 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 Data Movers, our greener data edition. I'm your co-host, Jamie Scott-Cutaya, founder and CEO of JSA. Along with me is my fabulous co-host, top B2B social media influencer. You know him well, Mr. Evan Christel. Hey everyone and welcome to Data Movers, where we sit down with the who's who in today's leading telco and data center world, supporting the infrastructure requirements of our modern world. And Jamie speaking of modern world, I'm here at Enterprise Connect. It's the enterprise communications, collaborations and contact center show. And wow, this industry is on fire after the last couple of years. So attendances up, folks are back, masks are off or on? Well, there's testing and there's COVID passports and all that stuff. So there's not too many masks here in Florida, but where there are a lot of people and this industry collaboration and enterprise comms has gone through us this 10 years acceleration in terms of adoption. And so everyone is here. I mean, so who's who now of the industry from Amazon to Google and on and on and on. So it's really interesting to see the doubling down of investment in applications and infrastructure around enterprise communications and remote work, which by the way is good for the planet. We're not commuting, we're not driving as much, we're not flying into as many meetings. So that's a step in the right direction, right? Absolutely, absolutely. You're singing my song now, my friend. And stuff that we are definitely covering in our book, Weiner Data, which is out in less than a month now on Amazon. Are you excited by any chance? I sense a little bit of excitement in your voice. You feel it a little? Yeah, yeah. I mean, when I woke up yesterday as the 22nd, I was like, it's one month, one month to go. I think I must have shared that out on social obnoxiously, but it is so exciting because we've really gathered the industry thought leaders with the best, best innovations and one of them here today with us. So I am so excited. I know here on Data Movers, we try to get the best guests and we dive into their backgrounds, their career highs and lows, their unique perspectives. Well, I am so, so thrilled guys to introduce today. Welcome, Mr. Bill Kleiman, Executive Vice President of Digital Solutions with Switch Data Centers. We should also say he's a contributing editor of everywhere with Data Center Knowledge, Data Center Frontier, AFCOM, Data Center World Program Share. So yeah, of course also contributing author to greener data. Welcome, welcome, Bill, how are you? I'm doing all right. Thank you so much for having me, Evan and Jamie. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for being here and doing my seven minutes of research for this show. You have so many accomplishments and different roles and contributions to our industry. I really didn't know where to start with questions. You know, fascinating story of your career span in this industry, you know, your journey as it were from areas like automation, manufacturing, the emerging tech. So tell us about this story and cue the music. We'll do it Oscar-like. No, we don't have music, but tell us about your journey upwards and onwards through this industry. Sure, sure. Wow, I know we have a limited amount of time here, so we'll make this as fun as exciting as we possibly can. Great intro, Evan, first I thought that was a virtual background. It's not a virtual background. You are- It's the infamous Gaylord of Intel. It's just gorgeous on the inside. Talk about that fresh atmosphere, all of those trees behind it. Evan, everybody listening, those are real trees. That's this real fresh air that he's giving us. It's like some sort of spaceship earth going on here, it's fantastic. Evan's got his own little bio dome. That's cool. Yeah. I like that. Thank you. Thank you again for having me. Everybody listening, it's a pleasure to be on this call. Obviously I work with data a lot and I'm a big fan of data centers having a look at Switch. Just to kind of give you a condensed version of my career and what I've been doing. Interestingly enough, the whole start behind all of this career and what I do actually started out in a different country. Believe it or not, I was not born here in the United States. I was actually born in Kiev, Ukraine. Wow. We may need another show just to talk about this because my fiance was actually born in Kiev too. And so yeah, it's been top of mind the last few weeks, huh? Oh yeah, you can definitely say that again. People ask me, Bill, how are you doing? And I try to be super jovial and energetic. I usually am. But usually my answer has been sort of like, I'm doing okay. It's been late nights in early mornings, checking in on friends and family still in Kiev and involved in Odessa. A lot of our friends have left Cardico, but I open this to everybody listening. If you find me on Facebook, I've been posting regular updates on the events there. So you're welcome to give that a read. You don't need to send me a friend request. You can just follow my account. But there's a brighter side to this story. We came to the United States in the early 90s. So I had a chance to experience Chernobyl being the collapse of the Soviet Union. I remember being a refugee when all this fun happened. But the bright