Welcome to this week's episode! Merritt Jones shares his life story and how his career collided with the Apollo program. We get a behind the scenes story of his work as a computer programmer and a astrodynamicist for IBM in the Mission Control Center during the Apollo 11 Mission.
Please check out and subscribe to my Youtube Channel and Newsletter!
JOSH KLOOZ, CFP®, MBA
WEALTH ADVISOR
Phone 281.719.0036
Text 281.699.8691
Fax 281.719.0156
jklooz@carsonwealth.com
1780 Hughes Landing | Suite 570
The Woodlands, TX 77380
Music by bensound.com
Welcome to this week's episode! Merritt Jones shares his life story and how his career collided with the Apollo program. We get a behind the scenes story of his work as a computer programmer and a astrodynamicist for IBM in the Mission Control Center during the Apollo 11 Mission.
Please check out and subscribe to my Youtube Channel and Newsletter!
JOSH KLOOZ, CFP®, MBA
WEALTH ADVISOR
Phone 281.719.0036
Text 281.699.8691
Fax 281.719.0156
jklooz@carsonwealth.com
1780 Hughes Landing | Suite 570
The Woodlands, TX 77380
Music by bensound.com
Joshua Klooz 0:01
most people are aware of their own financial balance sheet. As soon as we buy our first car or house, we become aware of it. If you're of a certain personality type, you may track it quite a bit. But I'd submit to you that we're also unconsciously aware of another balance sheet. And this one is sometimes tricky to measure and even harder to manage. Sometimes we often find it hard to put into words, but it's real nonetheless. I call this our intangible balance sheet. What I mean by this are those life principles, experiences, memories and stories that given any amount of money, we wouldn't drain. They're the memories that bring tears of joy to our faces, because we simply can't imagine life without them. We feel fortunate to have had them. It could be our first jobs, proposals, wedding days, burrs, struggles, anxieties, or fears, and maybe even some hindsight. It's all those things that melt into a memory that bring a distance stare to our face, and maybe even a smile. We feel lucky to have had them because they're what has made us us. So that's what I'm talking about when I talk about the intangible balance sheet. It's those moments in life that may be financially irrational, but which are indispensable parts of who we are. So, these episodes are focused on the stories that bring us joy, happiness, fulfillment, and ultimately may hold unnecessary keys that will direct the future for our family, friends, and maybe even neighbors. So listen in with us as we discover some of those stories that are meaningful to our guests. And maybe you'll even uncover hidden value on your own intangible balance sheet. Call this episode of the intangible balance sheet. I'm Josh Klooz, the senior wealth planner here for Carson wealth in The Woodlands, Texas. I'm really excited today to introduce to you all Merritt Jones. He has a very unique skill set and a very unique life experience and story. But without further ado, welcome to the podcast merit. Thank you for joining us. Happy to be here, Merit for level setting. And just to acquaint our audience with kind of your your story. Could you give us a little bit more about your background where you grew up?
Merritt Jones 2:20
Sure, I think it would be useful to understand my age, because it has a lot to do with, you know, with the way my life unfolded, it was kind of like being in the right place at the right time when some interesting things were happening. I was actually born in 1940 in Bogalusa, Louisiana. And shortly thereafter, at a young age, moved to Mississippi where I was where I went through high school, and also went to college in Mississippi. So I actually went through high school and elementary school, Intermediate School and High School in Central Mississippi. And it was kind of interesting, because it was a very rural environment and no one in my family had gone to college. And the key teachers kept talking about college now understand that I was taking vocational agriculture and shelf work. I subscribed to poultry farmer, you know, I was working in the fields. I actually judged livestock at the county fair, all that stuff that's sort of related to rural life, but somehow, through the guidance, some some of some very dedicated teachers.
They helped me get a scholarship to college, and I was the first person to go to college and in mathematics. And then I did some work in graduate, graduate work at William and Mary, in Virginia, and wound up working in the men space program, the Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas.
Joshua Klooz 3:43
And we'll get to that in a minute. But I do want to focus real quick merit on it seems that from an early age, you were attracted to technical fields, right? You remember a time where you kind of a light switch moment where you realized, hey, I really like going deep and knowing a lot about something that's that's narrow in scope.
