Intro: 0:00

Welcome back for a scorching news episode. Alex Perkins, from the Cables to Cloud podcast, joins William and Yvonne as we dive into the inferno of outages, chaos, legal battles and hacks that set the July news cycle ablaze. Buckle up for this high-temperature discussion.

William: 0:29

Welcome to another episode of the Cloud Gambit. With me is my excellent co-host, yvonne Sharp. Welcome, how are you doing this morning, yvonne?

Eyvonne: 0:41

Hello, doing great. It's a Monday morning. While we're recording.

William: 0:50

I don't know what day it's going to be when you're listening, but it's shaken up to be a Monday and with us we have a returning guest, alex Perkins. How?

Alex: 0:55

are you doing Alex? Yes, like Yvonne said, it is definitely a shaping up to be a Monday with all the news and stuff.

William: 1:02

It's a case of the Mondays oh man, yeah it's got a case of the Mondays.

Eyvonne: 1:05

Oh man, yeah, it's a collective case of the Mondays.

William: 1:06

Lots of news and a good Monday it is yeah. What about when Mondays just are like every day is a Monday, like Monday through Friday, it's like, oh, that's called a week and you're working Saturday?

Alex: 1:17

Yeah, yeah, it's called a week, this is true, or life right.

William: 1:24

Yeah, the news has been a spinning month of July, Just a crazy month and just kind of context for the audience. There is no way that Yvonne and I are going to be cranking out a news episode every other week on the Cloud Gambit like the media production team over on Cables to Cloud. It's probably going to be a once in a while when a lot of interesting news is queued up, kind of like what's happened this last July. There's just too much to ignore. Too many wild things have happened. Do you want to kick us off, Yvonne?

Eyvonne: 2:09

Yeah, and we're talking tech news. We're not even talking political news, but July was quite the month for headlines, but we're going to stick to tech today, much to all of our relief. So the first article we wanted to discuss is from ZDNet, and the Switzerland federal government has required the releasing of software as open source. So this is an incredibly interesting topic to think about what it would mean for an entire federal government to start pushing their entire apparatus toward open source. One of the things in the article, though, that it says it says this new law requires all public bodies to disclose the source of code software developed by or for them, unless third party rights or security concerns prevent it. This public money, public code approach aims to enhance government operations, transparency, security and efficiency.

Eyvonne: 3:14

So you know, I think I first read the headline and thought, oh, how do you go? 100% open source? But I think it's a little bit more nuanced than that. But I do appreciate that what they're saying is, if we have code that we have written or that is written for us, it must be open source, and I believe this will also drive the entire organization toward open source in a new way. Thoughts from you two I got a few just quick, toward open source in a new way Thoughts from you two.

William: 3:48

I got a few just quick, I think. First of all, I think it's awesome, I think it's a great proposition, especially on the surface, you know, one that kind of like think of Switzerland at the forefront of digital transparency and innovation. Really know, at least on. You know, again, on the surface, but in practice I just can't even begin to fathom how challenging this is going to be, this is going to be. The core definition of this is a journey.

William: 4:18

This isn't a thing that we're gonna, you know, execute in a few years, you know, I think that you know it is in a few years, you know. I think that you know it is in the realm of possibility, of course, and especially when you think of in comparison to like the US. You know, switzerland's government is much smaller and less complex than ours and even thinking about like European countries in general, they tend to, you know, put strong emphasis on digital sovereignty is the word I'm looking for which lines right up with open source principles. So I can't imagine our government ever agreeing to move in this direction. But smaller governments I guess it's finally the year of the Linux desktop, alex. What do you think?

Alex: 5:05

It definitely is the year of the Linux desktop, alex. What do you think? It definitely is the year of the Linux desktop, for sure. To me, I think, one of the key things that, yvonne, you already pointed this out but it does say unless the rights of third parties or security-related reasons would exclude or restrict this.

Alex: 5:20

I think that's really key here, because a company can just claim, like, how big is that umbrella? A company can just say, well, this is security related, so we can't, we can't open source this code. You know, I mean it's interesting because will companies they won't be able to have that proprietary advantage when, when writing this code. So are there going to be less companies that kind of make this software for the government because they won't be able to lock it down and get that money like forever from this? There's like a lot of interesting ripple effects that could happen from this, but I think what is most likely going to happen is that a lot of companies are going to claim that it's security related reasons and they can't open source. And I would just I'd like to see the restrictions on that and what that actually means. And this also took a decade just to get this passed. So it's been a long fight.