spot, the bright spot, I don't know, we don't have enough time to talk about all those little asterisks. My brother back in Soviet Ukraine would compete in these communications competitions. And it's unlike anything else. It was using a telegraph. I'm not kidding, right? And so he would sit down and we had this great apartment in a little area called Berezniki, if you're familiar with that, you know where it is in Kiev. And so he would put on these big headphones and he'd have his little telegraph switch, those little guys. And I remember being like four or five, six years old and just watching him do this stuff. Absolutely fascinated that those little beeps and boops, they were talking to somebody far across the Siberian plains, they'd be on the other side of Russia. But they were talking to somebody and sometimes he would let me sit down on his lap and put these big ear cans on me and he'd let me play with the switch. He taught me the numbers. He taught me how to do like SOS. And it was really fascinating to hear somebody respond back to you, right? In communication. So here I am, Evan and Jamie, a millennial telling you that I got my start in this industry in communications and data with a telegraph switch. But it's true. And then you slowly worked your way up to fax machines, I assume, and other, you know, dump phones. 56K modems. You know, I heard somebody on a subway one time, hang on a second, this triggered me. Their cell phone ringtone was the 56K dial-up tone. And I was like triggered. I'm like, what are you doing? Why would you do that in public? I was like, oh, that is awesome. And so coming into the United States in the 90s, I always held on to that fascination of just simply how we communicate in this era, how we can bridge vast distances and use technology and data to give people the opportunity to do amazing things, communicate, collaborate, play, work, live life. And so here in the United States, I had a chance to, in high school, I took COMSI classes in college. I got a network engineering degree. Then I got an MBA in marketing and other masters in information security. And really just never looked back. A lot of people in my industry in the data center space are adopted into this, like, I'm a marketing guy, but now I build servers or, hey, yeah, I did finance, but now I'm doing rack maintenance. I was lucky enough to actually flow into that and worked for one of the largest Citrix partners in the country as a platinum partner. I had a chance to deploy really cool virtualization solutions, cloud architectures, application migration, then I worked for a DevOps organization as well. So literally for a year, my head was swimming in application development, refactoring, relicensing, moving applications, like massive huge apps from on-prem to cloud and back. And now I'm with Switch working on, you know, some of the world's coolest, most advanced and most sustainable data centers you could ever build. So that's kind of like a condensed version of where I've been. So I've been very fortunate to work with the customer, work with vendors, work with the end user sites as well. And throughout all this time, in case you can't tell I'm enthusiastic about technology, I've really, really enjoyed helping people understand really complex topics in our industry. I just wrote an article, literally today as we're talking, it was published on the Nuclear Power Data Center, literally small modular reactors and how this could be a potential future, you know, as far as green and sustainable energy for the data center industry. Wow, game changer. Yeah, we need to take a look at nuclear obviously. So fascinating stuff. I think so too, it's interesting. So yeah, that's sort of like the remarkably the condensed version of how I got here. Yeah, and that actually is a beautiful segue into my question for you because obviously your work speaking for itself, you're known in our cybersecurity cloud data center industry, 15 years, I feel like it should be 50, but you were recently recognized with the 2020 I am 100 award and the 2021 I Mason's education champion award for your work with numerous HBCUs and for helping diversify the digital infrastructure talent pool, which we certainly need. So anyway, can you please elaborate more on how you've impacted our digital infrastructure industry, particularly with sustainability, ESG power development more and, you know, talking nuclear. Sure, sure. So thank you for that. It's one of my passions is I love working with students to help build the future of our industry. You know, I mean, you made a funny joke earlier like, hey Bill, I was expecting you to have like gray hair and be a little bit older, which is not an uncommon thing to say about, you know, folks in our industry. And I don't want to sound agist whatsoever. I've had absolutely amazing, you know, female and male leaders who just a little bit older than I am. But, you know, one of the things that I've seen, you know, impact our digital industry is, you know, obviously getting more young people into this space. I do a lot of work with high school organizations. For example, it's something I love to do when, you know, when I have time and don't sleep. Everything from judging high school business competitions to working with infrastructure masons and just being an