Implementing Digital Twins Across the DoD with John Wargo & Jason Robinson

John Wargo [00:00:00]:
There's also, like, the external front of trying to negotiate with different customers and saying, hey, can we work out a compromise? Because what you guys are asking us to do is very similar to what this Air Force customer wants. You're just asking for it in different ways. And can we work out, even if it's just a one off, could we try to pilot a common sort of deployment strategy between the two of them? And typically, that doesn't go well until you can tie it back to either time or money, and you can say, hey, if I don't have to do the same thing two different ways, I could deliver this to you in April instead of June. And then they start taking you a bit more seriously. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Through our blood and your bonds, we crushed the Germans before he got here. You and I have a rendezvous with Destiny.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:52]:
All right, we're here again. We're getting after it. I've got John Wargo and Jason Robinson with me today. My name is Bonnie Evangelista. I'm with the chief digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. Can you introduce yourselves and tell us who you are and what company you work for?

John Wargo [00:01:09]:
Yeah, my name is John Orgo. I'm the CTO and founder of Beast Code, and I brought Jason Robinson with me. Jason?

Bonnie Evangelista [00:01:15]:
Yeah.

Jason Robinson [00:01:16]:
I am Jason Robinson, solutions architect at Beast Code.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:01:20]:
Beast code. Sorry. I feel like when you'd say Beast code, do you get that response? A like, is it just me? Am I the weird one in the room? Okay.

John Wargo [00:01:28]:
I was going to say that happens all the time. That's, like, almost the pun that founded the company was we were all sitting around a table and trying to throw names out, and someone jokingly threw a beast code out as a pun on Beast mode, because we were hitting the gym and everyone laughed and said it was a dumb name. And then, like, three days later, we were like, well, that was the one name we actually remembered, so maybe we can make something with that.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:01:48]:
Has it been working for you as a brand?

John Wargo [00:01:51]:
Yeah, it's worked great for the last nine years. Okay.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:01:54]:
It's more than the two of you who founded the company, right? Can you tell us a little bit more about the origin story?

John Wargo [00:01:58]:
Yeah, so we actually. Recently. Recently, we've picked Jason up within the last couple of years. The founders were myself and six other people from a mid sized defense contractor. And we kind of just got fed up with the culture over there. I mean, it was a little bit of everything. From it policy through trying to procure new hardware. We just won a contract and brought money in, and they were like, no, you can't have new machines.

John Wargo [00:02:21]:
We got you money. Why not? And just overall culture, not a great fit. And we kind of just decided we could do it better. Don't really think we realized what all that entailed, but we set out to do better and make it work. Yeah, it's been going ever since.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:02:36]:
You said, that was seven years ago.

John Wargo [00:02:38]:
About nine.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:02:39]:
Nine, man. Okay, this isn't your first rodeo. You're in it now.

John Wargo [00:02:43]:
Oh, yeah, no, we're riding.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:02:46]:
Yeah. Okay, so tell me a little bit more about what you're doing in the space, the govcon space, and kind of what your niche or your core offering is.

John Wargo [00:02:58]:
Yeah, so we always say that we do digital twins. That means something different to everyone. I saw an article recently that a company claimed they were building a digital point of the Earth for weather. And I was like, I have that in my pocket. Like, I can just zoom out on windy. And that's my digital point of the Earth for weather. So I try to be a little more specific. We do, first and foremost, human machine interface.

John Wargo [00:03:18]:
So we're not trying to build, like, these hyper specialized engineering tools that you'll oftentimes see where you have to be a PhD or a specialist in a field to understand what's going on. Our first and foremost goal is that this tool should be approachable by everyone. And then the second thing, a second priority to that is doing data aggregation. So we have a platform that we call Beast Core, because, of course, we had to make a second pun off the name of the company, and it does exactly that. The whole point is that you could take something like a CAD model or a PLM type solution, which is really usable by CAD engineers, and it's a fantastic tool for them. But then you start getting people who are in the acquisition cycle, who are in the training cycle, who are in the operational cycle, and they're not really able to use those tools. And in the past they said, oh, we'll just build our own version of a digital twin. We'll have our own spreadsheets that sit over here, we'll take pictures in the interface, we'll build our own training content.