Merritt Jones 4:07
Yeah, actually, it sort of happened a little bit by accident. I did not realize it, but I guess my teachers did. But it turned out that in the field of mathematics, and I was the fastest kid in the class and math, it that was a talent that existed Nowhere else in my family. So it was kind of an aberration. But, but the teachers recognized that I had this talent in math, and pointed out to me and when in fact, when I got to high school, the math teachers gave me homework that they gave to nobody else to do or credit. And so at that point, I said, Okay, I have some skills in math, which I really wasn't aware of other than people told me that it was unusual. And so math, physics, biology, chemistry, all of the science courses came easier to me and most of the other kids in the class And so that led to me deciding to be technical. And I said, gee, I'd like to go to work for IBM, because that was a computer company at the time. And then my junior year in high school, Sputnik went into orbit. And I said, Wow, that's really interesting. And it turned out that in my high school annual, if you actually look on your picture, it says that Mary Jones, the person most likely to go into space? Well, it was was the prediction for me as one of the predictions I make for every member of the senior class I was, that was prescient, for sure. And then, as as, as it went on through college, and I started to focus on math and physics, the idea of going to work in the space program became real appealing. And so eventually, I wound up working in the Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Joshua Klooz 5:55
So you were sounds like he's very gifted at math specifically. But you remember the first time he realized, man, I can solve really neat problems with math as a kid growing up, maybe maybe it doesn't come to mind readily. And if so that's okay. But I do,
Merritt Jones 6:10
I used to work summer jobs. Now, there's a difference between math and arithmetic. I happen to be pretty good in both of them. But I worked some summer jobs in the construction industry. And all the carpenters started asking me to add all their fractions together. God, somebody said, Hey, man, what 123 sixteenths and two and five eighths. You know, and, and so, and so I begin to realize that not many, you know, it wasn't unusual to me, because I could always do it. But then I began to realize that not everybody could could do these calculations in their head, I can still take square roots in my head, you know, to a degree like that. And so it's sort of it dawned upon me over a period of time, because other people recognize it. Before I did, and pointed it out to me. I did not recognize that I had this unusual talent in math and associated things like physics until it was pointed out to me and I can say the teacher, a high school math teacher gave me homework that she didn't give anybody else. And I found out that it was more difficult than the problems that that the class was working through. And so after a while, I said, Okay, so when I went to college, being a math major just seemed like the thing to do. And then I did well, and and so
Joshua Klooz 7:27
there's a there's a part that you've talked about a little bit, and I've read about where you had to make a choice between your employer, essentially, and can you talk to us a little bit about Sure. What led you to make one choice versus the other? Because I mean, they're both choices. Not every person growing up has the option for but you've made a choice based off of not even a hunch, but just where you thought, hey, this is where the action is going to happen. Can you talk and tell our audience a little bit more about that?
Merritt Jones 7:59
Sure. When I graduated high school, the major oil companies tech, Texaco's, and the shells and the exons are actively seeking math majors. And part of that was to be able to analyze the seismic data to make a prediction as to whether a whale was going to be dry or not. And and they were paying well, they were offering the best salaries around so a little bit like the llv golf League, right. They were offering the best salaries around and several of my other colleagues who actually went to the went to the Omnicom the big oil companies like the Texaco's in the shells in the axons. I made the decision and not wanting to be in the best technology that I could find the thing that interested me most and that was a space program. So I chose to go to work for IBM, because they offered me a position they were they were they actually scoured the country looking for advanced math people. And I was in I was in Williamsburg, Virginia, and they found me and brought me down to Texas, because they were scouring scouring for people that they considered had math talent, to work the Mission Control Center Project. And so I made the decision to go into that job which actually was reduced pay from what I could have gotten in the other one, but to me the technology involved in putting a man on the moon versus trying to help someone decide whether an oil well was going to be dry or not. Was was an easy choice for me to make.
Joshua Klooz 9:32
And then the next piece was Huntsville versus Houston. Can you talk to us about the thought process and the decision making there?
Merritt Jones 9:41
Yeah, well, the first job offer I actually had came from Verner von Braun's group and hotspot says to work on the Saturn five booster and the appeal of working for von Braun. Clearly the greatest rocket sciences test scientists we've ever known. At that time was extremely high. I actually accepted the job to work work there. And then IBM comes and offers me and that was in Huntsville. IBM offers me a job in the Mission Control Center, where they had the contract to do that. The Mission Control Center in Houston, and I started waiting, sort of the glory, the glory of launch control versus Mission Control. Basically, launch control, which is done by Cape Kennedy is over and 17 seconds once the umbilical cord drop, launch control is out of the picture and everything, everything else becomes Mission Control. So after thinking about that, for not very long, I declined to the job in Huntsville, and chose to work in the Mission Control Center in Houston. And that was that was really the right choice. Because that's, that's where the really good stuff was.
Joshua Klooz 10:53
Now, so what year are we talking when you finally moved to Hue? 63?
Merritt Jones 10:57
We're talking 1963 That was out of graduate school.
Joshua Klooz 11:02
So what me between 63 to Sure, what what history. Now remember, by
Merritt Jones 11:09
1963, we had finished the Mercury program. And we had started the Gemini program. Now, what's interesting there is that the Gemini Program, most people don't realize this was inserted. It wasn't a part of the plan to go to the moon. NASA von Braun, as smart as he was made an made a mistake in the plan to get to the moon, he thought we could get there in a single stage large rocket. And this unsung hero doctor again and talk to who both who's an engineer and Huntsville said you can't do that. It'll be too big. And we'll wait too much. You can't take it down and bring it back up. And they they shut him off. They sent him off and put him in a closet somewhere because nobody liked that answer. Well, after they, about a year or two later, when they got through doing all the calculations, they realized that they could not go to the moon in a single state rocket. And he was right. So he got him out of the closet. And he proposed that you had to rendezvous. You had descent you had to put a vehicle in orbit around the moon, send another one down, bring part of it back up rendezvous and come back. And they felt that rendezvous was extremely risky. And that's why they didn't want to do it. But he was right. And so it's so we had to put the rendezvous sequence in so the entire Gemini Program was inserted to practice rendezvous. I mean, that was it wasn't there before. So we inserted the Gemini program into practice rendezvous. So in 1963, we were on Gemini Titan two, that was that was unmanned. That was an unmanned mission. But we had finished mercury. And we were now in Gemini. That's the way I got off on that side road was the head to NASA inserted the Gemini program, your practice rendezvous because it was critical but considered risky. And if you didn't rendezvous with the moon, the people didn't come back. I mean, that risk of the consequences if you failed. So we put the demo. So we put the Gemini program and and we did that like 6263 64. But we're working Apollo already. So those of us who work Gemini would transition to Apollo some people had already started working Apollo. And so after I finished the Gemini, I work the rendezvous sequence that actually was was my area of expertise was was launched when to launch targets and rendezvous sequence, transition to Apollo. And so, so I went to work in June of 63. And I went home, July, July night thing, I think 69 You know, for Apollo 11. So, that's what I took the moment to work in 63, I went home and 69. But those are the key years for the Apollo program were actually 62 through 69, because in 69, and we actually landed now we had Apollo eight in front of that, and 68 and Apollo now on Apollo 10. And Apollo 11 landed. And then we went all the way to 17. So we went through 97 year two. So so my, my life with Project Apollo was basically 6319 63 to 1972. And then after that we had we did Skylab. And we did the the Russian docking program. And then we did Space Shuttle. And then we did space station. I got out of the space program at the beginning of Space Station because basically there was nothing new there. Everything had been done. In fact, we had a space station with Skylab. Most people forget that. But the Skylab which had four missions associated with was also a space station. And on one of our missions, I stayed there three months.