educator for, you know, Latin serving, historically black colleges, universities. And what we're doing with these kids, these young adults, I should say, oh man, this is just so cool, you guys. We take electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering students, and we show them how our industry is directly a part of what they're learning every single day. Advanced power systems, mechanical design, even the civil engineers were wowed by the fact that, you know, for example, we are building a massive 14 mile long effluent water pipeline that's going to allow us to use 100% recycled, non-potable water to sustain a multimillion hyperscale data center. Like the whole space will not tap into the water source that's nearby in the Truckee rivers. It'll reduce nitrates from the river. It'll increase capacity to build more homes for people. And it actually helps save endangered and endangered wildlife species that are in the area. And this is something a civil engineer can do in the data center space. So kind of a long-winded answer about the educational part of it, which I really do enjoy doing. But how has all this impacted digital infrastructure? So things like power development, ESG, we're just seeing so much advancements out there. You know, everything for building massive solar systems that are backed by these really cool battery technology so that we don't lose the power of the sun that we've captured when the sun sets, right? We have these really cool, for example, Tesla mega pack battery packs that allow you to have like 800 megawatt hours. So much storage to then fuel back into a data center when the sun actually sets it. All this is done behind the grid. If this is foreign to you, that means that it's not touching the grid. It doesn't place a burden on an aging infrastructure. We're literally dealing with new types of power sources. And as far as ESG, listen, this is another acronym in our space. So I'm sorry if there's another one you have to remember. This one's kind of important. It's only three letters. So I can do, it's a five-letter acronym, but I really have trouble with it. I agree with that. Oh, you have them? Yeah, man, that was pretty long too. But ESG, you know, and everybody listening, that's an important one in environmental, social and governance. And these are metrics that have a lot of money and dollars behind them. Like investors care about this stuff. And what an investor tells you, the health of your company depends on how environmentally, social, and governance oriented you are, the better you're gonna be able to fare in the near future. So our digital infrastructure industry is actively looking at new ways to be creative in 2022 and beyond to make sure that sustainability, I mean, is at the forefront. I mean, heck, the literal theme of the AFCOM data center world conference coming up just next week in Austin is sustainability. Every keynote's gonna be around that. Many of the sessions are gonna be around that. You know, we're gonna have the Department of Energy presenting on small modular reactors and how they're ready to give you money. Here's a ton of money. Go build a nuclear reactor to power your hyperscale or edge environment or a city, for example. But sustainability is huge and it's evolved with the last, I think just very briefly five years at a blistering pace. And personally, I'm kind of excited about that. Me too. Now I am, your enthusiasm is infectious. And Bill, you mentioned, you have a chapter in greener data. Jamie, when is that coming out? When is greener data coming out? Oh, April 22nd. April 22nd. And in that chapter, you mentioned that the leader of switch, Bill, I'm sorry, Rob Roy would say, just because data runs the planet doesn't mean it should ruin it. I love that quote that Jamie shared. You know, so we're all see how data centers have gotten such a bad rap historically. And I love the vision and direction, velocity in which you're heading. And it's so fundamental to our society and our, you know, in commerce. And it really powers every aspect of our, you know, work life and workplace. And, you know, the buzzword that's all the rage now is the fourth industrial revolution, you know, we're sort of passing from the third phase to the fourth phase of our industrial economy. But what does all that vision mean for the future of data centers specifically? Is there a role for data centers powering this new industrial revolution we're seeing out there with robotics and cloud and IoT et al? I love this topic, Evan, because it's obviously it's near and dear to my heart. And yeah, in the chapter, I talked about powering and kind of surviving the fourth industrial revolution. Really quick, everybody listen, this is from the World Economic Forum. This might be a new term for you, but during the first industrial revolution, we used water and steam power to mechanize production. In the second, we used electric power to create mass production. The third was when we used electronics information technology to automate production. Now we're actively in the fourth industrial revolution that's building on the third, where this digital revolution that has been occurring since about the middle of the last century, it's characterized by a fusion of technologies that's blurring the lives between physical, digital