With John Wolpert, a renowned speaker, writer and visionary in technology and business innovation. As a CEO, product executive, and trusted advisor, John has been at the forefront of transformative technological milestones—from the dawn of the Web to the surge of artificial intelligence. He is best known as the founder of Flywheel, a trailblazer in the ride-hailing industry, and for his influential work at IBM, where he played a pivotal role in advancing open-source software, blockchain, and AI.

John has co-founded global R&D consortia and industry standards organizations, while his expertise in Open Innovation has been featured in the Harvard Business Review. A sought-after thought leader, he has conducted numerous new venture workshops and addressed esteemed bodies such as the European Union and the Australian Parliament, championing collaboration to tackle complex global challenges.

Join us in our conversation as John shares his journey from Carnegie Mellon to founding Flywheel and contributing to IBM’s breakthroughs in blockchain and AI. He dives into insights from his book The Two But Rule, exploring how teams can turn negativity into innovation while advocating for user-owned data and ethical AI. Tune in to discover his vision for a “two but society” and the evolving landscape of technology, teamwork, and data control.

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Takeaways & quotes you don’t want to miss from this episode:

• The power of graphic databases in AI.
• Introducing John’s “The Two But Rule”…
• Why is building a “terrible first version” of your idea crucial for innovation?
• What is “Speed Shaming”, and how can you overcome it?
• The vision for the future of AI and data control.

“If you don’t respect the needs that are driving those reasons, then you’ve got a problem. That’s where new tools like vectors AI and zero-knowledge cryptography come in.”

-John Wolpert

Check out these highlights:

• 09:06 John reflects on his love for coding, even as a non-CS graduate, and how tools today make it easier for non-specialists to create technology solutions.
• 24:41 Why is it important to listen deeply, especially for leaders?
• 33:58 The challenges in data sharing and supply chains.
• 42:50 How user demand is forcing big companies to adapt to more ethical and user-controlled data practices.
• 44:41 Listen to John’s final advice to the listeners…

How to get in touch with John on Social Media:

Imperfect Show Notes

We are happy to offer these imperfect show notes to make this podcast more accessible to those who are hearing impaired or those who prefer reading over listening. While we would love to offer more polished show notes, we are currently offering an automated transcription (which likely includes errors, but hopefully will still deliver great value), below:

GGGB Intro  00:00

Here’s what you get on today’s episode of Guts, Grit and Great Business®…

John Wolpert  00:04

My gig is to help teams do what I teach in the book, which is to really overcome negativity and naysaying, not by ignoring it, but by embracing it in a particular way,

GGGB Intro  00:19

The adventure of entrepreneurship and building a life and business you love, preferably at the same time is not for the faint of heart. That’s why Heather Pearce Campbell is bringing you a dose of guts, grit and great business stories that will inspire and motivate you to create what you want in your business and life. Welcome to the Guts, Grit and Great Business® podcast where endurance is required. Now, here’s your host, The Legal Website Warrior®, Heather Pearce Campbell.

Heather Pearce Campbell  00:47

Alrighty, welcome. I am Heather Pearce Campbell, The Legal Website Warrior®. I’m an attorney and legal coach based here in Seattle, Washington, serving information entrepreneurs throughout the US and around the world. Welcome to another episode of Guts, Grit and Great Business®. I’m super excited about today’s conversation we have not in this broad of a scope covered this topic on the podcast before. So very, very big. Welcome to John Wolpert.

John Wolpert  01:19

Hey, nice to see you.

Heather Pearce Campbell  01:21

Good to have you. John. So before we get started, we have to give a shoutout. We were just trying to recollect who introduced us, and I looked it up and it was our mutual friend, Lou Diamond.

John Wolpert  01:34

Lou Diamond, proud loud.

Heather Pearce Campbell  01:36

Totally. Lou’s been on my podcast. I’ve been on his so we’ll also drop a link into the show notes that will link you over to Lou’s episode. Definitely go check it out. He’s awesome, super fun, great energy, kind of a super connector guy.

John Wolpert  01:52

He’s got that big blue energy? Yes, he does. So positive and he’s a delight. He really is. I love that guy. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  01:59

Oh, he is a delight. He’s the one that does, like, the power, he just has all this energy. And his episodes are, like, 20 minutes, you know, super short and punchy. They’re awesome.

