What The Funk?

0:00 Jeffrey can. Yes, he can. Come on. Tripping over the barrel today. Tim, I've been excited about this one. David Forsberg, of course, you remember David Forsberg, friend of the podcast came

0:13 on probably 40 episodes ago. This is the guy that he feels really strongly about and pushed us to have on this podcast. So I know this is going to be good because Forsberg doesn't waste my time with

0:25 anything. And he said, Jeff, Jeffrey is the guy to have 40 podcasts ago. How come it took so long to get him on?

0:33 Yeah, what the hell? Never mind. I don't want to put you on the spot.

0:37 Popular guys, Tim. Popular guys. So when I see

0:42 the C-A-N-N, I always want to run the con rather than can. Is it can or con? It's can. Yeah, tin can, pop can. Yeah, con is the thing is people get confused with James con because probably the

0:55 most famous

0:58 spelling you've seen out there. but yeah, it's kind of a hand, yeah. Okay, Jeffrey can. So a speaker, a trainer, long tenured in the oil and gas industry, I think over 35 years.

1:14 I've heard you speak on some different forums and platforms, but we're gonna take this one a little bit differently today. I really wanna understand sort of you, where you came from, what makes

1:24 you you, going back all the way to, you know, where'd you grow up, where'd you end up going to college, and how did you get to where you are today, 35 years in the oil and gas industry? Yeah,

1:34 you bet, looking forward to it. You want me to start? Yeah. Tell us dirty stuff about it. Drop it on us, man, drop it. You can make it, I guess. All right, all right, all right, here we

1:43 go. All right, so I was, I grew up in St. John de Brundsway, come on places, which is East of Maine. So for those Americans who are geographically curious. I'm from New Hampshire Yeah.

1:58 Pretty much, yeah, it's a quick drive down actually. I worked for Irving Oil for years and made the commute back and forth to New Hampshire regularly. So yeah, I grew up there, left to go to

2:08 McGill University to study business and computer technology for business at the time, which would have been called MIS, management information systems, and recruited from there to join what was at

2:22 the time, Tush Ross. I actually know I've skipped a step This is the problem when you reach 60. Yeah. I'm sort of like, when was that again? So yeah, so I was recruited out of McGill to

2:36 Imperial Oil and moved to Toronto, spent three years working for Imperial there. And I was counseled to buy Imperial Oil as well as more informally that without the engineering degree, prospects

2:50 were dim in the oil and oil sector. And so I elected to go pursue not an engineering discipline, but. an MBA and got deeper into the more commercial world, then from there joined what was at the

3:05 time Tush Ross, and that became Deloitte literally six months later, back at that time, it was the big eight, became the final four. And I stayed there for 29 years, and worked in eight offices,

3:19 including postings in Hong Kong and Brisbane, Australia. Each, it's probably about 10 years yet. And I got back to my roots and got focusing on oil and gas at a posting in Calgary. And in all

3:32 that time, I had the opportunity to work, you know, up and down the breadth of the industry, onshore, offshore, oil sands, conventional, natural gas, midstream, oil refinering, fuel

3:42 retailing, wholesaling and trading, ports, port operations, rail,

3:47 spent a year in a fracking business, spent a year with a drilling company spent all, you know, so if you like, my superpowers, as I kind of characterize it as lots of breadth, pretty good depth.

3:58 I can find bottom on most topics, even though I'm not the engineer. And that's probably the, you know, sort of the thumbs eye version, the, there was a time when I was working in Hong Kong

4:12 living in Hong Kong and I was working in mainland China on manufacturing projects. And I took photographs of donkey carts delivering cold or to door. Wow. Yeah, way back then. We now think of

4:25 China as a world's largest network of bullet trains and nuclear power plants. And, but I remember when they got the energy delivery was donkey carts going door to door. I probably have photos here

4:38 on my desk. They're gonna, they're gonna bring that back. Donkey cart delivery has to be considered ESG.

4:45 Yeah. Well, and the, the, there was at that point, I thought, well, shoot, you know, half the world's population. If it's true in China, it's probably true in India. Half the world's

4:53 population, unlike Westerners, who get their energy by flicking a light switch. they get their energy by unloading a cart. And so that's what really got me at the time to go back instead of a

5:08 random walk around the world looking at manufacturing. I went back to my roots and oil and gas and I've stayed there ever since. So you said about China, my boss, he went and shot seismic in

5:19 various places. One of the things he describes is, you set out your recording devices in various places around the city, countryside, whatever. And the Chinese company had hired locals to go sit

5:36 on chairs next to each phone, each box and just sit there and watch it. So it wouldn't, nothing would happen to it, but that was so unsophisticated of a solution. For thinking about what they

5:51 were actually doing at that moment, it was, you know, when you have that kind of manpower. Okay, well, yeah, let's go do another, just put another donkey cart out there. Yeah, well, when