and the biological spheres. Many call it like the future of the internet, not something you look at, but something you are a part of, like this immersive world that we're all gonna be a part of. And I don't care if you call it cloud, I don't care if you call it the metaverse, web 3.0, it's gonna have to live somewhere. That's, there's no secret to it. And that somewhere's gonna be the data center. But unlike the previous revolutions, we must design and leverage this fourth industrial revolution not only to be sustainable, but to counteract the effects of the previous three revolutions. And that's a really, really important concept to understand. So what this means for the future of data centers, and I absolutely agree with you, Evan, it's been so unfair to see like mainstream media think that we're out there putting coal into our infrastructure just to make it run with these giant steam stacks. That's not true. Many of the leading hyperscale organizations and maybe the cloud ones as well have a huge focus and sustainability. And even those crypto mining, Bitcoin, farming data centers that are out there are now revamping their architecture to make sure that even their heavily utilized workloads are still modeled after some level of sustainability. Digital waste equals physical waste. It's just that simple. And when I speak to students, I try to give them an understanding of what it means to waste digitally. A single Google search can power a hundred watt light bulb for 11 seconds. Wow. How many Google searches did you do today? How much YouTube cat videos do you have streaming in the background or is Pandora or Spotify playing nonstop? That has an impact. Every single click that you do with your mouse, that has an impact, a real physical carbon impact. And once we start to sort of make that more tangible, more realistic, something people can actually understand, then they begin to see how this fourth industrial revolution is impacting our planet. And for the future of data centers, I think it's kind of exciting. We're going to see the future iterations of power design. I mean, we've seen everything from floating solar panels out in Japan. They have the world's largest amount of them to tidal turbines, to these obviously small and modular reactors to massive solar fields that are powered by or backed by these really advanced battery packs. This is the future of how we both deliver sustainable power, to capture it, store it, and then push it back into digital infrastructure. I mean, it's a part of the reason why you've seen new emission standards are on scope one, two, and three and how there's government entities that are now pushing for the transparency of the organizational transparency to make sure that these companies are in fact being green. For everyone listening, if you've seen a mainstream media story, if you've seen something out there saying these data centers are just horrible, it's really not true. The data center industry is actually trying to be a good steward of the environment. They're trying to be good neighbors to communities. They are trying to deliver solutions that actually bring power, water, all these resources back into the communities that they're living with. And they're just trying to be a good partner, not just the people that are around them, but certainly in the world. The fourth industrial revolution is going to have to be designed in a sustainable manner. And the underlying architecture, which is a data center, I don't get how big or how small they are, call it the edge, call it mist computing fog, whatever cool word you want to describe, physical digital infrastructure, it's going to have to be done in a different way in this near future. And it's going to have to be done much more sustainably. And I think everyone understands that. And some players like switch data centers are pushing the envelope more aggressively than others. And so tell us, how are you putting in action some of those advanced technologies and what's required to get the sort of adoption deployment to 100% over time? What sort of innovation do we need to take it from pilots and a small percentage of our infrastructure to 100% over time? Money talks, what's really fascinating about this upcoming data center world event is that we're having a new audience come and talk to data center professionals, capital investors, these are people who have a ton of money that are like, we would like to give you billions of dollars to build a green infrastructure, period. Solar, geothermal, wind, offshore, nuclear reactor, here's a ton of money that we want you to use because this will create a better bottom line and a healthier business, but also a healthier world. And we know that impacts everybody. I think in seeing this importance in innovation, and for example, Switch created the gigawatt one project where it is 555 megawatts of solar panels that's backed by 800 megawatts, megawatt hours of battery capacity. Or for example, how we're building that 14 mile, 4,000 acre foot effluent water pipeline to reduce the impacts of water and be a good neighbor also, not just, hey, we're gonna use recycled water, going to actively impact the communities of where we're building this stuff. It's going to require creativity, it's gonna require ingenuity. One of the people writing