In this episode of America’s Veterans Stories, Kim Munson dives into Kirk Ophel’s past – from his upbringing on military bases to navigating the clandestine world of submarines. Ophel’s tale unfolds through his struggles and victories, shedding light on the indomitable spirit that propelled him to redefine himself amid the rise of the Internet and AI. His insights on wrestling provide a metaphor for the human spirit’s capacity to overcome adversity and strive for excellence in all pursuits.
SPEAKER 04 :
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 Munson. These stories will touch your heart, inspire you, and give you courage. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Here’s Kim Munson.
SPEAKER 10 :
And welcome to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. 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. 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.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, thanks, Kim, and it’s an honor to be on your show. Gotta say thank you for all the things that you do for the veterans. So, as I begin to talk about myself, it’s challenging, but I started as, I’m the son of a Vietnam veteran. 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.
SPEAKER 04 :
Wow.
SPEAKER 03 :
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 brothers. Helped me get into a sport called wrestling. And wrestling is just nothing more than a street fight with rules. But it does offer you the ability to understand pain, grit, sacrifice. But the thing I took away from it the most, I think, was discipline. So I used 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. 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 got 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 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 that could quantify the downtime of their technology in one second by either a loss of revenue by $1 million or death. 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 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. I spent a good half of my career building the sky 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
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.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, ma’am. So again, you wake up some days and you You’re a young, ambitious person, and there’s a lot of things in life you’re trying to pursue. But I was blessed at an early age with the cancer that’s referred to as sarcoma, specifically MFH. And I’ve never had sarcoma. I’ve never had cancer in my life. I’ve never even heard that word. And the blessing of getting that type of cancer is in life. There are 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 early helped me understand what was my life, and it shifted everything back to Top Dead 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. The military is not only a leadership tool. It’s also the home for the most advanced weapons machinery built. So for me to work in a service like this, 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 into my battle with cancer. And I ended up fighting it in a way in which I raced in about 70 to 80 different ultra-endurance races from half Ironmen 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 charlatanry. and the training I learned in wrestling to be a cancer survivor that I am today.
SPEAKER 10 :
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. But the thing about wrestling is you can’t hide. It is you. Absolutely. And so you are responsible for preparing. You’re responsible for what happens out on the mat. 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.
SPEAKER 03 :
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. But 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. 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… And having that wrestler before I got into the military and then having the military really refine and optimize those skills allowed me to not only become a cancer survivor and thriver, but it helped me start the business that we created today.
SPEAKER 10 :
Well, and Kirk Ophel, for people that may not really know a lot about the 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?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, absolutely different. But one day we’ll hopefully see collegiate wrestling more prevalent on television. But it’s one of the oldest Olympic sports, Greco-Roman wrestling is where it began. And wrestling is a foundation basic sport, meaning fundamentally – There’s only one objective to the sport of wrestling, and that is to improve your position on the mat. And the most famous wrestler from our community of all time is perhaps a man named Dan Gable. And Dan Gable is made famous by a simple quote that says, wrestling is life. And, and, and I, I, I taught my sons that which were wrestlers. And I use that ethos for everything that I do in business, which is the entire, 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 or that teaches you endurance. And it teaches you grit 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
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? 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?
SPEAKER 03 :
No, not necessarily. Other than it’s a… It’s a sport that I think everyone should because 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
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?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, fair question. The answer is television and TV and movies like Top Gun or Crimson Tide or The Hunt for October do an amazing job to help recruit from the military, as they should. And for me personally, My father was 24 years active duty in the military, turned 18 in Vietnam loading bombs and 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 the officer and enlisted in different branches. So being born on an Air Force base, I knew what I didn’t want to do. Not that I’m trashing what my brothers and sisters in the service.
SPEAKER 10 :
Be careful.
SPEAKER 03 :
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. 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. I realized that I was meant to be on a submarine.
SPEAKER 10 :
And what was the training like to try to get onto the submarine?
SPEAKER 03 :
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 they use. And 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. And the options were aviation, naval special warfare or submarines. And And if you’re a wrestler, you’re going to go to where they come from. So I just felt like the greatest opportunity to reinvent myself could be found on a fast attack submarine.
