The In-Between Tech and Trust Podcast

🎙️with Christopher Trummer, MD Venture Lab Quantum / Semicon, TUM Venture Labs

Around 2019, quantum computing made its first big promise: machines with just a few noisy qubits would solve useful problems within two or three years, and many companies got ready for them. Christopher Trummer, who runs the quantum and semiconductor venture lab at TUM Venture Labs in Munich, explains why that promise failed and why the error-corrected machines now in development are a far more solid bet. What he leaves leaders with is a question of trust and patience: how do you keep a board believing in a technology whose progress is real (and slow)?

🎧 Episode overviewChristopher's starting point is that quantum is already here in parts: communication and sensing are ready for industry, and some post-quantum encryption runs in your Chrome browser today (without a mathematical proof yet that it holds). Quantum computing is the part still on its way, and he is candid about its first wave: the algorithms for the early, noisy machines never came, and the promise "fell out of the window completely." That shifts the risk to the companies waiting for them: keep the momentum and the board's support through slow progress, or miss the moment quantum starts to matter for the business. Eva asks how anyone prepares for this wave while still adopting AI, and his answer is sober: find the problems where quantum could help, then let a small team, or even a single person, keep watch.

💡 Key themes
​Which parts of quantum are ready today, and how far to trust encryption that is in use but not yet proven
​Why the first quantum promise failed, and what makes the second one more solid
​How companies keep momentum and board support while progress stays slow
​Whether quantum computing ends up with a few suppliers, the way AI did
​Why Europe founds so many deep tech startups and struggles to grow them past Series B

👤 About the guestChristopher Trummer is MD Venture Lab Quantum / Semicon at TUM Venture Labs in Munich, where his team works with quantum and semiconductor startups from the research lab to their first investment. Having spent much of his career between science and business, he sees quantum from both sides: what the physics can already do, and when it starts to matter for a company that has to decide where to put its money.
⏱ Chapters
​00:00 Quantum beyond the computer
​05:18 The algorithm that could break encryption
​09:02 Why quantum won't have a ChatGPT moment
​14:26 After the first promise fell through
​24:31 Europe's missing growth capital
​31:26 Drugs, fertilizer and superposition

🔗 Links
​Christopher Trummer on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-trummer-a58695108/
​Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/
​raidiant, Eva's responsible AI advisory - https://www.raidiant.eu/
​TUM Venture Labs, Venture Lab Quantum / Semicon - https://www.tum-venture-labs.de/labs/quantum/
​Global Deep Tech Report 2026, TU Munich - https://www.htgf.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Global-Deep-Tech-Report-2026.pdf
​NIST post-quantum cryptography standards - https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/post-quantum-cryptography
​Related episode - Energy From Orbit: Can We Trust Power Beamed From Space? - Martin Soltau (EP 42) - [LINK: Eva adds]

🎙️ Moran Cerf, Neuroscientist and Professor, Columbia Business School
Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist and professor at Columbia Business School, studies what happens in our brains when we talk, decide and get persuaded, and lately what happens when the other side of the conversation is AI. His research shows AI can read people remarkably well: from recordings of speed dates, it predicted who liked each other better than human observers did. The same skill worries him: we raise our guard when a person tries to sell us something, but not when AI does it in much the same way.

🎧 Episode overview
Moran's starting point is neural: in a human conversation, brain waves tune to each other and a nod or a glance carries much of the meaning, while a question-and-answer exchange with AI holds about a fifth of that information. His verdict on AI's influence is blunt: "We're a lot simpler than we think we are," and purchase times, flight bookings and browsing history are enough for AI to infer personality and nudge even political views. Eva pushes on teams that give AI agents human names: helpful in a Ferrari pit stop, he says, and a hindrance in a boardroom, where too often "if AI says do this, we end up doing this." On trust, he draws a line between the many mundane choices AI already handles well and the rare ones that define us, like a partner or a profession, and warns that our trust spills from the first to the second. His reason for hope is practical: when the world or our life changes, the AI twin trained on our past fails, and we get called back in.

💡 Key themes
Why AI can read and persuade people better than people can, and why we don't notice
When a human name for an AI agent helps a team, and when it distorts a decision
What the AI backlash has inherited from fifteen years of social media
Which choices to trust AI with, and how that trust spills over to the ones that define us
Whether control handed over for convenience comes back when life changes

👤 About the guest
Moran Cerf is a neuroscientist and professor at Columbia Business School whose work spans decision-making, persuasion and neural implants. He began by recording individual neurons to understand how the brain works, and several of his former PhD students now research AI at companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which puts him right where brain science and AI meet.

