The Trust Revolution

Most people consider consumer electronics disposable. There's always a new shiny version available, but do consumers really need a new phone or device every year? Should consumers just trust manufacturers? It's a complex issue, and host Luke Fox welcomed Kyle Wiens, an expert on the subject and founder of iFixit, a repository of repair guides for consumer electronics.He was inspired to create iFixit when he needed to repair an iBook and found no manual online. They didn't exist, and that's how the story started. This move actually forced Apple to offer free maintenance and service docs, something others have not.However, iFixit doesn't have resources for every electronic. “Over 20,000 new gadgets are released at the Consumer Electronics Show every ear. It's not viable for consumers to do the work that manufacturers should,” Wiens noted.This could change with right to repair laws. In this model, Wiens explained, “There are three legs to it—the information, special tools and software, and the parts.”Right to repair isn't a new concept; it's standard in the automotive industry, but tech manufactures want you to trust them for the life of the product. Wiens contended that shouldn't be consumers' only option.New laws to enable this are on the table. The problem goes beyond consumer electronics to medical devices and farm equipment. They suffer the same challenges, and Wiens explained a scenario with ventilators. “If biomedical technicians in the hospital can't fix it, it requires a service call, and that causes delays.”Wiens also spoke about how electronics went from purely mechanical to software-driven, which means the manufacturers must pony up the info and tools. Their argument on why they don't is rather hollow. “They say it's a safety concern, a cybersecurity risk, or it's protecting their intellectual property.”These arguments don't make much sense and likely damage the trust those manufacturers so desire to create.

Trust isn't tangible. Like any feeling, it's something that happens in relationships and interactions. Without trust, teams fail. So, how can organizations build high-trust teams? Captain George Dom USM (Ret) joined The Trust Revolution host Luke Fox to discuss the topic. Captain Dom shared his experiences as leader of the Blue Angels and his work in the private sector. He is the founder of the Hight-Trust Leadership Network and currently serves as the COO for ACI Jet. “Flying off aircraft carriers is a graduate education in trust, leadership, and teamwork. The essence of being able to do such things was the sense of building and sustaining high levels of trust,” Captain Dom said. In building this trust, Captain Dom noted it's the ability to be vulnerable, and to earn trust, a person must be trustworthy. “It's not binary; it's a continuum, and you're at different places with different people. The first step of trust is honesty with self.”Captain Dom discussed that without high levels of trust, teams can't be high-performing. It also impedes communication, so important decisions are never fully discussed. He believes leaders have to cultivate a high trust culture. “A high trust culture is one where someone can be their real self and show up with the best ideas and be authentic and transparent. That, in turn, drives creativity, adaptability, and resilience.” Captain Dom noted that the trust basics learned as a member of elite teams translate to the corporate world. He described five areas that leaders have to focus on to have high trust teams: character, commitment, competence, connection, and communication.

Trust is foundational to many relationships and organizations, maybe none more than those in military, intelligence, and government positions. Joining The Trust Revolution and host Luke Fox is a man who has experience in all three, COL Chris Costa. Costa spent 34 years in the Department of Defense as an intelligence officer and counterterrorism and hostage director. COL Costa has played an important role in security and shared his experiences. He's now retired and is the Executive Director of the International Spy Museum. “Trust is fundamental to being an intelligence officer and serving in the U.S. military. It starts when you take the oath to the constitution,” Costa said. COL Costa explained that trust among service members starts with the foundation of reliance on one other. What he learned about trust in that role, he took with him as he transitioned to the intelligence world. However, the trust in relationships is different. “It's a double-edged sword in intelligence. You're building trust with a source, but they could be a double agent.”When working with sources, those people are taking a huge personal risk. They could be captured, interrogated, or executed. COL Costa shared an experience with a young Taliban. “We are interested in the information he had, and we wanted to protect him, but he had to take direction from me.” That relationship was worth the trust instilled in the operative, and COL Costa said the intelligence he provided most likely saved American lives. In his next role as a hostage recovery expert in the White House, there was a new paradigm of trust. Families had to trust that he and his counterparts were doing everything to receive them. “We had an obligation to tell them everything we could without jeopardizing anything.” From a lifetime of service and trust, COL Costa is now providing a means of trust to the public by leading the International Spy Museum in D.C. These exhibits tell important, unknown stories about the power of trust.

