A Conversation With the Internet's Architect

Jon Clifton:
[0:05] Today, I am joined by Dr. Vint Cerf, the father of the internet, the recipient of so many awards, I actually cannot list all of them, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, all the way to 24 different honorary doctorates from universities.

Dr. Cerf, thank you for being with us here today and talking about your top five strengths.

Vint Cerf:
[0:28] Thank you very much for having me in this discussion, Jon. I always enjoy exploring these kinds of ideas.

Jon Clifton:
[0:34] As somebody that leads with Futuristic, Input, Communication, Strategic, and Analytical, what would you say to those that have a similar top five in terms of how they should be leading with their strengths?

Vint Cerf:
[0:49] Well, you know, first of all, I think that those strengths are really a cool combination of things. I mean, I really like the fact that those are my strengths because I resonate with them. I guess that's not too surprising, is it? But they feel like a really neat combination of capacities that allow me to survive and thrive in challenging environments where I have to learn that I could be wrong sometimes and that my ideas may not always be the right ones. The comfort level with that notion, I think, is really important. I think leadership is not about being absolutely right all the time. It's about recognizing when you're not right. And changing your mind.

Jon Clifton:
[1:52] Now, Vint, your top five strengths, Futuristic, Input, Communication, Strategic, and Analytical. With such a successful career, what strength would you say that it is that helped you become so successful?

Vint Cerf:
[2:05] Well, you know, that's an interesting combination of strengths. When you think about it, what do they translate into? They translate into openness to new ideas, Futuristic. I'm optimistic about the future, even though we have many challenges in today's world. But it's my belief that technology is our friend, even when sometimes it isn't. I like the idea of understanding things deeply enough so that you can be strategic as well as tactical in terms of using technology or exploring possibilities.

One of the things I learned is that you can't really predict the future, but what you can do is look at trends, for example, and try to get a sense for what future possibilities there are, some of them, you know, positive and some of them not so positive. But the ability just to imagine what those possible futures are is a way of helping you to figure out, well, what's the best thing I can do right now? So I think all of those little package of strengths allows me to engage with a wide range of people and a wide range of technology. Even when I don't understand it, I have a thirst for understanding it. And so I'm open to the input that I gain from some of those conversations. Man, if you can't listen to other people, how the heck are you going to learn anything?

Jon Clifton:
[3:41] People with Futuristic are always thinking in the future. And a few of the concepts that you've been talking about more frequently are things like the interplanetary internet, about bit vellum, to make sure that we are protecting the bits in so many of the technology things that we have today. How far do you think into the future as somebody with Futuristic?

Vint Cerf:
[4:04] Well, you know, I'm a great science fiction fan, and so I love reading science fiction stories. I started reading these science fiction stories in the 1950s. And so future then was 2000. I mean, 2000 was holy moly, you know. It's 50 years from now. Imagine what that's going to be like. Of course, now it's 2023, and I've lived through the 2000s. I've been, frankly, I've been disappointed. I mean, the first two decades of the 21st century, it frankly suck. I mean, a lot of good things have happened, but a lot of bad things have happened as well. So I have to admit to you that now the future for me is more like 2050, 2075, 2100. But nonetheless, all of those stories were helpful because they allowed me to share with the authors of those stories their imaginings for what could possibly happen. And in many cases, what could possibly go right and what could possibly go wrong. And it strikes me as anyone who's interested in what the future holds needs to keep in mind that sometimes things may not go the way you plan for them to go, and you need to be prepared for that.

Jon Clifton:
[5:18] Throughout your incredible career, as you were using Futuristic, as you were thinking years and years into the future, is there anything that you believe that you saw that no one else did?

