 How are you doing? Welcome to Hibachi Talk. According to the texts are here with another exciting off-the-shelf episode of Hibachi Talk. So I've got my good old buddy the co-host Rick's the Fundmeister of Hour. Hey Gordo, how are you? More money than God, just for the record. And we have a great guest, Bob Grigal, who is the president of Island Technologies. Has an incredible career in tech, but we're going to ruffle some feathers today. We're going to talk about the energy industry and what tech has done to the energy industry and how we've really shaken it up. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to set the mood for just a second. I do a little rant at the beginning. So I'm always excited about people, and I used to have a Prius, so I bought one in 2004, but Prius, Leafs, you know, I ride my bicycle, I don't burn energy. Well, you know, Rich, I got a picture of that when I was at Whole Foods last week. I mean, and people are all there, all taking care of everything and really hugging the trees and all excited and so on. But you know what? They're too damn lazy to put their shopping carts back. They can't even put the shopping cart back in the freaking stall. It's 10 feet away. They're killing me, right? Go hug my Prius, jump on your leaf, but no, no, no. I can't take, I'm too tired. I rode my bike all the way down to the Hall of Mall to take my shopping cart back. Come on, people, take your shopping cart back. How tough is it? It ain't that tough. Okay, I'm done. Okay, I set the tone. Anyway, we're going to... How are you doing, Gordon? You better now? No. Anyway, we're going to talk about the energy revolution. It's hidden in plain sight. We're going to talk about cloud crushes low mileage cars. It just crushes everything as far as energy consumption. It sure does. But, Bob, before we do that, let's build a background in yourself. So, where'd you go to school? You know, you've been in the tech industry a fair number of years. I can tell by the color of your hair. Yep. I'm a Southern California product born in Santa Monica, grew up in Westwood, went to UCLA for engineering school, then I turned trader to UCLA and went across town to USC. He went to Berkeley just for the record. Oh, I was accepted to Berkeley and UCLA and my parents said, we're not sending you to Berkeley with all those communists in the free speech meeting. If you had gone to Berkeley, I guarantee you wouldn't have gone to USC. I probably would have flunked out had I gone up there because engineering school was very difficult. I sometimes don't even know how. I never got an opportunity for any of those schools for the record. Yeah. It was tough. You couldn't make up thermodynamics and chemistry and calculus somehow. You either knew it or you didn't know it. Yeah. It came from the world. When I graduated in 1970, there was an aerospace crisis. So, there were no jobs available. I thought I was going to go to work for a user, a Ruckbuller, a TRW, one of those aerospace firms because my dad had been at Douglas Aircraft as a plant manager for the B-24 bombers and other things and worked directly for Donald Douglas Sr. And I was pretty sure I wanted to be in aerospace, but they had just finished laying off 20,000 engineers. And so, the only two job offers I got were from Department of Water and Power in Southern California Edison. And I thought, gee, that's dead last on my list of things to do to join a utility. I thought I was going to be boring. But actually, I'm so grateful. Southern California Edison was a great company. They put me on an executive training program where I wandered around the corporation for two years. Well, they put me to work for a vice president of each major division. So, I worked directly for the vice president of customer service and the vice president of fuel supply, then environmental planning. So, I got to go out and climb poles with Lineman and the customer service department and the fuel supply department. We bought coal, oil, uranium, gas to power our power plants. And then it eventually, and I wrote environmental impact statements just when the first environmental impact statement came out in 1974 when we didn't even know what it was. It was only four provisions. And wrote my first 300-page environmental impact statement on a pump storage plant in this year in Nevada range. And then I went over to procurement and eventually ended up as a contracts manager down at San Onofre, the nuclear power plant. So, the beauty that you're going to bring to this show, that you are bringing to this show is the fact that you know this industry, this energy industry from the inside out, from the grounds on it, not the political global warming standpoint. We can get into the conversation about that. But, I mean, your down where it's real. Yeah, I saw it and not to digress off our subject too much, but we were seriously looking at alternative energy sources. This is in 1970. We had geothermal plants in Salt and Sea. We had solar plants in the Mojave Desert. We had wind power up in the Tahatchippies. And we were seriously hoping we might have 10, 15 percent of our fuels, of our energy needs produced by these alternative sources. But, as you and I have talked about before, it turned out there were major league problems with each of those energy sources. It still exists in one form or another today and don't stand on their own financially. But I got a good overview of that. And then I diverged. I'll skip a couple other parts of my background, but I got off in the wonderful world of computers. And being a contracts manager down at Santa Nofri, we were buried in documents and arbitration hearings and lawsuits and 83 regulatory agencies we had to handle at Santa Nofri. And I became interested in the same field you were in for