Innovation: Why the Majority Is Always Wrong - Micheal Carducci

In this talk, Michael Karduchi presents the concept of holistic software architecture, emphasizing the importance of viewing architecture through a broader lens instead of relying on narrow patterns. He draws parallels between the art of magic and software development, arguing that both require a meticulous understanding of perception and deception. Throughout the session, he discusses the significance of having a diverse toolbox and the impact of deep curiosity, broad knowledge, and interpersonal networks on innovation. Karduchi references historical examples, particularly the journey of innovations in cryptography that defied conventional wisdom, to highlight the need for resilience and collaboration in the face of skepticism. Ultimately, he encourages attendees to embrace their position as innovators, relying on their unique perspectives to drive change in an often reluctant world.

really excited to dive into this talk. And I also think it's interesting looking at this. This is the first room that I have ever spoken at at GIDS that wasn't completely full. That means that the majority is chasing trends. And this group right here and the people watching this right now, they're looking for clarity in a complex world. And that's what I'm going to try to give

you just a little bit today. Uh if we have not yet had the pleasure of meeting, my name is Michael Karduchi. I like to call myself a holistic software architect. But what does that really mean? Well, if we approach architecture narrowly and we think about it just in terms of patterns and things like that, we actually miss a lot of the very important stuff. Being a truly

great architect requires taking a step back, looking at the bigger picture, considering all of the variables, even the hidden variables, the variables that your language model cannot see. And that's kind of what we do. And that's kind of what I want to show you some tools around that. I've also written a book. I run a YouTube channel. Uh I speak at a lot of conferences like this.

And then I have this whole other career. You know what? If you're taking that picture, I'm going to go back. You could grab that. I'll let you grab that. But I have this whole other career as a professional magician. Now, I used to think that those were separate. Oh, this is my day job and this is my side hustle or that's my day job and this is

my side hustle. They'd swap places a couple times. But the thing is, I used to think that they were completely separate. They're not. See, magic taught me to see things differently. Magic taught me to question what everybody else accepts as obvious. And it changed the way that I think about possibility. And more importantly, impossibility. It It leads me to agree with this man here, Muhammad Ali. Impossible

is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in a world that they've been given than to explore the power that they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. It's not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing. And to prove it, let me show you something impossible. in my

hot little hands here, an impossible object. Now, you might be sitting here thinking right now, what's so impossible about a card that has a spot printed on it? Well, that's a fair question because you haven't seen the other side. On the other side, there are four spots. Now, you might be thinking, "Ah, I see the impossibility." Or you're still wondering cuz you haven't seen all the sides

yet. See, this is an impossible object because it has more sides than it should. Not only is there one spot on this side, four spots on this side, but there are three spots on this side, and six spots on this side. I loved your reaction, by the way. But logic falls apart. How can there be one spot here, four spots here, three spots here, and six spots

here? Yeah. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Now, the majority is fooled. The minority is questioning what they saw or rather what they think they see because the thing is our brains are enormously expensive organs. And so, they optimize for power consumption. They like to run on autopilot. And one of the things that your brain will do without ever even telling you is scan for familiar patterns and

then fill those patterns in without your eyes actually giving you that information. Your brain's just going to do it anyway, without asking you, without telling you. It's just going to do it. And that is something that magicians like to exploit because I arranged these dots when I printed them in this card in a very familiar pattern. Six here. But there's not six spots on this card. There's

five. And that's the pattern. You see, nobody would arrange five dots like this. So when my hand is here, your brain just assumes, oh, four dots. When my hand is here, six dots. And if I'm over here, it's the same situation. We've got one dot or three dots. And now all I'm really doing is controlling what you see. I'm not trying to fool you. Your brain is

fooling you for me. >> Like big. >> And that means that the most dangerous situation to be in is to be in a situation where you think you know the truth. Like right now, where there actually are six dots on this side. There really are three dots on this side. Now, maybe the majority of you feel like you've already figured this out. And a majority of you

are realizing that I'm probably not done yet because on this side, there are actually eight spots. And I did that just to prove to you that the majority is always wrong. Thank you. Now, I got to say, y'all have been very kind to me. Not all magician, not all audiences are as nice as you are. Some audiences are a little more hostile. Because what I've learned over

the last 30 years or so performing professionally as a magician is that there are really three types of audiences. There is the majority. They are the people that just want to go along with the story. They accept what they what they see without questioning too deeply. They enjoy it. They're blown away. They had a good time. And then there is the minority. Those are the people who

are going to think a little deeper, who are going to question assumptions that their brains are just handing them to them unquestioned. They're going to question them on behalf of their brain. And then there's actually a third type of audience. These are the contrarians. These aren't the people who are thinking and rejecting with a thoughtfulness. They're actually completely rejecting without thinking or questioning. And that's an important

thing to point out because the majority might always be wrong, but that doesn't mean that as a shortcut that you can just disagree with everybody and everything. So what separates the innovators, that minority, the people who see what nobody else can see? what separates them from everybody else? The answer very simply, it just depends on what's in your toolbox. Let me give you an example. In the

United States, there's a very popular television program with these two legends, Pen and Teller. Uh, giants in the field of magic, major celebrities. They've been in magic so long, they know all the secrets. They know all the moves. They know all the techniques. There's a lot of stuff in their toolbox. And so they challenge magicians with their overloaded toolbox of all these things they know about magic

to come in and see if they can fool them. Because magicians have an enormous toolbox of techniques and devices and slights and psychological subtleties, things that we can leverage to create a deceptive illusion. But the thing is, when that's in your toolbox 247, this is why those two careers aren't separate. When I have that additional toolbox in addition to everything else I know about software and architecture

and everything else, it changes how magicians see the world. I just look at the world differently because I've been trained in deception and that allows me to see the world as it really is to see through other deception. I feel very differently about what's happening in the world right now with AI and everything else because there are a lot of patterns that I see that I recognize.