Alex: 6:20

A couple of things that's a good point.

Eyvonne: 6:21

Did I think about that. So I think it would probably be up to the Swiss government, as whether or not you know that being written for them is is meets security requirements not to be released publicly. If they're using software that's copyrighted by a vendor Microsoft, VMware, whoever then they're not going to release that Right. But going forward, I would believe that they would write into all their contracts that any code that is being written for them will be open sourced, and so I think it will change the economic reality of those contracts, and I suspect if they're contracting out code, it will become more expensive to contract that out to the Swiss government, because they will own it and the individuals writing the code will have to release it Right. So it's not like we'll write this for you, but then we're also going to maintain the rights to it and sell it to other people, which might have a different economic model than paying somebody to write open source.

Eyvonne: 7:33

But I also think you know, if more governments adopted this approach, maybe they could learn from one another and use one another's code and systems to improve. I agree that this is never going to happen in the US, just because the lobbyists would keep it from happening. And one more quick thought is that you know we talk about how scale breaks things. You know, the population of Switzerland is 8.7 million people, not over 300 million like the United States, right, and so the scale of managing a population of 300 million is orders of magnitude different than managing a population of less than 9 million, and I think part of that is what makes this possible and makes a country like Switzerland a good place to incubate this kind of idea.

Alex: 8:38

Yeah, definitely agree with all that.

William: 8:40

Yeah, A lot to think about. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out and the level of success. And then also if other um, you know, other countries uh, European or otherwise, you know look at this and think it's crazy or they try to follow suit, and how quickly. Uh, it's definitely to me seems like kind of a kind of a science experiment, but it's a science experiment that's got some wheels. So, yeah, I guess moving, moving along to the next thing, do you want to? I guess I'll pivot over to you, Alex, Do you want to talk about the news that you brought to this lovely roundtable?

Alex: 9:34

Yep, and this isn't really good news, right, but so Intel just reported a loss of $1.6 billion just in quarter two of 2024. And they lost $437 million in Q1,. It looks like so. This was cost $437 million in Q1, it looks like so. This was a very significant increase of over a billion in just one quarter and due to this, they have announced 15,000 workers are going to be laid off, so downsizing its workforce by over 15%, as part of a $10 billion cost savings plan for 2025. Just crazy numbers. And this just continues to keep happening in tech everywhere.

William: 10:10

Yeah, I wonder. The key priorities in that article, you know are interesting. They're kind of like the I don't want to say stereotypical, but just this thing that you always tend to see when this happens. You know operational costs are high. You got to reduce some, you know, simplify portfolio, eliminate that complexity, you know, be more efficient when it comes to the fabs and bringing some net, you know absolutely necessary to the. You know the success of the United States back over to the United States to diversify where some of these things come from. So we're not reliant, so supply chain isn't so crazy, so they're doing some, some very important work and it's, you know, it's. This is part of, I guess, running a business. You know again, when you, yvonne, was talking about scale, when you scale to a certain point and then your business really does a hard pivot. So it's really challenging for a business the size of Intel, you know, to pivot like that. So it'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Eyvonne: 11:29

Well, and this I put this Intel news in a different category than all the other big tech layoffs that we've seen in the last year or two, partly because what's going on at NVIDIA and even Broadcom right, those two chip manufacturers are doing incredibly well in the marketplace. So I think there's more going on here with NVIDIA than just the standard tech. Yeah, we overhired and we overspent, and now we have to come back. The story's different here, and I believe I saw Keith Townsend make some comments on Twitter and so I'm probably paraphrasing some of his thoughts, but I think what's going on is that, ultimately, intel needed to make a pivot a couple of years ago and needed to make some investments that weren't made, and now the market has shifted and so they're having to make those investments, and they're also suffering from the losses of not making those a couple of years ago, and so they're having to make some really difficult decisions.

Eyvonne: 12:36

Now we live in a reality where, at some point, companies have to invest in the long term to continue to be successful, but the market incentives don't encourage that kind of investment. They're always for the short-term payback, and unless you have very clear-minded, strong leadership and folks who really understand the market and who are thinking long-term and aren't thinking about the short-term payout, then we're going to continue to see organizations make these kinds of difficult moves because they over-optimize on the short-term and not the long-term, and I think it's unusual in this market for a chip manufacturer not to be doing well. And I think what we're seeing here is the results of some short-term thinking. That happened a few years ago, before Gelsinger was even in the seat, and now they're paying the piper.