Joshua Klooz 14:58
Long time Yeah, especially I, especially in that timeframe. In the research that I've done and the things that I've seen, I came away struck by just the the intense amount of camaraderie that anyone involved in this project had, and teamwork and just overall. Just goodwill ultimately. And in today's society, it makes you look at you marvel at it. Were there ever points, it's easy for us looking backward, a step A, B, C, and D, it'll happen, or they can talk to us about some of the friction points that you encountered along the way. Was there ever a point at which it was unclear whether the operation was gonna be success? Well,
Merritt Jones 15:48
sure. Let me point out one thing, for those of people who have watched Apollo 13, and heard gene Krantz make the statement that failure is not an option. Our guiding thought was that we will not kill an astronaut, period. We just won't do it. And the schedule was off the table. We could not check it ask for money. I could ask for more people. I could ask him to cut requirements, but I could not alter the schedule. Okay, that was because we were going to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. Before the end of the decade, that was a challenge. And that's what we're going to do. Yeah, we had lots of problems, where we didn't know the answer to begin with. We didn't know if we were right, once we got the answer. So we had techniques for doing that. The number of challenges were astounding. But we always we always seem to find a way. You know, I would work rendezvous for almost three years I worked there were other problems, I would work for six months non stop, you know, and you say, Okay, well, that didn't work. And after a while you say okay, I now know nine ways that it will work. And so you go found the TIF one that does. And we basically had two issues. The problems themselves, the mathematical problems, which is orbital mechanics, we call it celestial mechanics. Today, they call it astrodynamics. Right. But the problems themselves are extremely complex, you know, and you're in you're trying to work it and one day you say, Gee, I wonder if I really need to include relativistic factors. And you say, No, that the effects of relativity are smaller than the errors we have in the earth model. So we're just going to use Newtonian physics. So that's a decision you make. And it turns out that that was the right decision to make, we didn't refer to time, right. And so we had, so we would sometimes work for months or years, the translunar injection, mid course correction and lunar orbit insertion, descent, acid and trans Earth injection back to reentry. That was a that was a group of incredibly smart people working six or seven years to get that sequence to work. So we had two problems. One is we could actually come up with the right answer to the problem mathematically, and then it wouldn't fit in the computer because it wasn't fast enough, and it didn't have enough storage. So now you're sitting here and you've got a solution that is mathematically correct. And you can't program it in the computer, and the computer can't keep up with real time. And so now you have to go back, and I hesitate eighth grade, but we'd have to change the formulation to where the answer is still good enough. But it's now much, much faster. And smaller than it used to be. Art won't fit in a computer. And humans can't keep up with real time spaceflight, we can't, the computer has to fly the launch vehicle, the computer has to take us through the maneuvers. Because the human brain just as I asked enough. So we had so basically the second, the first part of the problem was to solve the problem mathematically. And then the second part was to get it to fit in the computer and run in real time. And those problems? No. Yeah, there were times that we did not know if we could even get it done. And once we got it done, would it really work. But you know, we would test this stuff over and over hundreds of simulations, independent verification, I would take it to a friend of mine and say tear this apart. And he would, he would he would not be my friend for that day and try to tear the mathematics apart or whatever, listen to my assumptions. And so it was a constant challenge. And until he succeeded, we're never really sure because it hadn't been done before.
Joshua Klooz 19:53
What phase of the whole process did you hold your breath on the longest?
