Abstract: This talk will be an expose of what we know about quantum noise -- the good, the bad and the beautiful! The bad news: noise limits our ability to error-mitigate, a term that refers to near-term schemes where errors that arise in a quantum computation are dealt with in classical pre-processing. I will present analysis that shows that current error mitigation schemes are more or less as good as they can be. The (potentially) good news: noisy random circuits escape barren plateaus, a problem that has plagued quantum machine learning since its inception. All of this points to the beautiful question: does noise make quantum circuits more 'classical' and therefore classically simulable?