There are many components of trust throughout the internet, and most people don’t realize how far those layers of trust go back. The Trust Revolution looked backward to the internet’s early days and the development of the Network Time Protocol (NTP), invented by guest Dr. David Mills. Dr. Mills, a computer engineer and Internet pioneer is known as the Father of Modern Time.“Protocols and algorithms to synchronize time were my sandbox.” Dr. Mills was on the first task force of the internet in the 1970s. “I was fascinated by what accurate time could be used for,” he said.One of the first experiments was synchronizing a clock with different power grids. When a grid began to lose up to five seconds, it was “time to put more coal on the burner.”Time synchronization became more accurate but wasn’t exact enough, so he developed an algorithm to compensate for disturbances, getting the time down to the low tenth of milliseconds.Today, technology users take time for granted, thinking it's fixed, and never questioning the time it provides. All users can give thanks to Dr. Mills for the innovation behind NTP.He and his early internet colleagues also did something rather remarkable in the 1970s—video calls and streaming. They were “zooming” way before the rest of the world. “We created these distributed conferences and broadcast them to willing universities,” Dr. Mills explained. In those days, bandwidth was low, and infrastructure was just being built.Dr. Mills was also the first director of the Internet Architecture Task Force. “Now that the internet was going to be a working item, there were issues with protocols,” he said. The question was should they use TCP/IP and if that should become the standard. It did, and without it, the internet might still be just a concept.

Trust plays a huge role in technology and with the growing capabilities of drones for delivery. To understand the role of trust in managing the highway in the sky, The Trust Revolution host Luke Fox spoke with Ken Stewart, President and CEO of NUAIR (Northeast UAS Airspace Integration Research Alliance).Stewart has an impressive background, working in wireless telecom, cloud-based software, and federated platforms. Stewart shared how trust shaped his pre-NUAIR career. He worked on a third-party, independent clearinghouse for mobile carriers. “It was a trusted platform in the industry that was able to authenticate and authorize and eventually became big in fraud detection, too.”Another critical role was working on democratizing the network spectrum on demand, which exposed him to working with the FTC. “We devised a way to share it in real-time, and that led to spectrum for autonomous systems.”Stewart led a GE aviation company relating to remote IDs or license plates for drones. “There’s a lot to putting drones in the air, and we had to create a trust network with diverse groups that different objections,” he added.A lot of information and data exchange occurs in spectrum usage, and a trusted partnership was difficult because not all users or their data had verification. With NUAIR, Stewart now has a new vision for the commercialization of drone use cases. “We operate a test site for the industry to test applications. It’s flexible air space the FAA allows us to provide access,” he shared. Users gather data, test ops over people, and design concepts.They also surveil a 50-mile traffic area, gathering important data to support the commercialization efforts of drone delivery. “The idea is a commercial model for UTM that’s scalable and economically viable. We’re working on healthcare delivery as a focus. How can we use drones to do this safely and efficiently?”