⏱ Chapters
00:00 The feedback loop AI can't join
05:46 AI reads attraction, then learns to persuade
16:01 From neural implants to brain-like AI
29:22 Trust it with groceries, not with a partner
37:07 Giving up control, and the retwin
42:29 In-between moments

🔗 Links
Moran Cerf on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/moran-cerf-407187/
Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/
Columbia Business School - https://business.columbia.edu/staff/people/moran-cerf
Moran Cerf's website - https://www.morancerf.com/
Anthropic research Moran describes - https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
Related episode - AI and The Cognitive Atrophy Trap: What Happens When We Let Tech Shortcut the Hard Parts of Learning - Tobias Burkhardt (EP 28) - https://open.spotify.com/episode/2vdo5QFoTroSQlZgEuRQin

🎙️ with Martin Soltau, Co-CEO, Space Solar
Solar power collected in space and beamed down to Earth sounds like science fiction (it did to the space sector too, until reusable rockets arrived). Martin Soltau, Co-CEO of Space Solar, is building it in the UK, and he is confident about the technology: NASA demonstrated power beaming in the 1970s. The part of his timeline he can't engineer is trust: how quickly regulators and the public accept energy that comes down from orbit.

🎧 Episode overview
It starts with Martin's verdict on Europe's energy transition: the UK and Germany, he says, have "tested it to destruction", and households pay for it with expensive electricity and weaker security. His case for orbit is concrete: a panel in space produces eight to 13 times what it would in the sunniest place on Earth, robots assemble the satellites from coffee-table-sized modules, and the beam can be directed wherever power is needed. Eva pushes on the catch: if launch still runs through a handful of mostly American providers, does Europe swap one dependency for another? On trust, Martin points to fracking (a technology that worked and still lost the public) as his warning, and explains why he answers the safety question with wifi frequencies and intensities anyone can measure.

💡 Key themes
Why a grid built on free sunshine and free wind still delivers expensive electricity
Whether public trust can be earned before the first satellite flies, or only afterwards
What wireless power changes about energy security when undersea cables are already being targeted
Whether governments that fund this will accept standards letting a rival's satellite use their receiver

👤 About the guest
Martin Soltau co-founded Space Solar in 2022 to build solar power satellites that deliver continuous electricity to receivers on the ground. He came from inside the space sector, where the idea sat on the science fiction pile until SpaceX made reusable launch commercial. Today his work is as much about convincing governments and regulators as about engineering.

⏱ Chapters
Tested to destruction (starts with: "I think it's the big challenging problem for humanity ...")
Why orbit beats the sunniest place on Earth (starts with: "So I suppose it starts with the fact that if you put a solar panel into space ...")
Launch, and who controls it (starts with: "Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, if we look at wind and solar and batteries ...")
Standards between rivals (starts with: "Yes, I think there are many examples of where nations have collaborated ...")
Coffee-table modules and crawling robots (starts with: "Yes. Well, if you came to space solar at Harwell ...")
The trust question (starts with: "I think you use a really interesting word there, trust ...")

🔗 Links
Martin Soltau on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-soltau-44596619/
Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/
Space Solar - https://www.spacesolar.co.uk
International Telecommunication Union - https://www.itu.int
Related episode - Sten Saluveer on what decides AI trust in Europe - https://open.spotify.com/episode/0gPKehnoNppMY0y3Jvdry0

🎙️ Sten Saluveer, Growth & Innovation, Telia

What decides AI trust in Europe - the size of the model, or whether people recognise themselves in the society using it? Sten Saluveer helped write Estonia's digital state agenda and now builds at Telia, and he argues Europe enters the era of AI power holding more than it thinks: a working example, and the diversity to invent its own category. For leaders deciding where their organisations stand in that game, this is a view from a country that stopped writing roadmaps and started shipping.

🎧 Episode overview
Sten and Eva move from why a builder who ran innovation at Cannes chose an Estonian telco, to what an agent-driven state actually looks like when more than a hundred and twenty agentic services already run and the plan reads like scenes from a citizen's life. They sit with the uncomfortable side: a quarter in which Estonians lost around thirty million euros to cybercrime, and a security goal that paradoxically aims to keep satisfaction exactly where it is. From Cannes, Sten brings the generational fault line - leaders over forty who see adaptation as given, talents under thirty who experience AI as a threat to their work and their environment - and the question of whether Europe can turn its diversity into its own category rather than playing everyone else's game.