John Wolpert  02:10

Good for sales. Yeah, he’s really good with sales folks and stuff like that. I’m a product guy, so he and I had an interesting conversation about the difference between a salesperson and product person, product people go in and neg the company by saying, hey, you know, I’m not really interested in what you want. I just want to know if what you want is a clue into what the market needs, and customers either love that line or hate it.

Heather Pearce Campbell  02:35

Oh, my goodness. Well, I bet that was a fun. Did you have a conversation on his podcast? Yeah, I think so. Ah, we’ll link to that as well. So we’ll put a link to his conversation my podcast, and then your conversation over on his podcast. Also, for those of you that don’t know John, let’s get John introduced. So John Wolpert is an esteemed speaker, writer and thinker in technology and business innovation. As a CEO, product executive, there’s the product piece and advisor. He’s been at the vanguard of technological breakthroughs from the early days of the web to the rise of Artificial Intelligence. That’s a big conversation. John is known for founding flywheel, a pioneer in the ride hailing industry. His work at IBM made him a key figure in the evolution of open source software, blockchain and AI. He’s co-founded global R&D consortia and industry standard bodies, and his thought leadership on open innovation has been showcased in the Harvard Business Review. John has led countless new venture workshops and spoken before the European Union and the Australian Parliament in his mission to help organizations work together to solve hard problems.

John Wolpert  03:52

Wow. You read that whole thing. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  03:54

I read the whole thing. I read the whole thing.

John Wolpert  03:57

I think we should call ChatGPT and see if we can get that short and thanks, though, I appreciate it.

Heather Pearce Campbell  04:02

Let’s do it, I’m kidding, but you know, there’s a lot there. That’s a big conversation. And I know when you and I first talked, it was like, whoa, tracing back to the start of your roots, at the beginning of the right, the early days of the web, we’ve come a long way, and this conversation around Artificial Intelligence right now is the conversation to be having. So I’m curious if you will retrace your steps a little bit around where did your early interest come in technology, like, why technology and innovation? Where did that start from? 

John Wolpert  04:43

Oh gosh, well, then in the olden days, you know, no, I was at Carnegie Mellon in 84, but I was not in CS that came later,and I did not graduate. I graduated from Berkeley in eight. Humanities and stuff and like, back in those days, you know, you wanted to have this wide range. So I did. I studied neuroscience and anthropology and all this cool stuff, but most of my friends were in CS in 84 which was the birth of, or what, I don’t know, we’ve had so many rounds in AI, but I remember everybody arguing about the there were these two big approaches to what we call AI generally, one was a guy named Doug Leonard who just passed last year. Sadly, he was a wonderful guy. I knew him and and then, you might have heard of like, folks like the guy from Google who just left. He was a Carnegie Mellon, and he had the other idea, which was sort of more about cellular automata and vectors and stuff. Turned out he was right, but now the lenet people are getting a new lease on their approach, which was kind of, you might call ontological engineering meaning. For 40 years, he employed English majors to teach computers that up is that way, and up yours means something different. I mean, seriously. And so now with llms, that kind of ontological engineering, and graph stuff like like Neo4j is very cool graph database for any of the anybody that’s into, you know, middleware and database stuff in your audience. I’m actually working on a graph project right now with Neo4j, and it’s very exciting, because you when you take vectors, when you take this AI stuff, and you can apply that to a graph like world, where you can say, yes, I’ve I have an intention, and it’s connected to this other thing and this other piece of information, you can start to see, well, graphs have been around for a long time, but they’re hard for humans to deal with. But if you can get that into what we call graph rag, into into an AI that’s using this other approach, then you’ve got really interesting, nuanced insights coming out, even beyond what, what we’re getting from things like ChatGPT and that sort of thing today. So I’m pretty excited about that. And it’s cool that I was, I wasn’t in the department, but I was sort of, I’m like, Forrest gumping My entire career. I mean, I’ve, I’ve, I was there at the beginning of Google, but I wasn’t at Google. I tried to hire one of the Googles when I was at IBM. So a few years later, they just hired all my people. So, oh, man, I’ve been I’ve been around mostly in the Bay Area, Australia, Germany and but always, yeah, ever since Carnegie Mellon, all my friends were in comp sci. So I I really got a taste for tech at that point. And my kids will tell you I’m pretty tech crazy, and I love to write code. In fact, I think there are engineering buddies of mine who no longer do it because they’ve already proven that they could. But I’ve always been a wannabe coder. I’ve always I know how to write code. I’ve learned it I but I never got sick of doing it. So whenever I get a spare moment, I like to write something, I like to build something.