I'm like, "Aha, that is deliberately deceptive." So, what's in the innovator's toolbox? Because we've talked about what's in the magician's toolbox, but I want to go more general, more broad. What's in the innovator's toolbox? Well, according to a gentleman named uh Everett Rogers, who is the authorative expert on innovation, the minority that is right and why it takes so long for the majority to catch up. He

listed a number of things. One of the first things was deep curiosity. The kind of people who are active information seekers that are going to go to talks like this when there is a tantalizing set of options that you could other rooms that you could be in right now. You say I don't want to just learn something new. I want to come out of this conference seeing

the world differently. You're curious. You're like what does Karduchi have to say? Now another one is breath of knowledge. So in in addition to the depth that you might have in a language or a framework or a tool or something else, you have a broader set and that enables you to bring ideas from other domains and other disciplines and apply them to the work you're doing. And

that's what allows you to see a solution that other people don't. Then we have diverse interpersonal networks. Who do you know? You know, we human beings have a tendency. We have a habit and it's a regrettable habit. The word is homopholy. We like to be around people who are like us that speak the same way and think the same way and sometimes look the same way or

look at the problems the same way. That's a problem because you're not learning anything new from those people around you. But that diverse interpersonal network, different people with different backgrounds and different perspectives. These things are contagious. They spread. And when you're around some when you're around somebody like that and you say something and they challenge you, that's exciting because you might just be about to learn something

new. And then they're the innovators are generally able to cope with uncertainty. We're not sure. We're not completely sure we have the answer, but we have an idea and we can explore that idea even though there's a lot of uncertainty around it. And then we have diverse mental models. Just different things that you bring from your background. The things that you do that have nothing else to

do with software that teach you new things. I had a gentleman who would always show up to my sessions and he would knit while I was speaking. He's probably the only man that I know that knits. And the thing is, there's a certain logic to knitting. Punch cards, like Scott was talking about in the keynote, didn't start with computers. They started with weaving and looms and automated

looms. And then we took that idea, somebody who was familiar with what we were doing in embroidery, took that to computing. And we do that so many times. George Bull or rather Claude Shannon the guy who basically is the father of modern computing figured out how we could actually build the machines that Turring theorized he had the answer because he took a philosophy class and that gave

him a new mental model that he was able to apply these things. One more is the willingness to explore new ideas. Uh I think Vancat once said that the the mark of an educated mind is the ability to entertain an idea without accepting it. So if you're watching this right now, whether you're in this room or whether that's you right now watching the camera, yes, I see

you. There's probably a pretty good chance that you see yourself on this list. And if you do, that means you represent just 2.5% of the industry. That's not my number. That's Everett Rogers number. And again, he is the authority on all of this. He studied it his entire adult life. It sounds cool, but there's just one problem. The guy who figured out that 2.5% figure something else

out as well. Here he is. Ever Rogers, author of Diffusion of Innovation. He said this, "The most innovative member of a system is very often perceived as deviant from the social system and afforded a status of low credibility by the average members of the system. So what you see, your ability to see the answer is the exact same thing that makes it almost impossible for the majority

to hear what you have to say." Now this man, like I said, he studied innovation his whole life. He wrote this book diffusion of innovations fifth edition. Uh it's the seminal work on innovation how ideas spread. And one of the big ideas in this book was the adoption curve that basically innovation starts with this small group of people right here 2.5%. In fact on this screen it's

practically invisible. I think that might be a feature and not a bug. But the ideas spread to the early adopters. These are the people that live in between the innovators and the majority. They're sort of the gatekeepers and they're a little more connected. So they're actually able to bring the idea from here to the early majority. And then once the early majority starts adopting the idea once

they start seeing the value, these other people who can cope with less uncertainty have less uncertainty because they're seeing these people succeeding and now they're trying to catch up. And then the last group, the most skeptical of all, the lagards, they're the slowest to adopt. And so the adoption curve isn't just a model of how ideas spread. It's a model of who's wrong and when. And more

importantly, why? Because at every point on that curve, by definition, the majority hasn't adopted yet. Which means that at every point at that curve, the majority is looking at the innovator and seeing a deviant. The majority is not wrong because they're foolish. They're wrong because they optimized for the past. And the thing is those people, the majority, they don't have enough information to see what the innovator

sees. Yet ultimately this idea of consensus, what we all agree on, it's a lagging indicator. In in other words, it's a metric. It's something you can measure, but it's always behind the curve and it's always going to be behind the curve. Then re the reality is by the time the majority agrees the innovation is already old. Is that's not an innovation anymore. It's just the next thing

that we're doing. And the people who moved first, they've already moved on. They're already on to the next thing. And this is just a natural human process. So the majority is not wrong per se. The majority is actually late because deep down they're waiting because adopting an innovation is ultimately a decision under uncertainty. And most people very rationally wait for social proof before they take on that

risk. So the innovator because they can cope with uncertainty, they don't have that need. And that's kind of the key thing. Now there's another aspect that I've kind of skipped over. I want to talk about this part right here, the chasm. [sighs] That's the hardest part. See, Rogers touched on the chasm a little bit in his model, but the concept itself was explored in depth in another

