Veteran Kirk Offel Brings Military Discipline to AI and Data Centers

Kim Monson
00:12 – 00:33
World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and our other wars and conflicts. America’s fighting men and women strapped on their boots and picked up their guns to fight tyranny and stand for liberty. We must never forget them. Welcome to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson.

Kim Monson
00:34 – 00:49
These stories will touch your heart, inspire you, and give you courage. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Here’s Kim Monson. And welcome to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Monson.

Kim Monson
00:49 – 01:17
Be sure and check out our website, VeteransStories.com. And the show comes to you because of a trip that I took in 2016 with a group that accompanied four D-Day veterans back to Normandy, France for, at that time, the 72nd anniversary of the D-Day landings during World War II. and return stateside realizing we need to know these stories. Every story is unique and we need to hear them, we need to archive them, and so hence America’s Veterans Stories.

Kim Monson
01:17 – 01:32
I’m really pleased to be talking with Kirk Ophel today and our theme is From Deep Dives to Data Centers, Creating a New Mission for Veterans in the Digital Age. So Kirk Ophel, welcome to the show and tell me a little bit about yourself.

Kirk Offel
01:33 – 01:46
Well, thanks, Kim, and it’s an honor to be on your show. I’ve got to say thank you for all the things that you do for the veterans. As I begin to talk about myself, it’s challenging, but I started as… I’m the son of a Vietnam veteran.

Kirk Offel
01:46 – 01:51
My father did two tours in Vietnam, and I’m the youngest of a bunch of boys. I have a brother in every branch of service.

Kim Monson
01:52 – 01:53
Wow.

Kirk Offel
01:53 – 02:18
The benefit of growing up on a military base… I was born and raised in a military base, military hospital. I felt like that gave me an advantage, especially having nothing but older brother helped me get into a sport called wrestling. And wrestling is just nothing more than a street fight with rules, but it does, it does offer you the ability to understand, you know, pain, grit, sacrifice for the thing I took away from it the most, I think was discipline.

Kirk Offel
02:19 – 02:40
So I, um, I use those two things to help me find a career in the Navy. So I enlisted in the Navy in my early 20s and I found a home for myself in the nuclear submarine program. And I got to be on a fast attack submarine. I deployed for about 288 days a year on about three and a half years.

Kirk Offel
02:40 – 02:54
And I had a chance to visit about 16 different countries. So I got to do all the things that submariners get to do. And then when I was done with that, I left the military to finish. When I did that, I found a job where I just basically stumbled into this new emerging industry.

Kirk Offel
02:55 – 03:14
That’s still probably one of the best kept secrets in the world. And it’s called the data center industry. It’s actually referred to as the mission critical industry and mission critical was defined by any company or enterprise. that could quantify the downtime of their technology in one second by either a loss of revenue by $1 million or death.

Kirk Offel
03:14 – 03:39
Coming from the submarine community where we also have a very deep mission critical background, it’s not measured in downtime, it’s measured in our own mortality. So I got a chance to kind of play in this space and I grew my career when I got out of the military. sitting in front row and watching the World Wide Web get created, and then I got to watch what’s called the Internet of Things get created, which led us to e-commerce. And then I, again, was riding the wave as we started building these things called the cloud.

Kirk Offel
03:39 – 03:56
I spent a good half of my career building this guy for the cloud until we stumbled into this new era, which is called AI data centers. So I get a chance to be a part of all those things, but it all comes back to what I learned being born and raised on a military base, being born within a military family, and then serving in the military myself.

Kim Monson
03:57 – 04:12
Well, that’s quite a story. And so let’s jump in here. In the information that your publicist sent over, you said that you actually had a challenge, a health challenge, somewhere in all of this.

Kirk Offel
04:13 – 05:04
Yes, ma’am. So again, you wake up some days and you you’re There’s so many distractions we have, whether it’s our own ambition or the circumstances of our family situations. But for me, being blessed with cancer really helped me understand what was my life, and it shifted everything back to Top Debt Center. So I do think that I credit my survivability with my cancer to the lessons I was born and raised with in a military home, and the tenacity and the grit that was conditioned and taught to me while I was in the military.

Kirk Offel
05:04 – 05:36
The military is not only a leadership incubator. It’s also the home for the most advanced weapons machinery. So for me to work in a service like the silent service of the submarine community, I had to endure a lot of learning and a lot of pressure testing or stress inoculation, which between what I learned in the military and what I learned growing up on a military base and the things that the sport of wrestling itself had taught me, all those things combined prepared me to my battle with cancer.

Kirk Offel
05:36 – 06:03
And, and I, I ended up fighting it in a way in which I raced in about 70 to 80 different ultra endurance races from half Ironman to Spartans and trifectas. And I did it to raise money for cancer research. But while doing those things, I really learned how to reinvent myself as a human being. So I fell back on all the military and the training I learned in wrestling to be a cancer survivor that I am today.

Kim Monson
06:04 – 06:20
Boy, that’s a remarkable story. And I grew up in a little town in western Kansas, and wrestling was one of the sports. And we had state championship teams and state championship wrestlers. And so I’ve watched a lot of wrestling.

Kim Monson
06:20 – 06:33
But the thing about wrestling is you can’t hide. It is you. And so you are responsible for preparing. You’re responsible for what happens out on the mat.

Kim Monson
06:34 – 06:41
You’re responsible with how you react to that. You can’t blame anybody. It all comes down to you, which I think it makes it a rather remarkable sport.

Kirk Offel
06:42 – 07:14
There’s no greater sport than the sport of wrestling because it holds you accountable to how much discipline you can impose on yourself. And whatever it is, it’s typically proportionate to how successful you are in the sport. The sport is incredible, and you should be surprised or you may be surprised to know that we have more CEOs in the Fortune 500 that have been on a wrestling mat than have ever been on a court. Wrestling also is the primary sport, and that represents the largest demographic of those that join any special warfare community with any branch of service.

Kirk Offel
07:15 – 07:28
They tend to recruit more from the wrestling community simply because we impose pretty high levels of expectations on ourselves, and with those expectations, we bring standards. And that’s something that, again, the military.

