Speaker 0 | 00:09.588

Welcome to another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Today, we’ve got Drew Stone with us. So, Drew, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself?

Speaker 1 | 00:21.037

Sure. I’m Drew Stone. I’m the Director of IT and Data Security at True Velocity Ammunition. We make… polymer cased ammunition and yeah, running an IT department for an ammo plant’s just a little bit different than what you normally see in a lot of other places. So, thanks for having me on, Mike.

Speaker 0 | 00:41.573

No problem. That should be interesting. So, do me a favor, tell me a little bit about the career leading up to Velocity and what it was like doing that. And then if you jump in and tell us what’s, you know, yeah, what is different about doing IT at a manufacturer of ammunition?

Speaker 1 | 01:02.135

Yeah, so my career kind of got started out a little bit strangely. I’m actually an eighth generation farmer. My family had been farming, excuse me, up in central Illinois for quite a long time. And I worked out in the fields when I was younger, decided I quite liked the air conditioning. So tried to find a way to get indoors a little bit more. at Anak for Computers. Our company was sort of acquired, kind of partnered with by a larger corporation around the time I was in high school. And I had up until then kind of been helping to maintain a lot of our IT infrastructure, keeping things together, helping out our end users. And as the business grew, so did my role with that. And eventually, by the time I left for college, I was… managing pretty much all aspects of our IT infrastructure. Went off to college. I got scooped up by the government and did some stuff that I unfortunately can’t really talk about right now. Maybe in 20 years I can. Past that, after working for the government for a while, I moved back home and got scooped up by… Monsanto, the company that had kind of partnered with us and partially acquired our family business years prior, because there’s apparently very few people out there that can speak farmer and speak IT at the same time. So I kind of act as a translation layer between the business and the IT team. And that was definitely interesting. If you’ve never seen a DB analyst out in the middle of a cornfield, it’s a sight to behold. But. He got people out into the field, kind of got the whole experience of what it’s like to be a farmer and why some of the software products that we were building may not have been entirely accepted by our farmers. You know, walking a mile in your user’s shoes definitely tends to help. From there, I went and worked for a small startup company where we were using machine vision to identify. weeds, diseases on plants, bugs on plants, things like that using Google Glass. And then I jumped back over to Monsanto, worked with them a little bit more, and then jumped over to the state of Illinois, helped with a cloud migration there. And then I wound up moving to Texas where I work for Velocity now.

Speaker 0 | 03:41.558

Okay. Wow. There’s a lot of little things in there that we’ll circle back to, I hope. working at true velocity the um so i’m just curious what what is different but you know i’m curious now for both sides both the farming aspect and the true velocity and and actually you got to play with google glass in the middle of all this too because you know i heard about it i remember the uh the um no the the bubble that google glass started when it when it first came out And then I never, ever really saw anything come from it from my perspective and my experience. But the fact that you guys were actually doing something with it. So talk to me about the difference between farming IT and true velocity IT. And what’s something unique that you’re doing with true velocity that the rest of we geeks and nerds aren’t doing?

Speaker 1 | 04:39.338

Yeah, so farming IT is kind of in a weird and good place right now. kind of at the tail end of an explosion in growth when it comes to integrating technology into farming. When I was a part of it, we had a kind of an old guard of farmers. you know, you’re what you think of when you think of a farmer, the guys that are out in a tractor, they’re out doing the work, they come home, you know, very little technology involved in it. But that was really changing when I was involved in it. It was starting to get brought forward and brought up into the modern era where if you hop into a tractor’s cab these days, at minimum, you’re going to have three or four computer screens staring back at you. And that includes everything from auto steer where the tractor can be driving itself to your yield monitors that say exactly, or your planting monitors, depending, you know, what’s going into the ground at what rate, what’s coming out of the ground at what rate, all kinds of other things. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to do at True Velocity as well. Manufacturing has, I don’t want to say it’s gotten to a rut, but it’s kind of been similar for the past, I don’t know how many years. One of the… details I can let slip from when I worked at the government is I did work on control systems. So things that run bread factories, you know, dams, stuff like that. And a lot of the stuff that was in use, some of those things hadn’t been turned off since they were installed in the late 70s or early 80s. Things just haven’t changed that much on that front. And at True Velocity, we’re changing things up a little bit. So I can’t go into… too many details because I don’t think we’ve gone terribly public with it yet. But we are working with that.

Speaker 0 | 06:30.853

Don’t give away the trade secrets. But so having dealt with a couple of things like this, you’re talking about getting away from like the SCADA systems and the PLCs and moving to something besides that. Or is this like a new version of the PLCs?

Speaker 1 | 06:48.621

Kind of both. Um, so the new system that we’re building. has a combination of the two. So it has kind of the older school SCADA and PLC systems built into it. But then a lot of that is actually controlled by C++ code instead of having to do ladder logic or anything like that, or the representation of relay logic. A lot of our stuff is now being built in more standardized software engineering means versus the older school. building out a ladder logic or a relay logic.

Speaker 0 | 07:25.086

So, and is this all custom programming that you and your team are helping create for the organization? Or is this something that’s more of like an industry standard that some of the industry leaders or people on the bleeding edge of this industry are using together?

Speaker 1 | 07:47.451

A lot of people out on the bleeding edge are starting to adopt this. We’re working with a partner based out of Europe. They’re much larger in Europe than they are in the U.S. In fact, with some of their test equipment, I think we’re the only ones in the U.S. that actually have any of it. So there are other companies that are doing this sort of thing. But as far as if it’s custom or not, our engineering team is building custom machinery, custom equipment, custom processes. and having to code it mostly from scratch to build what we need it to do, which in our case is assembling ammunition.