book. See, diffusion of innovations was theory versus practice. This is a book about marketing and selling disruptive products to mainstream consumers. But if you think about it, if you have a disruptive idea and you want people to take it on, you're ultimately trying to sell them on your idea. You're trying to market your idea. So this is one is theory, this one is more kind of And

it's all about crossing that chasm because that gap right there is where new ideas go to die. Not because the ideas are wrong, but because they just haven't accumulated enough of that social proof and enough of that momentum to cross that chasm. It's because at that time the idea is too out of step with out of step with the mainstream thinking, which means it's risky and most

people are risk averse. So the innovator is standing on one side certain and the majority is standing on the other side rational and in between that gap the chasm is just silence. So let me show you what that silence sounds like and it starts with the majority being wrong. Here's something you've probably seen dozens of times today. That little padlock icon. That little padlock icon was proof

that the majority was wrong. You see, for decades, the consensus in cryptography was simple. What this little padlock represents is mathematically impossible, not difficult, not impractical, impossible. But without it, the internet that we know would not exist. You know, we had the gentleman from Target talking about e-commerce. There would be no e-commerce. There would be no internet as we know it. Most of us probably wouldn't have

jobs because the entire software market would be different. But that little lock right there is a promise that whatever you send, your passwords, your credit card numbers, your private messages can only be seen and read by the person that you're sending them to. Everybody else will just see gibberish. And believe it or not, that idea was once a radical idea. In fact, at one point, it was

a dangerous idea. the thing is the I the idea that was radical wasn't codes. We've been using codes for thousands of years. Caesar ciphers and enigma machines and one-time paths and everything else. We had a lot of different ways to use codes to communicate securely. But there's always been a problem. How do we arrange the private communication in advance? So if we have Alice and Alice wants

to send a message over here to Bob on the internet which is by definition an insecure channel anything you send over the internet can be intercepted can be read and that means that our eavesdropper ees can watch everything going back and forth. So, if they've never communicated over this network before, and in fact, they've never communicated anywhere before, how do we establish a private communication? Because encryption

always requires a key to be able to lock the message on one side and then unlock it on the other So, if Alice and Bob are talking for the first time, they're going to have to transmit that key so everything else can be secured. But if Eve intercepts that key, then Eve can eavesdrop on all the communications even when they're using cryptography. That's the fundamental problem. And

if we go back, in fact, to the 1800s, this is August Kirchoff's and he said the general system must be considered public information. Security rei resides solely on the secrecy of the key. That means the only way you can you can't send the key over the network. We have to meet in person first. for the first time before we start to communicate and I slip you my

key and you slip me your key and we're good and now we can now we can communicate. But that's not how the internet works. How can you have a public key? That was the radical idea. Well, the majority tells us that we can't. But let's uh meet one of these crazy rebel minority figures, a chap by the name of Ralph Merkel. See, he saw some things that

nobody could see. One, that this problem existed and it's going to get worse as technology continues to evolve. This is a black and white photo because all a lot of this happened in the 60s and 70s before we really knew the internet, before we had the public internet. Now, he was a grad student and uh he had this idea and he even proposed it. He says, "Yeah,

I think this is what my project should be." 1974 establishing secure communication between separate secure sites over insecure communication lines with no prior arrangements being made. That was his idea. He was going to make that his computer science project. His professor said, "Nah, that's stupid. Why don't you do the other project because that's something you can actually do. This whole idea is a waste of time. The

majority assures me." But he pursued it anyway. He built a proof of concept and it worked. And then he submitted the paper to the ACM and he got a response. There was a reviewer who said this, "The paper is not in the mainstream of present cryptography thinking, I would not recommend it's published." There's our majority guy. And then the the editor of the magazine also wrote some

comments back to him and said, "I was particularly bothered by the fact that there's no references to other people who have done that. Has anybody else ever investigated THE APPROACH?" NO. THAT'S THE whole point. That's why he was revolutionary, but they rejected his paper. Remember what Rogers taught us. The people who are doing, they're in positions of authority and influence, and they feel like that's tenuous. And

as you move higher and higher up, and we're going to meet some people who are the highest that have ever existed, when that happens, you end up over here because now your whole reputation lies on you being brilliant, you being the thought leader. And if you endorse an idea that you don't fully understand, that's risky. So they tend not to do that. This is what Rogers taught

us. And so he was seen as a deviant but he kept revising, he kept resubmitting and he kept getting rejected. And he talked about this. He said what was striking was how the publication process was tuned to incremental improvements but was very bad at handling something that is just fundamentally different. And the thing is innovation can be lonely to be able to see something that nobody else

can see. Sometimes you start to wonder, am I crazy or is everybody else crazy? Well, statistically, it's probably me. But the thing is, the reality is you're never often truly alone. And I think that's why it's important to resist this myth of the lone innovator, that one person who sees everything and figures everything out and does it all on their own. You need to find your tribe.

I've been doing some really bleeding edge work that everybody tells me is wrong except for a small number of people who have different backgrounds, different perspectives, different mental models, different ideas, different tools in their toolbox and they're able to see what I see and we can bounce ideas off of each other and my ideas are debated with rigor instead of being shot down just because they're different.