6:03 your labor cost is low, you're motivated to put labor onto the problem. And so in the oil industry, and in many of the national oil companies, their headcount per barrel is off the charts relative

6:18 to North America. We are extremely lean, North America, we have no idea. I was doing a project in the Middle East for one of the state companies there, and I asked them for their Solomon. It was

6:27 a midstream downstream play. I asked them for their Solomon scores. If you don't know what the Solomon scores are, little mansplaining here. So Solomon is a global benchmarking service that will

6:38 give you right down to the actual piece of mechanical equipment in your oil refinery, precisely how much energy shoes you should use, how many people you need to maintain it, what your costs should

6:49 be, and it's extraordinarily detailed. So it's called the Solomon Benchmarks. So I said to them, what are your Solomon Benchmarks? I kind of looked around and they said. Uh, we don't want to

6:60 show those to you.

7:02 I don't know why it's because we know we're triple the head count of anybody else. And so our, our measurements are all off. And this, so this is, we, we, we, we, we, we see our industry in

7:16 North America is very, very lean. The rest of the world, it's, it's an, it's an employment agency from any companies. It's not really, it's not really an oil industry. It's to keep locals well

7:24 employed and looked after No, all that's changing. I was in Kuwait in 2020, 2019, just before the pandemic. And the, at the time, the oil company there was, it said to me, I, I, meetings

7:40 with them. I was talking about product costs and productivity. And they were like, oh, we are now under instruction from the kingdom to begin to think very much more strategically about what jobs

7:48 we provide in this industry. No more, no more easy, no more sitting on chairs, stereo geophones Right. Are they actually working? Those days are gone. So the industry's changing, changing

8:01 rapidly as we speak. But 29 years of Deloitte, I mean, that's not a, that's a heavy bag ready at any moment. We could need you somewhere else pretty quickly. So what was that like? I mean, I

8:14 don't know how many times you moved to various countries or travel very much, but what's that like as a young coming into the industry or into a professional career? What was that like for you?

8:27 Well, a few things that you don't appreciate the time but that you discover over time. So first is you discover that when you have to have your bags packed at a moment and notice to go somewhere,

8:38 you can't really commit to too much on the home front. Yeah. So the idea that you could say, Well, Monday nights I'm gonna take a course. Yeah. No, you're not. You can't commit to that. You

8:51 want a pet? You have to find someone look after it all the time. So you don't really appreciate that till you get into it for a little while and then you realize, Oh, shoot, I'm being kind of

9:00 locked out of all this stuff. The plus side though is you get to see the world and somebody else pays. So there's no, if you have a sort of a wanderlust, there's nothing wrong with that.

9:13 Then the third thing you learn is that most of the people you deal with in most companies

9:20 have lots of experience, 20 years of experience, but it's basically one year of experience repeated 20 times. It's not the same as in this consulting world where you're going from job to job to job

9:31 because every job's gonna be completely different. So after about five years, you've done 40 jobs. Your range of experience is dramatically different from who you're dealing with. They've

9:40 typically done the same thing for 20 years. Now they know that job exceptionally well, but in terms of experience, the consulting world, there's nothing like it. And that can be very intoxicating

9:51 It's like when you get into it and you really like it. It can be very hard to leave, but I also there's it's not that that part of the industry is known for, I guess, burning people out and, you

10:06 know, they, of course, they go settle it their clients Yeah, the turnover is very high. I work for one of the all sense companies on the turnover problem, and they were, they were pushing 7

10:17 turnover. And in a large industrial complex 7 turnover means your workforce forgets how the plant works, like your institutional knowledge is walking out the door. And so you'll remember like, how

10:28 do we, how do we fix that last time? Like,

10:32 you want to keep that turnover to 1 to 2 at that level, your employees can basically memorize the plant Hey, this pump's going down. Oh, I know with the other 30 versions of that exact same pump

10:42 bar on this whole, you know, multi kilometer square scale facility, I can go fix all of them now. So all that knowledge walks out the door. In consulting, you want to turn over around 15 to 20

10:54 percent. One, you want that because you want a constant refreshing of insight and talent and challenge and creativity. So the business model is totally geared towards bringing people in, work them

11:09 hard. They learn lots. Most are not going to survive as partners or get to the point where they own the business and you, they move on and then they become your alumni. And hopefully they become

11:19 clients down the road Yeah, yeah, if it ends well, if it ends well, this is, this is fascinating stuff. I didn't know about the 29 years at Deloitte because, because when you hit my radar, it

11:28 was more for the bits and bytes. Oh, yes. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the books that you've written and sort of what the, what the slant and angle you've taken in kind of late in

11:38 your consulting career and now as you are a speaker and a, you know, lecturer in the space. Well, the books are a whole story in their own right Um, they started out actually, uh, I started

