Power Struggle
Improving the energy dialogue in Canada (and beyond) through honest, non-partisan, and fact- based conversations.
The energy conversation is personal: it’s in our homes, in our hands, and now, it’s in our ears. Power Struggle invites you to listen in on honest, non-partisan, and fact-based conversations between host Stewart Muir and the leaders and thinkers designing modern energy.
Watch videos at https://www.youtube.com/@PowerStrugglePod
Power Struggle
The Energy Whisperer: Peter Tertzakian on Trust, Transition & the Power of Perception
What if the secret to understanding Canada’s energy future lies not in spreadsheets but in storytelling?
In this exclusive Power Struggle episode, renowned energy economist, author, and visual communicator Peter Tertzakian sits down with Stewart Muir to explore how we decode complexity, build trust, and make better decisions in a noisy, polarized world.
From photographing power lines to developing real-time AI diagnostic tools, Peter reveals how his unique blend of artistry and analytics is helping decision-makers, from cabinet ministers to CEOs, navigate the fast-changing energy landscape.
Why are Canadians still missing the signal behind the noise?
How can visual storytelling change how we talk about power, pipelines, and policy?
What does the “Studio” model mean for the future of energy intelligence?
Whether you're an investor, policymaker, or just energy-curious, this is one conversation you’ll want to revisit.
Don’t miss this wide-ranging discussion on trust, transition, and the tools we need to thrive in a world of energy abundance and information overload.
Watch now. Think deeper.
The energy conversation is polarizing. But the reality is multidimensional. Get the full story with host Stewart Muir.
Reach out to us with thoughts, questions, or ideas at info@powerstruggle.ca
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Algorithms and digital signal processing, that's what they work to do, is separate the signal from the noise. So our brain does it whether it's visually through imagery or whether it's our ears and our hearing through the audio. Uh we're signal processing all the time.
SPEAKER_02:I'm Stuart Muir, and today I'm joined by a friend of mine for over a decade, Peter Tertzakian. Peter is a true renaissance man in Canada's energy conversation. He's a financier, an economist, an explainer. He's a rare talent in the resource sector, someone who can speak to staunch supporters, skeptics, and even opponents, melding his problem-solving skills with deep compassion for those facing energy poverty. Peter's an artist, a photographer whose exhibitions tell the human story of energy. And as the co-host of Canada's most downloaded and influential energy podcasts, Peter is able to use his voice and deep knowledge to shed light on these important topics. So please welcome my friend, Peter Tertzakian. Peter, I saw you had an exhibition in Canmore again this summer. Not your first photographic exhibition.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, it's uh in the Canmore Gallery. It's called the Peter Tertzakian Gallery now. And it's some space that I've taken up. And it shows the works that I have assembled over the course of my career, and even before I first started photography when I was 15, back in the days of film, dark rooms, and so on. And it's given me an appreciation for how to communicate with clarity, how to communicate with different mediums, visual, audio, and others. But the Canmore Gallery is definitely a visual place. But we can talk about it more in terms of what the purpose it serves.
SPEAKER_02:I I would like to because your your images are not just, you know, aesthetically appealing and you you must find a lot of people uh appreciate it because you seem to have a a lot of uh works that you put up on the walls and someone comes and and buys them and goes off with them and you've got another one to put in its place. Um you're doing something popular and people appreciate it, but it runs into the center of your work because your pictures are about energy.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. So my core work is all about energy, particular emphasis on the finance of energy, the economics of energy, different energy systems. And the works really, as I like to say, or actually, as people say, picture is worth a thousand words, right? You've heard that. Well, I have always said picture is worth a thousand spreadsheets. Because if you think about whether it's photography or art, you go to say a gallery or a museum, you stand in front of the photograph or the image, and you think about it, right? Okay, what does it mean? And that's sort of that thousand words. And hopefully, if it if it captures you, you are thinking about it. Or if you're with someone, you start talking about the image and what it means. And so what I try and capture in the world of energy are two things. Uh, number one, energy infrastructure. Something as simple as, say, power lines is one example, sort of my current themes that I'm working on. Not a lot of people actually even notice power lines anymore. Right? You're walking down the street and there's power lines all over the place, or you're driving and you don't even see it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Because it's almost like your brain filters it out. What the photograph does, especially if it's artistically composed and framed, is it makes you think, oh, I didn't realize that was above my head. I didn't realize. And so there's also the written materials that we hope to also we're gonna be turning into audio that helps you appreciate the energy around you and what it means in terms of our society and things like more electrification. Okay, well, more electrification means more wires. So let's talk about that. Let's think about that. Are we gonna notice them? Does it affect the viewscape? How do these things affect us? I mean, that's just one example.