Alex: 13:42

Yeah, I'm glad you pointed that out, that Gelsinger hasn't been here that long because he was with VMware and then just a couple of years ago came back over to Intel. He previously was at Intel for a long time I think before that. But it takes a long time for a company this big to pivot. And a lot of what you said, Yvonne, is so true that everybody's so focused on the short term right now that pivoting an entire company that can lose one point six billion in a quarter, Like that's not an easy task to do, but especially in chip fabrication?

Eyvonne: 14:19

Right, because you have to engineer the thing, you have to design the fabrication process and then you have to fabricate it and it's you have to do all of that before you make the first dollar. Right, and so it's. It's a high stakes, very high capital world and that's why we see the dominance right now of companies like NVIDIA, because they were leading the charge on those chips and they got those chips to market. All those GPUs had them fabbed and ready, and then just opportunities in software really are taking advantage of those capabilities now and it's hard to catch up. It's not like we can hire some developers and lock them in the room for a year and be there.

William: 15:06

It's way more complex than that.

William: 15:10

And one thing that's just interesting about this too is it's not like the chip fab game, is. It's not like cybersecurity, where there's like a bazillion companies doing it. It's not that big and that saturated of a market. So when one of these things happens, it's definitely noteworthy news. And well, I do got to say alex, you know you mentioned what is it 1, 1.8 billion in q2, 1.6 yep or 1.6 um, I think cloud strike uh walks in the room and says hold my beer, because I think they lost 25 billion in like two weeks or less. What has it been? Not two weeks, like 12 days.

Alex: 15:52

Yeah, probably.

William: 15:53

Maybe a little more something like that. So the next article I actually wanted to talk about this is a good pivot is a BBC article from the BBC CloudStrike, sued by shareholders over global outage. So if you're, basically if you're a cybersecurity startup and you push a faulty software update that crashes like over like 8 million computers globally, which subsequently leads to like over I don't remember the percentage like over 30% drop in share price and however long it's been, you know it turns out. You will hear from your shareholders or their lawyers, you know, I mean, you know 25 billion loss. That's pretty gigantic. I don't think it can get any worse than that, at least historically. Don't say that.

Eyvonne: 16:43

I really don't want you to tempt the universe to show us otherwise.

William: 16:47

You saw July, wait till you see August.

Eyvonne: 16:50

That's right.

William: 16:50

I better knock on this wood. So I guess to you both like any ideas what I mean, we could talk about the semantics of the like all the you know what could have been done and what they did wrong, and oh, the you know cloud strike so bad or whatever. But um, what happens next, like what do you all see is kind of like, or just what are your thoughts on it in general?

Alex: 17:17

I you know what, what I have a little different perspective on this.

Alex: 17:23

Um, I don't really this is hard to explain properly, but I don't really love that shareholders can come in and sue a company for something like this. The lawsuit accuses it says it right here the lawsuit accuses the company of making false and misleading statements about its software testing. It just sounds like is that? Are the shareholders making this lawsuit truly educated about the internal software development processes and testing that's done by this company? It's just a little weird to me that like because I've read a lot of articles about you know why this happened and the stuff that they're going to put in place, and it just seems weird that a bunch of shareholders can get together and say, oh well, you guys did this on purpose. Like it almost seems like a negligence thing, like they're kind of representing it, like CrowdStrike was being negligent and just pushing things out, but they had a lot of stuff in place to account for this and it was a bug in. Like testing software is, I think, what it really boiled down to. So to me it's just a weird turn of events.

William: 18:38

It's all about the Benjamins, really.

Eyvonne: 18:42

A couple thoughts. I mean I think for me the biggest like as I look at CrowdStrike, the thing I find inexcusable is that they weren't doing canary deployments. You know that there should have been a smaller subset of devices that got this update before the whole world did Like and I do find that fairly inexcuscusable considering the industry they're in and the scale that they were operating at I agree with that Right.

Eyvonne: 19:13

At the same time, I agree that, like wait, can shareholders just lose money and get ticked off and go sue. You know that creates another dynamic which makes it hard for companies to grow and innovate and change. At the same time, you know, this article also mentions that Delta is reporting that they lost $500 million in revenue due to this outage. When they talk about compensating passengers extra overtime for repair lost service. So this whole event, as we all know, is so significant. It's incredibly non-trivial, I think, ultimately, what we're going to see from this, and maybe it's a bit of wishful thinking, but I am hopeful that now we have an event significant enough to make us rethink how we do end user computing with which they can do anything, and then requiring a stack of agents and security tools on those devices to keep them safe is suboptimal and that's probably the understatement of the year.

