The Future of Defense Acquisition with Will Roper

[00:00:00] I'm not a believer that process or reorganization changes much. And that's. That's how governments, at least in the time I served, mostly tried to effect change let's reorganize, or let's create a new organization, or let's change who an organization reports to. Very occasionally that makes a difference.

[00:00:23] My guiding star is that technologies and global trends change things, and the policies and reorganizations try to keep up with them. and technology's changing so fast now, that it's arguably broken the policy barrier, where just like the sound barrier, the policies can never get in front of it again. They will only trail.

[00:00:45] Alright. This is Bonnie Evangelista with the chief digital and AI office once again. And I have quite a guest today. The illustrious Will Roper, the former assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition. Will, thank you for joining me.

[00:01:21] Bonnie, my pleasure. Illustrious. I won't live up to that in this podcast, but I'll at least try to get a few lights on before we're done.

[00:01:29] You have a

[00:01:31] Reputation, you know, that, right? 

[00:01:33] Oh, if I do have one, if it's positive, it's because of the great teams that I had around me. If it's negative, it's probably because of me.

[00:01:43] If I were being honest I was not in the Air Force during your tenure but I've heard a lot of good. I would say there's a mixed bag. How about that? But mostly good. 

[00:01:55] Yeah, if you're driving change, it should be a mixed bag, right? It should bother people if you're trying to change things because whoever is in love with the status quo will not like the disruption of it. And of course, those who think the status quo has outlived its purpose will love what And so I do know I have a reputation as a disruptor and an innovator. These words are becoming a little overly in the department, but it's needed because technology continues to change and evolve, especially for the military. And so disruption and innovation have to be done in the organization. The status quo will never stay acceptable for very long.

[00:02:36] This is very much a learning platform. You not only held a senior acquisition executive role, but I think it's interesting that your background maybe doesn't lend itself to that functional area. You're more of a technologist and you have technical degrees and whatnot.

[00:02:54] Can you tell us a little bit about how you landed in that role? 

[00:02:58] It was a long circuitous journey for sure. I was a Georgia Tech student where I teach now as a time professor and 9/11 happened it had a big impact, I think, on everyone that was in school at that time. And I wanted to do something. I was a physics major at the time, had just graduated, was going to do a master's, and wandered into the Georgia Tech Research Institute and got involved with some DARPA programs. 

[00:03:28] And I was a very theoretical physicist. I was going to head and do a PhD. And so I thought doing some practical applied physics for defense to try to help deal with the new problem of, countering terrorism in the Middle East place that I could make a contribution and it made a profound impact on me because when you're working in academia, your output is experiments.

[00:03:54] And, or in my case, papers, theory results. So working with people in uniform who had real problems that had to be solved and where life and limb were on the line was a new experience for me. But I didn't think at the time I was going to do that for a career. I ended up graduating. I went to Oxford and the United Kingdom and started doing string theory.

[00:04:16] So I'm as far away from practical things. String theory is like this obscure theory, trying to combine the laws of physics that probably will never be proven in our foreseeable lifetimes. But the longer I kept doing string theory, the more that DARPA experience kept coming back. I realized I didn't want my life to be working on a theory that wouldn't be proved during my lifetime.

[00:04:42] And so I had this kind of crisis where I needed to figure out a different course in life. And so after signing to leave academia, I went to MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which was between academia and it was a defense laboratory established, over 50 years, over 75 years ago that invented a lot of the technologies that have helped the U. S. military be dominant. But it's associated with MIT. It has a strong university and academic connection. So I found that to be a good place in between the worlds that I was familiar with and after doing a lot of missile defense programs there, I got noticed by Ash Carter, who was the acquisition executive for the Pentagon.

[00:05:29] I got pulled in to be the chief architect at the Missile Defense Agency. Then I got pulled into working directly for Ash Carter when Ash realized that the Pentagon, although it needed to keep focusing on countering terrorism, was completely neglecting the rise of China. This was when you couldn't say China and adversary in the same sentence.

