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... Internet. He helped create TCPIP. He's been at the intersection of revolutionary advancements in technology throughout the years. He's the chief Internet evangelist at Google and he's currently working on the interplanetary Internet. Just pause for a second and how cool that is. Today's guest is also usually the best dressed in the room. Please welcome vint surf. You're listening to sea sweet blueprint, the show for sea sweet leaders. Here we discussed no bys approaches to organizational readiness and digital transformation. Let's start the show. Dr Vince Serf, thank you so much for joining me today. Well, it's absolutely a pleasure. I always enjoy our chance in this one will be no different, I'm sure you know. As a forefather of the Internet over the years, I'm curious, have you seen all these things that have gotten layered on top of it? Web, web two, no, and then web three. Huh, Social Iot, and it is a ramping up more and more more and people talk about, you know, some of the devisiveness of social media. As you look back and you see all this happen, does it feel a little bit like you're just watching your baby grow up into a meth addict or like. What is it like? No, no, I don't feel like that at all. And in fact, what I am seeing and what you were seeing, it was very much a part of the delivery design of the system. It was designed to evolve. I'm I'm not claiming it we're as good as DNA or doing like that, but we intend to. Intentionally learned lessons about layering architectures from the arbonut project and we recognize the utility and value of both adding new layers vertically and extending layers horizontally. And what you are seeing, what I'm in seeing over the course of now fifty years, is the addition of new protocols, the addition of new layers like the World Wide Web, make HETP, introduction of let's say, backward improvement on security, for example with the... |
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DNS sect or with https or with IPSAC or variety of other digital signatures on files, the main name system improvements. You know the way, there are a whole bunch of new put and another example as a new protocol called quick, which is an alternative to running PCP over gls, and it's an important development is it came out of Google. But I'm happy, in fact, I don't say proud because that clings more credit than I deserve, but I'm very happy to see how flexible this system has been in terms of ingesting new ideas and supporting new applications. That's great perspective in those great for sight. You know, some words that I always see when when I'm reading about you, that is associated with you, other than fun and well dressed and kind, is innovation and revolution, and I get really excited about the revolution word. I think a lot of people they get the they focus in on innovation or disruption, but the revolution word, you know, that's where the change happens, right. That's where something gets taken out in something new gets put in place, and I'd love to explore that topic of change, because we encounter organizations that are going through either through rapid growth or adoption of BOT or whatever, just through rapid change, and successful change is so difficult and I don't know if you have a secret recipe for successful change in your back pocket. Well, they're actually one of the most important aspects to dealing with change is even recognizing that it's coming. Either there's a fanous expression about preserving your business. If somebody is going to eat your lunch, it might as well be you, which means if you had better eat your own applications and replace them with something else before somebody else does, because if you do it, at least it's yours. If you don't do it, then somebody else will do it and then your business mnded operate. So that's one. One thing... |
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...to observe about change. The second thing is that change often changes parametrically, changes the space that you're in, and sometimes that calls for very different solutions than the ones that used to work. And so it isn't just a question of cranking up the bandwidth or reducing the latency or increasing their computational power. Sometimes you literal really have to rethink how to solve problems, and I give you an example of that in the Internet case, as we started working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the interplanetary Internet. That's so cool, by the way. It really is cool. I mean this is just this is sort of like, holy cow, we're living in a science fiction story, which isn't science fiction. It's, or at the very least it's engineering. Turning the science fiction into reality, which is what an engineering is all about. So here's the thing. We started out thinking you could use the TCPIP PROTOCOLS and may hell, they've been around for quite some time. By One thousand nine hundred and ninety eight, I've been running very well. You know what's the problem? Works on Mars. Surely the problem is between Earth and Mars or between Mars and Jupiter or whatever else, the distances are literally astronomical. We're supposed to laughter, and so you literally can't use the mechanisms that made tcpip work. So we had to invent a whole new suity protocols that we call the bundle protocol and the wicklider transmission protocol in order to make this work in high latency and highly potentially highly disrupted environments. And the willingness to embrace that kind of change, to literally step back and say, okay, we're in a different parametric space and we work before forget about all the things that used to work. rially yourself of assumptions that paying is your friend because it's nearly real time, and rethink how to do this. That's a very important capacity to have if you're going to cope with serious change. That's a but... |