John Wolpert  04:44

Oh my gosh. So my very limited experience in the writing code world, well, like, actually a couple, my first experience was learning this would have been back in the 80s, on an old Apple Computer, right, putting in a few lines of code, and then watching the some design, you know, flash across the screen. And that was pretty early. I still remember in high school, which was the 90s. I graduated in 95 we didn’t have a home computer until my brother got one, probably 9495 ish, and I remember the first time because I learned to type on a word processor. Do you remember those word processors with the…

John Wolpert  09:06

Oh, I had one. I had an old Olivetti typewriter that was that had a little tiny bit of memory, and, yeah.

Heather Pearce Campbell  09:13

Yes. And the little, tiny screen, you could see your line scroll as you typed, and one step up from like the original old school typewriters, but when I moved the first icon on a desktop, like with a mouse, like, dragged it and, you know, dragged it across the screen, I was like, What have I done? I remember being wigged out. Like, did I break something? What did I just do? That was in 95 like, when I went off to college, I was still learning how to email, right? Crazy. 

John Wolpert  09:47

I remember when I was a kid, my mom, who was a math genius. I mean, she had a full ride scholarship at U of M, back in the days when that was unusual and she didn’t take it. She put my dad for school. I always thought that was a bad idea, but she went, and she took a lot of classes, and she, I remember her programming punch cards back in the 70s.

Heather Pearce Campbell  10:13

Yes, the big like, the computers that took up, like, a whole room.

John Wolpert  10:17

Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, the computer wasn’t in our house, but she’d bring all these punch cards home. Yep, you know, that’s cool.

Heather Pearce Campbell  10:25

So fascinating, right? Well, and I, you know, I learn enough to get by, like, even in my business, I have to learn enough about technology to make things work and get by. But I’ve always built my own websites and learn to connect like back end technology for my online businesses and stuff. And I actually learned CSS, I’m sure not every element of it. There was a particular website. I don’t even know what it’s called, website theme or platform thesis. I know it was Genesis versus thesis, right? And I was learning thesis, but you had to learn CSS to be able to build your own website using thesis. And so that was a ridiculous little adventure. I spent way too much time going into that world, but I actually, really enjoyed it, and actually being able to visually create something at the end of that process, it was kind of like, well, that was a good learning experience. I really should have hired it out, but I super enjoyed it. 

John Wolpert  11:28

You know, my first company was an ad agency in the late 80s, and I stupidly hired Lawrence Livermore Labs computer scientist to teach me to write a certain kind of code, and I wrote the advertising placement accounting package for the company, which is exactly not what you should be doing if you’re running an ad agency. It served me later, because turned out the package I was working on, we got a lot of jobs from that, but it was a completely dumb idea. But I keep on seemed, I seem to always I’m making that mistake. Technically make that mistake right now. I’m not hiring out the work me and my new best friend, ChatGPT and or, yeah, GitHub, co-pilot workspace, which is super awesome. I think that’s something that’s I’m really getting woken up to right now is, how far can you get as a reasonably I wouldn’t say technical. I will say technical because people who aren’t technical are really not not technical. They’re just not interested. Yes, right? If you’re interested, you can be technical. I was an English humanities major. I’m from Berkeley. If I can be technical, so can you and I am technical, but it sure helps to have the grunt work done, because I was never the reason I wasn’t a good coder when I was doing it was because I wasn’t good at remembering 30 character strings in my head, and the tools sucked in the 80s and 90s. Now, the tools are fantastic. You can build what you want. So how far can you get before you have to raise money and hire and dilute yourself with technical founders and stuff, and how far can you get to prove an idea ought to be built? And then, then, once you’ve got it up, and people are like, Oh yeah, I hate this. I like this, you know, you prove it out, right? And if you can build the first terrible version of your software, then you can get to the point where you have leverage, and you can then hire somebody to make it, you know, suck less at that point, especially if you you’re aware of good patterns, like, you know, MBC, and, not just like there’s just bad ways of writing code. So, I mean, if you can, just learn a little bit about that, it’s not hard anymore. It’s just not even things like login. Login was the worst, you know, it used to be so hard just to just do login and user management. I did that in 38 minutes. You know that was done, was done, and it was high quality on Google, on GCP, with Firebase, and it was easy peasy, that used to take days of really skilled people, or months that wild.