[00:05:50] And so I got given the scary task by Ash to rebuild the United States strategies and war plans against peer competitors, and that pulled me into the government. I did a lot of fast prototyping and most of it was classified and most of it worked. They were disruptive, surprising concepts. And of course, when you're working directly for the SecDef and you're working under cover of darkness, you can go pretty fast. 

[00:06:21] The acquisition system doesn't have the blockers in and most of the capabilities that we finished, like a cat one-size, capabilities, they transitioned to the services as part of their secret war capabilities. And that's where I got noticed by the Air Force and Space Force, they were still combined at the time.

[00:06:42] And they asked me to come over and run their acquisition and procurement system. And I remember telling Chief Goldfield, why in the world would I want to do that? Like I've got a great job with a great team with several billion dollars a year to build some of the most advanced weapons systems that have ever been created.

[00:07:02] I, Started Project Maven. I had the first swarming systems. The first collaborative combat aircraft that are now moving into competition with the Air Force started with a program called Avatar in the Strategic Capabilities Office for SCO. I did a great job of imagining the future of war and then building it.

[00:07:20] Chief Goldfein said, yes, but If you never get to scale, then we can't win. And that hit home as true that we're not going to be able to compete against China with prototypes transitioned into procurement alone. We need to change the procurement system. That is a long but true story about how I ultimately found my way from going from string theory to running acquisition and procurement for the Air Force and Space Force.

[00:07:50] So man, I know from my observation, that you were very focused in your role as a senior acquisition executive for the Air Force. You're very focused on agility and I would say, providing cash to startups, like cashflow to startups, which with a lot of the work you did with your venture capital programs or strategies and whatnot.

[00:08:14] All things to me that I see the intent behind it. And I guess my question is how were you able to move the chains in your position? Cause as you're aware, it's when you're dealing with an institution like the Department of Defense that has been around for as long as we've been around, it can be very difficult to pull levers and I heard you say, go fast. That's not something you hear a lot of. So how were you able to do that in your position? 

[00:08:44] Oh, I had great people and a lot of trust and so let's unpack that. I had the trust of the chief of staff of the Air Force and not every acquisition executive does. Now the acquisition exec works for the secretary, but make no mistake, whoever is the chief of staff of a service wields incredible influence over the organization.

[00:09:09] And the fact that everyone knew that Chief Goldfein wanted me to be the acquisition exec to help get the Air Force to change, put the organization at least in a listening position, barely listening, I would say maybe one cracked open, so that's thing one. Thing two is I came in being the China and Russia person for the sector. 

[00:09:32] I had the job of creating disruptive surprise and I lived, ate, and breathed the peer competition problem. I just brought that in. My message was not change for change's sake. It's that the world has changed. China has changed. We haven't changed in the Air Force and dangerously, the Air Force was becoming synonymous with the fighter.

[00:10:00] That's not its history. Its history was following whatever the new technology was and operationalizing it. It started with supersonic airplanes, and then eventually had to do ICBMs and then stealth airplanes and then satellites, and then cyber. The history of the Air Force isn't about fighters.

[00:10:19] It's new technology. It's doing new things, breaking barriers, and it was in danger of forgetting that. And if it forgot that, it would not compete against China. It had to change. So that was thing one. We've got to change because we have an adversary that's compelling us. Then thing two, change for change's sake is not good enough.

[00:10:39] You have to change in a direction that helps you win. And the only way that we were going to be able to win, in my view, was speed and agility. We were not going to throw more mass at the problem. China has 18 times the STEM graduates that we have funding, more people, and more everything to put towards the problem.

[00:11:00] So we had to use the Air Force concept of the OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, act, make decisions faster, adapt, the air force believes that. And I think space force too, that's doctrine and how you fight a war, it needs to be doctrine and how you build the systems that can win a war. And if you look at Ukraine, the OODA loop is very much alive and well on the battlefield and the side that is wielding it at any point in time is winning.