Eyvonne: 20:40

You know we all you know billions of people on the planet at this point walk around with cell phones and we've never seen anything like this in the cell phone world and I think that may become a model going forward for how end user devices really ought to operate. And yes, there are going to be exceptions, there are going to be developers. There are going to be exceptions. They're going to be developers, they're going to be power users. But I think at the end of the day, we now have enough data and there's been a painful enough event to drive some change in the industry and I think ultimately that will be good. But it's going to be hard to get there because there's still layers of systems that are going to be some inertia.

Eyvonne: 21:33

So we'll see whether or not this is significant enough to force change or whether or not folks just move on to the next catastrophe.

William: 21:42

Yeah, now you're, you're absolutely right like some of the laptops I've worked on in the past and I know you both have been in this position too. But like you have so many like the procurement process just for all the agents you have, like an agent for per security engineer at the company. Practically you go to turn a brand new top of the line laptop on with all these things on there and it's like like I remember you know windows 2000 it's just so slow and then all the updates and it's just. It almost reminds me of like spyware in a sense, but I understand why it's there and why it's necessary and the compliance. There's so many different things. But you're right, there's got to be a better way to do it.

Eyvonne: 22:32

There just has to be. I've seen large organizations take a month to deliver a device to an end user. In other words, you've got a very well-paid engineer sitting on their hands reading documentation and not able to work because the procurement, deployment, security process is so overwhelming. And I think, again, that's another kind of malfeasance all on its own. That's another kind of malfeasance all on its own. That is a hidden cost right that I'm hopeful that an event like this might disrupt.

William: 23:17

I guess we can pivot over to your next article that you brought Yvonne.

Eyvonne: 23:24

Yeah, again, staying in the security space. I believe this happened before CrowdStrike, so it almost seems minimal and I hate to say that, but AT&T says hackers stole call records of nearly all wireless customers and so if you are, or have ever been an AT&T wireless customer, somebody has the metadata of all your calls and there could be names, text messages at least. Maybe not the content of that text message, but the fact that a text message happened, that a text message happened. It could reveal the people you frequently call, allow people to impersonate numbers. It's just yet another example of data loss. And how? Yeah, no matter what you do, if you operate in the modern world, some of that is always likely to be disclosed, and I'm going to say likely now as opposed to could be possible to be disclosed. I think it's likely for it to be disclosed, so careful who you call.

Alex: 24:47

I have been an AT&T customer since I became an adult, so it's funny because when I got the email from AT&T about this, I brought my wife does not follow anything tech related and I told her about it and she was. The look on her face of just this was already obvious that something like this happens so much that it she just didn't even care. It was like it's just par for the course. This is so normal that something like this happened and it's just it continues to happen and and, like you said, it got buried in the news. Is anything even gonna happen from this? Like I just feel like there's. It happens so often and no one cares or says anything and there's no consequence for it.

William: 25:35

I think this one is very this is almost like a different kind. I mean, it's just massively significant. You know, based on the scale. But you know, unlike the, you know things we see where you lose, like your PII, like personal identifiable, you know socials, maybe, things like that. You know, like Yvonne said, this is, you know this targeted metadata which can really reveal some you know crazy detailed patterns of communication and just movement. Even you know the ability to.

William: 26:08

You know, take this metadata and and like, maybe analyze it at some sort of scale. You're thinking every, every customer in that time window. I mean to me that's almost like a national security issue. I mean how many critical you know officials are using at&&T out there, like, and you think about their patterns, their movements and all you know metadata is. So there's just so much there, like every time you take a picture and you upload it to the cloud. It's like longitude, latitude, where it was taken, location, there's everything you can think of. So a lot of the metadata that's tied to stuff. It's extremely detailed, it just seems detailed.

Alex: 26:50

It's a really good point and, especially with all the AI stuff going on, I mean, what's stopping someone from getting this massive data and feeding it into a learning model? And just there you go, you have a profile on every single customer that has used AT&T. So yeah, that's a very scary thing to think about.