John Wargo [00:04:09]:
But getting them to stay up to date over the lifecycle of the platform is just an absolute nightmare. And so that's really where we stepped in and said, hey, what if you could take those really specialized engineering tools and make them digestible to a less specialized audience or to someone who has a different specialization, so that you could have someone, say, doing predictive analytics, but they still want a 10,000 foot view of what the platform looked like. Well, I could take that CAD data, and instead of rendering it in infinite precision as CAD data, I could just show it to you as a really basic visualization that you can overlay your data science on top of.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:04:41]:
Okay, you're going to have to way dumb that down for me. So is there like a use case or what use case are you solving? In that scenario you just described? There is an operator, an acquisition professional. Right. Who wants to do what you're saying help them do.

John Wargo [00:04:58]:
Yeah. So at the end of the day, it comes down to communication and cost savings, really? Normally, when you procure a new platform, you'll spend a lot of money creating these designs that tell you to the nth degree. Here's how we're going to build this thing.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:05:13]:
Sorry, so you're speaking to like, a reference architecture type thing?

John Wargo [00:05:18]:
Yeah. Okay, so we got our start with the Navy, right? So you might have, like, a naval ship that you're building and, you know, either hundreds of paper documents or hundreds of gigabytes of three dimensional models.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:05:29]:
Okay, and on the ship?

John Wargo [00:05:31]:
Yes, for the ship and all of the electrical wiring and cabling and the networks and weapon systems, every little piece of the ship is there, and it has to be for acquisitions because we built the ship from all these designs. But then you get, like, on our use case, our first use case was on a DDG 1000, so they had all of those things. But then you get into operations. So now the ship's been built, and the acquisition team high fives themselves and says, cool, we delivered the ship. Time to move on to whatever our next project is. We're talking to the sailors who are trying to actually operate the vessel now. And all they were given was, like, 132 dimensional grayscale drawings of how this thing is supposed to work, and they're supposed to stand watch and tell you when something's going wrong. And they're like, I can't believe we don't have anything better.

John Wargo [00:06:18]:
And we were like, you do have something better. You have all of that CAD data. It's literally 3D models. It's got connectivity, it's got everything down to what grade of steel that thing was made out of. And they're like, well, sure, we theoretically got that.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:06:30]:
And it's just not consumable for them, right.

John Wargo [00:06:32]:
Or they don't have license of the software. The software is too resource intensive to run on their machines. And then even if they did, that software is still, like, giving you an output, assuming that you're a mechanical engineer, not someone who's standing watch on a naval ship. And so we were able to take those and kind of digest them down into a simpler form and say, hey, here's your three dimensional model that isn't littered by welding marks, that isn't littered by all these ISO standard call outs, and instead is just a 3D model so that you can kind of wrap your head around what's going on, and then we can start aggregating data in from other sources as well. So then we're able to say, hey, what if I took live sensor data and gave you a sheet map of a specific system that you're looking at so you can see how it works? And it doesn't have as much data as, say, the predictive analytics solution that we're overlaying. And it doesn't have as much data as the CAD, but it has a little bit of both. And that situational awareness that you gain is really huge. And then we link back to both of them.

John Wargo [00:07:29]:
So if you are a data scientist, you can click here and go see 250 Monte Carlo simulations of how this thing is going to play out if you want to.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:07:36]:
You said you started in Navy and ships. Are you doing more than that now? Maybe. Air Force and planes, army and tank.

John Wargo [00:07:43]:
We've got a lot of stuff now. We've done infrastructure for IT companies. And so here are your servo racks, and I can show you the power and network flow between servo racks. We've done aircraft, like you mentioned, both on naval aviation and on the Air Force side a little bit. We've done a whole bunch of naval platforms. We've recently gotten into the submarine community. I'm sure I'm missing stuff. We're starting to get into geospatial infrastructures like buildings and civil engineering.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:08:08]:
Yeah, I'm curious. So, digital twinning is not completely foreign to me, but the couple of spaces, I've heard more conversation around it have been more from an assessment or sandboxing environment type of space. Any thoughts or to add on that in terms of using it to assess new technologies or capabilities that we should be considering?