[00:11:25] So I think that idea in acquisition was the right one. And then third, being cognizant that a lot of our opportunities to change were no longer inside of the DOD only. And the Cold War. The DOD represented 80 percent of the nation's entire R&D. That's incredible to say. It didn't get bad at doing R&D.

[00:11:49] It's just, it's flipped to only being 20 percent now because R&D, especially in things like software and data analytics and AI can be done by two people graduating from school. So, so much R&D can become ubiquitous and there's more capital to help startups, get companies up and going. So it was very clear to me that the department, especially the Department of the Air Force needed to change how it engaged with these companies and with venture capitalists, or it was going to be cutting itself off from a lot of technology trends that it was not going to steer because it simply didn't have the money to steer it compared to the broader US ecosystem.

[00:12:29] And I would say there was one other thing I found because so much of that technology was driven by software and data. It was very clear we were woefully inadequate, within the entire Department of Defense, but, especially in the Air Force with its close connection to cyber, we needed to get better at software and fast.

[00:12:48] There was nothing like the internet in the department. Like you locked your phones up going into your office and you left a world where you were connected to almost everything and then you entered a world where you were connected to almost nothing. And that's true out to the edge of the battlefield.

[00:13:07] That seems like a very fragile position if you're going to try to fight a data-enabled war. So that was how I came in. That was my message and we needed to change these different views. Speed was more important than cost. So cost, schedule, performance, the trifecta of acquisition, you can't have them all.

[00:13:27] You have to have one pressure relief valve. So do you want to trade performance? Do you want to trade cost or do you want to trade speed? And I thought the most important thing was to not trade speed. If you had to increase the cost or decrease performance to maintain schedule, the OODA loop, ideology for acquisition.

[00:13:50] And yeah, it is different because I think the acquisition system tends to focus more on cost. When the private sector delivers technology at cost later is a losing strategy. And I thought it would be a losing strategy competing against China as well. 

[00:14:06] I can imagine. So you're setting the table for the department to maybe have a different mental model about how to approach their acquisitions. And I can only imagine, some people are starting to drink the Kool-Aid, so to speak, and others, maybe not so much, but how were you able to differentiate between the good ideas and the actual innovation I think you

[00:14:31] were seeking?

[00:14:32] And that role. 

[00:14:33] I'm not a believer that process or reorganization changes much. And that's. That's how governments, at least in the time I served, mostly tried to effect change let's reorganize, or let's create a new organization, or let's change who an organization reports to. Very occasionally that makes a difference.

[00:14:56] My guiding star is that technologies and global trends change things, and the policies and reorganizations try to keep up with and technology's changing so fast now, it's arguably broken the policy barrier, where just like the sound barrier, the policies can never get in front of it again. They will only trail.

[00:15:19] So for me, looking at what technologies are the most interesting, the most provocative, the most likely to help us win that OODA loop of acquisition and be faster and more agile, We're very, few. The technologies and a few global trends, one technology was, clearly software. And to be specific about that, it was Cloud plus Kubernetes and then adding an I on top of that.

[00:15:48] Kubernetes didn't get a lot of talk in the department. But wow, what an amazing thing that Google did allowing software to move. They eventually open-sourced it, but allowing software to get from cloud Clouds where it was developed to edge devices where it needs to operate without introducing any additional error.

[00:16:05] Amazing accomplishment conveys directly to military purposes that still I don't think is widely understood within the government. That is something that allows us to be more digital. Digitally dominant. And of course, you're probably familiar with the Kessel runs and all the other software factories.

[00:16:23] We stood up platform one cloud one, all of these things are now serving the department. Because if you can't fight at machine speeds, you're, you've lost. So that was one trend that we needed to get ahead of software plus Kubernetes. And yes, AI, the over-buzzed term means you have to fight at machine speeds.