SPEAKER_02:Well, I imagine you walking around some city in Scotland and you've got your camera with you, and you're you're turning up to look at the the the chimney pots or the uh the wires. You're you're like, what's the expression? A busman's holiday. You go on holiday, you're looking at energy things, but it's it's not a mere holiday. I mean, you you've you've processed uh kind of worldview. And this is why I find it so fascinating because uh what I didn't know of your your other work that we're gonna talk about is is that you're sharing a way of seeing. And I don't think there's a lot of financiers and economists who who have that visualization the way they see the world, uh, as you do.
SPEAKER_01:For real. Yeah, no, I I don't know of any other. Uh that's not to say there isn't, and try and remain humble about it. But you know, the idea of visually capturing as a means, as an adjunct, actually, it's not the only means, of conveying complex subject matter and energy that augment the numbers that we also produce, because I'm actually a very technical person, is the magic. Because if you just present the numbers on their own charts, graphs, tables, and so on, frankly, it's rather dry. And so I've always, in my work, said, well, how can we make it more uh approachable? How can we make it so everybody around the table understands this better? And that's where the imagery comes in. And it's not necessarily all my works uh, you know, like I find imagery from all sorts of sources. But I have a fairly large collection, probably about 120,000 images that I've taken through my travels around the world or domestically. And uh I routinely think about which ones to put in a presentation, as obscure as they me, as obscure as maybe chimney pots in Scotland to illustrate that, okay, this is an obsolete energy system. Don't burn coal in a in a fireplace anymore.
SPEAKER_02:Aaron Ross Powell These artworks you have in in your gallery, they they're based on, I think often a quite austere black and white image that's a stark, uh high contrast, but then you've got a splash of color on it, and and that makes it jump out.
SPEAKER_01:Makes it pop. Yeah. So it's also uh the ability to get the eye to focus in on one thing that may be important. So the use of color. I've done deep dives also on color theory and the use of color, or making or findings in the imagery that I'm gonna photograph a strong color that I can see that brings some subject matter out and then turn everything else black and white using Photoshop or other techniques is uh is a technique that I like.
SPEAKER_02:It seems to me you're becoming more refined and getting to the thing that matters at this point in your your your career as an artist. Because I think back to, you know, some when I first got to know you work probably over a decade ago, and I got to know you uh around that same time, uh, I was reading stories you'd written where you would often have an image that was the center. There was that one from I think Halifax where you found somehow uh a found object, a utility bill from a hundred and some odd years ago, and you you saw the story in that. And you've got this wonderful essay or short story about everything you could learn from this document from that. And that was a story, and it took words and it took a picture to tell that story. But that's is that where you started in telling energy stories?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that was uh the utility bill was quite unique, and that's another type of genre of imagery, which is objects. So I've got a large collection of obscure energy artifacts and objects, and I have a studio that I would photograph them in. Now, photographing an old utility bill is not particularly difficult, but the magic comes in actually being able to now zoom in on different parts of the utility bill to show, okay, this rubber stamps in 19, it was November 1915, I think. And then what's fascinating about it, at least to me, because others would find it rather obscure, is okay, well, let's uh do a deep dive into who the person was. Let's do a deep dive into what the price at that time of gas was. How much has the price of gas inflated or not since 1915? What are the lessons we can learn about the person who received the utility bill? And indeed, it's quite remarkable in a sense that this was a wealthy lumber baron in Halifax who received the utility bill. We didn't know. We saw the address, so we we were able to trace it down. So we understood also that natural gas at that time was very expensive. And it was only someone like a wealthy lumber baron that could afford to buy a gas water heater or and a gas stove. And so you get a sense for the transition from wood stove to gas stove, from uh probably you know, heating up your water using some other type of combustion, say wood logs underneath the bathtub, right, versus a hot water tank, which was so much more convenient. And then we understand the conditions under which you know this notion of energy transition occurs. So whether it's uh the utility bill or whether it's the photograph of chimneys or other infrastructure, by the way, you know, the East Coast and Europe is a fascinating place to take these kinds of photographs because they're so steeped in hundreds of years of history, in the case of Europe, even more, certainly thousands if you go to the Breek Islands and places like that. But you get a sense of how society has evolved with their energy needs and their energy appliances. And these are lessons that then I juxtapose and bring forward to today and say, okay, we want to electrify, we want to try and get off gas stoves. What's it gonna take? Right. Well, we can look back not only at the research we did. Oh, but by the way, I've got the utility bill, and I've got the story of the character that uh was behind this utility bill, and here's his demographic profile, and we get a sense of a much richer story that can then precede any technical analysis that we may use to try and figure out how adoption may occur today.
