What it takes to succeed at DARPA: Tony Tether On Technology Leadership and Lessons Learned

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Loop.Com hello, I'm Bob Gourley, the chief technology officer with OODA LLC. Today on the OODaCast, Dr. Tony Tether. Dr. Tether was the Director of the Defense Advanced research project agency, DARPA from 2001 until his retirement in 2009. I think we all know DARPA. DARPA is one of the most famous agencies in the world. DARPA is the agency in the Department of Defense that focuses on research, development and demonstration of concepts, devices and systems in order to provide highly advanced new technology capabilities. As A director of DARPA, Dr. Tether was responsible for management and leadership of the Agency and its projects. He focused on the high payoff innovative research and development that the nation needed during this time. Now currently Dr. Tether serves as the CEO of the Sequoia Group and sits on several advisory and corporate boards. Dr. Tether, welcome to the Oodacast.

Hi. Well thank you very much. It's actually a pleasure to be here.

Well, it's been great talking with you prior to this and reading over your bio. And one thing that just jumps out at me as you've had a very long and distinguished career that started with a degree from rpi, Rensselaer Polytechnic. And I wanted to ask if you could give us a bit of your foundational story from that point on.

Well, you know, I. Well first of all, actually when I first went to school, I went to a two year junior college, what we call the junior college and that was a two year school in my hometown, Middletown, New York. And then I eventually transitioned to RPI for the last two years after. When I left. When I graduated from rpi, it was in the middle of the year and so I had looked around and I found a job with Bell Labs. Now Bell Labs was interesting to me because summertimes I had worked for New York Tel both my junior and senior year. So I was familiar with that company and I thought this would be a great place to go work, especially since they promised me I could go to school anywhere I wanted to get a master's degree. So I got married and I went down to Bell Labs at the beginning of February and they had a great incoming program. They took you around and showed you things and it's just a really excellent place. It's too bad that we let that go away. Bell Labs was really a premier organization and needed for this country. Anyways, I went down and I'm going around the tour and I had to meet this Fellow who they said I could go to school. Bell said I could go to school anywhere I wanted to for a master's degree. So I met with him and he said, well, we're here to pick your school. And I said, oh, I know where I want to go. I want to go to Stanford. And he says, well, you can go anywhere you want. But they just have the. These are the six schools. They were all good schools, MIT and they were all east coast schools. I said, well, wait a minute. They told me I could go anywhere I wanted to go. He says, well, you can go anywhere you want to go as long as it's one of these six schools. So we had this argument going on. He said, look, here's what I need to have you do. I'm going to see you next week and we're going to talk about this and you need to pick school. So I went. I lived in Middletown, New York. Bell was in New Jersey. I drove home thinking, oh my goodness. And when I got home, there was a telegram. Remember, this was back in the days, I think long distance dining was really just coming in. And I had a telegram from Stanford, offered me a three year scholarship to go to Stanford to get a PhD. And they were going to not only pay all the tuition, they were going to give me a stipend of $500 a quarter or something like that. So I go back down to Bell and I meet with the guy finally in the second week. And I said to him, listen, I know I've got it made. Look at this telegram I got. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to stay here until September and then I'll go to Stanford. And he says to me, well, here's what you're going to do. You're going to either pick one of these six schools today or you're going to leave today. I said, oh. So I left. So on the books, I was a Bell Labs employee for two weeks. I go home, I'm married, no job. And I look in the paper to see what kind of jobs there are. And there was a job to become a Fuller Brush man. Now, most of the people listening to this, they may have remember the movie or heard of the movie the Fuller Brush Man. Greg Skelton was the one who played that. But they probably don't remember people coming door to door. People don't come door to door anymore. And that's all taken care of by our computers now. So I signed up and I became a Fuller Brush man door to door. Salesman. You go around and door to door salesman. And the thing that you had to do was knocking on the door. In fact, they taught you quite well. They said, look, you. You really want to be looking around, and you want to. When you go in. First of all, they gave you a way to get in. One was, you knock on the door, person come to the door, and you said, look, I've got these things. I can give you, you know, a brush, blah, blah, blah. And I get credit for them even if you don't buy anything. And so that usually worked. And people would let you get in the door because they were in your. Your bag, and you had to open it up, and you would walk in sideways, no kidding, looking away from them. Because the Fuller people had found people will tend to not slam a door on you if you're not looking at the door. So you get in the house and you're opening up your case, and you're going. All these things were at the bottom of your case. And they taught you to look around the room and see if you can relate to anything and tell people we know. So you can say, hey, this product will help you in that problem over there. And, you know, and sort of relate to them on that. And they had you practice that. And it really worked. I. I had the person who ran that area would come around with you, and one time he came with me, and it was in the middle. It was cold, remember? And we saw it was. We were selling cream that you think that you would put on your hands and, you know, keep your. So we go into this house, and I would say that I got these people. I'm training him. He was actually the general manager. And so, you know, and I went through this field, came out, sold the can. He said to me, he says, now, wait a minute. That was really great. But next time we go, I want you to tell the person at the end, would you like a six pack? I said, a six pack. A six pack will last him for years. Nobody's gonna buy a six pack. And I'm arguing with him. He finally said, do it. Just do it. So we go to the next house, and I go through the spiel, and I come to the end, and I said, and would you like a six pack? And this person said, yeah, you know, so I sold a six pack. Now, that was like $20 of a sale, and I got 40% of that. Now, this is $8 in the early 60s, you know, I mean, so it was a wow. So I come out and he said, now Wait a minute. It'll never happen again. Never happen again. But what you're doing is that when you say this to somebody, if they really want to buy the product, they will tend not to go buy just one. They will probably buy two. And so this is the way you get them to buy two things. So it was a great learning experience. It was, you know, it was really looking at what became sort of the rest of my life. Like, when you talk to somebody, you said, what problem they had and what is the problem, and then how this, how what you have to solve that problem. One woman. I had a big catalog, and there was thing. There was a dust mop which was about the size of a bowling alley dust mop. And I was trying to sell it because it always gave me something to do to try to sell something that was crazy in the catalog. And I walked into this house, I got in this house, and she had a hallway which was probably 20ft long and about the width of a bowling alley. So I said to her, I said, you know, you got this big hair. And now if you go and try to adjust this with a regular dust mop, you're going to have to go back and forth and take you a lot of time. She said, yeah, I do. I have it. Really. It does. I said, I've got a dust mop here that with one sweep, one sweep, you can kind of what the problem is, and this is how you're going to solve it. And she said, that's right. I'll take one. And I said, one? I said, well, wait a minute. You might be in a situation where you take the one and it's dirty and you still want to do it again. So if you buy two of these things, you know, give you a throw in a little bag. She bought two of them. So I always read, listen, the filler full of brushes. Now I worked, and then I finally went to Stanford in the fall. But that job really, really. I have to admit that in my life from that point on, I constantly would sometimes very think about what would I do if I was a Fuller Brush man. Again with this. Now, it was bigger things. So that really impressed me. It also really, I think it really not only impressed me, but it really was something that I learned that really helped me in later years in ways that it's hard for me to explain.

