The Ubiquity of High-Speed Internet with Dan Watts, COO of Segra

(Dan at 00:00:01) Today, we're talking to Dan, COO of Segra, about the ubiquity of high-speed Internet and how to be more disciplined. You're listening to the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:16) Hey, Dan.

(Dan at 00:00:17) Hey. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) Fantastic, my friend. This is gonna be exciting. We're gonna make a podcast.

(Dan at 00:00:22) Sounds good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:23) Now, I was particularly curious to speak with you because I just bought a small farm in a rural area. And one of the advertisements they had on the listing was that it just got fiber, maybe three months before I purchased it. And then I found that there were these government programs where they would help the utilities provide fiber in rural areas, and there was government money to help spread fiber throughout the world. Is that kind of what you guys do?

(Dan at 00:00:52) You know, we play a part in that ecosystem. So what you're talking about really is the stimulus money that the government has put in play to help make it affordable for carriers to extend the networks out to the rural parts of America, crossing the digital divide, if you will. So in your instance where you moved to a rural farm, and if you're like me, you probably wouldn't have purchased the place if it didn't have high-speed Internet. So if you think about that, how important it is to you or to me, or just in terms of learning or connecting or all the things that we do in life, I think that everybody realizes at this point it's kind of like electricity was in the dawn, in the early days of electricity, where it started in the metro areas and then it began to grow. And then at some point it was so widely adopted that it was considered a necessity or utility for everyone.

(Dan at 00:01:38) And I think that's kind of where we're going with broadband. So the stimulus that you're talking about is the government's way of encouraging providers to go out and build to those rural areas where otherwise it would not be profitable to do so. So we participate in so much as—we don't provide fiber to the home, but at Segra we'll connect the middle mile. So we'll connect to the rural broadband providers or the WISPs that serve those rural areas, and we'll bring them back to the metro markets and back to the Internet peering points in a cost-effective way so that they can continue to build those communities out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:13) Okay. So, for example, something that was interesting here was that it was the electric company. And I've never seen—I've had broadband my whole life, well, not my whole life, but as long as it's been available I've had it, and it's always been through maybe a cable provider or Verizon or something like that. And for it to be through the electricity company, I thought, oh, that's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:34) And then I found out about the programs, and I told my wife, I said, honey, I think we have to celebrate. I think this is the first effective government program that's ever existed.

(Dan at 00:02:44) It's a good public-private partnership in a lot of places. You know, if you think about what we do from a core infrastructure perspective as a telecommunications provider or as a technology company, it's very similar to the electric play, right, from an infrastructure perspective. So that's why you see they can use the same—a lot of times—same pole lines. That's the same way you bury. It's all very similar in terms of how you deliver the connectivity.

(Dan at 00:03:09) And so folks are doing that in a variety of ways. There are telecoms that are focused on growing that rural broadband footprint out. There are local municipalities that are doing that. There are electric co-ops and electric companies that are doing that. And again, what we do is we try to help them with that connectivity back to the Internet, big-I Internet peering points and things of that nature.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:28) Explain that to me. So I'll just use the name of my provider so it's easier for the conversation.

(Dan at 00:03:33) It's called

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) Cumberland. Right? Cumberland Connect. And so Cumberland runs the wire out to my house.

(Dan at 00:03:39) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:39) And then you help take from Cumberland's facility back to Nashville because I'm outside of Nashville.

(Dan at 00:03:45) Yeah. There are major peering points across the U.S. where carriers co-locate and meet. Right? So that we can build this great giant network across the U.S. and across the world. So in your instance where you've got the local electric company providing your connectivity, they still need to get that back to an Internet drain somewhere where they can reach out to the rest of the world.

(Dan at 00:04:07) So they're—I'm not sure who they're partnering with, but they partner with somebody to get back to a major point like Nashville or other areas where they can get back out to the Internet. So your journey from your desktop all the way out to the world is a long one. It seems fast to you, but it probably takes place across a multiple number of providers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:29) And so I'm just trying to wrap my head around it completely. So you call them pairing points, correct?

