Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
We're talking about one of my favorite things to talk about,
(00:02):
and that is not college. Okay, Now, Kirk Awfel is
my guest coming up in Kirk. Just a little bit
about me before we get to you. I am a
college dropout, so all of the debt, none of the degree.
And to say that I am a fan of alternatives
to that potential path is an understatement. And that is
(00:24):
what you're very invested in. Tell me a little bit
about Overwatch Mission critical. We'll start there, and then we'll
talk about why the trades are kind of a new
hot almost blue collar.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, you got it. I'd love to talk about it.
Let me first say that you don't own the market
on being a college dropout. So am I? Oh right? So,
as I said, I wrestled at the University of the
Colorado for all three semesters before I enlisted in the military.
So I'll deptail my background in maybe a little bit,
and that tells us a little bit about Overwatch. So
my background is I'm former military, came from the submarine community,
(00:54):
but every man in my lineage is military. So I
was literally born and raised on military basis until the
end of the World War I wrestled in college for
a little bit and then found myself into the US military,
where I was enlisted and I got sent to some
training schools, some tech schools, And when I came out
of the military in two thousand, I sat front row
in Silicon Valley at this new emerging industry called the Internet.
(01:17):
So a lot of people think Amazon dot Com going
live in nineteen ninety four is really the birth of
the Internet, but we were iterating upon that already. So
when I got out in two thousand, I sat in
Silicon Valley and in a front row seat of watching
websho dot O get rolled out, and then we created
this thing called the Internet of Things, which allowed us
to build e commerce platforms and businesses online. That led
(01:38):
to cloud and then today I'm sitting in front row
watching the birth of AI, and I'm watching the demand
it has on labor, and I'm looking at the opportunities
that the demand of industry has that allow us for
the first time to truly build back the middle class
with a lot of really high pain, high quality careers
that don't require a college degree. Because in most cases,
(02:00):
technology iterates and evolve so quickly that the things that
we'd be teaching them on their freshman year. They would
already be obsolete by their time when they graduated their.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Senior A lot of and I will call it intelligence
work where people are sitting in a computer using their brain.
They're doing things, data analysts, things of that nature. Those
are going to be the jobs that are going to
be the easiest for AI to replace. And I said
it earlier in the show, Kirk. Can you can agree
or disagree? It would be incredibly ironic if we've been
(02:29):
telling all of these coal miners and people that we've
been putting out of work to go learn to code,
only to find out that AI has put the coders
out of business pretty quickly. I mean, am I wrong
in thinking that those kind of intellectual jobs are going
to be the first to go?
Speaker 2 (02:45):
White collar jobs are definitely gonna be the first ones
that AI will blow out. What AI will do is
create a massive demand for blue collar type jobs, jobs
like former military like me, transitioning out of college jobouts
like us. I should say, but I work for a
company to overwatch mission critical and all we do is
provide We're a technology incubator for labor. So there is
(03:05):
no think of the automobile industry of nineteen twenty five.
Just keep in mind we were building model ts until
nineteen twenty seven. We are in twenty twenty five, the
same state that the automobile industry was in nineteen twenty five.
I mean, we were putting cars on the road, but
we didn't have mechanics. We didn't have schools to teach
people the trades to figure out how to repair and
maintain these vehicles. There wasn't even until Henry Ford, who
(03:28):
we think created a car. He created a forty hour
workweek in an entire sub economy that lent itself to
the ability for companies to just build empires around tires
or brake pads or spark plugs, and the manufacturing and
the labor that goes into that created a ton of
really amazing jobs. We outsourced some of those component levels,
but fortunately for you and I America. Let's say in
(03:49):
the world, there's eight thousand data centers in the world,
more than fifty four hundred of them here in the
United States, which puts us in the lead. You could
add every data center outside of the United States up
together as many as we have here, so we may
be outsourcing manufacturing components to other countries, but the manufacturing
of the most prevalent and the most in demand technology
(04:11):
in the world will always come back here to the
United States. And we just we don't have enough labor
to build these data centers fast enough. Because there's no
training platforms. You cannot go to college today to learn
about data centers, right, very educational institutions that will teach
you about it.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Well, wait, let me let me stop you there, because
I'm interested in that the whole concept of talking about
teaching about a data center. So I know absolutely nothing
about a data center. I mean, zero and zip. What
would you need employees? What do they do? What kind
of jobs are we talking about specifically for data centers?
Because I think you're absolutely right. It's why I bought
stock in a small nuclear modular reactor company today, because
(04:49):
I know that data and AI and all this stuff.
What do you do? What kind of jobs are there
that are not being filled yet?
