Speaker 0 | 00:01.620

You know,

Speaker 1 | 00:09.943

being outside is great. I don’t mind neighbors as well. And if you had crazier neighbors, that would be more fun for the show. You know, you never know. I had a crazy neighbor once that yelled at me for mowing my lawn on a Sunday at two o’clock in the afternoon. Unbeknownst to me, it was Mother’s Day. And the kids were playing on the… on the on the swing set and uh we’re recording this this just makes it that much more real by the way we’ll do the introductions here in a second and uh joel you can you can put this on you can put this on because it’s always fun you know when you hear two real people talking so anyways um the lady came marching down my backyard and granted i i had like three acres three and a half acres of land so it’s not like we were like right on top of each other either i’m mowing the kids are on the spring shed swing set and this lady comes down and my i see my wife chasing after her she’s like marching down the lawn i’m like what is going on like this must be like some emergency or something and uh literally in the house next to me i’ve never met this lady before for whatever reason because i had some i knew everyone else in the neighborhood but i didn’t know these people they’re kind of like hidden to themselves i felt like they were doing like weird seances and stuff at night lighting candles outside and crazy stuff anywho comes down stands in front of the in front of the mower and I’m like, is the house on fire? What’s going on? And she just immediately starts dropping crazy F-bombs like, you got a lot of infant nerve.

Speaker 0 | 01:39.369

I’m like, what’s going on?

Speaker 1 | 01:40.270

My wife’s like, excuse me, my kids are embarrassed.

Speaker 0 | 01:42.151

I’m like,

Speaker 1 | 01:42.532

what the F I want? I’m like, what’s going on? And she’s like, and immediately this sense of calmness came over me. I don’t know what it was. It was like, I went calm. I just went really calm. Somehow, like in these, I get it. put in these crazy situations every now and then this sense of calm comes over me. So anywho.

Speaker 0 | 02:02.545

That’s useful. None of the days with Mr. Rogers anymore.

Speaker 1 | 02:05.586

Yeah, it is useful. And she just starts going crazy. My wife’s like, excuse me, my children are here. And I’m like, what? I’m like, what’s wrong? What’s going on? She’s like, it’s Mother’s Day and you have to mow your lawn on Mother’s Day. Here we go. See, now I’m the one getting interrupted. Yes. close the door. I’m recording a podcast. This is getting even more real now. It’s my life.

Speaker 0 | 02:30.254

Anyways.

Speaker 1 | 02:35.837

Oh, yes. She’s like, it’s Mother’s Day. All I could do is say, you know, I am so sorry. And I had my son… We both put the lawnmower in neutral. I turned it off and pushed it up and pushed it into my driveway. Up a fairly steep hill in our backyard. Anyways. That was one of my neighbors. You never know.

Speaker 0 | 02:58.649

Yeah, you never know. Happy Mother’s Day to her.

Speaker 1 | 03:02.351

I told some other people that and they’re like, I would have never acted that way. I would have been the kid’s earmuffs. All right. Today, welcome everyone. So this is the preview to the show. Welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. It’s rare that we have a true super nerd on the show. We have a super nerd on the show today, Sydney Burks, EHD. I’m hoping you’re not hungry and poor anymore. So founder of building the future, well, founder of Boundless Digital, which we’ll get to in a moment. But more important, you did five years of college. It looks like so similar. And your five years of college probably has no, no, it’s probably not a reason as to why I did five, six years of college. But you did. Is it five years? Is it five years? Anyways, 1998 to 2003 at MIT in physics and mathematics. So way above my head. So why did you do five years there? Or is it four and a half?

Speaker 0 | 04:05.512

No, you’re right. It was five. And it wasn’t the scenic route we always think about. It definitely took me a while to get out of there. I went to MIT because I was always interested from the young age of building a time machine. And if you ever watched that show from the 90s, Quantum Leap. There was a scientist on there, Sam Beckett. He went to MIT and built a time machine. So I said, all right, that’s what I have to do. So I went to college, said it’s got to be MIT. That’s the way to build my time machine.

Speaker 1 | 04:28.087

And we’re going to do it for real. And when I was a little kid, my sister used to, she used to talk about like the theory of going back in time. And I always just imagined it like, well, if you go faster than the speed of light, aren’t you just going past light? Like, so I could see what happened back in time, but how are you actually going back in time? This gets real nerdy, way above my head. And, but. Is it actually possible? To me, it’s no, it’s impossible. I don’t care. Like me, like general, like common sense tells me, no, it’s not impossible. You can’t go, maybe travel past time and maybe see what happened or in the past, but you can’t see the future or actually physically go back in time. You tell me how that’s actually possible.