And the thing is half of the concept basically this idea of privacy occurred independently in three different groups almost simultaneously. In addition to what Merkel was doing at the UC Berkeley, similar research was taking place. And also this idea had actually been explored by other innovators including James Ellis and Crawford Cook and Malcolm Williamson over at GCHQ in England. But that work was classified. So there was

no way for somebody like those magazine reviewers to say, "Oh, actually there has been research and there are rigorous proofs that we can point to." But all of that was classified. They didn't know about it. Merkel didn't know about it. And that's again the important thing. The majority wasn't wrong. They were just in the dark. They couldn't see the problem because the internet hadn't really materialized yet.

And they couldn't see the solution because all the modern and up-to-date information was classified. And so all of the work had to happen going back to first principles. So we've got John Gillis, John Gil, and Steven Pollig. They came up with some interesting ideas to tackle this problem. They don't get a lot of credit, so I want to mention them, but uh but yeah, resist the myth

of the lone innovator. Other people when an idea is ready, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great book on this called the tipping point and talked about how ideas don't just happen in isolation. and these revolutionary things, they reach this point where they're inevitable. It's just who is going to tip it over the So, one of the challenges of the innovator's toolbox is Merkel had a deep curiosity. He

had a breadth of knowledge, but his interpersonal network was not diverse enough to have intersected with those other people yet. but he was an active information seeker and as a result of that one day he tuned into a lecture that was being broadcast from Stanford University and he was listening to it the professor that was giving that lecture was a gentleman named Martin Helman and he'd been

working on the same problem in isolation until Martin Helman found his tribe and he met this guy over here Whit Diffy And so one of the things that you have to do if you have that idea is find your tribe. The best way to battle the silence and the loneliness is to find your people. Find other people who can at least try to see what it is

that you see. And the thing is Diffy and Helman weren't just sympathizers. They were collaborators. They brought different perspectives to the table. They brought different tools. They brought different mental models and different ideas. They didn't just brainstorm. They kept the work alive. Merkel had given up on publishing, but Diffy and Helman hadn't been put through the ringer so many times. So, they published New Directions in cryptography.

And this is where they introduced based on Merkel's ideas what is now known as the Diffy Helman key exchange. It was Merkel's idea, but they published it. And because their names were up here, even though Merkel's name is in here, based on his proof of concept, we call it the Diffy Helman encryption key, >> And the way the Diffy Helman key exchange works is kind of fascinating.

It the math is a little complicated, but I can explain it to you with colors. What we do is we start with a common paint. This is just a color. It's not a secret. It's just where we're where we're beginning. And then on my side, if I'm Bob, I come up, I generate my own random color that only I know. And Alice generates her random color that

only she knows. And then we mix the two. Now, you have to assume that it's hard. It's mathematically hard to take the colors apart because that's the mathematical principle that all of this is based on. And now we've got a mix of these two things that you can't really take apart. You can't subtract yellow to get that in the mathematical sense. You can swap those. Right now

you have you have my blend. I have your blend. And then we add in our secret color to their blend and we end up on the same common secret with one exchange over the network. It's beautifully efficient. It's brilliant and it underpins all of the security that we take for granted today. This is the Diffy Helming T exchange. Now, despite being based on his PC, it's not

named after him. And in fact, Diffy and Helman actually tried to get the industry to recognize Merkel. They said, "Well, really, we should call it the Diffy Helman Merkel key exchange." And everybody's like, "That's too many syllables. Diffy Helman rolls off the tongue, as Scott said, like Shakespearean pros." Now, Merkel didn't get a lot of credit for this, at least not publicly, at least not in the

mainstream. But that's okay. I love this quote by Harry Truman. It's amazing what you could accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit. Now, my head cannon, my belief, the way I like to think about this is Truman was actually quoting somebody else and he's getting the credit for that quote. So, he's like embodying that right now. And to be fair, that the system failed him.

But to Merkel, the work mattered more than credit. And that's an important perspective to have. Innovation is not about ego. It's about progress. So, here we are. It crossed the chasm. And it crossed the chasm not because that paper convinced everybody. It didn't have to convince everybody. It had to convince the right early adopters. And who were the early that developed it and got it crossed the

chasm? Well, they're right here. This is Addie Shamir. This is Ron Rvest. This is Leonard Adelman. They are better known by their initials RSA. You've heard of RSA. That's their commercial implementation of Diffy Helman and Merkel's ideas. Revest Shamir Adelman. And it took longer than it should have. And there were a lot of things that happened in the meantime. Like this one took decades to cross the

chasm for a lot of reasons. There was a lot of institutional resistance. The government tried to classify it. The government tried, the US government, they all do all kinds of things. They unfortunately they tried to classify it. They tried to block it. They tried to make it a crime to share these ideas. And in fact, back in the '9s when this was still hotly contested, RSA, it

was export control technology. It was classified as a weapon. And uh I actually got a t-shirt printed. Was living in England at the time. I'd go to America and every time I flew from America to England, I'd wear that t-shirt and it said, "Warning, this t-shirt is considered amunition by the United States government. Under no circumstances can this t-shirt be allowed to leave the country or be

shown to a foreign national." And I would just walk on the plane laughing the whole way. And people would look at me, they're like, "What?" Because on the back was the actual implementation of RSA, both in the source code and in a machine readable format. You could scan that t-shirt and run that code. This was very illegal. This was treason. And the rest of us who knew

this were just like, "Come and get me. Come and arrest me." Ultimately, it crossed the chasm. And every secure transaction that you have ever made depends on an idea that was once unpublishable. So, there's some takeaways here. The first one is don't give up. Most people don't give up because they're wrong. They give up because that middle part takes too long. Resist the lone innovator myth. Find