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah? Let me start with the broadstroke. Okay, So every
vertical of industry is that moves into the mainstream like
ours is. Right now, there's nine different job domains that
represent two hundred and eighty five different jobs, and some
of them are very homogenous, like HR and payroll and
marketing and finance. But the jobs that we're talking about
are the ones that are in the field that use
(05:15):
your hands. If you have a professional skill set, much
like a tradesman or a craftsman, or you have the
ability to reinvent yourself, you're going to have a job,
a lifelong job on data centers. I'll tell you why
we build data centers at gigawatt magnitudes. Now, just to
put in a perspective, we're building data centers behind like
off the grid and island mode. We're calling it behind
(05:37):
the meter power. So we don't have enough people with
their hands to manage the logistics. Well, it starts at
supply chain. Supply chain is an ext essential threat to
this industry. We don't have enough people that could go
into factories and manufacture the components and the widgets that
we used to build this infrastructure. Then we don't have
enough people that could truck it there. Then we don't
have enough people to get off the trucks and land
it at a piece where it needs to be. Then
(05:58):
we don't have the tradesmen that come in. Don't have
enough of them. This industry is three point two million people.
Since the birth of this industry, we are five hundred
thousand people short. And this industry has more than fifty
percent of our industry has been in this industry for
more than twenty years, meaning we're facing what's called the
silver tsudami. There's a ton of people that can retire
any time, and there's a lot of us that are
(06:18):
necessary to still continue to build this because the adoption
rate of emerging technology, specifically driven because the demand of
AI has made it to where we can't build data
centers fast enough. We are building more data centers right
now than we did in the last ten years. And
to ninety five percent of all the production environments that
we're building today that haven't even made it online, they're
already pre sold. We're selling out components all the way
(06:40):
into twenty twenty seven. So the only thing stopping us
is labored to build the components, labored to build the
construction means and methods in the field, labored to operate
the data centers, and labor to maintain those data centers.
And there's hundreds of thousands of career fields that have
really high paying jobs that don't require. In three years
(07:01):
from now, a college degree is going to be the
equivalency of a as a taxi medallion.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
That's how woh wow, that's a cold, cold thing right there.
And taxi medallions used to be incredibly incredibly valuable and
they were very very very very expensive, and Uber and
Lyft have made a taxi medallion pretty much worthless. So
let me ask the question, where, if anywhere, do these
schools exist? Where can people get the training that you're
(07:26):
talking about?
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah, you asked what was overwatched? Overwatch is the technology
incubator for labor. As I said, and break it down,
there's five phases of a data center life cycle. One
you have to develop it. Someone has to come out
and say I need that piece of land. I'll make
a business case of justify buying it, and my basis
of design for what I need looks like this. And
once you're done with that phase and you give it
to a design engineering team architects engineers. Okay, when they're
(07:47):
done designing what the basis of design was, then they
have to give it to a team to deliver it.
Once that team builds it, then they hand the keys
over to a commissioning agent, which is the fourth phase,
and they commission it to make sure it's design right
and built right. When you're done, you hand the keys
over the operator and they roll in tenants. There are
no schools. There are accrediting global accreditation firms that will
give you certifications into this industry, but there aren't really
(08:10):
anything established yet. Like I said, this is twenty twenty
five for AI is nineteen twenty five industry, which means
we are building it as we go, and there hasn't
been the data center career field boom, and it's called
the data center gold rush. It'll have a greater impact
on the workforce than in humanity since powered flight. There's
(08:32):
so many opportunities that there are jobs that your kids
may have in two years from now that haven't even
been invented yet. That's why when you ask me what
kind of jobs they have, I tell you they're smart
hand jobs, jobs that require you to use your hands,
and their jobs that pay you if you have that
skill set.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
So if someone is because to me what I'm hearing,
and you can correct me if I'm wrong, I'm hearing
someone who maybe has an electrical background or maybe has
a mechanical background, somebody who knows how to do those
things with their hands. How do you get into this field? Then,
if you have all this need and you have all
this opportunity, how can someone make that career shift from
(09:08):
maybe something they're doing now that they don't love or
they don't feel like they have a good career path on.
How do people even begin to tap into this?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah, great question, and that's the magic question. There's two
parts to it. First is you need the emotional range
to be able to work in what's called the mission
critical industry, our industry that's emerging right now. We refer
to it as data centers, but it's it's like saying
I'm in the airplane industry. Well, you're in the automotive
or the airplane industry, but you're not just working on
one platform or one airplane. And for us in data centers,
we're in a vertical of industry called mission critical. Mission
(09:37):
critical means if for every one second of downtime of
your it, you could quantify that loss in either death
or the loss of a million dollars per second in
revenue from ecommerce. So you need to have an emotional
range to come into this industry, which means you're doing
something that's never been done before, which it's not normal.
A lot of people want to go work in a
(09:58):
homogeneous construct environment where it's laid out in a linear
trend on how to learn certain things, and that's important.