Heather Pearce Campbell  14:16

Yeah, so wild. What? As you look back, what have been some of your favorite I guess I could call it either like projects or lessons, like as you look back in your career, what are some really standout experiences that you’ve had?

John Wolpert  14:33

Well, writing the book for Wiley, the two butt rule turned negative thinking into positive solutions. That was an amazing experience. Wiley was really fun to work with. I had an amazing set of editors for they gave me four editors.

Heather Pearce Campbell  14:48

Do you need extra others that standard?

John Wolpert  14:51

Well, this was a big idea book, so I was kind of on the fancy track totally. And, you know, they got it into 300 Barnes and Nobles and. People seem to like it. If you go to the two but rule, that’s the T-W-O B-U-T-R-U-L-E.com, or just my website, jwolpert.com, you’ll see the video that they green lit for the book, which is hilarious. I don’t know that you’d find I was surprised that they greenlit it, because it’s not typical for a major publisher to allow a video of a guy grabbing his own butt in a, you know, I think the line is, so get in touch with your greatest asset for innovation. And that was pretty so they had a sense of humor, which I thought was great, and my editor, my the the acquiring editor, but my working editor, the one I worked with for several months, she was really funny. She had been she worked on Tracy, she’d worked on the dummies books. So she knew that. She really helped me with tone. And yeah, I think it worked out really well. And now I work with a company called Team Rotary, which if your viewers haven’t seen it’s really kind of cool. It’s kind of like Master Class live for companies, yeah, and so now a bunch of companies every, every day I get another, hey, you got to be on camera for an hour with this team and this big company or this small company. And I think we’re doing a lot of good. It’s a it’s a funny thing. Team Roger, they’ve got like, Gary Kasparov and Nadia COVID niche and and a pit crew guy that like NASCAR pit crew will teach you how to do pit crew. A lego person, I’ll teach you go through Legos then, yeah. So very cool. So lots of famous people and me and my gig is to help teams do what I teach in the book, which is to really overcome negativity and nay saying, not by ignoring it, but by embracing it in a particular way, right? So that I think I’m a Gen Xer, right? I grew up in the era of the one but society, which is a boomer saying, but that won’t work. Boom, dad, like, drop right, walk away, right? We didn’t like that. So what do we do? We created a whole culture of no Buddhism. That’s not good either, right? Imagine, like Apollo 13, if somebody who had if, when they suggested the command module blows up and were part of it, and the first idea was to turn the ship around, burn back to Earth directly, and that would have been a very bad idea. But imagine if, when somebody, when one of the engineers said, Don’t do that. Somebody had said, Oh, don’t be so negative, right? So no, but society is as bad as a one, but society, what we need is a two, but society, right? Where we are in touch with each other’s needs and motives behind what we intend to do, and in touch with our needs and motives that are informing our objections to those things, and then find the innovative path to square both sides, right? So it’s about really, the book is really about intentions and understanding each other’s intentions, listening more deeply, but then not being afraid to say, but I don’t want to do that, but we could do this other thing, right? Often people say, well, that’s like Yes, and I say, No, no, it’s not like Yes. And if, if Hitler shows up and says, what you what he wants to do, you don’t say yes, and you say but. But I think what you really want is your mommy to love you, and this will make all the mommies hate you so but we could get you some help. A better way of doing it.

Heather Pearce Campbell  19:02

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Heather Pearce Campbell  20:45

Heard of what is so catchy about this book, obviously, is the title. How did you boil down the essence of this work into the Two but rule? What did that take for you? Like, I’d love to know a little bit about that process.