your tribe. Be careful of ego. And in fact, on ego, uh I saw an in interview with uh Martin Helman years and years later, 40 years after all this stuff happened. And he realized that he was a little bit combative. He was he had so much of his identity tied up in this idea that when people would push back, he would get And he regretted that. He

said, "Get curious, not furious. Friends are better than enemies." In fact, one point he met with people from the NSA and the first thing that he said to the guy at NS, the NSA, the National Security Agency, and they met to talk about this, he says, I expected you to have horns, you know, but friends are better than So Merkel's idea took years to cross the kaza

but across somebody built it the world caught up and there is a repeatable process here. This is the innovation development process as defined by Everett Rogers. Basically given some problem through some amount of research the innovator develops and formalizes a solution which is then packaged in a way that it can become adopted and at this point the diffusion of the idea begins. the idea begins to spread

and ultimately your idea might be adopted or rejected or reinvented or adopted and then later abandoned. That's kind of how it always follows a process very similar to this. So Diffy and Helman and Merkel, they recognized a need. That's the big one right here. Recognition, recognizing a problem or need. That was the big advantage that they had because of the way they looked at the world, the

way they could see the trajectory of technology going. They said, "We need this now, and we're going to start right now, even if it's hard. Even if we're working in the dark." So, they recognized a need that the world hadn't seen yet. And that was actually a big part of their problem, but recognition of the problem is rarely enough. There are problems where we recognize the problem.

We know it's a problem, and people reject the solution. Anyway, I'm gonna tell you one of those stories. See, back this is a a wood carving uh commemorating an event where a lot of people died. They lost their lives. In 1707, a Royal Navy fleet misjudged their position in the sea and they wrecked on the silly Isles and it killed close to 2,000 sailors. They drowned, which

is probably I don't know and I hope I never find out, but it is probably one of the worst ways to go. The thing is that incident highlighted a major limitation navigation by the 1700s thanks to a great deal of exploitation. We'll just point that out. The British had built an enormous navy and they basically owned and controlled all of the seas. And next they decided they

wanted to own and control all of the world. But just because they own and control all of the seas didn't mean the seas were cooperative cuz you have to know where you are. But there's no landscapes. We didn't There's no landscape that you can judge your position off of. We didn't have GPS. The only way we could figure out our latitude was measuring the angles of the

stars and the planets. We take solar noon and we measure the angle of the sun on the horizon. That tells us how far north south we are. That's pretty easy to do. But there was no known reliable method to measure longitude. How far east west you were. That was a huge unsolved problem. And because this was such a big problem, people kept losing Parliament introduced the Longitude

Act and they offered lifechanging money to anybody who could solve this problem. They just they they wanted the the best and the brightest of the entire world or at least that's what they said. They wanted the best of the brightest. And the prize in today's money would be around uh 3 to4 million US. This is thousands and thousands of locks and that was to anybody who could

solve the problem especially if your method was accurate to half a degree. And so we formed something called the board of longitude. And the board was stacked with the best and the brightest astronomers and mathematicians, the smartest people in the world. But remember what happens when you become recognized as that smart. You move to the wrong side of the curve, the unhappy side of the curves. So

the best and the brightest were there and the best and the brightest could not find the answer. Well, enter this gentleman here. This is a guy named John Harrison. Now he was not the best and the brightest. He was not a mathematician. He was a carpenter. He had no credentials, no degrees, but he had a toolbox. And that toolbox was materially different from anybody on the He

his world was gears and springs and materials and woods. He thinks in mechanisms instead of mathematics. And that's what gave him the advantage. And to him, the answer was obvious. You want to sol you want to figure out how far east or west you are, it's easy. You just have to know what time it is. You need to know what time it is in England, in London,

and you need to know what time it is on the ship. Now, on the ship, we can figure that out. We can measure solar noon, and all we have to do is figure out how many hours ahead or behind of the Greenwich meantime we're And we can calculate very easily in seconds exactly what our longitude is. Remember, I said the best and the brightest. I mean the

best and the brightest of all time. For example, Sir Isaac Newton rejected it. One of the smartest men who have ever lived. The guy who went who was working on a problem and he's like, "Oh, well, we don't have math for this, so I'm just going to go ahead and invent calculus real quick and then I'm going to solve this little problem." Oh, by the way, he

was still in his early 20s. This is what he did during his version of COVID. He invented calculus, but he said it couldn't be done. The scientific community had become overreiant on the familiar tools that they had. And they assumed, and this is the big one, they assumed that a difficult problem has to have it demands a complex solution. and they were engineering complex solutions that didn't

work or they did work but it took you like a day and a half to do all of the calculations to figure this out. So they overengineered their solutions. They had lunar methods. It was hours and hours of math every day. The measurements themselves were risky and they just couldn't accept that there was a simple solution. That was one of their blind spots. And the thing is

at that time we had accurate clocks but accurate clocks all relied on the same mechanism. The simple harmonic motion of a pendulum. Very precise, very regular, very repeated, very easy to model. And so we could build a pendulum with the right mass on the right length on the right period and it would very accurately tick and talk the seconds. But you put that pendulum on a ship

that is swaying and bouncing and writhing and undulating, it's going to throw off that pendulum. It's going to make that measurement inaccurate. The thing is, the problem wasn't the idea of keeping track of the time. The problem was the pendulum. And now we have a man who thinks in terms of mechanisms. He's like, we just need to invent a new mechanism. So he replaced weights with with

springs. We balance wheels, replace pendulums. This is how your modern mechanical watches work. And he had done things because he knew materials better than any of these experts. He laminated strips of different metals so they would resist changes to temperature. He used jewels and self-lubricating uh wood to make his mechanism close to frictionless. And he solved the problem with material science and mechanical engineering, carpentry knowledge that

no astronomer would have had. And then he proved his idea in 1761. By the way, he was at this for decades. In 1761, his fourth prototype, the H4, was put to test at sea on a sea trial to the West Indies, to the Caribbean in uh the Americas. And that chronometer that he built, the H4 performed admirably. It lost only five seconds over the course of the

81-day journey. 5 seconds over 81 days at sea. The problem was solved. Did he get his prize? Of course not. They moved the goalposts. The board wouldn't pay the astronomer royale who had already decided that the answer was going to be astronomy because that was the only tool that he had in his toolbox and he couldn't accept that somebody else would have a tool that he didn't.