The idea of trust is much different than it was in the previous centuries. It’s no longer just about people; it includes technology as well. The Trust Revolution tackles this subject with a wide-ranging interview with Maj. General Jim Poss. Poss is a 30-year U.S. Air Force Veteran with combat experience as well as being a part of the intelligence community. He’s now CEO of ISR Ideas, an intelligence and drone consulting firm. Host Luke Fox first asked Poss about the idea of trust in the military, intelligence, and government applications. “Trust is transient and has to be earned. In the military, the biggest trust revolution was revealing everything to allies in WW II, which lead to NATO. NATO is a military body, but it also has the role of maintaining trust between western militaries.”The conversation shifted to intelligence agency trust and cyber trust. “Access is a concern. Agencies are hard on the outside, squishy on the inside. Before there wasn’t enough auditing or the firm ‘need to know’ system we have now,” Poss said. In diving deeper into technology, Poss spoke about trust with the internet. “The internet was created to be something unkillable, not something that was trustworthy. All the security has been strapped onto it. It’s a system that wasn’t designed with trust as a core operating principle.” In the early days of the internet, the boundaries were blurred around access and security. Poss said there was an “Alamo” approach to cybersecurity with physical segregation. It wasn’t effective, as there were unsecure portals to the outside world. “We’ll never be able to make the whole thing secure, but part of it should be, and banks are a good example,” he added.The focus now is on layered trust; trust but verify and audit. Trust between technology and humans will continue to evolve. However, technology is only as trustworthy as the intent behind by humans.

Host Luke Fox welcomed fintech expert Adella Toulon-Foerster to the show to discuss everything crypto and bitcoin. Toulon-Foerster has an impressive backstory, holding two legal degrees and working for think tanks, law firms, and governments. First, Toulon-Foerster explained what bitcoin is. “It’s a centralized digital currency without a bank or single administrator recorded on blockchain, which is a public ledger. It’s the most transparent financial system.”While its operations are transparent, many feel its clouded in secrecy, but Toulon-Foerster assets its “trustless.” “With bitcoin, you don’t have to trust a bank will complete the transaction. Once it’s sent, it’s done, the end, no middleman.”One thing that drives Toulon-Foerster’s interest in cryptocurrency is that it could be a source of equity and equality. “It’s a permission-less way for the disenfranchised to participate in a global financial ecosystem without a government.”Cryptocurrency doesn’t require dependence on a financial institution. Its value and awareness of it are rising, with tweets from Elon Musk and a $1.5 billion investment by Tesla. How to categorize bitcoin is a tricky subject. “It depends is the answer. It could be a currency, but it’s not legal tender. It could be a commodity or property.”Could bitcoin become completely mainstream? That’s certainly within reach, as it may be more accessible and valuable than money one day.

Host Luke Fox welcomed Dr. Robin Berthier, a pioneer in the field and CEO of Network Perception, a provider of corporate compliance and cybersecurity monitoring solutions for utility companies.  Berthier explained the new challenges for the utility market. “Utilities have modernized and that connectivity, especially around equipment and IoT, increase the risk for disruption and attacks.”Berthier and Fox discussed a recent compromise to a water treatment plant. A weak cybersecurity network allowed for penetration. The attackers changed the setting of chemicals. Fortunately, the facility prevented the chemicals from going into the water supply, which could have been poisonous. How can utilities protect against this? Berthier recommends “defense in depth or multiple layers of security.” He also cautions that companies need to change the way they think about cybersecurity. They should focus on when not if an attack occurs. “It’s impossible to keep everything outside of the perimeter, so design a system with this in mind. Software vulnerabilities are only growing. There were 6000 in 2016 and 18,000 in 2020.”The position Berthier urges is cyber resiliency. To achieve this, he said, “Visibility is key. Know what you have in your network and keep it up to date. Also, follow the principle of least privilege for applications.”Cybersecurity is also a concern for more than just IT. It requires a robust compliance program, redundancy to ensure business continuity, and diversity of tools. For this to work harmoniously, teams across many departments are imperative. While cybersecurity is becoming more complex, Berthier pointed out that simplicity and usability still matter. Balancing them with visibility, resiliency, and compliance will be the future of a cybersecurity framework.