Yeah, that's fascinating. And I have a feeling we'll hear themes of this come out as we continue to discuss it. I wanted to say that we in the technology domain, frequently people Think of us as introverts, and we have a tendency to be that way and not want to communicate. And it seems like at an early age, you had this experience where you. You had to communicate and you had to listen for problems and understand what you're trying to solve in order to close a deal.

That's right. Not only had I listened to problems, but if I had to look around and see if I could point out a problem that sometimes people didn't realize they had, okay. Like, she never thought of this big hallway as a problem until I said, boy, you know, if you want to do this, you're going up and back and forth. And she said, yeah, you're right. You know, and so that was the problem. And I said, I got the solution right here, you know, and it was. But it was. You know, it's not. That approach followed me for the rest of my life, even to today, I think that way. And of course, at darpa, as you said, you know, that's what we do. You know, we basically first asked the question, what is the problem you're trying to solve? Okay. But the more important question after that is, what difference will it make if you solve it? And if you've got to have those. If you have the answers to those two questions, you'll be able. And now you'll get the money to develop what needs to be developed in order to do it. But, you know, we'll go on here and talk a little bit more.

All right? So then you did end up going to Stanford.

You got your Master's and a PhD and a PhD.

Now, clearly you were driven to Stanford for some reason. What had made you set your sights on Stanford as the place you wanted to go to?

Jimmy Dean. Jimmy Dean. I don't know if you remember the actor Jimmy Dean. You're too young. Yeah, well, Jimmy Dean. I was a great Jimmy Dean fan. Remember, he got killed in a car and Jimmy Dean was in California, So I was going to California. It was a. It was. It was California, and Stanford just happened to be there. Okay, great. That's fair.

Now, then, you did end up coming back to the east coast, and you worked in the Department of Defense. You were actually in the department from the late 70s to the mid-80s.

Yes, I was. But I came back. Well, the company that. When I graduated from Stanford, there was four or five of us that started the company. We were all Control Theory people, okay? Control Theory people that are ones that you look at a problem, you figure out how to solve the problem. And now this is using a member. Computers were just becoming available. I mean, it's hard for people to understand this, but computers were really just becoming available. So before people, when they solved the problem, they had to, they had to sort of say this is the problem, here's the response. And maybe that problem really didn't show up the way they thought it would. But if you had a computer that was doing this, it could be sensing what was going on. And whatever the problem was that showed up, you can then pick an appropriate response to it. And that was real time resource and control that we were all that way. So we, we started a company to do that. And in fact the company was very successful. Leave. The issue in the States was, remember the New York blackout which spun across the country. You probably don't remember this, but it knocked out all the stuff across the country. All the, all the, all the people went down, power went down. The reason was, is that when New York went down, it just cascaded because there was no way for anybody to understand that there was a problem and stopped it and stopped it from happening. It went by them so fast because they didn't have any computers doing it. It was people who were going to throw switches. So we showed that we could have stopped that and we did quite well in doing that. And of course we had two parts of the company, one that did more domestic problems and one did military problems. In the military at that time, they would come up with a threat, they would make up a threat, a scenario, and then they would develop their whole system based upon that scenario and maybe some modifications to it. Well, if the scenario didn't show up, everything they built was going to be like the New York blackout. And so we showed that we could actually create a system which when the threat came in, the system could figure out this is the threat that is there right now, and then respond to that threat so that we were no longer vulnerable if the threat wasn't exactly what we thought was going to come in. And we were quite successful with that. Solely company to British Petroleum. And I took off and had the opportunity to go into the government to find out what was really. I was always curious. I was on the outside, I was wondering what really goes on inside. So I was, I was able to go in and I became at that time the Director of National Intelligence for Harold Brown, who was the Secretary, the Secretary of Defense. And stayed there and stayed there until the end of the Carter administration. And then when Reagan won, I had an opportunity to. And I had to leave that job. I had an opportunity to go to the DARPA the first time. And I became this director of the Strategic Technology Office for the. For four years. And that gave me my experience at Darby. Then I finally left the government and went out into industry.