John Wargo [00:08:32]:
Yeah, no, I definitely think that's a great use for it. And again, this comes back to digital twin is just a huge umbrella. Like, at some point, anything that mimics the real world in a digital environment could be called a digital twin. So it's certainly not the niche that we find ourselves in. We actually get a lot of people who ask us, like, oh, cool. You know how all these things are connected? It's like, could you tell me what happens if I were to punch a hole in this pipe? Well, no, we're not a physics simulation. I'm not going to simulate how much water is coming out of that pipe based on pressure and all these other laws. That's not what we dO.

John Wargo [00:09:02]:
But there are companies that do that. We've integrated with a few of them. We're able to kind of wrap those up into a single product again and show you. Here's your predictive analytics next to those testing environments, next to a whole bunch of different things. So it's a big space.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:09:17]:
Yeah. You're nine years in. That's quite a bit of experience. And are you predominantly DoD customer based or are you doing any commercial?

John Wargo [00:09:26]:
Yeah, so we're slowly branching into the commercial space, but we're definitely, I'd say, like 99.9% DOD still.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:09:33]:
Okay. The reason I ask is doing work across multiple services. Curious, based on your experience, what patterns or trends you're seeing doing this type of work, because I can relate in a different sense as a person. In contracting, you kind of become a bridge to or connective tissue between certain things and portfolios and customers and whatnot. And I for sure see lots of patterns. So I'm curious, in your seat, what patterns or trends you're seeing, good or bad, that you want to highlight for us in this space?

John Wargo [00:10:06]:
It's been interesting to try to cross all the different branches. Like, you start in the Navy, we got very embedded into the Navy space, and you learn what it is and how they operate. You understand there's going to be some differences as you go across them. And it's been shocking to see how big those differences are and sometimes how small they are, too. So the Navy has a very unique posture when it comes to computers and cybersecurity, because up until very recently, they were the only branch that basically had to bring their own hardware with them. Like, if you're a submarine at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, you can't just hit any cloud provider in the world. What you have is what you took with you.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:10:44]:
Right.

John Wargo [00:10:45]:
And it's been fun to see how that permeates their culture. So on the Air Force and Army side, you could go deliver them software and they will buy software from you. And in the Navy, up until recently, that hasn't been an option because I can't just sell you software because what are you going to run the software on. So you end up always delivering hardware. And if you're a software company, you go find these hardware vendors that already have hardware establishments and server racks with authorities to operate that are accredited, and you basically partner with them to say, hey, when you deliver that server rack, I want to put this on. Like, trying to make those connections in the Navy has been very interesting. And we recently crossed into Air Force, Space Force, who have a lot more of a modern cloud model where you could do things like continuous authorities to operate, where we can deploy a piece of software to the cloud and it gets scanned every couple of hours. We get live security reports and a ton of time to fix them.

John Wargo [00:11:40]:
And there's very little upfront vetting, and there's like this continuous vetting that goes on and on and on, whereas the Navy has the almost exact opposite posture where they're very big on upfront vetting because we're trusting you to put you on this ship. And they don't have nearly the emphasis on continuous vetting because that ship is going to go be disconnected for nine months. It doesn't matter if there is a vulnerability that's disclosed. The ship is literally sandboxed in the middle of the ocean. And so that's been like a very interesting challenge for us to try to cross is just those two radically different cybersecurity postures between the two. But then on the flip side, they're trying to drive towards the same agile culture.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:12:20]:
Oh, interesting. Yeah. I didn't have as much of an appreciation for what you're describing until I talked with a gentleman named Jack Pan, who's the CEO of a company called Ocean Motion Technologies on a previous episode, and he talked about sensor data in the ocean, and I never thought about that. But it's not like you can plug a buoy into an electrical outlet to power it, number one, to continue to collect data, and then there's a waterproofing consideration that they have to grapple with. So I can completely appreciate what you're describing. My next line of thinking goes to how do we as a department, from an enterprise perspective, do mission domain like you're describing make it more difficult to have enterprise reciprocity? Maybe for some of the things you're talking about, whether it's like cybersecurity or deployment of software, et cetera. Curious just if that resonates or lands with you in general.