John Wolpert  20:59

As a Gen Xer with a seven year old son, an 11 year old daughter, I was uniquely qualified to write a book full of butt jokes. First of all, yeah, the clinical term for this stuff is momentum thinking, and it’s a serious subject, so it’s a serious book, but you’ve got to pepper it with comedy, otherwise nobody’s going to read it. And once you’ve seen your butts, you just can’t unsee them. So, I mean, it does it gets into the culture, and that was my intention. So, you know, companies who’ve employed team robbery in this way, I’ve done, like a whole bunch of them, they seem to pepper out, or that they seem to mushroom out, I should say. And so I’ll take, I’ll work with one team, and then another team finds out, and then I’m on with them. And this is, I think, where it gets to be useful, especially because very often it’s a team that’s saying in quality control, and they are always having to say, but that won’t work or but don’t do that, and usually to an executive, or to another team with power, like the product team, who’s already down the road on what they want to do. So how do you not just green, you know, green light or rubber stamp, or let the bad idea percolate through the company? Amy Edmondson, who actually was part of creating team Rotary, as I understand it, or at least it was a Harvard Stanford kind of collaboration that created this company, teamrotary.com, she does the whole, I think you probably know who she is. She does psychological safety, that sort of thing. A lot of that work talks about how younger or less empowered employees have to deal with more empowered leaders and and how they need to have a safe space to, you know, provide their own input. And I think that’s very valid. However, it’s also valid that you don’t want the experienced pilot throwing out their own experience to do what the inexperienced pilot tells them to do, if it’s the bad idea. So how do I find that in today’s world, everyone is afraid of everyone, and we’re all afraid of ourselves, right? So when you’re a manager, is the safest move a manager in a big company can make is to patch on the head, say it was a good idea. Oh, that’s a good idea, and then get out of the room as fast as possible, right? Let it die on the vine, right? That’s not the way we should be doing things. There’s got to be a way for manager to say to an employee, hey, I don’t like that idea, or that’s not a good idea, but I would like it if, but, and even if it’s a silly but right, even if it’s I was running a research team and we were given a big problem, and new hire came forward with a big idea, and an engineer on the team said, but that won’t work. And I said, but it would have and they rolled their eyes and said, Well, it would work if gravity was different. It’s true story. And another engineer on the team popped out of their seat A minute later and said, Wait a minute. What if I just do this? And that led to a very cool project, and one that got in front of Lou Gerstner, the CEO of IBM, pretty good day. Do we solve gravity? No, that’s a different story, but we did achieve innovative momentum, and that was the point.

Heather Pearce Campbell  24:25

You know, you mentioned earlier. It’s really about understanding intentions and listening deeply. And I think that’s a concept. I mean, I I’d be curious in your own life where you learned to listen deeply.

John Wolpert  24:41

Oh, I’m still learning. Like a lot of your your viewers, I’m an entrepreneur, and done that three or four times, and been an executive in some big companies as well. But it’s easy when you don’t have any ideas of your own. And I have friends who are like that. They don’t, it’s not, and that’s not pejorative. They’re so much more interested in everyone else than they are in whatever they’re thinking. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Very easy to be a good leader, because they’re just so enabling of others, and they’re very good listeners. But I think there’s another, there’s others of us who are very familiar with listening to their own voices, and some of us get good at coming up with good voices, right? Like, you know, I’ll say a lot, but sometimes it’s good. When you’re habituated over many years to come, throwing out, putting yourself out there, you have to learn how to put good things out there. So I think, I bet, a little bit better than the average when it comes to new ideas. So when you have your own ideas, but you also have to enable other people’s ideas, that’s hard. And one of the cool things about the two but rule is that, I don’t know about you, but whenever I am desperate to say something in a meeting or or even just one on one, it’s usually because I’m worried I’m going to forget what I wanted to say. But if you wait to formulate your second but before you articulate your first, but it’s very hard to forget what you’re going to say. It starts kind of taking finding purchase in your brain. It’ll come back. So I find that’s a useful trick in in for very energetic idea people to slow down a little bit but not feel like they’re going to lose the thing that makes them useful on the team, right? 

Heather Pearce Campbell  26:51

No, I love that. I think that waiting. I mean, I love the idea of waiting for your second, but I think it’s hard for a lot of people for the reason that you mentioned, like, oh, well, I’ve got to get this piece out, or I’ve got to express it before I forget it, or whatever. But I think you know, generally, the process of deep listening in workplaces. Let’s just start in. Workplaces can be really challenging. I was talking actually to my sister just the other day, whose husband is in education, and he is a principal of an early development, basically set of schools. So working with really young little kids and parents who obviously care a lot about those little kids. And it turns out the vice principal of this particular portion of the district had very limited skills and listening. And so you can imagine how that went when there’s a series of concerns issues with these little people and parents come to talk to administration about this, and she just couldn’t do any listening. I mean, she just have to jump in and put her position in, and it caused such heat the the act of not listening that she lost her job like the school district just realized, like, this is untenable. 

