and supply chains. Farai explains why quantum machines are not replacements for CPUs or GPUs but new teammates in a hybrid stack, each part doing what it does best. The goal is targeted advantage, not universal speedups, and the payoff arrives when the search space explodes beyond classical reach.

Along the way, we zoom out to nature as our design mentor. Bacteria that fix nitrogen more efficiently than factories, plants that capture sunlight better than our best solar cells, human brains that run powerful cognition on twenty watts—these examples aren’t trivia; they are roadmaps for engineering. By learning from natural intelligence and combining it with quantum algorithms, we can cut energy waste, shorten R&D cycles, and unlock better outcomes across industry and public services. Farai also shares his work leading the Africa Quantum Consortium, proving that the next wave of innovation is global, collaborative, and grounded in education.

If you care about the future of computing, climate tech, logistics, and medicine, this conversation will sharpen your lens. Listen, subscribe, and share with someone who still thinks quantum is just sci‑fi. Then tell us: which real-world problem would you optimize first?

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Follow The Brand! We hope you enjoyed learning about the latest trends and strategies in Personal Branding, Business and Career Development, Financial Empowerment, Technology Innovation, and Executive Presence. To keep up with the latest insights and updates, visit 5starbdm.com
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And don’t miss Grant McGaugh’s new book, First Light — a powerful guide to igniting your purpose and building a BRAVE brand that stands out in a changing world. - https://5starbdm.com/brave-masterclass/

See you next time on Follow The Brand!

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome everybody to the Plumbering Punkness. This is your host, Grant McGall. We're gonna go all the way down to Louisiana in the three point Louisiana area that I have been that I've been introduced to by Ferrari. I'm loving how he says his name because he just taught me how to pronounce it correctly. I probably still didn't do it right, but I'm gonna do the best I can because Ferrari, you are on the leading edge on quantum computing. And there's a lot of information out there, there's a lot of intelligence out there about quantum, and there's a lot of misinformation and misconception about quantum. Like what can it do? What can it do? People really are still kind of like on the fence about how we're gonna use this. And there's a big buzz around artificial intelligence and quantum computing. That those two convergence could be very explosive in our world. So please introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, thank you, Grant. Uh, thank you so much for having me. And yes, um, I'm joining you from Louisiana. So my name is Farai, which you did very well. Um Farai, my jandu. I'm from Zimbabwe, uh, but I'm joining you from Louisiana. I am a quantum physicist. Um, I've got a dual master's in uh applied physics, uh, one of them in theory, uh, one of them uh thesis best, uh, and I'm a teacher. So I'm a teacher at heart. I love teaching. I've been doing that for more than 15 years. I love teaching physics because physics is fun. Physics to me is a way of it's a way of thinking. And I don't say this because I'm a physicist. I come across other people. Recently, I was listening to Andrej Capati, one of the founders of OpenAI, and he's also interested in education. So uh the host was asking him about if you were going to be teaching young people something cool that's really super important in today's world, what is it going to be? It's like with no bias, physics. Like, why is that the case? Because it's just is it allows your brain to do interesting things early on in life. And it teaches you how to think about things, how to solve problems, how to just understand the universe, which is where we all play. So love that I'm a physics teacher at a school of science and math, science, math, and arts. So it's the Louisiana School of Science, Math and Arts, it's a state school uh which brings together motivated students to come and you know chase their goals and plan for the big stage to be leaders and innovators. And there's no better place to do what I do than that. Uh, and uh recently the school uh won an award of having the best teachers. So I'm amongst some people who are teaching me amazing things on how to, you know, uh how to explain these complicated, seemingly complicated concepts and make them accessible to everyone. That's what I love to do. I want to talk about physics to everyone so that they can use it as a tool in terms of thinking about their own life, their own careers, their own problems, uh, and anything else. Uh, and and and and use that concept as a you know, as an additional way of looking at things and uh uh extracting meaning from situations, from our universe, from happenings. And I know once in a while you have had to come across something that you know uh demanded that you think as a physicist. So we are all physicists. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00:

As a matter of fact, I know so this might be some information that you may not have known, but my favorite subject in high school was physics. I loved it. And I didn't I gotta see, I remember I gotta see in the class, but that wasn't the point. The point was I loved how there was no right answer or wrong answer when you approach the physics problem. To your point, it was like, I want to understand your critical thinking process. How did you arrive at this answer that you came up with? It's not just the answer. How what was the methodology? What was the thinking? How did you see this happening? You know, in physics, they say, hey, you can balance an elephant on the side of a cliff just using his trunk by using, you know, quantum physics. You'd be like, wow. And it's not so much of that, oh, can it really happen? It's just the process of thinking through that type of thing to hypothetically see that it could happen. So this opens up a lot of I call out of the box thinking. So we can see things like, hey, you know, we only experience the world according to our understanding of the world. So if we can increase our understanding and how we see things, we can have a better outcome or a better output in our life experience, I think. So with that said, this is this whole thing around quantum computing. If you would be so kind to from to explain to my audience who are mostly probably like, I know a little bit about quantum, I've heard of a cubic or one, a zero. I but I I'm really at that base level. First, give us an overview of what you think quantum computing is.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, um, so before we even go to quantum computing, which is the fun part, let me let me say we are quantum objects fundamentally. So when people talk about quantum computing, it sounds like you know, uh far out there, you know, alien and this I don't know, coming out of thin air and in existence field which has just arrived from nowhere. Uh, and as long as we agree that matter is made up of atoms, and atoms are made up of uh subatomic particles, and perhaps you go to electrons to protons to neutrons, and we can even subdivide these into other quarks, leptons, you name it. So if we agree on the fundamental building blocks of nature, and agree that when we get to those fundamental levels of subatomic particles, you and me don't live there. So we don't have an intuition of the way things work there. So when we talk about, for example, recently the Nobel Prize was awarded to John Martinez and the group uh and and uh the other cool researchers, uh, and they one of the concepts was on quantum tunneling. Uh, so they demonstrated that at a macroscopic level all this quantum phenomena could be, you know, could could could uh could be exhibited at a microscopic level and used to build circuits and you know uh uh uh do cool things with. So one would ask and say, I can tunnel, right? I can't penetrate through a dry wall. Uh, how come we can think about electrons penetrating through barriers? Then we begin to introduce the world of possibilities and probabilities and uncertainities, and then that changes the picture. So, to your point early on, it changes the way you think. So, the moment you are challenged, it will be like, oh, so I could actually think about this world we live in in uncertainty terms and in probability terms, which is what we we we we do every now and then. We do that when we think about the weather. We we are never definite that tomorrow it's going to be raining, it's probably going to be. And I haven't heard of people taking the weather report guys to court for whether that didn't happen. Sometimes you carry an umbrella, it doesn't rain, it's sunny, and you're like, Oh, so what's happened to the weatherman? So it seems um our lives are probabilistic, and we are happy with that in other worlds until we are not. So, what I'm saying here is fundamentally uh nature is in this probability maze of things, uncertainties, and at the subatomic level, these really express very well. And it has so happened that with the improvement in technology in uh in two ways: one in miniaturizing you know uh um electronic devices. And if you followed recently when um uh the founder of NVIDIA was presenting uh their roadmap recently in DC, he introduced quantum very well because it's native. As you miniaturize devices and pack a lot of transistors in a real state of uh material, then the transistors have to be very small. What is the smallest you can ever be? You begin to approach subatomic particle sizes, and the moment you get to that level, this world of physics usually washed out of our world begins to express. And then we talk about superposition, it becomes a reality. We can't talk about pinpointing position of an electron or for of a proton, these become concepts that we have to change because it's not no longer in the world of our tennis balls, our you know, uh uh, you know, pebbles and stones that we can touch and feel. So, in that world of things, we have to reimagine the world at a quantum uh mechanical level and shift our thinking. The moment we're able to shift our thinking into this superposition world, a world where things entangle, things tunnel, and a world where we can play around with interference of these, you know, this maze of things and orchestrate to build technological innovations, then it becomes natural. So, on a natural uh path of progress for classical tech, which is the usual semiconductor, you know, phones, computers, GPUs, you name it. Uh, as we try to make them faster and better, smaller, and interestingly, we want to make them faster. We also want to make them smaller so that we can peg more into into make more processing power into them. Then we get to subatomic level, then the physics shifts, and we have to think again about how do we make things work in that world. So now a lot of things have come together in terms of technological innovation, our understanding of manipulating quantum physics, such that we can engineer systems that can utilize these phenomena that express only at the subatomic level. And we can build technological tools that can sense our world in very, very precise ways. We can build tools that can allow us to take advantage of entanglement and do teleportation of information and do quantum communications and do communication in secure ways, in ways that we have never imagined we could do. Then it also happens that we can use these uh uh uh uh subatomic particles and these laws, these rich laws of quantum physics to do information processing because we can represent in these physical states at that level information. And the good thing about representing information in that level is instead of only having access to uh zeros and ones, which are on and off voltages, we can