(Dan at 00:04:35) Peering. Peering points. Think about it where big telecommunication companies interconnect, where you go out of one box and into another box. And there's a connection that happens at—at the simplest form, it's just how they connect.

(Dan at 00:04:49) And then they connect back to you and then out to the Internet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:52) Who maintains these facilities?

(Dan at 00:04:54) It depends. There's big real estate companies that own some of them, the carriers own some of them. There's a whole ecosystem around that as well. So it depends on where you co-locate and what city it's in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:08) Okay. How do they decide? Is it just business-to-business negotiation? Say you can join my peer area or you can—how do you work together with your competitors?

(Dan at 00:05:17) You just—typically, depending on where you meet or where you co-locate, it's a business arrangement to purchase space and power in a rack somewhere or something larger than that in one of the facilities. And then it's just a complicated networking architecture that allows you to connect the network so that they can talk.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:37) Okay. So they would look more like a data center than a water utility with lines coming together.

(Dan at 00:05:43) Yeah. 100%. What I'm referring to, you're correct. It would look much like a modern-day data center. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:50) Okay. And so they're owned by various people, organizations, and everybody just works together and figures out how to get the traffic networked and make it so it's profitable and so you can continue to grow and expand the systems and provide new technologies.

(Dan at 00:06:04) That's right. And then most carriers buy and sell from each other. So where there are pockets when you're trying to serve a customer that you can't reach and another carrier can, we'll buy and sell services to one another. So it's a good ecosystem. It's healthy and it's competitive, but there is a lot of cooperation in both the telecommunications and the cable space as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:24) What is the metric or the unit that you use when purchasing? Is it bandwidth that you're purchasing when you're working with each other?

(Dan at 00:06:32) Yeah. It's—that's basically—and that's the core metric, the unit of purchase, I guess, you would say. So just connectivity. And there's various layers of the OSI model

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:43) you

(Dan at 00:06:44) can purchase. So it just depends on the service that you're purchasing. And then you could be purchasing IP transit or transport from another provider. And that's kind of how that works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:54) I got to interview Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and I was so excited leading up to it. I would just explain it—people say, you know, who's that guy? And I say, oh, he's a creator of the Internet. And I got promptly corrected by the audience that he is the creator—and then that's when I learned about OSI and all of that and what layer he was responsible. And then it took so many brilliant people across so many different layers and all of this innovation to actually make it happen. There's not just one thing you can point at and be like, that's the Internet. Right? It's a bunch of cool things working together.

(Dan at 00:07:25) Yeah. The people that work in our industry and in my company do the most sophisticated, most technical type of work possible, and they make it look so easy. And that's one of the things that I'm just astonished by every day is just the complex nature of what we do for a business and how it works and how we interconnect with each other and how our teammates here at Segra and at other companies make that happen for our end users. It's extraordinarily complicated to your point. But the teams just do a phenomenal job. We work with a lot of really bright people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:54) If I'm driving in an area that you service where your lines will be, will I actually see Segra trucks?

(Dan at 00:08:00) Yeah, you would. Now we are a business-focused, enterprise-focused company. So again, we're not providing fiber to the home, like in your case, where you're receiving those services from the electric company. We are connecting businesses in our market. So we do have trucks. Yeah. You'd see us all over. We're across kind of the Eastern Seaboard. We have about 30,000 route miles of fiber. So we've got lots of Segra trucks rolled around doing good work for our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:26) So if I was—let's say there's a big business here and I want to get back to Nashville, would I call you up and you would run fiber just for me, or would that fiber exist and I would just jump onto it and you would run an extension out to me? How would that work?

(Dan at 00:08:38) So if you were the business?

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:40) Yeah. Yeah. If I was a big business and I wanted to pipe directly back, is that kind of what you guys do?