Okay, and industry. That's when you went to Ford Motor Company.

That's when I went to Ford Motor Company.

Now, how did that happen?

Well, Ford Motor Company really came after me to go to Detroit. And I kept saying, I am not going to go live in Detroit. No way am I going to go live in Detroit. So stop. You know, and they would come back and they would up the ante, and I would say, no, I'm not going. Finally, I got to the point where the ante was, you know, over twice the salary I was currently making. And they had promises of all kinds of. And they would give me a car, you know, and all this stuff. So I finally said, my God, I'm going to Detroit. And I went. So my first couple of days I was there, the headhunter guy in the partnership says, henry wants to see you. Henry Ford wants to see you. So I said, oh, okay. So we get in the car, we're driving over to Henry's, and he says to me, he says, you know, Henry was really taken that you won the Bendix Award. Now, the Bendix Award is a big award, more like in the automotive part. And the Bendix Award was so. It was very prestigious. And so, you know, here Henry's saying, look at this guy. He won the Bendix Award, and yet he's in the government. He's the guy. Go get him. I'm sure that's what happened. That's why they kept that coming up. So I said to the guy, well, it is true that a tether did win the Bendix Award. However, that tether was Carroll Tether, not Tony Tether. Carol Tether is my wife. When I started the company, she was our programmer. Okay. And actually, the programmer was the most important person in the company because the rest of us dealt with these equations, which. But. But, you know, but the problem was, you know, you had to put them in a computer, and the computer was going to be sensing things and it was going to be doing this in real time. And she was. She was the solution to the problem. Okay. And computers were just becoming really available. I know it's hard for people to believe this. We actually put an office in a computer square. It was a computer center. So we would run decks of card downs and run and see if the stuff worked. I mean, it was ancient Times, you know, hard for people to believe. So she. They got. We had a contract for how do we reduce the emissions, the emissions from an automobile. One way to do that is to actually see how the engine is performing and cut back the gasoline or do something, you know, in order to minimize the emissions. And they developed a real time technique to have that done in time. Big deal. Henry was really right to say, hey, this is a big deal. He just had the wrong person. Okay. Anyways, the headhunter guy said to me, says, let's not bring that up. And at that moment, I knew why I was there. I knew I was. I was sought after so much. And obviously I met Henry. He never brought it up. I never brought it up. He also never called me by my first name. He called me Tether. And I thought, well, maybe he really does know it's a Carol Tether or not a Tony Tether. And he just doesn't want to have to admit that, you know. Yeah.

Seems like you owe your wife a thanks for that one.

Yeah, I have, and she never lets me forget it, by the way. I should never have told her.

Tony, after Ford, then you went back to industry a bit closer to Department of Defense, and then would eventually rejoin DARPA as the director in 2001.

Yeah, I did, actually. Again, I was sought after. I really didn't want to go back into government, but the people who were doing the head hunting for the people in government, they convinced me to come in, at least come in and talk to the people. And I did. The first person I met was going to be the Secretary of the Navy. And he wanted me to come in and be his guy between. Between him and the Congress and all of that, you know, And I said, well, I'm not your person. So I listen, I know I got. I got everything you want, except I don't know the Congress. And you really can't afford to have somebody in here who doesn't know the Congress. In fact, if you had the only. If you knew somebody who knew the Congress but was not technical, he's still the right person for you, but it's all Congress. And he fought with me. And as I was leaving, he said, well, you can't tell me that you can't be the Director of darpa. Well, this is a guy going for the Navy. I figured I'd have any worry about it. I said, no, you're right. Director of darpa. No question. I'm fully qualified for that. So then I went to saw the guy who was going to be the Secretary of the Air Force gave him the same story. He agreed with me, you know, really. He didn't fuss with me. And then to the army. And the army guy fought a little bit, but I go back to the room and he said to me, what the hell are you? What's going on here? What do you mean? He says, we got Pete Aldridge coming to talk to you to be the director of darpa. Pete Aldridge. Also, I knew my first time around. So, in fact, most of the people were kind of from the first time around. And we. So we kind of all knew each other. So Pete comes in and he was going to be the undersecretary of Defense. Pete comes in and he says, hey, Tony, how you been? Blah, blah, blah. He says, listen, I gotta go. You're the director of darpa. And he leaves the room. That's it. I never was asked again, you know, I was never asked. I was just arguing I'd be the director of darpa. And he leaves the room. So these other guys came in and I told him what he said, and he said, well, he can't say that. And I said, well, he just did. And I thought, well, maybe I can get out of this. Anyways, although I must admit that Director Darka was enticing to me. Long story short, eventually, before you knew it, I became the director of Dartmouth. And it was, you know, and I. And, you know, I had really a good business going. I mean, it wasn't like I was giving up a lot of money for 135k a year. But you know what? I don't regret it one bit.

