 Okay, so we're about to begin an interview with Franz Fagan. It is November 27, 2015. We are in St. John's, Newfoundland, and the interviewer will be William McRaeff. So just to begin, can you please state your full name? My name is, well, Franz is Joseph Fagan, but better known as Franz. That's what my mother used to call me. And your age? 59. And where were you born? St. Joseph, St. Mary's Bay, Newfoundland. And as a child, what did your parents do? My mother started out as a teacher, and she taught for several years around the province. And then when she met my father, and they got married and started having kids, well, she became the homemaker, and she had ten kids, nine of which survived. One died as a baby. The rest of us are still around. So she was pretty busy looking after all of us, so not much room left for teaching there. My father was a bit of a jack of all trades. He started out doing things like driving a truck. They got into construction, was fishing for a while. He did little bits of everything to survive for quite a few years. And then for the last 21 years of his career, he worked for the school in my community as a maintenance man, janitor, and also a school bus driver. So he put in 11-hour days for 21 years in the last of his career. Yeah, they were pretty hard working, busy people. Especially with nine kids. Not to mention growing your own crops, and we kept animals and all that too. She must have helped out a lot around the house as well. Yeah, I had lots of chores to do. What were your interests or things to do as a kid? Well, as I mentioned, you know, lots of chores. I grew up, St. Joseph's is what we call around the bay, which is anywhere outside of the city of St. John's in Newfoundland. That's the expression around the bay, even though you might be in a town of four or five thousand people. But I was around the bay proper. I was in a small community of about three or four hundred people, maybe even less than I don't remember the exact numbers. So it was people, you know, they burned wood in their homes, so I had to cut wood every day. We kept animals, you had to feed the animals and clean up after them, that kind of thing. Even when my father was working full time with the school, we still had fishing nets out and stuff like that. A little bit on the side, so it was always the nets would have to be cleaned up. So you can imagine, if you've got a net, say that's 300 feet long, 20 feet wide, and it's in the ocean for about a week, it starts to pick up a lot of slime and seaweed and stuff. So you have to pull that in, spread it out on the beach, let it dry. And the way to clean it was we had a pair of gloves and you just bunched it up and brushed it in your hand. So there was a lot of work just cleaning the net. It wasn't just me, I had brothers as well. So I was lots of chores to do, but we did lots of, you know, lots of things for fun too. The summertime, you know, swimming in the ocean was good, fishing in the ocean, trouting in the ponds, something else, picking berries. We always played lots of sports like road hockey, softball. Once we got a school with a gym in it, we used to play basketball and ping pong, badminton, things like that, so we're busy. In the wintertime, we do a little bit of skating on the ponds, you know, the frozen ponds, playing hockey and, you know, tobogganing, that kind of thing. In general, you know, growing up in a community where it's very rural like that, there was lots of cliffs along the coasts and woods to be explored, so sometimes we'd just be out exploring, wandering around. Probably did some fairly dangerous things like wandering on to pack ice. When it came in, it wasn't like an adventure to go on to pack ice, but I had a pretty close call out there once and I never went there again. So yeah, it was an easy place to get yourself into trouble, you know, on cliffs and things like that, but we were never bored. Yeah, okay. I was a bit in shape too, kind of wood. Yeah, it was a tough job. We never really had to think about, you know, going to the gym or anything like that. Yeah, I'm kidding. It was just the natural way of life kept you moving around a lot. No kidding. Was there, early on, was there an interest developed for sciences or anything like that? I mean, you had mentioned exploration, but anything further? I think I really discovered my interest in science with the moon landing. Okay. And even before the moon landing, there was the Apollo missions where they were going around the moon. That's when I really got sparked up to science and thought that that would be an interesting thing to be working at. That seemed to be the most exciting thing to me on TV was when that kind of thing came on. And that probably sparked my interest, yeah. I mean, I don't blame you. I find astrophysics and space exploration incredibly interesting. So what, what were you going to be your path when you were in high school, getting close to, you know, university years? Yeah, well I didn't quite know what I was going to do. I knew I had an interest in science and I was reasonably good in math and, you know, the only science we had was biology in high school. You know, learned a little bit of geography. You didn't have physics and chemistry and such. And I knew that you could go to university and you could do teaching, you could do accounting and that you could do dentistry or medicine or something medical. I didn't know too much about anything else. And one day a person from the Memorial University came to our school to help educate high school students about what what programs were there and that's when I first heard of engineering. I thought okay well that seems pretty scientific so I'll probably go into engineering. So that's what I decided to do. But then when I got to university I had to do first year physics and chemistry in order to get into engineering and I had a really good physics teacher in first year who's a lot of fun, very enthusiastic teacher and the subject matter was exactly the type of thing I was interested in. So I decided not to go on into engineering that I would focus into physics. Okay so you did a was it a major in physics? Yeah I ended up doing a joint major in physics and mathematics and you know I was staying in the university residence and you know I was having a pretty good time there too. I was involved in the social situation quite a bit and in sports and all that but but I still worked pretty hard. It wasn't like I could get through with no effort. I had to work hard and so I ended up getting an honors degree which you know meant I had to work pretty hard. And then I didn't quite know what I was going to do with it. I think this is interesting and it seems like it's applicable to a lot of fields so I could end up doing a number of things. I thought I would be ending up into something like some sort of research scientist somewhere. But then when