(Dan at 00:08:45) We do. Yeah. Well, we would build the fiber to the building. And in an area where—maybe we serve a company that's headquartered in our footprint. Let's just—I'm sitting in Charlotte, North Carolina.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:55) Maybe we

(Dan at 00:08:55) serve a company that's headquartered in Charlotte, and they have a location that's outside of our footprint in Nashville. And we don't have our fiber in that region where it's cost-effective to build a location. We would lease that access from another provider. Like we talked about earlier, that's kind of an ecosystem in terms of how we collaborate to ensure that we can deliver connectivity to customers. And then we would manage that service. We would call it a Type 2 service through another provider to that location and then bring it back on the network to our customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:25) What type of numbers are you talking about? What size numbers are you talking about for transferring data?

(Dan at 00:09:33) It depends on the business needs, really. I mean, when I first started in the industry, I'll date myself a little bit, a T1 was very adequate to run a business. So 1.5 megs. Now I would say that kind of the base level that most customers purchase for their enterprise businesses—100 meg. But more often it's a gig. And so we're graduating into the—you know, it's like a T1 is now 100 megs and 100 megs is now a gig, and the evolution and the requirements for bandwidth continue to grow exponentially. So we're growing our network alongside that to ensure that we can deliver those higher bandwidth speeds for our customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:14) I remember the day when my dad's office got T1. I think I was super excited to play video games online because I would have the fastest connection. It was a really big deal. And that was probably late nineties, early two thousands. I'm not sure exactly when, but around that time.

(Dan at 00:10:31) Yeah. No. That makes sense. I exited the military in '99. And when I stumbled into telecom and when I did, T1 was the hot ticket back then, if you will. So that's about right in terms of time frames.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:46) So you were an air traffic controller. Correct?

(Dan at 00:10:48) That's correct. Yeah. In the military, I was an air traffic controller. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:52) How did that prepare you? Those are very high-stress jobs. How did that prepare you for the business world?

(Dan at 00:10:57) You know, the military in general and air traffic control specifically—I think all of the core tenets that you learn from a military perspective, like showing up on time, you know, making sure that you have attention to detail, you follow through, you conduct yourself in an ethical and moral way. I think all of those things are the base requirements for being successful in anything in life. So I think it did a great job as a young man coming out of high school, allowing me to mature and to grow into somebody that was responsible that could come and do a good job for a company. And then air traffic control specifically—it is, you know, you always read it on the list of the most stressful jobs in the world. It's always in the top five or whatever.

(Dan at 00:11:38) And what it taught me is that stress is really all relative. So it is a stressful job. It's a very cognitively intense job. So you can't really have an off day because it is literally life or death if you make the wrong move and that kind of thing. So there's an element of—the stress feels a bit higher because of the consequences.

(Dan at 00:11:59) But I didn't feel any more stressed out on a difficult day in an air traffic control tower when I was working local control, which is the key position of the tower, than I do dealing with some emergency at home. So stress is all relative. It's how you deal with the stress. It's how you think about it. It's how you process it. It's how you take your steps to resolve it are a little bit different, but it's all the same. That's the thing I learned from that job.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:23) I call it maximum pain or maximum stress. I had to get hit by a car when I was 12, and so I went through a bunch of rehab and learned how to walk again, all that type of stuff. And what I realized pretty quickly is there—your sensors, for lack of a better term, your receptors—you can—there's a thing called maximum pain. It's the maximum amount of signal it can receive. And if you understand that and you experience that, you're like, okay. Well, it just can't get worse than what it feels like when it's the worst. Now how do you deal with it today, when stuff starts to build up? What's your go-to? You go for a run, take some time off? What do you do?

(Dan at 00:12:58) I am an exerciser. Exercise is absolutely 100% my main coping mechanism for dealing with any kind of stress. So every day, pretty much without break, unless it's just a completely planned day off, I exercise. And if that means I've gone the whole day and it's 9:00 at night and I haven't gone for a run or lifted a weight yet, I will do that.