💡 Key themes
Whether a state can make itself agent-driven and keep the citizen in control
Why holding cybersecurity satisfaction at today's level counts as ambition
What Europe's own category could be when it stops measuring itself in gigawatts
The generational split on AI that surfaced at Cannes, and what it demands of leaders
Whether a telco can become the trusted digital partner of the AI economy

👤 About the guest
Sten Saluveer is an Estonian innovation strategist who has spent two decades translating between the market, the technology, and the governance layer - from heading Cannes Next at the Marché du Film to advising the Tallinn Digital Summit. He contributed to Estonia's digital state agenda, where he insisted the plan contain scenarios from ordinary life, and he recently joined Telia heading their growth and innovation initiatives. What makes his perspective matter here is the vantage point: he argues Europe's case from inside a small country where the agent-driven state is already operational.

⏱️ Chapters
[00:00] Why a builder chooses a telco when the era turns
[11:41] An action plan, not a roadmap - the state that ships
[18:11] Standing still as ambition - the cybercrime paradox
[23:15] When infrastructure has to assume it is a target
[28:03] Cannes: the generation that experiences AI as a threat
[38:26] Reclaiming agency - Europe's own category

🔗 Links
Sten Saluveer on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/stensaluveer/
Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/
Telia - https://www.telia.ee/era
Estonia's digital state agenda - https://digital-skills-jobs.europa.eu/en/initiatives/national-strategies/estonia-estonian-digital-agenda-2030
Related episode - 'Tech and Democracy with Nexus Politics' https://open.spotify.com/episode/3WVnBsaz3LfFPwn6xsX1N6

🎙️ Noah Wetzel, Photographer

What happens to AI trust when the most real photographs are the ones people refuse to believe? Noah Wetzel spent nine months and 600 hours preparing to capture 84 seconds of a total solar eclipse - then had to prove the result came out of a camera. This one is for anyone whose genuine work now meets default suspicion, and anyone deciding where AI belongs in a craft that has to stay real.

🎧 Episode overview
Noah captured a wingsuit athlete flying through totality in Spain: flashes triggered from a mile away, a subject moving at 150 miles per hour, two frames per athlete, no second takes. The conversation follows what came after the shutter - viewers at his own shows assuming the work is fake, magazine editors auditing every edit in his raw files, and a disclaimer on Instagram stating his photos are camera-captured. He is blunt about his own AI use: hundreds of hours on ChatGPT planning the shot, AI saving him days in processing, and a hard line at the frame itself. Where that line sits, and whether it survives cameras that can generate content on demand, stays open until the end.

🔍 Key themes
Why extraordinary authentic images now read as fake by default, and who ends up carrying the burden of proof
Where AI strengthens a craft and where it disqualifies the result - the captured versus created distinction Noah refuses to blur
What "the ethics of photography" means when every edit is contestable and everyone draws the line differently
What happens to that line when the camera itself can add what was never there
How you perform inside 84 seconds when preparation is the only thing left to trust

📸 About the guest
Noah Wetzel is an adventure and action-sports photographer, and the person behind what may be the most complex photograph ever attempted: a Red Bull Air Force wingsuit athlete crossing a total solar eclipse. The detail that matters for this episode is what he does after the work is done - he attaches a statement to his published images confirming they were captured by a camera, because the audience's default assumption has flipped. He argues the case for craftsmanship from inside a working life that uses AI daily.

⏱ Chapters
[00:00] 600 hours for 84 seconds
[04:33] Trusting preparation when nothing can be paused
[16:30] What generative AI changes about believing a photograph
[24:02] Why real work now carries a disclaimer
[31:41] Where the in-camera line starts to dissolve

🔗 Links
Noah Wetzel's website / portfolio — ⁠www.wetzelgallery.com⁠
Noah Wetzel on Instagram, ⁠www.instagram.com/noahwetzel⁠
Noah Wetzel on Facebook: ⁠www.facebook.com/noahwetzelphoto⁠
[LINK: Related episode — suggest a Pillar 1 episode on trust in AI systems, Eva to match to episode number]
Eva Simone Lihotzky on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/evalihotzky/
Documentary Released on PBS Recently - April 8th 2024 Total Solar Eclipse in Hill Country Texas. The film has received 17 film festival awards and been aired 1700+ times in the last month across 39 different states in the United States. You can watch the documentary online here:
https://www.pbs.org/show/eclipse-outlaw-chase/