SPEAKER_02:And you see these stories in the built environment, usually, things you can photograph that take this abstraction, that's too visual.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. So whether it's uh whether it's uh photographing infrastructure and buildings, again, I'll say it again, if you go to Europe and just look around, you can see on either inside or outside buildings evidence of multiple transitions, right? In obscure things like utility bills and uh other artifacts that I have. Even I've got a collection of you know, irons for clothes. And the evolution of the iron is quite fascinating in terms of uh all the different types of fuels that were used over history and how, again, society transitioned to the different kinds of irons, which was really a story about transition of fuels. What started out as a passion for just photography turned into a personal quest to understand how to communicate complex subjects within energy more effectively and tie it to the dry numerical analysis that we are accustomed to today.
SPEAKER_02:And you've done it in such a uh a pleasing way with what you've shown in in Canmore, which I haven't been able to get to yet. Oh, well, you know, come. I I'm I'm going to. I almost got there this summer and I was ready to go, and then um I was driving through Bath National Park and I just had to get to the coast.
SPEAKER_01:But it's online. You can take a look at it.
SPEAKER_02:You know, you you mentioned energy transition. This is something on on power struggle. We've talked about a lot. There's there's a new book um by Jean-Baptiste Frose. He's the French energy historian. He actually argued, less as a number of uh energy scholars have, that there isn't really an energy transition in the sense that we're transitioning to you know less energy or uh leaving entirely different forms. He made the argument that there's this energy addition. And I mean, you could get lost in the semantics of these terms when you go into the world of uh energy history, but but um just the sense that there is a an assumption that the world is moving in one direction towards uh having uh decarbonization sort of happen because of policies and uh technologies becoming available. And then this other one, when you look at the charts, and you know, you can say, well, that's great. I'm glad we're transitioning to something that is better. But then you look at, well, as that's happening, we seem to be using just more coal every year, notwithstanding what the International Energy um uh agency is projecting, and they have to update their projections downward every couple of years because they they keep going upward. And then uh humans are just wanting to have more energy in their lives. And whether you feel that's right or wrong, I mean, uh it's happening.
SPEAKER_01:It is happening, and I I I would agree. I use the term diversification. It's a diversification. It's a diversification of the sources of energy that we you know now having more diversification into renewable energy sources, which are not really anything new. I mean, we've used wind and sun uh many generations past. So, I mean, it's uh it's a diversification and it's a necessary diversification because as you point out, uh the population grows. By the way, I mean, you know, people associate population growth with energy consumption growth, which is correct, but it isn't the dominant variable in what drives energy uh growth and the need for more energy, is not so much population, but uh the growth and wealth creation. So if you have population growth in a dominantly rural agrarian circumstance, such as uh a developing nation in the rural circumstance, I mean, and the addition of another person into that circumstance does not consume a lot more energy. But the minute a person from a rural agrarian circumstance moves into a city, their energy consumption, by my measure, goes up about 20 times, minimum. Minimum. And if they go into a North American context where we tend to be bigger in everything that we are appliances, whether it's from refrigerators to vehicles, uh, you're talking 30 to 40 times.