Merritt Jones 19:58
Oh, Ah, well, if you want to think of it, it probably the scariest part. If you look at points where you really can't afford much air is probably the key one is reentry. If we're launching into orbit, I can actually have some things go wrong, I can still launch into orbit, it may not be what I want, but I can get there. If I can't get there, I can go once around, come back and land. You know, or maybe we actually had multiple board modes, we had a board to orbit, we had what we call return to launch site, we had a floor what's around, so, so if we're launching, that's really dangerous, you know, but still, we had all we had ways to get out of it. If you mess up the reentry, you're done. Coming back from the moon, if we come into too steep, we burn up. If we come in too shallow, we skip out, and we don't come back. And so so probably the problem is now when you go down to the surface of the moon. Oh, that was that was pretty dangerous. But But lunar module, which had been built basically by Bell Labs, under Grumman contract was incredibly dependable vehicle. And so we had pretty good faith in the assets to be incredibly reliable. So the descent to the power decent to the surface of the moon and powered SSL was critical. And then you had to do a rendezvous, and you had to do a trans Earth injection to come back to the earth. But that reentered back at the Earth, you're coming in at 35,000 feet per second, which is 25,000 miles per hour. So you're coming in at 25,000 miles an hour, you have maybe maybe one to two degrees of angle, to hit the atmosphere just right, too steep, you burn up too shallow, you skip out. And when you come back, and when you would come back, there's no thruster control. So game over, basically. So that that long winded answer to your question was the part that scared me the most would have been Earth reentry coming back from from the moon. And that was probably what scared most people most but we practiced it a lot of times.
Joshua Klooz 22:30
They move talks earlier in the green room was like, it would be frightening and scary, even today is by today's standards to think about strapping yourself to the noes have that much fuel, I can only imagine what that must have been like, well,
Merritt Jones 22:47
you know, the standard one they attributed to several astronauts I typically attributed to John Glenn. And he made the famous statement that said that, what were you thinking when asked the question, what were you thinking about when you were sitting on top of the rocket, he said, All I could think about that everything I'm doing was made by the lowest bidder. I've heard that. But if you take a look at the Saturn five the Artemis rocket is actually a little bit more powerful. But for 50 5060 years that was the Saturn five was the most powerful rocket in the world. And it burns 15 tons of fuel per second and burn for two minutes and 12 seconds and it took a 36 storey building. The Saturn five stack is 363 feet tall. That's that's a 36 storey building. 30 Something feet wide, weighed over, weighed over 3000 tonnes 6.16 point 2 million pounds depending on what was there. And it took this 36 storey 3000 ton vehicle from zero to over 4000 miles an hour and a little over two minutes. And you have to count up, get that zero over 4000 miles an hour. You're lifting at 36 storey building into the year. In two minutes. It's astounding and you're in the astronauts were sitting on top of it. When I watched the launch. I told somebody you don't watch it as much as you feel and I was three miles away in the VIP viewing area. And you feel the launch. I mean it vibrates everything. And that was three miles away. incredible institution. Oh, by the way, if you want a piece of trivia that I use, as people said, we launched 363 feet and we got 10 feet seven inches back 10 feet, we launched a 36 storey building and we got one story back which was the command module. Let's see what happened to the rest of it. Where is it at That's a fun question to have people pose about, well, gee, you know what happened to the first stage and the second stage and the third stage, and the launch escape system and the service module and the instrument units. They're scattered all over it will their various places. But basically, we lost 36 stories and we get one back. That is in the, in the next?
Joshua Klooz 25:25
Where do you go from an operation? Oh, you are accustomed to working very problems. There's ever one. After everything came back, there's a sense of accomplishment, relief. Where do you go? How do you? How did you personally process
Merritt Jones 25:47
this is true. And it took us 20 years to realize what we had done, that none of us working a program had any idea that we were a part of history. That sounds sort of strange to say that, but it's true. We were a bunch of most of us are 2324 years old. We were out of college, we were engineers, and math majors are like electrical engineers, aeronautical engineers, we were we were buying our first house, we just gotten married, we're having our first kids. And oh, by the way, we're gonna put a man on the moon, you know, but to us, we were doing our job. And we were scrambling on everything. And we felt like we didn't know anything. And we were trying to learn as we never studied as hard in graduate school, or college, as I did once I went to work. I mean, it wasn't even close. You know, it may it made college and graduate school look easy. In that setting we had to do because the penalty is not a bad grade. The pin is a vehicle that doesn't complete his mission with the lives of astronauts at stake. Right. And so we didn't understand what we had done, our wives didn't. And then we're at this 20th reunion, I remember it clear as a bell, and you get some newspaper people here and some television. And they're telling us that we were a part of history, and we're trying to realize, come to the realization that that was true. So it really took us 20 to 25 years to understand what we had been a part of. And then 25th anniversary, and then when we had the 50th anniversary, it really came home in 2019. They went out they found us, you know, they did did did interviews with TV crews. There's some stuff floating around on the websites and stuff. And you say, wow, yeah, it must have really been significant, you know, because they, because everybody thought it was but but to us, we did not understand the historical nature of what we were doing. We were just trying to do a job that that's where we could, you know, now after that, when we got through with that, though, we found that we had created all of the underpinnings of today's computer systems. We basically created information technology, as you know what today. And there's a whole list of things from real time systems to checkpoint restart to databases, to networking, to distributed processing, to transaction processing, systems management, almost everything that you see today, from a computer point of view, had its origins in the early days of the space program, because it didn't exist and we had new created.