(Dan at 00:13:18) Because that is my kind of Zen moment every day. It allows me to unwind. The endorphins are amazing. It allows me to refocus and reenergize for the following day. So that exercise is my key way to deal with that. But you also learn as you get older—or I have at least—take a deep breath, you know, step back, kind of detach a bit, observe the situation, and then logically think through how you want to process the next steps toward a resolution. And I think just that—as much as a daily unwind with the exercise does for me, it's that deep breath and the detachment and the step back in a critical situation or a stressful situation that helps me kind of make my way through.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:00) For me, because I work out pretty much on a daily basis or at least five days a week, for me, what the workout does, of course, the endorphins and all of that, but the way my brain processes it is if I can make myself do something that I don't want to do, which is usually like another rep, you know, if I can conquer that, I've got Jocko Willink in my head. I got Goggins up there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:23) And if I can just break that weak version of myself, then that's the win for me. Everything else is just gold. Because once you can make yourself do something, the whole world opens up to you. I mean, discipline is in such short supply professionally everywhere.

(Dan at 00:14:40) I couldn't agree with you more. There are countless days, everybody's like, well, you love exercise. Kind of. Right? But I love the results of it more than I do the thing itself. And there are countless days where I will sit on my couch for 30 minutes just dreading the next step toward the, you know, I have a home gym as well, and I have another gym close to the house, either getting in the car or walking out to the garage. I dread that step, but I do it because in the end, I've never regretted a workout where I haven't been injured. Right. So to your point, there's a lot of just the mental resolve of it that I appreciate as well.

(Dan at 00:15:15) And overcoming an obstacle, recently, oddly enough, I've started doing the cold plunge, like the cold shower.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:20) Oh, yeah.

(Dan at 00:15:21) That's miserable. That's a new level of misery. You know, I dislike running a lot and I run several days a week, but not as much as I do three minutes. And I dislike that probably more than anything I do, but I've done it. I'm probably on a two or three month stretch now of doing that daily just for the exact reason you described.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:40) I hate, what's his name?

(Dan at 00:15:42) Wim Hof.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:43) Existing. Wim Hof, man.

(Dan at 00:15:44) I know. He's ruined everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:46) For a month now. This program. It got popular, and I'm just like, no. You know who does it? Tony Robbins. He, if you watch the documentary, he built this square plunge thing. It's like a, you know, it looks like the great piece in Tetris. Right? The one that you always want. And he just goes out and jumps in it in the morning, and I'm like, I have discipline, but you know, you've kind of convinced me.

(Dan at 00:16:11) I think—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:12) I need to do it now. I think I need to go take the plunge.

(Dan at 00:16:15) It's miserable, but there are a few better feelings than when that three minutes expires and you can turn the shower on to hot or do whatever you're going to do. The rest of the night or the rest of the day, the rest of everything else feels wonderful because you're done with that three minutes. So just like the workout where it's like, you know, sometimes you dread having to go through the motions or you just go through the motions, the benefit at the end and then accumulation of benefits over years, really, is what you're building there, is just, to me, it's invaluable. So, yeah, it's tough, but it's good. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:48) Yeah. There's tons of science out there specifically about the cold stuff and aging, and so I like looking into that. But all right, let's get back to you. So what branch of the military was it again?

(Dan at 00:16:59) U.S. Army. And I chose the Army because they were the only branch at the time that offered, it's called split option. So I did boot camp between my junior and senior year in high school, somehow convinced my parents to sign the waivers and do all of that. In between the summer of my junior, you know, moving into my senior year of high school, I was off to boot camp. So did that, came back, was in the Army Reserves for my senior year in high school, and then I applied for active duty and was off directly after high school for my advanced training and airborne school, things of that nature.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:35) Amazing. I'm here today because of the Air Force. I didn't specifically serve. My dad, when he was 18, he needed to get out of the house. Right?

(Dan at 00:17:43) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:44) And so Air Force it was, and they taught him electronics, hardware and software engineering principles, and he worked on projects. They actually put the first GPS system into the B-2 stealth bomber.

(Dan at 00:17:56) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:56) And yeah. Yeah. It only became declassified seven or eight years ago when he told me. I was like, oh, he really took it seriously. He didn't even tell his family or anything. And rightfully so, I've got a microphone. I would have told everybody. So did you do any fiber stuff in the military, or was that all post-military?