11:50 writing articles and when I moved Australia, so I'll wind the tape back, I moved Australia. And I'm sitting in the couch with my wife and she said, hey, you're new to Australia, how are people

11:59 gonna find you? And I said, oh, well, how else do you find anybody these days? You go into Google and you type. So she said, have you tried that? And I'm, no, no, let's do that. So we sat

12:10 in the couch together, remember them all vividly. We typed my name into Google search engine. First Jeffrey Cannon pops up, convicted pedophile. I knew it, I knew it Oh, I knew it. There was a

12:21 Jeremy Funk around the same age as me, who, around the time that I moved from Boston to Colorado, a Jeremy Funk in Utah, committed like multiple other side type things. So the first, this is

12:33 2003, 2004, people were like, dude, you live in Colorado, right? This isn't you. I'm like, yes, I didn't murder two people. Everything is good, but it's scary, right? When you see that,

12:43 like, uh-oh. Online, that's your brand, right? So I resolved then and there that I would move myself onto Google's first page, and now I get that. this convicted pedophile into the background.

12:53 And that meant writing articles, having a constant stream of content. And so I began to write a weekly article series about the liquefied natural gas industry. So I wrote 250 odd articles in time

13:06 about every nook and cranny of that industry. I came to the end of that and I said, huh, big body of work, a lot of words, can't do anything with it I moved back to Canada and said to Deloitte,

13:20 now what? And they said, this thing digital and oil and gas looks like it might be a thing. And so I started another blog series. But this time more strategically, I said, this is not going to

13:29 just be an article. It's going to be a series of articles around a theme and that will turn into a book. And so once I had the 80 articles written, the first 80, that gave me around 100, 000

13:41 words, roughly. And so you throw off the top of each article and the bottom of each article, boom, You've got a book. The problem is the blogs aren't in the right order. So you have to reorder

13:51 them to get to the book. Yeah. And that's where the book came from. Oh, interesting. It was really a series of articles, yeah. And the second book, I was just a contributing author. I wrote a

13:59 chapter for a book on machine learning and data science in oil and gas. All about the role of AI and how it works. And the third book, which was just released in March of this year, so four or

14:09 five weeks ago, is called Carbon Capital in the Cloud. Yes. A playbook for digital oil and gas. If the first book, It's Bites and Barrels, was aimed at trying to say, here's why digital

14:20 innovation is good for you, what it highlights is there's a disconnect between the speed of a digital innovation out there and the ability of the oil industry to adopt, like we're totally

14:32 cross-threaded. And so the second book is, all right, so who does this well? Who actually is adopting digital innovations at speed? And so the second book paints the nine case studies examples

14:45 And then lots of, a lots of story about, about who does it well. tactics people can follow and so on, yeah.

14:54 So is, and your speaker, trainer, author,

15:02 in the block chain.

15:07 You get your fingers in a lot of those areas. What is the, what's your,

15:13 man, I know it's all fun for you 'cause you're doing it all, but what kind of, what excites you about all the different endeavors for you personally? Which one of those you gravitate towards?

15:25 Well, they're all fascinating. For me, I think cloud is largely now a given. I don't know of any big companies who really wonder whether cloud's a good idea or not. So from a technology

15:38 standpoint, the technologies that I really do have a strong interest in are any of the machine learning and artificial intelligence tools because the our industry sits on an ocean of data. and we

15:49 don't have enough people or horsepower to process it all, that's our big problem. There's a gap in not just capability, we don't know how to analyze the data, but sheer capacity, there just isn't

16:00 enough of us. And so how do you overcome that? You bring these tools to bear. And so that's the first thing that's of great interest. And there's no almost no limit to the upside in that world.

16:13 The second problem we have is trust. Our industry, we produce a fungible product that is completely indistinguishable from every other molecule of product. It's quite easily stolen. It's very

16:27 easily sold. It's enormously valuable. It can be sold everywhere and anywhere. It's not like you're trying to sort of sell diamonds. There's only a small number of places you can do diamonds. So

16:37 you can sell a barrel of oil for air or gasoline anywhere. And so our industry has this huge trust problem because none of the parties trust each other in the mix because of all of these factors.

16:48 And so we need different ways to trust each other. And this is the role of blockchain. And most of the people in the industry don't quite grasp this yet. They don't still don't get it. They still

16:57 think, oh, it's Bitcoin or some other nonsense like that. But I think they're totally missing the power of this to reimagine this industry and improve trust. And once you improve trust you, throw

17:08 away all of the old ways of doing business that we put into place to make sure we have trust. They all disappear. And that to my mind is the long game The short game is put these tools to work to

17:19 interpret all the data. But the long game is reimagine this industry with a different trust basis and really take out cost.