Kim Monson
07:42 – 07:54
Well, and Kirk Ophel, for people that may not really know a lot about this sport of wrestling, the wrestling that you’re talking about is different than what a lot of people see on TV with pro wrestling, right?

Kirk Offel
07:55 – 08:07
Yeah, absolutely different. But one day we’ll hopefully see collegiate wrestling more prevalent on television. But it’s it’s one of the oldest Olympic sports. Greco-Roman wrestling is where it began.

Kirk Offel
08:07 – 08:43
And wrestling is a is a foundation basic sport, meaning fundamentally is wrestling is life. And I taught my sons that, which were wrestlers. And I use that ethos for everything that I do in business, which is your entire life, you’re going to be thrown on your back at some point, and you’re going to have to learn how to fight off that. That teaches you endurance, and it teaches you grit.

Kirk Offel
08:43 – 08:54
Things that you’re going to need to have to endure a community like the submarine community, and those two things combined give you an advantage if you have to ever endure something with your own health, such as cancer.

Kim Monson
08:55 – 09:06
I think it’s remarkable how you’ve connected all of this together. That happens in life. All these things, we get them connected. But anything else regarding the wrestling component?

Kim Monson
09:06 – 09:20
Because I then want to move over to being on this nuclear sub. I’m not sure that I could go underwater for a really long time. So we’ll get to that. But anything else regarding wrestling that you want people to know?

Kim Monson
09:20 – 09:20
No,

Kirk Offel
09:22 – 09:52
not necessarily, other than it’s a It’s a sport that I think everyone should, it’s because the number one thing you’ll, the number one objective of that sport is to teach people how to improve their position at all times. And that applies to the civilian community, it applies to non-wrestlers. Everybody that’s working for a living should be trying to figure out a way to improve their position. So I do believe wrestling is a constitutional sport for character, but I do think that it also helped prepare me for during the training I had to go through to get into a submarine.

Kim Monson
09:53 – 10:09
Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about that. And so we’ve got maybe about four minutes in this particular segment. So what kind of training? Well, let’s start with how did you decide that you wanted to be a crew member on a nuclear submarine?

Kirk Offel
10:10 – 10:42
Yeah, fair question. The answer is television, TV and movies like Top Gun or Crimson Tide or The Hunt for October do an amazing job to help recruit for the military as they should. And for me, My father was 24 years active duty in the military, turned 18 in Vietnam loading bombs in F-4s in Southeast Asia, came out with a bachelor’s from Boise State, a master’s from OU, and all of his sons joined, both an officer and enlisted in different branches. So being born on an Air Force base, I knew what I didn’t want to do.

Kirk Offel
10:42 – 10:46
Not that I’m trashing with my fellow brothers and sisters in the service. Be

Kim Monson
10:46 – 10:47
careful.

Kirk Offel
10:48 – 11:07
I know, but I got half my family’s Air Force. But at the same time, you know, I think most young boys growing up want to be commandos or they want to be soldiers. And I got to another point where I feel like that was fulfilling enough for me. So I started having conversations with my father early on and said, hey, I watched a few movies.

Kirk Offel
11:07 – 11:23
I watched Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington and Crimson Tide, and I said, I can do this. And my dad, thank God, he was stationed in the Pentagon for a bit, and he has a small network within the military and happened to know a few guys. And it opened up an opportunity for me to ask while I was done. It was a no-brainer.

Kirk Offel
11:23 – 11:25
I realized that I was meant to be on a submarine.

Kim Monson
11:27 – 11:30
And what was the training like to try to get onto the submarine?

Kirk Offel
11:32 – 12:01
Yeah, you know when you go and you take the Armed Service Vacational Aptitude Battery, otherwise known as the ASVAB, they rank you based on aptitude and then if you can get into some more technical qualified type of opportunities. For me, I knew I wanted to go in and get something that was a technical background that would apply to a professional job skill, a trade or a craft when I left the military. In the event, I didn’t want to go back to college. So I just looked for what I thought would be one of the hardest jobs to do.

Kirk Offel
12:01 – 12:13
And the options were aviation, naval special warfare or submarines. And if you’re a wrestler, you’re going to go to where the… I just felt like the greatest opportunity to reinvent myself could be found on a fast attack submarine.

Kim Monson
12:14 – 12:32
Okay. And so I want to understand more about the submarine. I’m talking with Kirk Ophelm and a remarkable story, how everything is connected in his life. But before we go to break, I did want to mention the Center for American Values, which is located here.

Kim Monson
12:33 – 13:08
and Pueblo, Colorado. to instill in our children values of honor, integrity, and patriotism. So they put together some great educational programs, as well as they have a great On Values series as well, bringing in great speakers. So for more information regarding the Center, go to their website.

Kim Monson
13:08 – 13:14
That is AmericanValuesCenter.org. AmericanValuesCenter.org. We’ll be right back with Kirk Ophel.

Speaker 8
13:16 – 13:45
REMAX Realtor Karen Levine helps bring to life the individual stories of our servicemen and women. With her sponsorship of America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson, Karen honors the sacrifices of our military and is grateful for our freedom. As a member of the National Association of Realtors Board of Directors, Karen works to protect private property rights for all of us. Karen has a heart for our active duty military and veterans and is honored to help you buy or sell your home.

Speaker 8
13:45 – 13:47
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Speaker 2
13:57 – 14:16
All of Kim’s sponsors are an inclusive partnership with Kim and are not affiliated with or in partnership with KLZ or Crawford Broadcasting. If you would like to support the work of The Kim Monson Show and grow your business, contact Kim at her website, KimMonson.com. That’s Kim Monson, M-O-N-S-O-N dot com.

Kim Monson
14:28 – 14:42
And welcome back to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. Be sure and check out our website. That is americasveteranstories.com. And I’m talking with Kirk Ophel, and he ended up serving on a fast attack submarine.