begin to get access to this superposition maze of possibilities and use it for information processing. It allows us to encode and record more information. We have got more space to represent information. We usually I usually enjoy using vectors. Actually, I've been teaching them recently in high school, and I was talking about how we visualize this information in living in our open space as lines with the you know, as lines with arrows, and then we can represent, we can point these arrows anywhere we want, because we have all this 360-degree you know world available to us, even more degrees of freedom if you want infinity degrees of freedom, and we can use those to encode information. So instead of representing information only as one or zero, we can represent this information in these infinity possibilities in what we call a Hilbert space. So we begin to give this space a special name and we give it special features, we give it special mathematics, and we allow a programmer to put it into an algorithm and manipulate these devices we can build today to do information processing in amazing, fundamentally different ways. So the quantum computer is not um a progress, uh it's not part of the progress of superconducts of semiconductor-based computers that we all know, which are we called classical computers. Quantum computers are an entirely new species of computing device because they are based on fundamentally different rules and laws, and even programming them takes a shift in understanding, and that is what makes them fun, makes them powerful. But in conclusion, they are not coming to replace your classical computer, which is your supercomputers, your big data center computers, your laptops, your GPUs. No, this is why Nvidia is building a stakeway, it combines you know your GPUs. Uh, people are thinking of bringing TPUs, your CPUs, and using them for what all of these are good at, because they're not good at the same thing. But when you combine them, they give you a rich tool, a rich architecture, a rich infrastructure that allows you to do things we have never imagined you can do. So that is quantum computing, and that's how we get there. And interestingly, before you come in, these quantum computers promise um when they are available in their full form, they are still developing and very fast. So, and we love it that when you see players like Nvidia coming into there, it's showing you that something is real, there something is changing, something is shifting. So they definitely are going to land and be available. And right now they're available and they are showing fast progress and you know, surprising people in interesting ways. These quantum computers so happen that so happen to bring us capability to solve what are some of the world's most important problems, which are in optimization, which are in drug discovery, which can help us discover materials that are better for batteries, to give us long-range electric vehicles, and to optimize how we make complicated devices, including even making an aeroplane. It is made out of two point, almost 2.5 million parts that have to come together to build an aeroplane. How do you optimize the sequences of bringing them together? How do you optimize to find to discover material that can protect the aeroplane coating from the challenges of you know nature, if you want, so that the wings don't corrode? That could happen for ships, that could happen for many things that are useful for our day-to-day life. So that is why the quantum computers are important. Different modality, different techniques of processing information, different problems they can solve an additional tool to the tools that we have to do amazing things to take us to the next level. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, you you now that was textbook information, and I want my audience to really rewind all that information and play it very slowly for what you said, because it is the merit of all our tech. And then when you layer in quantum within that, it's a game changer. Now, one thing I've noticed in my lifetime, I remember watching shows like Star Trek, and I like Star Trek, right? Sit there and I watch Star Trek and I watch how they have their communicator, you know, like I got my hand here, and they were doing uh video conferences on the bridge, and all of a sudden you would see you know the captain talking to the engineer. This is all in the 1960s, so we're thinking like, wow, this is space age technology that we're getting uh to look at. If you really look at those things, we everything that we imagined of what we could use with like with technology is now in existence. Even now we're getting to you know space travel. And the one thing that always the what the one thing, always not the one trick pony in Star Trek that everybody loved was the transport, right? How you could just transport, you know, a human being from one point in time to another, and that seemed like, oh wow, you know, that's that we'll we'll never be able to do that. Well, what you're talking about, and you just mentioned it in quantum computing, the teleportation, the juxtaposition of time, more or less. And then if you can control those kinds of things to a certain degree, you actually have teleportation. This is something that actually is being toured with and worked on, and it used to be science fiction. Now it's becoming science fact. I truly believe anything that we can imagine can be real. This is why I always loved physics. Even though it sounds impossible, you know, from our present state, our future state, is very possible. Like you were saying about an electric car, the extension of how long it can go on on certain uh uh energy sources, things of that nature. Or we start looking at magnetism as a as a propellant, or how can we propel ourselves, start looking at space travel more elegantly? One thing I've always noticed in our use of technology is that, and I'm talking about human kind, it's not very elegant when you compare it to how