Speaker 0 | 08:24.537

How large of a development team do you have?

Speaker 1 | 08:28.278

I think we’ve got, this is more over on the engineering side. So my IT team supports them, but we don’t interact a huge amount with them. I think we’re up to five or seven at this point. So not a huge team, but we’ve got plenty of sharp people that have made some amazing things happen.

Speaker 0 | 08:49.368

Okay, so you’re more on the support side and helping keep… I always joke around and tell people, you know, we just keep the blinky lights blinking. So you’re more in that realm versus overseeing the engineers who are doing the custom code for the control of the production lines and the manufacturing line.

Speaker 1 | 09:14.922

Yeah. I live more on the ops and the security side, not necessarily the development side. Our engineering team, though, we do cross-pollinate quite a bit. If they’ve got some weird issues, they’ll bring it to us. Or as an example, we needed to figure out a way to get this monolith of a machine and the 18, I think, computers that live inside of it, hooked up to our network for reporting purposes so that it can send. telemetry data back and tell us how many rounds it’s making, etc. And we needed to work together to figure out a way to tap into the machine’s network and basically speak its language so that it can then pull that data or mirror that data out over to another system. my team then controls that we can use for reporting back to the executives and the plant operations team.

Speaker 0 | 10:09.067

And then depending on your cybersecurity infrastructure and beliefs, that can be a nightmare in itself, just making sure that you can access it and nobody else can, and they can’t come in and pivot in somehow. So there’s going to be a bit of a challenge around that, too.

Speaker 1 | 10:31.751

Definitely. Architecting that sort of thing, especially when that new machine with 18 plus computers living inside of it lives on the same manufacturing floor and for the most part, the same network as a whole bunch of what I would consider older legacy equipment. Yeah, it’s definitely something we need to keep track of and make sure that it’s guarded well. There’s a lot of one-way checks. Things can only move in one direction. Very specific permission structures on everything. A couple other things that I won’t dive too deep into. But yeah, it’s definitely a challenge keeping that and all of the other devices we have safe while still letting us get useful information out of it.

Speaker 0 | 11:14.969

So. And steer me away if I need to. So this experience that you picked up that we’re not talking about, and how much of that leads into the ability to help control and oversee and work with this stuff? Were you able to bring that experience forward into this realm? Or is it experience that you had to leave behind you?

Speaker 1 | 11:39.794

No, it was definitely useful coming into this position. Not only just because I… had at least a rough idea of what was going on and what was happening. I didn’t have to start from scratch. But also because I kind of had an intuition for where the weak spots could be and where the issues could arise and what we needed to do to harden those areas and make sure that we were being very, very safe when it came to any remote access or data exfiltration, things like that. So, no, it was definitely useful being able to bring that forward.

Speaker 0 | 12:14.941

Okay. So let me take a radical tack here, too, and jump back into the farming stuff. Because, you know, I get a little bit of the, or I have a bit of empathy or understanding about that. Because I remember coming to the current job that I have, and I’m driving up to the facility, and I’m thinking to myself, why are you going to a trucking company? What kind of technology is a trucking company going to have? And. I’ve been working here for 20 plus years, been challenged all the time. And one of the things that amazes me is when I get out there and talk with my peers like yourself and others, how often I find that we’re out there in front of the pack on what we’re doing with technology and how we’re leveraging it. And it sounds like you were doing some of the same with the farming side. So. You know, tell me a little more about that.

Speaker 1 | 13:15.850

Definitely. I would say we definitely were kind of out on the bleeding edge with a lot of stuff. So the project that I initially kind of got scooped up with was a, I believe it was called Field Scripts. I think it’s not going on anymore. But it was basically a way to use big data analytics to determine how to better plant a field. So we would take soil sample data based on a… I think at the time, 10 meter grid, combine that with GIS information. So, you know, elevation changes, soil types, things like that, historical weather patterns, satellite imagery, all kinds of different data points. And we would crunch that through a whole bunch of algorithms and we would be able to spit out a way to say, hey, if you plant crops denser in this area and sparser in this area, your whole field will wind up with a… 10, 15% yield increase. And we got it to work. In addition to that, we started looking at kind of other ways that we could augment that since, you know, hey, we’re doing undone stuff before or stuff that’s never been done before. Let’s see what else we can do. And I wound up at a, we called it a groundbreaker conference. It was a bunch of our kind of trial participants, the people that were testing out this new system down in Florida, I think. and ran into a friend there that actually had a pair of Google Glass. I said, hey, can I take a look at those? And he said, no, I’ll give you one better. Go show this to a bunch of farmers and figure out what they think about it. So I did. I went around to probably 30 or 40 different farmers that were down there and showed them how it worked, showed them what it did. gave them some prompting on ideas we could possibly do with it and then heard what their feedback was and it was amazingly positive they all wanted to see us do something with it and they all wanted to wanted to see us make something new and try something new so we did wow

Speaker 0 | 15:18.723

that’s that’s really cool because like whenever we were looking at it or talking about it you know the the biggest thing that we could come up with or one of the best things we could come up with was like the um the ability to have the manual while you’re looking at a tractor and looking at the engine and trying to have somebody do maintenance around it, having that manual or knowing what all of the parts were given in a specific area. But I knew that farming was leveraging GIS and some of the big data, but I haven’t ever talked to anybody about that. And to recognize… really ingest or empathize with the fact that farming, yeah, the low-tech people that are digging in the dirt are actually consuming some of the largest amounts of the big data and leveraging that to increase their yield by 10%. Was that the number you threw out there, I believe?