The principle of trust isn’t unique to human relationships. It’s also a significant part of technology infrastructures. This cyber trust is what lets software updates and patches from the development company to their customers. Unfortunately, hackers can infiltrate these exchanges, appearing trustworthy but are a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Such is the case with supply chain hacking and the cybersecurity story of the year—Solar Winds. Lending his expertise on the topic and explaining hacking's evolving world is industry expert, Cylance founder, and best-selling author Stuart McClure.“Supply chain hacking is one of the most overlooked aspects of cybersecurity. An antivirus signature-based approach isn’t going to stop this,” McClure said. He explained that a signature-based approach is deeply flawed. “It only detects viruses it’s seen before, that match known signatures,” he said.Realizing this system was broken, McClure revolutionized virus detection by using AI and machine learning when founding Cylance. “We applied machine learning and data science, learning from past viruses, and predicting in real-time whether something was virus-like,” McClure said. McClure went on to explain the SolarWinds hack based on what is publicly known. It goes back to misplaced trust. “The number one target of supply chain hacking is to hack the build server that houses all the code and before it’s compiled and signed with the digital certificate. Malicious code now looks legitimate,” McClure said. That appears to be what hackers did with SolarWinds. The hackers got into the code, it was released to users, and the customer networks trusted it and let it in. SolarWinds illustrates the weaknesses of supply chain security, breaking trust in the technology and business partners. McClure warned, “This case is not unique, and it’s not the first time this level of attack occurred. What is unique is that they hit a core element, hacking just one system to infiltrate many eventually.”

To say that Juliette Kayyem, CEO, Grip Mobility has a pretty impressive resume is an understatement. Kayyem spent the last two decades in both state and federal government, managing complex policy initiatives and organizing government responses to major crises. As a professor at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, she is the faculty Chair of the Homeland Security and Security and Global Health Projects. She formerly served as Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security and is a Pulitzer Prize finalists National Security Analyst on CNN and the Atlantic. In between all of these outstanding accomplishments, Kayyem loves to catch some waves as an avid surfer.Luke Fox, Host, The Trust Revolution had the opportunity to speak with Kayyem on the latest episode of the podcast where she shared some insight on recovering from mistakes as a leader, because as a CEO or a public leader, you will make mistakes. “But if you build trust in your institution in your environment, you will be able to course correct without people thinking, either you're stupid, or ill will, or you are hiding something,” Kayyem said.The COVID-19 crisis has provided opportunities for Kayyem to reflect on how honesty can make a difference for leaders such as CEOs or politicians who have made mistakes they need to answer for. She explained that there is a mythology about crisis and disaster management that expects people to respond to the truth with panic, but that mythology is damaging and untrue. “It's just not the way it works. We've seen this in airline disasters, fires. If people believe that there's competent instruction to help people, they will abide by rules, but they need to have that confidence,” Kayyem said.Catch Up On Previous Episodes of The Trust Revolution!

Trust is not something anyone gives freely, no matter the terms of the relationship. It’s even harder to earn in professional settings. However, it’s a foundation for leadership and one that today’s guest Jef Graham wholly believes in. Graham has spent his career in leadership positions with large companies, currently serving on the board of NETGEAR, while also being a professional CEO for several startups in Silicon Valley.What exactly, is a professional CEO? Graham explained, “Such a role is about scaling the company. In the first 30 days, it’s a time of discovery and understanding. I want to know what’s working and what’s not. On the people side, it’s about getting to know them—the employees, customers, partners, investors, and board. I’m trying to build trust.”Graham believes trust is a process and the result of behavior. “My role is to become a leader that’s trusted. Behavior builds trust. I’m transparent and personal, even with something as simple as learning people’s names,” he said.Being ultra-transparent as a leader isn’t mainstream, and Graham gets that. “If you’re open, people believe in you. When you’re not, they don’t. As my father said, ‘Always tell the truth then you’ll remember what you said,’” he commented.He also has the perspective that the goal of trust is to minimize risk. “Startups have failures, but it’s an opportunity to show customers how good we can be in difficult times. It bonds relationships,” Graham shared. Graham and Fox also talked about Theory X and Theory Y. Theory X is authoritarian, while Theory Y is participative and evident of leaders trusting people to take ownership. Graham’s a huge proponent of Theory Y. He said, “You get more out of employees, faster decision-making, and produce more results. People are happier and work harder.”

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