It seems like it's an opportunity to shape things that really, really matter.

Oh, yeah. No, it's. All of that. It's hard to even explain. I mean, at that time, you know, the DARPA budget was 2 billion a year. They actually even. Is what some people are talking about today. They wanted to raise it Rumspel. He wanted to make it 8 billion. I finally convinced them, hey, don't do that. You know, that's too much money. You'll change this place in ways that you don't understand. You know, we'll become a place where we're getting money out the door and we've forgotten the basic two questions like what is the problem? We're trying to. And what difference would it make? Because we don't have time to worry that we got to get this money out the door, you know, And I always told my guys, I'm not going to fund a program just because we have the money to do it. Yeah, right. Hell with it. We don't, we just won't, we won't spend the money. And, and so, so eventually he agreed and he, so he cut it back down and he's, and he, and, and the fellow who was the, the bean counter in the army and the government, they just said anytime you get a program, don't worry about it, you come and tell us, we'll give you, we'll get the money for you. So you, so, but I said, that's good, you know, we'll just keep that between us. And it was a great relationship and it really worked. It really worked. I mean, the guys at DARPA understood that the only way they were going to get money out of me was to answer two fundamental questions. And there were actually more. But if you didn't answer these two, you weren't going to get anything. One was what is the problem you're trying to solve? Okay, what difference will it make if you solve it? And depending on the answers to that, we would go through the other details like what technology did you have to develop and all of that and how much would it cost and when could you do it and who was the customer, you know, who was the customer was a big deal because we had to transition that money, that product to somebody. And I always, since I understood the government, in the government there are just organizations and services and there's a person called the eight. Okay? He's the guy who does the out years in the budget. There's a five year old budget, there's in the first year, is the budget year and the rest are out years. He's the one that does the out year. So I would go to him to convince him that I would with a, it's not a story like this, I'll do the first three years. But you in the fourth or fifth year from now, in other words, way out in the future, you have to put money in to take it away from me, assuming that we meet these criteria that we're going to, we're going to agree upon now. Okay? And it worked. Time marched on as it became the near year. It wasn't like we didn't have to fight in the battle of the near year, the current year. But I'll tell you what, it's a hell of a lot easier to fight a battle when you got the money already in there than to try to get the money in there. And so that's the way we ran it. And that allowed us to have great success rates in transitioning technology. Right. Because we solved the problem in the very beginning. Okay. You know, we knew what the problem was, and we solved it by going to the person who we could get into the out year where only he really was the guy you had to talk to. Right.

Well, Tony, you also, you provided some slides I want to show and have you walk me through these slides. And for people listening to the audio version of this podcast, these slides will be posted on our website so you can get a look your yourself. But let me bring these slides up and ask you to walk me through these.

Yeah. Now, the purpose of the slides is. It's amazing how many people really don't know where DARPA came from. Right. It all started with Sputnik. On October 4, 1957, the Russians launched a satellite, which was the first time it ever happened. This satellite, by the way, was. Was built by the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians were really the engineers of Russia. They're the ones that built the satellite and also built a booster that launched the satellite. Up until then, the United States was building an air defense system. Billions of dollars going into it because we believe that the Russians were coming with aircraft. Okay? That day, all of that went away. Because at that day, we knew that if somebody could make something that can go all the way around the world, they can make something, they can go halfway around the world. And that was the end of the air defense. And we really, that was the start of, you know, having missiles do this. Next slide. President Eisenhower, who was president at the time, actually a great guy, very intuitive. He asked, how did the US get beat going to space? How did we get beat by a third world country? You know, how come the U.S. how could we get beat going into space? Not being the ones that are second into space? Next slide. We had space programs, by the way. It wasn't like we didn't have in all of the services, somebody doing space. The army was doing it, the Air Force was doing it, the Navy was doing it. But there was this thing Eisenhower really discovered what today, it wasn't called us at that time. He discovered the valley of death. Okay? In the near term, we have people doing science and technology programs for the armed services. The armed services are doing them, okay? They're working on current problems. Okay? Then we have these people who are really out here on the far side. They got fundamental research, they got crazy ideas, they got new inventions. The problem is that they can't get over to the near side. There's this big gap here that takes money to take these Ideas and get them to the point where the near side becomes believable, that. That, hey, we can actually produce this and get it out in the field in maybe three, four years. So they're stuck. And this today is called the Valley of Death. Next slide. He created darpa. He created DARPA to mitigate the Valley of Death. And once you understand this is what DARPA does, DARPA is the organization that basically looks at these people on the far side, finds out what they're doing, asks the fundamental questions, what problem are you trying to solve? And if you can solve it, what difference will it make? And these people on that side typically didn't answer those questions. They didn't think of them, but they got pretty good at answering it. If DARPA felt that the what difference it would make is a big enough deal, DARPA is the organization that would fund those people to take them across the Valley of Death into the people who are actually going to then spend the money to make it a real thing. That's what DARPA does. And that's what DARPA does extremely well. Extremely well. And all the things that you hear coming out of DARPA all usually reside from somebody who came in and said, hey, I've got this idea. And they now know you might as well not come in if you can't answer at least the two fundamental questions. And it solves this problem. Yeah, okay. And if we can solve this problem, this will make a big difference and can articulate what that big difference is. And if we accept that, we fund them to get them to the point where he can demonstrate it enough to have people who are on the near side take it from us. And of course, like I said, my conversation of me with the eight is because I was setting it up that for the eight to do it, I would. When we started it, I knew that we wouldn't be ready for it to be taken over for three or four years. So I would get the eight to be putting money in his budget four or five years from now. And also agree with me what had to be done for him to take it. And that's how the whole system, and the system works that way today. It's still going on today. And it really wasn't something that I created. It was really created by a fellow in the 70s.