Kim Monson
14:43 – 15:03
And so we want to talk more about that. But before we do, During break, you had mentioned that we’re recording this on the anniversary of VE Day, which was the Victory in Europe Day in World War II. And I had mentioned that I had uncles that served in World War II. One of them was a bombardier.

Kim Monson
15:04 – 15:31
on a bomber, and I actually got to take a little fly with one of these bombers, and I was a little shocked at how cramped the quarters were, looking at what the bomb bay was like, and they would just scurry around on the plane, and I just couldn’t believe what these guys did. But you said that was nothing compared to the guys that served on the submarines.

Kirk Offel
15:32 – 15:48
Yeah, I don’t want to trivialize what the air crews did. I mean, to have an Air Force back in those days, it was Army Air Corps. And what was asked of them and what was expected of them would, in today’s terms, by all accounts, be considered unreasonable. And the same could be said about the submarine community.

Kirk Offel
15:48 – 16:22
So I was blessed to get on to a fast attack submarine that was stationed in the submarine capital of the world, which is New London, Connecticut. and and that’s where that’s where the cold war was real submarine community and and and i got a chance to meet so many world war ii veterans that had served on those tin cans back in those days. This was long before the nuclear program was established in the submarine community. And these people would go to sea in very, very tight and incredible living conditions that I couldn’t even imagine trying to live through today.

Kirk Offel
16:22 – 16:41
And they would go to sea and they wouldn’t come back until they offloaded them all the easy way, right? And the conditions that they had were there was no guarantees that they were going to be coming back. You know, so just like in the planes, you know, they’re up in the air, they could always hit the ground. And if you’re in a submarine, you have one wrong problem, a steam line rupture, a flood of some kind, that ship ain’t coming back to the surface.

Kirk Offel
16:42 – 16:43
So it’s just as equally dangerous.

Kim Monson
16:44 – 16:54
Yeah, very dangerous. And I can’t remember, I think that I did interview one guy that served on submarines. And didn’t they normally kind of go out by themselves?

Kirk Offel
16:55 – 17:10
Yes, so submarines. Well, there’s a fair question. So we have battle groups, and those battle groups are led by carriers, and those carriers have a lot of supporting staff around them. And there’s always going to be, every time you see an aircraft carrier, you just imagine there’s a submarine doing donuts, right?

Kirk Offel
17:10 – 17:34
But in the most part, we have different types of submarines. You have the ballistic missile submarines, which if one of those submarines were to beat itself on any country other than Russia or America, that country would have the most, the third most powerful weapon arsenal in the world. So there’s those types of submarines that go out and they’re the nuclear deterrent. We probably have less than 80 submarines in the fleet and they represent probably 50 to 60% of the nuclear deterrent.

Kirk Offel
17:34 – 17:45
That being said is there’s a fast attack submarine fleet that exists as well. And that’s what I got to be a part of. And those ones definitely go out on their own. They are hunters, but every now and then they’ll be assigned to a battle group.

Kirk Offel
17:45 – 17:50
I fortunately was assigned to a submarine that got to go do missions that submarines are designed to do.

Kim Monson
17:51 – 17:55
Okay, so how many crew members on a fast attack submarine?

Kirk Offel
17:56 – 18:13
Yeah, anywhere between 120 at that time with a 688. And I’m sure that some of those numbers have slid around. But that would be the whole crew. And then sometimes, depending on the mission, we’d bring on people as well, either people from the Naval Special Warfare Community, from the Intelligence Community, or other.

Kirk Offel
18:14 – 18:24
So it’s not unusual to have 135 people on a submarine that’s 360 feet and four inches long. So it’s still pretty compressed. It’s a tight space to operate in, but it’s amazing to see how much they’re able to accomplish.

Kim Monson
18:26 – 18:30
So if you can, tell me what a typical mission might look like.

Kirk Offel
18:32 – 18:54
Yeah, there’s there’s a few different campaigns or applications for submarines. Obviously, submarine to submarine warfare, submarine to surface warfare, and then we have the ability for vertical launching systems. So set off the coast of some country and we can we can launch weapons without being detected. So there’s a slurry of those things.

Kirk Offel
18:55 – 19:14
And then there’s always unconventional missions as well, like counter-drug interdictions that will help to support certain groups or neighboring partners. So I got to be a part of three of those types of missions. So I got to do what submarines are designed to do and what they write books about.

Kim Monson
19:16 – 19:17
I bet that was pretty exciting, yes?

Kirk Offel
19:19 – 19:51
I think that it’s incredible. and it’s when you’re 20 years old and you’re driving a multi-billion dollar warship it’s hard to relate to your counterparts that are stuck in college still because they’re talking party they went to last night and you’re talking about how you were driving a submarine at test depth for the last three months and you were parked off the coast of some third world country right so it’s hard to relate what you do there, because one, you can’t talk about what you do on submarines. And because of that, even if you could talk, most people wouldn’t believe you or understand anyway.

Kim Monson
19:52 – 19:54
And how long were the missions normally?

Kirk Offel
19:55 – 20:11
In my time, the average or the longest duration of deployment I went on was just a little bit over six months. But some of the deployments could be three months, We went underneath the Northern Ice Pack. That was three months. I sailed around the world in 12 minutes, I can say that.

Kirk Offel
20:12 – 20:28
You go down and you do other things maybe in the South Caribbean or other parts of the country, those mission days as well. But traditionally, most submarines don’t go out to sea for more than six months at a click. But a submarine by nature is designed to be able to steam for one million miles or 20 years without a refuel.

Kim Monson
20:30 – 20:31
And this is a nuclear submarine.

Kirk Offel
20:33 – 20:47
Yes ma’am. So the nuclear Navy is now 76 years old. And back when I was more intimately involved with the programs, we had 34 reactor propulsion plants. So the discovery of fission and fusion took place 76 years ago.

Kirk Offel
20:48 – 21:16
And now we have hundreds of submarines that not only hit the fleet, but I bet you we have hundred submarines that have been refueled since they’ve hit the fleet. And these are incredibly efficient, not only machines, but crews. So they’re very, we are trained and conditioned to endure long missions that are untenable to typical people, for sure, because we, we remove ourselves from the face of the earth. And, and, and that does do things to humans,

Speaker 1
21:17 – 21:17
right?

