Ep 48: Eddie Schutter, CTO of Switch

James Thomason: 0:05

It's The Next Wave Podcast episode 48. Our guest this week is Eddie Schutter. He's the chief technology officer for Switch with over 25 years of experience and leadership in the data center in information technology industry for organizations including eBay, at&t DCF technologies, the green grid data center pulse and other various advisory boards. He's a director of the IMA since board of directors, the executive advisor of the technical curriculum advisory board for CNET training and engineering advisory board for SMU Lyle School of Engineering. And he's a Navy veteran, he studied Aerospace Engineering at Texas a&m University. He resides in Dallas, Texas with his wife of 20 years and their 11 children. And Eddie. I mean, if we could start with the last thing first. You have 11 children. Are they all yours? Is this a Brady Bunch thing?

Eddie Schutter: 0:50

Yeah, no, I mean, they're all ours and my wife and I didn't none of them are twins. We just, you know, enjoy having a large family and, you know, manage our carbon footprint as best as possible.

James Thomason: 1:01

That's incredible. I mean, I have you know, automatically just deep admiration, because that is a lot of fathering. But I have more admiration for your wife because that is a lot of mothering.

Eddie Schutter: 1:10

Yeah, yeah. One extra kid in a bunch.

Brad Kirby: 1:14

I know you're in a farming too. Is that have anything to do with the helpers or? This guy?

Eddie Schutter: 1:22

Yeah, that's the old story. Right is you have large families just so you can have folks who work the farm but no, I mean, that's actually something that's just more or less do as, as a support for my family, my my parents and my in laws. But But yeah, I know it's relaxing this different, something different than, you know, day to day tech. So

Dean Nelson: 1:44

Well, Eddie, I've been waiting for a while to get you on the podcast here because we've known each other for a while. I don't know if you remember. But Bill Clayman was our first guest on this podcast, way back when when we started January 1 2020. Holy crap that was right before the pandemic. That's right. And you and Bill are kind of polar opposites, if I remember correctly, is that

Eddie Schutter: 2:08

bill's the younger, more attractive, charismatic version of me? Yes.

Dean Nelson: 2:15

He definitely has a bit more energy than all of us combined times. 10. Just so everybody's getting the idea. But listen to episode one. That was a fun one. But Eddie, I'd love to help our audience understand a little bit more about you. Can you tell us your journey how you got into tech and, and how you got to here because you're now the CTO of switch?

Eddie Schutter: 2:34

Yeah. Now so you know, for me, like a lot of people, particularly our age, Dean, is that, you know, I got, I got into tech, basically, in junior high, where I read Steve Wozniak's, you know, biography and got really interested in him and then got involved in computer programming on, you know, Commodore evicts, and the whole thing. And so from that journey of going from programming, and then going into the Navy, and being in electronics, and aviation, electronics, and then, you know, studying in aerospace, and then also, you know, kind of moving through, just really was able to touch on a lot of different disciplines that are related to digital infrastructure and what happens there. But my first like, real tech job, I would say, outside of the Navy, I was a police officer in the city of Richmond, California, and had to work in the office while and when I was in there, you know, you wrote some software and did that some other things and, you know, basically got asked to, to be the assistant IT director, part time. And then the rest of the time I was doing police work. And so that's sort of an odd entry into the market. And then, you know, we had our first couple of kids and my wife was like, Hey, I'd like pretty get out of police work. And I put the word out, and my project manager from PAC Bell encouraged me to come and fly there. And and so I went and interviewed and got the job and started as a network, a network engineer, level one, network engineering pacbell network integration. So that's sort of how I got started getting into the data centers, and, you know, beyond networking, was by by accident, you know, they asked me to build a network backbone for these internet data centers they wanted to build. Next thing I know, I was involved in the construction of the data center, you know, growing up, the son of a electrician, master electrician helped in general contractor, so understood how construction projects work. But, but yeah, so that's been sort of the evolution, you know, 20, almost 20 years at at&t. And then of course, she twisted my arm and convinced me that I should go to eBay. And so I went over and just enjoyed eBay. tremendously great people. You know, a lot of real strategic thinking and efforts around that. I got to a place where, you know, I knew we couldn't move back to the Bay Area and You know, wasn't, wasn't the best thing for everybody. And so, I looked at basically stepping out to do something different, maybe consult with private equity and such. And, and then Rob, you know, charismatically drew me in and pulled me over. And next thing I know a CTO is switch. So being the CTO is, which is unique, because Rob, you know, as an inventor, and he's got patents and things like that. So how do you support, you know, someone who's constantly coming up with something new, and something engaging, that solves problems in a way where you don't get in their way, but she helped them come to the realization of that technology and what they want to do, and then help scale that up. So that, to me, that was an interesting challenge. I look at him, as you know, you know, a mind, a mind similar to Steve Jobs and others, right, but capable of really just seeing the future, five and 1015 years down the road, seeing what technologies lead to that. And then you know, jumping in to help deliver that. So

Dean Nelson: 6:01

yeah, just just to give a little people with some flavor on this to me and I have known each other since I was at Sun Microsystems. And our first introduction was through our CIOs at that point, and it was the sun blackbox back in the day, and our CIO gave Thaddeus, I think it was right that his royal, the CIO over at at&t at I don't know if it was for the whole thing or division, but gave him a black box. And just so people get an idea of the black box is one of the first modular data centers in 20 foot shipping container with a whole bunch of sound stuff all integrated in it. It was actually designed really well. But then that led to a year and a half worth of engagement between Eddie and I is that he comes over and he's like, hi, Dean, nice to meet you. What the hell is you give us?

Eddie Schutter: 6:44

Well, thanks for just rotting everything. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we had started down a path of modularity. And we were looking to, you know, figure out how to create sort of modular sleds that were contained inside of central office spaces or data center spaces. And our first candidate for that was a Uverse solution in Reno, Nevada. And, you know, getting, you know, a large group of people at at&t together to, you know, to line up behind something new and disruptive as tough is in any company, but you know, particularly it was at at&t And yeah, so Dean, then, you know, tossed out candy, million dollar candy at us. And then, yeah, I've got to do something with that. And I got a whole bunch of people that don't want anything to do with it. And so I said, then you got to join this conference calls going forward. Now. Of course, he only stayed on him as long as he want is, he only stayed on for like two months. And he's like, dude, man, I don't know how you do it. So, but we yeah, we got we got the modularity done. And accomplished a quite a bit. That was a gem. Right? Yeah. Yeah, the high density gem. That's what we call HD gem. Right? We printed out pictures.

James Thomason: 7:55

So I've run a picture because so for one thing, Eddie you and I have a really similar career trajectory. I started my career in networking as well. And while you were building data center and backbone for pacbell or SBC, I was over at Exodus communications. And of course, then he was eBay, which was an exodus customer. And I can remember a point in time where most of eBay ran on a single sun. No, Starfire Eaton K.

Dean Nelson: 8:22

Holy crap. That's, that's. That was an accident. Sorry, that was an accident. It was an accident. It was it? Oh, my God. Really? Yeah. On it. Yeah. Yeah. They

James Thomason: 8:31

had it. They had one of the they could afford only one of these things. Okay. It's just this was before the IPO.

Brad Kirby: 8:38

No way. Just blown your mind doing?

Eddie Schutter: 8:42

That. Math was probably the essay on this on this. System Administrator. Yeah.

Dean Nelson: 8:49

So Massa was our boss right at eBay, right. Amazon hired me. And then when I left Uber or left eBay, Eddie, Eddie took over the whole group, right. But But look, I this is funny, because that's the 10k.