nature uses technology or it is how it utilizes energy, whether it's at the earth level or the solar system level or the universe level, it's very elegant in how it does certain things. And if we can begin to understand that and get our efficiencies together, we can start to really have some advances and start to understand how we could potentially move to other other places in space and time a little bit more elegantly than trying to blast through it, you know, like we're kind of doing now, uh, which is not that elegant because we were using explosive technology if I if I had to say it like with rockets and things like that. But not to go too far down that road. I want our audience to truly understand what you said is so important. Quantum is a is has a use case, it has a specific use case in what it does and how we can take large, super large amounts of information and crunch it down for so it becomes palatable for us to use and then make better decisions and run our lives a little a little better. Help us understand from your lens what can quantum computing be used for that could solve some big problems for us.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you. So you gave the answer. I'm just going to say it again. You said it beautifully. Because we went down to this fundamental understanding of nature and we are utilizing it, we are harnessing it to do information processing. Why do we want to do it that way? Richard Feynman's imagination in coming up with this idea of quantum computing at that seminar point was this understanding you just expressed right now. There are things that are so efficiently done by nature that we haven't managed it to replicate in the lab. Uh, let's start with the. I come from rural parts of Zimbabwe. I grew up in the subsistence farming communities in Zimbabwe. We have always been taking manure from the crow where our cows, you know, uh live, and we take it to the fields as our fertilizer for the season. It so happens that bacteria can digest on that so efficiently and do nitrogen fixation and provide nutrients to our plants and give us a good harvest, a good nutritious harvest. I'll underline. Can we produce fertilizer in the factories using the hub bulge process and achieve the same uh the same uh end? No. It takes a lot of energy to produce fertilizer. That is why fertilizer is not found uh everywhere else, and that's the reason why some regions have got hunger is because they don't have access to the you know to these nutrients that are required by plants in order to get a good harvest. That is enough for a family or to feed a community. This process is very hard to do, very expensive, uses a lot of electricity, and people wish it could be more efficient. So that's just optimizing chemistry. But bacteria has got that figured out even better using very little energy. You they don't need a power plant for that. Let's think about how we make drugs. We try to replicate, we understand uh the biological system to the extent that we do, and we come up with all these drugs, we bunch them together, we mix them so that some of them are going to fight our bodies, but our bodies are going to reject everything you put into them. So you want to stabilize that and mask that and hide that so that your body can cope up with it. But can we take away the side effects and the toxins that get into our body? No. But then our forefathers, our ancestors had natural helps. And I see after people get sick, I've seen that because I've had sick relatives, I have also been part of community where I've seen people eventually resorting to organic methods of addressing ailments. Why do we end up there? What is organic? It's natural because we understand that in the lab we can't replicate what nature does. I recently came across an article that showed that we need a tiny place, or in terms of surface area, square feet, you name it, part of the US, which is going where we can install solar panels and we can harness enough energy to power this whole country. As long as we build solar cells that are efficient enough. Our solar cells are around 30 to 31, 32 percent efficient at this point. Why can't they be 50? Why can't they be safe entry? That's an understanding of material science that we still have to reach. Plants are perfect at doing photosynthesis, they are optimized for absorbing whatever they need from sunlight and make things work. So nature has this figured out, and perhaps it's time that we understand how these tools that harness the way nature works at its fundamental and at its fundamental level to think about the problems that you know challenge us every day in our world, especially these big problems. So, this is how you begin to think about material science. This is how you begin to think about drug discovery. And that process of drug discovery takes many years, including through clinical trials, working against the side effects until you get that drug into the market. It's not even at that level where it's good enough. It's just good enough so that compared to not having it, yes, it justifies that we should have it in the market because without it, the the outcomes are perhaps dire. But otherwise, it's not perfect. So this is where quantum computers shine. In those to address those problems where this understanding of how nature fundamentally operates uh is really a huge lift. So these problems are about optimization, how do we distribute resources from where they are to where they have to go? Our world struggles, not out of a lack of abundance, but out of just a terrible distribution, um a terrible asymmetry. It could be in information, it could be in resource, it could be in capital, it could be, you know, in anything you can think about. There is always somewhere where things are more concentrated than where they are required. And such is the mystery of our world. It could be labor, it could be raw materials, it could be minerals, you know, all those things don't seem to be, you know, we don't have to, we don't seem