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...yeah, and I would imagine that also requires quite a bit of humbleness to go through that rethinking process. Well, it's not only perhaps I don't know a humble is the right thing, but I can tell you that it does require some courage and willingness to do admit that this idea doesn't work anymore, and that's a tough one, something you know. I'll give you an example of from science. Science is about formulating theories based on what you see and then making predictions and then measuring to find out whether the predictions match the theory and or where the measurements and match the predictions. And you know it's so imagine you're a scientist and you are going to go test your theory. So you make a bunch of predictions, then you make an experiment, you do a bunch of measurements and since this is a podcast, people can't see me waving my hands, but imagine that you laid out of a chart and you're hitting everything exactly where you predict it was going to be, except for this one point over here. Now there's one scientist looks at that and claim to his old theories as well. It's probably just a measurement mirror. I like more it and everything else is wonderful and the other scientist looks at it and he says, oh, that's funny and then tries to figure out what's that point doing there and he ends up getting the Nobel Prize because he discovers the theory is broken and they didn't predict that point in it should have. So let's hope that the people are listening to this podcast are that kind of scientists who are willing to say, Gosh, that was wrong where maybe it was wasn't right enough, or maybe it wasn't accurate enough. Maybe I've measured more precisely than I could before. The previous theory worked okay in a course way, but it doesn't work in a more refine one. You need to be able to say that of your designs, of your models, of your business structures, of your organizational structures, when times change. More scientists encourage sounds good to me. How do you walk the line, though, of what... |
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...do you throw away what don't you throw away? I was just thinking of the conversation we had a recently where we were geeking out about home automation and you know, with my my wife is a bit of a Lutte, and so I need to make sure a real switch works for everything right. And maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but you know, it's kind of a topic of resilient systems. That example, that that you were talking about, where maybe you need an APP to open your car right or you need an APP to make a phone call. You can't just make a phone call. At what point do you get rid of the old for the the to move forward, versus hold onto some of the old to maintain resilience? Well, it's a good question. And for digital preservation, sometimes you want to hang on the old software and find some way to make it run so that you can access objects, digital objects that were created fifty years ago and for which there is no backward compatible alternative. And so for digital preservation there may be a very strong motivation for maintaining the ability to run old software, for example, and old operating system for emulate old hardware. And the other thing I think you need to be very careful about is, as good as innovation can be and as attractive as it can be, if it doesn't work or if there's some condition under which it might not work. Thinking through how to deal with that case is super important. You can't just give lip service to back up and a google. For example, one of the things we do on an annual basis is to run a disaster recovery test where we actually shut off primary services and turn on backup services and run on them B line, and that's the only way you'll ever find out where you really have a backup system in that I don't care how much desktop simulation you do if you don't run line. It's kind of like the guy that religiously backs up his tape. You know, he's got an APP on his laptop and it backs up onto takes three hours battle bla, never ever tested recovery from that thing,... |
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...until finally the hardware breaks, buys a new processor and tries to back it out and turns out it's never written anything on the take. So you know the I could not overemphasize how important it is to be serious about backing things up, and I don't mean by this just back up your storage. I'm talking about systems and Reazil Games and backup systems, especially for stuff that you're really relying yeah, and thinking of those conditions where it won't work as being your guidance. As far as this is where we need to maybe preserve some of these older ways of doing things. You know, Arnon Pencil is still my friend. I keep note books. You know. People say, well, why don't you just, you know, use your laptop or use your mobile, and the answer is, well, it's easier to sketch things on these pieces of paper. They have a lifetime measurable in decades, if not centuries. Show me a piece of art where show me a piece of digital media that has a lifetime it's longer than years. I mean, we haven't even had these things that long. So some of them we don't know, longer than last you know, I'm personally always trying to figure out how much of it is me getting older or or, you know, being set in my own ways versus holding on to the past. You know, even I don't know when Apple got rid of the headphone check right. You know, I grumbled about that and I was frustrated by that. You know, what am I going to do if the you know, wireless is great, but what happens when wireless the battery breaks? Right, and and I'm always struggling in personally to figure out which means holding on to the past versus allowing for change. Well, I have to tell you I want I want to kill people that change connector types. I mean already know, because at some point it just goes you go crazy, because I don't give a good example. I have a hard drive that I've been backing up my old seventeen inch Mac on for a long time and I've, you know, been patting myself on... |
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...the back. Oh, I agree so good about religious about backing and stuff up. Then one day I thought, well, wait a minute, I'll never get another seventeen inch Mac. So if I have to back up from the hard drive, I mean I have a Macintosh with any matching connector that can even gather the data, and maybe there is none, maybe there will be no driver or anything, will know how to even with a physical, you know, adapter will know how to read it and it's so I realized, you know, at that point that maybe this religion had not served me well. And then I need to think of a better way to do that back up. So yes, you sometimes you have to step back and make sure you've answered the question. Is this going to work under you know, and then pick a scenario. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Given your time with Darpa, I'm curious what, if any, do you think that commercial organizations can learn from the way that Darpa does things? I know I was I don't know if this was the same when you were there, but when I worked on some darper projects, there's very much just like three phase system where, you know, you have separate teams kind of working redundantly on the same problem during the first phase and the then you get to the second phase, you throw some of that away, you start over again. It was extremely inefficient, but I think it there are some great outputs came from it and I'm curious your experience. What, if anything, you think other organizations can learn from the way Darpa does things. Well, and my time probably preceded yours because I was there from seventy sixty eighty two, which a long time ago, right. So the projects I tended to work on did not do the triple play thing, but what we did have was a lot of diversity involved in the projects. So we have many different perspectives and we kept iterating, we kept trying things out, learning lessons finding things it didn't work, you know, going back rethinking and redesigning, reimplementing and testing, and the fact that Darpa had both the capacity to support things for... |