SPEAKER_02:Now, has that ratio held true through say early modern times into modernity, or is this a kind of a modern phenomenon up there?
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's my measure of it over the course of the last sort of post-World War II.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, so in recent century almost.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah. So your your per capita energy consumption in a rural agrarian uh low-income environment, more or less what we would call a sustainable kind of economy, is relatively very low. But the minute you move into a city, you say, well, okay, I need an apartment, I need a refrigerator, I need to start moving around, I need to uh you know, cook different way. Uh it's just it's just a a massive amplification of energy need. And so the the dominant factor over the course of the last couple of decades uh has been the urbanization of China. I mean, people in China moving from that rural agrarian context into the city and the incredible development and expansion of their cities. So, you know, necessarily you say, well, where's the energy coming from? To support this rapid migration and wealth creation, uh, the pull has had to come from all sources. So, in this regard, renewable energy has only really served to uh dampen the aggressive further growth of the fossil fuels, and it's been an adjunct. And had renewable energy not come into the mix, then our use of fossil fuels would have been substantially higher yet. But it's still growing, as you point out.
SPEAKER_02:Now, someone watching Power Struggle this episode might have said, Well, this is a really interesting photographer. I don't know who this Peter Tredzakian fellow is, but he sounds like he's got a great visual thing. But you you know a lot about energy, and that's because you're a financier and economist. You're also an advisor to uh prime ministers, to uh uh provincial, federal governments, to industry. And you're you're so much more than a photographer. Um tell me about your uh educational training.
SPEAKER_01:What uh what did you prepare to follow this career? I would say my my educational training has been a little bit like uh brownian motion, uh, which is a physics term, which is appropriate because I started out in physics. That was my first degree. I took a little bit of geology and then I became a geophysicist. I had the opportunity to go either into mining or oil and gas. I went to oil and gas and spent the first uh eight to ten years of my career exploring, developing, but from a very technical perspective. I was a theoretician, mostly a mathematician, and uh developed a lot of algorithms for what is commonplace today, obviously, is the digital world and signal processing. But uh I won't reveal my age, but uh I put it this way uh the digital revolution came to CDs in the 1980s. And I looked at that and go, wow, this is just an extension of what we're doing in terms of the signal processing that we do in terms of processing sound waves as we try and map out the subsurface of the earth. So I have a very technical background. Then I went back and did an economics degree uh with an emphasis on econometrics. I had my personal nature, I like to do deep dives into subject. And uh at a period in my life when I was more impulsive, I said, okay, I'm dropping this geophysics gig, I'm going into economics and econometrics. Well, guess what I found is the mathematical algorithms you use in doing signal processing and physics and uh statistics. There's a lot of statistics. Well, it's these are the same kind of algorithms in trying to instead of predict what's under the ground, you're trying to predict economic forecasting. And so it was all very interesting. And what is most interesting as I sit here today is that all those algorithms are the foundation for AI. I mean, artificial intelligence is nothing new. It was really started well, maybe even before my time. But, you know, the first hints of talking about that was in the 1980s and 1990s, I think is when the term was coined. I could be corrected on that. But so, you know, if you look today at what underpins a lot of the AI algorithms, it's basically the statistical construct. And what's different today is just the ability to use the computational power in ways we could never even conceive of back even 10, 20 years ago.
SPEAKER_02:And now amazingly, the signal processing needed to process data about geophysics in the finding of energy like oil, petroleum underground, which required certain methods. That's right. Was later used to develop CDs for the public to enjoy doing that.