James Thomason: 9:01

That's the same K Yeah, well, it's totally it's not it's not the one that was there. This is just what I you know, it's one of okay, so it's someone's own pile now. But that's, that's what it looked like, right

Dean Nelson: 9:09

there. So so the 10k, I'd remember I was in a all hands meeting at Sun Microsystems, with our VP that ran all of the team engineering team. Her name was Anne showy, I think it was Yeah, and showy. And so she's in the middle of giving a talk. And then somebody walks in and whispers in her ear, as she goes meetings over all engineers on eBay that have that, like literally that way, there's 600 people in that room. Because that database got corrupted. It did. And they were down for two, some days. I think it was because because, ultimately, everybody pointed fingers back and forth about what went wrong. But I'm pretty sure somebody applied to patch it correctly. And it corrupted the database, right? So anyways, after all that, if you think about it, then Eddie and I went both went to eBay like that's, it's such a small world. And here we are 20 years later. Wow,

Brad Kirby: 10:02

just for our listeners in the non metal heads, because I can't see the picture. Just very explain quickly what we're looking at

James Thomason: 10:09

the 10 day, yes, yes, son, he would call me 10k Or a Starfire. And that was the the codename for the thing when it was still in development of Sun Microsystems. So it was a high end UltraSPARC two server that had a ton of processors in it, and ran ran Solaris. And so that was like the biggest back in the day, if you wanted to scale up, there was no scaling out there was only scaling up, right. So if you wanted to scale the database, you needed a bigger server. And after that, he needed a bigger server still and a bigger one after that. And so all of the modern sort of techniques that we use for scaling horizontally these days, database sharding, all those things. Were not a thing at that time. So I remember that that box came out right around 9697. Okay, yes, got got a wheeled into wheeled into an accident data center over on, I believe Lawson lane. And the rest of eBay ran on Sun enterprise 4000 or 4500 series servers, those were about 19 inch rack mount servers are about, I would say 12 view or something, you know, eight or 12 view. And they had racks of those things everywhere. And at the at the time, they could only afford a single Cisco 1000 series catalyst switch. So all of eBay ran off of one database that ran through a single Cisco switch. And I was in charge of the data center of the switch and the the backbone network, you know that all that was connected to

Brad Kirby: 11:38

that's funny that we Daniel that that that's crazy connection.

James Thomason: 11:43

Wow. So during the eBay outage that needed to be solved, you mentioned, which made the press I remember that that was a big deal. Like it was, you know, it was everyone's like, see, the internet doesn't work. You can't do commerce on the internet. That's ridiculous. You know, even eBay is down. No one can trust it, no one can rely on it. So at some point, they were they were ripping things, you know, things in and out of that colocation space. And somehow they managed to connect switch to a switch to a switch and create one of the worst spanning tree loops I've ever seen. Which was like, yeah, so I came in, and the supervisor, you know, the supervisor of this catalyst switches, they would have a little LED that shows you what their CPU utilization was. And I was like, you know, maxing out at 100, you know, 100%, I'm like, well, that's, that's not there. There's your problem, right? That's not good. That's not supposed to happen. And sure enough, someone in their troubleshooting had connected, and created some kind of bridge loop. So we had PortFast, and all these things, you know, because that was to basically explain explicitly permit these sort of packet storms to start, but we wanted ports to come up very fast. And

Dean Nelson: 12:42

it's it's blows my mind. So we have Yeah, really, and, and Brad, for our for our non technical users. Give us a visualization of what you just saw on the screen. What does it look like?

Brad Kirby: 12:53

It looks like honestly, like exactly what a server would look like, if you had like an emoji for a server. That's what it looks like. To me.

James Thomason: 13:00

It's like a refrigerator.

Brad Kirby: 13:02

Refrigerator. Yeah. Yeah, like a massive tool cabinet. Just like it just, you know,

Dean Nelson: 13:07

yeah. It's just it's, it's a $2 million, a $2 million. Refrigerator. Yeah. But but that that event that happened, triggered eBay to build their own data centers, and trigger the whole wave. Yep. And I stepped in in 2009, and took over topaz, which is the project that was the original kickoff from that. And that was an RFP that came back through with sun. And we're linked back in and we started having these connections to help them, right, because I was an internal end user at Sun. And then ultimately, I went over there. But then Eddie, you took that project, and you went, boom, like, so tell us tell us more about the what you scaled already there?

Eddie Schutter: 13:45

Well, you have two left and eBay. What do we do? So, you know, basically, if you remember, there's a lot happening in parallel of that. One of them was you had just finished combining PayPal and eBay into one organization. And then you and I talked in May. And you were real proud of the fact that you had just completed that. And then like a week, like a couple of days later, you were told to tear it all apart again. And so y'all went through that whole cycle of trying to tear it apart again. And I joined in August 3, which was the first day that PayPal was not part of eBay again, you know, technically. So it was sort of a, you know, it was it was really a high change cycle that we were going through. There's a lot of activity that was happening at the same time. And I think one of the things that really stood out to us was that to scale. We had to get to a place where we met the we met the latency needs that were in based on the enterprise applications and the hyperscale applications. We were running, like Elastic Search and things like that we needed to meet the scalability for that, but we also needed to sort of, we needed a way to get past the boundaries of You know, physical boundaries of the data center where we could put any cabinet with any application anywhere. And obviously, that was some struggles, you know, from the architectures that were originated for the platforms. And so we move quickly, you know, I pulled over a guy named parent up Lahiri from Juniper, who was, you know, critical in the control platforms. And we started working towards how to do VPCs. How do we deploy that, you know, we looked at ways to kind of change the, the lifecycle of fiber, the lifecycle of a systems, you know, how do we move to ODM platforms, and potentially, you know, drive down some of the cost of hardware. So there's a whole bunch of functionality, which allowed us essentially to collapse, you know, quite a bit of the data centers into a much smaller bundle of data centers that are higher performing, and also provided us with a lot of capabilities. But interestingly enough, like the sustainability of what we had in switch was awesome, assisted, you know, eBay a lot, because eBay, you know, being Utah's not, you know, not a state known for sustainability. So, you know, that was one of the challenges we had, since most of the power that was coal based, and it was a regulated state. So, you know, we is, you know, you you went to legislation to try to get things change there. But ultimately, you know, we were able to, and as the application was modifying ports, resiliency, right? Imagine had this challenge, he kept giving me the look, I want to be able to just turn off a data center, and the application not have any hiccups whatsoever. And so there was a lot of there was a lot of effort around how to create the, you know, the resiliency of the application in such a way where there are no interruptions in the system. And we were able to build the last data center as I was exiting data center, eBay. Last data center we built was a tier two data center that was capable, at a much lower cost of delivering, you know, the same availability with a good staff. And you know, what we were getting by default, in many ways, their tier three, tier three, four type data centers that we were in. So

Brad Kirby: 17:08

quick question around separation of PayPal and eBay after you merge them just was that because of the financing the payment aspect of it, or is it complete? It

Eddie Schutter: 17:17

was a requirement by the SEC. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Say it's complex, very complex.

Brad Kirby: 17:24

Very, FinTech at guys. I was just, I thought maybe that was it.

Dean Nelson: 17:28

But actually, if you think about it, the what what happened with that separation specifically, was that eBay and PayPal were better together for a long time active investors came in like, you know, activist investors, and all that kind of stuff. But they realized when they did the calculations that there is more opportunity for both companies individually than there was together. So it changed over time. And that's what really triggered it. Because as Eddie was saying, we spent 15 minutes months, integrating EMA and PayPal, we found 21 cloud platforms internally, right, got it down to one. We had like all those different things that in their industry, Sivananda. Right, led that whole integration effort. And, and I've told this before I was at the White House for a sustainability event woke up at 5am. Right, it was going to go start talking. And then they said, eBay and PayPal are splitting. I'm like, holy crap, I have no briefing. I have no idea walking into a room full of reporters. I was like, Ah, well, like six people, the company knew about it, right? And then we spent 10 months separate in it. And so then Eddie, basically, so that was taking Thank God, we did the integration, because no way that separation would have been happening in that time period, period. Because all the legacy stuff you can imagine we cleaned up already, then it was great standard all up and the team did amazing work. That was one of the I've always said the most rewarding parts of my career, but I never want to do it again.