Speaker 0 | 05:11.387

I’ll tell you what we understand right now. So we, I guess I’ll say we scientists, we’re still figuring out what time means. Now, we don’t understand any way right now where you can get into your DeLorean, go 88 miles an hour, and then show up in the future. That’s still off the table. But we are discovering things that make sense when you look at things going backwards in time. For example, if you look at certain subatomic particles behave in a certain way, The behavior looks as if they’re going back in time. We also have the concept of things called time crystals, which are kind of like physical spatial crystals, such as salts, a type of crystal. And with normal crystals, they have this pattern that repeats throughout space. Scientists have recently discovered crystals, which they call time crystals, which are patterns which repeat throughout time. So I’m not saying that we’re going to be traveling through time like on Star Trek anytime soon. But time is definitely one of those things that we are still uncovering what it means on the quantum mechanical level. And I think as we discover more of that, we’ll find more tricks that influence how time evolves. If that makes any sense.

Speaker 1 | 06:14.280

I’m just trying to see what subatomic particles that you’re saying that look as if they’re going back in time. Are we talking wormhole stuff? Are we talking particle accelerators? What are we talking here?

Speaker 0 | 06:24.508

Well, when I talk about subatomic, what I mean is when we’re talking into the field of quantum mechanics. So I actually did my PhD in quantum optics. And. There’s a whole universe which behaves different from the universe we’re used to, we’re accustomed to. We’re accustomed to things such as Isaac Newton, Apple Falls, it hits you on the head, force equals ma. Things go around and define orbit. Things are well positioned at a given place in space. However, as you shrink things down to the quantum mechanical level, a new set of rules starts to emerge. And reality looks a lot different than what we’re used to reality looking like. For example, you can take a quantum mechanical ball. a very small ball and throw it at a wall. And then there’s a chance that ball appears on the other side of the wall without having actually physically broken the wall or anything. So you might be thinking, okay, that’s weird. Space and time look differently on the quantum mechanical scale. So when you start involving that realm of physics, everything changes.

Speaker 1 | 07:24.617

It’s nice. It becomes like 2001 Space Odyssey where we pop out somewhere weird or something. Not really. In your PhD bullet points, you have particle swarm optimization. It sounds really cool. It sounds like application prioritization, except probably a lot deeper than that. What is particle swarm optimization?

Speaker 0 | 07:53.635

That’s actually something interesting I was trying to do to get my PhD done. So particle swarm optimization is basically a way to… optimize some complex problem. And you basically take your answers and represent them as small entities. And each of these entities kind of behaves in a different way and they converge on their own to a global optimum. So that’s the type of optimization problem. And I was actually using this for my PhD because my PhD was in something called quantum optics. And what I was doing was building what we call a quantum memory, which is basically the hard drive for the computers of tomorrow. Now, when I started my PhD for a finish at 10 years ago, we were talking about quantum computers, which were things we’d see in 50 years. And things have gone so quickly now, anyone can actually listen into your podcast. They can go on the IBM website and run their own quantum computer algorithms today. So the field has just exploded. And back then I was building a system to basically store information from light onto atoms so that we could use that as a quantum mechanical hard drive.

Speaker 1 | 08:54.969

That’s insane. And thus we start to… that’s you start to get the idea of maybe I should go into, I don’t know, technology of some sort. In other words, you go from, look, I want to build a time machine to, I don’t know, we’re going to like work with Cisco Meraki.

Speaker 0 | 09:13.519

Yeah. It’s, it’s kind of funny. I, I’ve always been a physicist and scientist at heart and technology is one of those things that just kind of come easy, you know, from taking things apart, rebuilding them. My first computer was an 8088 back in, back in the eighties. And It’s always been a part of my lifestyle. And after…

Speaker 1 | 09:30.295

So this is, so in 8088, what was the first computer again?

Speaker 0 | 09:37.637

Yeah, it was an 8088. That was a chip, the model of chip that ran it. It was a very old thing that you could program in a language called Logo, where you had a little turtle you drew across the screen, writing things called BASIC. It was kind of legendary in the computer geek community, I think.

Speaker 1 | 09:57.199

Oh, I remember logo, right? 90.

Speaker 0 | 09:59.583

And then exactly

Speaker 1 | 10:00.866

45 and make it, make the line go across the screen like a thousand times and change colors. Cause that’s, that was like what you did when you screwed around in fourth grade or whatever.

Speaker 0 | 10:08.481

Basically. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 10:10.133

Nice. Yeah. Logo was a, could you do anything? So what could you do in logo that was, that actually did something other than kind of like graphics and stuff?

Speaker 0 | 10:20.140

You know, I was, I was probably like you just drawing circles and squares and everything and was happy with that. But you know, once you get the taste of it, then you start going deeper and deeper and it just moves so quickly. It takes over your whole life.