John Wargo [00:13:24]:
Yeah, there's definitely a couple of efforts that are like trying to make that happen and how it pans out kind of remains to be seen. I caveatted almost everything I said with like, up until recently, this is how it worked because there has been a shift to try to put, they're typically called like edge cloud servers. So it's like a cloud server where you're saying, here's the hardware to run your software and then you just deploy the software on demand as you want it. I'm not giving you a server that is designed to run, say, Microsoft Outlook, and that's the only thing it will run. It can accept a wide variety of applications. Typically you only see that on services like Amazon Web Service or Microsoft Azure that are in cloud because their whole business model is give me your software and we'll run it for you. And so there's a couple of places in the Navy where they're trying to adopt that architecture. And, you know, we do need to decouple the delivery of hardware for the delivery of software because we want the same agile development principles that the rest of the industry is currently tracking towards.

John Wargo [00:14:21]:
And one of the only ways to get there is to make the barrier to iteration lower on both fronts. And so I think that's probably going to be the biggest thing that ends up happening is eventually the Navy is going to credit one of these systems or probably several of these systems and say, hey, we're going to put this cloud environment local on that ship so that you can deliver us just software. And then that opens the door to the next step, which is, okay, well now how do we get the Navy and the Air Force and the army and Space Force and everyone to agree on any percent software? Because again, right now the Navy fundamentally disagrees with the Air Force software accreditation because they have a fundamentally different deployment strategy. So I think once they unify that deployment strategy, they'll be at a better place to try to establish that reciprocity.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:15:07]:
I hope this doesn't feel like an unfair question, but you're very much describing the natural tendency for, I call it the compartmentalization across the department, or you could call it the siloed nature of the department. How are you navigating? Or I don't want to say managing that, but how has it been trying to find kind of help be a bridge maybe, right. As somebody who again, sits in a seat, who can see patterns because you're supporting people who have similar needs and either bringing awareness to those common denominators or areas where you can see group A can leverage group B's thing. I don't know. I'm curious what that looks like for you.

John Wargo [00:15:49]:
I mean, in a couple of words very hard. There's kind of two different fronts, right? There's the internal front of, how do I get the engineers within my company, within beast code, to sort of understand what everyone's doing so that we're not programming the same wheel 20 times? But then there's also like the external front of trying to negotiate with different customers and saying, hey, can we work out a compromise? Because what you guys are asking us to do is very similar to what this Air Force customer wants. You're just asking for it in different ways. And can we work out, even if it's just a one off, could we try to pilot a common sort of deployment strategy between the two of them? And typically that doesn't go well until you can tie it back to either time or money, and you can say, hey, if I don't have to do the same thing two different ways, I could deliver this to you in April instead of June. And then they start taking you a bit more seriously.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:16:39]:
How have you been able to, despite that, find success either in your company or for the department?

Jason Robinson [00:16:47]:
So one thing that I would say there is our shift in attention to becoming more of a product company. Some of the stuff that we've chased after in the past has been like we're a sub to another contract. And in those cases, you're just very well defined, I think as we shift more towards being a product company. So focusing on digital twins and being the best at data aggregation and showing those 3D models, being the best in the space isn't just like company strategy. It's more than that. It's like for the branches of Department of Defense. Whether you're Navy or Air Force, everybody has a need for digital twins. So I think that's probably way up there on the list of things that we would define as success.

Jason Robinson [00:17:40]:
I want to go back to the.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:17:41]:
Digital twin thing in a second. Would you say that maybe right now in this point of time, it's not enough just to have service offerings and say, I have the best experts? I think what I'm hearing is you have to have a product now. Competitive advantage comes with having a product. What's your read on that? I don't know if that's accurate.

Jason Robinson [00:18:03]:
No, you're right. I mean, you could define business several different ways. If you look at it just in terms of revenue, then having a product that you can sell licenses on, you can sustain your business that way, but then also just from the customers perspective and the fact that we can get something into the hands of someone who wants it very quickly, rather than the contract revenue. There's nothing against having those contract vehicles in place. We have them and they work very well for us. But focusing on the product has advantages, not just for us, but for all of events.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:18:43]:
So I couldn't agree more. Here's why I agree, but I wanted to get your perspective first. Having a product means, or I would assume it means, especially if you're talking about product improvements and design. You know, who your end user is, like who your market is in the department, which is something we talk about a lot, or that comes up a lot in conveRsations. In these types of conversations is knowing whoever your end user is. In your case, it sounds like operator sailors, like tactical boots on the ground type people. That's not always the case, but I don't disagree for that fact alone. I do want to go or ask your opinion on the digital twin thing.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:19:20]:
You said everybody needs digital twins. From your experience, do you think most people in the government that you interact with know and understand that?