James Thomason: 18:49

Moments check

Eddie Schutter: 18:50

often a lot of stress during that cycle, right? So yeah, the same thing goes with tearing it apart, because we had, you know, very specific windows of things we had to do in a certain amount of time, or else there were penalties much bigger than then, you know, the entire department's budget would have happened. So we we had a lot of pressure on the team. But you know, the the team there works well. And so I would say interestingly enough, when I left eBay and went to switch, you know, eBay's a large customer switch, and that's well, well known and documented. So we were very careful on the timing and the communications to make sure everything was above board, that there was no sense, you know, no, because Because Maslin runs an ad, very ethical organization from that perspective. And, and we wanted to make sure that we we supported each other in the process, and it was good.

James Thomason: 19:42

Also, we mentioned of course, in the intro, that you're the CTO of switch, but some of our audience may not be aware of, of switch because you know, kind of, unless you're in the space, you know, I'm not sure you you know the brand so maybe you could just tell the audience, what is switch. What do you guys do?

Eddie Schutter: 19:57

Sure. Yeah, so a little bit of what you have to understand is sort of the background of switch. And I won't go too deep into it, because there's a lot of stories out there, and you can read about them. But basically, Rob Roy, was, you know, early on during the bubble, you know, Rob was building, in the end of the Las Vegas market colocation business, something that he saw, as having legs on it wanted to do. And by chance, and if you, I'm going to talk about something you guys will remember again. So by chance, Rob was across the street from Enron's nap that they were building and which, which I think some of us were involved in putting some of the systems there. So Enron, remember, they were going to do this exchange of Internet access and internet IP traffic, much like they were selling, you know, power, but it caught up to them, they had this asset with like, 60 carriers deployed there. It was like the only, you know, truly non public NAT that existed at that point. So Rob was the only bidder and acquired that data center, and essentially created what we call the telecom, our core cooperative, which is the telecom cooperative that we have, and allows us to, to buy tremendous amounts of carrier at discounted rates that we basically democratize for our clients. So from that perspective, it was just an a massive, you know, uplift and opportunity for him. And there really wasn't that many data centers in the market, either in Las Vegas. And so Rob, just organically grew it. But the one thing that he did differently, because he looked at data centers, he saw a lot of inefficiencies, and how we were, you know, deploying at the time, which a lot was based upon, you know, the environmental requirements with the compute that we were putting in the space, right. So, you know, Rob kind of saw these things that were evolving with it, and took action. And, you know, he was one of the very first folks that to, to find ways to basically optimize cooling in the space. And then, you know, went even further to follow patents and come up with his original ideas of how to do that containment, and, you know, basically led the way on what became hyperscale, before there was hyperscale. And so from, from the perspective of, and when I got introduced, to Rob's data centers, was when I went to eBay, I know, we had folks from at&t That went and did a tour. But you know, I was knee deep in my own things, and I really wasn't paying attention to the market that much, as far as what everybody else was doing, other than, you know, what Sun Microsystems was forcing down my throat, but the rest of the way I was just, you know, we were trying to innovate in our own labs and come up with ideas about how to do things. And, you know, when I did get introduced to Robin, I did my first tour, I really had two reactions. The first one was, you know, how in the world am I paying for all this paint and light man, because, you know, I wasn't used to data centers was such color, and, and it really fit the Las Vegas, you know, showmanship type of thing. And I was a little worried we were paying for that. I found out later that, you know, Rob had unique ways of getting the cost down, that, you know, were completely competitive use building data centers, half the cost, I would build them, you know, for the enterprise environments that we were building him in, and he was building better data centers, the man. So you know, I wanted to kind of get to know what that secret was, and then servers, that myth, and the second piece of it was that, you know, I hadn't met anybody that had as long run of capacity, you know, like 1314 terawatt hours of availability, and never have any downtime that they paid. Like my first in a data center. It was before the first year was over, we had somebody hit the EPO button and take down the whole building, right? So there's those kinds of things that you expect to happen under normal operation. It just didn't happen. But, but Rob has always looked at the datacenter as a platform for everything else he wanted to do. And so, you know, thinking that way, and think about the synergies of multiple locations, connected via, you know, short cycle, various low latency connections with, you know, high volumes of bandwidth. And at the same time, high availability and reliability built into this space, but at a cost that was, you know, aggressive. That became a perfect platform for how do you build all these other things? And so we've, we've mentioned robotics, we've got software, we've got healthcare related industry activities were involved in so we've got a lot of technology. So we went IPO is a tech company. I think the market really wants us to be a colocation company. And we're working to figure out this stuff right now with our board. But at the end of the day, you know, we consider ourselves more than a colocation company. Should I say that?

Dean Nelson: 24:40

James, I've had a I've had a quite a bit of history with switch if you think about it, as you're saying large customer did a lot of design sessions and things and brainstorming stuff with Robin is great, because I agree completely with Eddie it's, it's just people that can see things in the future patterns that others can't see. And being able to now connect those dots and magic happens and that's what's happen over switch and I just to give a shout out, right? I'm not compensated, I don't have any stock to survey you know. So I'm just giving a shout out here that it literally is the the sexiest data center design out there. If you think about it, you walk into this. Yeah, in the data centers, it looks like a frickin Hollywood movie set. Yeah. So cool. It is in the thing. You can have a nice polished, you know, the pain on the pig. But it actually backs it up when you get 100% uptime. With that many clients and that many hundreds and hundreds of megawatts across all these different sites. There's something going right. So yeah, I mean that Rob has done an amazing job of getting a building a company like that. And you know, it was really neat to watch them go public and see the success for everybody. And then when you went over Eddie, I'm like, okay, here they go. Here's the next level. Here's another chunk. Because let me let me give one other shout here. There's a complementary aspect. Like Eddie was saying, there are people that are visionaries that can actually see the future put those in, but they need people that are doers that can actually translate that thing back into action. And Eddie and I, by the way, Eddie, I appreciate the little shout out to like, we're able to do that. And I Masons who've done that eBay, we've done that, like we've worked together for so many years on it, it's just really complimentary. So it keeps me in check a lot. which I appreciate. And I'm sure there's some of that same check stuff going on switch and other roles that you had. Is that

Eddie Schutter: 26:20

Well, so? Yeah, I'm the pragmatists to the to the visionaries. But that's how it works. It works out for me

Brad Kirby: 26:25

visionaries like the pragmatist, though. Damn right.

Dean Nelson: 26:28

It's like yin and yang, man, everything comes together. Yeah.

James Thomason: 26:31

So I spent some time that's at Rob's Innovation Center. So I think one of the cool things about switch, just in general is that, you know, Las Vegas is very much a town that is in transformation, and has this great legacy. And, obviously, for gaming and entertainment, but it has a lot of potential as, as we affectionately say in town, like I think most people know, I moved to Las Vegas in 2014, from Silicon Valley, and we say locally that it's becoming a real city, you know, we have, we have actual sports teams. Now, you know, we have, there's more to Vegas than just the strip and gambling. And one of my high hopes for it has been the transformation to more of a tech hub and center, because I just think it has a lot going for it in terms of lifestyle and convenience, and you're living, still working in tech, but living a different kind of life than you would otherwise work in Silicon Valley. And you guys know, from my numerous comments on this show, I'm not not a huge fan of Silicon Valley anymore, you know, because of the the lifestyle constraints, the traffic, the cost, the taxes, you know, so I've always been a fan of switch just for really trying to be a good citizen of Las Vegas and foster innovation and bring people together for meetups and host people in the space. And they've always you know, since since that Innovation Center has been open, they've always been doing that and sponsoring startups. And, of course, Tony Shea, who unfortunately recently passed away last year, bought most of downtown Vegas and started refurbishing it. And so I kind of hoped that Rob's gonna be one of the bidders for all of that space, because I still I still see a lot of potential in downtown Vegas. And I think that's the kind of that's the kind of person who should take that on. Because it is not one thing about it, it is not easy to transform a place like Vegas into something that it that it does not already right. So it just anyway, I admired that. And I guess I've spent some time over there, I've never got a chance to meet. Rob, I wanted to ask you it. I mean, as the CTO switch, obviously, you're you're tracking a lot of different technology trends. And it's a really tough thing to do. One of the things we talked about in the show is a trend quite a bit and of course is near and dear to my heart is the trend of edge computing. And I believe recently you guys had a strategic announcement about about this and what you guys are calling the fourth cloud, we call it the fourth internet over at edge x. We talked about it quite a lot. But this is between you, Dell Technologies and FedEx corporations. So tell us, what's your perspective on edge? I mean, as a hyperscale data center company, obviously edge is a little bit opposite the current model, but obviously in every area explored the Explorer. So tell us more about this partnership relationship? Sure. I mean, your