Joshua Klooz 28:22
Can you share just a few a few more details and like how long it takes to understand that does it is it typically just the capability to solve a problem, you're like, hey, we can do that for you. And how does that happen? Especially within a corporation, like,
Merritt Jones 28:37
bear with me this, this might get a little bit tedious. But what happened was each each thing that you attempted to do led to the next step. And basically, it wasn't that we planned it so much as it was necessary. Because now as a mathematician, there were no computer science majors at that time did not exist. So if you were an electrical engineer, or a mathematician, or a physicist or a chemist or an aeronautical engineer, our civil engineer you programmed. In fact, after a while you started hearing terms like computational fluid dynamics and Computational Chemistry, because I started developing the mathematics specifically to be on a computer. But that wasn't the way it was we would come up with a math and then we'd have to redo the math to make it fit into the computer memory and CPU. So, so remember that so So basically, the people who did the initial programming, or very often the people who developed a mathematics later only brought in coders or programmers. But initially, I did my own stuff. I do the cat I do the mathematics for for a rendezvous sequence, and then we're programming and so that that may, that made us intimately familiar with the computer itself and programming languages and compilers, only conjectures and all that other stuff. Okay, so. So we had inadequate memory and CPU and IO. So we had this constant battle between speed and accuracy. So now we needed to have some sort of systems management, I'm developing a system. And so I've got control that but then the testers want to test it. So now we have to have a test system, right. And then once they test the system, NASA wanted an operational system to do the simulations and train your flight controllers. So the concept of a development system, a test system, and an operational system got created back then actually were on tape is what they were then but but that concept still exists today. And they call it the promotion scheme. You go through user acceptance testing, you go through low level testing, you go through beta testing alpha test, but that that concept, which is still used today was created, basically back in the Mercury and Gemini program. It just evolved where it is today. The if you were if you were running the whole mission, and you got through launch and the computer failed, and you wanted to practice on Robert, you didn't want to have to go back and go through launch again. So we created the concept of a checkpoint restart, said, Okay, every once in a while, I'm going to take a picture, literally a picture on their computer memory, right. And then if something fails, I can go back to that point. And I can load it and I don't have to spend all my time going through whatever it took me to get to that point. That's huge, because the computers are slow. Oh, but what happens? What about the things that took place since then, since that checkpoint is only five minutes ago. So we had to create a logging system. So we had to create a logging system for the transactions. So that once we put the checkpoint in, we could go from the checkpoint up to the current time of the failure by Re re entering your transactions. So that's how the logging system got created. And so and then, we've said, Well, what if the computer itself fails? What do we do? Well, we need to failover to another computer. So the idea of failover train computers, we create, in fact, we call it the mission operational computer, the dynamic standby computer and the static standby computer. Right? That to take to account for the fact that the computer itself might fail. And so we had to create the concept of both checkpoint, restart and failover. And that was done. And basically, most of that was actually perfected in the Gemini program after mercury. Right. And so so now we have checkpoint restart. Oh, and oh, by the way, you had to create a real time system. So we took the standard operating system from IBM, and made it and took it from OS to RT O S, real time operating system. So we've created the real time operating system to keep up with the clock. So now you've got, you've got a real time operating system, you get checkpoint restart, you've got logging systems, right?
And, and so so each problem would lead to the next problem like that, and, and then pretty soon, we had more data than we could handle. The databases weren't big enough. So now we had to learn how to expand the databases, which mean, metadata. The data about the data became as big as the databases themselves, we had to change the way we looked at databases, we had to change the way we looked at the metadata. And what did you search if you were looking for something? And then, and it turned, what was really interesting is that when we found out later on, when we got to where we needed to distribute the computing system, we were in Houston. So we go to the pipeline industry, and the pipeline industry has a stuff called a SCADA system, supervisory control, and data acquisition. And it's what they use to control the flow of fluids or gas, through pipelines using sensors and pumps and stuff works perfectly for a network of computers. So we actually went under using a pipeline control system for the distributed computing system on the vehicles. But that was, but we thought about that, because we were in Houston. And we say, well, those guys have got to have something, you know, for their for the pipelines, which had 50 60,000 miles of pipelines with these pumps, and they had to redirect stuff as it sounds a lot like a network does, right. And so, so you, you, you kept going to the next problem, and now people started calling us around the country. Because if it was real time, if it was big, if it was fast, if it was nasty, mean tough, hard to do. We'll go to Houston. Those guys know how to handle that. stuff. So now you get calls from wind tunnels. wind tunnels have never been real time before they say can you make our windows operate in real time, so we can actually modify the test without having to shut it down, look at the results and run the test again. And we said, Sure. And so now we're helping NASA Langley and NASA Ames and our main gear and Development Center, we helping all these places with their windows by helping them go to a real time system. Right? And then there is an end of the story. So, so Well, the computers aren't big enough to handle the big problems that we have. So what if we put a bunch of them together? So let's take a bunch of little computers, and gang them up, call it a cluster, we'll create a cluster. So a very smart gentleman arts Livermore National Lab, march out near San Francisco, Dr. Eugene Brooks wrote this article called Attack of the Killer microbes. And what he said was, was if you if you put enough little machines together, you can make them behave like a big machine for certain kinds of problems. So we actually went out there we being IBM, and myself, I was the architect to help put together this cluster of workstations to do the job of the supercomputer, Cray supercomputer, actually, at a fraction of the cost, that doesn't work for all problems, but there are problems, which it works, okay. And we did that. Now, to show you how things grow. We put this cluster together and the concept caught on and other people started wanting clusters. So we started building clusters around the country. And the clusters got bigger. The first one was 14 computers. And then pretty soon it was 30, something that was 60 something, and it kept so IBM likes the idea. So they put them together in a rack, they strip off the keyboards, they strip off the displays, they just get to the processes, and he rack them up. Right. And so what's interesting is that this led to a computer called the SP one which led to a computer called Deep Blue. Deep Blue is the machine that beat Garry Kasparov at chess match. Deep Blue leads to a later version called Blue Gene, GE Na, lutein, which is the computer that they use to map the human genome 10 years before anybody thought they could and Blue Gene leads to watch, which won the Jeopardy, and which is now out there. So that was a revision, you know, from a cluster of workstations and to a bigger cluster, and to into a deep blue into Blue Gene and Watson and another companies are doing the same kind of progression to. And so now we can basically put 10s of 1000s of processors together to solve massive problems like the Big Bang expansion, our global weather prediction, you know, mapping the human genome, things like that. Pharmaceutical drugs, simulations, things like that can now be attacked by these kind of machines.