years. And the document imaging and electronic content managed millions of pages of documents and CDN, e-sized drawings and contracts and receipts. And that led me often to the last 25 years of doing electronic content management in one form or another. So what brings us to the subject of our conversation is, and I alluded to it when I talked about the pre-issues and the leaves and so on and so on. I mean, tech consumes an incredible amount of energy. It does. And it's kind of hidden, we call it hidden in plain sight. There was a fascinating article that prompted our discussion in real clear energy that I read regularly. And they were talking all about the tremendous new demand from a variety of sources that all have to do with the tech industry and the demand and that it's far greater than some of the other things like electric cars that we may think is bringing a tremendous demand. But actually, it's this whole Silicon revolution. And while everything we do creates and demands energy, Silicon Valley really has revolutionized the demand for energy. And it started off kind of slow. In fact, when I was in engineering school at UCLA and from like 65 to 70 timeframe, we actually sent the first internet message from UCLA to Stanford. It was just an email text message. I didn't even know what was going on. I have no claim to fame there. But Dr. Leonard Kleinrock, that they consider the founder of the internet, that he led a group and they sent that first message. And we had no idea that what demand that was going to create. And what has happened is that through a whole series of things from the data centers, the energy production concern with making all of our cell phones and network devices and that's semiconductors and think of how much electricity we must be consuming. How much do you consume now versus when you were going to Berkeley? energy? I mean, cell phones, watches, just go down the list. Back then, networks, we were just moving off of slide rules. So, you know, and now, well, my days, it was the Apocos. So, so, so, so we sit here and we think, Oh, I'm going to go get a electric car. I mean, it's, you know, the thought process is kind of nice. But when you think of what goes into constructing an electric car, the batteries, the whole process, the disposal of the batteries, and then by the way, where do you think the electricity comes from that powers your Prius? And the little secret is it's probably 40% coal, not here in Hawaii, but on the mainland, it's probably 40% coal and the rest oil and gas and uranium from nuclear power plants. And it doesn't just magically come out of the sky. Yeah. And also on a kind of a pound per pound mile for mile, irrespective of whether that's coming from an electric vehicle or some other source, it's using about the same amount of energy to create it. Right. But the big difference is the amount of energy that used to take to say create a refrigerator or a hairdryer, you know, the weight of refrigerator weighs a thousand times more than a hairdryer, or I'm sorry, about 200 times than a hairdryer, it would be about 200 times more energy to create the refrigerator than the hairdryer. But now we fast forward to a cell phone, a cell phone takes as much energy to be created as a refrigerator. It weighs a thousand times more. It's a thousand times less. So the thing is, my cell phone takes more energy to create than a refrigerator. And when my cell phone, when my refrigerator was done after 10, 15, 20 years, I can recycle it. What do I do after my two, three years on my cell phone? It's just trash going. I mean, in fairness, a few folks like Apple are trying to make as many parts recyclable as they can. But by and large, there has been a tremendous amount of silicon PC cell phone waste that just goes into a dump on like a car that may get ground up and sent to Japan and recycle it to create another car and so on. So now we're sitting in all these PCs, terminals, monitors, mice, I don't care what all those things are, and they're not recycled. Now they're not. And then now we have these new elements and the cloud is probably the biggest one that we can all relate to. And of course, everybody that's using Facebook and Google and Netflix, the rest recognizes what a tremendous amount we're depending on the cloud and then what unbelievable bandwidth is being required from that. And then the cloud, in turn, is requiring these huge data centers that are the size of a Walmart or a larger. There's even bigger, something bigger called a hyper center. Yeah. And these are billion dollar installations, each one of them, and 300 plus already 300 plus heading to 400 probably within the next year. Google's growth has been 12 times over the last four years and the need for data centers. Apple's been putting them up fast and furious for their cloud initiatives. Amazon Web Services, Amazon and their Amazon Web Services. And as you know, they're they're even selling those services to other big corporations that have cloud and web services on demand because they're so efficient. And they're huge energy consumers, huge, huge. And it's kind of a dirty little secret. Folks like Apple and Google are trying to make out like they're pretty energy conscious and they're trying to use all the alternative energy sources. And I'm not criticizing and they're trying to do the best they can. The only thing that's fallacious is they're not covering 100% or even close to a majority of their energy needs. It's a small percentage. It may get better. We hope it all does get better. But again, they're going to be dependent on coal fire, gas fired, oil fired, nuclear power to really supply these data centers because they can't count on the weather. Is it going to be a sunny day? Is there going to be enough wind to fire these so