I came to the end of five years I'm at this pretty intense work just to try and keep up with all of all the academics. I think I got a little bit burned out you know and I wanted to get out into the real world and do something, make some money, experience something different than being in school which I'd done by then for I'd be 16 years straight in school. And I didn't realize why I kind of got burned out but now I do looking back on it. Because there was a number of opportunities that came along to go on and do a master's or a PhD. You know different universities will let you know that they have programs and I got a lot of letters about that and I was approached by certain professors to go and do a master's and carry on but I kind of lost the desire and it has to do, now I look back at it, it has to do with the way they teach. In physics you know it starts out pretty interesting and pretty fun really doing experiments and all that kind of stuff but as you get more advanced advanced in it here's the way the class works. You come in you sit in the classroom and a professor comes in takes a piece of chalk and starts writing on the board mostly with his or her back to you it's mostly men so we'll say his and they're talking you know while they're writing the equations and you're sitting there writing as fast as you can and this stuff is all pretty much new to you and it's pretty advanced and it's a little bit hard to follow along and so you're missing a lot of the concepts and at the end of the day you get as much as you can and then you try and figure out what's going to be on the exam and then you work like crazy to cover off what's going to be on the exam so you can solve the types of problems that you're going to be asked to do. So that's a pretty exhausting way to be learning and now if I was if I was doing it here's what I would do and I would recommend it to anybody who's going into the field just hand out the notes with all the equations on them. Go in project those equations onto the onto the board and spend your time explaining what the heck they mean how the how they came about to exist uh what is the you know their historical development and all of that how they're applicable to the world why it's important that you should be understanding this and then just work through it and explain that as you go it would be fascinating and don't do just once because now at the time you've saved from writing stuff on the board for 45 minutes you've got time to go back over it and review it a little bit maybe even have some a little back and forth question and answer that way people would remain fascinated and they'd learn a lot more now you still at the end of the day you have to understand the equations I'm not saying for a second that that you can remove the math from it but it's just done very very inefficiently I yeah I completely uh see what you mean there's a good uh engineering school all over again yeah you probably experience the same thing for sure so I'm really glad today to see that there are you know there are online education forums uh the Khan economy is one that I've looked at we're a really excellent format for the way they teach things and hopefully the establishment is going to start to learn from this yeah um so so you wanted to so you you you graduated you you did your bachelors you wanted to try something in the real world yeah so what was what would you consider to be your first uh official job my first official job you mean post-graduation yeah when I was a kid uh yeah like post-graduation yeah okay and how did you get it yeah I uh I started you know looking at some of the interviews that were being made available and one of them was with an oil company called Amaco and some of my friends had gone to work for Amaco as chief physicists and they all seem to be pretty happy with their with their new lives so they've done physics like myself there wasn't really an established geophysics program at that time so the companies were hiring mathematicians engineers physics students and training them into geophysics now of course there are excellent geophysics programs here at memorial across the country but they weren't as established and I think there were a few courses so anyway I I had a couple of opportunities and uh but this interview with the oil company seemed to be the best opportunity that I had I hadn't really given a lot of thought that I'd end up working for an oil company but I said well I really don't know any geophysics and they said well the fellow interviewed me his name was Norm Pullen great fellow he said well um you know we can teach you the the geo party you know if you know the math and the physics we have a very good training center we're going to send you and plus there's lots of on-the-job training and uh yeah you'll probably like it so I said yeah it sounds interesting that's how I got into it and what was your first position well you start out as what they call a junior geophysicist and the the first thing that happened when I went there was that you sat within sat at your desk and they gave you a bunch of thick ring binder manuals to just start looking through and see what you could pick up on your own about seismic exploration and seismic processing certainly a lot of seismic processing and stuff and that was okay for a couple of weeks and then I was given a little I wouldn't say a little it was a big mapping project so way in geophysics and type of geophysics I was doing works is you're interpreting seismic data and you're using that data to make maps of what's going on underneath the ground various layers you can map them with the sort of ultrasound method same sort of physics is an ultrasound but you're doing maps over it could be tens of square kilometers or it could be over a hundred square kilometers depending on how big just how big the project here is project is that you're working on and so I was assigned a project to just start mapping this huge project it was going to take about six months after about three months I was getting really really bored with it and because there was no end to it no thinking okay I'm not really learning a lot this is becoming very mechanical and I'm starting to second guess why why I'd taken this job but then for whatever reason I got taken off that job and I was given to a different supervisor and this turned out to be one of my great mentors as it turns out the supervisor that I had second fellow and his name was Jimmy Hodgson he was a little Scotsman full of energy full personality he used to spend these weekends you know walking through the mountains in Alberta and no stopping this guy but anyway he he took a look at me and he could see what I knew and what I didn't knew didn't know and he just gave me a little project a mapping project that was going to take me about two or three days and then when it was done he was able to critique what