Jason Robinson [00:19:29]:
I think we're trying to make them understand. I think one of the best things you were talking about, like what are some good use cases for digital twins? I think the easiest one to throw out there would be training. If I'm trying to learn my job, the ship's been built or the plane's been built. It's been there for a decade. But I'm young right now, high school. I just joined the Air Force or the Space Force. I'm going to need to know how to do my job in the space that I operate. So if I can use a tool like Bscore, where I can see the platform that I'm on, I can go to the space that I would be working in, familiarize myself with it, interact with it, click on any of the systems within it and see what's the flow and see the technocrapence related to it.

Jason Robinson [00:20:19]:
That's all stuff short of actually being on a boat or in the plane. That's the next best thing is, I guess what I'm trying to say, can.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:29]:
That extend to not just tactical operations? What about business type operations? Do you see that type of digital twinning applying in those types of functional areas?

Jason Robinson [00:20:43]:
Yeah. So digital twins can be part of any PLM. I think we've positioned ourselves well for that. At some point we will get more into the commercial space, but yeah, absolutely. You've got some complicated manufacturing process, and you want to see a digital twin of your production facility or even your warehouse. There's really no shortage of use cases for a digital twin.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:21:10]:
Can what you're describing be applied to even a functional lane like acquisition? We're not operating a machine, right. But we have systems we use to do business. And I'm just curious if there's a use case that digital twinning would benefit or add value to something like an acquisition field, which is more maybe administrative. But I think you understand my sentiment. It's not a technical or tactical functional lane.

Jason Robinson [00:21:42]:
So I think there's a part of the, and correct me if I'm wrong here, because it's been a couple of years since I took the training, but I seem to recall there's a section of the acquisition process where it's past analysis of alternatives, but before you actually start building, where during the, I think it's the systems engineering process, there's a phase there where you can start building out possibly a digital twin, is that right?

Bonnie Evangelista [00:22:09]:
I think you're describing I could be wrong with phase or two, like a pre milestone, a type decision, and where you're conducting, what are my options? And you can be piloting, experimenting, prototyping, potentially whatever it is, right. That's addressing the mission. Need statement?

John Wargo [00:22:27]:
Yeah, it's really interesting to see where the thread takes you when you pull on it. I mentioned we've done some it cyber twins before where, hey, you have a server farm and a whole bunch of data centers, and you want to know, say, which server is processing a pizza software, because maybe the software has to exist on three different physical nodes that if one of them goes down, you have high availability. You might need to know that, you might need to know the flow of data, but you also might need to georeference it. So you can say, hey, within this half square miles, server Farm is running on Blade three of server Rack 42. And I can show you exactly where it is geospatially. But you also might want the functional representation that shows you how many network hops away is that server from a different server. And we've done stuff like that and started dabbling in that kind of world. And it's really funny because as you start pushing that front, people are immediately like, oh, well, if I knew where my email server and my document server was, and I already know the traffic between them, could I just tag users? And then could I map that to a functional process like what you're talking about, of when should they be reaching out to these things? Because we already have functional representations, we already have data flow, we already have people.

John Wargo [00:23:41]:
And you very quickly start leaving the realm of being physically grounded in what's traditionally a digital twin, like a digital recreation of a physical object, and you start getting into digital twin, where it's a digital twin of another information system or less physical construct. And the parallels are really fun, and there's also some very big, not parallels, that get kind of hairy too.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:24:04]:
Is that common? Or I'm imagining it's not common, but are people doing that, like, trying to make digital twins of non physical things, or is it trending in that direction?