Well, and Tony, looking at this, I think all of us recognize that if this was not in place, we would not have things like the Internet today. And there's so many other capabilities that DARPA has brought us. If DARPA was not Doing this process that you just described right here, the deaths from COVID would have been just horrible, horrifying. Who knows how much larger they would have been without DARPA's investments in the biological sciences?

Well, again, yeah, and DARPA was doing it on the come. You know, they were. They. They had a. There was a problem. There was a person that came by, says, we got this problem and I've got a solution, and blah, blah, blah. And so DARPA was funding that. When Covid came along, it was. Again, it was too bad in one way, but fortunate that they were. That they were. But that's what they do. So. Next slide. This is the thing that created DARPA. Can you imagine this? Two pages and look at the date. February 7th. It was four months later. I mean, can you imagine today anything in the government? Now, this is Eisenhower pushing this. Okay, Eisenhower understood this. He understood this. How he understood it, I don't know, but. I know, but he definitely understood it. And so he created darpa. And this is the document that creates DARPA in the Department of Defense. And in fact, the director, as you can see, he had him reporting to the Secretary of Defense. And also this person reporting to the Secretary of Defense is not subject to congressional confirmation deliberately. He did that. So this person was freewheeling. There was nobody that could get to him and harm him except the Secretary of Defense, you know, okay. And so he knew who his boss was and the Secretary was. So this was amazing to have to have this done. Now, DARPA almost went away because people talked to Eisenhower and said, you know, it's really not good to have the whole space business. Remember, he was really answering from his viewpoint, the Sputnik question. People said, it's not really probably good to have the space program of the United States being done by the military. And he agreed. I know he agreed because he created NASA. I mean, you know, he replicated NASA. NASA to do the space program. NASA once again, has got a. Has got a creation like this. You know, guy's not subject. It's really not an agency, even though it's called an agency. It's a. It's a thing, I guess is the only way to put it. And it does report to the secretary. In fact, in this case, it actually reports to the President. Now, DARPA almost went away. Remember, the whole thing that was created for was Sputnik and to get us back into space and all that. It almost went away. Next slide. As luck would have it, we were trying to get an atmospheric test Ban treaty, a nuclear bomb Test Ban Treaty. The problem was nobody knew how to tell if somebody violated it. DARPA created a program called Project Vela. Vela is a satellite that a nuclear explosion has a very distinct signature, you know, electric electronic signature to it. And it's partially to do with the way that the thing, the bomb is created to go off. So we knew the signature. The question was, how would we know if somebody set it off in the atmosphere? From the signature, we would know something happened, but we didn't know where it happened. Okay. DARPA created a program which had many satellites up. In fact, they're still up there, still working, where these satellites could take that signature and basically put them together and figuring out what time, how long it took to get them and they could find a point on the ground or the point in the air that that bomb went off. And that allowed us to go along with the Test Ban Treaty. It wouldn't have happened. DARPA did that. And that basically gave DARPA the shot in the arm so that it. While it was, you know, it went downhill when NASA took over space and it came roaring back with DARPA solving a major national security problem. That, again, somebody already on the far side knew all of this, and DARPA was the organization that got them to accelerate that into reality. Next question. Finally, George Heilmaier put all of this down on paper. There's an interesting story. George Heilmaier was the DARPA director in the late 70s. When George came in, he had a computer department. And the guys in the computer department would come and give him this document and ask him to sign it. This is what George told me. So, you know, and he would say, well, wait a minute. What is. What is this about? Well, I said, just sign it, George. And so he was not going to do that. You know, he said, wait a minute. Where does this. Tell me what's this going to solve and why I care? George, just sign it. He said, no. So he stopped signing them. And. And so finally time went on and they weren't getting any more money to sign that. They came to George and said, okay, okay, George, tell us what you want. Tell us what you want and we'll do it. Okay. So George sat down and he wrote down these questions. The first two are obvious. What is the problem you want to solve? Articulate your objectives with absolutely no jargon. How's it done today, and what's the limits? What's new in your approach, and what do you think will be successful? Who cares? What difference will it make? Well, those four questions are really wrapped up into the two that I've talked about. George Heilmaier is the one who put it down. And then he made the agency execute those programs. And that's the only way they were going to get him to sign money. They hated him for it. They hated him for it.