Joshua Klooz 38:13
Mary, you've talked to this point in conversation primarily about the challenges he encountered. And the technical expertise needed to overcome those challenges. And just as problem sets, we spoke earlier, you had talked about the skill sets, decision making processes and how principles drive those processes and enable people to make decisions at the lowest level and enable them free them up to make more progress quicker than they could have otherwise. Can we shift just real quick because I found it really fascinating because it it's applicable to almost every industry in almost every situation.
Merritt Jones 39:03
Yep. And if I don't, if I don't get to the point, just jump in and help. Right. And what I found out was when I left high school, when I left high school, I went to a very tough private law school called Millsaps. College, very small school in Jackson, Mississippi, still, by small I mean 1100 to 1200 total enrollment. I'm sitting at the table on my first day it was a it was a it was it was a world changing day for me. I'm sitting at the table with seven people. There six valedictorians and assoluta Dorian, and the salutatory was in the same class as one of the valedictorians and I remember thinking to myself that the playing field just changed. Everybody there is just like you. So you go through college, you go to graduate school, and guess what the playing field changes again, keeps going. And now I go into the space program, they send me down to Houston. And I'm in, put in a department called the math analysis department and the playing field changed again, you could never get comfortable. Because every time you started getting comfortable, you put into a new situation with more challenging problems. And people just as smart as you are, in fact, you learn that after a while, what you do is you learn more from each other than you do from the books and stuff, you go into work the problems together, we, we had, we had problems flowcharts that would fill a wall with five people sitting around trying to determine, you know, what you do here, what you do there? What happens if this fails? You know, if I if if the engine, if the engine shuts down early, what do I do? If my, if I lose my platform, what do I do and you got you got maybe several really smart people trying to figure this out. So after a while, we fit more on each other than we did on the books. And that told us to put they're really good at told us to put those people together. So don't spread them out as you put them together because they can learn more from each other than any other way. And so we actually would congregate into the groups that would work those kind of problems. We take the people who could do it the researchers net and put them together, I mean, physically put them together and adjacent offices. So they can talk to each other. Okay. Not to make it to collaboration is it, it's more difficult, I think, I think if you could, because we did so much by looking at it, we call it it just stopped, right? I could never solve a problem until I could wrap my mind around the problem. Right? If I'm going to try to solve the problem of a rendezvous sequence, I've got to be able to manage a vehicle sitting on the ground or vehicle in the air and getting them together at some point down and what do I have to do to make that happen? Right. And so until I can wrap my mind around the problem, I couldn't solve it. Now. Oh, we did talk to each other over the phone itself, which, but I think at some point, you really get the most bang for the buck when you put everybody in the same room. And that's one reason is we do a lot of good stuff at conferences and workshop, we'd actually hold a workshop, when we tried to figure out how to distribute massive data worldwide. We held a workshop on it, because it was a really tough problem. And so we would bring the we invited like 20 to 25 environmental data researchers, and we put them together in a place and put them together for three days to try to adjust this problems. I think at some point, you need to get some together so they can interact with each other. But some of it can be done remotely certainly.
Joshua Klooz 42:53
Got it. I didn't want to derail it. But the question occurred to me and I had to ask,
Merritt Jones 42:57
Oh, but I think it's the key is I think that you get to a certain level, where you begin to learn by working with each other in the field. Because you can say, what if this and guess what, I'll do this, but you can't do that, because and you can get an interaction going there. That is just it's just difficult to get any other way. And so I specifically would put the people together if we had a tough what happened on Apollo 13? Right, Gene Krantz calls together a tiger team, you got three days and failure is not an option. Right. And they had, they had to solve the problem of what to do with a lack of oxygen sufficient oxygen in the lunar module. Either they moved the filters over and did it with duct tape. Remember, they had to solve the problem of not enough power left or restart the computer and Ken Mattingly brilliantly goes into the simulator, and reduces the startup power cycles by 20%, which we thought couldn't be done. And he did it. You know, but Gene Kranz, you basically had three days to save those guys. And Gene Krantz pulls together a tiger team. Right, and they work with each other. And they solved the two or three main problems that they had to solve. An authority would have been using a lunar module to do the thrust instead of the command service module. Right? But we learned to do that. And you put the people in the same room, you give them all the coffee and chocolate they could have literally, locked the door you go away, you put cops in the computer room, which they did. And that's the way you do that. So say no, we're okay.
Joshua Klooz 44:47
What other principles do you think stand out to you over the course of your career?