Speaker 1 | 16:23.308

Yeah, it was anywhere from 10% to 20% depending on the field. That’s huge. It was fantastic. And kind of to your point, it was a very interesting junction of, like you said, the people that are out digging in the dirt and then big data. Because one of the issues that we ran into on that project is, OK, well, we need their historical yield data so that we can train the models and put that in for further differentiation. But how do we get that data from them? Where do we go to get it? And it. A lot of people in St. Louis originally thought, oh, well, they can just upload it to us. These people have dial-up at best, maybe a cell connection. So we had to start thinking of alternatives to that. And eventually we just said, hey, you know, yield monitors, nine times out of ten, stick all of their data onto either a USB stick or an SD card. Send it to us. You know, either make a copy or just send us what you got. I remember there was one guy that sent us, he was a pretty big farmer somewhere out west, and he sent us like a gallon Ziploc bag full of SD cards. So it’s really interesting seeing that junction of, hey, we’re doing this high-tech, cutting-edge stuff, and you don’t have internet. How are we going to deal with this, and how are we going to bridge this gap?

Speaker 0 | 17:56.146

And the security person in me or the, oh, man, taking all of those different devices and plugging them in and, oh, no, no.

Speaker 1 | 18:07.715

It was a bit of a nightmare.

Speaker 0 | 18:09.016

You can get the data. And then, oh, man, all of the different formats that they all must be using and everything else. So, okay, one of the things that you brought up that you learned and did was. you know, being able to speak from personal knowledge of farming, being an eighth generation farmer, and then having the IT experience and then blending those two together. Talk to us a little more about that and how that helped you advance in your career and how did you handle that in the areas? Because, you know, that doesn’t really translate or the ability to talk. business and IT has always been a great benefit for me. But how did that translate or how did you learn the business as you moved into completely new industries? Because I’m pretty sure manufacturing of ammo is a lot different than growing a crop.

Speaker 1 | 19:14.628

Just a little bit. Yeah. So originally I co-opted with Monsanto while I was in college for a six-month term. And originally, I was supposed to go in for the help desk, and I got scooped up within two days, I think, before I even had my email set up. Somebody came up and said, hey, you’re late for the meeting. Really? I don’t have a calendar. So cool, let’s go. It was for building out a new dealer application, something for the dealers to put in their orders, their shipping, financials, everything. kind of interface with our ERP system on the back end. That was where I got my first taste of, oh, okay, I can speak farmer. I know from experience of farming what this is like. But I also can talk to our subject matter experts and our business analysts and architects to help kind of determine where this app is going to wind up going. And getting that early on in my career was incredibly, incredibly helpful. Because from then on, I wanted to learn as much about the business as I could, not just… you know, the kind of backend hidden side of it of, okay, well, you know, here’s the financials, here’s how this is going to work. Here’s how we’re going to interface with this system. But also why are we doing this? Why, you know, what problem are we trying to solve for our end users? How are they going to see it? And what lens are they going to see it through? So I actually wound up working with our UI UX team fairly extensively going over wireframes of new systems and, you know, new phone apps, things like that, to both help the UI UX team in, hey, this is how a farmer is going to view it. This is what they’re going to see it as. And then also going to the farmer side and saying, you know, this is what we’re trying to build. Can you show me how you would want to use it? And having the perspective of, you know, the kind of backend business, how everything integrates, what we’re trying to do from a financial perspective, mixing that with what is the real problem that we’re trying to solve out in the real world? And how are the people that are embracing that problem going to deal with it? That’s been incredibly helpful, regardless of where I’ve wound up. I would actually challenge you real quick on that,

Speaker 0 | 21:39.728

only on one aspect of it. You’re saying the business and the IT side, but you were talking three different groups there. You have your developers and the people that are creating the UI and the UX. You have the people who are trying to run the business and make money off of what’s being developed. And then you actually have the customer who is going to consume and use all of this. So you’re not just talking IT and business, but you’re also talking IT business and customer.

Speaker 1 | 22:10.645

True, true. I think the whole time I was with Monsanto, I was kind of thinking of it as… okay, what do we have from the farmer perspective and what do we have from the company perspective? But no, I think you’re completely correct. We do have those three different parts. There was another kind of test project that we worked on where it was almost a social network for farmers where they could check in, report what they’re seeing out in their fields. And then if we get so many reports of a disease or a certain pest spreading in an area, then we could send alerts to other farmers. And- That really exemplifies what you were talking about. I’d almost forgotten about that until you mentioned it. We had to communicate with the development group pretty extensively on, hey, this is how farmers think. This is what it needs to look like. This is how it needs to function, or they’re just not going to use it. We had to work on the business side of it with, here’s the analytics that we can get from it so that we can see, okay, well, this disease has moved into this region. look towards chemicals for that? Do we look towards a different variety that’s going to be planted in the next few years? How do we work our business intelligence for the future on that? And then working with the customers, obviously, to say, hey, this is a system that can help you as well, because now you can see, oh, rust is moving in from the south. So you should probably start calling your chemical dealer and seeing what we can do about that. So working with all three teams is… Definitely critical. And thank you for catching that.

Speaker 0 | 23:49.490

Yeah, no problem. It was just one of the things is that, you know, it’s you hit on something that I learned really early on and try to make sure to to get my my coworkers and my team asking all the time is why? Because we have so many people who come to us and say, I need this. And and they can tell you what they need or they design some kind of a solution. But they’ve designed some kind of a solution in like Excel. And because they know Excel and they know their problem. So they match those two together. And I learned early on to start asking, well, wait, what are you trying to do? What’s the real goal here? How are we trying to make business better? Or what are you trying to do that helps you in your day-to-day life with this solution that you’re telling me about? So that I can actually. focusing on the problem because typically I had a much broader or bigger tool set to work from than they did. So I learned to ask that question, why? And, you know, asking from all three of those perspectives, well, what kind of money is this going to make us or what kind of financial benefit or cost avoidance can we get from it? There’s a business. You know, how are we going to do it? There’s the geeks. And then why are we doing it is the customer.