they must be connected to the electrical grid in order to meet some peak demand or some bad energy weather situation that won't provide the power that they need? Cool. So let's pause there because we're going to take a break. So I told you this thing goes fast. Wow. So excuse me. We'll take a one minute break. We'll go pay some bills. Here of Aubrey Gale, Rick's the fundmeister. Go to the tech sour. He bought you talk with back in a minute. Hawaii is my mainland every Friday at 3pm on think tech Hawaii. We talk about things of interest to those of us who live here. And my past blogs can be found at kawaiilukas.com. I didn't listen. Freedom. Is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea? At DiveHeart, we believe freedom is all of these and more regardless of your ability. DiveHeart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and defy gravity. Since 2001, DiveHeart has helped children, adults and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before. DiveHeart has helped them transition to their new normal. Search diveheart.org and share our mission with others. And in the process, help people of all abilities. Imagine the possibilities in their lives. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and I'm the host of Shrink Rap Hawaii where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this. We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at three o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. Well, welcome back. We've got Angus coming up to join us and he's going to give us some comments about some of the recent happenings at the state legislature. Angus, welcome. How are you doing? I'm good. It's great to see you. Hey, Barbara Gill. Hey, I remember you guys. It's 1543. You came into our village. You rigged it, blundered. The Vikings had to do something. That's right. The Vikings had to do something. It's great to have you on the show. Thanks, Angus. Anyway, I'm talking about the waste of energy. We're going to talk about the state legislature. I mean, I'm very thematicated. So anyway, our state legislature and the privatizer this week, they said it was an epic fail. And I did a little segment a few months back where I talked about the advertiser and their endorsing candidates. I wanted them to come out next and say, of all the candidates we endorsed, how many were involved in that epic fail? I went a lot. Anyway, the cool thing is, or maybe it's not the cool thing, is Mr. Josuke, the former chair, is no longer the head of the hoose, or the house, or the senate, or whatever you want to call it. Anyway, I like his comment. We're always secretive. That's being part of the legislature. Welcome to Hawaii, the only third-world country in the United States. Anyway, yes, I can tell I'm getting a wee political lately, but you know, I'm going to be running for office, so didn't forget when I started putting my fundraisers out there. Yeah, right. Anyway, as I was saying, every segment, let your win gate free where you be. Aloha. Great. That's great, Angus. Thanks very much for that little perceptions that you've given us for our legislature. How about misperceptions? Yes. And we're back with Bob Bergell talking with us about energy and the changes of energy. And because of tech, so we'll just kind of summarize what we talked about in the first half, and we'll get a couple more questions for you. Yeah, just real quickly there were three major factors that are creating this tremendous demand, and one of them was the semiconductor. That started in 57 with for a child semiconductor when they're first factories. Then the second phase was the explosive growth of the internet in today's billions of users. And then finally we come into this is the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, and I was at Macworld Expo in 2007 in San Francisco when that iPhone was introduced 10 years ago. Boy, it was revolutionary at the time Steve Jobs was still alive and cut up and introduced that. And yet, as revolutionary as we recognized it was at the time, we had no idea where it was going to take us and what we would be seeing here 10 years later. I'm just amazed. Yeah, we're astounded. I'm sitting here with the Internet of Things, right? Because you've got the networks and the physical networks, but then you've got the wireless networks, which consume 40% more energy than the online networks. That's a great point, Gordo. The wireless networks actually are taking way more than the data center. So they're actually in a certain sense a threat to the overall capacity of the networks and they're growing like crazy. Wireless is growing like crazy. So just look around your home or your office and see how many people have migrated from being on a wireless connection and what the power that's associated with that requires. I mean, you're sitting here and you're holding this device and I'm on the Internet right now, right? I'm not using it, but I'm consuming the wireless network that I'm on. I'm consuming the network that the mobile carrier is on. All of that energy is being produced so that this phone can sit idle. Yep, yep. And not do anything at this point, except maybe an email will come in that I might get later, or an Instagram or a Facebook or a Pinterest or whatever. Or a tax. Or a tax whatever. And I'm like I'm not burning any energy. Whole country want to meet. You are. A lot. Well and there's a term I'll throw out here and see if you guys know what it is. The data coursing through all of our wired and wireless networks now is two Zeta bytes. That's an incomprehensible number, but you want to take a wild stab at what that. No, you're the you're the guy, you're the engineer. I'll let you do that one. A Zeta byte is a thousand terabytes or a billion gigabytes. A billion gigabytes. So just