SPEAKER 10 :
Okay. And so I want to understand more about this submarine. I’m talking with Kirk Ofel 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. In Pueblo, Colorado, it’s on the beautiful Riverwalk. And the center is co-founded by Drew Dix, Medal of Honor recipient from actions he took during the Vietnam War, and Brad Padula, who is an award-winning documentary maker. And they realized that they wanted to have a place that, first of all, would honor our Medal of Honor recipients. So they have the beautiful Portraits of Valor, but also… to instill in our children views 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. That is AmericanValueCenter.org. AmericanValueCenter.org. We’ll be right back with Kirk Ofeld.
SPEAKER 08 :
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SPEAKER 10 :
And welcome back to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteransStories.com. And I’m talking with Kirk Ofell, and he ended up serving on a fast attack submarine. 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. 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.
SPEAKER 03 :
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. So I was blessed to get onto 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 Two 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. And they would go to sea, and they wouldn’t come back until they offloaded them all the easy way, right? And the conditions they had were there was no guarantees that they were going to be coming back. So just like in the planes, they’re up in the air. They can 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. So it’s just as equally dangerous.
SPEAKER 10 :
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? No.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, 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, just imagine there’s a submarine doing donuts right under it, right? 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 beach itself on any country other than Russia or America, that could happen. that country would have 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. 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. I fortunately was assigned to a submarine that got to go do missions that submarines are designed to do.
SPEAKER 10 :
Okay, so how many crew members on a fast attack submarine?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, anywhere but 120 at that time with the 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. So it’s not unusual to have 135 people on a submarine that’s 360 feet and 4 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
So if you can, tell me what a typical mission might look like.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, 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 sit off the coast of some country, and we can launch weapons without being detected. So there’s… a slurry of those things, and then there’s always unconventional missions as well, like counter-drug interdictions that will help to support certain groups or neighboring partners on. So I got to be a part of three of those types of missions, right? So I got to do what submarines are designed to do and what they write books about.
SPEAKER 10 :
I bet that was pretty exciting, yes?
SPEAKER 03 :
I think that it’s incredible how And it’s when you’re 20 years old and you’re driving a multibillion dollar warship, it’s hard to relate to your counterparts that are stuck in college still because they’re telling you 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
And how long were the missions normally?
SPEAKER 03 :
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. You go down and you do other things, maybe in the South Caribbean or other parts of the country, those mission days as well. Traditionally, most submarines don’t go out to sea for more than six months with a click, but a submarine by nature is designed to be able to steam for one million miles or 20 years without a refuel.
SPEAKER 10 :
This is a nuclear submarine, right?
SPEAKER 03 :
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 30, 40 accurate propulsion plants. So the discovery of fission and fusion took place 76 years ago. And now we have hundreds of submarines that not only hit the fleet, but I bet you we have submarines that have been refueled since they’ve hit the fleet. And these are incredibly efficient, not only machines, but crews. So we are trained and conditioned to endure long missions that are untenable to typical people, for sure, because we remove ourselves from the face of the earth. And that does do things to humans, right? So for us, 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
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, they had to 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? What does that look like to get supplies onto a nuclear submarine?
SPEAKER 03 :
Excellent question. And that is the only thing that, I mean, you want to impact the mission, you have to impact the quality of life, and the best way to take care of that is… 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 the walkways you’re walking on cans. And you kind of go out of them deployments, and you’re removing components. You’re removing components along the way, 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 will be 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 powdered milk. 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 there’s 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 are, you don’t typically eat reindeer as an example, but if you pull into Norway, you get a chance to.
SPEAKER 10 :
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 nuclear submarine?
SPEAKER 03 :
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. And that means we have hard tanks and soft tanks like ribs spread throughout the submarine. And 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 could just pressurize those tanks harder than the pressure on the outside of the submarine, and we could discharge that waste out. And then we also have… a trash disposal unit or a TDU machine, which is hydraulically operated, where we have to take sheets of metal, we have to run trash cans like torpedoes, and then we have to compact as much trash into that as we can by simply weighing it down. And then we have to weigh it to make sure that it’ll sink all the way to the bottom. And then what we do is we 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 into the abyss where you’ll never see it.