17:28 Really, really good stuff here. I want to dive in a little bit into the cliff's notes of this without revealing all of your secrets. You mentioned sort of nine case studies. What would you say to

17:37 the operator that is traditionally a laggard, maybe has had the same staff in place for a while. And then recently a new board member, CEO, ESG person We need to really start pushing this. We

17:49 need to move to cloud. We need to automate. We need to optimize in the field and in the back office. That means AI, it means machine learning, it means operating by exception. Maybe blockchain,

17:58 all of the buzz terms that we can possibly believe. Where does a company start? Like, what do you do for the company that's at ground zero and has the same infrastructure that they had 15 years ago?

18:09 Yeah, it's

18:15 a good question. And the book actually has case studies from each of the major verticals in the industry Integrated companies, upstream players, midstream downstream. It's, this is really a

18:20 management question. The board can say what they want. Your specific example is new board member comes in. So first challenge you've got to get is alignment around the board that this is valuable

18:32 and meaningful to do. And to give you an idea of how hard that is, there are four big oil companies in Calgary that are basically 70 of our oil production. Only one of them is really kind of

18:42 torqued into this The other three are doubling down on the traditional ways of doing things. So this is not, it's not a given that you get a board member in who's kind of enlightened. Maybe they

18:53 work for Cisco or IBM or something and they're like, oh, you should, we should do this. It's not a given. So the first thing you gotta do is get the board sorted. Then the board has to work with

19:01 management and then management has to get sorted. And the problem there is management takes a lot of work to get management up across the curve, what this is all about. And the performance metrics

19:15 that the board agrees and then imposes often block management's ability to do very much. So assuming you get management aligning the portal line. So now your next move is, all right, now what do

19:26 we do with the troops? And at that point, the key is to find the, within any of oil company organization I've ever met, there's gonna be some 20 of the people there who are super keen. They

19:40 podcast in their spare time, for instance, and they know what this technology can do. Yeah, exactly So the creature, how do you unleash those people? and get them to play the role of your

19:49 digital leaders. I mean, Tim, you know they're all your age. How do you get a bar?

19:56 There's a there's a point right now. We look at where the industry is. There's a lot of guys my age who are on the board or management or whatever. They see the end of their career. And where do

20:08 we want to go? Just if I just stick around for another three or four years doing what we're doing, I don't have to worry about it. Correct. I think that's part of it Yep. And then there's the

20:18 resistance. And we know that they're the guys at the lower ends of the company that are new Jose Rodriguez. They have the vision, but the mechanism to really drive change, they just don't have

20:36 that kind of power yet. Now, fortunately, he's at a great place that kind of matches his vision

20:44 Yeah, I think it's it's a. it's tough to walk down and then you never, you always run into, you know, we want to make this change and you run into, hey, we're, we've got all the IT resources

20:56 on our ERP changeover. So we won't, you won't have any access to that for two years. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Then it really isn't a priority.

21:07 Yeah. Well, it is agenda altering in these organizations, right? You just said, but good examples though, companies have done this well But that typically they find one enlightened, quite

21:17 senior guy or gal who, and by that I mean, not the CEO, but they will be senior vice president, executive vice president, they've got a broad remit. And they have the bug and they get it. And

21:29 sometimes that's the CFO. It's not usually the CIO, they're generally too low in the organization, but if the CIO does report direct to CEO and then they're at the table, then it could be the CIO.

21:41 But for the most part, I've the successful ones I've seen, they're going to have a title that - puts them into ops or production or some other frontline operational role, and they're going to be

21:51 quite senior. And simple things. You just asked the next level down. This year on your personal plan, for your unit, you will do one digital thing. I don't care what it is. Maybe you train

22:06 people. Maybe you go on a data cleanup exercise. Maybe you put one of your applications on the cloud, just one, but you gotta do one thing. And so what you do is you start the flywheel by putting

22:18 one thing on. Then the next year it's two things. And then the year after that's three things. And pretty soon, what you find is that you've got enough momentum that you can get some action going.

22:30 Experiments and trials and things are actually proving themselves out. And what I've found is once the flywheel gets moving, you've got the believers on board. You don't have much problem with this.

