 Live from the JSA Podcast Studio, presenting Data Movers, showcasing the leaders behind the headlines in the telecom and data center infrastructure industry. Hey everybody, welcome to a very special edition of our Data Movers podcast. It's part of our greener data series. So welcome, welcome. I'm your host, Jamie Scott Okutaya, CEO of JSA. And along with me is my fabulous co-host, Mr. Evan Castel, top V2B social influencer. Hey, good to see you again and welcome everyone to Data Movers, where we sit down with the most interesting and influential men and women of today's modern data center and telco world, supporting the infrastructure requirements of this new normal. But first, Jamie, let's talk about you. We're always talking about our guests and your clients and other interesting things. But I think our viewers, listeners would be interested to know how did you get into the marketing and media world? Like what was a young Jamie Scott-O doing in her twenties to kind of build up her brand and her career? Like what was that like? Ah, a little bit of luck. A lot of late nights studying up, I guess. In short, I was going to NYU for my graduate degree in writing and I was writing my thesis and my friends that I lived with were like, you need to go out. Like come for a drink with us. You need to get off, you know, just writing this book and go. And so I actually, when I was sipping in cocktail at this bar was sat down right next to a gal who was hiring for MSNBC and she was hiring writers and my friends introduced me as a writer and I remember thinking, I don't know if you can call me a writer, like, you know, big names, Shakespeare. That's a writer. I'm just Jamie. But it kind of was an upward spiral from there. I was writing for MSNBC. I was a journalist there, got really interested in the journalistic perspective. And then my next move was to go into PR and I wanted to be representing the companies pitching their news to the news, to the news broadcasters. And I found myself at Telex where I was head of marketing in PR and that got me into our industry. And then once I understood that this is this core network infrastructure that powers all of our communications, all the ways that we stay safe and secure, all of our economies, our ways of entertaining and educating and learning. I just, I was hooked and decided, hey, what I did for Telex, I could do for one or two more logos. And that started JSA in 2005, 17 years. Wow, 17 years. That's amazing. What a great story. My main takeaway is spend more time at bars talking to strangers. Also get go to amazing graduate school programs. But yes, well, enough about that, but that was fascinating to hear the story. Let's get on with our incredible guest. Yeah, actually, who wants to talk about me? I have, especially when in the wings, we have the most amazing speaker friend. I'm so blessed to say he's also one of our contributing authors for greener data. But with me today, please welcome Mr. Brad Meisner. He's the product manager for global large diesel generators at Kohler. Welcome, Brad. So I was actually really excited to talk about plumbing, but we can talk about large diesel generators too. Very, very much into work, but just kidding. You must get that all the time at Kohler. But your background is actually in engineering as is mine, I have a double E and you worked in lots of engineering projects outside the data center space from I'm seeking Bayer belts, I heard solar panels, control systems, maybe a Kohler bathroom installation. I don't know, what else do you have going on outside in your past and how does that relate to our sector data center? And what are some of the commonalities when you think about engineering and design thinking and that kind of thing? Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me on. Jamie, it's always great to be with you, Evan. First time meeting you, fantastic to be here. So thank you. As I jump into your question here, first of all, yes, I'm on the power side of the Kohler business and it's very much a B2B market for us and not as familiar to most as our plumbing products, but we're actually the third largest standby power producer in the world. Lots of expertise in this space. And as I jump into your question then about, what's the difference between engineering products for a data center customer versus some of the other things I've done? The really big difference is how technical and how much knowledge the data center space has when you think about that customer base, they know the product as well as you do, they have lots of hands-on experience and they also come to the table with a lot of preconceived notions of it. So I just try to educate the customer and it's a different type of education that you're trying to give. But ultimately it really ends up in this really collaborative space of how we develop product, how we deploy generators and becomes very intentional about how we do things which is a lot of fun. How it's similar though is there's just this common thread across engineering about innovation and continuous improvement and always trying to strive to bring a new capability to the market. And that's always the fun part of it for engineers like myself. Wow. All right, I gotta ask. I'm gonna ask the big elephant in the room question, I guess. Of course, you Brad are in charge of the environmental policy and sustainability for Kohler's diesel generator division. And so on one hand you have the enviable position of being one of the biggest suppliers of emergency backup power for data centers around the world, huge. And then on the other hand, the technology you're championing is well notorious for its negative ecological impact. So how do you reconcile the two? How does Kohler approach these seemingly opposing goals? Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. And the environmental impact for diesel engine you think of an old dump truck going down the road in this big plume of black smoke behind it and you can just see the environmental impact from it. You're describing my dad's Volvo back then. That was exactly that. But I think we've come a long way, right? Yeah, yeah, I was just gonna say if you look today on the on-road truck technology, no longer are seeing that black smoke coming out of it and it's much cleaner. And a lot of the technology that we're rolling into our diesel engines for our generators are all things that have been applied to on-road truck technology. So certainly there's delicate balance between the long-standing history of diesel engines and the emissions and pollutions that come from it. But it's also the most reliable and power dense and easily deployed product in the market for any of these data center sites. So it's absolutely critical to the infrastructure for everything that Jamie described there of powering our entertainment, our life safety systems, all of that. So a lot of it comes back to that education piece, but that's also making sure that we're striving for better and better with the product. So there's a lot of things that we can do from a continuous improvement standpoint, a lot of things that we've done. You look at our engine technology over the past 20 years starting back in like 2000 and the improvements that we made to reduce pollutant emissions and the things that we continue to do today around introducing after-treatment systems onto our product and looking at alternative fuels for the diesel engines that are gonna significantly reduce our carbon emissions that I'm gonna talk a lot about later in this podcast. So interesting. And speaking of education, I understand you're enrolled in an MBA program at Purdue, one of our great institutions. I'm curious in a modern program like yours, do they talk about sustainability and environmental impact in the way they're educating future business leaders? Yeah, yeah, and thanks for pulling in the piece about me going back to school, I always love talking about it. So certainly we're talking about environmental aspects, we're talking about social aspects. And really this idea that businesses have to be more than just a vessel for creating a product and making money. We have to be every single stakeholders that our business impacts has to be thought of and considered. So environmental impacts through our products, through our supply chains, through our manufacturing processes, all of that needs to be considered. And really what the teaching is focusing around is how do you balance these demands as a future leader of business and of industry? So there's no like sustainability course per se that we're taking as an MBA, but it's certainly kind of interwoven into everything that we're doing now in business. It's also thinking about our chapters in greener data and your experience so international and colors reach in the data center world, of course global. How do you see that the issue of environmental protection really differ from market to market in country to country? What's that like? Yeah, yeah, great question. So when I think about sustainability as a whole within the power generation industry and even in the data center in distress, the parallels, a lot of it starts out of two locations around the globe. One is California and in the US and the other one is Europe. And those are really the two thought leaders in the space. And what happens is as those regions adapt new standards, drive new technologies, new requirements, the other areas quickly look and start to pick up on those and those ideas. A great example is one that came out of California recently affects both the generators as well as the data center industry. So right at the end of 2020, it was like a Christmas gift for all of us. The Bay Area of California, which is the Silicon Valley region, lots of data centers sitting there. They released new regulation that requires all diesel generators being installed in that region to be tier four compliant. So basically near zero pollution. And what that did is it showed that demonstrated the industry that yes, this can be done. And now you see areas like Phoenix, Virginia, all of them starting to gravitate towards this requirement. And that's usually what you see. You see it either come out of Europe or out of California, they institute these new standards and new requirements that drives the industry forward towards a more sustainable future. Awesome. And you're a co-author chapter in the new greener data book by a JSA is about a lot of emerging tech, really exciting stuff in the new green tech world from hydrogen fuel cells to sustainable fuel sources and more. So of all those emerging technologies, what innovation do you think is most promising for our space in the data center? Yeah, yeah, it's a great, we kind of set it up as this evolutionary or revolutionary because we're pursuing technologies in parallel. And when we think of what's the revolutionary stuff on the horizon, that's typically thought of as like batteries or hydrogen fuel cells. And then the more incremental that evolutionary type changes is things that we're doing to internal combustion engines like diesel generators that we can start implementing today