He was actually competing with Harrison's approach. So the judge was also the competition. There's a little bit of corruption in there >> and they demanded more trials. They changed the world rules and then he spent another 20 years fighting for the prize that he already earned. And you would think that the brilliant minds on the board would be the early adopters, but like I said, they rarely

occupy the groups that you would expect. And meanwhile, people kept dying. These were the stakes and it was all about ego. It was all about no, no, no, it has to be my field that solves this problem, astronomy. But the thing is, Harris did have a modest tribe. In fact, one of the people on the board of Longitude was Edmund Holly. Sir Edund Halley, this is the

guy who discovered Haley's comet, Holly's comet. And uh he knew that they were all going to reject it. And he knew that he was unqualified to evaluate what Harrison had done. So he recommended that he go talk to a clock maker and get some feedback that way that he could we could get a little bit of social proof so maybe the board would hear him. Uh he

had another modest ally and that ally happened to be the king. And at one point the king said, "You know what? I'm sick of this. John, resubmit your proposal to Parliament. He's like, I did several times, like one more time. Trust me. And the king actually spoke to the prime minister and said, wait, give this man his prize or I'm coming down there and I don't want

to come down to parliament and you don't want me to come down to parliament either. The man finally received his prize at the age of 80 and he passed away three years later. He spent his entire life on this problem and ultimately he did prove the answer. The challenge that he ran into was not that the answer was wrong but just that he was the wrong person.

Except he wasn't. He was the right person. The board of Longitude were the wrong people and they had the wrong methods. But the rest of the world caught up. By the 1800s, every ship had a chronometer. This was the way we did it. And we still do similar things with very accurate timekeeping with GPS. It's just instead of springs and uh and balance wheels, we have atomic

clocks and the decay of cesium atoms. But the world caught up. But what happens when it doesn't? What happens when you show the world the future and the world just doesn't get Well, let's talk about this because right now I am delivering this presentation in PowerPoint and I built it using a drag and drop interface. I'm running it on my personal computer. Now, I coordinated with people

and I did some research. I talked to people using instant messaging. Uh I've done this talk or I've done talks like this over Zoom. I broadcast these things. I've had conversations with people over Zoom video conferencing over the internet. I used a mouse. I used an outlining tool to kind of gather and collect and sort and organize my ideas. Uh, and I built it. All of this

stuff is checked into a version control repo. And uh I've collaboratively edited some of these ideas using collaborative document editing to collaborate with other people who have insights and inputs on this. So I use something like Google Docs. You probably uh looked at the schedule online using HTML. You probably bought your ticket. Your ticket got emailed to you. So we've got a lot of different ideas that

are now the fabric of modern computing. And all of this at one point was revolutionary. And today it's just the fabric of modern computing. Each one of these things fundamentally changed just by itself. Each one of these things by itself fundamentally changed how we work and how we build software as well as the kinds of problems that we could suddenly solve with software. All of those things

and a boatload more were invented and first seen by one person, this guy. I would wager that almost nobody knows who this guy is. This is a man named Douglas Angelart and he demonstrated demonstrated didn't talk about these things. Didn't say they were possible. Didn't say this is something we can do in theory. He built all of that and demonstrated it back in 1968. And his demo

that he delivered is so legendary we refer to this demo to this day as the mother of all demos. Not Steve Jobs with the iPhone. Not Steve Jobs in 1984 with the Macintosh. The most important technology demo in history was his in 1968. The mother of all demos. Now, where did this idea come from? Well, remember active information seeker. See, back in the 1940s, this gentleman here

was a young naval officer, naval technician, and he had just been shipped out to the Philippines, and the war had just ended while he was at sea. And so once he arrived, they didn't really have anywhere to send him just yet. So, he was waiting for his next assignment. And he's he could just sit in the barracks and while away the time, but he explored. He just

wanted to take in the Philippines. And as he's walking around, he sees an old traditional Philippine hut on stilts, a wooden hut. And there was a sign. It was the Red Cross library. And he read an essay in a magazine that he picked up in that library. The essay was called as We may think, and it was published in 1946. This was about the time that we

got the first digital It was written by a guy named Vanavir Bush. And Vanir Bush was the head of all the strategic defense research projects during World War II like the Manhattan project and a bunch of other ones. So he had overseen the development of the most devastating weapons in the history of humanity and he was reflecting and his the question he was asking himself is we

made incredible progress in a short amount of time. Now admittedly the progress we made was towards the destruction of humanity. But what if we take the same resources and the same ingenuity that we applied to the atomic bomb and instead of applying all of that ingenuity towards the destruction of humanity, what if we applied these ideas to the betterment of humanity? So this essay was his vision

in a little bit of a thought experiment. What if we use technology to augment the human mind? But at the time this idea was just too out there. It was uh a hypothetical what if blue sky thinking of the worst kind and the majority just kind of ignored it but it didn't land for them but it landed for Angelart. It landed for Doug and he decided to

make that vision a reality. Now you have to understand in the 1940s computers were not these machines that we have now. Computers were people. >> The dictionary definition of a computer in the 1940s was one who computes. It was a job. It was semi-skilled labor. The computers, the engineers would like do stuff with the with the numbers. The computers would give the engineers the number. And we

had exactly one computer known. This is uh the Aniac. There were actually a couple computers that existed at this point, but the Aniac was the one that we all sort of knew about. It generally gets credit as being the first. It's not. Sorry Americans. It's one of the first. They'll get over it or they won't. I don't know. But when you look at this, there's no screen.