Speaker 1 | 25:14.852

So definitely. No. And that’s one thing I’ve tried to instill with my team. here at True Velocity is always ask the question of why. A lot of times, like you said, people will come to us and say, hey, this solution isn’t working. Well, it’s a solution that we’ve never seen before and we have no idea what it’s trying to do. So have that discussion, talk to them, figure out what the end goal is in this process, and then either build from there, help them fix it, or talk about building something new. Any of those are valid options.

Speaker 0 | 25:49.520

Yeah. All right, let’s jump rails into a different area, too. So tell me a little bit about your experiences with technology as you were growing up. What kind of, what world did you grow up in? Because, you know, when I was in elementary school, there were no computers around, not for public use. And we were just told, all right, be home by the time the streetlights came on. And pay phones were a thing. And, you know, being anchored. to a part of the house because the phone cord could only reach so far was some of my experience. What about you?

Speaker 1 | 26:29.254

Somewhat similar. I think I’m a little bit younger, so we did have computers. I remember when I was growing up playing games on DOS with my dad, we have had some sort of ancient Dell machine that I think I still have kicking around somewhere here with some games on it. And that’s kind of where I… got started with everything. Windows 95 didn’t come out until I was almost in my teens, I think. I don’t remember, honestly. But it was very much the same. And especially since we lived out in the country, internet wasn’t really a thing for us. We had dial-up probably by the time I turned 10-ish, and it worked. It was okay. I remember specifically one incident where we needed to download some printer drivers and that only took four hours. Oh yeah, it was not fun. I don’t miss those days. But yeah, kind of watching technology progress. We were out in the country, so we were just a little bit behind the curve. I had friends in school that, you know, they had cable TV, which that was an amazing thing for me. We only got over the air because there was no cable near us. When broadband internet started becoming a thing, we still didn’t have it. I remember when we got our first kind of real broadband at our office, and it was two teamed T1 lines, and we were blown away having two megabits to play with.

Speaker 0 | 28:11.416

Yeah, and that’s… that’s with some of it reserved for other things because T1s are 1.5 so yeah. I noticed when you or at least when you got one of your degrees so I was thinking that’s when you’d joined into the workforce and everything but I’m looking at some more of the history and recognize that you were like I remember coming to work and being excited about getting a cell phone. thinking that was cool and how now, you know, five-year-olds are getting cell phones and cell phones that can do so much more.

Speaker 1 | 28:52.958

Oh, I remember when I first figured out, well, first had a Palm Pilot that was capable of Bluetooth and Bluetoothing that to my Motorola Razr and getting MobileNet off of that. And that was the most amazing thing ever, being able to see email or web pages wherever I went. blew my mind at the time and now you’ve got i mean my phone has been hanging with work emails the whole time we’ve been talking so it’s just a normal part of life yeah oh man and then like cameras on them too i swear i remember thinking why

Speaker 0 | 29:28.883

would you put a camera on a cell phone what what uh why and then here every take every picture i’ve taken for the last probably last decade has been from my phone And now half of what I’m deciding which phone to get has to do with the camera.

Speaker 1 | 29:49.408

Yeah, no, I do photography as a hobby. And one of the sayings that’s always rung true is the best camera you can ever own is the one that you have with you. And it’s just unlocked so much potential having a device that has a good camera always in your pocket. I still carry a bigger camera around when I know I want to go take pictures of something, but I can’t count the number of times that just whip out the phone, take a quick picture, clean it up in post. Hey, that actually turned out well.

Speaker 0 | 30:16.107

Yeah, for sure. So for me, this one’s kind of a personal one because I’ve always.

Speaker 1 | 30:26.616

gone one direction and you know the the name of the show goes the other direction so are you a geek or are you a nerd and what’s the difference um that’s a great question i’ve been called both so many times in my life uh normally my wife i think i sit on this the uh the the non side of the fence or i sit directly on the fence of yeah i’ll take either i’m good with it they both mean

Speaker 0 | 30:54.572

to me roughly the same thing so okay because i’ve always thought of the geek being the the technically minded and computer kind of guy and then my kids have been hitting me with nerds nerds don’t even have to know computers or anything they just have to be a subject matter expert on something and then they’re that kind of nerd so an anime nerd or you

Speaker 1 | 31:19.453

know i guess i can see that um i grew up in a very small town so like my my high school graduating class was 92 so there weren’t too many of us i think there were like three or four of us in the school you know uh freshman through senior at any one time so we didn’t really uh we didn’t really call each other all that much other than hey idiot get over here and fix this nice

Speaker 0 | 31:44.208

yeah see my my graduating class i’m not even sure how big it was but it was full of really technically um astute people because growing up in los alamos where uh the home of the nuclear bomb you know and just the number of people that worked for the national laboratories up there so i totally get not being able to talk about things but it was definitely an interesting experience growing up there so um let’s see what’s tell me something else interesting what’s one of the one of the times you know the face palm moment

