Episode 4: A Conversation with Technology Executive Lewis Shepherd (Part One)

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In this episode of Oodacast, I'm talking with an old friend and associate and comrade, Louis shepherd of VMware. Louis, let me give people my version of your bio, if that's okay, and then you can correct the record. I met Lewis probably in 2003 or 2004. You had gotten the call to service after the horrific events of 2001, 9, 11, and had been working very successfully in Silicon Valley, helping create and drive innovation there. And you came into the national security space, where you had some background previously, and then began working at the Defense Intelligence Agency. Of course, I'd been in the intel world for a while and had several friends there, and eventually I was pulled back into the Defense Intelligence Agency, where we both served together, helping to bring advanced technologies into that important mission set after we both left dia. I've still followed you closely, of course, and watched as you created, created new capabilities and brought the very best of R and D from the commercial world into government use. And you're now serving both worlds today. You're helping VMware steer their R and D investments to make sure that they are creating the right thing. You're helping government decision makers think through what's the realm of the possible and all sorts of strategic places. Is that good for a brief bio? What kind of things did I miss there, Louis?

No, very much. I'll only underline that I began life as a outside of technology, as a political scientist. That's what my graduate work was in. And I therefore was able to perhaps think a little bit differently from people who came up purely learning, coding and development. And so I think it's a happy marriage, I like to think, to be understanding the human side and the social side and the relevant governmental implications of the kinds of technologies that we develop and use. Now, I got more technical, you know, the older I got. I was always an early adopter and learned to code and. And so forth. But I'm pretty comfortable on both sides of that fence, which I think is really important, not only in government but elsewhere, so that we always have a nice human centric understanding of the implications of the technologies we build and deploy.

Right. We were just talking with another OODA Loop member, Dan Geerstein, who called himself an accidental technologist as he described his career. And I thought, you know, that kind of applies to me too. And now hearing you describe that, maybe it's a bit of that way for you as well. You get pulled into this and you find you can make a difference and you keep making a difference.

Yeah. And I don't want to discount the people who have made that same transition in reverse because there are many, many examples of great people who were hardcore technologists, hardcore computer scientists, for example, or other technical disciplines who have come to play a really important public policy role or advisory role in public affairs and other aspects of the human uses. So that's, I think, a great, you know, we talk about seamless in deploying technologies. This is one where the seam should be actually recognized and celebrated in a way, because otherwise you're never going to explicitly try to recruit people from the other side of the fence from you and to actually understand the imperatives from either side.

That's a very good point. And it's also, I mean, it's critical in this current time of crisis. And we see case after case after case where some policymakers have no understanding of technology or science, and we're all paying a price for that. But you see these other champions who have excelled in science and their discipline, like Dr. Fousey, for example, who is informing policymakers with smart fact based opinions and assessments that are helping do the right thing. I think we need to know that.

Well, and I think one of the things I've always used as a teaching element in my thinking about this, the role of technology in government public policy, has been our experience with that very question you're bringing up in the nuclear era, the earliest atomic era. So we had hardcore physicists like Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, who had very developed thinking on the human and social implications of the technologies that they were involved in, in sparking. And their views were often discounted. You know, Einstein may be less so, Oppenheimer more so, their views on the social and human and public implications of the technologies they had developed. And I think we need to keep our minds open to the relevance of the views of those who, unlike me, actually came up from a purely scientific discipline.

Right. Louis, I do want to ask you a few questions about the current crisis and then I really want to talk to you about your views on the future of technology, including how it may have been impacted by the current crisis, but also where it's going regardless, whatever we do. But starting with this current pandemic, there's a lot of info out there, a lot of good info, a lot of specious info. It's info overload. And it's like we're asking every citizen to be an intel analyst with this overwhelming onslaught of Information from every source. Books, radios, videos, TVs, Twitter, Facebook. How is a person supposed to find the best sources? And maybe the way I should ask that is what sources do you tap into for trusted information on this pandemic?