to have this perfect distribution. So you can imagine that in your logistical, when you want to handle logistics, which is one of the big deals that we need to be able to figure out to make our world work more efficiently. How do we gate aeroplanes when they come to big airports? That looks like it's a trivial problem, but it's not. It's actually very, very hard. There are many, many permutations of thinking about where should this aeroplane go when it lands so that it does so efficiently, quickly, and get people on their next trip as fast as possible. Those are some of the problems. Amazon struggles with routing our packages every day. Which direction should I go? Which uh you know, drop points should I sequence, and uh, which vehicle should I use? And in order to make all this budget work and get create maximum value or maximize profit or maximize on time of delivery, you name it. Then we talk about the materials, just what on what material should we build this technology for it to be efficient? We make beta batteries so that they, you know, we fight against the heat generation during charging, uh, during charging and discharge. We we also charge them very fast, we also make them you know discharge very slowly, and we can you know uh uh uh store more energy without any detrimental effects fighting against the things that can go wrong, what material can allow us to do that? That's not a trivial problem to solve. So, all these are the type of problems that scale up very fast and challenge our supercomputers and our classical computers, just because you just need to think in a different way in order to handle the scaling up. How do you harness? How do you handle that scaling up? It appears as if it is only a quantum computer because it works on those fundamental principles that allow us this huge computational space and allows us to leverage superposition, entanglement, quantum interference, to orchestrate these systems in very you know controlled ways in order to solve problems like that. That seem to scale very fast in a way that just defeats your your your your classical computers, no matter how big they will ever be.

SPEAKER_00:

Yes, thank you. I want you to thank you for for that enlightenment and and understanding where we are in our journey as as a human race and understanding life of it of itself and how we can we we are just tapping into what what nature is doing fundamentally for millions of years. It wasn't last week. We we we're always looking at this, oh, this is such great innovation that you know we've been expanding into a future realm, but this has been going on for a very long time. I wrote a paper around that. I said, no, right now we're talking artificial intelligence, and then we start looking at human intelligence and then natural intelligence or the the world of nature that's always been around us. If we think about this, these are intelligences from nature. It's been doing this for a long time. These are living things, it's been doing this for a long time. Human beings have been doing things a long time. We were we were talking uh last week, like the same type of compute power it takes to simulate the human mind takes an enormous amount of energy. Yet our human mind operates on about 20 watts. So you got 20 watts of efficiency in our elegant computers, as I all say, it takes many, many cycles of uh of energy to create or simulate that type of intelligence. We have a long way to go in understanding and becoming more uh efficient in our uses of our our technology. But it's gonna be a great journey, it's gonna be a great journey and a humbling journey, I believe, as we go forward, because we can recreate our human world and our human experience to be better. Because we know we live in a world really of scarcity, but I don't think it's a scarcity of resources, I think it's a scarcity of information or intelligence of itself because we don't know how to utilize it. You said it your best. We're talking about something manure, yet we can't even recreate that. But it's been in existence for you know untold millions of of years. But if we knew how to do that, our our world fundamentally shifts. So we start looking at, yeah, we have a scarcity of food, we have a scarcity of shelter, we have a scarcity of certain types of resources, and if we can knew, like, you know what, maybe we're doing it wrong because we live in a world, I've already this has been my fundamental problem. Farai. My fundamental problem. We have this scarcity resource of energy. We say, oh, we don't have enough energy. We don't have enough oil. We don't have enough electricity. Yet we live in an abundant ocean of energy. There's no shortage of energy. There's no shortage. We don't have to do anything for that to happen, but we don't tune into it, I don't think, very well. And I think if we did that, those things that we should start looking at as shortages today go away. And we we start solving newer problems. That problem gets solved. That's how I would like to see this story, you know, unfold in the quantum world.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, and to your point, early on, you mentioned about imagination. So imagination is what it takes. Um and if we can reimagine things, we we will be able to get on top of these challenges and these boxes where we are trapped, and we'll be able to tap into the into our greatness as humanity. And we have got that. But for years, I think for one reason or another, we have stopped believing, we you know ended up narrow-minded, you know, having blingers, and you know, we ended up being closed up in a box, and we stopped imagining. So even Einstein talks about imagination is more important than knowledge. And I know I posted about that on X recently, and it has been attracting interesting attention over there. And uh that's what I'm saying. To say one of the things the reason why I was I was posting that was because uh I think Elon Musk posted about how they wanted to etch some information on um stones