Speaker 1 | 32:20.916

that you just you were dealing with somebody helping somebody out and you’re just like oh my god so a couple odd tickets that kind of fit that um so here in texas you know in what would that have been February of 21 we had the snowpocalypse where you know massive snowstorm all the fun this was while our company was still pretty much on premise everything. We hadn’t shifted away from an on-prem exchange server yet. That was mostly due to regulatory concerns, which I can touch on later, but we fixed that since then, thankfully. But at the time, all of our stuff was housed at our facility and we did have a full building UPS system that was good for something like 70 or 80 hours worth of use. Well, it’s the snowpocalypse. We vastly exceeded that. Our facility was without power for something like five or six days. And when the power went offline, all of our email systems went down. And, of course, I’m getting phone calls pretty constantly saying, hey, can we get email back up? How are we going to get this fixed? What’s going on? Most of the time when I told them, yeah, our facility doesn’t have power. There’s nothing we can do until that comes back. Most people were sane enough to go, oh, okay, yeah, that’s fine. She called and said, you know, well, do you know when email is going to be back? And I said, well, probably when the power comes back on. We can’t really do much until then. Well, can you get that back on sooner? Didn’t quite know how to handle that. That one kind of stopped me for a moment.

Speaker 0 | 34:05.072

Yeah, right on.

Speaker 1 | 34:07.133

Yeah, let me call the power company. Exactly. We did have a couple. Years and years ago, back when I was in college and worked for a computer store, we had one very interesting case that I don’t think we ever found a resolution to. A lady came in and said, hey, I’ve got a problem with my iPod. Do you guys do iPod repairs? And at the time, no, we didn’t. We had the little prepaid boxes, basically, that you would buy the box for, I don’t know, it was like 60 bucks, put your device in it. At a prepaid shipping label, you’d ship it to this company. They would do the repair and send it back. So we said, you know, we’ve got these. The only thing is, is that they don’t cover liquid damage. So what sort of damage happened to your iPod? You know, was it liquid damage or not? And she kind of thought for a second and looked at us and said, I don’t know. And we all kind of looked back at her and went, okay, you’re going to need to explain a little bit. She said, well, it was sitting in my backpack, and I guess I put my backpack down the wrong way, and there was a banana in there, and the banana got mashed into the click wheel of the iPod. Does that count as liquid damage? We all kind of looked at each other and had to go, you know, I don’t know. So we gave her the phone number that was on the box and said, you know, give these guys a call, see what they say. And if they say they’ll do it, come on back and, you know, we’ll sell you the box. Well, we never saw her again. So all we can assume is that bananas do count as liquid damage.

Speaker 0 | 35:50.664

Oh, man. Well, and or self-inflicted wounds. So. What are some of the things that you’ve done that you feel have helped you get promoted? And I mean, I know that for me, one of the most critical pieces is that ability to talk amongst the different groups that we’ve already been mentioning. But are there other things that you’ve done that you’ve learned that have helped you in your career?

Speaker 1 | 36:22.806

I mean, that’s the major one. Being able to communicate well with the business, with the developers, with the customers. Having that communication open between all the parties really, really helps. And I know that’s helped me in my career a lot. Another side of it, though, is just pure curiosity and looking for things that are out there that could potentially help, could potentially change the way that you’re doing things for the better. Uh, the Google glass situation was kind of like that where, uh, if it hadn’t been for that friend that had a set, we wouldn’t have embarked down that path and, you know, having the chance to go show it to a bunch of customers and say, what do you want us to do with this? What do you think would be cool to do with it? And hearing the variety of answers that they came back with, it was astonishing everything from having their yield monitors directly above their eyes to what we wound up doing eventually, which was using machine vision to identify bugs, weeds, diseases, things like that. So always being curious, always wanting to know how you can use something in your business or if it can be helpful in your business. And then the final part, I’d say, is watching what other verticals do and seeing how they do things and why they do things the way they do. So at Monsanto, I worked with a small software team that we kind of turned. We used the I think it’s Lockheed’s Skunk Works model and kind of worked on that a little bit to give us the ability to make these new systems, these new trial things that we could build relatively cheaply. If they worked great, we can build them bigger later. If they didn’t burn it down, start on something else.

Speaker 0 | 38:13.000

What do you think about that saying? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Speaker 1 | 38:21.623

In some cases, that’s okay, especially when it comes to technology. And this is the security side of my job kicking in. If it’s not broke, it just hasn’t been exploited yet. So you need to be on the lookout for what it’s doing, why it’s doing it. See if you can patch it up, shore it up. If it’s a business-critical system, Definitely take a good look at it and see, you know, hey, is this doing what we need it to do? Is it fulfilling all of our goals or are there pain points that we can fix here that can help us with either customer adoption or just making people’s lives easier and making them more productive when they use it? So a lot of times, if something isn’t broke and it’s still in use, there’s probably a reason, but you might be able to do better.

Speaker 0 | 39:13.178

Yes, I’ve started to adopt the thought of if it ain’t broke, break it and make it better.

Speaker 1 | 39:19.819

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 39:20.900

But yeah, there’s all of those critical pieces. You definitely need to be aware of your surroundings and what we call that situationally aware.

Speaker 1 | 39:31.403

Indeed. Yeah, a lot of the another thing that popped into my head with the if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. Like I mentioned, there were some. programmable logic controllers that I’ve worked with in the past had been online since 1982. They had never been updated. They’d never been touched. Unfortunately, a lot of the reasons we were looking at those is because the manufacturers decided it’s not broke, so we’re going to break it. And they broke it in a very interesting way by putting an Ethernet controller directly connected to it. No security, no nothing. These are devices that were built before the Internet was a thing, and all of a sudden they’re exposed to the wider Internet. It doesn’t go well.

Speaker 0 | 40:12.943

And completely exposed to the wider Internet?