[00:16:41] And if you don't have a machine-to-machine architecture, you've, already lost the utility. The second trend that I thought was very impactful was digital engineering, which was a term I made up after. Going and seeing McLaren racing and being blown away by how fast they were engineering race cars, a thousand for every race, and collecting data back from their physical race cars to improve the models and simulations.

[00:17:07] So their next round of digital twins was even better. And throughout a racing season, their cars evolve and even obsolete earlier designs. For McLaren, the car passed the final checkered flag. Is only 15 percent similar to the car that passed the first one. And that first car is not even qualifying.

[00:17:31] So they obsolesce their designs in a single racing season. It was amazing. It was the future. And I wanted to start using it to build things like airplanes and satellites. It took Formula One, 10 years to make the pivot and it will take, the department that probably more, but it was so clear that in Formula One, you can't win doing analog in-quotes engineering anymore.

[00:17:56] And that would be the case for us in defense that models and simulations are good enough now to be sources of truth for many instances. And we needed to harness that. And a handful of programs did a great job. So I thought this is a thing, it's going to be a deep tech long lead thing, but we got to invest in it and get good at it.

[00:18:16] And the final thing was the third thing was just a global trend that, Hey, there's a lot of money in the venture capital world. It wants to work with the defense. It doesn't know how to, there are a lot of technologies that will not be classified for defense. That could have a huge impact on the battlefield, artificial intelligence being one of them.

[00:18:35] So we needed to change the way that we worked. Then my hope was that if we wrapped all of that under the aegis of being fast and agile, as opposed to delivering everything. either on cost or on performance targets, but always late, that we could keep upcycling the military's capability, and keep disrupting what adversaries like China thought about us to keep deterrence in place.

[00:19:01] Oh, wow. So, you, just basically covered, I think, some of your key initiatives and your tenure. And since you've left, it's been a few years, like, where have you seen progress stall or gain momentum in the direction, you've been describing, that you

[00:19:18] think we should be going as a department? 

[00:19:20] I think the momentum has continued because things shouldn't be tied to a person, meaning that a different person could come in and radically disagree with them. That's. what I found working with people in the past is that political leaders would come in, they would have way too many initiatives and they would only be an inch deep that would mostly be talk, hollow talking point victories, or maybe experiments in a Petri dish.

[00:19:49] But I decided to focus few things. I also focused on talent. I found a lot of things that weren't fair, especially some of the Ways we design systems to exclude women and minorities. So I'm a big believer that if you want to compete against China and they have 18 times, the STEM graduates and a much bigger population, you can't cut half of your pie, even more than half of the population your, candidacy for positions in the future force.

[00:20:17] But the thing I think that resonated with most people in the Air Force and probably the broader department is these technology trends. Cannot be ignored. what software is doing? I don't think I have to convince you it's a big deal and that we need something like the internet for the military with maybe a few different safety tricks.

[00:20:36] That's pretty self-evident. Now, fewer people have gotten to see Formula One racing, but I think it's a little more in the public consciousness with Drive for Survive on Netflix. And wow, what happened in that industry? It's pretty clear to me. That will happen for other industries. And since leaving, I've created a startup to try to help the government, accelerate private industry.

[00:20:59] And I work with Formula One Racing now, and it's amazing. It's even more amazing when you're behind the scenes. And so I'm a believer in this and the DOD just put out a directive on digital engineering. So I think. I think it's realizing this isn't going to be like an easy button. I don't know if that was the expectation.

[00:21:18] New technology is never easy and it's not going to make risk go away, which is another thing I find with government leaders. Like we made a mistake. So digital engineering must not work. no, it just changes the kinds of mistakes you can make, right? You can make bad mistakes digitally engineering, but you just make them faster.

[00:21:36] And so have to live on the fast track 

[00:21:39] Because the Yeah, the fast track is the key. And the fact that we need to work with venture capital, there are still some people in the department. I've heard senior leaders say small businesses only have a small impact, but that's not true anymore. DIU is being stood up by Carter.