and much faster. And when we think about the biggest things that are happening around the diesel space, it's really around alternative fuels. And there's two words out in the market for it that we're seeing a lot in the data center space. It's HVO and renewable diesel. HVO is typically talked about in Europe, renewable diesel is the name for it in the North America region, but they're really the same product. And what it's doing is it's taking and capturing waste streams of like animal byproducts, basically any byproducts of making food, which is very plentiful. And it's used as a process mixing with hydrogen. And you end up with this really revolutionary fuel where you have basically net zero, a carbon impact from it, because you're taking that carbon impact from the waste stream, repurposing it into a fuel. And that's where the renewable name comes from. So you think about how we reduce carbon at a data center. It's a really revolutionary technology that's gonna drive to near zero carbon at a data center and without having to use these revolutionary technologies. That's one that's certainly there. The other one is just advancements in engine technology. Like I've been talking about and then I think we'll talk about it more later but there's this push in the space also to think differently. How do we operate these generators differently? How do we deploy them differently in order to reduce our footprint from emissions from carbon? When we talk about those revolutionary pieces, when we talk about batteries and fuel cells, there's a reason why they're seen as revolutionary. They're not ready today to replace a generator on a data center site. Batteries that's very large, the footprint it's gonna require, when you consider the entire life cycle of a battery, actually creates a lot of carbon to create that and then also to recycle it. Short period of time that can provide backup power. So there's these hurdles that it has to overcome. Hydrogen fuel cells is probably the more promising the two technologies in my opinion. But the issue with the hydrogen fuel cells is your source of hydrogen. So today, hydrogen is primarily made from natural gas and that actually creates a lot of carbon. When I'm comparing it to a diesel generator, but actually the same from a carbon perspective, when you factor in the renewable fuel, it's actually cleaner to run your diesel generator. As more renewable technologies come available for our energy grid, I think solar, wind, electric or hydroelectric dams, those types of technologies will drive us more towards a process called electrolysis, which will allow us to have green hydrogen. But you just think of what it's gonna take to build out an infrastructure around that. Think of how long it took to build out infrastructure of all the gas stations and trucks that transport our diesel today. You had to build all of that up for hydrogen. So the earliest we would really see a green hydrogen revolution is gonna be 2030. And even then I think there's a lot of question marks still that need to be answered around it. So very important, you know, coalers attacking both sides, that revolutionary piece and the evolutionary piece and continuing to drive the best products out into the market that we can. So fascinating and actually speaks to how your coaler brand just so much more than what we might initially think about and we think coalers so innovative, a hundred year brand, right? I mean, phenomenal. But getting back to thinking differently in the chapter, Guino data that you authored, you called it a sustainable thinking, you know, really wanting data center designers to adopt to the sustainable thinking to move forward. So tell us a little bit about what is sustainable thinking? What are some examples of it? Why is it important? Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I mentioned how knowledgeable the data center operators are and these data center engineers are. At the same time, they're also very risk averse. Sean Farney is one of my mentors in the space a long time participant in it. And he always talks about how hard it is to get people to think differently and think new. And one of the reasons I think that is, and he's reinforced this with me, is a lot of these operators are incentivized by uptime. So why think differently? If I'm incentivized by uptime, why try something new? And it's kind of breaking that mold and really thinking of sustainability as right there with as important or even maybe being more important than these uptime pieces, which might be crazy to for some people to think about. But taking these safe risks within how we do things in order to be more sustainable, how we operate a data center site, how we exercise our equipment, how we build our equipment, how many pieces of equipment we put on a site for redundancy, all of those things that we can drive towards. And so, of course kind of done is mapped out this, I think of it like a staircase. So this is how much pollutant I have today. I want to step that down by taking these incremental steps of how I test things, of how I build my product. And we kind of roadmap this out much like we do like our product roadmap. So just these incremental improvements that we can do and start deploying. And we're finding industry leaders and thought leaders throughout the world who are interested in doing this with us. And we're starting to put some of these ideas actually into practice and testing them so we can prove them out before we take a widespread. Fantastic. And have you put together a sort of 10 or year or long-term view of where you see diesel engine tech being in relation to data center environmental issues? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It kind of goes back to that incremental, that evolutionary piece versus the revolutionary piece. One of the things that we're going to see happen with internal combustion engine. So today it's primarily all diesel, but you think about an internal combustion engine that can run on natural gas. They can run on a hydrogen. So there is also this roadmap, this process of taking our engines and evolving them into a hydrogen, which will allow us to run zero emissions just like a fuel cell would. Then how do we take these assets that are sitting on data center sites, right? In 20 years from now, when fuel cells or other technologies are developed, we're still going to have these assets that are still very viable on these data center sites that we need to convert. And that's a roadmap to also get those converted. Yeah, amazing. I'll tell you, Brad, I say to you, and I just, I feel the futurist coming out. You're just, you're mapping out our future. And we really appreciate your brilliance, your insight. So let's go ahead and get to the more relaxed, fun, rapid fire section of our Data Movers podcast. This is where we just ask you some goofy questions and get a little bit more data on what makes Brad tick and especially on his off time. So let's start with, what's your favorite dessert? Oh, great question. So my mother-in-law is a fantastic cook. She's also very giving. And she asked me every year for my birthday, what I want for a birthday cake. And she makes this fantastic eclair tour, which if you don't know, it's like this mixture of graham crackers and I don't know if it's like vanilla pudding, but it's very, very good. And that is absolutely my favorite. And every mother-in-law right now is thinking, there, that's the guy right there. Like perfect in love. Yes, awesome. So what's the first thing you do in the morning after waking up besides eating the eclair tort? What's next? Man, if I could wake up every morning with a eclair tort next to my bed, I would just be in heaven. I should suggest that to my wife. As I think about it, probably the thing I do, because it's always to an alarm that me and my wife both wake up to, I basically say the same thing every morning, I ask her how she slept. So that's probably the most boring thing, but yep, that's, it's always interesting the response I get to. I think you have a really good knowledge, like that's pretty cool. So when you were a child, what did you want to be when you grow? So I wanted to be a mechanic. So I'm a mechanical engineer, so I kind of do that by background. Of course, I moved into marketing now, which is like the dark side. But yeah, I wanted to be hands-on, fix cars, fix equipment, those types of things, but yeah, my parents, I have a knack for math and science. So they pushed me to go to engineering school, which has been a great fit for me. Yeah. Well, there's always a second career. We need more mechanics. So you never know. I understand you sing karaoke. What's your favorite karaoke song? I absolutely do not sing karaoke. As you can probably tell, I'm an engineer, right? So I'm very monotone. I'm not comfortable with being up in front of a whole group of people, especially making a fool out of myself. So I have no talents in music. I can't play an instrument. I can't sing. That's why you need to sing karaoke so we can make fun of you. No, no, I've got to. We're gonna have a karaoke episode, Jamie. We're all gonna sing karaoke. I don't know, I don't get ratings. Or maybe not. They'll be like, turn it up. I'm with you, Brad. It's like, you know, no one wants to hear me on a mic trying to sing. But so what is your favorite superhero? Iron Man, right? He's a brilliant engineer. Yes. He has this fantastic suit. They get to fly around the world. That's always been cool to me. Magical card course. I can see all the correlations, yes. Yep. What about pets, Annie? Do you have any, one to Annie? I don't. Trying to think if my daughter still has her goldfish. Nope, right now. I've got two daughters that keep me totally busy so I do not need a puppy in the house or anything like that. Good strategy. Keep it that way as long as you can. Trust me. And all right, my last fun facts question. What is your favorite place on earth? Colorado. I love the mountains. I love the snowboard. I love the fact that, and fun fact about Denver, I think they get like 310 days of sun a year and you have the mountains right there. It's just this great place. A lot of active people, things like that. Everybody's friendly. So yep, my favorite place on earth that family didn't live in Wisconsin, I would be in Colorado. Nice. Awesome. Well, thank you for joining us, Brad. Really interesting. I had no idea that there was so much innovation happening in diesel generation and power generation. It's like, well, it blew my mind. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And Brad, again, thank you so much for your time, your energy, your brilliance. We so appreciate you. And I'm so excited to also be able to promote your chapter in greener data. And guys, if you enjoyed today's Data Movers podcast as much as we did, go ahead and check us out at jsa.net slash podcast for upcoming episodes being released every other Wednesday morning. Yeah, and follow us on Twitter at Jay Scotto and Evan Kirstel and follow Jamie on TikTok for her karaoke songs. And we'll chat to you later. And as always, stay safe, think green and happy networking.