Speaker 1 | 40:17.827

In some cases, yeah. Completely without firewalls or anything like that. That has… somewhat gotten better from what I’ve seen in the industry. I know at our shop, when I first got here, it was already way better than that. It was running on its own air gap, isolated network, things didn’t talk out of it. That was difficult for the business to accept because they’re not getting metrics out. So that was part of the challenge is how do we get these metrics out? How do we communicate with the devices in a safe way? How do we make sure that nobody else can talk to them? That sort of thing.

Speaker 0 | 40:53.400

I’m thinking of that service that’s out there, and I can’t think of the name right now, but they’re constantly scanning the Internet for everything. So they can tell you who’s got cameras that still have default passwords on them across the world. They can tell you where all of those PLCs are or what network they’re on. Do you know the one I’m talking about?

Speaker 1 | 41:16.586

Yeah, I think it’s Shodan. Yeah, there was a pocket. There’s a talk at DEF CON years and years ago. I only ever saw it on YouTube. At least I think it was DEF CON. And I think it was called something like drinking from the fire hose known as Shodan. And the guy just went on a, you know, hour, hour and a half long bent about, you know, here are the things that I found on Shodan. And he’s including stuff like traffic lights or dam control systems, things that you don’t want people playing with.

Speaker 0 | 41:50.236

Exactly. And then especially something that’s been out there since the 80s that you can find manuals on and if you’ve got total access to it, oh man.

Speaker 1 | 42:03.061

Yeah, it just seems like that.

Speaker 0 | 42:07.703

At least it helps fill the curiosity need. That curiosity statement that you mentioned earlier makes me think of something. I grew up with that generation, and I think all of us have versions of this. My parents telling me, don’t touch that. Don’t touch that button. And I was probably somewhere in my mid-20s when I finally had the insight that, wait a minute, it’s a button. Somebody engineered that button for a reason. It’s there to be pushed. Now, it’s always wise to kind of understand what it does. does before you push the button. You know, like the delete button. You really want to understand that before you hit the delete button, what it does. But somebody created the button for a reason.

Speaker 1 | 43:01.062

Definitely. I was incredibly lucky growing up. My parents really wanted to kind of nurture that curiosity. And we had an auction house that would do like estate sales or just I don’t want to say junk sales, but things that people didn’t want anymore. And it was anything really. And it was only a few miles from our house and we would go hang out there whenever they ran their sales about once a week. And it was great because every now and then you would get these ancient computers that would come up and my parents would buy them for five bucks and be like, okay, here you go. Have fun, tear it apart. You know, put it back together. Nine times out of 10, it didn’t work again. But It was a great learning experience of this is what does this, this is what does that. I shouldn’t touch this. I should touch that. And like you said, it goes back to that curiosity of what does this do? Why does it do it? And can I use it? And it’s been hugely helpful in all aspects of IT. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 44:05.124

that how can I use it? That’s one of those things that there’s so many different ways. So, all right, back to the Google Glass for just a second. So. are they still using Google Glass to do that kind of stuff?

Speaker 1 | 44:16.929

I don’t think so. That project, I think, got shelled during the Bayer purchase and a couple other things on the business side. So I don’t think they’re doing that anymore. But Google Glass itself, as far as I’m aware, is still alive and well. They just sell it as an enterprise version now. The first generation one was, eh, it did its job. It was designed to… you know get the idea into people’s hands and it was a raging okay but the enterprise ones that i played with kind of before i got out of that space are actually pretty decent so a raging okay like that um you know the the reason i was

Speaker 0 | 44:58.814

wondering was because you know here i am we’re talking about curiosity and everything and i’m i’m already blending that with the current or some of the current technologies that we’re seeing more and more of so um and i can’t remember where i saw it but i saw something with farming and drones and so being able to fly over the field and and get your um yield assessment and and having drones do those inspections for you you So being able to take exactly what you guys were using Google Glass for, put that capability into a drone, and drones then hit up huge fields and do this stock-by-stock inspection of the fields.

Speaker 1 | 45:46.251

Oh, yeah. Drones have been huge in Admin. They were just kind of getting started when I was in it. And they’ve only gotten bigger. It’s like aerial photography on steroids that you can call up on command. And it’s a whole lot cheaper. One other thing, though, that I know was getting played with. I have no idea where this went. I only talked to the guy a few times. He was a rather large farmer, I think in Montana. I don’t remember. And his son was really into drones. So he built a homemade hexacopter that weighed like… 60 plus pounds. I mean, this thing was huge and outfitted it with spray tanks. And what he decided to do is see, okay, what happens if I do targeted application of herbicides, weed killers in a field? How much is that going to change my inputs? And is it going to help my yields? So they took a little 40 acre field and basically gave it to his son and said, here, you go ahead and run your tests with this and let’s see what happens. And this is all completely manual. He had an integrated machine vision or anything like that to identify where the weeds were, or any technology like that that was coming later. But just through manual piloting and manually running the drone once or twice a week, I think, they dropped their inputs by something like 60% or 80%, and the yield was unaffected. It was fantastic.

Speaker 0 | 47:17.961

Nice. Okay, so huge. cost avoidance that led to a higher revenue because of the cost, less cost.

Speaker 1 | 47:28.897

Yeah, they weren’t really expecting any higher yields out of the deal. They were just hoping that it would be a parody of typical broadcast spraying. And it was. The yields were pretty much the same, but they used way, way less in the way of inputs. So they were able to make a higher profit off of that field. just because they were sending a drone out to go spray for them.

Speaker 0 | 47:54.641

So, all right, let me try to jump tracks back into the true velocity. And what are some of the things that you guys are doing that you can talk about? Like, there’s got to be some testing. There’s got to be some quality control. There’s got to be some stories around that that are different as far as IT or just, you know, your experience with the business. You know, I’m… Obviously thinking of things like the high-speed cameras and watching what happens when they’re hitting some of the gel blocks or something like that. But is there anything else out there that you’re having to deal with in support?