Eddie Schutter: 29:15

view? Yeah, so I, first of all, it is an inevitable effort, it's going to happen, and it's going to happen sooner rather than later. The constraints are the obstacles that we see to the edge. You know, one of the promises was that 5g was gonna fix everything right, but because those who actually built out or been involved in building out the cell networks know that, you know, that is a lie. Yeah, we need like 40 times the number of points of presence and there's a whole bunch of factors that play a role in this. But But I would just say, you know, quite plainly that the the edge must say it this way, compute it for us to realize what the digital economy He wants to accomplish right. I call this the omnis, where we become, you know, where everybody is an Iron Man where they remember everything, they have the ability to do anything, they're constantly aware of everything, US Army's capabilities, right? For everybody, as a consumer, or as a business, to have those capabilities, you have to have ubiquity of network, you have to have, you know, secure and available systems at the, at the edge, you have to have a certain amount of capital and equipment at the edge, there's all these pieces that have to be at play a role there. But most importantly, you have to have a user who's going to pay for it. And so the challenges, obviously, these obstacles are the when you look at whether it doesn't matter what utility service it is, whether it's power, or water, or gas, or whether it's Telecom, they were all designed basically to fail to run to fail. At the edge. They weren't designed for high availability, they weren't designed for continuous operations all the time. And so, you know, there's sort of this natural engineer design and deployment, you know, 100 years of deployment, that we're trying to figure out how to overcome, in order to make the edge like viable for these user stories to really get momentum. But the user stories that are out there, than they've been out there for many years, right. I mean, even as far back as the 80s, when at&t was doing in the future, you will commercials, right, you know, the edge was part of that story, even back then. And I think what we're finding now is there is a volume of opportunities and builds that are going on that are starting to address some of these obstacles in a meaningful way. Number one, and number two, just the nature, if you look at the economy, of different things like retail, for example, or the economy, transformations that are occurring in media and entertainment, or socialist, social relationships, or just just all these different fact entertainment as a whole, but transportation management and flow control, right? Even vehicle, and you know how the type of cars we're going to be buying and operating soon, right. So all these different things that are coming together, sort of at this time are leading to an apex of where you have to have data collection, and compute and, and an arbitrage at the edge. And these things are pushing them work their way into the market space in such a way that you have to go do that. So you know, even though we did an acquisition a data foundry, we've got this relationship with Dell that we've done, we bought the, you know, extra property at the Dell campus where we're building our data centers. You know, alongside of the Dell campus, they're around rock. So we've got these efforts that we've put together. But what it takes is partnerships. And that's like when we built the internet, right? If you think back when we built the internet, there's a lot of ISPs working together with the carriers and integrators in order to make those connections occur. So you could peer content to each other. It wasn't one big company buying it, or for big companies buying it all, it was a lot of these companies coming together to do so that's what that's what this is going to have to happen. Now, we I'll make this quick because I give you guys an opportunity to talk but we looked at the the public clouds and the private clouds they are today. They're designed and built in such a way to lock in the customer, that really take away choice and flexibility from the customer. Some of that's natural, because you use tools that are vertically integrated. Some of that's unnatural, because you know, you're paying twice as much for network that was going to be paid for anyway. So there's pieces that are there's a lot of that that happens. And you know, of course, early adopters are going to spend the most regardless. So what we see is that we want to create the flexibility. We want to democratize access to the edge network. We want to have flexibility we want to avoid lock in and prevent it. And we want to help businesses like FedEx, for example, transform what they do today to what they could be doing in the future. And I think that that's what we're doing.

Brad Kirby: 34:08

That's That's great. One of the questions I had Eddie was last year, you guys, you guys announced edge robots for monitoring edge data centers and edge premises, which I thought was pretty neat. These are like little robots to go around with cameras and sensors, to check people for COVID-19. And really just talking about security at the edge. And given how secure switches facilities are. Where do you see do you see any challenges at the edge with your deployments with FedEx and Dell? What's your view on that?

Eddie Schutter: 34:40

Yeah, so I mean, first of all, if a large part of FedEx is deployment in their facilities is actually airport hubs. Right. So if you think about that, those are some of the most secure locations in the United States right now. And access only you there are ways to get access to them, but you know, they're designed for security purposes. But, I mean, one of the pitfalls of an edge strategy is the, it's not the build in the buy and the deployment, it's the operation of it long term. If you look at the behavior of the carriers, right now, they're, you know, they would rather, you know, give away the last mile and the facilities than operate on with a large volume of labor to support that. So, you know, if you look at automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning capabilities, those type of platforms, you have to come and do sort of the same things you have, traditionally as disciplines, but a smarter way. And not, you know, it's not about not employing people, it's about employing people to do smarter things, as opposed to, you know, other things. So, you know, having drones that are that are doing surveillance, that normally you would have a security guard driving around in, or having a robotic system that does that, you know, passively capturing images and documenting what's going on, or in some cases, potentially intervening if it's necessary, and using the right kinds of things, you have to apply that, you know, based upon what the threat might be, and also apply that in a way that prevents interruption to that service switches, definitely, we're taking what we do in our prime data centers, and we're applying it on the edge, we're probably the only ones willing to go out to try to do that as a tier four type configuration, because it's not cheap. And it's counterintuitive to the way central offices and edge facilities have been designed and deployed in the past. So

James Thomason: 36:36

that's a big claim, right? Clap class for being, you know, 100%. uptime, right. So really, as good as being in a regular switch facility, but at the far edge of the network. And the other aspect of this I wanted to bring up was the three companies commitment to sustainability. Right. So I believe, embedded within this joint announcement was the the commitment to recycle or reuse and equivalent product for every Dell Technologies product that a customer buys. And FedEx is global commitment to decrease its environmental footprint, and achieve sustainability and switches commanded to reduce data center campus locations with 100% clean energy. Yeah. Is that Is that true?

Eddie Schutter: 37:18

Yeah. And we've been doing that already. Right. I mean, if you go back to the clicking Green report, which, you know, we probably posted on our website, you know, the, the number one position of that clicking Green report with Greenpeace was switch, which, you know, for the size of company, we are, then the commitment that we've made. That's, that's pretty impressive. alone by itself. Right. And, you know, and that's after years of being in the green grid, and being involved in sustainability and everything else. So just looking at that alone was, that's a big commitment. But we've been doing that already is sort of a sense of our business for several years. Obviously, we wouldn't go backwards, you know, in that, in that endeavor, we want to figure out how do we become even more so a part of the sustainability story and, and well, here's the important part of that is, our partners in this relationship have to have the same commitments we do are more more so. And we have to enable each other through that process, right? So it's not really sustainable. If I even if I basically go out and put a small coal plant right next to, you know, or run a bunch of diesel generators all the time. And it doesn't help Dell, and it doesn't help FedEx, and it doesn't help the community. So I think those are factors. But I, I want to go one step further, because sometimes this affects us in a negative way. But if you look at switch, if you go into switch, right, we didn't negotiate, you know, zero state taxes, our sales taxes for our data centers, were negotiated a 2%. Tax, that 2% goes to the education system in Nevada, because the state of Nevada, we probably could have negotiated a zero sales tax for our customers, and then we get that advantage. But look, that's our contribution. And that's our customers contribution to the education and the future of our industry. And, you know, you can let that happen and other property taxes or other places, but in Nevada, that's where it needed to occur. So I think if you look at it, we're not talking about just environmental sustainability, but about full ESG diversity, we're looking at everything that we do, including economic sustainability for the region, including the culture of the region, you know, how do we maintain the culture of the region and still provide, you know, good jobs with secure careers as well and health care? So