22:39 It becomes much more of a, Where do you find the capacity to do it faster? the real issue that works out there. So Jeffrey, when you go into organizations, are you primarily working with upstream

22:54 oil and gas operators and advising them on one of these areas, whether it's cloud, carbon, you know, productivity, ESG, blockchain, is it generally one of those? And where does it, where does

23:07 it tend to start and who do you interface with at these companies? Well, if you work back, it's hard to kind of be like super clear, and here's the one guy, and it's not quite that way. The

23:20 industry's complicated, as you know, upstream, midstream, downstream. The different segments of the industry behave very differently. Refining is a manufacturing industry, right? 247, process

23:30 continuous manufacturing. It's already highly automated. And so how do you engage with that group when it's not going to be the same as say someone who's in retail. So it depends. But in the

23:44 upstream, for the most part, this is principally about taking companies whose business models predate the internet in many cases and trying to move them forward to where they are prepared to do some

23:57 things differently. And so, as I said, it depends. There's just no one answer here. Yeah, I mean, and Tim, this kind of aligns with conversations that I've had and you've had with the Rob

24:12 Hembres of the world, with no technical debt, you can approach this much differently, right? Yeah, I can point to some companies today that started fresh and I have 100 cloud native across the

24:23 board and they can do that. They're also aware they couldn't have done that when they were at the pioneers or Devins or Chesapeake's or whoever because there's more red tape, there's more systems,

24:33 maybe it's a bigger lift. But it's fascinating to see what some of these leaders do. I think when given the opportunity, most of the people will look to optimize lower costs take advantage of what

24:44 we have from a cloud and technology perspective, it just doesn't seem like the full reality for a lot of companies. And you said something, Jeff, that's stood out to me a little bit. And that's

24:56 companies that had been around before the internet. Well, how many companies exist that can even think 25 years, right? How many of these companies think they're going to be around in five years?

25:06 Maybe right now it's more optimistic than it was a year ago when everybody's filing chapter 11 But I just, I don't see a lot of companies that even have the 25 year mindset. The ones that do are

25:17 willing to talk about ESG and blockchain and have moved toward cloud. The rest, generally speaking, it's like we can't even get that.

25:26 I guess it's the nature of the Western countries. We don't play a long game in politics, in business, everything's a short game. Well, capital markets force that because you've got to show up.

25:40 with a dividend or a EPS target every 90 days. So it forces you to behave in a certain way. But when you get into these big tenders that come out of the Middle East with some of the companies you

25:54 work with, obviously,

25:57 you see this desire that seems impossible to get done in the timeframe that they're suggesting, but you see what they're trying to build towards, you know, set up an infrastructure for 25 years now.

26:13 Yeah, yeah, it's very true, but it's exceptionally hard to do. In 2015, 2016, I left Australia to return to North America. And by that point, I'd gotten to know the four big LNG projects on

26:28 the East Coast of Australia quite well. And so this is 2016, not that far ago, when you sort of think about it. And I got to know the senior technology professionals in there quite well, and each

26:42 of them took me aside after I was on my way moving back and said,

26:48 very interesting piece of data, three of the four. The third one hadn't actually, a fourth one hadn't actually turned into a project yet. So it was still early stages for them. But the other

26:56 three, to a person, they said, we have built our businesses as if the internet did not exist. Mobile computing wouldn't work for us And big data was fictitious. This is in 2016. Oh, no. Oh, I

27:13 thought you were talking about 1996. Okay, I lost you for a second. Well, 2016, 2016.

27:19 So what was going on there? Well, they're in build. They're in build and deliver the business. And it takes four to seven years to build one of these things. So it's coming live in 2016. So that

27:29 means that their design was 2010. And so they were using the very best insight they had back in 2010, which would have come from where? 26 to 2010, maybe 2006. You go back to, it's just

27:40 literally post Y2K. That was the mindset that was flowing into the design of these businesses. And now they're locked into a business model that in hindsight, really? You don't, the internet does

27:53 not exist. How did you get to that? But that's the, that's the challenge of even, in fact, your Middle East example, you could put a big tender up, but you're gonna run headlong into armies and

28:03 armies of people through this industry who only know one real good way that you get stuff done and, that's the one that they just did that worked. And they're gonna bring it and try and put it into

28:13 your new business. Yup, you gotta do a lot of work. Gotta break through that. But back to the point earlier that we talked about Jeremy, which you didn't actually kind of fully explore, but I

28:26 believe quite strongly in the case results are pretty clear unless you've got the CEO saying. this is

28:38 the way we're going. Get on or get off the bus, right? At least you've got that. Your digital change efforts are really gonna struggle. 'Cause people who have an out.

28:44 It's interesting though, on that point, this is a real example that I've been a part of.

28:52 We're talking to higher levels, and they say we're gonna reduce carbon emissions by, I guess, source one, source food, carbon emissions body. 15 by 2025, or something along those lines.

29:08 And the first thing I do is I go sell their worst offender to someone else, which that's fine. And then started investing in new gas projects. But the problem is, they're gonna meet their target

29:27 as but, 2025

29:29 they have to start as that project ages.