SPEAKER_01:Which is also used in Photoshop algorithms. But the thing that came first was the pursuit of energy that begat product. This is a good point because the oil and gas industry in the 70s and 80s, particularly the early 80s, uh had the second most amount of computational power after the weather agencies. At least that was the stat that was quoted to me in the 1980s. And the uh I worked for a big multinational, and the computational power of that time with mainframe computers in that context of the 1980s was staggering. And I was fortunate enough as somewhat of a nerdy person at that time to be able to use that computational power and uh knowledge. And I mean, that's been foundational for me because what's also foundational, and it gets back to, you know, you talked about the color in the images. And, you know, I think we share both the pursuit of trying to clarify, right? Clarify messages. What is that is trying to separate the signal from the noise? Right. Well, algorithms and digital signal processing, that's what they work to do, separate the signal from the noise. So our brain does it, whether it's visually through imagery or whether it's our ears and our hearing through the audio, uh, we're signal processing all the time. And that is really foundational as well in my pursuit, is because I know that people are bombarded by noise, especially today. And especially today, not all of that noise is true in the background. So, how do we now extract the signals, the veracity of what we are pursuing out of all the noise that's out there, and then use that signal to help influence better decisions, whether it's a policymaker, whether it's a corporate executive trying to make a big dollar decision, or other elements of society.
SPEAKER_02:So you have your art studio. You actually showed me around that uh a few years back. And I was amazed at the artifacts of energy history that you have in your studio. And that's where you make your images that are at your gallery. That's right. But um tell me about the studio you started two years ago.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So I decided to use the word studio. That's nothing novel. Uh, there's lots of studios like Dencture Studios and so on. Venture Studios are sort of backed by venture capitalists, typically to make products, whether it's a software product or a widget of some sort. Whereas Ivy is a studio that I've put together as a knowledge studio where knowledge is the product. And really, the studio that I established is really a culmination of my career and life's work, whether it's the artistic content, the written content in the books I've written and all the articles I've written. And then all this, all the analytic works and the analytic algorithms and IDs that we've used through my career in trying to help analysts make better decisions, whether it's through numbers, through the written word, or through visual aids.
SPEAKER_02:We are at a time when the proliferation of data everywhere has led us to think we know everything, but do we know everything?
SPEAKER_01:Well, let me put that question just on pause for a minute because it's worse than that. It's the proliferation of all this data and information is being is coming at us from multiple channels. And our brain has, as I said, filter through all of that to try and understand whether it's true or not, first of all, and then how to collate it all and compounding that or attention spans, I think you would agree, have substantially diminished. I mean, you know, the TikTok or YouTube short is now what, 30 seconds. Uh, try and get someone to read uh a chapter, let alone a book, these days. I mean, I'm I'm broadly generalizing, but I think you know what I mean. I it's just like, okay, I'd rather listen to a 30-second video rather than do a deep dive into a book. So it to me, it's a broader question uh uh that you're posing is uh especially for people in the knowledge business, which you're in. Yes, like your resource works is out there trying to gather information, distill it down, and through your podcasts and your other materials, trying to give people some sense of signal with veracity that they can trust that they can start doing some critical thinking. But what what is that really in terms of a knowledge sense from a product sense? Because the way I think about it is uh now from a business perspective, but you would call it market share. Right? But you know, in our sense, it's like we need mind share. But to get somebody's attention even for three seconds, so they'll listen for 30 more uh seconds, you gotta have a great opening line. You gotta have a great opening line. You have to have great clarity up front, and you have to have content that people are willing to come back to. I mean, the knowledge business as a product is one of the most difficult businesses out there because your product can often last only 30 seconds and then it's obsolete, right? Well, or certainly what is the shelf life of a report these days that somebody spends toiling hours writing a report?
SPEAKER_02:There's another one coming right behind it.
SPEAKER_01:Soil behind it, and then uh, you know, uh President Trump makes an announcement or some other thing happens in the world, and everything in the content of that report is now out of date.
SPEAKER_02:I I want to dig deeper into the complexity that you're in, but um just to give others a sense of how I you know see the the arc of your career, no pun intended. Uh Arc Energy Podcast is the most downloaded energy podcast in Canada. It probably ranks pretty pretty good internationally every week. You and Jackie Forrester there. And it just everyone in the energy game listens to it because you get great guests. You you're an explainer of Calgary to Ottawa. You're you're a Calgary whisperer from an Ottawa perspective because you can give insights. And anyone watching is probably thinking this this guy that uh Muir's interviewing, he's not my stereotype of an oil and gas guy from Calgary. He's got a very different approach to it. But then from uh a Calgary perspective, I think you've become known as a sort of Ottawa whisperer. You can explain why Calgary sees the world a certain way to the various bureaucrats and politicians and policy people in Ottawa. And it's not just about energy and finance. You've committed yourself to bring in the thing that the financial models and the climate models don't get in is that that phenomenon of carbon as a kind of feature of this but I don't want to start explaining that. I just all I want to say is that you are as accepted in Ottawa to explain outside things as you are in Calgary to explain outside things. No one else has that status. And I'm not saying that to flatter you, but I just think really you you are unique. So I want to understand how you've been able to, you know, acquire this ability to, you know, juggle that and and and how does your work with Studio Energy, you know, support that?