Vint Cerf:
[5:30] I don't know that I could claim that I foresaw things that no one else did. I think the more accurate sense is that I'm willing to spend a lot of time on projects that take a lot of time for fruition. So as an example, the internet design work that I did with Bob Kahn started in 1973. And we weren't able to turn the internet on in some really definitive way for 10 years. It was January 1, 1983. And anyone who's paid attention to the history of the internet will know that a great deal has happened since 1983. And so I'm still at it. I mean, the internet continues to evolve. There are all kinds of new things that we've been able to do, partly because of the increased capacity of the system. And so this willingness to make long-term commitments and to spend a great deal of time is, I think, thematic.

So another example, which you mentioned earlier, is the Interplanetary Internet Network. That began in 1998, so that's 25 years ago, and with the expectation that we should be doing something then that we were going to need 25 years later. So here we are. It's 25 years later, and as you can see from the headlines, we are on the cusp of a return to space, that we are going to be moving out into the rest of the solar system. Some of it may actually be commercially motivated. Even the return to the moon, the Artemis mission includes mining on the moon, commercial mining on the moon. So it's literally around the corner. And so I pride myself, I guess, on my willingness to be patient and persistent in some of these projects.

Jon Clifton:
[7:15] When you were working on developing email, when you think about your Futuristic, what was your vision for it? And now that we use email so much today, I think that there are literally billions of emails that are sent by humanity every single day, was your vision realized or what were you thinking at that particular time?

Vint Cerf:
[7:35] Well, first of all, remember that the notion of network email arises out of the ARPANET project while I'm at UCLA as a graduate student. So that's 1971. And we all instantly recognized the utility of deferred communication. It was faster than sending postal mail, but it had the benefit that you didn't both have to be awake at the same time in order to communicate. So it was a very powerful enabler during the ARPANET project, and we recognized it as such. I didn't start working on MCI mail at MCI until 1983, or late 82. And it was already a well-established practice in the academic world, but it wasn't available to the general public.

And so the project internally was called the Digital Post Office. And the idea was that we were building a different kind of postal service that was online and computer-based. Frankly, I think we were probably about 10 years early because laptops were not available at the time and desktops were just becoming available to the general public. By 1992, I can remember people apologizing when they handed me their business cards saying, I don't have my email on the business card yet, or I don't have email yet. And that was literally 20 years after the notion of network email surfaced in the research community. So I am persuaded that this is just one of a number of different communication mechanisms that help us stay connected to each other and stay in touch and stay up to date. I still feel avalanched by email, especially if I have meetings all day long, so I can't see the email until I get home at night. And then after dinner, I'm answering emails until 11 o'clock at night. And there's something not right about that, but I don't know quite what to do about it.

Jon Clifton:
[9:41] What are you concerned about in terms of what you see in the future right now?

Vint Cerf:
[9:46] Well, I am very concerned, of course, that we have very fundamental challenges as a civilization. The global warming problem is absolutely, I would say, a dire threat. Now, we've been wrong in the past about dire threats, for example, the population bomb. What happened is that we learned how to feed more people. The new methods of agriculture, fertilizers and things like that, genetically modified or hybrid crops that produce larger quantities of food, more efficient farming, all of those things have enabled us to support a much larger population than we thought we could. On the other hand, those same mechanisms have also produced some bad side effects. And so we are facing some really tough problems that lie ahead. We're experiencing that literally today as we speak out on the West Coast, where California is experiencing some fairly severe storms, some of which I think are attributable to the rise in temperature.

So we have that big problem. We also have a serious problem in the information technology world of misinformation and disinformation, which is indistinguishable from where truth and falsehood are becoming indistinguishable. It gets worse when we start thinking about deep fakes where we can produce imagery that looks indistinguishable from live video, and yet it's actually been fabricated. Parties do appear to say and do things that they didn't actually do or say, and that can lead to all kinds of serious negative consequences. So we are living in an increasingly complex world where we have to be conscious of those potential hazards. And so I have this feeling that we're not teaching young people and ourselves or older people about these hazards and these risks. We need to do that so that people are aware of what problems they might encounter in this information rich environment. And I use the word information rich because information isn't always true. Some of it's false. And so you may be information rich, but it may be filled with false information.