There are very few companies like Overwatch Mission Critical that
have a technology incubator for labor with a university that
sends people to it to learn how to lead. So
we bought a company called the Talent Word Group. We
teach people how to lead themselves, then how to lead others,
and once we're done building stronger leaders, then we build
(10:19):
subject matter experts. So we've partnered with a company called EPI.
They're the largest and most global accredited firm for data
centers in the world. They're the only one that Amazon uses,
the only one that Microsoft uses. There's a lot of
people that use this group to get certified in data centers.
We offer that in our schoolhouse. So when we hire
fifteen people a month right now, they all come in,
(10:40):
they get immersed in the leadership training, they get immersed
into subject matter expertise, information and data centers, so they
know the language and the lexicon, and then they get
introduced to a program. It's no different than what we
did in the military. I enlisted in the military, I
went to a bunch of tech schools. Then they put
me right on a submarine and I was in the
fleet and most of everything I was learning was on
the job training through immersion. And that's what we really want,
(11:02):
is people that want to go reinvent themselves and like
learning in immersions rights.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Somebody on our text line said, uh, Mandy, what about
older people they want to change careers. We got to
one who's fifty two, one who's fifty one? They want
to change careers? Is this is this something they could look.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Into fifty year olds or spring chickens today?
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Right?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
We need What they offer is that emotional range. They
may not have the subject matter expertise, but what they
have is the ability to work in an environment of conflict.
And the number one thing.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
That stress your your high stress is what I'm hearing.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
That's well, yeah, I mean we're spending millions of dollars
a day, like we're on Stargate as an example, and
there's other programs like Stargate that are equally of magnitude
of size that we haven't talked about yet, and those
programs are massive. We're talking about the Manhattan Project of
the fifth and Dustrial Revolution and programs that are similar
to that. So you need people that want to reinvent themselves.
It doesn't matter if you're thirty one, it doesn't matter
(11:59):
if you're fit to one effect, there's a big advantage
between hiring gen xers over some advantages of hiring millennials
and some advantages of hiring gen zs because they're not soft. Well,
that's right. They have the stars, they have the calluses.
Those older people that have worked in corporate environments, they
have a homogeneous conditioning of education that they can introduce
(12:21):
to younger workforce that is probably more at depth to
pick up the subject matter expertise.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
This is fascinating. I mean, this is really really interesting.
I got a lot of people coming in and asking questions.
Somebody just made this point though, Mandy. Just in case
you didn't know, Microsoft is building a two million square
two two million square foot data centers in Wyoming, in Cheyenne,
which is just up the road from us here in Denver,
So obviously there's going to be need Mandy, Oh, go.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Ahead, Microsoft can pick their teeth with that data center.
That's how many data centers they have. And they have
way more data centers than that. They're way bigger.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Okay, this one says, so what specific steps does a
twenty five year old man need to jump on this?
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Go to www dot wereoverwatch dot com and submit an application.
We started our company by hiring transitioning veterans first because
they came from a skilled trade. If they weren't a
tradesman like an electrician or a plumber, if you join
the military, there's a good chance you were exposed to
HVAC or maintenance operations or other forms of technology where
(13:22):
it's not the only thing that we get is people
that have the ability to learn at an insane learning curve.
So if you're a young twenty five year old and
you don't want to go to college, take a number.
Neither did I, Right, I enlisted and used my hands,
and that with the ability to immerse myself in an
environment that allowed me to use and learn through my hands,
I was able to go build a career. And you
just some people don't know where to begin. I say,
(13:45):
think of it as a game of baseball, maybe even
belong in the outfield. Maybe you belong in the infield.
All I'm telling you is just get in the game
and then figure out over the course of time where
you belong on that field. You can be a first baseman,
you can be behind the plate, but you won't know
until you start playing. So if you don't know where
to begin, I can tell you this. You could go
to we are overwatch dot com and submit an application
(14:05):
because we have over one hundred open job wrecks at
any time. Because the pent up demand for this industry
is talent, and talent comes from those twenty five to
fifty one year olds that want to reinvent themselves. This industry,
it does not lack genius or intelligence, that lacks leadership,
encourage and people that want to reinvent themselves.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
So what are we looking at salary wise? And I
realize it's arranged depending on what you're doing, but what
kind of salaries do you look like it? Give me
some ballpark numbers.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Entry level jobs are around fifty five sixty five K,
no problem, no college degree required, and within a few
years it's not hard to be making one hundred and
twenty one hundred and forty K. Heck, there are plenty
of people that we pay a quarter million dollars a
year too, they never won step foot on accomplish campus.
So it really comes down to those people that want
to go out and go get certified in data centers
and they want to roll up their sleeves. They have
(14:51):
to look at a data center career like you would
any other tradesman, like a plumber or an electrician, that
has to go through an apprenticeship before they I'm a
journeyman before they become a master. But you're going to
see that there's more. The fastest path becoming a millionaire
today is not going to college. It's going through the trades.