There's no keyboard. How do you program this thing? You actually wire up the logic gates by hand over here. That's how you programmed it. It wasn't a chip that could process instructions. It was just a series of logic gates. It was ultimately just a big expensive hot loud programmable computer. So, a programmable calculator. So, this is what most people saw. But when Angelart looked at these early

computers, he saw all of this. He saw the complete picture and he would describe his ideas to anybody who would listen, but the ideas wouldn't land. Everybody thought he was a crackpot. And that's the problem is that he had the whole complete picture in his mind, but whenever he talked about one piece, people just didn't get it. He says, "Yeah, what we're doing is we're going to

connect the computers together." Well, why would you need to connect two computers together? What's the point of connecting two computers together? Like, they didn't get it. A puzzle never makes sense when you look at just two little pieces. But he didn't give up. He left the Navy and got his PhD. And he did that to learn the skills to build his dream. He got his PhD in

electrical engineering. And then he worked a mundane job for years as a researcher. And it ultimately took about 15 years for the real work to begin. And the thing is, Doug had more than a dream. He had patience to go through those 15 years and the discipline to go and do an entire freaking PhD to lay a foundation for the work to begin. And he finally got

a small grant from ARPA, a an organization that would end up profiting handsomely from his work. >> And the result of this grant was this paper right here, 1962. He laid out his vision. It got attention. He got some big grants. His lab was fully funded. And now he had a team. He started what became known as the augmentation research center. How we can build entirely new

tools to augment the human mind. Meanwhile, like I said, the majority of the computer science community thought he was a crackpot. Even his boss thought he was a crackpot. In fact, one of the major funders for his research was a guy named Bob Taylor who worked at NASA. And he's like, "Hey, we're doing cool stuff at NASA. This stuff would be really helpful for the things that

we're doing." And so one day Doug's boss got on a plane, flew all the way across the country, barged into Bob Taylor's office to say one thing. He said, "I want to talk to you about Doug. Why are you funding this guy? He's a lunatic. But the thing is, it wasn't just wild ideas. He was actively building it. And shortly after that, the world saw the mother

of all demos. He showed us all of this. He did the presentation live while on a Zoom call essentially with somebody 30 miles down the road. They were video conferencing. They were working on a collaborative document. They demoed all of this stuff with the mouse and the screen and the graphical user interface and the window metaphor and the desktop metaphor, all of this. And as impressive as

demo was, it landed with a thud. The world just couldn't process it. They just, it was a mix of awe and bewilderment. It was like watching a magic show. It's like, okay, cool and fun to watch, but you're not going to go home and make a helicopter disappear. Now, three or four years later, Doug repeated this demo again. And in the audience were the best and the

brightest in the computer science community, including a world-class professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT. He was there. He was one of the best and the brightest. And at the end of the whole thing, this professor raised his hand and said, "I don't get it." like all the stuff we take for granted today. He showed the world and the best and the brightest looked at it

and said, "I don't get it." He says, "Everything you've shown me today, I can do with my ASR33." Think about that. The mouse, drag and drop, Windows video conferencing, and he's saying he can do with an ASR33. This is an ASR33. This is a standard issue teletype that all it does is prints out whatever you type in there. That's all it does. and prints out whatever comes

out of the computer. This was your screen back in those days. And he's like, I can do all of this video conferencing and all of this stuff with And it's like I guess like in a touring sense, I guess, but from a potential and capability standpoint, it was night and day. And one of the guys there, Andre Vanam, he said, "If the best and brightest can't get

this, what hope have we got?" The demo didn't cross the chasm and things went downhill. His team started to fracture a year or so after that. They they they had different directions they wanted to go. So they packed up all of his ideas and took him four miles down the road to Xerox. And then shortly after that, a lot of things happened. Laws changed. Uh the landscape,

the geopolitical landscape changed. His funding dried up. So he lost his team. He lost his funding. And then he lost the lab that he founded. He got fired from his own lab and all his research got sold off. And then just to add insult to injury, his house burned down. Like that's how things were going in the 70s for Doug. But he never gave up. He kept

pursuing his ideas for the rest of his life. And the thing is, the reality is we never saw his vision. For everything that we have, everything that he gave us, everything that started in that lab, including the internet, including the ideas that would lead to the worldwide web, which is the internet as we know it, email, video conferencing, the graphical user interface, the mouse, all of this.