SPEAKER_01:You know, it's also provincial capitals and I would just say stakeholders at large that sometimes don't see eye to eye in terms of all these very sometimes contentious issues such as carbon policy or the approach to building infrastructure and so on and so forth. But to answer your question, it comes back to understanding knowledge as a product because uh you want to create a product that people will call buy in quotations. Okay. So we think about products, whether it's uh cell phone, a can of soda, a pop, or whatever, it has features and in economic parlance, it has utility, it has different elements of utility. So, what are the elements of utility that a customer wants? Trust they want trust in the knowledge that it has veracity, right? They want to know that it's timely, they want to know that it's unique, which is a unique product, and a whole bunch of other uh features of utility. So I wake up every morning paranoid about creating a quality knowledge product that has utility that appeals to all the different stakeholders, and sometimes it's very difficult because of the contentious nature of uh where we're at, and increasingly contentious because of the polarization of society that we're witnessing. Now I'm also, by the way, on that note, thinking that the polarization of society creates the opportunity for this kind of product. Because all of a sudden, particularly actually with AI, because now all of a sudden the customers are saying, I don't know what to trust. Right? That is the highest value utility in your product, dimension of utility in your product. So if you can create the ability to position the product as a desirable product with a lot of utility, that does not stray into a different kind of product, which I would call opinion. Because, especially opinion that is extreme, you cannot appeal to all of the different stakeholders by having a product that has this extreme dimension. And so it takes a tremendous amount of effort and knowledge manufacturing to create the product that I'm talking about. And step one is to be conscious of all these dimensions of utility. So that leads to the studio that I established is can we create a space that first of all brings in all of the collective works, uh, whether it's as I said, visual, written, audio, analytical, in under one umbrella, focus on energy, because that's been my life and my passion as the subject matter, particularly the finance of energy. And can we use it as a place to convene people using that product as the core convening attraction? That's basically the principle. And as a personal passion to try and dial down the contention. And um happy to say I think we're getting there. But it's hard. It's hard work. I like I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. It's uh first of all, the knowledge business, as you know, even if it resource works is the way I describe it. It is hard work. And so that's but that's only challenge one is uh you've got to keep the product coming off the assembly line. Uh it has to you cannot falter on the dimension of quality. Uh otherwise you will lose the dimension of trust.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Well, I can relate to your description of waking up in the morning and I'm I'm familiar with that anxiety. I think anyone who you know really is is deeply invested in whatever they do is is familiar with that feeling that just you can't you can't really escape it if you're that much invested into it personally.
SPEAKER_01:No, you can't. I mean, if you think about, I don't know, let's just take, for example, the product cycle of an iPhone, right? It's not comes out once a year in September. And you know, that's pretty aggressive. You can imagine the engineers working, at least I do. Okay, these people are working, trying to already think about not only next September, but several Septembers after. But that's the cycle. In the knowledge business, like the product cycle, as I say, I mean, it can only last sometimes a day or two, and you've got to move on, right? And you cannot for a moment stop thinking about the next piece of knowledge that's gotta come out.
SPEAKER_02:Now, there was a time when the people doing what you do, whether I'll bet you had classmates who went to work in hedge funds and got uh into that world, you you've pursued a very different path and you've stayed in the public realm, which I think is a an act of probably some sacrifice uh if you think of it that way. But you know, I think uh the Canadian discourse on energy is the better for it. So I'm I'm glad you uh uh made the choices you have. But um there was a time when a spreadsheet was the kind of uh the product of it. A static these cells are not changing or flashing, they're but moving through that because of some innovations that you are applying. That's right. In response to this problem of of needing the latest information because Trump sneezed or Putin invaded or Yes, definitely.