Eyvonne: 27:11

And if this article is to be believed, it says AT&T said the attack began with illicit access to one of its accounts with a major but low profile cloud data storage company called Snowflake, which, first of all, that description makes me chuckle. Second, that description seems to imply that it was just a credential attack, that it wasn't an attack of infrastructure, it wasn't necessarily a failure of the security of the snowflake service. It was a credential attack, is how I'm reading this right. And so again, two-factor folks, all day, every day, two-factor at all. Please, pretty please, for the sake of all of our data. And and again, I'm not a security expert, so I don't there may be more to this than than the Washington post is revealing. At the same time, it's, it's a jungle out there.

William: 28:24

It is definitely a jungle. So next on the list is TikTok spent $20 million a month on Microsoft Azure's OpenAI service. That's a lot of money that I think are worth mentioning here from my perspective is you know, azure's opening eye service is obviously generating gigantic amounts of revenue. I think the expectations were like for this year is like over a billion or something, and a key contributor to that revenue, as it happens, it was TikTok. I don't think it actually tells the exact amount that TikTok spends overall for the service, but this is honestly a testament in my opinion.

William: 29:25

Of course, it says that TikTok's uh parent company, bytedance, is also developing its own um models and process for this stuff. Of course, um and and that would lead, you know, I believe they originally tried to build their own models and then they pivoted to a partnership with OpenAI, you know, in order to probably move things along until such a time that they've got their own, you know, homegrown solution available, and then they will probably go that way. It was kind of surprising, honestly, to see apple do that just because they're so they're all like about building internally and um, you know, they're an engineering company at the end of the day. So, um, any any thoughts from the peanut gallery on this one yeah, I mean 20 million.

Alex: 30:29

It crazy, these numbers that just keep getting thrown around for all these news articles, man. But 20 million a month is a lot for TikTok to spend, um. But at the same time it's like open AI, like could I might even actually lose? I was trying to find some specific numbers for this, but I saw something that said they could lose as much as $5 billion this year just from how much it costs for them to train their models and run on Azure and I'm sure they have deals with Microsoft to run on Azure. I was trying to find the data for that and I couldn't find it.

William: 31:07

That makes TikTok multi-cloud. Don't they run their core stuff on OCI? I think yeah, they do. I'd have to look it up. I'm pretty sure it's OCI it's.

Alex: 31:17

OCI. I think I remember reading that for sure. There you go. There's a good example of a company that's multi-cloud. Go ahead, alex. No, go ahead.

Eyvonne: 31:30

I'm trying to get my thoughts together, it's an interesting topic and I think, ultimately, when we see this kind of spend, I don't know, I'm, I'm, I'm having a hard time too. William, you're just going to have to cut us out.

William: 31:53

Yeah, I guess we can, I'll, I'll do it. So we're on a sort of a you know a home run, just uh, with Microsoft, I think my out of all the companies that had a bad month, I think Microsoft, you know, I didn't even include the central US outage on here, but they had a tough it was a tough tough month for. Microsoft.

Eyvonne: 32:11

It's been a rough go, yeah, yeah, I mean even even though the CrowdStrike outage wasn't officially their fault, they're taking a ton of heat for it. But I also mentioned this because we all know how folks like to blame the network that I've seen several articles that spoke about the global Internet outage that happened the day of the CrowdStrike attack, and so I'm just here as a source of clarity. I'm fighting the misinformation that that Friday was not an Internet outage and if you weren't using a Windows device running CrowdStrike, the internet works just fine.

William: 32:49

Coincidence, Interesting Last article from me that I wanted to just throw out here, since we're on the theme of Microsoft-y rough July. On BBCcom, Microsoft says cyber attack triggered latest outage. Six days ago this was published and again Microsoft is having a rough month Cyber security attack causing outages, Central US going down, the CrowdStrike debacle and then also Microsoft. To throw just one more in there, Microsoft is now listing OpenAI as a competitor in AI and search. And that's significant as well, because Microsoft you know, we know Microsoft invested I don't even know how much capital in OpenAI billions and billions, and you know it's integrated OpenAI pretty heavily. You know it's also OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider, I think you know. But despite this beautiful, like notebook-esque love story, you know we're now seeing Microsoft classifying OpenAI as a competitor, and I mean my own thoughts here. There's always some narrative behind the scenes, but I think the the article references the ftc's ongoing antitrust investigations, you know, basically between um, you know, ai, startups and cloud providers.