29:33 and that's sort of compressing out in the field, suddenly they're actually coming back up. And that's the part that, you know, the way you plan for that is very difficult. Yeah, I think of it as

29:45 a, it's like a, for engineers out there, it's the slope of a line, you know? If you're, if your goal is by 2050, say, to be to a half your current emissions or carbon neutral, that means over

29:58 the next 20 years, you've got a one or 2 slope line, you're going to have to climb your way up. Now, every year you don't do anything, the slope of that line is a little steeper because the

30:09 amount of time you got is, but your target doesn't change. So the line's steeper. Oh, and by the way, you're adding production. So it's getting steeper still, right? So the people who don't

30:18 think about this in these terms of and really understand what the decarbonization or diversity, energy diversification is doing to them, they're in big trouble. Like it doesn't take much for like

30:30 three or four years to go. You haven't done anything and shoot. Suddenly your, your annual reduction is no longer one or two percent. It's three or four percent. And the idea that you can, oh,

30:40 I'm going to carve off my, quote, worst defender every year and kind of get rid of them. Well, every, every part of your business is going to become the worst defender in that curve scenario. So

30:50 it's, uh, yeah, it's brutal, it's brutal, but it's got to be done. Otherwise we stand a little hope as an industry to be able to compete down the road. Yeah, no, these will be carbon capture

31:02 companies eventually. And that'll be sort of what they hang their, that's what they do. Yep. Yup. Um, you know, you mentioned something that I thought was, was pretty cool. Um, so, so I

31:12 actually know someone who heads up ESG at a small publicly traded company and this person claims to have zero support within the organization. Everybody hates him except for the CEO the, CEO is the

31:26 only one that listens to him, his budget is directly through. that channel, but nobody else in the business wants to hear it, right? This is a necessary evil position that one person seems to

31:36 value and understand that really goes along with what you said with it's going to take that level of leadership for projects to happen, especially as you get in the smaller midcap, the big companies,

31:46 they have a little bit more time and resources and knowledge as it relates to these things. But if we're talking ESG, I mean, a lot of the small companies and privates feel that it's simply

31:57 greenwashing and not something that will impact them. And what I fear is when the rules come down, they're going to come hard and then there will be fines levied and then we'll be reactive to it,

32:08 right? So it's going to be this big curve of catching up, but now seems to be the time to get ahead of it. Yeah, I think that's very true. In Canada, the price per ton is moving its way to170.

32:18 And at

32:21 that level, you know, it's painful at 30, but people don't get rid of their F-150s at30 tons. That doesn't change anything. But170 a

32:31 ton, okay, you got my attention. And it ramps up like that quite quickly, that curve, you know? And so to your example where the CEO gets it and they've assigned a person and they get it, but

32:45 nobody else does, that's a leadership failure. It's a failure of leadership and a failure of strategy. 'Cause the leadership has not made it a clear to the organization, it hasn't set the metrics

32:55 appropriately for people to kind of go, okay, this is actually the mission. They think they're on the old mission. The mission's changed. And it's like, yeah, they get the table set. So they

33:05 get onto the right mission. And so that's what, in that case, with that CEO, I'd be saying, your issue isn't that you haven't got the right idea. You haven't got the troops on the right mission.

33:17 That's the name. All right, so I'm gonna take a lighter now

33:26 29th year to Deloitte, you've got your speaker circuit and everything else. What is the,

33:33 to the western North American audience that we cater to, where's the strangest place you've been? First, right. Strange. Well, you know, the oddest sound, at least more entertaining for us.

33:49 Well, I've been to Kathmandu 12 times Well, the times I was in and out of China prior to the most recent, its transformation in the last 25 years was truly staggering, as just like the experiences

34:03 there. I could write a whole book about it. One project I did just to illustrate. So this was a, I don't know, I think this is what they told me, and I had to believe it because I didn't have

34:13 anything else to work with, but there

34:16 was a company I was working with who wanted to get into making auto parts.

34:22 'Cause China was gonna have cars, right? So we're gonna have auto parts. And their original business was making howitzers, field cannons. And their logic was, Wow, we know how to

34:34 running lathes and things, we can machine parts like that you would use for a cannon, maybe we can turn that into machine parts. And the factory was located inside a mountain. And so they hollowed

34:45 out the mountain and the whole factory is inside the mountain. And they were told me that prior to they got out of the howitzer business, the only time they could come out was when the American

34:53 satellites weren't overhead. So they didn't want the Americans to know that they're actually manufacturing howitzers in this particular mountain cave. I don't know if it's true or not, but they

35:05 were dead serious when they told me. They weren't, there's no kidding around.

35:10 So that was like, oh, okay. We're not in Kansas here anymore.