And with the data center industry, our industry is growing
(15:12):
faster than every other industry because of the growth of
every other industry's adoption of technology. So we are the
fastest growing industry in the world. And we have more
pent up demand than we have talent and access to
talent today, So we try to recruit from the military.
First responders. Twenty five year olds are great because they
have if they haven't figured out what they want to do,
they've definitely figured out what some of the things they
(15:33):
don't want to do right and that helps them get
more focused.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
So I'm on it. By the way, I put a
link already on the blog to the website, so you
just go there and you can click on the career button.
Somebody said, do you offer college internships. I don't even
know what that would look like.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Tons of them. We love those. Every summer we load
our benches with as many college interns as you can.
We also have a DoD Skill Bridge program that allows
us take military active duty military and for the last
six months of their duty career, they could come work
for us and we don't have to pay him, but
we immerse him on construction programs or data center projects,
so they could be introduced to the industry as a whole.
(16:10):
So when they do transition down the military and they
go out and they try to look for a job,
we could help place them and show them that they
have exposure and some semblance of education. Again, this is
no different than how they teach us in the military.
We go to school for a little bit and then
we hit the fleet and you learn everything in the fleet,
learn on.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
The job, fascinating stuff. Kirk Offel is my guest with
Mission Overwatch, and you can find a link on the
blog to all of this, got a lot of questions.
We're going to rip through a couple right here. We
got four minutes left. Yeah, this one said, I have
forty two years in the concrete industry, commercial, residential, industrial,
civil and managing people that need to learn that trade.
(16:48):
So I don't know if he's asking for a job
or someone else.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Mandy, I asks a demand for that skill set. Yeah,
he just has to figure out do I want to
travel or where do I want to live? Because we're
building data centers first cities and now the bespoke secondary
and third tier market. So if you're working in a
lifestyle state or a lifestyle city, you have to be
willing to travel with that skill set. But there's a
lot of demand for that skill set. That's a couple
hundred thousand dollars job.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
We are overwatch dot com is the website. Somebody else
just asked me this, Mandy. This guy must have watched
me play baseball. I was out of position my entire career.
That from Andy, this is what I have to put
up with. On the text line, I'm trying to go
through these very quickly to find the most useful one.
You're fine, now I think that's it. I think the
(17:33):
rest have dropped off. A lot of people are saying,
you know, rural jobs are important, and we have a
lot of rural kids that are growing up. When do
data centers come to rural areas, if at all? Although
I would say Shyenne, Wyoming getting two is kind of
a big deal.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
The large magnet. So we build in all the NFL
cities because the hub spoke backbone of the fiber bone
of the Internet of the United States is long the
railway system. But we build certain magnitude and volume size
of data centers in different markets. What I was saying is,
we don't build one hundred megawat data centers anymore. We
build one, two, three, five gigawat campuses that take five
to seven years. So these construction programs, they are there
(18:12):
for a very long time, and we're going to go
build them in areas where it won't the optics won't
be bad for the communities that they support. So you
don't want a data center in a market that someone says, hey,
you're stealing our water, you're stealing our energy, and there's
not enough jobs. But there are areas in the United States,
so we could go build these large language model AI
(18:34):
data centers and we could connect them back through the
edge to the NFL city so there's no latency issues.
So these data centers are going to be built, I
mean Abilene, Murillo, Orslaw, not just Northern Virginia, not just
the NFL cities. They're going to be built. The sky
for the cloud of the world is Northern Virginia. The
home for AI will most definitely be West Texas. So
(18:56):
there's so much building opportunity right now that everybody that
wants to be a builder in some capacity, the sky's
unlimited for them for the next three years. It's the
data center.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Gold Brough kirkoffle with Overwatch mission Overwatch, and you can
find them that we are overwatched dot com. I really
appreciate your time to a fascinating subject. I mean, it
really really is. I had no idea. I didn't even
know this was a thing. I didn't even know data
centers were going to be I mean, I do know
that AI hoovers up a tremendous amount of energy, so
that's what I do know. And it sounds like this
(19:28):
is another thing that I need to be paying attention to.
I really appreciate your time today.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
I appreciate it's an emerging industry. Try to think of
this as it's still very punk rock. It's still new.
When the automobile industry came out, it wasn't mainstream. Now
look at it that this industry will be have a
greater impact on humanity than the automobile.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
All right, Kirkoffel, I appreciate your time, man.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Thank you guys if you have because I got it now.
I have like fifteen questions that just popped up. Send
send them an email. They have a contact button right
there on the website. We are overwatched dot com. Fascinating
We're talking about one of my favorite things to talk about,
(00:02):
and that is not college. Okay, Now, Kirk Awfel is
my guest coming up in Kirk. Just a little bit
about me before we get to you. I am a
college dropout, so all of the debt, none of the degree.