Alex: 34:17

So an interesting nugget there yeah, I mean, I people had to think that this was going to happen. I know a lot of this came about when they just announced their new like search GPT beta feature, because Google I saw in another article Google also said that they now see them as a competitor, or listed them as a competitor. So of course, as soon as they announce a search tool, right, they're going to become competitors for everyone else. It is a very strange turn of events because they're they run on Azure, so that is weird, and, of course, microsoft owns like a very large portion of of open AI as well. Um, but yeah, I, it's. It's funny seeing them publicly acknowledge that their competitor, after they've spent so much money, invested so much money into them, for sure.

Eyvonne: 35:17

Well, I think you know, in any time you you work on the vendor side in in technology, you find that there's often a frenemy situation that comes up that in some ways we work together and in some ways we compete with one another and trying to find that sweet spot. For how do we leverage partners and other vendors and work together to create a solution that's mutually beneficial for everybody, but not let the balance of power get so out of whack that one person is benefiting more, one company is benefiting more than another one or ends up being in a predatory kind of a situation. It is a really difficult line to walk. I think Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI has always been a little different. You know, we had that incident several months ago where OpenAI the board fired Sam Altman without Microsoft's input and then Satya jumped in and reversed that decision, but then we found Microsoft ended up with just a non-voting position on the board and now they're no longer on the board. I mean, I think you know OpenAI is on the ascendancy and they're using the relationships that they can, at whatever stage that they're in, to move forward, and then they're going to move on, and so I think it makes sense that Microsoft says that they're a competitor.

Eyvonne: 36:54

Google definitely sees them as a competitor and it's going to be interesting as AI shakes out, especially as we head into the trough of disillusionment. I think we're pretty much, we're almost there, right? What happens as we emerge from that into the slope of enlightenment, you know, and that whole hype cycle and AI actually gets implemented and is used more broadly? Or is it going to be a situation where you have a few core companies that really use it and they become the control centers for AI? I don't think we know how that's going to shake out yet, but it's an interesting. It will be interesting to watch over the next few years.

William: 37:39

That's a good point. I think what you're saying I mean what you're saying is kind of a feather in the cap for how fast. I think a lot of these things are results of how fast this technology is moving. You know, it is just changing faster than anything I've ever seen in my life.

Eyvonne: 37:59

Yeah, and I think usually it's years to go through that whole process for any technology.

Eyvonne: 38:05

And I think what that means is that you know, like, as we've compressed the ends of the height cycle, we've increased the frequency or increased the peaks of the curve Right, and so you know, and I think you know, it's also going to be interesting to watch as the market responds to that. So, you know, I think we've got interesting days ahead. As far as, like the Microsoft outage that you first started with William it, you know, this article indicates it was a DDoS attack. Ddos attacks are incredibly difficult. I think you know we saw, you know, google Cloud defend successfully against a 398 million packet per second attack several years ago, and it's going to be an increasing challenge.

Eyvonne: 38:57

I know Russ White, over on the hedge, has been on a centralization kick. I think we're you know, and I think we're going to see some move to edge. I think we're you know and I think we're going to see some move to edge. I think we're always going to have centralization, though, and we're going to have to figure out how to better defend and, yes, it's been a really rough month for Microsoft.

Alex: 39:20

Yeah, that article. It's funny because it says it took down Minecraft as well.

Eyvonne: 39:26

So just want to point that out Elementary age children were distressed everywhere.

William: 39:32

Many, many tears were shed in this outage by many age groups.

Alex: 39:37

Yeah, but also real quick. There's in this article. It says Professor Alan Woodward said you'd expect Microsoft's network infrastructure to be bomb proof. That's I. Just why would you say that that's such a? I don't know who the professor is, but that's a very weird statement to make.

Eyvonne: 39:58

Show me someone who has never run an operational network. Exactly Without showing me someone who's never run an operational network. Yeah.

William: 40:09

The thing we work in called technology is apparently fickle, and we're sitting atop protocols that were invented in the 1980s 80s really and 90s that we rely on predominantly for all of this stuff. All right Well I guess it's about time um, I guess everybody knows where to find you. Alex, do you want to just throw your social handles anyway?

Alex: 40:38

yeah, uh, just at bumps in the wire. Um, I don't really post too much on twitter x, whatever you want to call it but very occasionally I'll just write some random, something random, linkedin I'm always on LinkedIn or X. So if you want to reach out to me, feel free and I'm sure you'll get a response very quickly.