Students don't trust oil executives at the 2018 ONS conference - Soul of Innovation

Welcome to the Soul of Innovation podcast. My name is Thomas Anglero, and, uh, this episode I want to discuss with you my reflections on attending the world's second largest oil and gas conference in Stavanger. The name of the conference is called ONS. It's my first time attending it this 2018. It was very different than other conferences I've attended, and I've attended— well, that doesn't matter— a lot of conferences. A lot of us attend a lot of conferences, but I attend a lot of these IT-type conferences. We have very different people than oil and gas, obviously nothing different there. But what's interesting in attending such a conference, an oil and gas conference of that magnitude in 2018, is by looking back at what has happened to the oil and gas industry. Very much so the oil industry in the last 2-3 years with the decimation of the value of the price per barrel of oil, which went as high as $150+ and dropped down to the $40s, $40 per barrel. I think it went down lower than that, maybe to $36 a barrel. It's now making a climb, and as of the time of me talking here today, I believe we're in the high $60 per barrel. What happens when you have an industry that started back in, wow, let's say the '40s? Oh no, before that, way before that. What am I talking about? Way before that, and slowly climbed up and became really, a lot of people call the oil industry and the people that run the oil industry, the people who actually are running the world, if you follow that train of thought, that they are the oil barons, the money barons, the people who control the World Banks and things like that. But regardless, the fact is Whether you want to call these people conspiracy theorists or not, people who control oil do have incredible influence on our world. And these were the people who I was with this past week for the first time in their setting. And that's the first time in their setting. What I saw, get to the point, is that though they have insane amount of money still, The stance, the type of talk they had, the cockiness, the pleasant arrogance, if that is possible, where a person is overly confident but in a very pleasant manner. It's actually something I learned, and that was a good, good thing to learn this past week. But when looking deep into their eyes and when discussing disruption which is what I was there to talk about. I had two sessions. I had one speech, and then second, I was moderating a panel of several famous high-end CEOs. And talking to these people, looking at them, when we got to disruption, they had learned how to digest renewables, renewable energy, solar, wind, energy, and that didn't bother them anymore. They faced this question, they faced this disruption for quite some time, and they've learned not to show their card of that they are quite uncomfortable with that disruption. So there was a session I attended, and they had a high-level executive on stage with some students, and this one student did a fantastic job because the executive said that we are committed to their own oil and gas executive, of course, and they said they are committed to continuing to fund, increase their funding in the oil and gas sector, and that if you look at their history, that they in the past year, they've invested a tremendous amount of money into, sorry, into renewables, not into oil and gas, sorry. The student looked at him without hesitation, says, excuse me, sir, but I disagree with you strongly. I looked at your annual report and it shows that you've invested less than 1% of your profits into renewables. And yet this gentleman was saying they're planning a significant amount. He's saying they were talking about above 40%. He was caught lying on stage. And he had no answer other than, uh, uh, well, I would have to check that out. You see, what is happening now is that the existing powers that be don't have an answer for what's happening now. They don't have a plan that guarantees them profits. Definitely not profits. But their biggest concern is they don't have a plan that guarantees their existence in the near future. Definitively, in the long-term future. That is what I saw at this conference. What has worked before in the oil and gas era, if we call it that, which is slowly coming— not even slowly, it was coming to an end, and as of now it's accelerating, and it is coming to an end. That era lasted very close to 100 years, and it's the same philosophy: dig a hole in the ground, whether it be on soil or in oceans, pull up the oil, get some gas with it, resell it extremely high price, make a lot of money, sit back, hire poor people, pay them almost nothing, and you reap all the profits. That business model, that revenue model, is coming to an end, and they're not a part of the new one because they forgot what it is, a new business model. They forgot how to create a new revenue model. These people have become so damn lazy intellectually. They've never been intellectually smart. After 100 years of doing the same thing, you don't need to be intellectually smart. So at this student conference that I attended, there were 200 students there. What I saw was that these students, they saw through all of these executives here. I talked to a whole bunch of them after my presentation, and they said, 'We cannot bond when not one of these oil and gas executives here. Not one of them do we believe. We know they're not true because we've already done our homework. We will never work for them. And that's the other thing, another point taken away. These executives in oil and gas companies, there are few of them. Few of those companies can hire young people, but their number one complaint, and they even said it on stage, that's how bad it is where they admit their flaw on stage. They said the following: We cannot get anyone to come work for us. There is almost no oil and gas students in universities. The kids are not interested in studying oil and gas. And when I talked to them, not only were they not interested, but it was, it was actually— how do they word it— close to insanity to even think toward working oil and gas. Not because of the money, not because the type of work, it's because the association it has to everything wrong with our world, our planet today. Think about it. Business today is driven by motivation, my personal values, not driven by what oil and gas was driven by for the last 100 years, which is and was money. Those days are dying and coming to an end quickly. This wave, and it's a permanent wave. It's not even a wave because a wave has ebbs and flows, right? Like tide ebbs and flows. This wave is not a wave. It's a layer. It's like sediment. Over time, the, you know, the soil settles and we get a new layer on top of the old earth. That's what we're experiencing now. This new sediment is burying oil and gas and it's not coming back. We'll be able to look back on it. We'll be able to reflect on it and say, wow, look at those days. But that is a layer of sediment that we'll never see again. It was an interesting conference in that reflect— reflection, in that sense, that I didn't see the answer. They didn't speak the answer. They didn't have the answer. A few of them talked about Uber. A few of them mentioned Airbnb. And when they did, what was really interesting is they didn't know how to talk about it. Because in their world, they laughed at these things, and now they're forced to mention these things on stage to gain some credibility with the audience. But yet they don't know how to speak the words. It's like, you know, you're forced when you're a kid and your parents say, "Eat the broccoli," and you're chewing the broccoli, you don't want to eat the broccoli. That's the same face they had on stage when they mentioned air BMB. They were eating broccoli. So, summarize this whole thing. Now is your moment. The ideas you got are not crazy. The ideas you got are perfectly timed. Back in the dot-com days, I thought anything was possible. I didn't understand what the dot-com days were about when they were happening. I never lived through anything like that before. Here we are again, and it's totally different. This is not got the dot-com rhythm, but this is that thing of like any idea is huge, and it ain't about money, it's about all of us. So go for it. I, I, this is absolutely the time. We have the cloud, we have open APIs, we have everything that has never existed before for one individual to just launch a global company and change the world. I'm constantly seeing in the news people from India and Pakistan who are entrepreneurs, have a small company, and they're already global and they're making millions. If that's important to you, but they're helping to save people's lives. It doesn't matter if you're in a third world country, you're super poor, go find a damn library, go find a PC and hack it together. Take a whole bunch of friends and beg a corporation, maybe you do their dishes in exchange for internet time, and get yourself doing something. And if you're in a Western civilization where you got everything, you ain't got no damn excuse. Why haven't you done something? Why haven't you? The world leaders of oil and gas who control the money flow, control the oil flow, and continue to control energy are losing their grasp And they don't have an answer for us for tomorrow, so the answer is us, and the answer is you. Go do something. I got your back. This is Thomas Anglero, Soul Illumination Podcast. Take care, go forth and spread beauty and light. Till next time.