We need to learn how to deal with that. And I think we haven't yet learned to do it. So my simple rubric for this is sort of like maybe we should have an internet driver's license where you have to learn what the risk factors are before you're allowed to use the internet. Of course, I'm not literally proposing that. But I think the training programs that would lead up to an internet driver's license would be actually useful in the same way that we teach driver's ed in order to make sure that people have been exposed to good practices for safe driving.

Jon Clifton:
[12:53] Your number three strength is Communication. How did you see Communication as something that was helpful and useful to you throughout your entire career?

Vint Cerf:
[13:05] Well, first of all, I enjoyed reading, and I enjoyed writing. And that includes, you know, poetry and not so much short stories. I really suck at dialogue, which is really too bad. Not too shabby on description, but really crappy with dialogue. So I enjoyed finding ways to express myself. I love words. I love, you know, crossword puzzles. I love word puns. Language is fascinating. So, for most of my career, the idea of finding ways to communicate ideas, to get people to understand what you're thinking, to get the model in your head into their head, has been a very important objective for me. And communication, of course, is the means by which we do that. So I've found in retrospect, looking back on my career, I discovered that in order to do something big, it's really smart to get help, especially from people who are smarter than you are. And so that's a sales job and so I learned very quickly that if I couldn't communicate my ideas and enthusiasm for doing something or getting something to happen then I wouldn't get any help. And so learning how to communicate those ideas and to generate excitement and to generate commitment it was really important, and I believe that to this day that if you can't communicate your idea as well, you won't get any help and you won't do anything very big.

Jon Clifton:
[14:43] You know, one of the things that we've seen in our database now is that engagement is dropping among workplaces. And one of the reasons is that we are now living in a more asynchronous world, especially now that so many more people are working in a hybrid or working remotely. And that sort of asynchronous communication is causing us to write to each other. And that failure to understand each other is really a challenge. What would you say to people as someone who does excel in communication, especially in the written word? What do we need to do now as leaders in order to improve that so that we do understand each other through the written word?

Vint Cerf:
[15:23] So this is interesting. I tend to be rather terse. You wouldn't guess it from our conversation, but my email exchanges are very brief. I tend to boil things down to one or two sentences and sometimes just one or two words. And I'm sure some of my colleagues find that amusing. On the other hand, I have other colleagues who, you know, if I ask a question, I get back a dissertation. I think brevity is important. Capturing the essence of something is important because people won't remember, you know, a 500-word essay, but they might remember a one-sentence statement. So my view is that brevity is important.

I am a heavy user of email, partly because I started using it when it was invented in 1971. And I found it useful partly because I'm hearing impaired, and so audio conversations have some risk factors associated with them if I didn't hear the key word in a sentence. So written communication for me is important partly because of my hearing impairment. And so I've gravitated to jobs that involve use of email. What I believe is that you can maintain relationships in written form. But they need to be reinforced from time to time by face-to-face meetings. Even this one, which I'm thoroughly enjoying, isn't quite the same as sitting at the same table and enjoying a meal together or getting up and having a big argument on the whiteboard. And so you need those reinforcing moments. But I think as long as they are there occasionally, you can maintain quite a good working relationship with written communication.

I will say that during this pandemic, where we were all so isolated from each other, the ability to do this kind of conversation that we're doing right now, I think has made a significant difference. It still isn't the same as being in the same room, sharing an experience together, but it's probably better than purely written communication. Now, let me go back in history for just a second, because I want to observe that the brief kinds of communications, short email kinds of exchanges, are very different from the kinds of written exchanges that you would have seen two or three hundred years ago or even earlier. Because the means of communication was very high latency for any distant parts. So, you know, if you were in Europe trying to communicate with somebody in the new world, it could take weeks for letters to be exchanged. The consequence of that is that people tended to write longer letters and to try to communicate as much as possible in those letters because you knew that you weren't going to be there to explain anything and also that the exchanges would be infrequent. Now that we have these very rapid exchanges, whether it's, you know, texting or TikTok or, you know, five-second videos or what have you, we are actually losing some of the quality of thoughtful exchange, thoughtful discourse. And so I wonder whether we need to do something about that in order to improve the quality of the exchange.