incomprehensible the amount of data that is coursing around and just growing by leaps and bounds. They say a stack of two Zetas if worth of dollar bills could go to the sun and back one million times. So is this a stack? A stack? A stack like this. A million times to the sun and back. Yep. So the scale of this infrastructure that's being created and it's just projected to still grow exponentially. And these Walmart size centers humming with computer memory and servers and although in fairness we've gotten tremendously more efficient than we were previously they one of the interesting points was if a data center had the same efficiency as in 1987 so last back that time frame it would have required five times the amount of power as the city of Manhattan. Five times of Manhattan. To operate. So think of that. Just get your head wrapped around that for a data center. Well they basically there wouldn't be any data centers that might be one or something but we couldn't have them proliferating as they are now. So right now they're estimating there's 300 of these major data centers were on the way to 400 and these hyper centers in rapidly. And while we're having tremendous efficiencies and shrinkage of hard drives and shrinkages of the servers and so forth. Less moving parts and greater efficiencies in the transistors and processors and yet still the growth is. Well because we keep buying these. I mean it's probably because that was yesterday. I got a I got a new phone. That's the two that I've I've watched series two right. And guess what I consumed energy yesterday just like charging it. So now I'm one of who knows of how many individuals who bought one of these yesterday. And so I'm sitting on this thing going okay well guess what I've just contributed to the consumption of energy. Now it's the number one smart watch. I'm not that smart to figure out how to work it yet but I'll get there. But just take your 10,000 steps a day. I was looking at it right now. I'm working my way there. But again it's the realization that all of these things that we use the Netflix, the Facebooks, the Pinterest. All of those technologies are burning energy to give you the consumer something that you want. So don't I don't want you sitting there thinking just because you bought a Prius or whatever you turn your lights off that you're not a contributor. Every time you buy one of these things they're not saying don't buy one because I do. You are burning energy. And even changes that we've noticed say going from the 2G network now to 4G and soon to 5G that's requiring 60 times more energy than the 2G network. So we're taking one step forward two steps back we're gaining some tremendous energies and costs are lowering but same time the demand is going through the roof so net-net we're increasing demand exceptionally and it's growing faster than offshore oil platforms and any other kind of thing. We talked about the revolutions coming before World War II basically the airplane and the auto and it took the airplane 20 years to start using about 5 million barrels a day of oil. So 70 years for 5 million barrels a day go ahead. And then only took 2 decades for the silicon revolution to have the same growth. 20 years for the technology industry to consume the same amount that took airlines 70 years to do. It's amazing and this is another interesting stat the digital things there are more complex products of course but they take a thousand times more energy pound per pound to create considering a typical product. Yeah so pound per pound so this thing takes pound per pound more energy a thousand times more energy been my refrigerator or whatever. Well and we're making 30 times more smartphones annually than refrigerators. And then we're making smart refrigerators so that's not we're making smart refrigerators smart toasters internet of things. Because my refrigerator can go and look in there and realize what product is not in the refrigerator and go ahead and make a list and get it to order. Exactly. And all of that takes power. Well and there's one thing on the horizon that you've probably heard of but it hasn't really been actualized yet and that's the self-driving cars and the smart cars that Google Apple a whole bunch of people or Tesla are all working on. And should those come into being which I'm sure they will but who knows when those could create more zettabytes of data because the smart car can consume all kinds of technical information and if it's going to be a guidance device as well. And imagine that and also be on a wireless network. And all that will consume. And all that consumes. So you'll not believe this we consumed it all. Speaking of energy consumption we're done. We're not done because we're going to have to do another show but I've been encouraged that we need to kind of scratch the surface. But I think it's interesting and I'm going to drag it a little bit is that we're talking about energy and all the different forms of energy and the fact that the tech industry is one of the largest if not the largest consumer of energy in the world. It is. And that's what it is. So speaking of no energy we spent a little bit of energy. You can get an autographed solo cup. One seventeen in the series. Bob I don't want you to see that selling on eBay because it will consume more energy than it costs to produce this thing. This will go on an honor place on me. I'm sure it will. In the rest room. Anyway Barbara Gal. Thank you so much man. Terrific. We're going to have this. We're going to do this again. Bob is president of the Boys Bunch and the Boys Bunch we raise money for Make-A-Wish so we're kind of influential in town. Fundmeister. Great. I was fun to have you on the show. And like we say at the end of the show. One two three. How are you doing?