(Dan at 00:18:13) No. I got out of the military, and I thought I wanted to own a gym. So I was geared up to go figure out how to own a gym. Dawned on me fairly quickly that you don't typically make a lot of money doing that. And so a guy that was at the gym said, what are you doing? I was doing some personal training, things of that nature at the time. And he's like, why don't you come work for us? We're a technology company. I was like, because I have no clue what you do. And he's like, that's fine. We'll teach you. So somebody took a chance on me. My first boss took a chance on hiring me just based on her perception of my aptitude to learn. And then I've had a phenomenal, wonderful career as a result of her gracious acceptance of me with no experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:55) Have you ever done that with members of your team or?

(Dan at 00:18:58) As frequently as I can, you know, it's core to me to make sure that we do, and it's something that we're working hard on here at Segra. How do we drop the barrier to entry for folks to either come straight out of high school or maybe come straight out of college and enter into a workforce with no experience, or maybe it's a mid-career change for somebody where they don't have a ton of experience, but they're smart, they're hardworking, they're humble? They're all the things you want in a teammate. How do we build a program here that allows them to grow in our organization based on those qualities and those characteristics as opposed to experience level? So, yeah, I'm super passionate about that. I've hired a lot of people in my career with no experience, and some of the best teammates that we have and some of the best people I've ever worked with had zero experience when they started.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:45) Yeah. I hired a server once. I was like, this guy was just on top of it. I'd been there at the restaurant a couple times. Every time, he's just crushing it. And, you know, you have a brief conversation. You can kind of tell what's behind someone's eyes. Right? And it worked out really well. Now I'm curious to know about what you just talked about sounds like code camps but for broadband. Right? Have you looked at how the economic development organizations are working with private industry to help people transition from service jobs or transition from, you know, just general coming out of high school into code camps. Have you seen these before?

(Dan at 00:20:25) Yeah. We have. And in fact, our Chief People Officer and I, Vanya and I talk a lot about how we can build something similar here. And it's being done across the space in a variety of ways, you know, and at the core, we're a connectivity provider, like we've talked about. But we really do so much more than that. We offer cybersecurity solutions, cloud services. We have data centers. We offer collaboration. And so we do a lot more up the stack, if you will, in terms of managed services than just the core connectivity. So for us, it's how do we start to build opportunities for new teammates to enter in one of your entry-level jobs like I did. It was the most entry-level position in the company. And then allow them to career ladder and move across the different segments of the business to learn and grow and progress as they gain knowledge and awareness and interest. So we're working very hard on, you know, just like you described with the code camp or something of that nature. How do we build that kind of telecom technology 101 to help our teammates start to learn to grow and then provide them with opportunities to learn in-house or through vendor partners so they can grow their career?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:34) I've gotten the chance to work with a couple of different Chief People Officers, and that's exactly what they do. So one of the cool things that they'll do is, you know, I think it was Netflix or one of the big five, they created that software that lets people apply for jobs internally so that they can switch their job within the organization. So that way, they'll keep people in the ecosystem. But because so often, people will feel like, well, I've noticed as an entrepreneur in hiring people, a lot of people don't know how to ask. Or they don't know how to, it's really clear for them to see a title at another place and try to go get that versus creating a new title here or solving some new problem here and having something change within. So I go out of my way to talk with my team about that because, you know, it just helps build a culture of people that are looking for problems to solve and that are as self-directed as you can be because there's, you know, limitations to that.

(Dan at 00:22:33) And the other benefit to that really for the organization is the cross-functional awareness that you build when teammates have worked in different segments of the business or in different groups allows their aperture to open in a way that benefits the customer, it benefits their teammates, benefits innovation, all the things you want to do as an organization. The more experience you can get high-potential teammates, the better. So to your point, exactly. I love it when one of my teammates moves from one group to another or one department to another department and learns more about the business because they can bring those insights back to benefit their current role and their old role with their new teammates and their old teammates. I think it's phenomenal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:12) Can you give me some context as to the size of Segra?