And to say that I am a fan of alternatives
to that potential path is an understatement. And that is
(00:24):
what you're very invested in. Tell me a little bit
about Overwatch Mission critical. We'll start there, and then we'll
talk about why the trades are kind of a new
hot almost blue collar.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, you got it. I'd love to talk about it.
Let me first say that you don't own the market
on being a college dropout. So am I? Oh right? So,
as I said, I wrestled at the University of the
Colorado for all three semesters before I enlisted in the military.
So I'll deptail my background in maybe a little bit,
and that tells us a little bit about Overwatch. So
my background is I'm former military, came from the submarine community,
(00:54):
but every man in my lineage is military. So I
was literally born and raised on military basis until the
end of the World War I wrestled in college for
a little bit and then found myself into the US military,
where I was enlisted and I got sent to some
training schools, some tech schools, And when I came out
of the military in two thousand, I sat front row
in Silicon Valley at this new emerging industry called the Internet.
(01:17):
So a lot of people think Amazon dot Com going
live in nineteen ninety four is really the birth of
the Internet, but we were iterating upon that already. So
when I got out in two thousand, I sat in
Silicon Valley and in a front row seat of watching
websho dot O get rolled out, and then we created
this thing called the Internet of Things, which allowed us
to build e commerce platforms and businesses online. That led
(01:38):
to cloud and then today I'm sitting in front row
watching the birth of AI, and I'm watching the demand
it has on labor, and I'm looking at the opportunities
that the demand of industry has that allow us for
the first time to truly build back the middle class
with a lot of really high pain, high quality careers
that don't require a college degree. Because in most cases,
(02:00):
technology iterates and evolve so quickly that the things that
we'd be teaching them on their freshman year. They would
already be obsolete by their time when they graduated their.
Speaker 1 (02:07):
Senior A lot of and I will call it intelligence
work where people are sitting in a computer using their brain.
They're doing things, data analysts, things of that nature. Those
are going to be the jobs that are going to
be the easiest for AI to replace. And I said
it earlier in the show, Kirk. Can you can agree
or disagree? It would be incredibly ironic if we've been
(02:29):
telling all of these coal miners and people that we've
been putting out of work to go learn to code,
only to find out that AI has put the coders
out of business pretty quickly. I mean, am I wrong
in thinking that those kind of intellectual jobs are going
to be the first to go?
Speaker 2 (02:45):
White collar jobs are definitely gonna be the first ones
that AI will blow out. What AI will do is
create a massive demand for blue collar type jobs, jobs
like former military like me, transitioning out of college jobouts
like us. I should say, but I work for a
company to overwatch mission critical and all we do is
provide We're a technology incubator for labor. So there is
(03:05):
no think of the automobile industry of nineteen twenty five.
Just keep in mind we were building model ts until
nineteen twenty seven. We are in twenty twenty five, the
same state that the automobile industry was in nineteen twenty five.
I mean, we were putting cars on the road, but
we didn't have mechanics. We didn't have schools to teach
people the trades to figure out how to repair and
maintain these vehicles. There wasn't even until Henry Ford, who
(03:28):
we think created a car. He created a forty hour
workweek in an entire sub economy that lent itself to
the ability for companies to just build empires around tires
or brake pads or spark plugs, and the manufacturing and
the labor that goes into that created a ton of
really amazing jobs. We outsourced some of those component levels,
but fortunately for you and I America. Let's say in
(03:49):
the world, there's eight thousand data centers in the world,
more than fifty four hundred of them here in the
United States, which puts us in the lead. You could
add every data center outside of the United States up
together as many as we have here, so we may
be outsourcing manufacturing components to other countries, but the manufacturing
of the most prevalent and the most in demand technology
(04:11):
in the world will always come back here to the
United States. And we just we don't have enough labor
to build these data centers fast enough. Because there's no
training platforms. You cannot go to college today to learn
about data centers, right, very educational institutions that will teach
you about it.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Well, wait, let me let me stop you there, because
I'm interested in that the whole concept of talking about
teaching about a data center. So I know absolutely nothing
about a data center. I mean, zero and zip. What
would you need employees? What do they do? What kind
of jobs are we talking about specifically for data centers?
Because I think you're absolutely right. It's why I bought
stock in a small nuclear modular reactor company today, because
(04:49):
I know that data and AI and all this stuff.
What do you do? What kind of jobs are there
that are not being filled yet?