Speaker 1 | 48:35.474

Oh, we go one step further than the gel blocks. This one I know they’ve mentioned in interviews, so I’m fine to talk about it. So our stuff, I have to keep thinking of that in the back of my mind. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 48:46.797

definitely not trying to get you in any trouble. Or us.

Speaker 1 | 48:50.278

So our composite cases are translucent. You can see light through them, unlike brass casings where you can’t. So our chief of engineering, my manager actually, Ken Overton, Dr. Ken Overton, he built a clear chamber that we could fire rounds in. And we could watch how propellant is burned inside of the round as it’s burning. We had a whole bunch of high-speed cameras focused right on it, looking at it very, very closely. And we could track the flame front from when the primer was struck and the powder was initially ignited all the way up until the round actually separated from the case. And doing stuff like that and being able to see this data that no one’s ever seen before let us do some really cool optimization when it came to making our rounds to the point where, I can’t remember which round it is, but… One of our rounds, we were able to decrease the powder load in it by 10%, thus saving us on inputs. But we get all of the exact same characteristics. So the same speed, the same energy on impact, same flight characteristics, everything. So we get to deal with some pretty interesting tooling as well. We’ve got our test lab, which I joke, my office sits at the end of it. Yes, the end that they shoot at.

Speaker 0 | 50:17.062

That’s why I started giggling right away.

Speaker 1 | 50:21.045

So I hear them very well when they’re testing, but I know we’ve got several traps in the way between me and the actual bullet. And then… like a quarter inch of AR 500 steel between the traps in the wall and then multiple concrete walls until it gets to me. But still a little disconcerting every now and then, especially when we’re shooting some of the bigger stuff.

Speaker 0 | 50:43.041

But you can’t help but think of what’s happening on the other side of the wall.

Speaker 1 | 50:47.623

Exactly. Well, especially when, you know, where we’re at, it kind of sounds like somebody hammering for the most part, you know, like somebody banging on the wall, but you know, somebody shooting at you. Um. But our test lab has all kinds of fun things. So we’ve got one station which is designed for platform testing, which means these are real weapons either that we’ve designed or that we’re using from partners. And how does our stuff work in that? And we can capture all sorts of data around it. And then we’ve got test barrels, which are specially designed barrels that they’re hard mounted, they’re breach fed one at a time. But we’ve got pressure transducers all the way down. the barrel so that we can track pressure curves as the round separates from the casing, moves down the barrel and exits. And then we’ve got laser curtains all the way down this tube so that we can see what the speed looks like at different locations. If there’s any fall off, make sure the bullet is not tumbling, make sure it’s doing what we expect it to do, that sort of stuff. And the amount of data that we can gather from that is kind of staggering. And we… modify well we didn’t really modify we kind of used that same technology in our molding process so that we can gather pressure data inside every cavity of the mold every time a shot of plastic goes into it and that lets us take a look at you know how is the mold performing is the plastic flowing the way we think it should be what pressures did we see and it also lets us you know filter out the rejects before they ever get filled or you know make it further down the process. So very interesting stuff and staggering amounts of data that comes out of these things.

Speaker 0 | 52:32.894

Yeah, I was just, I mean, you mentioned one thing that I’ve never heard of, but I’m thinking I’ve got it right, you know, laser curtains. So I’m just imagining a section in a room where, you know, lasers going either top down or left to right, and just a… Using that for the sensors and being able to do imaging or something because of that. Am I somewhere on target with that?

Speaker 1 | 53:02.334

No, you’re pretty much there. We use laser curtains in a couple different places in the facility. On the one hand, it’s from a testing perspective. So we can get very, very accurate measurements as to when a projectile breaks the plane of that laser curtain. It’ll immediately trigger and we’ve got, you know. sub millisecond, I think it’s down to a couple microsecond timing intervals that we can determine where that round is. And then we also use it out on the machine floor as a safety feature. So for some of our equipment where manual intervention is required, we’ll have laser curtains in place. Those I think have been a little more industry standard for a while, but those will shut the machine down and trigger an e-stop if somebody breaks their plane while the device is in function or in cycle.

Speaker 0 | 53:52.694

Wow. Okay. That’s kind of cool. So, you know, so there is some reality to the thought of those lasers sweeping through the room as somebody’s trying to break in and steal something from the, you know, a Mission Impossible 5 or whatever it was.

Speaker 1 | 54:09.441

I’ve always wanted to build a room like that just to confuse the heck out of anybody that breaks into it. Wouldn’t do anything. It would just look cool.

Speaker 0 | 54:17.785

Yeah. And then… Keep pumping in smoke or something so that it can be the lasers.

Speaker 1 | 54:23.607

Keep the hazers going all the time.

Speaker 0 | 54:26.929

Those laser curtains, how visible are they? Or is it not visible to the human eye?

Speaker 1 | 54:33.532

They’re infrared for the most part, so you can’t see that they’re on. You’ll see kind of a dull glow from either side, and that’s about it. Kind of what you’d see from the IR illuminator on a security camera or something like that.

Speaker 0 | 54:46.877

Yeah, you put the right… glasses on or something that does that separation, the polarization, and then you can see it.

Speaker 1 | 54:53.895

Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 54:55.788

Or use another camera to look.