SPEAKER_01:I smile because uh you talk about the spreadsheet, but uh you know, I came from the calculator world, and uh even in one of my high school courses, we had to learn how to use a slide rule. Right. Uh but you know, this is informative because going from slide rule, and I remember uh it was in grade 12, and I went up to the math teacher who was trying to teach us how to use a slide rule, and I had with my summer earnings, the previous summer's earnings, bought a hand calculator, and I sort of went up to him and said, Why do we need to use a slide rule? This is calculator.
SPEAKER_02:I've got this Hewlett Packer thing. I spent uh$500 on this instrument. This Texas instruments.
SPEAKER_01:So I said, like, what do I need to learn how to use a slide rule for? And kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, Yeah, I get, I get it, right? Then so that was a major step change, and then came the spreadsheet with the particularly post-the introduction of the IBM personal computer circa 1980, 82 in there, of which I was an early adopter. And then, of course, it was Lotus 123 and then Excel. And now, you know, we go from the Excel world, of course, into the uh bespoke computational world of programming, and then into AI. Okay, I mean, this is the kind of step change. And so if you think about calculator, you think about spreadsheet as the, I mean, the ability to again manufacture knowledge through numbers. Now we're into this next generation of artificial intelligence, which I view as a tool. And so I'm doing deep dives into understanding okay, how can this help in the manufacturing of knowledge with veracity and in an extremely timely manner? And this I think this is where I'm getting to your question, is because with the way the world is changing, it seems on a weekly basis, with yet another announcement, whether it comes from the United States or China or the EU or wherever, like we don't know where it's coming from, right? That has impact of um and it's unpredictable. You say that well, every time one of these announcements comes out, you're in a fast-paced business. You want to know, well, what's the impact on my business? Or if you're a policymaker, if you're attained to this, well, okay, what does this mean? Or the finance department. Well, uh the sophistication, a lot of the entrenched ways of analyzing these numbers is in a spreadsheet. So somebody's got to go and type in all the numbers. Or if it's a sophisticated models, you have all these interlinked spreadsheets that start creaking is no good. Right. The decision maker can't wait for somebody to go run through this entire model. Like, I want to know now. So what we're developing in the studio are what I call real-time diagnostic models of the economy. Because we want to be piped in to the real-time indicators of markets and other things that we can either measure directly or indirectly through proxy to be able to get a picture of what's going on. So we're for now, we're focusing on the oil and gas economy, for which there's a lot of data, but not limited to that. Okay. But you know, this is super important because if you think about this personally, at a personal level, I mean, do you have a smartwatch? I mean, yes. Yes, you do. Okay. So a lot of people do, and a lot of people have these digital weight scales. I mean, I have one. You stand on the thing and it tells you not only your weight, but somehow magically it tells you your body fat and your BMI and this, that, and the other. You know, how does it know all that stuff, right? Uh well, the BMI might be easy, but like the body fat composition, et cetera. It deduces out of pulsing an electrical signal for your body. Okay. I I digress a little bit, but my point is that I get a real-time picture right now. Right now. My watch or my app tells me how many steps, tells me my heart rate, tells me all sorts of other things, uh, directly or indirectly. Uh maybe you go to a clinic, you get a blood test, an MRI, you get. So we're constantly monitoring our health, right? We want to know. We're almost paranoid in terms of, well, how many steps did I do today, or what's my weight, or what have you. And I take that analogy and I say, okay, we need this kind of real-time measurement and diagnostics of our economic situation. I can't wait for last quarter's economic report. I can't make decisions off that because in the interim between that report and today, so you know, President Trump might have made five announcements on tariffs that just completely upend. We may have an announcement from OPEC on the oil, and we might have something to do with Russian sanctions and what have you. Well, all these things affect markets, and that static measurement of the health of the economy is stale. So if I'm going into a boardroom to make multi-billion dollar decisions, I need to have the latest measurements in the economic model. So, in part, our studio is developing the diagnostic tools to be able to measure real-time the health of the energy economy. But that's only part of it because it's getting back to the earlier like charts, tables, and numbers. These are foreign to most people. So the second part of the studio is to be able to take and communicate those numbers with clarity, to be able to get the attention of people and the trust of the people with that piece of knowledge that is the the least lagged and delayed as possible as they go in to make decisions about uh where we're headed, either at the country level or the corporate level or whatever.