But these questions endure today. I see them every day.

They definitely have endured today. In fact, when I got there and I was a member, I was there twice. You know, so I was there in the early 80s, and George had just really done this. So, you know, I was one of the first people who embraced this. And when I was the Strategic Technology officer and I, I basically. I guess we got a little time. Let me give you another. Another story. I used to go out and go to. To where they. People were doing testing, you know, where they were, and I would watch what was happening. You know, we had soldiers against. And then other soldiers acting as enemy soldiers. And I would wander around and watch, listen to what was going on. I came back one day. This is when I was stoked. I said, well, you know what? I found that the real problem these guys have is that we know where the enemy is. We got all kinds of sensors that tell us where the enemy is. We don't know where the hell we are. Every time people are talking to each other, they're saying, well, where are you? Well, I'm by the big rock. What big rock? And they would get a map out and try to figure out where the hell a big rock was. And I said, by the way. And GPS was just coming in. Okay, early 80s, okay? And there were just a few of those satellites, and there were a few GPPs things around, but they were big things, and people had to wear a backpack. So one guy would wander around out there, and in his backpack, it would take him like 25 minutes to 30 minutes to get a fix. And then he would only know where he was. So I went back and I stole the guys and said, any of you guys have any ideas of how to make this be smaller and faster? I'll fund it. So I had a guy who was really into gallium arsenide, which is a particular material, and he came to me, said, I can solve it. I said, okay, tell me how. He says, well, I'm going to use gallium arsenide, which has a noise figure which is far less than that in silicon. The noise figure is the noise in the system. And if the noise is high, then the satellites have to be close to you to get a signal that you can Detect if you got low noise, you can see the same satellite further away. Which meant that for the few satellites we have, you could see many satellites at once. So, you know, that would solve the problem of the 25 minutes becoming pretty fast. So I said, well, how big can you make it? And he said, how big do you want to make it? And I said, well, I smoked at that time. I said, here, see this Marlboro pack? Put it into this marable pack, everything. So he went away and he came back in about a week and he says, well, I can't put it in the Marlboro pack. And being the pecker head that I was, you know, I said, well, that's it, you know. And he said, no, wait a minute, wait a minute. Virginia Slims was another cigarette pack that was. If you don't know what, remember Virginia. But they were taller, okay, it was taller. He needed that form factor. And I gave it to him. I gave him the money. Six years later, the first set of this was finally made in silicon. It turned out that as time went on, we got more and more GPS satellites and it actually went into a cigarette pack. This is the device that today is in your cell phone, that today is in your car. We used to. Now we used to. We tried to pretend like we knew it was going to go all that way. Really. We really did. We talk about what. Do you think anybody's going to really use this? Yeah, people who. Backpackers would use it, you know, but. But it really changed the world. It changed the world from that little simple question, what difference would make in a guy who had an idea which until then he couldn't get anybody interested enough to give him what turned out to be a total of $60 million to basically build the first one. It changed our whole inventory. We used to have missiles that we had to have them cross. If they had to go through over the ocean, they had to cross land in a particular place because they took a measurement of the land and then they knew where they were.

I remember that, yes.

Total freedom. Total freedom, yeah. You know, I mean, it was total. And that's where the. And all of this came from. This guy who had a. On the far side guy who had this idea that once he heard this problem, he had the solution to the problem. He was just lucky, I guess, that I was there. I mean, I was lucky there and came back and said, this is the problem that exists. And that was it, the whole world. Now this guy. You can go back to this as being the defining moment when we knew what the problem was, and we knew. And he also had the solution to the problem. And $60 million later, we were producing them.

Tony, as you're telling me this story, I'm thinking back to this formative stage you told us about prior to this that maybe helped wire your brain in the right way while you're at Fuller Brush and realizing that sometimes you need to spot that problem and. And figure out what the solution is and sell that solution.

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And the Fuller Brush people, by the way, you know, I mean, I was. I was just. They are the ones who, if you really want to get down to who was the guy like this guy who gave us this thing that now everybody uses? Somebody in Fuller Brush. Somebody in Fuller Brush. Remember, they were very successful door to door salesman. They had a good product, too, by the way, the product. You'd have to be ashamed of it. It was excellent. They only had very excellent products. But somebody said, God, what is the problem that we're having? And what. And came and thought about how to attack that problem and taught people that, you know, and it worked. And so this is the same thing, really. Not much. At the end of the day, it's not much different. I mean, Heilmar, he had his set of questions. If you talk to a lot of people, that people will tell you, yeah, I always thought that way, and I believe that. But. But Heil Meyer was the first person in the right position who could do something about it. And he was enough of a person like me who said, hey, you're either going to do it this way or you're not going to do it, you know. And you know what? I control the money, so it's up to you, you know. And as time went on, all the guys really started to appreciate this because they understood that this is something that they. That at the end of the day, this is, of course, you know, I mean, it's. This is an. Of course, of course.

Yeah.

But, you know, a lot of things that are, of course, are only, of course after you finally see them. Yep. Yeah. Anyways, sorry for the length of time, but that. All right.

One second, Tony. I'll edit this delay out.

Okay. All right.

Now, based on that, let me return to this topic of Congress, which is reportedly now deciding to double the budget of DARPA from 3.5 billion to $7 billion a year based on all this. What's your opinion on that?