Kirk Offel
21:17 – 21:28
So for us, you know, you’re also surrounded by some of the best sailors the fleet has to offer, and they are sent to some of the most advanced training you could ever imagine. Very safe at all times on one of those ships.

Kim Monson
21:29 – 21:59
So Kirk Ophel, when I was in Normandy, and one of the guys was 101st Airborne, dropped in behind enemy lines on D-Day, and they all had to have, their packs had to be, they had to have a parachute, they had to have their clickers, they had to have rations, all of that stuff. And it was the first time I really started to appreciate the logistics, to make sure everybody had what they needed. So how do you have enough food to be out there?

Kim Monson
21:59 – 22:03
What does that look like to to get supplies on to a nuclear submarine?

Kirk Offel
22:05 – 22:13
Excellent question. And that is the only thing that I mean, you want to you want to impact the mission. You have to impact the quality of life. And the best way to take care of that is.

Kirk Offel
22:13 – 22:36
So submariners in the U.S. Navy are sometimes considered the best fed sailors in the Navy because it’s the only way that you can improve our quality of life. So we have a pretty interesting storage. When you go to sea, you fill the submarine up. Every compartment you can has food, even in the walkways, you’re walking on cans and you kind of go out of them deployments and you’re removing components.

Kirk Offel
22:37 – 23:02
Um, you’re removing components along the way and, and you kind of eat your way through the submarine so that what you’re doing is you’re walking through compartments to where it’s too crammed or too packed right now. But if you stay in that compartment long enough, all the canned food and all the stored food that you have there that we consumed. And you have to imagine, we go to sea for a long time, so perishable stuff only lasts a few weeks. And we make, you know, powdered milk.

Kirk Offel
23:02 – 23:26
We use powdered eggs. We use a lot of things that are either frozen, canned, or powdered to make it through. And then on occasions, we may pull into some country, and as a byproduct of that, they have fresh produce. or you know we could get a refreshment of our ship stores and it’s not uncommon for us to have a really good supply officer on a submarine that has the ability to go out negotiate with the locals when we get into different countries and find us things that

Kirk Offel
23:26 – 23:31
are you don’t typically eat reindeers as an example but if you pull into Norway you get a chance to

Kim Monson
23:33 – 23:48
What about refuse? Because you’re probably going to want to be undetected. So you’re not obviously throwing cans off, you know, out of the submarine or also the human refuse. How does a nuclear submarine?

Kirk Offel
23:49 – 24:00
Yeah, we just don’t let people go to the bathroom. It’s that simple. No, what we do is you have, I mean, people don’t realize that a submarine isn’t designed to sink. So we have to purposely and intentionally sink it.

Kirk Offel
24:00 – 24:23
And, and that means we have hard tanks and soft tanks, like ribs spread throughout the submarine. And, and we, we, we put all of our sand waste into hard tanks. And then we would, depending on which depth at sea we’re at or which waters we’re operating within, we can just pressurize those tanks harder than the pressure on the outside of the submarine. And we could discharge that waste out.

Kirk Offel
24:23 – 25:04
And then we also have, um, a We have a center on the submarine where you put your trash in a can that you made, you flood, you close the hatch, you flood it, you pressure it, and then you just, with some impulse there, you jettison it, and it dumps out all the trash down to the bottom, somewhere in the abyss where you’ll never see it.

Kim Monson
25:05 – 25:09
Wow. And how deep can a nuclear submarine dive?

Kirk Offel
25:11 – 25:25
You know, that’s a good question. There’s some books out there called the Book of James. I always recommend people go take a look at that. Whatever they publish is kind of that’s the script that submariners tend to The test depth of submarines vary between each submarine, and they’re also incredibly secret.

Kirk Offel
25:26 – 25:35
So one thing that they teach you when you get to the submarine community isn’t just what you’re going to be doing, but what you are and are not allowed to talk about. So test depth is one of those things that we typically don’t talk about. But

Speaker 1
25:35 – 25:35
I think

Kirk Offel
25:35 – 25:43
if you look at the Book of James, on average, you’ll probably see a submarine functions with the capacity without issues. Okay.

Kim Monson
25:45 – 26:05
Okay, we’re going to continue the discussion. I’m talking with Kirk Ophel and a remarkable story. Grew up as a son of a Vietnam veteran and was a wrestler in school and was able to take the things that he learned to become a crew member. on a fast attack nuclear submarine.

Kim Monson
26:05 – 26:27
We’re going to talk about his career here now in just a little bit, but all this happens because we have great sponsors. And one of those sponsors is Hooters Restaurants. They have five locations, Loveland, Aurora, Lone Tree, Westminster, and Colorado Springs. And how I got to know them is a really important story about, I call them PBIs, Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Interested Parties, and the proper role of government.

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26:27 – 26:36
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Kim Monson
28:18 – 28:41
And welcome back to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteranStories.com. And I’m talking with Kirk Ophel, and he is a son of a Vietnam veteran and in high school, well in school, and then served as a crew member on a fast attack nuclear submarine.

Kim Monson
28:42 – 28:53
And I’m fascinated with the submarine. Is there anything I missed asking you regarding serving on the submarine? And then we can move over to what you’re doing now.

Kirk Offel
28:55 – 29:19
Yeah, you know, it’s a really small community and it’s a great place to be from. Sometimes it’s a hard place to be because the deployments could be very taxing and take a toll on you. But I do think no, regardless of how hard it is to be in that community, it is absolutely worth it. Because if I wasn’t a submariner, I would never be able to find, I would have never found the career that I’ve found since I left active duty in the world of technology.

Kirk Offel
29:19 – 29:28
And I credit my submarine community and my submarine training to being able to give me the opportunity to thrive in an emerging technology world and environment that we live in today.

Kim Monson
29:29 – 29:39
So Kirk Ophiel, you’ve been able to take this, all of this, to launch Overwatch Mission Critical. So tell us about that.