(Dan at 00:23:16) Yeah. Just shy of a thousand employees. We have, like I said, we're 30,000 route miles of fiber across nine states. So think like Augusta, Georgia, up through Pennsylvania, and then we have nine data centers through that footprint. And then, like I said earlier, we have, you know, not only the core connectivity at the core. We're an infrastructure provider, so fiber connectivity. But really what we focus on is the managed service stack that really helps our enterprise customers solve their technology troubles. And those services, that cybersecurity, the cloud, the collaboration services pull through the infrastructure. Because if you're solving somebody's cybersecurity problem, they'll purchase their connectivity from you. So it's really kind of an opposite go-to-market motion than you would think in terms of like, we're going to go out and we're going to sell you some bandwidth or some fiber connectivity. We're really just trying to help you solve a business problem. And we're tightly aligned with our customers and tightly aligned with our sales teams from a product perspective so that we stay current with what our customers need from a technology roadmap perspective so that we can solve that problem for them. And then what we provide in the end is, I call it one neck to hug, not one throat to choke, but a single source of procurement for those customers that eases that procurement on their IT staff so they can go focus on their core business and allows us to take care of the day-to-day technology needs in the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:36) Do most of your customers, they come in as fiber and then you help them with additional stuff, or is it the opposite way around?

(Dan at 00:24:43) Carrier customers, it's, you know, so we sell to all the big wireless carriers. And like you and I talked about earlier, there's an ecosystem where we buy and sell from other carriers across the nation. That's all fiber-based, connectivity-based, you know, wavelengths or just fiber or connectivity-based services. Our enterprise customer base, so when we're selling to the businesses in our footprint, that mid-market space is really that, it's we lead with the services and the fiber just follows. Because, again, our focus for those customers is how do we help them solve some of their critical IT roadmap needs? Right? And so we're just trying to help ease that burden on those IT decision makers in those companies.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:22) When you see emerging technologies like Starlink, what do you think the future looks like a hundred years in the future? Do you think it's going to be like there's trains and buses, you know, like there's Starlinks and then, you know, the physical fiber? Are they always going to coexist? Is one going to out-compete the other?

(Dan at 00:25:41) I mean, I think that there's always going to be a need for physical fiber. I think what will happen, you know, maybe it won't be a hundred years even, is that there will be such a ubiquitous availability of connectivity. I'll call it, when you think about, you know, we're in the very nascent stages of the metaverse and autonomous and connected vehicles and, you know, the continuous widespread adoption of cloud services, AR and VR, all of the buzzwords that you hear, we're actually starting to see that in practice in some areas. So as that grows, the need for that ubiquitous connectivity and high-speed connectivity and sometimes low-latent connectivity exists. So I think it'll be a blend to your question. I do think it'll be a blend. But I think my hope is that everyone in the world, you know, that at some point has access to that information because I think it fundamentally changes everything. And I know it has for me, you know, to have the access to information at my fingertips at all times. My growth since the, you know, since the adoption of the cell phone and I've had that thing in my pocket, it's just been exponential. And I want, you know, personally, I think it's super rewarding to be in an industry that's helping extend that to everybody. Playing even a small part in that where we're extending that knowledge out to the world is just exciting and phenomenal. We've got ground to cover to make sure that everybody has equal access, and we cross that digital divide there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:13) Yeah. I'm really grateful for it too because it allowed me to improve my quality of life. I mean, I could never get to live out on acreage like this because the cost of this in the city or directly on the edge of the city would be just outside of my reach currently. Right? And so we get this quality of life, but we also have this gigabit internet. I told my wife, I thought it was kind of funny because I go, this is the fastest internet that I have ever had, and I'm out in the woods.

(Dan at 00:27:42) Yeah. What's cool about it is you can pick your spot to live. And in your case, you get a lot of the benefits of living out on a farm. Right? But you don't lose the connectedness to everybody else, right, to information, to people, to the news, to, you know, just reaching out to your friends, you know, getting on a video call. You and I chatting, you don't lose any of that in this environment. And it's all, you know, thankfully due to the connectivity. And you think about that's one application, but think about telemedicine. Think about all the other exciting things that we're going to be able to do for these rural communities. It's really, really going to, it's a game changer, I believe, for rural America.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:22) Yeah. Shout out to Teladoc. I got to do this interview, I think two weeks ago with this company. They're called Teladoc, and it was really interesting because the way that they promoted themselves or described themselves was like a quarterback to your journey—

(Dan at 00:28:37) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:38) Versus just, oh, I've got, you know, a runny nose. Let's get on a video call.