Speaker 1 | 10:31.968

When I was, uh, I was a pre-med for a little while in college. Everyone in my family was a doctor. And then I realized it was a dying breed and there’s no way I was going to go through that torture. The, and my brain just, my brain just sunk. It just went, Oh, I know what it was. The, I remember when the, the human genome, like the human genome was mapped out at like maybe like a half a percent or something, or maybe let me give it 3% in college. And I remember our professor saying, you know, it’s going to be forever. Like eventually someday we will have the entire human genome mapped out. And then fast forward one decade, like done due to computer technology or whatever it was that we did to speed up the process. What did we actually do to speed up that process? Do you know?

Speaker 0 | 11:20.344

I think one of the biggest accelerators was the acceleration of computational technology. So now that we can actually compute things a lot faster, we can analyze genes much more quickly. We can store data much more efficiently, and that just didn’t exist 20 years ago when they were trying to figure all this stuff out. So since computer technology has improved, the cost of doing these things has just fallen. And now we can do a lot more efficiently, just as you’ve seen them do and come up with the COVID vaccine in three days, based on the research they’ve done over 20 years.

Speaker 1 | 11:52.622

And modeling without actually having to micropipette and test things. They can actually do like a pharmaceutical testing modeling without actually doing the physical. physical testing like we used to do with trying to find manufactured drugs etc now exactly they model the tests with data ahead of time and then and then test the actual ones that come up um which is mind-blowing also um the iron the other irony of this is that there’s a bunch of kids in the background which is cool they’re not my kids everyone listening to us is going to think that whatever kids in the background are mine we’re just i’m just letting everyone know Now that that’s not, except for the one interruption I had at the beginning. I have no clue who’s in my house right now, except that my son said, hey, someone’s here. Why? So technology, was it just that technology was like, hey, this is a much easier way to pay the bills? Like, how’d you end up in software development?

Speaker 0 | 12:45.700

Yeah, you know, honestly, that was probably it back in 2005, 2006. I think some of my college mentors and heroes, they were some of my friends who were the really cool guys who could build websites and things. They would get jobs paying their bills just like that. So I said, okay, I want to do that. Physics is cool and everything, but it doesn’t really pay the bill. So let’s learn to do this stuff on the side. So that’s what got me really into it.

Speaker 1 | 13:08.438

It’s kind of like me too. Except mine was not really, mine was creative writing. So it was completely opposite brain. So I ended up leaving chemistry, bio or chemistry major, right? And just saying, no, I’m just doing creative writing. And now here I am in technology. So, you know, similar thing, you know, creative writing can only pay so much. So let’s get to the meat of this show. And again, my kids watched this movie called Diary of a Wimpy Kid. And there’s a scene in one of the movies where the really cheesy parents are playing this game. I love you because. And you have, I guess, I don’t know if it’s really manufactured, but build or working with software to make managing Merakis easier for MSPs. that need to maybe make changes across or security changes across, I don’t know, thousands of devices, let’s say, or at least make their life a lot easier. But I’m not a huge fan. I’m not always a huge fan of Cisco. I understand that I am a fan and I’m not a fan at the same time. And I’d rather play the I hate you because. Meraki, I hate you because. So honestly, you play first. So Meraki, I hate you because why?

Speaker 0 | 14:30.394

Meraki, I hate you because you don’t really give enough visibility into what’s going on under the hood. Oh,

Speaker 1 | 14:35.978

okay. Great. Meraki, I hate you because, let’s see, you have a lot of manual steps and you are missing a ton of things.

Speaker 0 | 14:51.417

Meraki, I hate you because you oversimplify it and the experts feel like they don’t have the tools that they need to really dig under the weeds.

Speaker 1 | 15:00.787

Nice. Let’s see. What else did we have? Meraki, I hate you because managing uniform changes is really just… Not that easy or possible.

Speaker 0 | 15:17.394

Meraki, I hate you because when there is a wishlist item, it could take years for that to actually get addressed.

Speaker 1 | 15:24.856

Nice. Meraki, I hate you because I’m so tired of making all these changes that I leave a lot of holes in my security.

Speaker 0 | 15:37.559

Meraki, I hate you because if I want to delegate some work, to one of my junior associates or to an external consultant firm, I have to take the risk of giving them full access to everything, which means they might break things.

Speaker 1 | 15:49.410

Oh, yes. Yes. So Meraki, I hate you because I only have two levels of, I don’t know, administrative access or one administrative access. Okay. You win. You win. Because I know you’re going to have many more examples and it’s going to make me look stupid. Right. And most of the examples that I just used are ones you fed to me anyways. So why do you exist? What are you going to do? So how do you make it so that we can love Meraki again? Where you’re like, you’re like the relationship therapist, right?

Speaker 0 | 16:26.054

Exactly. That’s what they call me.