Kirk Offel
29:40 – 29:50
Yes, ma’am. So the term we use because it’s a military term. It traditionally means a sniper. But if you look at the definition, it’s defined by simply something like this.

Kirk Offel
29:50 – 30:16
It’s when a smaller unit disrupts the dynamic on a battlefield while simultaneously supporting a much larger unit. And that’s what that’s what Overwatch is set for for snipers is they’re typically able to with one sniper, they could hold back two platoons because Uh, no one wants to step in the range of where that could be. And for, I created a technology incubator for labor and, and we wanted to be disruptors. So instead of giving the industry another fleet, we wanted to give it.

Kirk Offel
30:17 – 30:32
Seal team six for what we do. So the mission critical vertical, as I said, is an industry that’s measured in, in downtime. If you, if you lose your technology, if amazon.com went dead for one, seven, who can they lose? If you’re an airline and you can’t.

Kirk Offel
30:32 – 30:46
maintain your e-commerce? How much revenue do you lose? I started in Mission Critical by building hospitals and by building FAA towers. Things in which Mission Critical wasn’t measured by revenue, it was measured by downtime and death.

Kirk Offel
30:46 – 31:30
And I think the reason why as this industry began to emerge, it really embraced Transitioning regardless of what your rank is, wherever you arrive at, your job is to learn the job of the person above you by teaching the job to the person below you. And that is what we built the ethos for our business on. And we did it trying to support and serve an emerging industry that I think will have a greater impact on humanity than powered flight.

Kim Monson
31:31 – 31:51
Well, so a question, because you’re probably, these data centers and AI, there’s a lot of talk out there about that, that AI is dangerous or it’s a great opportunity, dangerous, all these things. What’s your thoughts on that, Kirk Ophel?

Kirk Offel
31:52 – 32:06
Yes, it’s all fair concerns. I mean, why wouldn’t we? You have to think about AI today, what data centers are. And let me try to explain it.

Kirk Offel
32:06 – 32:20
I always use a phrase, I go, it’s this guy for the cloud, right? But what it really is, the data center is like going into a Home Depot. But instead of rows upon rows of home improvement equipment, it’s like a server farm. It’s just set up with all this technology.

Kirk Offel
32:20 – 32:32
And that’s what the cloud is. The cloud means someone else’s data center. So whatever technology that you’re not keeping on your premise or on your phone or your computer is going, and that somewhere else is a data center. That data center is the sky for the cloud.

Kirk Offel
32:32 – 32:53
But it’s also the home for AI, the entire technology engine that supports all of cloud and all of AI comes from one data center. Every app on your phone is a data center. So every time that someone touches their phone to buy anything online, to stream something online, to upload or down something online, they’re touching it. Not only a data center, but touching multiple data centers.

Kirk Offel
32:53 – 33:15
And the data center industry really didn’t start. Some people will say it started in 1994 when Amazon.com went live with their website because they represented about 60% of the internet traffic. But this whole industry itself is what 2025 is in AI. Think about the AI that we’re using today.

Kirk Offel
33:15 – 33:31
2025 is for AI, is what 1925 was for the automobile industry. And what I’m telling you is, as much as we think the AI that we’re using today is great, It’s not even as efficient as a rotary phone. That’s how bad the AI is today that we’re working with. And it’s only going to get better.

Kirk Offel
33:31 – 33:44
And of course, with the adoption rate of any form of emerging technology, there’s going to be concerns and threats and risks. Benefits of what AI will do specifically for the middle class is going to have a greater impact on anything else we’ve seen from technology.

Kim Monson
33:45 – 34:05
So question, are those that say that these data centers require a lot of energy? And of course, there’s all these narratives around affordable, reliable, efficient, and abundant energy. Is nuclear going to be the thing for these data centers?

Kirk Offel
34:07 – 34:24
Yes, ma’am. So it’s a really interesting thing because we’re talking about energy, we’re talking about technology, but we have to look at it through the lens of national security as well. So I’ll give you an understanding. So painting with a very broad stroke at a very high level, today we build what’s called hyperscale data centers or centers.

Kirk Offel
34:24 – 35:08
And that means it’s going to be 100 megawatts of power, okay, minimum. That means you need 40 acres of land. That means you’re going to, on 40 acres of land for 100 megawatts of power, you’re going to consume between 1 and 1.5 of data. and it creates a lot of career growth and career opportunity for people that are looking to get into alternatives to college or the military or other alternatives such as the trades.

Kirk Offel
35:09 – 35:51
And one of the things of emerging technology, specifically driven because of the demand for AI, has allowed us in recent quarters to discover that The rate in which we use and deploy energy in the United States today is no longer tenable. And what I mean is, we need more energy to support the demand of AI than what we can get from the grid. So there are, we’re 12 years behind the United States on transmission lines, and there are probably 10,000 grid interconnection requests throughout the United States right now for power from a utility provider. And at the same time, as we’re trying to simultaneously reduce the usage of dirty fossil fuels.

Kirk Offel
35:52 – 36:14
We are trying to figure out a way to adopt a stepping stone to get us closer to nuclear, because nuclear is the safest, scalable and most sustainable form of energy we could provide. And we haven’t created nuclear reactors here in the United States for quite some time. But China has. In fact, they’ve commissioned 10 nuclear reactors every year for the last three years, with the exception of last year in which they commissioned 11.

Kirk Offel
36:15 – 37:06
And they will still build 100 coal fire power plants this year. and it’s going to be primarily used for national defense and safety and security first. So knowing that we have now put such a huge demand on the United States grid, and now realizing that no matter what we’re doing without nuclear, we’ll never be able to catch up, until we figured out nuclear, we started adopting natural gas. And according to Goldman, we’ll probably put 45 gigawatts of renewable energy on the grid between now and 2030, and 60% of that are roughly 27 gigs alone.