Dean Nelson: 39:36

and that we're going to talk on masons and sustainability and industry efforts in a little bit in this podcast, too. But I want to go back to something you said that I want people to understand, because this was a unique approach that Rob did, and it was controversial. So you have the green piece. The first thing that came out is basically how dirty is your cloud? That was a very first report. And if you think about it, they attacked Facebook. Apple like attack was The right word, they went after it. I remember I was at eBay, Olivier science, right? Or as I was still a son and Olivia Assad said, have you seen this and everybody's getting attacked on this. And then you fast forward 10 years. And the change has come from that is now the most sustainable companies in the world are driving. They're like Google, right? Their infrastructure and teams, so they're all going after it. But it was very adversarial at the beginning. And so what Rob did is, let's collaborate. He called Greenpeace into the right into Vegas, they sat down, and he said, So what do we need to do? And so if you look at the result of that the report switches the only company on the entire list just to pull that back out any that are straight A's. That's the report card, right? 100% clean energy, then you've got influencing policy, and you have transparency and like all those categories, they said, Great, okay, let's figure out how to do it. And I think that's, that's really a testament to what, you know, we should be doing versus making this adversarial. And so, you know, what, I Mason's? We have been collaborating with Greenpeace for a number of years now. And this is already going into China and like a lot of things that we're trying to go back and help and influence. But you know, that approach and collaboration is such a critical thing. Because there's no way we're going to get to the sustainability goals for what we got right now without working together.

Eddie Schutter: 41:15

And frankly, it's not, it's not saying that Greenpeace is right about everything, right? It's saying they get a seat at the table to talk with us. And we have a seat at the table to talk with them. And, and let's work together so that we can support each other, and the vision and the mission of what we're doing as opposed to, you know, doing something in spite of them. And vice versa. Right. So,

James Thomason: 41:37

so other than edge, what would you say are the two top technology trends that you're tracking as CTO? And why are they important?

Eddie Schutter: 41:45

First of all, I obviously I live in Texas, and right after the the big trees that we had, right, the Snowmageddon or whatever, to get in with whatever you want to call it, right? So after that happen, and literally, you know, my family of, you know, 13 people, we were sitting here freezing to death, because we have one little fireplace with gas, everything else running on electric, you know, we had no power, there was all kinds of problems. And on top of that, you know, like everybody's water mains were breaking around us. And, you know, it's just incredibly difficult time, I was going out to my truck to start it up, and also to take conference calls. So I'd have a way to charge my phone, you know, things like that. But what was clear to me, and you know, I'm a proud Texan. So don't, don't get me wrong, but you know, what we weren't doing in our effort to be sort of independent and to do what we did as a state. We didn't plan for, you know, what climate change is, what's happening and climate change and weather. So whether you believe in global warming or not, doesn't matter, there are definite climate changes going on. The storms are more powerful, everything's different. The risk factors are more we're paying more for insurance. Now everybody is right. And so if you look at the reality of it, is that there is a change afoot. And so what what it did was it helped me recognize because there's this whole string of things, if you go back and look at the Texas event, you know, where oil producers or natural gas producers, right, the pumps, because everybody thinks everybody in Texas has an oil well, but the natural gas that we all had, there's only just a handful of companies that actually had backup generation, or that were listed as being a critical power, source of energy for the state. And so there was a supply chain interruption whenever the power went down, and the amount of natural gas, but most of the states were moving to natural gas as a generation platform over the last 10 years, right. So if you look at that, suddenly, natural gas plants no longer had a supply. And of course, the whole citizenry of the state was now relying on propane and, and natural gas for its heat, because most of it didn't have power. And you can just see this big cycle of things happening, just getting in the way, not ever expecting that we would have global, you know, change, climate change, that would cause us to have to have fire sprinklers that were, you know, in our buildings, and I'm on my every building, it didn't matter whether the shopping center or a hospital or anything, you know, all of our spies fire sprinkler systems, they were not they were not insulated. And so those pipes would freeze up and break and then it would wash out or flood out the grocery store, fly out the hospital, pull it out the institutions where, you know, kids were going to school and everything. And so if that's the case, right, then how big is that? and UK take a couple of the fires in California, and PG and E's bankruptcy and what occurred there and you take the major power outages we've had, suddenly it dawned on me that we have a global problem where our utility and infrastructure cannot support the growth rate of the global economy and the data economy that we're building right now. And so if you think about that, this it'd be the same as like in the industrial age, not having Would the burn or coal available, right? Well, what are we gonna do in order to keep accelerating, you know, humanity the way that we are in the digital infrastructure age and, and that, to me is a critical risk factor. And so I brought it back to the Masons board, I said, Look, I'd like very passionately wanted to say, in some way, and we're in the process of developing this for the tech committee, in which I'm working with Christian blahdy on and I'm recruiting some diversity to help us lead this effort. But right now, I'd say, unofficially officially say that we are going to make a statement to say that the infrastructure that currently delivers utilities to the world doesn't matter where it is, is not designed to support the future of the digital economy. It's not designed for that. And that's going to be fixed. So for

Brad Kirby: 45:50

a Canadian chartered accountant that's in his late 30s. That lives in Canada, I have a pretty extraordinary amount of knowledge about Texas energy because I started my career at Deloitte, just after Enron when they consumed Arthur Andersen. And then I worked at Brookfield asset management, which, you know, they own Tsu. And they've they've been involved with, they're even helping build Tesla's Solar City right now. They're one of them. They're building with them. And they just an even like LGPL, which is the gas pipeline that runs through theirs is a portfolio company. So I have a very in tune with that. So it just kind of just in terms of serendipity and turning it all back into, into our histories, our collective histories. It's just that interesting. Yeah, well,

Eddie Schutter: 46:40

I you know, it the other part of what I didn't talk about is our supply chain isn't designed the right way, either. Actually, just in time delivery on supply chain is what's really caused us the most headache. As a result, the current slowdowns and, you know, compute in our deployment cycles right now. I mean, when was the last time it took us six months to get something from Cisco, right? So, and I'm not beating Cisco up. We're all in this situation. Every company is in that situation. So I look at it. Yeah, I look at it. Well, they say it's pandemic driven. But I think it's the fragility of the just in time delivery model and Supply Chain system that we have, it wasn't able to handle a pandemic, which we supposedly had been preparing for, you know, it's like since 2006, since the big stars event, right? So, in reality, we're not ready, and we think we are and yet we're ready to go populate another planet, maybe? And I question, if we're using the same constructs, what we've done on earth, you know, how smarter we are, are we going to be on another planet? So

James Thomason: 47:42

that's a great point. Also, your point about the fragility of the supply chain, of course, I think our awareness of that is all heightened because of COVID. But just prior to COVID, I've been spending a lot of time in Texas, at various refinery facilities, you know, who are doing innovative stuff on the edge to try to modernize their operations. Because, you know, they do things like Hey, I wonder how many gallons of chemical are left in that tank, and they send the guy up in the hot Texas heat and opens the hatch. And if he falls in there and die, as well as just another workplace fatality, that's, it's it's a tough space. It's a tough industry, right. So they're, they're digitizing that stuff in there, putting computing in places has never been before and sensors that that are, they're all new. But then, you know, in talking to these guys, you realize, wait a minute, you're telling me, if the boiler goes out in your plant, you stop producing this petrochemical. And if you stop producing this petrochemical, 50 of your customers stopped production and 50 of your customers stopped production, then like, yeah, there's no more pig food. I mean, it's it's a weird collapse of domino hitting Domino, hitting Domino. And it all, you know, at the bottom layer of the supply chain, there are these critical facilities that manufacture something that is critical to the rest of the supply chain. And if those stopped for any reason, whatsoever, pandemic equipment failure, magma bubble underneath California, whatever reason, then, you know, millions of people are affected simultaneously. And I just, I had no awareness of the fragility of the supply chain of the supply chain that really powers modern life until until I started to peel the layers of the onion and become terrified. And then of course, COVID head, and it's like, well, now we're all aware that the supply chain is like really brittle, like compared to the internet. The supply chain is completely fragile, right? It's not designed. I don't know if you've ever read the book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, on anti fragility and the idea of building things that are robust against unpredictable, things like pandemics, like you're never going to predict the moment in time. When a pandemic is going to take over the world. You're never gonna predict a moment of time where the magma bubble into Los Angeles is bursts and everyone falls into a pit of hell. So you better design the supply chain in advance of that and also, we've lived In a relative time of peace, right, I mean, other than our 20 year occupation of foreign countries, as military operations compared to the wars of, of antiquity, or even the wars in the previous part of the last century that were on a global scale, the world in general, has not faced that kind of scale of conflict that disrupted pretty much everyone's life on the planet since the end of World War Two. And since then, we seem like completely incapable of dealing with that kind of calamity. Right? If, you know, I think of it in military terms, as a person who's studied a lot of military strategy, a few, a few strikes here, a few strikes there, and you've got an entire nation crippled, at the knees, you know, from the supply chain. Now, our military infrastructure is very robust and resilient and anti fragile. But the rest of us, you know, we're not gonna have toilet paper, right? And we're gonna be hoarding toilet paper for for food.