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Yeah? Let me start with the broadstroke. Okay, So every
vertical of industry is that moves into the mainstream like
ours is. Right now, there's nine different job domains that
represent two hundred and eighty five different jobs, and some
of them are very homogenous, like HR and payroll and
marketing and finance. But the jobs that we're talking about
are the ones that are in the field that use
(05:15):
your hands. If you have a professional skill set, much
like a tradesman or a craftsman, or you have the
ability to reinvent yourself, you're going to have a job,
a lifelong job on data centers. I'll tell you why
we build data centers at gigawatt magnitudes. Now, just to
put in a perspective, we're building data centers behind like
off the grid and island mode. We're calling it behind
(05:37):
the meter power. So we don't have enough people with
their hands to manage the logistics. Well, it starts at
supply chain. Supply chain is an ext essential threat to
this industry. We don't have enough people that could go
into factories and manufacture the components and the widgets that
we used to build this infrastructure. Then we don't have
enough people that could truck it there. Then we don't
have enough people to get off the trucks and land
it at a piece where it needs to be. Then
(05:58):
we don't have the tradesmen that come in. Don't have
enough of them. This industry is three point two million people.
Since the birth of this industry, we are five hundred
thousand people short. And this industry has more than fifty
percent of our industry has been in this industry for
more than twenty years, meaning we're facing what's called the
silver tsudami. There's a ton of people that can retire
any time, and there's a lot of us that are
(06:18):
necessary to still continue to build this because the adoption
rate of emerging technology, specifically driven because the demand of
AI has made it to where we can't build data
centers fast enough. We are building more data centers right
now than we did in the last ten years. And
to ninety five percent of all the production environments that
we're building today that haven't even made it online, they're
already pre sold. We're selling out components all the way
(06:40):
into twenty twenty seven. So the only thing stopping us
is labored to build the components, labored to build the
construction means and methods in the field, labored to operate
the data centers, and labor to maintain those data centers.
And there's hundreds of thousands of career fields that have
really high paying jobs that don't require. In three years
(07:01):
from now, a college degree is going to be the
equivalency of a as a taxi medallion.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
That's how woh wow, that's a cold, cold thing right there.
And taxi medallions used to be incredibly incredibly valuable and
they were very very very very expensive, and Uber and
Lyft have made a taxi medallion pretty much worthless. So
let me ask the question, where, if anywhere, do these
schools exist? Where can people get the training that you're
(07:26):
talking about?
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah, you asked what was overwatched? Overwatch is the technology
incubator for labor. As I said, and break it down,
there's five phases of a data center life cycle. One
you have to develop it. Someone has to come out
and say I need that piece of land. I'll make
a business case of justify buying it, and my basis
of design for what I need looks like this. And
once you're done with that phase and you give it
to a design engineering team architects engineers. Okay, when they're
(07:47):
done designing what the basis of design was, then they
have to give it to a team to deliver it.
Once that team builds it, then they hand the keys
over to a commissioning agent, which is the fourth phase,
and they commission it to make sure it's design right
and built right. When you're done, you hand the keys
over the operator and they roll in tenants. There are
no schools. There are accrediting global accreditation firms that will
give you certifications into this industry, but there aren't really
(08:10):
anything established yet. Like I said, this is twenty twenty
five for AI is nineteen twenty five industry, which means
we are building it as we go, and there hasn't
been the data center career field boom, and it's called
the data center gold rush. It'll have a greater impact
on the workforce than in humanity since powered flight. There's
(08:32):
so many opportunities that there are jobs that your kids
may have in two years from now that haven't even
been invented yet. That's why when you ask me what
kind of jobs they have, I tell you they're smart
hand jobs, jobs that require you to use your hands,
and their jobs that pay you if you have that
skill set.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
So if someone is because to me what I'm hearing,
and you can correct me if I'm wrong, I'm hearing
someone who maybe has an electrical background or maybe has
a mechanical background, somebody who knows how to do those
things with their hands. How do you get into this field? Then,
if you have all this need and you have all
this opportunity, how can someone make that career shift from
(09:08):
maybe something they're doing now that they don't love or
they don't feel like they have a good career path on.
How do people even begin to tap into this?
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Yeah, great question, and that's the magic question. There's two
parts to it. First is you need the emotional range
to be able to work in what's called the mission
critical industry, our industry that's emerging right now. We refer
to it as data centers, but it's it's like saying
I'm in the airplane industry. Well, you're in the automotive
or the airplane industry, but you're not just working on
one platform or one airplane. And for us in data centers,
we're in a vertical of industry called mission critical. Mission
(09:37):
critical means if for every one second of downtime of
your it, you could quantify that loss in either death
or the loss of a million dollars per second in
revenue from ecommerce. So you need to have an emotional
range to come into this industry, which means you're doing
something that's never been done before, which it's not normal.
A lot of people want to go work in a
(09:58):
homogeneous construct environment where it's laid out in a linear
trend on how to learn certain things, and that's important.