Kirk Offel
37:08 – 37:50
So you’ll see us going and building data centers in markets outside NFL cities where the energy is at, because now when we build AI data centers, they just need a lot of aggregate energy, but they don’t have to worry about network latency. So we don’t have to worry about putting them close to where all the eyeball content and video caching from consumers and humans are. out somewhere where no one gets to see them because these large language model AI data centers are just learning data centers and we are feeding it so much information that we don’t need to worry about it communicating to other things because we create more data on this planet every nine months than in the history of the world combined prior to that.

Kirk Offel
37:50 – 38:11
So data is the number one most valuable commodity on this earth. And we are using now to shore up national security, find greater means and methods for adopting and utilizing energy. And ultimately, it’s going to be used primarily for health care after that. So we have no choice but to shift to nuclear because we don’t have enough energy on the infrastructure today.

Kirk Offel
38:11 – 38:32
And if we just fire more coal-fired plants, that doesn’t solve the problem for Ali, right? At some point, we’re going to have to help consumers understand the dichotomy between nuclear weapons, which we all don’t like, and nuclear energy, which is the safest, most sustainable and scalable solution for energy we could put on this earth.

Kim Monson
38:33 – 38:42
Okay. So, Kirk, on this then, Will, do you think that you might have a nuclear power right next to AI centers? Is that what you envision?

Kirk Offel
38:45 – 39:08
The future will require us to have a small modular reactor, an SMR. uh… within an adjacent vicinity of where the infrastructure for data centers will be put and you’ll you’ll put them in a way which you wouldn’t know that they’re think about this whenever our fast attack submarine which had a lesson thirty megawatt reactor And just to put in perspective, that’s enough to power Chicago for the entire day at a minimum.

Kirk Offel
39:09 – 39:31
So we have a 30 megawatt reactor. We pull up to some third world country and we actually will hook up to their shore power and we will move the needle to the left. So we will steam while sitting at the pier and put energy back on the grid for these countries sometimes when we pull into them. What people don’t realize specifically right now, if you’re in the United States and you’re within a military base that has carriers or submarines, you’re already sitting right next to nuclear reactors.

Kirk Offel
39:32 – 40:03
But it is so safe that we don’t ever hear of disasters on US nuclear submarines because the amount of training and the amount of conditioning and the amount of education that goes into training a fleet to be able to maintain and operate that nuclear reactor in a safe way, it’s into our brains to make sure that we do it without compromise. And that’s why we don’t have any compromise with the integrity of our reactors. So I think that there’s just a lot of people that have followed propaganda their whole life that have been told nuclear is bad across all fronts.

Kirk Offel
40:03 – 40:26
And the reality is it’s not. It’s actually incredible. And it’ll be the only way to reduce the carbon footprint. That’s the reason why I’m telling you today that the demand for data centers, capabilities such as cloud or AI, Those two demands on data centers will force us to shift our entire economy into a different form of energy, a safer, more reliable form of energy.

Kirk Offel
40:27 – 40:41
And that is the only way we’ll reduce the carbon footprint. And that’s why I’m telling you that the data center world isn’t just going to have the greatest impact on humanity since powered flight. It’s going to create jobs than anything we’ve ever seen. And those jobs will bring back and strengthen our middle class.

Kim Monson
40:42 – 41:01
And I want to talk about that. And Kirk Ophel, I need to give a little bit of a disclaimer because my listeners know that I normally am just on the radio doing audio work. But I did, I was asked to moderate a documentary called A Climate Conversation. And it’s a whole series of podcasts.

Kim Monson
41:02 – 41:19
And I’ve become convinced that carbon dioxide is actually beneficial. It’s something that plants need. So I wanted to just give a disclaimer that I don’t think carbon is bad. I like carbon dioxide is bad.

Kim Monson
41:19 – 41:24
I like it. So I just needed to give a disclaimer. But I wanted to make

Kirk Offel
41:24 – 41:25
that

Kim Monson
41:25 – 41:25
comment.

Kirk Offel
41:26 – 41:41
Yeah, but too much of a good thing is a bad thing. I think if you go to China right now and you see what they have to do, because two thirds of the world’s population sits between China and India. But they represent 85% of the world’s pollution. Because that’s where lion’s share of the manufacturing takes place.

Kirk Offel
41:41 – 42:00
And if you look at the carbon outputs that they have, it’s pretty chronic. So when people want a nuclear, they should go watch a show from… There’s a movie on Apple TV called Nuclear Now. And that show is a documentary that talks about, it bifurcates the differences between all types of forms of energy.

Kirk Offel
42:01 – 42:16
How dangerous is nuclear versus how dangerous is coal and everything in the middle. And you’d be surprised. I challenge all of your listeners to go watch that objectively with an open eye. I was born and raised with propaganda through all the media and the news that said, this is good and this is bad and don’t do all these things.

Kirk Offel
42:17 – 42:40
But now, you know, the best thing about technology is the Goldilocks model of technology. It was too hot before it was too cold. And right now, in the fifth industrial revolution, it’s just right. right now we’re in the fifth industrial revolution where we as humans are meant to have a healthier more harmonious relationships with machines and technology in our lives and I believe it’s the technology that we’re building in these data centers has given us more transparency and visibility into the

Kirk Offel
42:40 – 43:03
truthful matter of things that are either beneficial or harmful to us so we get to really learn we don’t have to listen to traditional NBC. We don’t have to listen to certain things. We could go out and there’s so much information out there, we could find it ourselves and we could educate ourselves. And I think over the course of time, people will realize, good, not everything we were told is bad is bad, but there is some things that are in the middle.

Kim Monson
43:03 – 43:05
Okay. So with that, again, what is that movie?

Kirk Offel
43:07 – 43:28
Nuclear Now. And it’s from Oliver Stone. You don’t have to be an Oliver Stone fan, but he’s very objective in how he rolls out the differences between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. And if we could go back in time, the Sahara Club, Greenpeace, all the first ones to line up and protest against nuclear, they’re the first proponents for it today.

Kirk Offel
43:28 – 43:58
And it’s because we just needed to educate ourselves. think about it up until what 1967 we were still doing lobotomies for the last 60 years so it just takes time before we start understanding what is really good for us but the technology that we’re building is allowing us to have more visibility into the things impacting us and nuclear now is an example of how everybody should be educated by watching something like that because you can challenge it all you want but you cannot challenge the science And I’m a person that looks at objectivity and everything.