SPEAKER_02:It's it's so unfathomably complicated, but I'm quite happy to know that you, as this artist, photographer who has a an ability to visualize the world through these paired back elemental images that to you are explainers, you're the one doing this with the complexity of the energy system, the the carbon system. I have a kind of last question for you because I want to know how you're doing and getting and winning trust. Will they trust you equally, whether they're the money people at finance or the the climate people at environment or the the oil and gas mines at the royalty department of the energy? Three different lenses, ways of seeing the world. You see the world through your one lens. You're you're the guy with the camera.
SPEAKER_01:The short answer is yes. But I've trust is something you build up, as you know, over years and decades. You know, it's a it's a difficult thing, but you have to be conscious. You have to be conscious of it. And as I said, you have to be delivering the product that has those dimensions of utility. And more importantly, the product has to be delivered in a certain way that is not confrontational, that allows the person, persons around the table to think for themselves. And that's something that I'm I've always been big on is I don't like to go in a room and tell people what to do. That's point number one. You know, everybody seems to be an armchair quarterback. I don't play that role. I'm more the color commentator telling you, this is what's going on. Here's what I uh I think is the current situation and where it may go, but let's talk about it. And then it draws the conversation in terms of what may happen. So there's a there's a real difference between being the armchair quarterback to, you know, that seems to have all the answers. I don't have all the answers, but I can tell you I've developed the tools through my career to be able to collect the information to turn it into the knowledge we need to seek answers. And I've also tried to marry the visual, the audio, the written, the numerical all together in a package that allows people in a non-confrontational way to be able to relax and talk about the issues. And I guess in some ways that is the formula for gaining trust, because if you try and push your opinions on someone too hard, it doesn't work particularly today. You know, I can I can tell you that walking into a room and saying you have all the answers, or Stuart, this is what you should do. Don't you understand this is what's going on? Okay, how many people are gonna listen to that? So you're putting out the the information? Yeah, let that. Like I'm putting out the information. I'm uh, you know, there's a real opportunity here with the tools that have been being created. I'm very excited about this AI world and what we can do is uh it's not just AI, it's the ability of the data architecture and the new age software and the algorithms that we can develop in terms of monitoring the system, the economy, and then creating the materials off of it that diagnose. And I'll say it again because I think I said it earlier. It's my role, the studio's role, to discuss treatment options. It's not my role to be the surgeon to deal with it. That's your role. All right. You do the surgery. I'll tell you where the tumor is and what the what the in the economy, I'll give you the treatment options, but I'm not gonna do the surgery, nor am I gonna tell you how to do the surgery. That's your job.
SPEAKER_02:Peter, I feel like I've asked you to give up some trade secrets and you've really given up uh not maybe IP secrets, but I think a way of seeing I really appreciate that. I think a lot of people are gonna be able to are gonna want to go back over what you've been saying in in this uh episode and just just uh maybe uh listen to it a second time and get the depth, get a lot of depth in there, and I appreciate that you've come uh out to Vancouver here from Calgary to sit with me and and share this way. You know, uh there there is in in uh places where power is transacted uh often people who have to be the smartest person in the room. And I always feel when I'm with you, I'm with the smartest person in the room, but that's never the the vibe here because I I don't think uh um people realize uh the the depth you bring to it. But here on display today, you know, uh I think you you've you've shared that.
SPEAKER_01:So I hope I've shared it with humility because uh I will never acknowledge that I'm the smartest person in the room because the definition of smart has many dimensions. Uh so uh I sit here actually with respect. I feel like we're sitting on my patio a few years ago when we uh first discussed resource works and look what you turned it into. So I sit here as a mutual admiration club in terms of what LB accomplished, and uh we all contribute in our own way to make the world and the country and the circumstances in which we live a better place for ourselves and subsequent generations. So thank you for what you do as well.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you, Peter. This has been Power Struggle, first time out here for you, and we'll do it again sometime. Thank you, Peter.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you very much.
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