SPEAKER 10 :
Wow. Well, and how deep can a nuclear submarine dive? Wow.
SPEAKER 03 :
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 the, that’s the script that submariners tend to… The test depth of submarines vary between each submarine, and they’re also incredibly secret. 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 I think if you look at the Book of James, on average, you’ll probably see a submarine functions with the capacity without issues. Okay.
SPEAKER 10 :
OK, 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 myself. on a fast attack nuclear submarine. 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. It’s all something that happened when I was serving on city council. So be sure and check out Munson.com and you can find that whole story. But again, I really appreciate their sponsorship of the show and we’ll be right back.
SPEAKER 05 :
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SPEAKER 10 :
And welcome back to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. 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 wrestled in high school, well, in school, and then served as a crew member on a fast-attack nuclear submarine in the United States. 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.
SPEAKER 03 :
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 can be very taxing and take a toll on you. But I do think 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 have never found the career that I’ve found since I left active duty in the world of technology. 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
So, Kirk Ofill, you’ve been able to take this, all of this, to launch Overwatch Mission Critical. So tell us about that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, ma’am. So that’s what 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. It’s when a smaller unit disrupts the dynamic on the battlefield while simultaneously supporting a much larger unit. And 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… No one wants to step in the range of where that could be. And for us, we created a technology incubator for labor. And we wanted to be disruptors. So instead of giving the industry another fleet, we wanted to give it SEAL Team 6 for what we do. So the mission critical vertical, as I said, is an industry that’s measured in downtime. 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 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. And I think the reason why, as this industry began to emerge, it really embraced. Transitioning military back. Every day that we are deployed at sea or in station with what we do in other branches, we are putting ourselves in harm’s way and we are in a mission critical environment. The difference is, is we’re also in a leadership incubator. The entire military is trained from a left seat to right seat cockpit mentality, meaning 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
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?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, it’s all fair concerns. I mean, why wouldn’t we? you have to think about ai today what data centers are and and let me tie a few things together if i can because people think data centers and they don’t know And let me try to explain it. I always use a phrase. I go, it’s the sky for the cloud. Right. But what it really is, the data center is like going into a Home Depot. But instead of roads upon roads with home improvement equipment, it’s like a server farm. It’s just set up with every all this technology. 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 site. phone or your computer is going, and that somewhere else is a data center. That data center is the sky for the cloud, 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 not only a data center, they’re touching multiple data centers. 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. 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. 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
So question, there 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?
SPEAKER 03 :
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, and that means it’s going to be 100 megawatts of power, okay, a 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 gigawatts. gallons of water flushing through a closed loop system a day. And for every megawatt of a data center that you build, you typically leave one person behind to manage it. So it’s gonna create jobs for people that operate the data center that are left behind. But it creates about 1400 jobs that last anywhere between one and five years to build. 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. 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. 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 can 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. And they will still build 100 coal-fired power plants this year in China alone, just to support for energy so they can try to catch America by 2030 on the race for AI. And you have to remember, AI is not a consumer. We use it as consumers, but you have to imagine it being the most advanced weapon machine in tech ever built. 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. 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. 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. And if we just fire more coal-fired plants, that doesn’t solve the problem for all of you, 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
Okay. So, Kirk, on this then, do you think that you might have a nuclear power right next to these AI centers? Is that what you envision?
SPEAKER 03 :
The future will require us to have a small modular reactor, an SMR. within an adjacent vicinity of where the infrastructure for data centers will be put, and you’ll put them in a way in which you wouldn’t even know they’re there. Think about this. Whenever our fast attack submarine, which had a less than 30 megawatt reactor, And just to put it in perspective, enough to power Chicago for the entire day, the minimum. 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. But it is so safe that we don’t ever hear of disasters on U.S. 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 environment. 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 since the integrity of our reactors. So I think that there’s just a lot of people that have followed propaganda their whole life that had been told nuclear is bad across all fronts. And the reality is it’s not, it’s actually incredible. And it was, it’ll be the only way to reduce the carbon footprint. That’s the reason why I’m telling you today that there’s a 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. 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
Well, 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 was asked to moderate a documentary called A Climate Conversation. And it’s a whole series of podcasts. And I’ve become convinced that carbon dioxide is actually… beneficial it’s something that plants need so i i wanted to just give a disclaimer that i don’t think carbon is bad i like carbon or carbon dioxide is bad i like it so i just needed to give a disclaimer and yeah but i wanted to make that comment 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 the two-thirds of the world’s population sits between china and india
SPEAKER 03 :
But they represent 85% of the world’s pollution because that’s where lion’s share of the manufacturing takes place. 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 bifurcates the differences between all types of forms of energy. 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. 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 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
Okay. So with that, again, what is that movie?