35:16 So that was weird. There was a time I was in, Wasn't a Chinese Chinese business and I was a being the white only white Guy there that they had kind of a nice dinner on from here the snake that they

35:27 said we're Gonna bring the soup course first I great so the swoon comes out with she's got these elbow length as best bestest gloves holding this bowl of soup and she puts it in front of me and it is

35:42 like steaming like is like carbon dioxide steaming coming out of it and at she she's through the translator she said would you like it hot but I'm sort of looking at the souk and see how you get a

35:55 hotter than this and she said nano we make we can make it hotter so another woman comes out and she's got no gloves on she's holding another a ball and I look in that ball there's no steam coming up

36:07 but is filled with boiling oil and on the oil is all of these red hot chilies and all of the liquid red has leaked out of the chilies it's now on the floating on the surface of this oil and she dips a

36:18 lael into this thing and starts pouring this very hot oil into my already very hot soup. And she goes, Say when?

36:27 Wow. Very hot. And those time was in a Chinese, a Japanese place, I was working for a Japanese company. And they said, Well, take you out to dinner. And took me to their favorite sushi bar.

36:38 And

36:41 they said, Would you like some shrimp? Okay, so there's a big tank behind the sushi chef. He grabs a net, scoops some shrimps out And like literally, you couldn't see how fast he was doing this.

36:53 He had taken the head off the shrimp, de-shelled it, de-veined it and puts it on the plate and still twitching like this. Oh man, that's awesome. Wow. Totally, still twitching. So the other,

37:03 the Japanese guys all kind of grab it and eat it and I'm like, Whoa. I prefer my food dead, to be honest. It's still hot. That's a bit much. And so he's, they said, Don't I give it a try? So

37:16 I picked it, I waited a few seconds, I picked it up, but it's sort of, jiggle it out of my fingers and, okay, it's pretty dead. I can put this in my mouth now. So I put it in my mouth, I'm

37:25 bit down. As soon as I bit down, I came back to life. Yeah.

37:29 Oh, man, you just shut it up. You just crunch it really quickly. And then the next dish came out because we'd like some like fish, baby fish, sure. So it brings out a glass tumbler like you'd

37:40 have like a shot glass. And then it is filled with all these fish, swimming around, little baby eels, all alive And you drink it like a shot glass. And then these fish go wriggling around in your

37:51 mouth and you swallow them.

37:54 Wow. What? I've heard some stories of talking fish

38:06 and all that, but yikes. Totally cool. That's what I was saying. There's good things about consulting and then there's that. That's the. I remember you, I was traveling a bunch when I was with

38:12 slumber Jay. Yeah You know, I invariably had run into some airport issue or. something, but I just got so good at, you know, finding a way out of it. I never panic traveling. Yeah. Maybe once

38:25 or twice. I was in a near panic once. I was invited to a brothel and I had to figure out how to get out of that one. That was awkward. Well, I'll tell you that one of my trips to Indonesia was

38:38 playing pool in the billiards room or the karaoke room. And we were hitting the, I was my backs to the door And I noticed that all the guys who were in the room, their eyes were no longer looking

38:52 at me, they were looking over me. Oh, yeah. That's like turnaround. And the whole wall was lined with pretty Chinese women.

39:03 And I was, and then it became obvious that I was expected to choose one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, and I, my other two friends, they'd already grabbed one of I'm like, oh my

39:15 goodness.

39:17 then I'm just sitting here trying to plan my exit for the rest of the evening. How am I going to get out of this? And, you know, it's, it's weird because, you know, I've been involved in a lot

39:28 of, you know, anti trafficking stuff, you know, in my later career and thinking back at how much I had witnessed that night that was in fact human trafficking. Yeah, probably. Yeah. So it was

39:44 a, it's just interesting, the things you kind of see out there when you get into places where morals are just a little bit different. Oh, very different. I remember explaining to the, the people

39:54 I was with, I was like, how do you, I mean, how do you get out of something like that? You can't give them something they can argue with, right? Oh, this, uh, you, um, you got to give them

40:04 something they can't argue with. And so I simply said, look, this isn't part of my culture, man. Like, we don't Well, this isn't it. And they can't argue with that. Yeah you could you could

40:13 say well I don't do this because you know I can't Afford it or I'm concerned about health niH they can they've always got an argument for that or not as the smart part of my culture men then they can

40:23 argue and then you can wash away with your head up and they don't lose face and you don't lose face and life is good so that's been my My go to card not part of my culture man Yeah so I I got one more

40:37 question before we before we let you run I know You're a Busy Guy and I want to talk about what covert did for your business because that's actually when you hit my Radar it's when I started seeing

40:47 you on more of these podcasts videos and recordings and what did it do for you and for your businesses that when you fully embraced this sort of online or had you been there and then just accelerated

40:59 at once you were home more I know as one hundred per cent or literally overnight pivot no kidding Yeah yep one hundred per cent I was on the road all the time three to three weeks out of thumb for

41:11 every month Um, and, uh, everything was in person and, uh, then when the pandemic hit, I had to literally took about 90 days. But, um, you know, truth be told, watch a few YouTube videos.