[00:21:55] And then we stood up AFWERX in the Air Force and Army stood up Futures Command and all of them are trying to reach. DIU now reports to the SECDEF. And if you look across the portfolios of these organizations, it's not what people thought. Just like app-developing companies, companies develop hypersonic airplanes rockets, and satellites at a very different pace. Price point and supplemented by private capital. it's hard to argue you shouldn't be part of that trend and influencing it. But I found in some of our efforts like Agility Prime, which was super controversial, it's electric airplanes, vertical takeoff and landing airplanes. Probably not going to be big, like it was an emerging trend that seemed important for the nation.

[00:22:40] Seems like it's going to have a big impact on global. Transportation and global logistics. And it could have, a reasonable, even significant impact on military logistics. But that program I saw split the department of the Air Force about how to work with venture capital. In my camp was the group, let's help this market achieve success so that it becomes a dominant commercial market with the U S zip code.

[00:23:08] And then in the future we'll have access to its systems. The other group said, Hey, we shouldn't spend any money on this. Because our money should be going towards the top battlefield-impacting technologies only. And that's, a healthy argument to have. You don't want to go too far either way, but I still believe that most of the competition with China is keeping a healthier and more competitive, more innovation-oriented industrial base period.

[00:23:37] And the military historically. Has had the role of seeding deep technology for military purposes until it could be commercialized for obviously commercial purposes, and that's the Cold War was one and then it birthed the information age satellites and the Internet. High gains. Antenna microprocessors were born out of the Cold War.

[00:24:00] They were expensive and only militaries, only the U. S. military and Soviet Union to a degree could afford them. but with sustained capital going into them from the military, they eventually reached the point of commercialization. That is a historic role the U. S. military has played. It has forgotten that.

[00:24:17] I'm on the defense innovation board now. It's forgotten that. as the first adopter of deep tech, it is the seed corn, not just for the future military, the future economy, and Google, Facebook, Amazon, all of them being here, Microsoft being here with us zip code, all the soft power benefits that come from that, is due to those cold war strategies where we're not executing that.

[00:24:42] Now we're in real danger of just being tactical across the board and tactical across the board. It loses.

[00:24:49] I want to circle back to your earlier point about talent. That was a focus of yours. And I think solving some of the observations you're sharing, requires amazing talent. We focus, at least my team is extremely focused on this from the acquisition perspective. what does the acquisition professional of the future look like?

[00:25:12] And we think about these things. We think about the actions and behaviors, like caring about speed, like you were talking about, or caring about how to creatively think about the authorities and regulations we've been provided to make them. I remember Cameron Holt told me one time that you have to make them sing for it to see something or to hear something beautiful, And wonder what advice would you give the acquisition professional of today, given what you did and what, now. what should we be focusing on? 

[00:25:48] I'll try to give some specific advice, to anyone listening. If you've got something that you want to accomplish, here's a playbook that generally works if your idea is successful. Good, but also implementable. the first thing is whatever your, idea is, your ability to make it happen is going to be based on the trust of those who will also be needed to implement it.

[00:26:22] And trust is much easier to build up front. So, a fatal flaw, I think, is forgetting who the stakeholders are, and stakeholders, anyone that ultimately gets a vote, and whether your initiative happens or not, if you bring in people at Act 2, They won't love your initiative the same way as if it was act one.

[00:26:45], if it's act one, it's partly their initiative. And the more that you share the ownership of the initiative, the more likely you are to succeed. Next thing, once you've got the kind of stakeholder group, use the benefit. of the gray zone of bureaucracy. It's not just a thing on the battlefield.

[00:27:05] Very few things are forbidden. If you ask for permission, the answer will typically be no. break no laws. Laws are real. Everything else is mostly paper that's interpretable. Use that to your advantage. That was a big secret for me, was go so fast that by the time the lawyers could catch up to you and say we want to talk about your interpretation, you've already produced some success and now it's harder to say that thing you did was a bad thing.