Speaker 1 | 16:27.154

I want a divorce. I want a divorce from Meraki. Okay. I want a divorce. And you’re saying, no, no, let’s work it out. Let’s work it out. You don’t have to get it because it’s going to cost you so much money. You’re going to like lose half your possessions. You’re going to lose all your, your, your children are going to be divided up. Your customers are going to leave you and they’re just not going to put up with all your crap. And he, you know, it’s like, like you’re here, like, like save my relationship. You’re my therapist. Like how are we going to save this relationship? And so that I can love Meraki again, I want to be, I want to love you again. I want to love Meraki.

Speaker 0 | 16:57.846

Well, Meraki, they’ve actually heard your complaints and they, they were going to keep the dog too, but they decided to try to work on things. And one thing, and one, one thing they’ve done is Yeah. They’ve actually decided to actually address some of these issues by opening everything up to program the programmation via the APIs. So that’s one of the nice places where Mark has actually stepped forward. They said, okay, the future of network infrastructure is network automation. And the only way we can do this is by opening up infrastructure so people can program it, customize it and really build it exactly as they need to function.

Speaker 1 | 17:29.784

This is classic, you know, let’s make something really complicated and maybe, I don’t know, dumb it down. Let’s sell it because we can stamp our name on it. You know, let’s sell it because it’s Cisco product. Right. Of course. And then let’s just get everyone else to fix our problems, which is great. And then they can make money off it too. And anyways, let’s make life easier. So let’s start tackling some of these crazy Meraki things. And first of all, who out there could be listening to the show right now that has Meraki stuff and like, what do they know? Like, let’s just go down there. What’s the number one things that they’re banging their head against the wall on?

Speaker 0 | 18:05.269

The number one thing that bothers people with Meraki right now is making changes across many networks at once, or even if you’re a managed service provider, an MSP, doing those changes across multiple organizations. So for example, if Meraki gives you a solution using templates, however, those are really, really rigid. You can’t really customize things the way you need to. And what we’ve done is we’ve developed a layer on top of Meraki using APIs, so that if you want to standardize your networks, your organizations across hundreds, thousands of networks or hundreds of organizations, You can just do that in one place, push those changes out and be sure that everything is consistent the way you want it without having to manually click through things which can take hours or days.

Speaker 1 | 18:43.969

And what are some of the biggest problems that you’ve seen? Well, if they can’t do it now, what’s the biggest kind of problems, I guess, that people are trying to solve from these changes other than just complete? labor waste and inefficiency to managing your business. But what about issues with your customers?

Speaker 0 | 19:08.436

I’ll say there are two big ones. One of the big ones we hear all the time are managing firewall rules. So for example, if there’s a, we have customers, every single phone call, they say, okay, let’s say I have a, I just discovered a new command and control server somewhere on the internet and I need to block it for all my networks at once. How do we do that? And the answer is you click through a hundred different pages, you take a few hours and maybe you’ll get it right. Maybe you’ll miss something. And that just really frustrates customers to no end because it’s a critical situation that creates a security fault. And your whole business can be at stake if you let things like that slip.

Speaker 1 | 19:43.929

That has got to be very, very frustrating. You must have to have just like Meraki jockeys just literally making changes all day long, every day, all day. How often do we have to make changes? How often should people be making changes?

Speaker 0 | 19:59.259

We think these things happen around…… at least a few times, several times a week for most network administrators we talk to. But if we’re looking at MSPs who manage networks for other companies, this is a nonstop thing all day, every day. It can happen.

Speaker 1 | 20:12.509

It’s got to kill scalability.

Speaker 0 | 20:14.934

Absolutely. It kills scalability and it also kills because you also can’t easily delegate the work because if you let someone else do it and they break something, then you’re screwed. You have two problems.

Speaker 1 | 20:27.845

And yeah, if you do it wrong.

Speaker 0 | 20:30.227

If you do it wrong, exactly. So that’s actually the second place where we come in to play. We’re releasing now with next week, actually a role-based access control solution. So that says, okay, let’s say you’re scaling your Meraki organization. You need to add more members to your team. You need to take on more responsibilities. You can delegate things so that they can only access the specific menus that you choose. And that way there’s absolutely no way they can break anything outside of their scope. So that’s a work in

Speaker 1 | 20:55.767

Meraki’s inability to provide multi levels of administrative access.

Speaker 0 | 21:01.270

Absolutely, absolutely. And we’re hearing people ask for this for the dashboard. And we’ve also had some requests coming in for the API. So one of the things on our roadmap is to create an API gateway, which also gives that same… role-based access control to API endpoints so that you can create automations without completely automating your destruction of your network.

Speaker 1 | 21:19.621

Ah, okay. What else we got?