There are very few companies like Overwatch Mission Critical that
have a technology incubator for labor with a university that
sends people to it to learn how to lead. So
we bought a company called the Talent Word Group. We
teach people how to lead themselves, then how to lead others,
and once we're done building stronger leaders, then we build
(10:19):
subject matter experts. So we've partnered with a company called EPI.
They're the largest and most global accredited firm for data
centers in the world. They're the only one that Amazon uses,
the only one that Microsoft uses. There's a lot of
people that use this group to get certified in data centers.
We offer that in our schoolhouse. So when we hire
fifteen people a month right now, they all come in,
(10:40):
they get immersed in the leadership training, they get immersed
into subject matter expertise, information and data centers, so they
know the language and the lexicon, and then they get
introduced to a program. It's no different than what we
did in the military. I enlisted in the military, I
went to a bunch of tech schools. Then they put
me right on a submarine and I was in the
fleet and most of everything I was learning was on
the job training through immersion. And that's what we really want,
(11:02):
is people that want to go reinvent themselves and like
learning in immersions rights.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
Somebody on our text line said, uh, Mandy, what about
older people they want to change careers. We got to
one who's fifty two, one who's fifty one? They want
to change careers? Is this is this something they could look.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Into fifty year olds or spring chickens today?
Speaker 1 (11:23):
Right?
Speaker 2 (11:25):
We need What they offer is that emotional range. They
may not have the subject matter expertise, but what they
have is the ability to work in an environment of conflict.
And the number one thing.
Speaker 1 (11:34):
That stress your your high stress is what I'm hearing.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
That's well, yeah, I mean we're spending millions of dollars
a day, like we're on Stargate as an example, and
there's other programs like Stargate that are equally of magnitude
of size that we haven't talked about yet, and those
programs are massive. We're talking about the Manhattan Project of
the fifth and Dustrial Revolution and programs that are similar
to that. So you need people that want to reinvent themselves.
It doesn't matter if you're thirty one, it doesn't matter
(11:59):
if you're fit to one effect, there's a big advantage
between hiring gen xers over some advantages of hiring millennials
and some advantages of hiring gen zs because they're not soft. Well,
that's right. They have the stars, they have the calluses.
Those older people that have worked in corporate environments, they
have a homogeneous conditioning of education that they can introduce
(12:21):
to younger workforce that is probably more at depth to
pick up the subject matter expertise.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
This is fascinating. I mean, this is really really interesting.
I got a lot of people coming in and asking questions.
Somebody just made this point though, Mandy. Just in case
you didn't know, Microsoft is building a two million square
two two million square foot data centers in Wyoming, in Cheyenne,
which is just up the road from us here in Denver,
So obviously there's going to be need Mandy, Oh, go.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Ahead, Microsoft can pick their teeth with that data center.
That's how many data centers they have. And they have
way more data centers than that. They're way bigger.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Okay, this one says, so what specific steps does a
twenty five year old man need to jump on this?
Speaker 2 (13:00):
Go to www dot wereoverwatch dot com and submit an application.
We started our company by hiring transitioning veterans first because
they came from a skilled trade. If they weren't a
tradesman like an electrician or a plumber, if you join
the military, there's a good chance you were exposed to
HVAC or maintenance operations or other forms of technology where
(13:22):
it's not the only thing that we get is people
that have the ability to learn at an insane learning curve.
So if you're a young twenty five year old and
you don't want to go to college, take a number.
Neither did I, Right, I enlisted and used my hands,
and that with the ability to immerse myself in an
environment that allowed me to use and learn through my hands,
I was able to go build a career. And you
just some people don't know where to begin. I say,
(13:45):
think of it as a game of baseball, maybe even
belong in the outfield. Maybe you belong in the infield.
All I'm telling you is just get in the game
and then figure out over the course of time where
you belong on that field. You can be a first baseman,
you can be behind the plate, but you won't know
until you start playing. So if you don't know where
to begin, I can tell you this. You could go
to we are overwatch dot com and submit an application
(14:05):
because we have over one hundred open job wrecks at
any time. Because the pent up demand for this industry
is talent, and talent comes from those twenty five to
fifty one year olds that want to reinvent themselves. This industry,
it does not lack genius or intelligence, that lacks leadership,
encourage and people that want to reinvent themselves.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
So what are we looking at salary wise? And I
realize it's arranged depending on what you're doing, but what
kind of salaries do you look like it? Give me
some ballpark numbers.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
Entry level jobs are around fifty five sixty five K,
no problem, no college degree required, and within a few
years it's not hard to be making one hundred and
twenty one hundred and forty K. Heck, there are plenty
of people that we pay a quarter million dollars a
year too, they never won step foot on accomplish campus.
So it really comes down to those people that want
to go out and go get certified in data centers
and they want to roll up their sleeves. They have
(14:51):
to look at a data center career like you would
any other tradesman, like a plumber or an electrician, that
has to go through an apprenticeship before they I'm a
journeyman before they become a master. But you're going to
see that there's more. The fastest path becoming a millionaire
today is not going to college. It's going through the trades.