[00:27:37] Fast positive results are hard to pull back. So use that gray zone to go fast. Fast and get the results, making sure you don't get over your skis on statutes, but interpretable things with the best of intentions to make a positive outcome. When you have that positive outcome, take it back to the organization.

[00:28:00] They will try to collapse what you're doing like a bubble. But positive results keep the bubble open. The number of times the department zeroed out the budget of Kessel Run, I lost count of, but the more positive results they produced, the more we could keep the bubble from collapsing. And then finally, make sure that your initiative isn't just a one-and-done.

[00:28:22] Which it is for so many people in government. It needs to be a template that others can recreate. Template means a repeatable thing. So Kessel run was a repeatable template. Anyone could go create a software factory following the template of Kessel run. So it wasn't a one-and-done. There were like 50 other software factories by the time I left the Air Force.

[00:28:49] So think through. The things that are needed. So, someone who's not you, not an entrepreneur, but a fast follower can take your playbook and fast follow it. And there's a good chance if you get to that success and you get, your leadership to say, Oh, that's a good idea. And you hand them a template that others can recreate.

[00:29:12] Most of the organization is the military, I found not most, but there are significantly more fast followers and entrepreneurs. So the way to get to enterprise change is not entrepreneurial. That's it's not innovation that only gets the first plant growing. The judgment of your initiative is whether you can turn that plant.

[00:29:35] Harvest its seeds so that others, the fast followers, can turn from one plant into a garden. And most innovation fails, I think, because either the idea is bad, or the consensus isn't built. Or, and this is when it's most it's, most painful and crushing when you get through that and you get your plant to grow, but you forget about gardening.

[00:30:00] And that, I think if there was one thing that helped me, I never, took my eyes off scale. And so I have focused so much and didn't do a bazillion initiatives because it takes a lot of effort to get to gardening. And if you do that, Then there's a good chance that statistically there are enough, plants blooming, enough flowers blooming, enough seeds coming that you can keep year after year a sustainable crop.

[00:30:28] But just remember, eventually, whatever it is you did, it becomes the status quo, and it'll eventually need to be changed. So do not put any, Ego in it, everything that I have done in the Air Force or government will need to be changed. And I hope that if I'm still around to see it, I'll be helping with the wrecking ball.

[00:30:47] It needs to keep changing.

[00:30:51] I love that last point. I want to know what you would do today if you were still in your former position, what would you, in the spirit of wrecking balls be rethinking any of the initiatives or strategic objectives you laid out for us? what do you think are the new trends that we should

[00:31:10] be looking to 

[00:31:12] in the

[00:31:12] Department?

[00:31:13] thing that I misjudged looking at formula one and then projecting into our acquisition system was how hard it would be to create. Digital engineering platforms. It looked so effortless for Formula One, and for a handful of programs Sentinel that was able to copy them, I thought, okay, this is something we're going to get, something I know now because when I left the Air Force and Space Force, I started consulting on this at McKinsey and worked Outside of defense or, pharma and medicine and all that.

[00:31:57] telcos, things that I didn't know a lot about, but I saw the same problem. they couldn't do what Formula One did or a classified defense program did. They couldn't bring all of their information, their data sources like models and Sims and cost models and everything.

[00:32:16] They couldn't bring it onto one network because not everyone owned it. The data, like one company owned one piece, a different company owned another, and they weren't going to give up their piece. So I realized when I left that the real problem, the real thing holding back digital engineering is that you've got to be able to do it.

[00:32:38] Digital threads, which are the connecting of the data. It has to able to be done decentrally. And now I know having worked on solving that problem for a year and a half. That is very hard. It's if that's all you do is a top-talent software company, it's hard enough. So, if I could go back, I would have changed expectations and said, Hey, we need to focus on infrastructure.