The same opinion when I came in and they wanted to take my 2 up to 4, 5, 8. You know, it really is the wrong thing to do. You can, you'll end up with. And look, the Congress is trying to be helpful, okay? They are really trying to be helpful. But it's getting back to the old saying that if you're only. If your only tool is a hammer off, probably problems look like nails, right? Well, the Congress, their only tool is money. It really comes down to it. They can pass laws, but it's money. So their tool is money. And so from their viewpoint, the problem is they don't have enough money. Well, that's not the problem at all. In fact, in my mind, having that much money would get a place like darpa, because if you didn't spend that money, then they come around and they really get on your butt. You know, how come you're not spending the money? So you end up in an organization that is becoming very good at throwing the money out to people, but not really finding out what difference it would make. And so they're not getting ideas and somehow figuring out what are the really, really good ideas that I'm going to put a lot of money on and what are the ideas that are, you know, but maybe I'll bring them along a little bit longer. Maybe something happens there. And the ideas that just are just absolutely interesting. But NIH should be doing that, okay? You know, I mean, it's not like somebody shouldn't be doing that. But it's not a place like darpa. DARPA is not nih. DARPA is a place that solves problems, does not create knowledge, which they do. Somebody's got to create knowledge. I'm not saying that they're not a good. This is not a good organization, because they are. But that next step, that Valley of Death, is what keeps NIH from being well known for delivering anything. They can't get across the Valley of Death. So DARPA is the only organization I know whose whole purpose in life is that Valley of Death. And they could have too much money. Now, what they should have, and like I said, the deal made with me was that, okay, okay, we understand. Because they knew that I wasn't going to be able to spend that money and the comptroller would be on me, the Congress would be on me. And you know, and in my case, I probably would have told them all to get bent and then I would have been fired, you know, and so, but, but, you know, so that didn't happen. And they didn't want that to happen. So they went along with the, you come see us if you really got something that you need money that you don't have the money for. So I think it's dangerous. In fact, I doubt it'll go through. I mean, remember this is only one party. Congress is just proposing that. But again, I don't want people to. I'm not saying that that was a. Again, they are trying to be helpful. They're really trying to be helpful. I mean they really are. And the only thing that we can help is give you money. And I'm saying no, no, no, wrong. Okay, maybe there's other ways they could do by making, creating laws or creating something, you know, that, that find out what is it in darpa that if, if only the law was a little bit different and they did change the laws for darpa, by the way, we don't have to have, we can go and actually award somebody a contract without going out and having it go for a full blown competition. We can do single source. If we didn't have that ability, we'd be back to having these big competitions. When we knew the person that we, we wanted to give, at least give him enough money to get to the point where we then would go, you know, sort of like, okay, now it's time that he's proven it, that it can be done. Now we need to go and find people who can actually go from the can be done to the make it done. Okay. And that's a different organization. Typically, you know, a small company does not do a big company's job very well. And a big company usually doesn't do a small company's job very well because quite frankly, they're not interested in that part of the spectrum. Yeah, I mean they are and they're not. You know what I mean? Right. So I don't know. So I think it's a danger. I don't think it'll happen. But I really do believe that throwing that kind of money is wrong. Saying that anytime you have a problem, come see us, tell us what problem you're solving and that why you think it should be done and we will give you the problem without requiring a pint of blood from you. That is the more, the better way to do it. But in Congress, who would that be? So I think they ought to leave it alone and let the Secretary of Defense be the one who does it.

Makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. So that's my impression, I hope that, I believe it'll happen that way. But internal to the sec, into the internal to the dod, there are a lot of people who New people. There's a whole turnover now and a lot of people really don't understand. It's not that they're dumb or anything, but they never had anybody tell them this story. Hey, you know what it's about? It really is two questions. What is the problem you're trying to solve and what difference it'll make? And if that's a big deal, they. Then you find the money and the program. You know, not only just the money, but the program and help that person to go get that, cross that valley of death. You know, that's. That's what the job should be. Right, Tony? Yes, sir. Go ahead.

I just wanted to say I really appreciate all this and I wanted to conclude with a really hard question. And I figure if I can't ask you an incredibly hard question, who am I going to ask? And that is, I would love your thoughts about cybersecurity, any thoughts you have on this topic at all. But something that really concerns me is the fact that the US invests so much in technology, advanced technology, not just government, but commercially only, to have that stolen by adversaries that want to leverage our work and creation of intellectual property for their benefit. So we have this issue of needing to protect our intellectual property. Additionally, we're building this world where everything is interconnected, so it makes it easier for the adversaries to use digital means to come right up next to us and threaten our personal privacy or lock things down with ransomware or steal information for their financial gain. And it's really a concerning world we live in. And I just wanted to ask your thoughts on that dynamic.