John Wargo [00:24:15]:
I'm going to pop out and say that that probably just comes down to your definition of the word digital twin, because I think doing simulations of nonphysical things has existed almost as long as computers have. But I think it took us coining the word digital twin, and then people said, oh, well, what if this is a digital twin, but it's this thing that we've been doing the whole time.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:24:36]:
Yeah, maybe I should have started the conversation with this. In terms of what is your definition of a digital twin, what does it mean to you?

John Wargo [00:24:44]:
It's always a fun one. I have an internal blog post that I put out that tried to pin a very exact definition down, and I think everyone wanted to fight me all at the same time, because everyone thinks of it a little differently. I tried to define it as, like, the digital portion of a representation of a physical, tangible thing, and so I could throw out a platform, and the physical object and the digital twin are both innate to that platform, and it doesn't have to necessarily be tied on 3D models or anything, but I have a friend who bought a new car and they could pull an app up on their phone and it tells them how much gas is in the tank, and they can turn the car on and adjust the climate it, and set up their navigation and all of the things you could do to control the car, you could just do from the app. And that effectively is creating a digital twin of their car. I don't think anyone would ever say it that way unless you're in this space, but it is a digital representation of a physical object that could be tied in that sense, that controlling this literally has command and control over the physical object, or it could just be for analysis or training or any of the other use cases like we've talked about.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:25:51]:
So you mentioned defense unicorns earlier, and it sounds like you are very pro collaboration with others who complement what you're doing. Any piece of advice, or for someone who's going down a similar path as you on, like, what's the best way to do that? Or any kind of advice that you would offer others who are listening to kind of break in.

Jason Robinson [00:26:15]:
Yeah, I would say that it's worth building that kind of relationship because it allows you to focus on what you do best, allows them to focus on what they do best. And then from a staffing perspective, you're not stretching your resources across multiple areas of expertise. You can really become great at what you do. So I know it's not like, just a given that you can get that relationship with just any partner, but I would always be looking for it.

John Wargo [00:26:49]:
I think a lot of our contacts have come from kind of speaking up and just seeing who takes your side. Right. Like I mentioned earlier that we try to push the Navy forward on cybersecurity posture and on deployment options and especially tying them into, like, well, you want this more agile software development process, but you can't have this cyber posture that forces people into doing waterfall. And usually when you take a stance like that, you're not the only one. And usually that customer has kind of heard those types of arguments before, especially if you can find someone who's receptive to them. They're usually a phenomenal networking opportunity just to say, like, hey, you sit down and you have dinner with Ominix. Who else has told you this? I can't be the only one saying this kind of thing. Then you start getting hooked up with, oh, well, there's this guy I met who did a similar thing for the Air Force.

John Wargo [00:27:33]:
Perfect, give me his name. So that's how we've done a lot of it is just kind of being bold, taking a stance, and you'll either learn very quickly why people don't take that stance, which is learning, or you'll find other people who are taking that stance, and usually they need just as much help as you do.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:27:51]:
That reminds me of somebody who is not in the govcon space. Her name is Cody Sanchez. She always talks about, it's not about the how, it's about the who and everything that you do. You can't do everything yourself, and so you should be looking for who can take you where you want to go. And I think that's what you're describing.

John Wargo [00:28:12]:
Yeah. And I definitely agree with the sentiment. There's a lot of people who you'll find that don't realize that they're in that position of power to make that happen for you. And on the flip side, there's probably people who you can help out that you don't realize you can help out. And so just keeping your mind open and your eyes open for those kinds of connections are super valuable. But, yeah, you hit it on the head.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:28:34]:
Yeah. Okay, final question, speaking of defense Maverick. So we like to promote kind of a culture of doing things different for the sake of doing something different, because sometimes the status quo isn't working. And being bold in our government DoD construct and trying to break through whatever your apparent glass ceiling is and whatever your circumstances are. So in your seat, you have a very interesting and unique perspective. As someone in industry who has been serving government for nine years now, what does being a defense maverick mean to you?

John Wargo [00:29:10]:
I think to me, when I hear that sentiment, it kind of comes back to sort of the topic we were just on of, like, keep your eyes open. Sometimes theRe's a reason we're doing something one way. Like I outlined, there's a reason why the Navy has the posture and deployment methods they have today, but also that doesn't necessarily just make it right. So when I hear defense Maverick, it's not necessarily just about different for the sake of being different, we're just going to challenge things and ask why we're still doing it this way. And sometimes there's a valid reason, but being bold enough to ask the why will at least get people thinking. And that's how you could find the people who are also bold enough to ask why. And you just push that bar forward. A lot of times, you're not going to be the one making that 100% improvement.