(Dan at 00:28:41) Because

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:41) That's how I was thinking. When I started the interview, that was my impression of telemedicine. Was, okay, I have a cough. I open up this thing. They're gonna send something to Walgreens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:51) Right?

(Dan at 00:28:51) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:52) But they described it as this sort of larger service where they'll actually order labs for you, and you can go get them and come back. And I thought that was really interesting. And whenever I find things that are super interesting, I like to share them.

(Dan at 00:29:07) Yeah. Actually, I listened to that podcast that you had with them. Oh, you did? Yeah, I did.

(Dan at 00:29:13) And I'm fascinated as well with telemedicine in general and in health. Right? And it seems like both you and I are interested in health and self-improvement, that kind of thing. So there's one application that's like, okay, I've got a cough and I don't want to have to drive to the doctor and I'm busy. Let me do a quick wellness check on an urgent care type call.

(Dan at 00:29:33) And that solves one problem. But what he was talking about with you is it's next level fascinating because at some point we're going to have a wearable. Like my Apple Watch does it for me now. It tracks my sleep. It tells me my heart rate. It does all those things.

(Dan at 00:29:45) But at some point that's going to extend beyond that to the point where it'll predictively tell me when I'm about to become ill or when there's an issue that could be of concern. And that type of continuous monitoring of your health and well-being, you'll know when you're starting to get run down. That's fascinating. And I think I hadn't thought about it in that context until your podcast with him, but that next level of not just your basic care or my annual physical checkup that I could do virtually, but that continual monitoring of my well-being is just, that's exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:23) Well, it makes sense. Right? I mean, we do it for, well, you're in telecommunications. Somebody I talked to years ago was telling me about the system that they build. They would deploy it at sensors, IoT, of maybe, I think it was cell phone or some transmitting towers that were in Hawaii, and the parts are so expensive.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:43) And there's such a delay to ship them that they built this technology to determine when they're going to fail. And there's these incredibly complex mechanical systems operating together, and they can, with a degree of accuracy, predict their failure. And when I saw how complicated that was, you know, because my background's software engineering, when I saw how complicated that was, I said, yeah, it's only a matter of time before I'm gonna get a notification that says, hey, you need to go to sleep. Your immune system's down 32%.

(Dan at 00:31:08) Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, anecdotally. And I have read this online. Like, I monitor my heart rate pretty consistently because it tells me if I'm overtrained. It tells me a lot of things.

(Dan at 00:31:18) When my resting heart rate goes up overnight and I'm not overtrained, so if I haven't overextended myself from a workout perspective, I'll know two days out ahead of a cold, ahead of anything that I'm about to be sick, because I'll have a 10 beats elevated resting heart rate overnight. And 100% of the time that happens, I've caught a cold or something. So it's like that kind of awareness that instead of me having to monitor it, it sends me a note. How great would that be? You can kind of get ahead of it, start treating the illness as early as possible so that you can pass it as quickly as you can.

(Dan at 00:31:53) It's very exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:55) Are you wearing the watch overnight?

(Dan at 00:31:57) Yeah. I am. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:59) Were you a watch guy before the Apple Watch?

(Dan at 00:32:01) I was. Yeah. I've been training with a heart rate monitor for many years. And then, you know, I graduated into the various evolutions of that wearable, you know, Polar or whatever, along with the heart rate monitor. And the Apple Watch has just kind of taken that to the next level.

(Dan at 00:32:19) So I recently adopted it maybe last year, the Apple Watch, and I do. I wear it every night when I sleep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:24) What are some of the other ones that you've tried? Polar.

(Dan at 00:32:26) I was a Polar. Had all of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:28) I never heard of that. So Polar is the name of the thing?