Kim Monson
43:58 – 44:19
OK, so again, that movie is nuclear now. And then I’d also recommend that people check out our documentary, A Climate Conversation. We will continue the discussion with Kirk Ophel at CENATI and did want to mention the USMC Memorial Foundation, which is another nonprofit I highlight on a regular basis. The official marine memorials right here in Colorado, and they’re raising money for the remodel.

Kim Monson
44:20 – 44:29
It was dedicated in 1977. So it’s time for a remodel. and get more information, go to usmcmemorialfoundation.org. That’s usmcmemorialfoundation.org.

Kim Monson
44:29 – 44:31
We’ll be right back with Kirk Ophel.

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44:33 – 44:52
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Speaker 7
45:03 – 45:19
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Kim Monson
45:27 – 45:41
And welcome back to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. Be sure and check out our website. That is America’s Veteran Stories dot com. And I’m talking with Kurt Ophel, and he was a submariner on a fast attack nuclear submarine.

Kim Monson
45:41 – 45:49
He was a wrestler in school. And in fact, in between segments, you said that you actually wrestled out out here at UNC. Yes.

Kirk Offel
45:51 – 46:04
Yes, ma’am. I graduated from high school in California. I wrestled in Southern California and then I end up uh… getting onto one of the best schools in division two at the time, University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, which is now one of the best schools in division one wrestling.

Kirk Offel
46:05 – 46:15
And I made it three whole semesters there before I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. So I loved Colorado. It’s such a beautiful place and such an amazing wrestling team. They have an incredible program even to this day.

Kim Monson
46:15 – 46:34
Well, and I know that they have a great reputation. But let’s talk about the work that you’re doing with data centers and AI. And these data centers, it seems to me like it’s a great way to reinvigorate many of these little towns throughout America that have been in decline.

Kirk Offel
46:35 – 47:08
Yeah, for sure. If you think about it, when we in the 80s and the 90s really begin to outsource all of our manufacturing to overseas. We really outsourced a lot of the jobs, the professional skilled and trained workforce of the middle class. And I don’t think we knew it at the time, but what we’re doing now is we created so much of the Internet, 8,000 data centers on this planet, about 5,500 of them sit right here in the United States, which means we are the largest manufacturer of the World

Kirk Offel
47:08 – 47:28
Wide Web, the Internet of Things, of the cloud environment and of the AI. So the sky for the cloud is primarily in the United States. Same with the headquarters of AI. So the largest headquarters in the world for cloud is northern Virginia, because it’s the headquarters of the largest company in the United States, which is the federal government.

Kirk Offel
47:28 – 48:01
And the largest headquarters for AI in the world will be in Texas. Stargate is a great example of that. But what’s happening is when we started shifting a lot of these manufacturing jobs outside of the United States, it had a massive negative impact on the local communities and society in orbit of that. And now you look at the largest players in the internet, like Facebook and Apple, Microsoft and Google and Amazon, Oracle, IBM, those players represent 80% of the cloud in the world, basically.

Kirk Offel
48:02 – 48:41
And they have, like Google is an example of an incredible steward, where what they’ve chosen is they will not go into a market where they can’t have a positive impact on society immediately, meaning they will want to repurpose a distressed asset of infrastructure in a town and need to convert coal-fired power plants into natural gas power plants to support the data center load or another healthier, renewable, or sustainable form of energy. But what they want to do is they want to help create a ton of jobs that build back the middle class. So what you’re going to see is building these data centers in markets where manufacturing was the most prevalent throughout the United States, particularly hit the Midwest.

Kirk Offel
48:42 – 49:11
And what you’re going to see is us go build data centers in not only those pockets where we could do a lot of prefabrication and warehouses where we could build modular parts of data centers, because data centers are almost built like Legos in the field now, but with a higher level of QA and QC, you know, Stabilized Labor Force. What we’re doing is we’re going to create so many jobs in the middle class because the largest thing to manufacture on planet Earth right now is an AI or cloud data center. It’s the largest demand user of energy and labor.

Kirk Offel
49:12 – 49:29
And because America represents a lion’s share of these data centers. And just to be clear, if you were to add up every data center on planet Earth outside of the United States, it still would not be as much as what we have in the United States. So the number one thing to manufacture on earth right now is a data center. It is the sky for the cloud.

Kirk Offel
49:29 – 49:49
It is the home for AI. And we as consumers wouldn’t even be talking to or listening to podcasts or radio shows like this without a data center. So data centers are the most omnipresent thing in our world that we use today as consumers and we just don’t even know it. All we use touch and application, but we don’t realize that application is in the home of a data center.

Kirk Offel
49:50 – 50:15
these data centers are going to be built in markets that were distressed because of outsourcing and manufacturing. And the jobs that we’re going to bring back will be the manufacture. We outsource our components of technology to China and India, which represents two thirds of the world’s population, 80 to 85 percent of world’s pollution because of the manufacturing they do there. But we will be bringing the manufacturing of the assemblies to create data centers back to the United States.

Kirk Offel
50:15 – 50:43
And that labor force is going to exist here. And it’s going to allow for a lot of people to to look at options outside of going to university or going into the military or going into the traditional trades. Now the opportunity exists for them to go out and make a really great healthy living, $75,000 to $300,000 a year potential in one of the nine different job domains that exists within the data center industry. And those nine job domains represent 285 different types of jobs that are available.

Kirk Offel
50:44 – 50:58
So this data center sprawl of demand is only going to create more opportunities for us to go back to middle class, and we’re going to go build them in markets that were the most distressed as a byproduct of outsourcing so much manufacturing prior to that.

Kim Monson
50:58 – 51:27
Well, and the other thing is, is in these distressed markets, the numbers that you’re talking about, 75,000, 100,000, you can buy a homes, nice homes in those areas. And so that will make housing affordable for these people to own their own property and own their own homes, which is great. We’ve got about, oh gosh, maybe about six minutes left. And I want to talk about what you’re doing with your company, though, with veterans, because this is a fast changing industry.