That wasn't his vision. Those were the tools to enable his vision. And nobody was ever able to see what he saw. And that meant that basically in the 1970s and the 80s he was at some company just turning invisible in the corner. Nobody ever listened to him again. Nobody ever gave him more funding. He never quit even though the world never saw his vision. And I already

got ahead of myself here. You might be saying, "But Michael, we have these things. You make it sound like his ideas never crossed the chasm." But they didn't. Around the same time the iPhone was released, he was interviewed in Smithsonian magazine. and the interviewer asked them a simple question. You started this work in the and it's now 2006 and you've seen how everything has changed and everybody

uses the mouse, everybody uses the graphical user interface, we have the internet, we have the worldwide web, we have all these things. So, you must be pretty proud of yourself. How much of your vision have you seen come to fruition with everything that we have today? And yeah, that's that's his answer. That's the question. And the answer that he got was very precise. He said 2.8%. For

everything that we have started in that man's lab, it represents 2.8% of >> Uh it wasn't this wasn't the vision. This was just the scraps that we scavenged. So my advice is don't try to boil the ocean. In the words of uh Nicola Tesla, let me see if I have some audio here. for a minute. >> Let's see if we have audio. >> Uh, we don't. Do

we have audio for the PC? >> Hello, sir. >> All right. See if we got it now. Uh well that's okay. What Tesla said is that the society only tolerates one change at a time. And what I want you to remember is that Tesla is to electrical engineering what Angelbart was to computer science. Another forgotten genius. Doug saw too far. He wasn't an innovator. He was a

visionary. And most people can't see that far. His vision didn't cross the chasm, but pieces did. His team took the interface and created the Xerox Alto. Uh Steve Jobs took the interface to market with the Lisa and then the Macintosh and the internet started in his lab. The first message ever sent over the internet arrived at Doug's door. Tim Berners Lee took his took his ideas around

hypertext to the world and the web. And his vision was to augment human intellect. And maybe we have audio now. Let's find out. Uh because this was the key. And I think Steve Jobs says something insightful I remember uh reading an article when I was about 12 years old. I think it might have been in Scientific American where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these

species on planet earth. Uh how many kilo calories did they expend to get from point A to point B and the condor one uh came in at the top of the list uh surpassed everything else and humans came in about a third of the way down the list which was not such a great showing for crowd of creation. And uh but somebody there had the imagination to

test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. Human riding a bicycle blew away the condor all the way off the top of the list. And it it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle

of the mind. uh something that that takes us far beyond our inherit abilities and uh I think we're just at the early stages of this tool. >> Exactly. We're at the early stages. This is as far as we made it cuz some ideas don't win arguments. They just keep being built on. Sometimes you're not the one who takes the idea across the chasm. Sometimes your job is

just to make sure that the work doesn't stop. Now before we close, we have a couple minutes left. You might think innovation requires you to be extraordinary, but that the truth is anybody can be an innovator. Anybody can change the game forever. And I'll prove it. This is a young man uh named Dick Fosbury. And in 1962, he was a very unremarkable student. He was an unremarkable

athlete, but he wanted to play some sort of sports. He wasn't big and strong enough to play American football. He ended up playing athletics. And he was drawn to the high jump. And this is how the majority approached the high jump. but he couldn't do it. He wasn't flexible enough. He wasn't limber enough. It just did not work for him. So, he developed he wasn't good enough

to use these techniques. So, he developed his own. And it looked like this. They started calling it the Fosbury flop and mostly as a joke. And the first time the world saw it, they laughed. Then he started winning. He shattered the school record. And then he went to the Oregon State University and he shattered the university record. And in 1968 he represented the United States in the

Olympics and not only won a gold medal but he shattered the Olympic record. And the thing is it wasn't brilliance that caused this to happen. It was the constraint. It was the thing that he couldn't do. Because when you can't do the obvious thing, it forces you to do the creative thing. And we all face these things and we seize them as obstacles or impediments. But this

just might be your superpower. This might be your secret weapon. And there's one aspect of this that I haven't talked about yet because every all these are stories about people with an idea that the majority thought was wrong and our innovators kept going. But there's this little thing called the Dunning Krueger effect where your confidence is not connected to how right you are. Both of those two

things feel the same. So, how do you know if you're Fosbury or if you're chasing folly? I read a great blog post a while ago called How Developers Stop Learning: The Rise of the Expert Beginner. Uh, he shares a journey of learning to bowl and he rejected the proper technique. He made rapid progress and then a strange thing happened. He stopped improving. And so, he has this

this idea of the expert beginner shortcircuits the skill model. So, I'll leave you with this questions to ask yourself to validate that you're on the right path. Are you chasing assumptions or are you avoiding mastery? Does your idea solve a real constraint or are you just expressing a preference? Does your idea get stronger under skeptical attack or do the and do the results improve as you push

further? This is the framework. This is the diagnostic. But I know we're out of time. So, uh I I encourage you to I I'll just encourage you with this. If you're sitting in this room and you see something that nobody else sees yet, being ignored isn't proof you're wrong. It's usually proof you're early. To quote the great Mahatma Gandhi, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at

you, then they fight you, and then you win." Uh, Rogers called us Rogers called us deviants. Apple called us the crazy ones, the ones that actually change the world. Most innovators don't quit because they're wrong. They quit because So, if you saw yourself anywhere in this talk, hang in there. Keep going. I'm rooting for you. We're all rooting for you. Thank you. [applause] And also, if you

want to learn more of some of these stories, uh, an invitation, we've got one that's available now. This is about Merkel and Diffy and Helman. One that's coming soon, the whole story of Douglas Anglebart, and it's coming in the next couple of weeks. It's all available on my YouTube channel. If you do decide to subscribe and watch a video, throw a message in the comments. I'd love

to I'd love to hear from you in there and I'll definitely reply. I reply to every comment. So, uh, look forward to seeing you over there. Appreciate y'all. Thanks [music]