this book with us, Dean Nelson, for example, talked about like the carbon sticker, right? Every single piece of manufacturing equipment that goes into a data center, it's gonna be like the nutrition facts that you see on food. But instead of nutrition facts, guess what it has Evan and Jamie and everybody? Yeah, data on how much of a carbon footprint this UPS has or this air flow unit has or whatever else might be in your data center actively working. The other major important thing is, being creative and creating patented technologies or using ingenuity with your partners to be creative. We designed our own T-skip, this thermal compartment that does 100% heat containment that allows us to use very simple physics to let the hot air rise get pulled out of the building as we push cold air in. And that level of heat containment, that gives us the opportunity without liquid cooling to push rack density, 55 kilowatts per rack. Now, if you're listening to this, the latest AFCOM report, the state of the data center report at least, mentioned that the average in the industry is still between seven and 12 kilowatts per rack. It's not bad, but when you start talking about new advancements, containment units, rack level density, and you can actually push that level, that means we can do more with less physical infrastructure and space, more density, more air flow and less power requirements because it's all sort of condensed. That's the kind of exciting stuff that we're gonna be seeing out there. Everything from new ingenuity around battery, power design, physical infrastructure design to the creativity of our industry cohorts. So what they're doing to make sure that every single piece of visual infrastructure they build is sustainable. I'm just so excited about this conversation, but let's sort of move from data centers to enterprises. Bill, according to your chapter in greener data, the EPA states that carbon emissions are responsible for more than 80% of overall greenhouse gas emissions. So to remain sustainable, how can enterprises really define their carbon footprint and challenge others around them with their emission strategy to ensure that it's not just a long-term goal, but there's actual substance to it? Wow, Jamie, that's a good question. All right, all right, everybody. In our industry, there are different classifications of data centers. There's your traditional enterprise data center, let's say mom and pop bakery shop and mom and pop bakery shop have their own few racks right there on site where they make their goods. And then there's co-location and hyperscalers. That's kind of a reset. What is the misconception here is that we're all sort of like bundled up together in this one data center terminology and everybody thinks that we're all super inefficient. That's not true. For hyperscalers and co-location partners, the entire goal is to be as dense and sustainable and efficient as humanly possible because you want to get more tenants into your environment. You wanna be green and sustainable. You wanna make sure that your tenants can, for example, retire requirements around sustainability. Now, at the enterprise side, that's not always the case. And before anybody starts throwing virtual socks at me or if I start getting like random Twitter messages saying that I'm crazy, not all enterprise data centers are inefficient. Let me just start there, but many of them are. And I've spent time in the enterprise space. These infrastructures usually have very much higher power you should affect in this rate is these PUEs. They're closer to the two range instead of closer to the one range. And really their goal is just to maintain operations. Is it up? Are the lights blinking? Fantastic. I can access my applications that are local. The enterprise data center is usually more legacy. Usually doesn't have as much containment. Usually doesn't have as much efficiency being built into it because again, the goal is just for it to operate. In the enterprise space, I don't wanna make this sound too blunt, but it's important for enterprise leaders to focus in on what they're good at. So if mom and pop bakery is good at making really good sourdough bread, they should focus on making really good sourdough bread and not making and facilitating and operating a data center. In those kinds of situations, I would recommend that they probably move to a co-location, save money and actually become greener in the process. Many enterprise locations, data centers have legacy gear. They're older, their containment isn't as good. And there is an awakening happening in the enterprise space where many are actively closing their data centers and moving them to co-location spaces because they see it's more efficient, more cost effective and much greener. So if you're in the enterprise space and you have a data center, I mean, don't get rid of it. Have a moment, a reflective, introspective moment and ask yourself, is it really as efficient as it is? Is it needs to be at how much money am I spending? The cost of goods sold scenario is really important. How much does it cost me to sell this widget in my data center versus if I took this thing and put it in a co-location site? The numbers today especially could surprise you. I think that to become more efficient and a global space long-term, those