(Dan at 00:32:30) It's like Garmin and Polar.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:32) Are both Garmin. Oh, like Polar. Polar. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:35) I know those. Yeah.

(Dan at 00:32:37) So it's like, and then the chest strap, and you can kind of do some...

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:42) I did.

(Dan at 00:32:42) A lot of training wrapped around my heart rate, letting it elevate and then letting it recover a little bit and then hitting the next session. So, over the next round of reps. But I've been doing that for a while. And then as a byproduct of that type of training, I started to really get interested in my resting heart rate, and then I started monitoring overnight.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:00) Yeah. I got really interested. I haven't done the heart rate thing, like continuous monitoring of it. But I definitely got interested in how my body stored fat based off of my macro count, like the composition of the macros. And I was reading online, different people process it differently.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:14) And so I was like, alright, I'm gonna start measuring my food and my macros and stuff. And this was about two years ago, and I just started it. I was like, alright, I'm gonna do it for 30 days, and it just stuck.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:24) And once you get in a habit of something, it's like I can tell you how many grams of everything I've eaten today. And it's really interesting because I found the right mix for me, where I can eat a lot, what I consider a lot. Like, I can eat a lot because I like food, but I'm not putting on a lot of fat. And I also have, you know, I'll adjust the mix too based off of how hard I'm working out. Like, if I get sick, I'll change some stuff up because you don't want to go too crazy when you're sick.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:50) But that's interesting. It sounds like your heart rate, your body responding to it. Do you think that's why your heart rate's going up? Your body's preparing to fight this thing or the early stages of fighting it?

(Dan at 00:34:01) 100%. Yeah. And so an elevated resting heart rate, your body's doing something. It's trying to recover from too much exercise, or it's the very start of the onset of a cold. Right?

(Dan at 00:34:13) And so your body's starting that response that says, hey, we've gotta go fight this thing, and you can get a little early glimpse into that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:20) Who do you get inspiration from? Do you follow anybody online?

(Dan at 00:34:23) Yeah. You've already dropped a couple of the names that are familiar to me. So yeah, I'm a big Jocko fan. Extreme Ownership a couple of times, Dichotomy of Leadership. I like the leadership philosophy, listen to his podcast.

(Dan at 00:34:35) And there are a couple other podcasts I'll listen to just that are business related. There's a macroeconomics podcast that I'm, I'm a bit of a nerd. So I'll listen. There's some very kind of geeky podcasts I listen to. And then for motivation, inspiration, leadership, probably Jocko's my go-to on that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:51) Yeah. He's so consistent with that sweat picture on Instagram.

(Dan at 00:34:55) That watch. 04:30. Yeah. 04:30 in the morning, he's up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:59) Yeah. Yeah. What's the best leadership advice you've ever gotten?

(Dan at 00:35:03) That's a great question. You know, probably, we talked about it a little bit earlier. It's just the capability to detach is to make sure that, you know, when you get into a stressful situation or you're encountering a problem that seems too complex to solve, detach a little bit, take a deep breath and find a way through. You know, that's, and from a problem-solving perspective, leadership-wise is the best one. And then just in general, just extending kindness to everyone. Like, you know, everybody's going through something and just really remembering that when you're in a stressful situation or you're trying to coach somebody through something, or you've got a hard discussion to have with an employee or a teammate, just remember that, you know, everybody's suffering from something in life and just to try to extend as much kindness as you can as often as you can in those situations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:54) We gotta do the business thing. Who's your customer? If people want to learn more, how do they find out more?

(Dan at 00:35:59) Yes. Segra.com. You know, that's the best spot, the one-stop shop for us. You know, our kind of archetype customer is a business headquartered in our footprint. We do really well with multi-site businesses, that kind of mid-market space.

(Dan at 00:36:14) So would love to talk to any of them about, you know, their connectivity, cybersecurity, cloud collaboration needs. Yeah. I think that's the best way to just hit us on the website. It's probably the best way to reach us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:24) Amazing. Well, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Dan at 00:36:27) Feel great. Appreciate you. It's great getting to know you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:30) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.