And with the data center industry, our industry is growing
(15:12):
faster than every other industry because of the growth of
every other industry's adoption of technology. So we are the
fastest growing industry in the world. And we have more
pent up demand than we have talent and access to
talent today, So we try to recruit from the military.
First responders. Twenty five year olds are great because they
have if they haven't figured out what they want to do,
they've definitely figured out what some of the things they
(15:33):
don't want to do right and that helps them get
more focused.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
So I'm on it. By the way, I put a
link already on the blog to the website, so you
just go there and you can click on the career button.
Somebody said, do you offer college internships. I don't even
know what that would look like.
Speaker 2 (15:46):
Tons of them. We love those. Every summer we load
our benches with as many college interns as you can.
We also have a DoD Skill Bridge program that allows
us take military active duty military and for the last
six months of their duty career, they could come work
for us and we don't have to pay him, but
we immerse him on construction programs or data center projects,
so they could be introduced to the industry as a whole.
(16:10):
So when they do transition down the military and they
go out and they try to look for a job,
we could help place them and show them that they
have exposure and some semblance of education. Again, this is
no different than how they teach us in the military.
We go to school for a little bit and then
we hit the fleet and you learn everything in the fleet,
learn on.
Speaker 1 (16:27):
The job, fascinating stuff. Kirk Offel is my guest with
Mission Overwatch, and you can find a link on the
blog to all of this, got a lot of questions.
We're going to rip through a couple right here. We
got four minutes left. Yeah, this one said, I have
forty two years in the concrete industry, commercial, residential, industrial,
civil and managing people that need to learn that trade.
(16:48):
So I don't know if he's asking for a job
or someone else.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Mandy, I asks a demand for that skill set. Yeah,
he just has to figure out do I want to
travel or where do I want to live? Because we're
building data centers first cities and now the bespoke secondary
and third tier market. So if you're working in a
lifestyle state or a lifestyle city, you have to be
willing to travel with that skill set. But there's a
lot of demand for that skill set. That's a couple
hundred thousand dollars job.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
We are overwatch dot com is the website. Somebody else
just asked me this, Mandy. This guy must have watched
me play baseball. I was out of position my entire career.
That from Andy, this is what I have to put
up with. On the text line, I'm trying to go
through these very quickly to find the most useful one.
You're fine, now I think that's it. I think the
(17:33):
rest have dropped off. A lot of people are saying,
you know, rural jobs are important, and we have a
lot of rural kids that are growing up. When do
data centers come to rural areas, if at all? Although
I would say Shyenne, Wyoming getting two is kind of
a big deal.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
The large magnet. So we build in all the NFL
cities because the hub spoke backbone of the fiber bone
of the Internet of the United States is long the
railway system. But we build certain magnitude and volume size
of data centers in different markets. What I was saying is,
we don't build one hundred megawat data centers anymore. We
build one, two, three, five gigawat campuses that take five
to seven years. So these construction programs, they are there
(18:12):
for a very long time, and we're going to go
build them in areas where it won't the optics won't
be bad for the communities that they support. So you
don't want a data center in a market that someone says, hey,
you're stealing our water, you're stealing our energy, and there's
not enough jobs. But there are areas in the United States,
so we could go build these large language model AI
(18:34):
data centers and we could connect them back through the
edge to the NFL city so there's no latency issues.
So these data centers are going to be built, I
mean Abilene, Murillo, Orslaw, not just Northern Virginia, not just
the NFL cities. They're going to be built. The sky
for the cloud of the world is Northern Virginia. The
home for AI will most definitely be West Texas. So
(18:56):
there's so much building opportunity right now that everybody that
wants to be a builder in some capacity, the sky's
unlimited for them for the next three years. It's the
data center.
Speaker 1 (19:05):
Gold Brough kirkoffle with Overwatch mission Overwatch, and you can
find them that we are overwatched dot com. I really
appreciate your time to a fascinating subject. I mean, it
really really is. I had no idea. I didn't even
know this was a thing. I didn't even know data
centers were going to be I mean, I do know
that AI hoovers up a tremendous amount of energy, so
that's what I do know. And it sounds like this
(19:28):
is another thing that I need to be paying attention to.
I really appreciate your time today.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
I appreciate it's an emerging industry. Try to think of
this as it's still very punk rock. It's still new.
When the automobile industry came out, it wasn't mainstream. Now
look at it that this industry will be have a
greater impact on humanity than the automobile.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
All right, Kirkoffel, I appreciate your time, man.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Thank you guys if you have because I got it now.
I have like fifteen questions that just popped up. Send
send them an email. They have a contact button right
there on the website. We are overwatched dot com. Fascinating
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