organizations, especially enterprises and SMB, those smaller data center sites that I know are running less efficiently, this is your moment. This is your moment to capture that carbon and see how you can make it way more efficient by asking some really important, sometimes tough, introspective questions. Should I still be in the data center business? Maybe I should start working with a partner or at the very least as an enterprise data center, should I be looking at new technologies, new solutions and new partnerships to make my ecosystem greener? Well said. Fantastic, absolutely. Well, that was a lot to take on but super insightful, super exciting. Can't wait to re-listen to some of your answers here. But now is the time we've all been waiting for. It's the rapid fire questions where we try to embarrass you in front of everyone. Of way. But let's see, let's jump right in, Jamie. So question number one. So you're obviously an industry analyst, a blogger, a thought leader in our space. But of all the topics that we touched on, what's your favorite topic to discuss? Wow, I'm really, dang it. I have notes. I figured this was gonna be one of the questions, Bill, what's one of your favorite topics? And I'm looking at these notes and they're not right because it's not true. I don't wanna call myself a flavor of the weak technologist because I do really enjoy working with a lot of different kinds of solutions but keeping my finger on the pulse allows me to talk about really specific technology trends that are happening in our industry that I think are critical for everyone to understand. You know, my fascination right now, I guess if we're gonna call it in a broader sense would be power. I've been really, really fascinated around power. And I've had people throw a joke around me, Bill, how could you be supporting nuclear power data centers having survived your noble? I'm like, well, you live through one of them. They're all the same and it's a horrible, let's not do that. But, you know, I think power delivery has really, really been fascinating for me. I've been writing around about things like micro grids as a really cool bridge between legacy fossil fuels and new emerging sustainable power solutions and how these architectures are creating sustainability resiliency and a really cool entry into the market for new types of power sources and new locations even where data centers can be built. I really do enjoy talking about, for example, these new technologies like small modular reactors or advanced modular reactors as well as AMRs. And there's different types of needs for the power solutions that are coming into these. They're not huge. They produce quite a bit of power. You know, there's still pros and cons to them. And then I think one of the other things that I really enjoyed talking about, you know, I hope this is not a surprise to anybody, but cloud. I've spent so much time helping organizations build cloud applications, deliver them into the big cloud providers that are out there. I've also seen the opposite side. I'm witnessing in our world, I hate saying this, but the repatriation of a lot of workloads. Well, that's called cloud rebalancing where companies are now starting their application designs with repatriation in mind. Like, holy cow, like we're gonna put this thing in the cloud for two years, but they're gonna reevaluate it. It shouldn't still be there. You know, cause the dirty little secret about cloud computing is that the spend never goes down. That build doesn't get lower. It only gets bigger. And I think what's fascinating in our industry right now and what I've been really enjoying talking about is that balance. How do I find it? What should live out there? What should be living on premise? What does data gravity look like? Especially when I'm trying to impact more people in the space. So kind of a long-winded answer. I'd say like power on cloud. My favorite topics. I love it. Awesome, awesome. So, okay, here's the question. If you could run your own nonprofit organization, which I don't know, you might. And I feel like nothing is outside of your, oh, hey Ms. Ava, hello. This is Ava Capri. She's excited to join us today, huh? Oh my God. I don't know if you can see her. I can. She pees it apart. She's my life. Okay, so if you could run your own nonprofit organization, what would it be? What would you choose and what's your cause? Why? You know, ironically enough, it's perfect that your little girl came into the scene. I love kids. I love working with kids. I really think that my nonprofit would be, and obviously what's happening in Ukraine here as well. And I've been working with a lot of nonprofits right now actively. It's probably to work with kids, whether it's schools, whether it's maybe refugee programs or just being a mentor or like a mentorship program, for example, with kids that maybe are underprivileged. I really feel like when I grow up, I wanna do that. I wanna go be a teacher or a mentor or adjunct professor one of these days when I'm done with the corporate world. But that's definitely one of the things that I wanna do is work with young adults and kids because I mean, I don't know how many folks out there listening can probably attest to this, but I love that aha moment, right? When their eyes light up and you