John Wolpert  28:23

And there is theater to this. I think that I know people who are have such a high clock speed that they they appear as though they’re not listening and they’re in there. There’s an argument to be made that they aren’t listening as deeply as they could, because it’s not really about when you hear people say, Well, you’re not listening. I say that to my kids, you know, they’re like, and then they quote me chapter and verse. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  28:46

What I say, like, No, I listened. I just…

John Wolpert  28:48

I just didn’t agree. Yeah, exactly, yeah. I’ve said that myself. I listened. I just don’t agree, right? So there’s again, two buts, I think that not talking is not the same as listening, but it’s a lot easier to seem like you are, right. So good for you if you’re a non talker, but if I’m not talking to you, then I’m probably not listening either, right? So how do you listen deeply? Everybody has different rhythms, right? If you’re from New York, you’re going to be talking faster, and if you’re from somewhere else, you’re not. And so we have to respect each other’s sense of timing and the fact, and we also have to give each other a little bit of a break, I think, to say, hey, look, you know, you’re not a wallfire flower, you just have a slower sense of timing. Hey, you’re not a blowhard. You just have a faster sense of timing. And if we can start from there, we can remove the judgments that I think come out up from both sides of that equation.

Heather Pearce Campbell  29:56

Well, that’s a huge start, like respecting that difference in. Timing. I mean, it’s also, I think, a difference for some people in their processing speeds, right? Like my son, which I’ve learned as a parent, my son has processed everything that’s happening around him, or that you’ve said, and he’s like five steps ahead of you. So energetically, it’s a challenging thing to keep up with on some days, but we realize, like, we just have to talk in the language of speedy processing for him and remind him, like, buddy, everybody around you is, like, still catching up to where you’re at. And it helps a lot for him to understand that, because it is easy for him to miss social cues. 

John Wolpert  30:40

Yeah, we don’t want to be speed shaming, right? Maybe that’s a thing. Hey, did we just coin a thing? Speed shaming?

Heather Pearce Campbell  30:49

It happens absolutely, and I think it happens a lot with children, but I still think as adults, some people just don’t recognize that they are processing way faster than others. And so, even in this particular instance that I was talking about, this woman would just stop the parents, like, let me stop you there, like, as a way to redirect or get her two sense in. And it’s like this whole listening thing is a really big deal in the context of success at work, success in relationships, success in in working with teams where you want the most creative, best ideas to come out of those teams, right?

John Wolpert  31:28

And so whether you’re fast or slow, agreeing or disagreeing, the trick is being able to reflect what the needs behind the things that you’re hearing are. And that, you know, in products, we say, and I think this is a great line to remember. It’s always helped me in products, is this, what somebody wants is never so interesting or as important as why they want it. So, you know, you can a customer or a client will tell you, especially when I was at IBM, you know, they would be like, I want this button. And I’m like, why do you want the button is the interesting question. And maybe it’s not a button. You really that I can give you a better way of getting that, you know, even better. So why is it important? And, yeah, that’s the foundation of the two but rule, and it’s especially useful in very gnarly problems like, Well, I mean, you’re in legal, right? So my fascination and the one I’m applying the two but rule to right now has to do with on a project I’m working on. You know, just writing code on has to do with the conundrum of intentions and in contracting and negotiation with third parties of other entities, how do you find the connections and coordinate when there is information arbitrage that you absolutely need to maintain in supply chains? I’ve been if I had a nickel for every project I’ve been involved with where we thought that we could get companies to actually give each other their data. They’re gonna give you the data, right? They’re gonna keep that data internally, and you have to find a way of coordinating without actually having the data. And then we say, oh, let’s do an initiative to get all the supply chain data in a big honey pot. No, nobody does it for reasons, right? So if you don’t respect the needs that are driving those reasons, then you’ve got a problem. So how do we now? We have some new tools with vectors AI, and with with some things like zero knowledge, cryptography and something called fhe, there are new tools for being able to coordinate and even find each other like good fits, high signal relationships, without actually exposing your information or your intentions to others prematurely. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  33:58

Ah so you and I talked about this. This is ringing a bell. In our very first conversation, you talked about this.