Speaker 0 | 21:23.743

So another thing, the other problem that we’re solving right now is often for MSPs who deploy new customers. Sometimes they have a golden configuration they like to reuse over and over and over again. And that takes quite a bit of time to deploy that, set it up, verify that it works. So what we’re doing is we’re releasing a new… automation deployment system. Basically, you upload your configurations through an Excel file. You repeat that one or more times for a given organization, and it just goes through a recipe and makes sure everything’s exactly the way you need it.

Speaker 1 | 21:53.220

Okay.

Speaker 0 | 21:54.221

Keep going. Oh, yeah, there’s totally more. One of the other problems we hear a lot is something called configuration drift. So what that means is, let’s say, you have a big organization, tons of networks. If you’re using Meraki templates, things are more or less consistent. but you have a lot of restrictions. Whereas if you try not to use those templates so you can have more flexibility, sometimes things change in ways you don’t want them to change. That means someone might name something incorrectly. Someone might put the wrong configuration in and forget it. And over time, things just kind of get haywire. And what we’ve done is we’ve actually created a system using these basic templates, which let you audit your whole network to say, okay, are the names following the format that I want those to follow? For example, if I use my city underscore country underscore network name, does it follow the form?

Speaker 1 | 22:44.799

Local host is always a good thing to name things.

Speaker 0 | 22:47.240

Exactly. You can say, okay, which ones are violating that policy and just go fix them right away. Same thing for the configuration options. Let’s say you want to block access to communication between all the clients on your network, all the wireless clients. People can always forget those kinds of things. And we let you just set up a really quick check to say, okay. Are any of the networks not following my policy? And if not, let me know so I can go fix it. And that saves tons of time. That’s actually some of our customers’favorite feature because they can see throughout all the clients they manage what’s out of compliance, what’s going haywire, and they can fix it really quickly.

Speaker 1 | 23:21.564

Give me an example of an industry that that might be helpful in. Are there any particular standout industries where this is?

Speaker 0 | 23:31.402

I would say a lot of the industries where there’s regulation. So if we look at things such as government, medical industries, we have a biomed client who uses this quite a bit. Anything where there’s a lot of regulation, you have to really make sure that the networks operate how you are legally obliged to make them operate. This is where something can really come into play.

Speaker 1 | 23:50.777

Okay. What else we got?

Speaker 0 | 23:54.200

Okay. So we talked about the… the conformity, we talked about the deployment across multiple organizations and networks at once. Oh yeah, we also just released, we have a few tools to help migrate networks. Now what I mean by this is that Meraki has this weird feature so that if you take a device and move it from one place to another, it loses its configuration completely, which is just a real pain. And when you have customers or when you’re an MSP or something, you want to move a device to different places so you can split your organization or do backups or whatever, you have to spend all the time reconfiguring every one of your devices, which is just a nightmare. And we’ve actually released a tool which lets you clone organizations and move devices so you can migrate organizations from one place to another and save that configuration so that you don’t have to do it over and over again by hand. Now, that’s really useful for when you want to do things such as backing up an organization. You can do a snapshot. to see what it was like at a given point in time. That’s useful for when you have a big organization that you want to split into smaller ones. You can use this functionality to get those things done quite efficiently.

Speaker 1 | 25:03.176

What about this log data and monitoring and remediating stuff there?

Speaker 0 | 25:09.098

Right. So another thing that we hear a lot about is it’s quite painful for… people to really parse through the logs and understand what’s going on inside of Meraki. So one solution that we’re coming out with in the next few months is a syslog as a service solution. And that really integrates the Meraki API so that you can understand the logs and the events that happen in your organization and your infrastructure. So, for example, if a client triggers a firewall rule or firewall blockage, you can see that in the logs. And then since it’s connected through the Meraki API, you can actually build your own workflow automations. So let’s say you get a lock event of a device uplink going down. You could set up an automation to say, okay, when the uplink goes down, fail over to the secondary uplink so that you can maintain connectivity. Or if something goes down for five minutes and comes back up, send us an alert or do the things that might help remediate that situation so someone doesn’t even have to look at it.

Speaker 1 | 26:05.745

What other people are doing this stuff? Do you think companies have their own software dev teams inside to fix crap like this?

Speaker 0 | 26:13.392

Most companies, I think, try. The thing about network administration is that it’s come from a place where it was really manual historically. This whole idea of automating things is really new to the field. And it’s not necessarily in everyone’s skill set. People consider themselves network engineers, not necessarily programmers. And a lot of people just don’t even want to spend time, waste time programming because it’s a whole career on its own. It’s something you have to really spend a lot of time to get right.

Speaker 1 | 26:40.416

And just the thought of hiring someone to develop software and everything seems, it just doesn’t seem realistic in many cases.