just change that paradigm on what's happening in the world. I love that. I live for that kind of moment where you can inspire these kids to do something amazing in your future or just to give them hope about something in the future too. That's what I'd wanna do. Yeah, I definitely want you talking to Ava in like 10 years from now when she's like, mom, what do you do? That industry is so boring. I'll be like, no, no, no, let's have Bill's take on what we do. It's way cooler. I got you, Jamie. And I got you, Ava too. We'll have that discussion. Same level of energy, don't you worry. Awesome. So we've talked a lot about big picture, but what's one thing or two things you do every day in your own personal life to contribute to improving the environment? Things like are you a gadget guy, connected home guy or are you doing any projects that help with sustainability at home? Yes, I was looking forward to this question. Okay, okay, oh my God. So I wrote an article on data center frontier called the cloud powered parent raising a baby on an app at a time. I'm not kidding. So I have a three and a half year old and literally before she was even born we use several applications and data to, oh my God. Wonder Weeks was one of them. Baby Tracker was another one that we used. We have a Nannette smart camera, watching over her. And all of these tools are amazing because they're driven by data. But let me answer your specific question here about what's one thing I've done to contribute to the environment. My home is a very, very, very connected home. And I love looking at ways that I can use data to make the environment greener. Hey, look at that. That's the title of our book. And there are really cool little things that you can do. Let me give you some really specific examples. Downstairs in the basement on our main waterline I put a smart meter. It's called Flow FLO. It's made by M O E N. And here's what it does. It will learn how your household uses water. I can tell you if it's a faucet, if it's an outdoor sprinkler, if it's a shower or if it's a toilet. And what's really cool is that it learns. So like if in the middle of the night there's a leak or there's a sprinkle or stuff like that, it will turn itself off, right? Almost immediately, like it can detect down to the trip. Wow, so cool. How, you know, if there's a problem in your house and then they'll call you and then they'll text you and say, hey, there's something going on. I've actually used that feature several times. We had a leaky faucet outside for our water hose and it's just starting to leak a little bit and my phone goes off and I'm like, okay, nothing in the house and then I go outside. Holy cow, this thing would have kept going for quite some time. Wow, very cool. That's cool to keep your pipes from bursting and you know, making sure there's no water leaks. You know what else it does? Tells me how much water I use. How many bathtubs I fill up, how it compares to the national average, ways that I can conserve water. And what's amazing is, remember we talked about this, Jamie and Evan, that the tangibility of data when you start to actually see how you're impacting the world, you turn your faucet on, you don't understand, but when you start to turn that water flow into data, wow, holy cow, you just absolutely open your aperture on what you're actually doing on the environment. So like, well, maybe I'm gonna be more conscious. Maybe I'm gonna turn this thing off. Now, we've also got a really cool APC smart battery in my little server rack downstairs in the basement that monitors the flow and outflow into my rack of how much power I use. So in that sense, I can actually tune on my servers because I did get the ones with the power efficiency on there, how much power they're actually using at one given time. Now, I've got like a 1500 watt power supply on that thing, but I am actively on this giant Dell server using like as much as like a thing client would be. Just super, super little tiny amounts because my virtual workloads, they just don't need a lot of power and it's little using like a hundred watts or less at any given time while that server is running. And that's amazing amount of information. Now, not everybody listening is gonna have a server at home, maybe some of you do, but you could absolutely start to include some of these different kinds of technologies into your home, whether it's a water meter, I've got another one that's actually connected to our HVAC system that tells me the air quality in our house, how often our system is running. When there's peak times, you can sign up for that kind of stuff with your power provider as well. But that's the kind of stuff that I've been working on in the house and it is absolutely fascinating when you start to see and leverage data of your everyday life. I mean, talk about this, like the step counter on your watch you can measure your water, your power flow in your house, your air quality and so on. And this is gonna become the normal, I think for many, many homes in the very, very, very, very near future. But like right now, this is stuff that you can start deploying to see your physical impact on this world. Yeah. How am I not doing this yet? Like this is awesome. Get on it. Right, absolutely. All right, so let's take this outside, shall we? What