Kim Monson
51:28 – 51:32
And I know that you’ve really working with veterans with your company.

Kirk Offel
51:33 – 51:45
Yes, it’s the reason why we started our company. We started our company for one reason. Our mission as a business is to help our clients unleash emerging technologies that have a positive impact on everyone around the world. And that’s what technology does.

Kirk Offel
51:46 – 52:13
But our purpose is to stop the cycle of suicide within the veteran community, period, full stop. Right now, when we started our business, 22 veterans were killing themselves every day, which is a number that’s incredibly unacceptable. So when you join the military, you don’t do it to make money, you do it to make a difference. And we feel like those transitioning veterans, if they don’t find an opportunity to transition into something of meaningful significance again, they’re higher likelihood of harming themselves.

Kirk Offel
52:13 – 52:41
Combat infantry or those exposed to combat have a higher likelihood of harming themselves. So what had happened was, is I had people that had worked for me for years, and I worked throughout this industry for years and one day I woke up and heard a story about how I potentially could have put a veteran at risk because they were at high risk of harming themselves, but they had the opportunity to learn about a job at the data centers first and that’s what stopped them. So we went out and we created a business under a couple different rules, but they’re very similar to what we had in the military.

Kirk Offel
52:41 – 53:00
The first one was, much like all of us that once took an oath, I refuse to work for, work with, or work for anyone that I wouldn’t die for again. And that’s the oath we took when we were in the military. The other part is, I wouldn’t work for a company that didn’t have the opportunity to have a positive impact on stopping the cycle of suicide within the veteran community. And that’s what we’re here to do.

Kirk Offel
53:00 – 53:26
So we believe that these people that serve the military in uniform have the ability to serve this demand of industry that we have right now with the same level of integrity and character they showed when they were active duty. You have to remember that the military isn’t just an incubator for leadership because we adopt left seat, right seat cockpit training. The military is the home for the most advanced weapons machinery and technology ever built. It is the ultimate mission critical environment already.

Kirk Offel
53:26 – 53:42
We don’t measure that environment in downtime. We measured in our mortality. So I think that what we have is the golden ticket to where we see this emerging industry that’s just becoming massive. It took 46 years before one Americans, one in four adopted electricity.

Kirk Offel
53:42 – 53:59
It took 27 years before one in four Americans adopted connectivity or a copper wire in their home. This technology has been around for 30 to 40 years. It’s not, we’re not too far away from watching the tipping point before this industry becomes mainstream. And this will be the largest industry on earth.

Kirk Offel
53:59 – 54:15
Every other industry will serve adjacent to this, to support the growth of this one vertical of industry. And veterans are coming away and transitioning out, 40,000 veterans are transitioning out of the military every month. And they are already pressure tested and trained as leaders. And they’ve been exposed to advanced weapons, machine and tech.

Kirk Offel
54:16 – 54:37
The only thing we need for experience in this industry are people that have the ability to learn and insane curves, and people that join the military have demonstrated their ability to do that. So we know that if we give people transitioning out of the military an opportunity to grow a new career and reinvent themselves here, they’re less likely to hurt themselves. And that’s the way we contribute to reducing the cycle of suicide within the veteran community.

Kim Monson
54:38 – 54:42
So if someone is listening to this and they want to take some action, what should they do?

Kirk Offel
54:43 – 54:56
Visit us at www.weareoverwatch.com and start learning about what data centers are. Do some Google research. Use your AI on your phone. Ask some questions and try to take it upon yourself to learn what a data center is.

Kirk Offel
54:57 – 55:11
Don’t think of it as a piece of technology. Just think of it as another language. And like any other language, you can learn it through immersion. give yourself the chance to understand the data center technology world and understand that the greatest opportunity that you have to grow your career will be here.

Kirk Offel
55:12 – 55:24
In fact, the job that you’re going to have in three years from now, it hasn’t even been invented yet, but you’re going to learn about it right now because this industry reinvents itself every month right now, and it’s going to open up more opportunities for careers every day.

Kim Monson
55:25 – 55:37
I think this is so exciting, Kirk Ophel, regarding our small towns and our veterans. The work that you’re doing is really amazing. We’ve got about 45 seconds left. Your final thought for our listeners.

Kirk Offel
55:38 – 56:01
If you are someone that’s transitioning on the military and you’re not sure what to do in that transition, give us a call because not only is this industry valuing your talent, they demand it because they need it. So there is so much opportunity. Reach out to your fellow brothers and sisters and your soldiers and sailors and airmen, and let us help you in this transition. When we get to the top of the wall, it’s always our job to reach back and grab the hand of those behind us.

Kirk Offel
56:02 – 56:14
And if you’re not looking in the military and you don’t want to go to college, look in the data centers. You don’t need a college degree to make $150,000 to $200,000 a year in this industry. You just need to be able to work hard. That’s all you got to do.

Kirk Offel
56:14 – 56:23
And you have to be willing to reinvent yourself. This industry evolves at the same pace in which we adopt technology. So the world’s all wide open.

Kim Monson
56:24 – 56:31
Oh, I love it, Kirk Ophel. Thank you so much. Thank you for all you’re doing. That website is weareoverwatch.com.

Kim Monson
56:31 – 56:32
And let’s stay in touch.

Kirk Offel
56:33 – 56:35
Thank you so much. I appreciate this.

Kim Monson
56:35 – 56:51
And my friends, indeed, we stand on the shoulders of giants. So God bless you and God bless America. Thank you for listening to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Monson. Be sure to tune in again next Sunday, 3 to 4 p.m.

Kim Monson
56:51 – 56:53
here on KLZ 560 and KLZ 100.7.

Speaker 1
57:01 – 57:15
The views and opinions expressed on KLZ 560 are those of the speaker, commentators, hosts, their guests, and callers. They are not necessarily the views and opinions of Crawford Broadcasting or KLZ Management, employees, associates, or advertisers. KLZ 560 is a Crawford Broadcasting God and country station.