and send them in, put them in a capsule and send them to space so that they orbit space and the next civilization will be able to find that information intact, perhaps you should we face whatever catastrophe our world can you know may present to us. Uh and I posted and said, if I remember growing up in Zimbabwe, I know the uh the group that we call the Sun, in who are now living in Botswana, and they used to do rock art paintings, and those rock art paintings are still in existence today, surviving weather elements, whatever they use as paint, I don't know what it is, but it's UV stabilized, it stands the test of time, those drawings are still there, and you wonder if they had a bit extra knowledge looking at the technology and the chemistry that we all know now today, if they were using that optimize whatever they used back then, maybe they will be finding a chemical or a material that can write and edge things on uh surfaces that will never erase in you know billions of years, if you want. So we have always had this. So, even if you go back to history, and because I also participated in a session where we're talking about quantum and art, because that's very important. Like you're saying, we have to think about these natural intelligences that we have, because everything else that we build is out of our imagination of understanding our universe and how it already works, and how we can harness that and build the other things that we need suiting our context as it were. So that is the way we are building AI. People are even beginning to think of culture. How do you culture AI? So they have to be intelligent that are talking to each other, and then so all these things you know show you how we learn as a society. We learn through interaction. We that's how we that's how we get cultured, that's how we get these value systems that inform you and me to know what's right and wrong. And so now we are we are connecting these systems and training them on data. And it's interesting that the data we are training AI on is only a small fraction of big data that's available online. Yes, a lot of the good data is out there in nature, it's in you and me, it's out there, it's not in digital, and that is what we have to tap into if we are ever going to build a truly human-level intelligence system or a system that can get us there. So, you as you listen to these conversations, uh, you know, from you know different experts and powered by imagination, you know, uh, reconcile all these thoughts. There's a lot of value that begins to come out of it, and it can help you think about whatever comes next for you, for your career, for solving problems that are of interest to you, for your society, for your community, and whatever allows our you know, us as humanity to go to the next level. And that's that's what is that is what physics, what physics does. It teaches you to have this open mind of thinking broadly, not you know, not feel like you you are not a person who is going to hit roadblocks. You you think about is is is this a problem or it's an opportunity, or is there another way of thinking about it? So that is what quantum does. It's a new way of thinking. And with that new way of thinking, you can reimagine your problems and find different, you know, to find opportunities to solve them, which you you may have been missing all along. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00:

I love that that you have to think differently and understanding that the answers are are available, but you've got to reach for them. Someone told me this a while ago, it really helped me to get some perspective. He said, I want you to imagine yourself in the center of the universe, just at the center of the universe. And he said, Tell me how big you are, and then he said, Tell me how how small you are. All of a sudden, those concepts of large and small go away. He said, There is the concepts of size and space. If I'm in the center of the universe, how how big are you? How how relevant are you? All those things are in proximity, and and there's other factors that kind of come into that, but fundamentally that doesn't matter. So you start to you start to see things differently. As you said earlier, we've kind of put ourselves in our own mental box about how we see things. And I and I use another analogy, I always love this analogy because it's a truth statement. For a large portion of Europe in the you know, before the 1500s, they thought the world was flat. This was their understanding, their fundamental understanding of life was a flat world. Was it real? It was real in their mind, it was real in their imagination, but wasn't actually reality from um, let's say a physical standpoint, right? And I still believe our understanding right now, how we conceive life to be or what it is, is just as imaginary as a flat world, because it's really relevant to our understanding of life. And that understanding doesn't mean it's not real, it's it's real to us at that time, very real. But it becomes very unreal as you begin to see other things unfold. And maybe that's part of that, you know, how we get to that more elegant um technological society and other advances because we're just beginning, as you said, we're just the sample set that we were all enamored now with artificial intelligence, just a smallest segment of human intelligence that being mirrored back to us. When we look at the entire ecosystem of true intelligence, of true engineering, of true marvels, it's a humbling fact, a humbling fact that uh we have a long way to go. But if we apply these things correctly, we can solve a lot of current problems and then continue our journey on into this exploration of this thing called life. So before I let you go, I want again for the audience to know um where they can contact you, where you are at, and what you are most again passionate about for people to know as we've gone through this entire podcast. What is that last thing, that last bit of information you'd like to leave with us?