[00:33:06] We need to encourage, I wrote in those, that there are no spoon pieces that we needed to own our tech stack. And be able to share it and furnish it. And those are true. I just didn't realize how hard that would be. And I think that's one thing I would change. And if I think I also, I would have loved to finish, getting AI to operationalize, I got some testing done on the U2 with an AI co-pilot.

[00:33:37] The research laboratory has since, done a fully, Autonomous flight with the F 16. And that was awesome. And that seems like the data from that is great. But fighting with and against AI is going to be a new thing. It's not going to make humans go away. I don't believe that. I think it's going to be an adjunct where humans are going to need to understand when AI is having a good day and a bad day.

[00:34:01] I know we will face things like algorithmic countermeasures, algorithmic stealth, algorithmic chaff, algorithmic jamming, and I'm confident that we'll create the same. There are even emerging industries now that are doing that to prevent IP loss for art or to prevent check fraud. So counter AI is becoming a thing.

[00:34:24] I think it's going to be highly, technical. so I hope that, if I were back at that, I could at least help pull together the right technical teams to solve that. And, it's in the public domain that I've gone to Ukraine with Eric Schmidt, and we wrote an op-ed and time on that, but I certainly would try to help Ukraine with the resources we have in the Air Force, because a lot of what is happening there on the battlefield were things that we did In prototyping for Ash Carter, really inexpensive systems that are holding much more expensive systems at risk and changing the cost equation, flipping it by orders of magnitude.

[00:35:08] So what was talked about and demonstrated is now battlefield reality. And that seems like something that. The U S military needs to know how to fight with and against, not something you want to, you don't want to learn on the battlefield, right? The OODA loop would be a little too scary to face for the first time. when you've got to do it against, a peer like China. So I think those are the things I would do differently, but I think. the people who are serving now are great friends and colleagues and they see the world their way and they, of course, have access to information I don't have.

[00:35:43] And one of the things I think is important is getting different people to look at the problem, look at the feel the elephant, and determine which part of it needs to be solved next. And it probably wouldn't be a good idea as much as I love technology and disruption to lead an organization for 30 years.

[00:36:02] So. I don't think, right? Way too myopic. And I don't know where between three and 30, the inflection point is, but there, is a healthy thing about having leaders change over. So you don't become too tied to the way one person sees the world. So that's both a strength of our system and occasionally it is a weakness, but that's the answer.

[00:36:24] I think as I see it today, as I feel the elephant today, I think that's the part of the problem I'd go to.

[00:36:31] I think that's a perfect way to round out our conversation. But I, do have one more question for you. I always save the best question for last. So the world would like to know, do you dip your grilled cheese in hot chocolate? Or would you dip your grilled

[00:36:49] Cheese and hot

[00:36:50] Chocolate? 

[00:36:51] I would try it, because 

[00:36:56] Okay.

[00:36:56] needs to be, I'm a good

[00:36:58] Sport and I like new experiences. I don't know what I would think about it because I like a grilled cheese sandwich to be crispy. And so if the hot chocolate does not defeat that purpose, then potentially, but I think Bonnie, you've given me something to try now.

[00:37:17] So, more to follow.

[00:37:19] Yeah. because you mentioned the crispy part, are you a fan of dipping your French fries in a what's

[00:37:26] The Wendy's milkshake called? The 

[00:37:28] Broste, I understand the appeal of that and occasionally might do it. I do prefer the savory side of fries.

[00:37:38] Yeah. Okay. We're all learning, right? So you get to go try that and you get to report back

[00:37:44] to me on if you like it or not. How 

[00:37:46] Thanks, Bonnie. I, hey, that, I have, I promise you, I've never been asked so interesting a final interview question. Thank you for that.

[00:37:55] Yes. All right. Thank you so much for your time and for giving us a little bit of insight. Can't thank you enough for sharing and learning and encouraging the Exquisite acquisition talent out there to continue to disrupt experiment, and continue to look with an eye toward the future as well as scale.

[00:38:13] Super important. Thank you so much.