Merritt Jones 44:52
Okay. Some of the things we learned was that was to say, the level the playing field kept changing, it kept wives and you If you kept going up, which is, which is the way it should be. You need to be intellectually curious, I don't know of any any other way to say that. You want to know, not just what something does, but why it does it, you don't want to just know that you want to understand it. If you don't understand it, you can't extrapolate. Now remember, what we did was took a knowledge base that we had, and we had to extrapolate it to problems that we had never saw before. And if you did not understand the basic, and you didn't know whether you could extrapolate it or not. And so and so, the key is, the key is, is the is to have the understanding, that allows you to extrapolate to something that you haven't done before. And and to get that understanding, you need to be intellectually curious, you know, why? Why does, why does this thing do what it does? Kind of a thing, and fortunately, most of us were, are curious. You know, in, you sort of say, you know, each hard job you give me is an opportunity for me to learn something else. And the more I learn, the easier it becomes to be learned because not to sit is better. Right? And so and so how did we even think about using a pipeline industry package to solve a an on boards? Distributed computer system? Because that's a network. A pipeline is a network, just like an air traffic control systems and network just like their own interstate highway system is a network, switch network theory. And if it's network theory, and we understand the limitations, and we ought to be able to make this work, and we did. Okay, so and but what I found out pretty early was that the, probably one of the most important things to get something done is to get the right people to do it. The policies and practices and procedures are nice, the tools are nice and stuff. But but there, none of that will overcome incompetence, and get the right people in and they've got the wrong tools or the wrong policies around. They'll fix it. I mean, they will, they'll just fix the test that's there later. You'll give them the right guidance, give them the right ground rules, tell them what the objectives are. It's just like when Gene Krantz said failure is not an option. Here's what we need to do. You know, and then the people went off and did it. He didn't do it. Right, he had a group of incredibly smart people who went off and solve those problems under pressure with the world watching. Right? If you get the right people in the job, they'll do whatever they need to do. Yeah, and so and after a while, that just when I first became a manager, it was kind of bragged a little bit that I was the smartest guy in my department. Well, after I had been manager for a while, if I was the smartest guy in my department, it scared me to death. So you surround yourself with the best talent you can find. And they'll tell you what needs to be done. Another thing that, that and this sounds funny, but I'm convinced of it, is trust your gut. I, when people say, you know, I don't know what's wrong here. But something just doesn't seem right to me as if those are experienced people are smart people, I said, You better listen to them. Because something is going to be wrong. Every time we ignored a statement like that we paid a price for it. Now, what I think is really going on is somewhere in your experience. Something hasn't been subconsciously triggered, you don't know what it is, you're not quite sure what's wrong. But something is used, something is wrong here. Maybe it
Joshua Klooz 49:04
may some in the recesses of your brain.
Merritt Jones 49:08
You may realize what it is a few days later, or maybe maybe even a week later. But trust me, we're not when I've got a room full of these, these very smart, experienced people. And we're sitting here and we're trying to figure out how we're going to do something. And if somebody in that room says, I don't know what's wrong here, but I have a bad feeling. You better pay attention to it.
Joshua Klooz 49:30
Because it's really not a feeling it's something in your brain and in your subconscious.
Merritt Jones 49:36
Past experience has been triggered. And so we just we just we just found that you better you call it your gut feeling but just it but you better pay attention to it. And, and that and a lot of people we learn to trust that we say well, let's figure out what it is. And we would
Joshua Klooz 49:54
even call it an intuition is almost underserved
Merritt Jones 49:58
to a degree really pretty sure that we most of us felt it was something in the past, we just were not quite sure what what memory had been triggered. And sometimes we would actually remember what it was, you know, but the point is, don't ignore that, because it's going to get Yeah. And, and I mentioned something a while ago about and this is really important about, about not being able to solve a problem until you can wrap your mind around it. So you're sitting here saying, okay, and this is just one example, there are other problems. But this is the one at hand for us is, we've got a vehicle sitting on the pad. And we're going to sit it on the moon, and we're going to bring it back with people. How do you do that? You know, and so 1000s of people now work for a decade, you know, building upon what was in the past, to try to figure out what it takes to take something sitting on the surface of the Earth, send it to the moon landed on the moon, and bring it back to the earth and, and so we have to put our, you have to wrap your mind around the whole problem. To solve the pieces of Assisi, I've got to, I got to put it in Earth orbit. And then I got to send it to the moon and I got to put it in a lunar orbit, they're not canceled landed on the moon, I've got to bring it back up, I've got to send it back to Earth. And I've got to, it's got to go through reentry. And I've got to have oxygen and food can't take too long and it can't wait too much. Because if I add weight to it, then I need fuel to lift the weight, then I need fuel to lift the fuel, then I need fuel to lift the fuel that lifts the fuel the lift. So I mean it was and so so after a while you take this big problem, and you break it down into pieces, it would be like an architect trying to do trying to design a skyscraper. You know, and somebody's got to work the elevators, somebody's got to work the air conditioning system, somebody's got to, but But you have to conceive the big picture. As I used to say I, I have to wrap my mind around the big picture. And very often when you came to gas, like me or anybody else in this world, somewhere, there's a flowchart that's the size of a wall. Right, and people are up their market on this link, because that lets you see the whole picture. And you start to do something women, if I do this, that's gonna fit this down here. And I can, and you have to see that. And so that's where we call the to start. It's a little bit like if you've ever seen a car, and I put all the pieces of a car in front of you, it would mean nothing to you. But to a guy who's who knows a vehicle. So those are all the parts to a similar car. He knows the picture. Right, the big picture. And so we very often started by trying to see if we could, if we could understand the big picture. And then all the component pieces that we had to solve, we had to have a launch window, we had to have a launch targeting, we had to have a rendezvous sequence, we had to have a trajectory predictor, we had to have a database handlebar, you know, on and on and on. So now we need these 250 parts. And then people start working on those parts that oh, yeah, that part has five parts to it. You know? Yeah. And so it just keeps feeding that light and keeps branching out until finally you get the whole thing put together and you can make it work.