John Wolpert  34:06

Yeah, working on a project where you can, I mean, there’s the applications are in contracting, like, imagine, you know, you’re writing a contract, and you have a lot of intentions behind that contract that you cannot signal to the other party, and they have the same Well, how could you find the synergy point without disclosing these points to each other directly used to require intermediaries. Now I can confidentially talk to your digital twin without your digital twin talking to you.

Heather Pearce Campbell  34:44

That’s almost like a right, like a sandbox, right, like a testing space where…

John Wolpert  34:51

Yeah, in dating, you could, like, have your twins date each other 500 times and then decide whether or not you should ever be introduced. Right? That, yeah. I find that to be a fascinating problem is this sort of confidential compute problem where we, we don’t even have to trust the the SaaS or the application anymore. We can do things under in a black box where not even the not even Google, has access to it. You’re the only one that has access to the data and but at the same time, we can find connections. And again, it comes back to things like graph databases and graph analytics like Neo4j so if you can, if you can effectively find the high connectivity in your graphs without actually exposing the data between the counterparties. It’s really kind of an interesting idea. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  35:47

Well, it’s huge. I mean, what you’re talking about early in my career. So there’s a series of books I think you mentioned, like the yes and right? So the difficult conversations, the Getting to Yes, getting past No. There’s a series of books written by the people who run the program on negotiation at Harvard, and they would teach these seminars to attorneys to legal professionals. And so I went and studied with them for a week and advanced negotiations course. And it was based largely around their book difficult conversations, but applied in real world scenarios, right? These are folks who would get flown around the world by the US government into hot spots like international turmoil. We’ve got, like, a very limited time to resolve this before something very bad happens, right? And so it was like, what you’re talking about, this concept of the thing that’s being asked for is far less interesting than the why behind it. And in the legal space, it’s left to the skill of the lawyers to try to figure out that conversation in order to come up with a mediated resolution, or something that allows parties to meet in the middle, despite on first appearances, being as far apart as you could possibly be.

John Wolpert  37:14

Oh yeah, and it goes all the way down to the individual and all the way up to the nation state. I mean, there are techniques in zero knowledge for coordinating things like Non Proliferation treaties, where you know we need to know that you’re abiding by the nuclear treaty, but we probably you don’t want us to know everything you’re doing with your nukes. Right? So how do we know you can there’s some cool math that allows you to prove things like that without disclosing information. And I think you know things, this sort of thing is becoming mature enough that with a fairly short order now, and we really need it. Thanks. Now that AI is creating deep fakes all over the place, we need a way of of of being able to say, This is my data. I have agency over it. I own it. I own it, and control it. That’s where the web three and blockchain people were kind of, we were telling a bit of a fib, because you don’t get control over an NFT that the data behind that asset is all over the place, and you don’t have control over access. If you don’t have control over access. You don’t really own a thing, just in law in most countries, so, but if you can say, No, I’ve got my data, I don’t actually ever expose the data to you, but the vectors my AI can sit in front of that provide value to you, but you can’t replicate my there’s some attacks you can do, but you can avoid them. You can basically say, Look, I’ve never seen your data. I’ve never exposed that data to anybody, but the AI in front of it is informed by the data provides enough value to you that you can pay me for a thing, but I still maintain control over my data. The problem is, if that data is in Facebook or in, you know, a centralized system, or on a totally decentralized system like blockchain, which is not a good idea, either you wind up losing control, or they they’ve got you so this, we’re walking into a near future where maybe Google or AWS, or, You know, Amazon or whatever is running that container for you. But that container is confident is locked down. You only have the keys, and then you can say, hey, my tweets are addressed to. Are on my addressing. But hey, Twitter to Dotto you can have, I will open up a fine grain authorization so that you can utilize them in your platform under these circumstances, under these conditions, kind of like sub stack, right? All of my substacks are mine. I own them legally, and they’re on my domain, even though they’re being run by substack. So imagine. You log into a new a new system, a new platform of any kind, the next Facebook and you say, and the next day you get an email saying, Hey, you’re the proud owner of a pod. You own this pod. Here’s your dashboard. We don’t control it. You if you want GD, you know if you want it to be in Germany, you can put in and and here’s the click this button, you can replicate it somewhere else, so that, if I shut you off, you still have your data, and the internet knows where to find your data. That’s the important thing, right? I mean, you don’t want to lose your social graph, and you don’t want to lose your your links and your SEO, but you definitely want to participate in something that’s aggregating eyeballs like a Twitter, right? This is the future, I think, is where you own your data. You control your data. You have your own replicated pod. It’s not on a blockchain. It doesn’t need to be. You also have self you know, you also have authorization and identity that you can get from various sources, including, you know, your drivers, your digital driver’s license, which is a thing now, and and all of that kind of accumulates to your data set. And sure, yeah, Google’s going to run it for you. You don’t want to run your own data set on your own home server, but the legal says you own it, you control it. They don’t have access to it. And some of these systems, like Google’s confidential compute containers and what Apple just announced with, with Apple AI or Apple intelligence, when it goes to their cloud, they can’t get access to it, even if they wanted to, because it’s under Advanced Encryption. 