Well, you know, it's a problem. And the problem is that we created it. We recreated this world with the networking and all, and we deliberately created it that when a person wants to go get some information, he doesn't have to know how to make it happen. It happens. And then there are people who then actually get to know a little bit more. And so rather than having to be a random thing, they can kind of help stop, steer it to a location. And so we have created a network which is open to somebody doing mischief now, you know, one way to solve, and we can try to come up with all kinds of ways, but really all the people, when they're coming up with ways to protect it, what they really are doing is that they're pulling up barriers, right? They're closing it down. They're not letting it be. So, you know, you don't have to know what you're doing. It'll go figure it out for itself type of thing. And I don't, I don't, you know, I don't think we've gone so far now that we can't, we can't reverse this. But, and maybe, maybe what we need to do is to. Maybe one way to satisfy it is to basically figure out, okay, what is it that we really want to protect? Okay, what is it that we really want to protect? And really put them, put a wrapper around that where you don't get in. If somebody doesn't give you permission, it makes it a little bit harder. That means you got to get permission and you gotta. And that, that is a problem. And that takes time. You know, it won't. It just can't happen at the speed of light. But, you know, so you do that and, and, but then the question is, well, what is not so important that you let people get in at their will? You mean my home? What am I? My home. I kind of don't want people roaming around in my home and looking at cameras and seeing what the hell is going on. So you can bring yourself to a conclusion that really what we really want to do is somehow find a way that we can go and have my home be one of those places that you just don't get in without permission. Okay. You know, yeah. If I'm not around or, you know, to give you permission or whatever, it's going to take longer for you to get in. It might even make my wife mad because she might forget the code word or something like that, you know, But I mean, there's all this downside of doing this, but I don't have any other really good answer. I really don't have any good answer except to, you know, sort of like back to the future, just say, okay, what is the problem? The problem is, is that we have made it so people don't have to. Don't have any way of protecting themselves because we deliberately made it that way. And they like it that way up until the time when they get violated. Right. So I don't have an answer. I guess I just, I don't have a good answer anyways. I don't have a good answer. You know, I think we got to recognize that is the problem. That's the problem. And I don't have any solution. I mean, without, you know, without the what difference it makes being we go back, we go. We're less flexible, you know. Yeah.

I think you've hit on a key point here, which is there's not going to be a solution. This is going to be with us indefinitely. It is a infinite game. We are going to continue continuously be under cyber attack, just like crime is going to be with us indefinitely. And law enforcement will always be an issue in the, the real world, in cyberspace. We need to understand there's always going to be a threat.

Well, you know what, on our cars, we're making our cars so that they, they're going to drive themselves, by the way, that. There's no question in my mind that that can be done. I mean, because obviously, once again, we did prove that, right? We had that, you know, we had the contest and people showed they could do that in traffic with other, other cars. The problem we got is that can somebody get in and take over your car? Yeah, I don't know why not? There's nothing there stopping it. You know, there's really nothing there stopping that from happening. And so, okay, so, okay, maybe we can figure out a way to do when we send out a signal that we have a code on that signal so that when it reflects back to us, we know we were the ones that started it. So that one goes through right away and others don't. You know, there's ways to do it, but that means we've slowed down a little bit. We no longer can be going 100 miles an hour and having this car so flexible that it keeps itself. You know, we now have to, maybe we can only go 60 miles an hour. There's a consequence. But, but somebody needs to start thinking about that. Right? And that's the only answer I know is that you, you're going to have to put some restrictions on it. And restrictions mean you're not going to be as fast and flexible as you were before. And I think this is a darker hard problem, by the way. I mean, this is really a DARPA hard problem is how do I come up with a system which allows only me to get in or me people that I have explicitly allowed to get in and yet not lose the performance that I love so much today? That's a DARPA hard problem. And I have to believe there's somebody in DARPA trying to solve that problem. I don't know who it is, but I have to believe there is somebody doing that. It's such an obvious thing that somebody had to come and, and I'm sure they got the money to go and well, if they have any ideas, you know, I mean, just knowing the problem is not good. What are your ideas for solving this problem? Right, but, but that's about all I have to say.

All right, well, thank you very much, Tony, for this. Just. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. I enjoyed it, too. I really enjoyed the conversation, Bob. I enjoy you. You. You ask good questions. You got a good background. You know, it's just fun. In fact, you know what? You'd be a good DARPA program manager.

Oh, thanks for saying that.

Really appreciate it. No, you would. You'd be a good DARPA program manager or maybe an office director, too, if you want a job. I'm sure they got job openings over there.

You know, what an honor. I think I would love to be able to help say that I shaped the future by doing that.

Well, have you gone over talk to the current director? Yeah, she's very easy to get to. I know her. You know, she's. She's actually a very easy person to get to. You ought to go talk to her.

Well, maybe I should and would love to have her on the oodacast one day. My fear is in talking to people like that, that what if I waste their time? What if it's a conversation that does not add value? That is what holds me back from those kind of discussions.

Well, you know, hopefully somebody will listen to this conversation that we just had and they might say, you know what? I think I got a solution. And now they kind of know where to go and know how to approach them. So who knows how many people we've just gotten DARPA money for. Right. Remember, not all of DARPA things are successful, but even those which fail are successful in that we know why it didn't work. And so what does DARPA do? We go working on the why it didn't work part and solve that problem, and then we'll come back to this other problem. Cool.

Well, thanks, Tony. Really appreciate it.

Bye bye. Thanks for listening to this. OODA Loop production. For the latest analysis on cybersecurity technology and global risks, please visit www.ooda loop.com.