SPEAKER 03 :
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 the lineup and protest against nuclear they’re the first proponents for it today and it’s because we just needed to educate ourselves i mean 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 itself. And I’m a person that looks at objectivity and everything.
SPEAKER 10 :
Okay. So, again, that movie is Nuclear Now. And then I’d also recommend that people check out our documentary, Climate Conversation. We will continue the discussion with Kirk Ophel at CINETI. And I did want to mention the USMC Memorial Foundation, which is another nonprofit I highlight on a regular basis. The official Marine Memorial is right here in Colorado, and they’re raising money for the remodel. It was dedicated in 1977, so it’s time for a remodel now. and get more information, go to usmcmemorialfoundation.org. That’s usmcmemorialfoundation.org. We’ll be right back with Kirk Ofell.
SPEAKER 06 :
That’s 303-880-8881. Call now.
SPEAKER 07 :
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SPEAKER 04 :
From the mountains to the prairies,
SPEAKER 10 :
And welcome back to America’s Veterans Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure and check out our website. That is AmericasVeteransStories.com. And I’m talking with Kurt Ophel. And he was a submariner on a fast attack nuclear submarine. He was a wrestler in school. And in fact, in between segments, you said that you actually wrestled out here at UNC, yes?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, ma’am. I graduated from high school in California. I wrestled in Southern California. And then I ended up Getting on to one of the best schools in Division II at the time, University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, which is now one of the best schools in Division I wrestling. 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
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.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, for sure. If you think about it, when we in the 80s and the 90s really began to outsource all of our manufacturing to companies, 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 worldwide 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. 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 shipping 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. 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 and markets where manufacturing was the most prevalent throughout the United States, particularly hit is the Midwest. 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. And because America represents the 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. 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 is touch and application, but we don’t realize that application sits in the home of a data center. 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 manufacturing. We outsourced our components of technology to China and India, which represents two-thirds of the world’s population, 80% to 85% of the 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. 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 exist within the data center industry. And those nine job domains represent 285 different types of jobs that are available. 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
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 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 now. And I know that you’ve really working with veterans with your company.
SPEAKER 03 :
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. 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 insane. 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 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 in 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. The first one was, much like all of us that once took an oath, I refused 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. So we believe that these people that serve in 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 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. We don’t measure that environment in downtown. We measure it in our mortality. So I think that what we have is a golden ticket to where we see this emerging industry that’s just becoming massive. It took 46 years before one in four Americans adopted electricity. 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. 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. Every other industry will serve adjacent to this to support the growth of this one vertical of industry. And veterans are coming away. 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 attacks. The only thing we need for experience in this industry are people that have the ability to learn in an insane curve. 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
So if someone is listening to this and they want to take some action, what should they do?
SPEAKER 03 :
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. 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. 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
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.
SPEAKER 03 :
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. 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’ve got to do, 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.
SPEAKER 10 :
Oh, I love it, Kirk Ofell. Thank you so much. Thank you for all you’re doing. That website is weareoverwatch.com. And let’s stay in touch.
SPEAKER 03 :
Thank you so much. I appreciate this.
SPEAKER 10 :
And my friends, indeed, we stand on the shoulders of giants. So God bless you and God bless America.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you for listening to America’s Veteran Stories with Kim Munson. Be sure to tune in again next Sunday, 3 to 4 p.m. here on KLZ 560 and KLZ 100.7.
SPEAKER 01 :
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.