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...significant periods of time and has its patient capital, so to speak, but also was persistent about making things work, I mean trying to make things work. The important outcome was does it work or not? That's a good test. I mean, you know, it's really hard to fake that. Either works or done one. So in my case I had many different projects, but the good part was that they all coalesced into this one gigantic thing, which we call the Internet project, which involved the bag of satellite, not the packet radio on that pocket cryptography, kind security, the protocols themselves, the Internet based systems and then all applications that ran on top of them. So all of that was manageable, in my head anyway, because it was all aimed at the same target, which is see if we can get this to actually work. And so I think one thing that's been very obvious in the Internet story is that the government has been a huge and important player inpatiently supporting, over decades, the evolution and development of this system and at NSF at the Department of Energy, at NASA and our all of them put long term funding in place and a stuff is still funding stuff they started in one thousand nine hundred and eighty two and there's still pursuing UK research. Of course it's different, it's changes over time and it targets are different, but the persistence is there and you don't always get that in the private sector. They're most depending on where the capital comes from, which is why it is so important for the government to stay very involved in basic research and tech transfer and applied research, because it has the capacity to be patient. Is Funny in in many cases you almost see the polar opposite of instanstead of patients capital, it's got to happen extremely quickly and instead of the very simple test of does... |
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...this work or not, there's a myriad of our a lie calculations. It just confuse everyone from what the heck are we actually trying to do here? So I think I'd like to use it does the does this thing work or not more often, because that, I think, it grounds everyone. Well, for me anyway, it's a really wonderful acid task and you know, when people say, well, is the dumb my idea, and my answer is, I'll tell you what, if it doesn't work, you're free to call the dumb. My idea that does work, then we can argue over over that. But there's it's hard to argue with something that works. And that's the other problem you run into. You talk about change. Sometimes the old things still work well enough that it's hard to get people to do something new. That's the tough side of things. That work is that they persist. That's right. And then you start factoring in human fears and patterns and biases, and gets really messy. Well, you know, I don't want to have to spend time learning to do something new. I've been doing this for the last thirty years. I'm really good at it, so don't give me your new thing. And it keeps saying yes, but it's faster and jeeper and if we do it this way then we can do all these other things. And you know your reaction is leave me along, go bother somebody else. Yeah, I know we're running up on time. We got two quick questions, fun questions for you. So the first one is, is it a little bit of a bunnet bummer that we don't have a night system here and that Tim Berners League gets to be Sir Tim Berners Lee and you don't get to get the night. Listen, I have a solution to this problem. You know, I want you to know this. First of all, that breaks it happened. You know, we argue over as a good idea or bad idea, but brexit has happened, so the UK is now free of the you. Second you know we've seen some fairly awkward and maybe even awful political stress here in the United States. My proposition is that we should simply declare that the American experiment is over, and then we're returning the country to the Queen. We're inviting Canada, Australia and the New Zealand to reform the British Empire, at which point we can have titles again. I'm... |
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...on board. Next question. So the the next and last question is what is the best advice that you've ever received? The best advice that I ever got, quite honestly, came from a Nobel Prize one, or Josh Letterberg, but, blessed society's not with US anymore. He was night at night, he was no belt or his research on recombinant Binga. He I was lucky to have contact with him while I was at Stanford University and again as Vice President of the corporation for National Research Initiatives, which PROB CON started in one thousand nine hundred and eighty six, and Josh was on the board. Bob And I were working on digital libraries and I remember spending a substantial amount of time covering a whiteboard with an explanation for Josh about what it was we were trying to do and the motivations were all this other stuff, and at the end of the Josh let Dabby and he said vent do something, and you know, that's the point. I just don't just talk about it, do something. That's the best one ever got. I love it. That's great advice. Well, Dr Sure if I really thank you for your time. Appreciate it and I enjoy any time we get to speak, so thank you so much. Well at first of all, just call them event like everybody else does. Second, this was a sure way at least as much fun for me as it might have been for you. And third, to the folks who were listening to this. You know I'm not smarter than anybody else, but I can I can tell you that if you don't step outside of your own box every once in a while, you'll get trapped in it. So keep that in mind. Solid advice. Thanks so much, Vin bye bye. Technology should serve vision, not set it at intivity. We design clear blueprints for organizational readiness and digital transformation that allow companies to chart new past. Then we drive the implementation of those plans with our client partners in... |
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