"While We Were Looking Over There"

Think about where we were technologically just 10 years ago, when everybody was really excited about our utopian tech-driven future.

Netflix used to mail you DVDs, now they spend $15 billion a year feeding their content algorithms. Google used to cutely offer you the "i'm feeling lucky" option, now they predict your searches before you finish typing them. Snapchat and Instagram didn't exist yet, and Facebook was still a place where you could find someone under 45.

With modern smartphones, we have more technology in our pocket than what NASA had to send humans to the moon. We have more information at the tip of our fingers than all the libraries of the ancient world. We can make a few taps and gestures and food or drugs or people show up to where we are.

But think about it. To the ancient world, we'd seem like a society of depressed wizards.

This week I speak again to Judy Estrin, Internet pioneer and serial entrepreneur to better understand how this problem has metastasized.

Then, I sit down with K Krasnow Waterman, who was the Chief Information Officer of the first post-9/11 data analytics facility established by the White House and, next, led the reorganization of the FBI's intelligence operations. K helped me form a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the problems we face.

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Featured guests this episode:

Judy Estrin is an Internet pioneer, entrepreneur, business executive, and author in the United States. Estrin worked with Vinton Cerf on the Transmission Control Protocol project at Stanford University in the 1970s, often looked at as the project that our modern e-mail emerged from. Estrin is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded eight technology companies. She was the chief technology officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000.

Estrin served on the boards of FedEx Corporation (1989-2010), Rockwell Automation (1994-1998), Sun Microsystems (1995-2003), as well as the being the first woman to serve on the board of Walt Disney Company, where she served for fifteen years (1998-2014). She served on the advisory boards of Stanford University School of Engineering and the Bio-X interdisciplinary program, and is a member of the University of California President's Science and Innovation Advisory Board.

K Krasnow Waterman

Early in her career, K was on the design team for a new IBM outsourced services and storage business; an officer of Morgan Guaranty Trust managing data centers and special technical projects; she then became a trial attorney and in-house legal advisor. K returned to her technology roots when she became inception CIO of the first post-9/11 task force created by President Bush, served as the interim chief operations executive for the reorganization of FBI Intelligence infrastructure, and represented the Department of Homeland Security in high level negotiations to set the requirements for interoperability of federal data systems. More recently, she served as Global Head of Anti-Money Laundering Infrastructure at Citigroup.