John Wargo [00:29:55]:
Hey, I came out with this entirely new methodology or architecture, and it's going to require the industry to adopt it. It's that huge push. A lot of times it's just those 1% improvements of, hey, if I can get one program office on the Navy to agree with one program office on the Air Force for one of our cyber compliance tests, that's a 1% improvement. Still, that's one little nudge forward that I can use as either an argument to something else or it's an experiment that we learn why we don't typically do that, or there will be something that comes out of that and just a little 1% improvements start adding up and adding up and adding up.

Jason Robinson [00:30:29]:
I'll add to that a little bit. And I'm actually going to quote a prior episode from Defense Mavericks. So I think you'll enjoy this. When you had Mike Pansky on, he said you have to educate your customer because they can't be an expert on everything. And that's something that I have seen firsthand that we do when we're talking with the customer. We're always telling them what's possible and what can be done, and we explore that and prototype it and eventually build some software or product around it. So I think that could also be an answer to what a defense Maverick is, is just helping the customer as early in the process as possible, even if it's overlapping, where they're trying to define requirements.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:31:16]:
Yeah, I'll try to round this out as much as I can before we break. But what you're describing, the first thing I thought of in my head when you were talking about, I'm going to call it the awareness. So if you are even willing to be aware that when you ask the question whether it's why or for what reason, are we still doing it business this way, the scene in my head always comes up as, like, everyone looks around the room and nobody knows the answer. And that is very, very common where we're doing business a certain way, because it's just been done so many years. And finally someone is, I will say, bold enough and has enough courage, right? Because depending on culture and chain of command, whatever, there's a lot of reasons why people don't ask why. So that's step one, awareness. And then, so there's some leadership and courage in that. And then two, to your point, Jason, you still have to have somebody open enough to try a different path.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:32:13]:
And that, too, there can be some stumbling blocks to getting to that. So it's not always as easy. There's no easy two step process. Right? Like there's always this thing you mentioned, Mike Piansky, we talked about the labyrinth, right. There is a labyrinth that we are navigating. And so I very much appreciate the commentary. Any final words? Anything else you want to leave us with?

Jason Robinson [00:32:37]:
I'll give you something that you might throw away. So, up to you, whether you keep it or not. But preparing for the podcast, I had to go and listen to past episodes, and I found this common thread about customer or consumer, the culture, the fact that what we're trying to do is big, audacious things, and we're trying to do it fast, because on the other side of this is we have adversaries that are working against us, doing the exact same thing, trying to use the same technologies to put them in a better position. And when I step back and I look at that common thread of people and speed and just the culture, it makes me think of America in its greatest moments. But then there's other things throughout history where we've come together to solve these really great problems. And sometimes we did it for the sake of science sometimes we did it for the sake of national security, and we do these things and we do them fast, and we have this passion. And so in our greatest moments of American history, has always been people, culture, speed. And I like the fact that defense mavericks is positioning around those topics.

John Wargo [00:33:58]:
Yeah, pass another example out. That came to mind, as you were saying, that World War II, specifically on the European front, there's a lot of people who consider that war not to be over, but to have been won. The moment that we could build naval ships faster than the Germans could build torpedoes, like, imagine that metric. Just let that sink in. I can build ships faster than you can build the thing that can possibly sink them. Like, the whole point of a torpedo is that it's a Tarpit. I can build that for far cheaper than you could build the thing you're destroying. That wasn't the case anymore.

John Wargo [00:34:31]:
And it comes down to people and speed and industry and really just honing and mastering your craft. And, I mean, none of us want another conflict, but it'll come at some point, and it's going to be the exact same thing just on a different stage. The stage will be computers and information technology. Instead of manufacturing ships, it'll be deploying AI services or something like that.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:34:52]:
Well, I greatly appreciate your time and insight today. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope this was fun for you. Do you have a good time?

Jason Robinson [00:34:59]:
As it. Awesome.