Eddie Schutter: 50:49

Right? I think all of that is is was symptomatic of these sort of underlying issues that, you know, whether it's through Value Engineering, or whether it's through, you know, optimization of economies, or whatever it is, that allowed ourselves to create these facilities that have occurred, right. So if we were going to turn AI on to something, you know, that's definitely one area we should be looking at is, you know, from an actuarial perspective, is the interrelationships of all of these supply chains, these systems, and really understanding how to make better decisions actually have a duty of care, to make better decisions about how to sustain these businesses and these solutions, and the services to the general public and to people. Otherwise, why aren't we doing it? Right? I mean, you can guess for the, the 85 or 100 years, you're gonna live on this earth, potentially, you can enjoy, you know, all the money in the world. But if you're not making it so that you can extend your humanity beyond just you, then you pretty much aren't part of humanity anyway. Right. So I think of it in that perspective is that, and that's where it really, you know, switch absolutely is one path, but there's only so much switch can do is one company. I look at it from my Mason's as being my platform to go out and share with the whole world that this is our situation as a as a group, and we need to address it together.

Dean Nelson: 52:16

Yeah, Nettie, this, this brings up another topic. I think it's really important, you know, on this show, we've, we've talked about the politicization of politics and everything. And the propaganda, right of everything through social media, and the internet itself. And, in your opinion, how is this impacting business right now?

Eddie Schutter: 52:35

Yeah, so this is something that's really frustrating for a lot of us right, is that we have a duty to, to make these predictions to do this work, to build the solutions, with a responsibility that meets the needs of our clients, but also of humanity in general. And you do that based upon provable data, what's happened, and what and honestly, all of the stuff that we've built in digital infrastructure, whether it be the internet, or whether it be private network or services, is that, you know, basically, there's two, two things that basically the internet's known for ransomware. And, you know, social media, that's bad. And so, right now, I look at this, and I say, you know, what, we have to figure out how we're going to change this, we have a responsibility for duty of care. And, you know, the problem that we have is that everybody we've trusted in the past now, with misinformation, and all the things that are going on on the internet, and the politicization of what's happened, whether it's in healthcare, whether it's in science, whether it's in you know, ecologies whether it's in economics, there's no place that this hasn't happened at this point. And so all the people we used to trust, whether they were clergy, they're your doctor, you know, your pharmacist, whether it was the you know, not nobody ever trust the politicians, but, you know, whether it was somebody who looked up to that you voted for, or something like that. Now, everybody's called into question. And so there's a real challenge for us to figure out how do we go regain the trust of the public of the general public? And how do we prove out what we're saying to be true? So I'll give you one example. I'll give you one example of this. And that is, when we were, we were going to go to, you know, the northeastern region where, you know, everybody wanted to move to Virginia, for example, and get a data center in Virginia. And so we were trying to figure that out. One of the things we started looking at was, you know, if we had an outage in Virginia, up there, how long would it take us to get fuel in order to refill our systems? And, and we did a quick study and discovered, look, there's not enough gas within four hours of that area to service all the generators that are deployed in that area. So everybody who thinks that they have tier four availability, do you really have that cheer for availability. And on top of that, do you really think that you're going to have the opportunity to, you know, get cast before somebody else in the, you know, in the industry? Right. So, I guess the question is, is, you know, who's looking at that? Who's thinking those assessments? Who's figuring those pieces out? Then how are you taking that data, taking it back to the public, communicating it in a way so that they can make informed decisions that are accurate. And I think that's a real problem that we have in the industry

Brad Kirby: 55:29

right now. Especially if you add in like a Colonial Pipeline, hack and make it a real challenge?

Eddie Schutter: 55:37

Well, that's the other part of it, right. And so that's the other emerging thing that's happening is, it used to be hackers just did it for fun, or some sort of, you know, some minor espionage type things. Now hackers are doing it, you know, as part of an organized crime, or, you know, militaristically, they're doing it as a way to disrupt economies. And, and then, of course, people who want to hate each other on the fringes of both sides. They use it as ways to hate each other. And quite frankly, if there's something that threatens to take down, you know, our humanity as it is, it's the fact that people are willing to do things in the past that they weren't willing to do in the past. They're willing to criminalize themselves to do things that they had in the past. And I think that's something that I worry about. There are plenty of visionary people who said, you know, people are basically good, and they've done these things. But you got a lot of bad behavior lately. And that worries me. And one of the things that also worries me is that to be in a community, you have to figure out what you're going to compromise. So that you can so that you can live with each other. Right. And that's something that I've seen that we do less of. And I'm not talking about just United States that's happening there. But I mean, look at you know, there's plenty of unrest, and lots of countries, particularly ones that are locking down right now, that has sort of similar behaviors right now. So I think it's just a, it's a theme that I find troubling. And I think we need to find a way for those of us who have committed our lives to doing technology and developing data that's provable, to be able to communicate back to the public and say, Hey, tell policymakers, this is a trustworthy advice. And this is this is sound. And to the public, the same thing

Brad Kirby: 57:21

becomes very philosophical, right? That definition of bad the definition of hate wrong getting into the meta ethics of it, of it, right, we talked about that quite a bit on this show, like on our regular episodes. So definitely agree with you on that piece.

James Thomason: 57:37

You know, I was I was watching a interview with Eric Clapton, the musician, you know, because he had some negative publicity recently, because he posted some questions about taking the vaccine, and he had a negative experience with the vaccine himself. But what stuck out for me was that in the outset, he said, Look, I don't know anything about any of this, I don't know the science. I'm not a doctor. I'm a musician. And I just trust that the people who do know this stuff are doing the right thing. And if they say this thing is safe, it should be safe. And you bring up a great point, because if trust is eroded, we really live in a modern technological time where expertise is becoming increasingly specialized, and narrow. And it's impossible. You know, I used to think, back in the 90s, it was, I could stay on top of most of the trends in tech in general, you know, it was slow moving enough that I knew a lot about wireless, I knew a lot about the internet, I knew a lot about different areas of computing, the rate of change now is so intense, and the domain expertise required so deep, that it becomes difficult to even as a scientist, even as a person who's in the space to really understand the value of these niches, we really have to trust experts. On the other hand, you know, if the experts themselves are politicized, then that immediately erodes their trust. And I think, in the pluralistic nature of the United States, one of the things we've had and taken for granted, perhaps in the last 50 years was that, you know, a lot of our as experts strived to maintain neutrality, and to, you know, to stay out of the political process, and those who are employed by the state, you know, in perpetuity, between administrations really did their best to, you know, steer clear of the the political machinery, because that that machinery was likely to be replaced in two or four or six years. And, you know, they nevertheless needed to continue on carrying the carrying out the business of the public, the public interest, right, that the duty of care you speak of. And I agree with you so much that that is completely eroded in the last, not just with the previous administration. But the last, I would say the last few administrations in succession. As the nation has become increasingly polarized and politicized that people no longer trust experts, you know, about very basic things. You know, like vaccines, your well being and I, you know, I'm not a vaccine scientist and I understand at a very high level how these things work, right. And but I couldn't tell you one molecule from another, you know, gaze gazing into their gazing into their microscope. And so I just have to trust that when the guy who has been working on the HIV vaccine for the last 40 years of his life, at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, looks at this vaccine and says, Yep, this is safe and effective, you know, I'm gonna trust that guy, because I don't know anything about this. And less and less of us are willing to make that leap. And it's clear why, right? So what a great point, I just wanted to echo that and, and say, How do I mean, how do we sort of recover from this? And you mentioned building trust? And that becomes increasingly hard to do, right? If, if everyone's always angling for their, for their pet political project, or their their pet pork, as the case may be? How long do you think it takes us to