Speaker 1 | 54:58.108

Exactly. You can kind of see it on phone cameras. Those are getting more and more IR shielded as camera generations improve. But you can still kind of see them on that as like a purplish glow. But yeah, that’s a good way for us to either keep machines safe, which, like I said, I think that’s been an industry for a little while. I haven’t been on the manufacturing side that long, so I’m not sure. But from a testing perspective, it’s… invaluable being able to get you know ultra precise data as to exactly when something moves in front of that sensor but then for our qa side we use a whole lot of other optical measuring systems as well uh first time i ever saw one of the giant zeiss optical measuring machines was at our facility and we do that to test some of the internal components of our rounds before they either go out for manufacturing or you know if we’re prototyping something new Oh, and one other fun piece that behaves, but this is one piece that a lot of places I don’t think do. We actually do have an MRI machine in our office. It’s an industrial one. It’s a smaller one, but it allows us to take pictures basically of the inside of a completed round so that we can see how’s the powder packing. You know, is the, well, and it gives us enough resolution to say, is the bond between, you know, different plastic components or the. the plastic in the round or the plastic in the base, you know, what does the bond look like at a very fine level? Are there any bubbles? Are there any gaps? Things like that. So it was a kind of an eyeopening experience when I came in for my interviews three years ago and you see the big, you know, radiation warning sticker on the door. It’s kind of like, I know we make ammunition, but what else do we make?

Speaker 0 | 56:48.150

Yeah. Wait a minute. So, so how did they, There’s got to be some of the rounds that you’re investigating that have magnetic properties to them that are still certain levels of that, right?

Speaker 1 | 57:05.439

Yeah, I did misspeak. It’s not an MRI machine. It’s a CAT scanner. It uses x-rays for everything. We just call it the MRI for ease of use. But yeah, all of our rounds actually. uh have a magnetic component so we use a steel base at the very bottom of it to kind of anchor it to give the gun something to pull on to eject the round and then also it makes it easier from a cleanup perspective at like you know a training range or something because you can just wave a magnet over it and you pick them all up makes it so much easier okay

Speaker 0 | 57:40.861

interesting thought there um All right. So what advice do you have for tomorrow’s generation or anybody that’s listening to us that’s trying to figure out how to get out of the data center in a closet and get into the executive boardroom? At least as a geek or as a nerd, how do we help make that transition besides, at the very least, being able to speak to the business and understand why? What else you got for us?

Speaker 1 | 58:14.368

Being able to speak to the business is hugely important, like we’ve said, but being able to understand the business, figure out where they’re coming from, what is driving the business side of it. Start understanding where the profit and loss statements come from, what the motive is for how can we earn money on this thing. Try and look at it from the business’s perspective, as well as stay curious. Find new and cool things that can make. a section of the business more efficient. It can make their lives easier. Look into those things, you know, prototype some ideas. You don’t have to physically have the device with you. Just, you know, write down some ideas, talk to people about it, try and get some support of, hey, would it be cool if we could do this? And, you know, chop it around. Go talk to users. Go out and live in their shoes for a little bit. It’s always good just to get out of the data center, get out of the server room, and…

Speaker 0 | 59:11.320

go see what people are doing and see what their problems are and you might have a solution already that can help them yeah for sure i mean yeah it’s amazing what we have in our toolbox and it’s it’s that other piece of it that that we’re not saying but it’s that that ability to see damn alerts um to to see how something’s being used and see how you could reapply its capabilities in a uniquely or a completely new way for a separate type of solution.

Speaker 1 | 59:49.106

Exactly. Exactly. It’s how can I, how is somebody else using this? Can I do something similar or can that thing help me in this other completely unrelated area? There have been so many times throughout my career where, you know, drones were a great example. They were cool. They were fun. We were using them for aerial imagery. And somebody went, hey, I can put a sprayer on that. Let me see how that works. Being able to kind of think sideways, think outside the box and see, is this. an application that’s never been tried before? Is this something that another, you know, business vertical somewhere out there, say the healthcare industry has already done? And if so, can we adapt it to what we’re doing? How can it help us? Can it make us money? Those sorts of questions.

Speaker 0 | 60:40.668

Those are, it’s all great advice. It’s, you know, understand the financials, speak the business, look at it from the sides, think outside the box. All of those fun ones and put them into practice and then communicate with others. Talk.

Speaker 1 | 60:56.322

That’s the big one.

Speaker 0 | 60:57.583

Yeah. Be able to talk to people.

Speaker 1 | 61:01.106

That is the big one.

Speaker 0 | 61:03.248

So is there anything you want to promote, Drew? Is there anything that Drew wants people to know about or you want the world to know about Drew?

Speaker 1 | 61:13.256

I mean, come check out our website, TVAMO.com. See what we’re working on. We’ve got our commercial line. Out there right now, yeah, I don’t have too much to promote. I’m an IT guy at heart. I like to hide in the dark.

Speaker 0 | 61:31.118

Give me pizza and a monster.

Speaker 1 | 61:33.219

Exactly. I’m good to go for the weekend. I’ll get that server upgrade done.

Speaker 0 | 61:39.622

All right, sir. Well, it’s been an awesome conversation. Thank you very much.

Speaker 1 | 61:44.023

Thank you.

Speaker 0 | 61:45.224

And I hope this was enjoyable for you. I know it was for me. definitely a very interesting and engaging conversation.

Speaker 1 | 61:52.987

Hey, it was fantastic. Thank you so much for having me out here. I appreciate it.

Speaker 0 | 61:57.329

Thank you. And those of you listening, please make sure to stop by wherever you got this podcast from. Give us a thumbs up and leave a comment. Let us know how we’re doing. That’s definitely how we get to know what we need to do and how we can make this better and fit your needs. So please, customers, let us know. All right. Thank you very much, Drew.