It's a tough challenge to be fair and to be honest because. Well, let me put it this way, the positive aspect of this and to answer the question, I think we need to realize that at the same time that there has been an explosion of new sources and now a vast array of information sources available to everybody at the touch of their phone. At the same time, there still continue to be what fully existed before the Internet era. And that is a wealth of trusted, branded, curated sources of news, edited sources of news. So you know, the I have a lot of respect for the role of editor. In college I worked as a lowly copy editor on the University of Virginia student newspaper. Smartest person on campus, in my mind was the editor of that paper. And he, you know, corrected a million mistakes that I made. Editors play a really important role in the scenario you're talking about. We have so much information available. So. So I like news sources that have a strong tradition of editorial excellence. Now, the world of journalism that hasn't extended over into social media yet. I know that Facebook has hired several thousand human editors at the same time as trying to develop and deploy machine learning technology techniques to be able to curate and edit the profusion of not just news sources but user generated content that go into Facebook sites. But in no way does that match the deft and polished and practiced and experienced eye of a human editor on a source like the New York Times. So I'll mention the New York Times. It's, you know, long been seen for almost 100 years as the nation's preeminent print news source. I live in rural Essex County, Virginia. I'm the only subscriber. My wife and I are the only subscribers to the print edition of the New York Times in our county. And thank goodness for the woman who delivers that paper at 5:30 every morning to my doorstep. I still read the print New York Times every single day, seven days a week. And I learn a lot more about a lot of unexpected things because I've used every digital format of every newspaper I can find and I've never found one. Some of them do really innovative stuff. Washington Post I'm a digital subscriber to the Washington Post. I love, I know their CTO and he does a wonderful job with innovative stuff both on the mobile version and the desktop version. Still doesn't match the experience and the ability to absorb a lot of information in a short amount of time that reading a print newspaper does now. So sources like the New York Times and the beauty of the web is I can read the New England Journal of Medicine online when I never could read the New England Journal of Medicine before. So in a pandemic, the medical and health and academic research sources become invaluable. I'll get back to social media in a second here, but one of the things that I noticed about the New York Times is so they have a very large, digitally aware and very proficient staff who focus on information visualization because they're trying to bother handle complex topics in a way that are very amenable for their readers and also to deal with increasingly new generations of readers who are used to consuming information in much more nimble, agile visual ways. And so here's an example. On March 22, and we're filming this on March 31. So you know, just a week ago, March 22, a little over a week ago, the Times posted online. So I saw it online. A phenomenal information visualization spread about the birth of the novel Coronavirus in Wuhan, China, and the spread of it across China and the spread of it then internationally. And it is a series of just insanely helpful and compelling data visualizations done in a really interesting and just fantastic way. Conveyed a lot of information, did it in a really dynamic and moving way. As I looked at that, I thought, wow, this is fantastic. Thank goodness I look at the digital version every now and then as well. That was on the 22nd. Three days later, on the 25th, I open up my print New York times and on 2, 3 interior pages spread across 3 pages of newsprint were really well done translations of that dynamic online digital information into print graphics, which of course were static, they were colorized, but you know, the majority was black and white. It took a lot of thinking on how to do that. They got the same message across and pretty much it's valuable to look at both. But you know, that version in the print paper was accompanied by inches and inches and inches of columns of phenomenal reports and so forth. So I like to rely on the tried and true sources like that. But you know, one thing that our conversation here reminds me of is so you at Ooda Loop, Bob, you and your team, you opened until our quarantine era here you've been holding conferences and hosting face to face real time meetings for large audiences. Large audiences are great. We're all now getting used to more and more events being performed virtually. So we have a great wealth of choices of online conferences, video driven conferences that we can consume. One that I'll pitch because again it answers your question is tomorrow as we're recording this and wait, you're going to be posting this later? One that I'll encourage people to find back online and look at because I know it's going to be posted immediately after it's filmed on April 1st is at the Stanford Institute for Human Centric Artificial Intelligence, which goes by the acronym of HAI At Stanford, Stanford University established this Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence. A novel combination of what we were talking about before, about the blending of, of disciplines and backgrounds. So there's going to be an all day conference and people can check out the videos of it.

I saw you tweeting about that, Louis. So anybody wants info can find you on Twitter, right? You've got a link to it in your Twitter feed.