Eddie Schutter: 1:00:55

the sound of the story of philosophy? So here's another interesting aspect of this. And then I'll, I'll answer your question. Nowadays, it's easier for an influencer to gain a following to believe something than it is for a scientist with proven papers, and lab testing to demonstrate this, you know, the opposite, right? And so, you know, that's the thing I think it's is uniquely different, is that in the digital age, and the ease of access to information, initially, you remember when you're, I remember when my kids were going to school, and they were writing papers, their teachers would say, Hey, don't use Wikipedia, because that's not a true source of information, it can be corrupted, you got to actually go to, you know, stacks and go figure this out, right. But the trend has definitely led to, you go to your chosen echo chamber to get the information you want. And it doesn't matter whether it's true or not, because you chose the echo chamber. That's the truth, you know, right. But that doesn't mean it's true. And so, an even gets harder, because on the data portion of it, you might say, well, you know, if it's true, it'll be true, under the same conditions repeatedly. And so therefore, you've got, you know, three points are going to make a line. And so then you've got something that's predictable and outcomes. But, but now, people are saying, well, you know, you skewed the data, your data sets not good, or, you know, the field of it is too small or things like that. So, how do you do that? I think it starts with, frankly, a new generation. I don't think it starts with the generations we have, I think it's going to take a new generation to correct the evils of we we've generated for ourselves right now. And that's to help them you know, understand that to see truth, you have to see this pattern of outcomes that are consistent of what's being stated. But it'll take us a generation to really get to a place where we kind of pulled ourselves back to that, in my opinion. Yeah, I

Brad Kirby: 1:02:55

think it's really important that people understand that media is bias to begin with, right and understand which bias which side of the fence they're leaning. Because if there's some, if there's a material story that's come out that's, that's influential, I will always go to the left wing and the right wing and in the central sources to check even internationally, to just to just to validate it, because it's they're going to put their own spin on it, or just making be completely false. So I agree, it sounds like something Bill, Bill would say, because I think he wrote about Gen Z and ethics, which I talked about our very first episode.

Dean Nelson: 1:03:29

Yeah, that it goes back to what Eddie was saying that, you know, when Kim Kardashian has more followers than Phil Fauci right, and can send out a tweet that can be completely counter to the science. That's the reality we live in. Right? It's It's just crazy, because we've never had that before, the dissemination of information and the influence that can be done. And whether it's right or wrong, it can probably propagate everywhere. Right. And so of course, people get in that echo chamber and start listening. But Eddie, I want to I want to loop back to something because this all ties together to credibility and people listening and working together. So think about the collaboration. And, you know, we do we do a ton of that I masons, and just so for the audience, Eddie was one of the founding members of iMasons. He was one of the people I call the first nine people and said, Hey, let's get together and have a conversation, right? And Eddie, and I were it was right during the exit of eBay, and in between Uber and things, and it was just we collaborated on a ton of stuff. And so He's a board member. And he also is the executive sponsor of the tech Committee. He mentioned Christian Belady for Microsoft and the work that's going on there. But I really want to find out what you're working on there. I want you to share that with the audience it. And one thing to weave into that too, is that, you know, I published the article, and thanks for your input on that article, by the way, interglobe books around the innovation, and the ability to collaborate and innovate, but also protecting the inventors. Right, and the innovators in our industry. And so I'd love to hear your perspective on all that.

Eddie Schutter: 1:04:53

Yeah, I mean, I mean, one of the things that used to make America different, you know, the United States different than say, you know, other countries is that, you know, if you invented something if you had an original idea, and you're able to document that, and you are protected, and you can try to make a living off of that, and you could use that as a way to advance humanity, but also advance, your own your own research in your own efforts around that. And so we're, we've been known as a great nation of inventors, you know, for years, right. But one of the problems we run into these days is that, you know, in a global economy, you there's things you need to share and want to share. There are constructs that support, you know, open environments, and open collaboration that support that, but there's also constructs that support, you know, continuing to have invention. And when we talk about technology, people get a little, you know, hey, you know, you should be able to give that away and not worry about it, if we had the same conversation about art, or about music, or something else, and you say, hey, you know, as a musician, first of all, it's hard for musicians to write something brand new and different, because there's, yeah, because there's so many, you know, spins of the same, you know, same patterns of music and the same, the same sort of structures of music and melody and things like that. It's all been done, there we go. So, the challenge you run into is that we want to support the arts, we want the artists to continue, because the artists, basically, generally speaking, most artists choose to sacrifice, you know, the, the, the nice things in life in order to produce the art they produce, right. The same thing goes for inventors, if you look at most inventors, they're not the guys that make it rich is the is the person who figured out how to convert it into a, you know, a hockey stick product that everybody wanted to buy, right, they've already moved on to inventing the next thing, right, the next heart valve or whatever it is they're going to do. So there's, we have a duty as well to protect the inventor and the vintage idea to give that that inventor the opportunity to create, you know, runway to do the next thing to continue to do what they do. Because we're not all inventors, everybody's got ideas, but not everybody has the capability of seeing, you know, sources of real true problems, and not just symptoms, inventing something to solve the problem and multiple symptoms, and be able to really, you know, solve problems that we have in the future. If you take that away from them, then what happens is they end up becoming just like everybody else, and you lose the unique gifts that they had to help humanity accomplish what goes on in the future. And you could say, Look, you know, a company is just not going to get money. But that's, that's not really what's happening, what's really happening is, you're defeating the purpose of being the inventor, or the musician, or the artist or the dancer, you see, I'm saying, so that to me is, that's that's the power behind, you know, why we need to support intellectual property and why we need to protect it. And then, you know, look, when, when, when there's not really a reason to do that, going forward, the inventor gets to decide that, and then that inventor can say, Look, I'm going to give or donate the remainder of my, you know, period of time on this to, to the public, so that others can make it better. Because I have what I need to eat and to move forward and, and to continue to invent. So there you go.

Dean Nelson: 1:08:33

And this is this is a the combination here is important because think about it I masons, we collaborate. And so we leave our companies at the door we come in, and we actually start sharing information to go back and move things ahead. Right? And right, we're, we're actually better together than we are as either reference than apart. And so, you know, the, the some of the parts, you know, is greater than the whole. And I think that we've got to figure out a way to collaborate, be up balance that inventor and invention protection at the same time.

Eddie Schutter: 1:09:02

But and you got to have a safe place to do that, right. So you want the inventor to share, you know, how you share what they think and what's important and what's not important, in a safe way, if they know that they can trust that people aren't going to run off with their invention and try to replicate it in order to, you know, essentially steal from them right? At the end of the day. When we take away from the inventor, we take away from our future. Because if you're not an inventor yourself, honestly, and you're just somebody who goes and purchases products off of somebody else's ideas and inventions, then you're you're taking away from them everybody's future, because we're taking away from their ability to go and continue doing that. And that's how I look at it that way. And to me, you know, it takes ethical people who care about doing what's right to create safe environments where you can be collaborative and not have to worry about somebody running off with material. So