Speaker 0 | 26:48.603

It’s a nightmare. You have to think about so many things about the software development process, hosting, security, making sure you actually get it right. And as someone who does it, it’s something you don’t want to be doing if you don’t have to do it. I’ll just say that straight out. And yeah, to answer your question, some companies do take that approach. They say, okay, let’s really build out things to try to… smooth over some of these network administration pains. But what we’re doing is we’re just saying, okay, we’ve thought through some of these things. We’ve talked to a lot of Meraki users. We’ve identified much of the pain points. And now you don’t have to waste time building this yourself. It’s been tested, proven, and you can just take it out of the box and use it and get your job done.

Speaker 1 | 27:25.428

What’s your relationship like with Cisco? Because I know, you know, it’s always interesting when you’re working with a big company like that, you know, whether it be Cisco, whether it be Microsoft. And a lot of times they’re very thankful. I mean, I know a lot of my… Microsoft partners that are, whether they’re direct routing partners or whatever it is, Microsoft’s actually sending them large enterprise clients because it’s just easier for them and it’s not in their wheelhouse to fix certain issues like this. What’s it like working with Cisco?

Speaker 0 | 27:53.721

That’s actually something we’ve been seeing happen a lot recently. One of my co-founders is actually an ex-Cisco Meraki employee. He was one of the initial salespeople of Cisco Meraki here in Europe. And since we’ve established a technical partnership with them, we’ve been actually coming up with many of our features based on the issue they’ve had with their customers. So they will come to us and tell us, okay, we’ve got some customers that are having this issue. Is there anything you guys can do about it? And we provide a solution which addresses it.

Speaker 1 | 28:23.532

I’m assuming a lot of this, this MSP model in general, it’s very US-based model. I don’t know what you’re always, I mean, you’re in France. So what’s the… What’s the model like in the rest of the world? I’m assuming this, obviously this software is going to be very beneficial to MSPs in the United States because it’s just how we do business over here. There’s a lot of outsourced IT. There’s a lot of outsourced IT for small to medium-sized business. What’s it like in the rest of the world? It just seems like almost bootstrapped. The rest of the world seems almost like, hey, look, we just make it happen. In the United States, it seems very, how do I say? I don’t know, systematic or done a certain way, even if it’s the wrong way?

Speaker 0 | 29:09.834

That’s a really interesting question. I wouldn’t even say it’s the wrong way. What we’ve noticed, what I’ve noticed from speaking to users and customers all over the world is the United States is definitely in advance. It’s more mature by light years in a lot of things. And I’d say just the mindset, the mentality. I’ve actually talked to some Iraqi users who have tried this on their own and they have just gone. over the edge with the stuff you can do around Meraki automation. And it’s in the culture to say, okay, how can we take something that’s broken and make it better? And that’s one of the things I really like about working with customers and companies in the United States because this is just part of our DNA. This is who we are. You look at some place like Europe, there’s a lot of hesitation to go into new things, to try things which we don’t quite understand yet. They can easily take two years just to decide to really give it a shot. To me,

Speaker 1 | 29:58.381

it feels like the cloud is underdeveloped in Europe. Is that true or no? It just doesn’t seem like there’s this more kind of open marketplace as much as there is. I feel like there’s a lot of kind of server-based stuff still. At least from a telecom perspective, it’s just interesting because there’s like a telecom guy on every street corner in the United States selling some sort of cloud product, even if they’re like hosting it out of their garage and you don’t know that. And they call it a data center, which is, I mean, I know it, but I’m just, you know, what’s the cloud environment like?

Speaker 0 | 30:31.462

Yeah, that’s interesting too. It’s finally starting to come into its own after a lot of resistance. And I think the resistance comes not. only from the security aspect, because there is a belief that if it’s not in my country or in my, in my place, then it’s not secure. But I think there’s also, it’s driven by a lot of anti-American sentiment. So if it’s, if it’s American, it’s bad and we don’t want it.

Speaker 1 | 30:57.574

And who started that problem? Why is it bad? Why is it with the hatred for America? I hate America, but can I get a ticket to come move there? What is it? It’s a lot of that. I want to go to MIT. Um, what’s, what’s the deal?

Speaker 0 | 31:13.781

I mean, there’s a, there’s a lot of hypocrisy around that. And it’s, I think it comes from a lot of places. It comes from, for example, we export, we Americans, we export a lot of our culture. Some of the biggest companies in the world are American. A lot of, there are not any like that, not many like that in Europe.

Speaker 1 | 31:28.645

What’s the culture of hatred? What, what aspects? I just want to know, like what aspects of American culture are hated?

Speaker 0 | 31:35.707

Well, off the top of my head, Amazon, I mean, Amazon is a really bad word here.

Speaker 1 | 31:39.320

Wow. Really?

Speaker 0 | 31:40.580

Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 1 | 31:41.620

is it just like a money or what? Just like a complete takeover or what?

Speaker 0 | 31:45.742

No, it’s not even a monopoly. It’s just the idea of buying books online and not supporting the local book seller is, is bad. A big company. Yes. It’s a bit, it’s bad. You’re bad.