Heather Pearce Campbell  41:39

Got it. So where my brain is going right now is that it doesn’t seem like it’s in the interest, and I know we’re bumping up against time, so I’ll try to keep this short. Doesn’t seem like it’s in the interest of big data to give up control.

John Wolpert  41:52

It hasn’t been, but now it’s changing. Where users are demanding it, and enough of us, yes, and enough of us are building things. I know of a really big video game company where the CEO is adamant that if there was an easy button for letting users control their own data, they would do it. It’s just that the tools for doing that are not readily they haven’t proliferated, and they’re not accept you can do it, but you have to be like a really good systems level developer, and you have to kind of buck the system. You know, there’s all these very popular frameworks for building applications out there and web things, and they haven’t matured to the point where, you know, the option is, hey, here’s your container. That’s…

Heather Pearce Campbell  42:34

Well, I wondered if user demand is what’s driving this, because it seems like a big problem, and people are increasingly, I think, less willing to just sign over everything to big data, which, in the past has been the model. 

John Wolpert  42:50

These things take time to move, but they are moving, and we don’t need fancy shiny objects like blockchain to do it. We can do it with the web protocols that we have. We just have to have the right priorities and policies. I always say when you know if you get the policies and priorities right, you don’t need blockchain. And if you don’t, Blockchain just makes it worse.

Heather Pearce Campbell  43:11

Well, and this is a huge reason why people need to be involved in the conversation around AI and be contributing their voice of demanding these ethical improvements to the way that we utilize access data, etc. John, this is such a fascinating and big conversation, I feel like we could go way deeper. It’s been a joy to connect with you. I know that some folks are going to be like, where do I find John? Where do I find his two but rule book? Will you talk to us real quick about where you are and where people can find and connect with you? 

John Wolpert  43:48

You can find the book wherever you buy books the Two But Rule that’s with one T important,  2 B, U, T, and it’s important to spell it correctly when handling your buts at work, you can also catch me@jwolpert.com and substack is  2buts.com.

Heather Pearce Campbell  44:09

Perfect. We’ll share all those links at the show notes. So if you’re busy, you’re walking around, you’re driving, hop over when you get a chance to legalwebsitewarrior.com/podcast, check out John’s episode, and John, I’m so excited that people are going to get to explore your world and hear more about this really important topic. So thank you very much for joining us today. What is your one final takeaway for folks and action steps, something that they can go do?

John Wolpert  44:41

Go to Team rotary and get yourself some time learning the two but rule with us, or learning how to play chess orlearning how to do a pit crew.

Heather Pearce Campbell  44:56

We’ll share that link as well to Team Rotary. Alright. Thank you. John. And appreciate you.

John Wolpert  45:01

You too. Thank you. Bye.

GGGB Outro  45:03

Thank you for joining us today on the Guts, Grit and Great Business® podcast. We hope that we’ve added a little fuel to your tank, some coffee to your cup and pep in your step to keep you moving forward in your own great adventures. For key takeaways, links to any resources mentioned in today’s show and more, see the show notes which can be found at www.legalwebsitewarrior.com/podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and if you enjoyed today’s conversation, please give us some stars and a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast so others will find us too. Keep up the great work you are doing in the world and we’ll see you next week.