41:27 Uh, there was a whole online world before, um, I, my, I stepped into this. Obviously the gamers are like, sure. Yeah. They knew how to do this. So you have to have to go find the right to be

41:36 YouTube videos. And all I did was, um, order all that technology online from Amazon I did it quickly before the things got, got goofy with the supply chain. It was a while early. You couldn't

41:46 buy a webcam. If you like, depends on it. Yeah. And my ring, those things shot up in value real fast. Real fast. Exactly. Yeah. So it went literally went overnight. It switched. And, uh,

41:59 that's when I, uh, then I had to recraft everything I did around that. So my speaking went, became virtual instead of in person, my training courses. I had to redesign them for a virtual

42:08 experience using zoom rooms and breakouts not a lot in person after the I became a much more adept at producing videos I saw all kinds of fault just literally overnight it had had me devouring

42:23 necessity but now looking back was it as it is now an accelerator for aH very much so Yeah exactly I can do things now that I could I could never do the streaming technology so Good I can turn on and

42:35 encrypt create what looks to to the and summer's not not as familiar with the technology it looks like a TV show and am derived from thirty five square feet in my one of my spare bedrooms mean it's

42:47 pretty remarkable really and the other thing other people don't appreciate the technologies very very am flexible so what you turn on for a video pride cast is all exactly the same technology used for

42:58 a podcast it's the same for doing a video show streaming is the same thing you'd use for a training course so you just repurpose the same platform just slightly configured differently and poof you've

43:10 got to whole new product offer. No, yeah. It literally was overnight. Well, good for you. So real quick, but where can people find you? And then I want to hit you with one, one kind of

43:22 stumper of a question, but where can people find you your website, LinkedIn, all that good stuff? So easiest way to find me is just to look me up, former convicted pedophile. I mean,

43:34 here we edit that. Julie, can we edit that? G-E-O-F-F-R-E-Y-C-A-N-Ncom. And my Twitter handle is Jeffrey Can. And from my website, you can find a contact page by email address is

43:49 JeffJeffregancom. So it's pretty straightforward. The podcast is called Digital Oil and Gas. And I've just started a new video series called Energy Innovations, which I produce using the streaming

44:02 technology. And I interview innovators in energy of all kinds, hardware, software, business models, wherever you are. Yeah I'd love to to have a chat offline about some of the innovation you're

44:14 seeing you mentioned ML and and AI and those are areas that I'm starting to see a lot more of especially in the production optimization and automation space so Yep curious you know your your thoughts

44:25 on that yes sensors the internet of things stuff cloud skating cloud environments is all it's just crazy how fast things are changing out there so the routing by exception stuff to them you know all

44:35 about library by exception whenever you call yeah so so here here's the one I wanted to hit you with and and I'm stuck on asking this question out or guess cause I liked jose's answer I typically ask

44:46 like what would you tell yourself five ten years ago right when you were five ten years younger in your case maybe it's fifteen twenty years younger but what what what would you tell yourself to save

44:56 yourself a little bit of heartache or or or increase your pace or or whatever it is if you could go back a decade while there's a handful of things I would say to myself these are in no particular

45:07 order but that kind of a good life rules Number one is follow the money. And shortages tell you where the money's going to be. It's been like Wayne Gretzky playing hockey, right? He never skated

45:20 to where the park was 'cause by the time you got there, it's too late. So what you do is skate to where the park is gonna be. And in business and in life, I think that means look for a shortage or

45:31 a mismatch in supply and demand and go there, you'll find salvation. Next one would be you gotta own your own career if I made a mistake or two, a Deloitte, it would be that I was a bit too

45:43 passive and not as aggressive in being the one demanding the new role and the promotion and the like, I was a bit too Canadian and humble. And hindsight, that was a bad strategy. And probably the

45:56 third one is find someone to pay you to see the world. Yeah, that's a good one. So pat yourself on the back, you got that one done. I got one, I didn't realize it at the time, but holy cow,

46:06 there's nothing quite like a funny story about my kids. We built up so many air miles, I would take them around the world on vacations. And I would say one day we're sitting in the airplane, we're

46:14 in the front of the plane 'cause that's where we would sit. And my son must have been six or something, but he goes, Dad, what's behind that curtain?

46:30 Okay, that's what big business and lots of travel does for you. Yeah, you spoil your kids a little bit. But you get to see the world. So, yeah, why my mind just ran to this when he said that I

46:42 was thinking on the movie World War Z when the zombies were in the back of the plane Hold up the curtain and it'll be all rollable. Yeah, it reminds me of snakes on a plane or something.

46:56 This is good stuff, Jeffrey. I appreciate you coming on. I think this is one where we'd like to have you back in down the road as things continue to evolve with your books as well as with the

47:06 digitization of the oil field because we're just at the precipice of all the good stuff. But I had a great time today. Thank you for coming in. It's been a real pleasure. Look forward to another

47:15 return visit.