Absolutely. And I think the virtue of it, the value of it, is the institute itself is led by two people on the Stanford faculty. One is Fei. Fei Lin, who of course is a phenomenal computer scientist, has also at times been with Google, leading Google's AI research. She's back full time, I believe on the Stanford faculty, but her partner in it is John Etchemendi, a long time highly renowned Stanford philosopher, professor of philosophy. And it's that kind of blend that gives it the human centric AI aspect. And then you mentioned Twitter. I'll admit that like Bob Gourley, perhaps second only to Bob Gourley, I'm a Twitter addict. I use lists a lot on Twitter, so I have probably two dozen active lists that I curate. Some have very few members, they're really selective. And those lists are maybe four or five accounts that I want to be able to see on a particular topic all at once if I want to focus on that. I have a list on US politics which has probably 200 political reporters, political activists, officials, government people, elected officials, public policy people. I have one on China, I have one on Russia, I have several on artificial intelligence, several others on other kinds of technologies. Curated lists in Twitter are a feature that I don't see on Facebook. The ability to do anything like that successfully where I as just an anonymous user can actually curate a set of accounts and follow them as a group. And I find that to be an extraordinarily helpful research and news consumption tool for me. And I encourage people to use that. You can really gain control over the swamp thing, the morass, the tidal wave of misinformation Are your lists public or private? They are 100% private right now, but I'd be happy to unlock a few of them.

Well, I use a mix. Some of mine, I just have a bunch of public lists have been out there for a long time. Others I intentionally wanted to keep secret because I thought it's nobody's business. So there's a mix. And like some of my secret ones are, here are the people that I absolutely must read. Maybe I should make that one public. You're on that list, for example, and I look at that list and if somebody has posted anything on that list, I'm going to read it. And so that is people like you that I definitely could, I see as a. Serving as a great curation and filter.

Yeah, well, and it goes back to your original question of how do average people take control of the tidal wave of information that's available? And yeah, some, some digital channels offer those kinds of tools. Yeah.

So thanks. Thanks for both of those. I think the digital panels like this Stanford event, which I'm going to look for myself and try to attend, and the use of Twitter in that way, I think is very important. In fact, I'd say I was given more insights on the coming pandemic from following people on Twitter than from any media source. And then as things started to develop, I was given more insights on what we should do about it than even the cdc. So it's very important that you find trusted people to follow and engage with.

I'll point out one other analogous environment, and that's LinkedIn. Now LinkedIn. So I was still with Microsoft Research when Microsoft acquired LinkedIn. And I thought it was a great, brilliant, inspired move. And one of the things that I liked that I heard at the beginning and that they've lived up to, as Microsoft said, we're not going to monkey around with, we're not going to screw up what really works with LinkedIn. And I think they've very much lived up to that. It's still basically run as its own company. It's a great service and there have been some integrations between the series of Microsoft services and so forth. But as an environment, one of the great things about LinkedIn is that you have very easy, quick access for authentication and validation of who's posting, what you're looking at, what's their background. And it's a, you know, you wind up becoming very nimble, as nimble as an HR professional at assessing the credibility of people based on their kind of track record, background and online resume. And that really helps with the volume of information that's presented in LinkedIn. And it's great source because people tend, as you know, people tend to be a little bit more professional about what they're posting and commenting on. Not always, but usually. And so that, especially in this period where everybody's working remotely, by and large, I noticed that the, the volume of posting on LinkedIn has really grown. I think people are trying to be as professional in the online realm as they can, and that highlights the value of LinkedIn.

Right. Louis, I want to transition, ask a few more questions about technology, and I've always appreciated your views on technology and where it's going and what it can do. In fact, for the last almost eight or nine years now, I've been running the CTO Vision blog, where I write personally about technology and have other analysts helping me write there, too. And I was wondering if you remember who named that blog for me. CTO Vision. Is that a memory that you have?

No, I'll tell you.

It was you, Louis. I was reviewing with you several ideas and the fact that you were already writing. You still have a blog that you maintain periodically. And I was doing a bit of writing here and there and wanted to bring it all together in one location. And you suggested the name CTO Vision, and I grabbed it. And it's. I wanted to start off the conversation by saying, I appreciate that, Louis.

Is there an account where all those royalties are piling up somewhere or. That's right. Happy to help. Happy to help.

Thanks, Louis. I appreciate it. And we look forward to continuing the discussion with part two of this oodacast.

Great. Thank you. I look forward to it. Thanks, Bob. Thanks for listening to this OODA Loop production. For the latest analysis on cybersecurity technology and global risks, please visit www.oodaloop.com.