Jon Clifton:
[19:01] What do we do?

Vint Cerf:
[19:03] Well, one possibility, of course, is that meeting face-to-face tends to force you into an extended dialogue, like the one that we're having right now. And the necessities of extended dialogue are really important. One of the things that I learned from Sherry Turkle, who's an MIT professor who's written a number of books, one of which was called Alone Together. She was describing teenagers with their mobiles sitting around the table or in a shopping mall, not even talking to each other, but texting on their mobiles with somebody else who wasn't part of the crowd. And hence the alone together rubric. What she was getting at, though, is that these kids were finding that texting had the property that if you didn't respond, it was okay. Whereas if you were in a telephone conversation or a conversation like this one, if you asked me a question and I didn't know what to say and so I didn't respond, the awkwardness of that silence is notable. And the teenagers who were using texting took advantage of the fact that they could avoid the awkwardness because they were excused from not responding. Because it was understood that in texting conditions, you might not be able to respond because you got distracted or some other more important thing happened. And so you could escape the awkwardness of silence. So the kids don't talk to each other on the phone anymore. It's because they don't know what to do when they encounter a moment of awkwardness.

Jon Clifton:
[20:49] Now, people with Input have an unusual ability to never stop asking questions. You have an unusual ability to do that. What are your thoughts on inspiring others to do the same thing, especially when we live in a world today where humanity does such a great job of communicating, but we may not do as good of a job as listening? And you have shown through your unique ability to ask questions that you are a great listener. What do we do to inspire the rest of the world and other world leaders to do exactly the same thing?

Vint Cerf:
[21:20] Oh, listen, it's very simple. You don't learn anything unless you shut up and listen. And you probably don't learn anything unless you ask questions. There are no stupid questions. There may be stupid answers, but there are no stupid questions. And some people will come and hesitate to ask a question because they don't want to sound stupid. But my reaction is, listen, if you don't know the answer and you want to know the answer, ask the question. And then, of course, you have to evaluate the answers you get back, because sometimes you may get back stupid answers. But questions are and always should be welcome.

Jon Clifton:
[21:58] Now, people with Input oftentimes love when there are people who challenge their thinking. Who do you look to in order to challenge your own thinking?

Vint Cerf:
[22:08] Well, many of my colleagues here and some of the people who report to me, I actually have to insist that they challenge me. If my articulations don't make any sense or if they think I'm going down a bad path, there are a lot of people, especially in Asian cultures, who are very reluctant to challenge authority. And that's the essence of good leadership is being willing to accept challenges and to respond to people who are saying to you, you know, that you're about to walk off the edge of a cliff. I have occasionally told my engineers, if you don't tell me I'm about to do something stupid, then at the end of the year, your fitness rating is going to suffer because you should have told me if you knew at the time I was doing something dumb. And so I have to insist on people feeling comfortable saying, you know, wait a minute, have you thought about X, Y, and Z? Some people say, well, you're the leader. Didn't you already figure that out? And have you discarded all the negative consequences? And the answer is no, because I didn't think of that one. So I really want that kind of challenging input. It's valuable.

Jon Clifton:
[23:24] People with Input consume an incredible amount of information. What is it that you consume? What kind of information are you constantly consuming in order to keep yourself informed on virtually everything?

Vint Cerf:
[23:36] Well, I'm not informed on everything, but I do feel like I'm inundated with input. First of all, again, I use email a lot. And the consequence of that is that people draw my attention to a wide range of articles, videos, and other things. I learn a lot from that. It's wonderful. They are acting as filters on my behalf because they're exposed to all kinds of material that I don't normally see. And so they draw my attention to that. I'm truly very grateful for that. And that's an example of input. Another kind of input, of course, is subscribing to a lot of different scientific and technical magazines, which I try religiously to try to read through when I can. And I enjoy that very much, especially like the first half of Science Magazine, which is written in plain English, as opposed to the second half, which is absolutely not written in plain English.