James Thomason: 1:09:59

at the end If you care to comment about some of the changes taking place in open source, because a lot of their the foregoing conference preceding conversation has reminded me of, you know, the the modern Internet where you guys talk a lot about the fourth cloud, the previous three clouds, a lot of them depended on open source that is people sharing their not only their ideas, but their actual work, you know, writing code testing code tremendously time and resource intensive work, and publishing that code for free. And we saw, we saw the emergence of Linux. And of course, we saw the commercial sponsorship of Linux by IBM as a as a counter strategy to Microsoft and others. And in the modern sense, we now see products like Kubernetes, etc. But we've also seen companies like Amazon, and I am going to kick Amazon in the teeth a little bit, I'm sorry, if they're a switch customer, we've seen them take open source projects, and then monetize them at great scale to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while the primary sponsors of those projects are sort of left in the dust. And there's been a backlash to that, you know, companies like MongoDB, Redis, they've changed their open source license agreements to no longer be truly open source, they basically they're open, you can do everything you want to do with them, except to build a service like Amazon Web Services, you know, out of those licenses, and so that, that started with a handful of companies, the the aforementioned ones, and then it seems to be spreading, you know, where more and more projects are changing their license to prevent this sort of cannibalization of their of their work. And there's something else you said earlier in the podcast about, you know, when we were all building that first commercial version of the internet, there was a real sense of, to me, you know, of exploration and experimentation and sort of camaraderie between the technologists who were experimenting and innovating in this wide open field, and a lot of sharing and you know, for the first time in history, people were putting their lives online, they were blogging, they were, some of them were oversharing, you might say, some of them are still oversharing. But there was this, I mean, for me, a real sense of a really contagious sort of sense of innovation and sharing, and that whole, you know, call it tech hippie, open source movement thing. So I wonder if you might predict, I mean, where do you see things? How important is open source to your strategy? Or, you know, in general, to what's coming? And what do you how do you see that developing under current circumstances? Yeah,

Eddie Schutter: 1:12:25

I think under current circumstances, so I think what's happening is, and let me just use RFPs are the original network, you know, network RFCs, that we worked on, everybody worked on together, right? If you look at the way the internet is, and the way we do networking, today, it's built on trust, actually, trust of the systems that are adjacent, and that communicate between each other. So the relaying messages without corrupting those messages in a timely fashion, and in a predictable way, so that you have quality communications from end to end. But the problem is, and this is why we have ransomware, and when we have hacking going on is that there are those who exploit the trust. And so now everybody's talking about building no trust systems, or, you know, building systems that are, you know, that are adversarial, and, and how do those systems operate. And in the outcome of that is that we end up on little islands, pointing guns at each other until we know that we're okay to work with each other, right. And that's not going to be collaborative. And so if you look at open source, and one of the very first things that happen in open source, actually, whether it was open source data centers, or open source hardware, or open source software, but one of the very first things that happen, if you remember, clearly back to the Sundays, but somebody ran off with some code and, and went and commercialize that and it, it disrupted everything. And then as you look at some other pieces that came out in open, the other thing that happened is, when corporate money got involved in sponsoring open source environments, that corporate money had an expectation of return on investment. And that that expectation, basically cause people who normally would have shared in a trustful way to start looking at their own interest and putting themselves before the purpose of the community, what the community was trying to do. So the best way to break down the community is to basically start caring about yourself first, I think is the key. So you have to figure out alright, what can I do? And how do I behave in the community when I have a duty to my company, and not to share intellectual property or solutions for my company, how do I behave? And then how do I stay aligned to that behavior? And I think it's really important that these communities create these, you know, clear messages and this is one that we were very sensitive to when we created I masons, which is why he talks about leaving your company at the door, those who haven't left their company at the door that come in, and, you know, unashamedly, you know, try to market to everybody in there. They don't stay in I masons, we all out. And, and, and the key here is that we all have a common commitment to doing good together. And we put that first but we don't, we don't go and share our company's inner secrets or where we're going or make forward leaning statements, or any, anything that's inappropriate in those scenarios, right, which we stand in the space that we need to be in to do the right thing for everybody. And that's part of the responsibility and quite frankly, goes back to honoring right, if you if you honor each other, and what your responsibilities are, and you treat each other special, and you do more than expected, and you do that with a good attitude, you're not going to spend your time trying to figure out, you know, how do I go, you know, steal this code, toss it up and make it look like it was my original idea?

Dean Nelson: 1:16:05

Well, Edie, I think that we could talk for 16 hours straight on so many different topics. But well over a time, but I've enjoyed this quite a bit, we usually end these podcasts with predictions. And we'd love to get your take on a few things that you think the future is going to look like. So take us out with that.

Eddie Schutter: 1:16:23

So I think a couple of things one, and this is one that Dean's been bugging me about for years, and we've we've fought each other off on this about water versus air, but there's definitely a trend towards higher density right now. Now, whether those use cases are pushing those things to happen, I don't know. You know, it's still see underutilization occurring even in high dense configurations, even, you know, hyperscale platforming is still under utilization. So if you look at the amount of equipment and energy that's been put in place, in order to enable that use, we still behave as you know, we're only going to run it at 40 or 30% utilization. So that case we fail over, you know, we still have capacity to run the app. So I think that there's clear lines of building 100 kilowatt platforms where people desire to be air, I mean, there's there's, there's some limitations with air can do. But that density creates another problem. And that is when you put all your eggs in a very small basket like that, aside from it being really heavy, and being really high. You also, you add to the risk profile of that blast radius and how it impacts everybody that's dependent on the solutions, right?

Dean Nelson: 1:17:33

You mean like eBay on an e 10k?

Eddie Schutter: 1:17:37

Exactly. Like he then e 10k.

James Thomason: 1:17:40

Or, you know, single catalyst switch? Let's not, there you go. Yeah, or

Eddie Schutter: 1:17:43

all the 911 services and four cabinets in one building, or, you know, things like that, right. So, I think that there's a trend towards higher densification, we have to be careful. And we have to be diligent to make sure that we basically build the right size, the right, the right application, the right solution, so we get the highest yield of work or value work out of the water, the energy we consume in order to make that happen, or the carbon impact, right. So there's that second thing is, I think, security is going to get harder. So what's gonna end up happening is we're going to change the way we interact and communicate and experience the way applications work today. And basically, the mains that will allow those applications to operate securely in the future. So today, we again, we live with a certain amount of trust you, you've trust, that you can walk down your street in your neighborhood, take your dog for a walk, and I, you know, potentially not get mugged or not get shot or not get run over or, you know, not get struck by lightning, or whatever that is that trust is built upon, you know, experiences and things like that, I think the chain is there's a tremendous amount of change. I also think that the constructs of identity in the past have to change as well. And so while many people are worried, you know, whether because of religious reasons, or distrust of the government, or whatever it is, I think there's going to be a point in time in which we're going to be known by something different than or our social security number, or, you know, our bank account number or driver's license or something like that, there's going to have to be a change there, because most of that is already been exposed somewhere, and it's not secure anymore. And the last thing is, look, the data center market is going to keep growing, and the digital infrastructure markets going to continue to grow. It's not going to be like it used to be it's going to be different. But the pendulum swings both ways, a lot of times in these markets, but the need for digital infrastructure continues to grow, the knowledge of digital infrastructure, how to support it, how to manage it, how to make it work in a way in an integrated way that supports the solutions that we need for humanity continues to grow. And so none of those things are going away. We're just getting more of them. I think they'll get smaller I think there'll be distributed across a much broader, you know, distribution. And I think you'll have to closely to couple the utilities from an origination source to those systems in order to create the resiliency and the redundancy you need. So there you go.

Dean Nelson: 1:20:16

There you go. Well, Eddie, I want to just share one more thing. I got a message at the end of this podcast. I got my test results back. Oh, I'm still positive for COVID 14 days, man. Geez, yeah, hell. So last episode, we were talking about my little quarantine down here. But yeah, anyways, but thanks for the predictions. Eddie.

Eddie Schutter: 1:20:37

should wear a mask more often. That's

Dean Nelson: 1:20:40

better. Yeah, I'm feeling fine. It's just I'm still positive. So anyways, thanks, Eddie, for being on the show. We really appreciate

James Thomason: 1:20:50

it. Thank you so much. Take care. Eddie shooter, thank you so much for being on the next podcast. We really appreciate it. Folks. If you enjoy shows such as this one where we bring you the best and brightest minds in tech who actually care about the future of humanity and the planet. Please do give us a like it helps us grow our audience. Our podcast is sponsored by infrastructure Masons who do not need builders of the digital age. Learn how you can participate by going on the web UI masons.org and by edge x building a new platform for all the things visit us on the web at Ed J x.io. That's Ed J x.io.