Joshua Klooz 53:33
Are there practical ways that you can start teaching yourself? I mean, I'm a father of four kids. And all the things that you've mentioned are all things that I want them to start understanding from a just from a problem solving perspective, in your mind is, is there are there ways that you can start fostering that at a young age and full transparency on the board? I'm on the board of a private school as well. And you start seeing these kids and you're like, man, there's so much potential, there's so much opportunity. Are there ways that you think you can start fostering those things at an early age?
Merritt Jones 54:10
Actually, I've tried that. I was a medical assistant in college. And the reason I became a math the system was just got the tutoring jobs. And in graduate school, I was also a tutor. I have tutor the football team. But, but what you try to do is to get them curious. Right, you can start asking questions. I think that intellectual curiosity is the single most important thing. So when something does something, and the question is, why does it do that? How does it do that? You know, it's what I'll tell you about the understanding. And that's intellectual curiosity. I asked one of the kids at the driving range the other dice guy who works at the at the golf club and it was raining I looked at it and I said, What's the best way to walk through the rain? To get to get the least wet? And a guy looks at me, I said, Well, do you stand up straight? You as you can tell that only your shoulders get wet? I said, Your Do you run real fast? Or do you walk slowly. But if you want, if you stand up straight, you have the you have the smallest area straight up, that's assuming the rains coming straight down. But then if you start moving, you now begin to sweep the space in front of you. And if you move fast enough, then you'll get wet all up and down. Even if the rain is coming straight down. So if so maybe going as fast as you can, should you been over? If you've been over you have you have more top air you expose but let's frontal area. I said, I don't really know the best way to go through the rain to get the least wet, do you? Right? Because I want you to think about this. So would you so we could try to do is to get intellectual curiosity I ask a person one time? How come? If I go from zero to 17 and a half 1000 miles an hour going out? And I go from 70 and a half 1000 miles an hour? Does he move coming back into the earth? How come I don't burn up going out? But I do burn up coming back? And that's a very good question, actually. In fact, I'm a lot of pretty smart people that couldn't answer that question. So what I tried to do was take it at any at any particular stage is to find a question that would be interesting to them, and pose the question to see if they can if they can understand it, or think about it, you know, and and it could be why do you have a rainbow? And oh, why sometimes? Do you have two rainbows? And was the second rainbow in in a reverse color from the first one? And how come the rainbow is always behind you? If this, if you look at a rainbow, you can be assured that the song is as on your back as it was it on your back. So what you do is you try to whatever age they may be, you try to find a question that will pique their intellectual curiosity to see if they can understand why it does what it does. In fact, I have somebody the other day, how do you hit two rainbows of center one and pick? How do you get one rainbow? And then I talked about refraction and reflection within a water molecule and I say oh, if it does it twice, by the way, you get two of them. And so and so at any age group, you can try to find a question that would be interesting at that age. And ask the right quick. Remember Einstein said he likes to talk to children. He didn't like to talk to other scientists. He wanted to talk to children because he learned more when you talk to children because they ask better questions. And so what can do is you try to with your kids with me with my with my brother, my older brother called me and said he wanted to be smart. He said how you learn to be smart. I said be intellectually curious. That's it. In what are you curious to try to find out why it does what it does so that you can understand it. And to me that intellectual curiosity is what you need to try to foster. Absolutely the world.
Joshua Klooz 58:36
Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us.
Merritt Jones 58:41
So a lot of fun. I was wondering introduces I had a coach friend who introduced me at a superconducting supercollider conference one time he said, This is Meerut Jones. He said he can speak an hour on anything in two hours if he knows nothing about it. And then he followed that up with that I had the ability to express a sentence and two paragraphs. So I can get welled up. So I hope this has turned out to be useful.
Joshua Klooz 59:12
No, this has been so much fun. Thank you again, and we look forward to future conversation. Thank you again for joining us for this week's conversation. We trust that your time has left you both enriched and inspired to better invest your own intangible balance sheet. As always, we wish you and your family continued truth, beauty and goodness on the road ahead. The opinions voiced in the wisdom and wealth podcast for Josh clips are for general information purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. investing involves risk including possible loss of principal. No strategy assures success or protects against loss. Guests are not affiliated with Carson Wealth Management LLC. To determine what may be a pro for you, please consult with your attorney, accountant, financial or tax advisor prior to investing. Investment Advisory services are offered through CWM LLC and SEC registered investment advisor. All right dress locally is 7080 US landing Boulevard, suite 570 The Woodlands, Texas 77380
Transcribed by https://otter.ai