is your favorite outdoor activity and why? I do love swimming. I was a competitive swimmer, but I'm gonna say that my favorite, favorite, favorite outdoor activity is hiking where there's no cell phone reception. I think that's like my favorite. As a technologist who's like persistently connected, we just spent a long weekend in a cabin in Michigan where we had just like basically no internet. It was great, right? Got a chance to disconnect. My office at Switch is in Las Vegas. I am not a big strict person at all. Keep me away from Las Vegas Boulevard. I just, it's just not my jam, but what is my jam is Calico Basin, Red Rock, Valley of Fire. After a day at work, for example, I will go to the hotel, change, text my team where I'm gonna be and I'm gone, hiking, just going up some giant hill or a side of a mountain. I love, love, love doing that kind of stuff. We took a big road trip before our kid was born out into Banff in Kananaskis in Canada. We were like, we drove so far north, we were like eight hours away from Alaska and then we made a big turn back and drove through British Columbia all the way back. It was a two and a half week trip. And boy, if that wasn't like the coolest thing ever, stop in the middle of a highway that was like barely traveled, just get out and look at mountains or go on a hike, find an abandoned river or like a water and just a lake and walk by this lake with the mountains in the backdrop. In case you can't tell, I enjoy being outdoors and hiking and being around water in nature. That is my jam. Wow, that is so fun. I need to get outdoors more often. You've motivated me, inspired me. And thank you for joining us, Bill. You know, when we started this episode, Jamie said that she loved you so much. And I thought, well, Jamie loves everyone. So that's really no really high standard. But now I love you too, man, you've been great. And I've just learned so much from this really brief conversation about the future of our industry. I think this is one of my favorite episodes to be frank, Jamie. So can't wait for others to hear it as well. And on a side note, I know we've been joking and laughing and it's been really fun. And but I would like to have a chat with you offline. And maybe we do a live stream, Bill, on what's happening with Ukraine, the terrible tragedy unfolding there. And what could be done from our viewpoint here in the US? Absolutely. And just for everyone listening, I really do appreciate this. Like I said, geez, I don't want to end this on a bad note, but the request that I have from my friends and family in Ukraine, and I guess everyone's gonna learn something more about me. My name's not really Bill, because this is not very creative, right? It's Vitaliy, Vitaliy Yurievich. Nice to meet you, everybody, Porchin Pityatna. And the one thing that a lot of my friends and family are saying is like, please just don't let the world forget about us. And they're scared. And just so if you hear or see a story on social media, share it out because international pressure really does help. And most recently, this is literally, I've just kept couple of days ago from the office of President Zelensky. Help.gov.ua, I'm gonna say that one more time. Help.gov.ua, there's a Ukrainian and English version is the official website for Ukraine. You can see where there are open corridors to receive aid, where you can send them, how you can send them, what's in needs. You can actually send very specific items. You're welcome to reach out to me. I work with micro-organizations. So basically people, if you send money towards people that I know or that I recommend, it's literally gonna go right into the hands of humans and individuals and humanitarian aid. Like I could tell you where it's going. So just be sure to share out what's happening out there. It is an extraordinary situation. You have Ukrainian friends, they're probably not okay. It's been constant updates of like familiar neighborhoods, streets you know, places you've been to. I can't imagine, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's extraordinary. I don't know what other word to use. But checking on your Slavic friends, especially your Ukrainian ones, they might say that are okay, but then be like, are you sure you're all right? Is there anything you wanna talk about? But yes, Evan and Jamie, thank you for bringing that up and everybody listening, it's an extraordinary time. Definitely keep my country, my people and your thoughts whenever you can. And Evan, yeah, let's talk about this, absolutely. We must, we shall, absolutely. Well, thanks, thanks so much. And Jamie. Oh gosh. Extraordinary, Bill, that's from the beginning to the end, you are amazing and whatever we can do. Again, help.gov.ua, checking it out. And Bill, I'll talk to you directly too. We absolutely are going to have a charitable contribution to the proceeds of greener data. So a lot of conversations here, but let's all do good guys and stop this massacre. It's not acceptable. So, hey listeners, if you enjoyed today's Data Mover podcast as much as we really did here, please go ahead and check out jsa.net slash podcast for more episodes releasing every other week on Wednesday mornings. And follow us on Twitter at jscotta when Evan Kerstel. And until then. And always stay safe, happy networking and green.