Speaker 1 | 31:54.466

That’s like, you’ve got mail the movie. Come on, dude. We banged that one out years ago. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. Bookstores are okay. No, but I like, you know, anyways, keep going. Okay. So yeah. Books weird. Okay. Keep going. Makes sense. Makes sense.

Speaker 0 | 32:09.612

I was, yeah, I was reading just about, um,

Speaker 1 | 32:11.613

Hate on America a little bit more. Anyways, what else do we hate?

Speaker 0 | 32:15.876

Well, books for one thing, the cloud, the cloud is American and you know, uh, all the cloud operators, they’re going to steal our business. So we can’t use them. Um, deliveries. So if we look at things such as, uh, Amazon deliveries and I keep saying Amazon again, but they’ve been changing, bringing so many opportunities. If we’ve seen through COVID, the whole idea of having things delivered. to your house by a big player can be bad. It’s better to go to the store and pick it up because, because you’re more faithful to the, to the local.

Speaker 1 | 32:43.719

It’s called the Amazon effect. We even have that here in America, like even regular business owners, like regular distributors, logistics companies, et cetera. They call it the Amazon effect. Amazon comes into town. They hire all, they just pay all, they just offer to pay everyone more money and the company loses all their employees almost overnight. And, but it forces them to go to automation. And, and, and robotics and stuff like that to replace these. But okay. The Walmart effect too, we were hating on Walmart years ago too, because they came in and put the local hardware store out of business. But it’s inevitable.

Speaker 0 | 33:19.734

Yeah. And anytime we talk about anything around automation, things that might even remotely put jobs at risk, there’s a full stop on the brakes here.

Speaker 1 | 33:31.378

What about other countries that just have more… kind of monarchy style, non-democratic process where you’ve got more of a, like you’ve got Orange over there. That’s like a big, massive company. Like in the United States, we have tons of providers, tons, just so many. It’s like, it goes, the list goes on and on and on and on. I’m just curious how that, you know, is in maybe France. Like, do you guys have tons of ISPs or do you pretty much just have like one or two ISPs or is that kind of open market and you’ve got all this competition there? From that standpoint in the United States, we’re very competitive.

Speaker 0 | 34:04.684

Yeah, we have about three now. So it used to be… Three? Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 34:10.068

See, now I can hate on you guys. Like, oh, look at this. Monopolizing ISP. Anyways, but go ahead.

Speaker 0 | 34:15.353

Yeah. No, there used to be France Telecom back in the day and then a few other ones branched out. So now we have about three big ones. But it’s just as everything. It seems like a collaborative thing. They all set the prices to where they want it to be. They give you the same crappy service. You get what you have.

Speaker 1 | 34:33.272

That’s the same world. That’s the same around the world. Okay. Yeah. Yep. It’s the battle of media equity. I’m better because I suck less.

Speaker 0 | 34:43.895

Right.

Speaker 1 | 34:44.455

It’s what’s this deal. So anyways, let’s get back to something that might be even kind of nerdier. You were going to build a warp drive. Did you write drive? What’s up with the warp drive? What were we doing?

Speaker 0 | 34:56.719

So I was, I’m a, I’m a huge Star Trek fan. And in college, I had the opportunity to come to Europe and Belgium and study with this guy who built a warp drive. Now, he came up with a theoretical model for the warp drive. So I don’t mean he actually put one together, but he came up with the math to say, OK, here’s how you would build a warp drive in theory. And just to explain what a warp drive is, so in Star Trek, that’s how the Starship Enterprise goes from star to star. They basically fold space around the ship, and instead of moving through space faster than the speed of light, they basically bring space to them. Kind of crazy.

Speaker 1 | 35:31.680

Aren’t there actual physical models of that in physics? Hasn’t that been observed, kind of like something going into a wormhole and showing up on the other side or completely disappearing in the universe somehow?

Speaker 0 | 35:42.046

So we haven’t seen it yet. We haven’t observed it in the research. There are theoretical models which say, okay, if something did go through a black hole or a wormhole and come out, here’s what we would see. And there are people who have also said, okay, if we were to build a warp drive to change space so that we could get from one place to another faster than the speed of light, here’s how it could look. Now, the problem is when they start doing the math and showing how it could look, it turns out that in order to do that, we need to do things that are really impossible right now. Such as take enough mass to make up the entire universe and squeeze it into a ball the size of a peanut. which we can’t really do very easily. But when we can do that, then we can probably have warp drives.

Speaker 1 | 36:19.801

So explain. So you were going to build one. You had a theoretical model, and I’m assuming that that’s in the theoretical model.

Speaker 0 | 36:27.143

Yeah, that was in the theoretical model. So I did an internship to learn the theory of general relativity so that I could understand how we could build warp drives. And I didn’t actually build a warp drive, but it was definitely a passionate thing for quite a while.

