The Exchanges

Q it's so important. So I really hope you stick with us to the end. And hear everything he has to say because it's a tremendous amount of value and I had a really great conversation. So I hope you enjoy this interview with Tom Pierce. So Tom, tell me about your experience in the military. What was it like? Did you enjoy being told what to do all the time?

A Certainly. It was, well, actually I, I ended up not being told what to do all the time. Uh, the military training drilled that into me real heavily. Uh, and that was about, uh, nine months of training, but it was actually on the first day I reported for duty. I was supposed to be, uh, an, an officer in a nuclear ammunition logistics company. And my very first day of reporting, uh, my, my new commanding officer informed me that I had been reassigned, like minutes before I even showed up. And, uh, they had seen my math background and my, my interest in computers, and yeah, this is 1981, so pretty early. And, um, they were just forming this analysis team. So I got the incredible opportunity to be as a brand new second lieutenant included in a very senior, uh, combination military civil service analysis team, immunizing, uh, analyzing ammunition and missile maintenance logistics for the army. And pretty much my entire four-year tour was spent in that analysis team learning from military and civil servants much senior, much wiser to me, uh, in the very early days of the Army's use of computers to try to manage the logistics, simulation modeling, all kinds of fascinating things. And, and yeah, I, I used this old Desktop that had a dust cover on it that was on my boss's desk, and nobody was using it, so I asked if I could just play with it. Basically, I used it to do briefing slides, …

AI assessment note: “actually I, I ended up not being told what to do all the time.”

Q And oftentimes afterwards, uh, they will end up getting into a field or, or creating a business around the thing that they were working on in the military. And they'll have full right to create some sort of IP around what they've done. Do you think there's a similarity here, uh, between the U S and the Israeli armies, or is it not common to have done what you've done?

A Well, uh, I, I don't know if it's common now. It certainly wasn't common then, you know, computers were, were brand new and I'm not even sure I had heard the term intellectual property rights back then, but certainly the things, the software that I wrote while in uniform belonged to the U S army. Um, after I got out of the army, I spent a number of months in minimum wage jobs before a defense contractor who knew of me from my time in service got ahold of me and wanted to use my experience. And then I started developing software for them for about seven years. And then after about seven years with them, I finally decided I wanted to kind of go out on my own. And I still didn't have the IP rights to anything I wrote because I was modifying code that somebody, that Boeing owned. So it really took me a long time before I, I, uh, negotiated with my employer and my customers the right to retain the, the property rights of the software I wrote. And that's quite a battle. It's still a very difficult field, but I ended up having to retain the services of a, of a, of a rather, uh, Talented intellectual property rights attorney to help me negotiate the terms and conditions of my contracts. But, uh, yeah, it, it, it's still slippery. And, and I think in some ways it's getting even slipper, slipperier as far as, uh, what are the boundary lines around what I wrote versus what I, what ideas I…

AI assessment note: “the software that I wrote while in uniform belonged to the U S army”

Q experience in working for defense contractors in those early days. Um, so you didn't have any rights over what you were coding, and I think that's common. I think when I had my tech company, we had people sign away the right to the code that they were developing. Um, because we were paying them for that code. So why should they have, uh, you know, the right over that?

A Exactly. And in fact, for me, it was third hand. It was the U S army ballistics research lab that was paying my employer to write code for them. So I wrote code for my employer who, you know, so the, the code belong to the U S army. And, um, we, we just kind of retain some of the basic ideas and structures and, you know, those are yours. Uh, you, the thoughts, the education, the learning, as long as you're not actually, you know, cutting and pasting, copying exact proprietary algorithms or anything like that. And I didn't do any of that, but certainly my way of thinking was very much shaped by the simulation modeling and logistics applications that I wrote. Both while in uniform and, uh, under the Ballistics Research Lab.

AI assessment note: “for me, it was third hand. It was the U S army ballistics research lab”

Q What's the most important thing you think you've learned so far in life?

A Oh, very, very good. Um, I think it is really good to approach every human you work with, with the presumption of innocence and the presumption of good faith. Um, I do consider myself a skeptic. I consider myself most times a grumpy old man in the balcony because I've been there, done that, been lied to too many times. But it is still better overall to, to treat each new encounter, each new relationship with a tremendous benefit of the doubt and a lot of leeway for mistakes. Actually, one corollary to that I learned from my, my son, who's been now been working for me for 15 years. And, uh, he, he's an optimist by nature. He, he believes nature is conspiring for his happiness, if only he'll pay attention to it. But when, when things are done poorly or, or, or badly, uh, his default response is to always, to, to never attribute to malevolence what can easily be explained by incompetence. Don't ascribe ill will. Don't, don't ascribe evil to somebody who might just be having a bad day or be overwhelmed or be untrained or, or, Any number of reasons that they didn't perform well. Don't assume that it's, that it's evil and malicious and malevolent that they're, you know, that they're trying to hurt you. I do have a tendency After so many times, you know, how many times do you overlook an error? You know, three times or 70 times seven, you know, to get, get into the New Testament a lit…

AI assessment note: “approach every human you work with, with the presumption of innocence”

Q So do you think the work you had done in the eighties was used in the first Gulf War?

A You know, I wish I knew that, uh, certainly some of the ideas were, uh, we were involved in a very collaborative environment. You know, I would travel over the country and meet the same people in different cities because we were all briefing the same concepts to different field commanders. And from the way it played out, many of the concepts that I was part of, I was involved in those discussions, uh, certainly seemed to have borne fruit in, in the, the, the way the conduct of the First Gulf War went. The logistics were really quite amazing, the way they played out. Um, and actually my first army boss ended up leading a tank battalion in that war. So, uh, yeah, the connections are there. I just don't know how strong.

AI assessment note: “certainly some of the ideas were”

Q So this led you, let's say out of the military and into continuing to do what you were doing. And you also started to become a pastor. How did you reconcile trying to do something good for a community? While doing something potentially deadly against other humans in other countries?

A That's a, that's a, that's a profound question. I'm glad you had the boldness to ask it. Um, my father was career Air Force. My uncle was career Army. So many of these issues I had kind of wrestled with through childhood and adolescence. Um, Even in one of my ethics classes that, in seminary, it was taught by one of the world's leading, you know, most renowned experts on biblical ethics, and the thing that sort of made his reputation was his concept of just war. What, what makes a war just? Under what circumstances is it good and right to step in and defend someone who is being attacked from An oppressor. And of course a lot of this, you know, grew up in the distant shadow of World War I and World War II, but then also informed by some of the really difficult ethical, uh, situations in Korea and Vietnam. And I thought that professor did such an outstanding job, and as it happened during that semester was when the first Gulf War started. So we were in class using his textbook of just peacemaking, ah, and analyzing the, the actions and decisions of the U.S. and its allies in whether or not to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. And it made just absolutely fascinating debate and discussion. I, I've never felt like the answers were simple and clear. Um, it was actually, you may be familiar with the, uh, science fiction writer Orson Scott Card. I heard him give a lecture that had n…

AI assessment note: “the thing that sort of made his reputation was his concept of just war.”