So I get great value from those kinds of exchanges. I do find that I ask people, when I deeply am trying to understand something, I often ask them to draw me a picture, and I don't mean literally you know sketching a photograph but you know show me a diagram or give me some visual model of what it is that we're talking about. I find myself reacting very positively to these kinds of visual models. It helps me enormously to organize my thinking about complex systems if we can see a kind of block diagram of the various pieces at the right level of abstraction. So I've learned and many of my friends have learned that if I'm not understanding what they're saying, they need to draw me a diagram. And it's amazing how that can cause your understanding to suddenly become much clearer.

Jon Clifton:
[25:38] You have Analytical number five. And one thing that's so important to people with Analytical is getting the data right. People with Analytical consume an incredible amount of data. Now that we're living in this world of big data all the way to fake news, how do you know when you feel like you've got it right?

Vint Cerf:
[25:56] Well, first of all, you have to learn in the business I'm in that you don't always have all the data that you want. And the decisions have to be made in the presence of or in the absence of all the information you would like. That's where judgment and guesswork and imagination really count because you have to make up for the lack of data with some of these other properties. On the other hand, to the extent that you can get the data and you can use that information to eliminate misunderstandings, eliminate untruths, is really important. In this world of misinformation and disinformation, finding good data is a big challenge, partly because, as you say, you can fabricate data now. We're in the fake data, fake news world now where our artificially intelligent engines are generating stuff which turns out to be wrong. I mean, some of the large language models in the chatbots that you encounter in today's world are capable of sounding absolutely articulate and being absolutely dead wrong because they were trained with data that turns out to be incorrect. Or they conflate things because of the mechanics of machine learning that should not be conflated.

And so learning to think critically about what you're seeing and hearing, and even about the data that you're shown, is really important. I mean, I'm a big fan of spreadsheets, for example, when you're trying to figure out, you know, numerical information and how do things all, you know, hang together. And some of the most important things that, for me, in looking at that kind of information is to figure out whether some of the numbers will tell you that there must be something wrong. You know, like this number and this number should add up to that number. And if they don't, there's something wrong in the spreadsheet. And I know my staff probably go crazy because I'm always saying, you know what? There's something wrong with this computation. And they say, well, I just plugged the number in. I said, well, that shows because it doesn't compute. So being able to tease apart evidence that the data is wrong is really valuable.

Jon Clifton:
[28:18] You've had so many amazing partners throughout your career. How have you leveraged the strengths of others to help them become successful?

Vint Cerf:
[28:27] Everybody knows things that I don't know. That's why one of life's lessons is you can learn something new from almost anybody you meet. And it's important to keep that in mind. They've all had experiences that you haven't had. And you can learn something from that. I found working together with other people to be enormously enabling. My favorite situation is in front of the whiteboard, you know, having this giant knock down, drag out argument about what's the right way to get something to work. So for me, I find this partnership to be extremely energizing. I'm not a lone thinker. I think better when I'm having a discussion, when I'm trying to explain to somebody why I think X is true. It often turns out that as I'm explaining why I think it's true, I realize why it's wrong.

One of the most powerful tools I've ever had, experience for finding bugs in software, is to take a piece of code which is not working properly and sit down with someone who is knowledgeable and to say, let me explain to you why this is supposed to work. And sure enough, as you walk your way through why it's supposed to work, either the other person or you will realize where it is that an assumption was made that was wrong. And I have to tell you, if there's ever a life lesson to keep in mind, it's that whenever I really screw up badly, it's because I made an assumption that turned out to be wrong. And so I have to keep reminding myself, okay, what assumptions am I making in the course of trying to decide what to do or how to design something or how to build it or how to test it? What are my assumptions? Question your assumptions.

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