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much. Um one thing that I wanted to mention before I move on to those things was I was challenged when my teacher told me that a straight line is a straight line is part of a very large circle. So it changed my like, oh, I only sing it as a straight line because it's part of a very large circle, so I don't see where it curves. So that's you know, some of those examples that just blow your mind away, and that's why I love physics. It challenges you to just think about things again and say, What is this fact, or it is just because of where I am? The other thing is it is very important to travel because traveling exposes you to uh to different communities, different people, different worlds, you stop being a village champion, it gets you out of the box. You begin to see that you are a very small part of a very big world with a lot of things that are happening, and there's so much to learn from, and there's so much you don't know. It makes you stay humble, it makes you stay curious, and you learn every day. What I do and what I'm passionate about is I'm just a curious person. I love learning, and I love sharing that knowledge with others. I love you know demonstrating that we can actually get out of this box and do big things. So I am a community builder, I'm a teacher, I'm a community builder, and I'm young at heart. I'm learning every day. That's why I teach. So I teach because I want to learn every day. I want to be challenged to go to go and share with other people what I'm learning, get them to challenge my thoughts. I've got an open mind, I can go back again and I can emerge with new understanding. So I love feedback, and that is a good place for me to thrive as well. So I'm a multitasker. I'm a multitasker, I'm a multi-talented person who works on many things. I am scatterbrained, believe you me. I work every day to you know fight very hard to make sure that I keep things in line, in sequence, in sync, and I do what I have to do. So I'm a teacher, I'm a community builder. I'm I am building one of the largest efforts ever done in Africa to bring people together around quantum computing. So yeah, I'm I'm a founding executive director of the organization called the Africa Quantum Consortium. If you follow me on LinkedIn, you will, you know, uh experience my journey with me. You will see where I've been, where I'm going, and what we're doing every day. And how this is my passion is because it brings people together. I love it when we just have conversations like what we are having now, exchanging perspectives, calibrating each other, challenging each other to think out of the box and to keep on learning and to re-evaluate things and you know, question things that are in front of us. Not in a bad way, but with that view to make things better, with that view to make, you know, to get other people out of their own mental traps so that they can achieve their full capacity. They can, I believe each and every one of us is a very important resource in the computational equation of the world, if we are allowed to perform. So I want all of us to be good qubits. I imagine we are all part of a big quantum computer. If we are all made up of atoms and made up of matter, and we are natural beings, then we are qubits. We are those bits of information in a quantum system, and we are all very capable of working together to orchestrate this wave that makes humanity flourish, that makes our world a better place, and that makes our lives more meaningful. And that makes you and me get to that day when we are washed out, we are satisfied of our role. We were good qubits, we played our part in the computational equation, and we made the universe achieve its ends, whatever that is. I think that's the big picture, and that's who I am. That's where so you can find me on LinkedIn, and that's the best place to find me. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh no, thank you again for being on the Follow Brand show. This is your first appearance, and I want the audience to get behind what you just said because you are doing great things, uh, not only in the US, but also in Africa, also in your home country of uh Zimbabwe. I think all of these things are so important because this is a new age of mankind that I see unfolding, you know, going and getting just all the other headlines that were happening, you gotta look at what our our world is fundamentally shifting in front of us and and other things are just occurring. And we I I can see, you know, my kids' kids looking at this like, wow, you know, uh this is a big change. Because if you really look back even, you know, a hundred years ago, all right, just imagine yourself in the world of 1925 and then you were teleported to 2025. What a big difference. What a huge difference in space and time and in experience that has occurred. So we are on a great journey. So I want to thank you again for being on the show, and you've already told us exactly how to contact you. So I encourage everybody to contact you on LinkedIn. I can't, and I want to tell everybody that you came to meet through Yara. Yara um introduced us together. She introduced Sri Mati uh uh with me as well. She knows some very, very wonderful people that are doing enlightening things in this world. And we need to know more people like you. I want to know the other qubits out there, like farat fire that are out there so we can do more and get these positive images out there, these positive conversations going. So thank you again. And your entire audience can tune into all the episodes that follow the brand at five star bdm. That is the number five. That is Star S T R BDM. That's for brand for being for brand, be for development, infomasters.com. I want to thank you again for being on the show. Appreciate it. Thank you. You're welcome.