Speaker 1 | 36:42.068

So take mass, form it into the size of a peanut. Why don’t we just use where that already exists, you’re saying? Like, so black holes somehow? You got to speak, again, you’re speaking to a very layman here. So, you know, people are going to be laughing at me now. So, you know, dumb this down for me.

Speaker 0 | 36:59.542

That is true for black holes. You do have a lot of mass in a very small space. The second, there are a few more details. The other detail is you have to actually set that mass up in a certain configuration. So you can’t just… ball into a ball and say, okay, now I have a warp drive. You have to actually shape it in the right shape. And then you have to do things with it so that it could warp the space in the way you want it to. Basically, that means it’s just really, really, really, really complicated to do. And in theory, if we were God and we could do everything with the universe, we can make it happen. But right now we still have a long way to go.

Speaker 1 | 37:32.198

I like that you said that. Makes sense. So it might be happening already, but there’s no way in human beings doing it.

Speaker 0 | 37:39.068

Well, that’s a question. The question is, are there some other advanced species which might have discovered ways of manipulating space in ways that we just haven’t come up with? And that’s when it gets really interesting, because as long as things are not really prohibited or forbidden by the laws of physics, there could be some scenario in which they’re accomplished in some galaxy, in some society, somewhere.

Speaker 1 | 38:02.381

Does space have an ending? And you can’t use a Star Trek analogy here.

Speaker 0 | 38:08.524

Think a good point.

Speaker 1 | 38:09.244

In 1998 on this episode with the boom, whatever. But anyways.

Speaker 0 | 38:14.805

I’ll use a different analogy. It’s like asking, does a basketball have an ending? Yeah. If you’re an ant on the basketball, where does it end? Now, for the ant, it probably never ends. For you, the human dribbling it, of course it ends. It ends at the surface. We think the space is probably something like that, too. And we’re just the ants. And for us, it looks like it might never end. It might even go in circles. Whereas if there’s some kind of, I’m going to say being or conscious or whatever outside of our space, it could easily see things that we just don’t see. And so it looks like space is just a tiny little looking glass.

Speaker 1 | 38:51.259

The tuna fish sandwich analogy, there’s actually space between the tuna fish and the sandwich. You just can’t see if it’s small. And then there’s a tray of tuna fish sandwiches and some guy walking around with it. And we’re inside that space, one of those sandwiches. I don’t know why I thought of that one. That’s how we go. Why tuna fish? I must’ve been hungry that day. It has been an absolute pleasure speaking to you. Please talk to me about the Meraki you solved, though. What we can do is make life easier right now. So you’re wasting less time, you know, managing devices and kind of going through the manual operations. There’s days where I have motivation problems on days when you kind of work for yourself. Maybe you know this. Some days you wake up and you’re like, what am I going to do today? Whereas when you have a job, managing Meraki firewalls, you know what you’re doing for the day. You just wake up and you’re going to do that every day. And how can we make that go away so that people can have problems and wake up and be like, what the hell do I do today? You know, what you’re trying to do here, I’m assuming to a certain degree. So what’s the big deal?

Speaker 0 | 39:54.365

Yeah. Our vision of this is that computer networking is, it’s a really complex field and it’s only getting exponentially more complex as we go forward. And we really believe that at some point in the near future, it’s going to get so complex that humans just can’t even do it because there’s too much to keep in your mind. And the only answer that we see to that is an automation, a future based on automation. So you have a network which is automated, it detects faults, it fixes itself, and it almost manages itself. And our mission is to bring about that future. Now, we’re starting with Meraki, and we hope to branch out towards other aspects of this as we go forward. But for Meraki, we’re saying, okay, we’ll take the solution for MSPs or people who manage many networks, many organizations. We help you make sure things stay consistent. We help you make changes across large numbers of networks at once so you can save time. You reduce errors, and that way things break less often because you don’t have that human error behind it. That’s what we’ve got in place.

Speaker 1 | 40:52.368

Sydney Burks, everyone, if you want to make your Meraki life not so painful, reach out to Sydney, find them on LinkedIn. Boundless Digital, type in Sydney, S-I-D-N-E-Y, Burks, B-U-R-K-S, Boundless Digital LinkedIn, you’ll find them. Where else can they find you? Give me some more. How can people reach out to you?

Speaker 0 | 41:13.178

Yeah, so you can check out our website, www.boundlessdigital.com. And we’re also on the Meraki store. So if you’re a Meraki customer, Meraki user, you can search on the Meraki marketplace and you’ll see that we have about seven different applications there. You can just reach out and also hit us up at contact at boundlessdigital.com.

Speaker 1 | 41:30.357

Sir, thank you for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure.

Speaker 0 | 41:32.721

Same here. Thank you too.