I'd done and then I had to present my results to another supervisor and it was part of a real job so a real project I should say so then I presented it to the actual decision makers as part of the team I was a little a little five minute piece at the end and I thought okay now I'm getting the feel for this and then that same guy he gave me a slightly bigger job you know maybe you took me a week or two and within I'd say five or six months of this I was really enthused about the work and I was I could see as soon as I saw a job how long it was going to take to do it what needed to be done and I was excited about it and you were a lot more excited about a three to six month project if it came up well yeah I mean I didn't I don't mind taking on a big job when I know what has to be done and maybe I've got some people working for me by then and everything else but but to take a young person who doesn't know anything and just give them this mechanical job that they're going to have to do for six months that that's sort of soul-destroying yeah so people people should be very aware of that if you got young people coming in they're full of piss and vinegar as they say full of enthusiasm don't give them something so overwhelming and boring that you're going to cross their spirit yeah for sure so um so you worked how long did you work for for Amaco I worked there for five years okay and um I was quite enjoying it but I was also a little bit homesick about Newfoundland you know my friends were here and I was used to the culture here and where was this job you took I was in Alberta Calgary yeah and you know being that being the center for the oil industry it still is in this country um and so though that they were a great company and I have nothing but positive things to say you know and were there any learned a lot there I made a lot of good friends there would you consider to have worked on any like major major projects major findings uh I wasn't involved in any make making any major discoveries I was working in well-established areas we had as part of a team always if I say I should be we was working with geologists and engineers and landmen there are about landmen even though probably a good number of them are women um so my role of course was interpreting the seismic and tying it in with the work the other people were doing and a lot of the work I did was in northeast Alberta which was very well established as a area where you could find gas and it was pretty easy to find gas there you know you look at seismic data and we can see what we're called bright spots and I think our success rate was up around 80 percent there you know finding small little gas fields here and there little pockets of gas and proven areas and the other kind of things we were looking for were were reefs like coral reefs that are you know buried in the ground maybe a couple of thousand meters so you know 300 million years ago that was actually in the ocean but now under thousands of meters of sediment and these things are very very subtle on the seismic data so it was a huge amount of effort that went into refining the processing of the seismic data you weren't looking for big gigantic mountainous structures like you might see in the offshore here all the easy stuff had been found it's the very subtle stuff you were looking for but you you also knew where not to be drilling so we tended to have a pretty good success rate there but no I wasn't a part of any big discoveries like Hibernia or you know some of the newer ones in Alberta you know the bigger ones in Alberta mostly happen back in the 50s and 60s and every now and then you find something today yeah um forgive my ignorance but uh reefs finding a reefs what does um what exactly do you get from a reef well when you're looking for oil and gas oil and gas especially in a basin like Alberta you know it's present pretty much everywhere so what you're looking for are places where there's good porosity okay permeability lots of little holes in the rock that something can flow out of and so if if oil and gas or and or gas accumulate in those situations and you drill into them you get a good flow rate today people are drilling into rocks that don't have that good porosity and permeability and they're still getting a good flow rate by doing what's called fracking or creating fractures in the rocks we were doing that we were trying to find you know good pre-existing porosity so you can imagine a reef that's made of the corals it's going to be have lots of little holes in it and it can hold a lot of water and gas and some of the best fields in Alberta are reefs actually so naturally find the odds are finding a reef would have a lot of porosity yeah now some of the reefs of course were emptied or full of didn't know oil and gas they're full of water but in other areas if you found a reef you were almost guaranteed that it would be productive I mean they used to sustain a lot of life too so odds are they would contain fossil fuels yeah but the source rock itself was a separate generally the source rocks are shales you know they can't be in limestones but generally they're in shales so the shale was kind of underneath or surrounding the reef and the oil and seeps into the porous zones okay thanks so so you were saying you you worked there five years but then you you're a bit homesick yeah I got nowhere homesick and and things were really starting to take off here in Newfoundland around 1984 it was a big discoveries being made every year there was new announcements so things were looked like it was going to be the next North Sea and so I said oh what the heck you know that I came home on vacation I started talking to some people I said yeah there's probably going to be lots of opportunities here and I thought well I kind of like it here and I've learned to learn enough that I can probably start applying it back here and so I made the leap of faith that came back and decided to do a semester learning a little doing some geology courses because I still you know had that physics degree math and I thought I'll fill in a few blanks for me and after doing the semester then I decided see what the jobs are there and I had a couple of offers and I ended up accepting one with the provincial government and it was a big learning curve when I went there because as I mentioned I was used to looking for very subtle things on seismic data and offshore here you're looking at gigantic structures with big faults and it's a it was a much more type of what we call elephant country for finding big things and it was a different type of interpretation skill than looking for really subtle changes in the shape of a wavelet that I was doing in Alberta but fortunately for me the province had received reports on every big exploration project that had been done offshore and those were eventually released to the public anyway I was able to look at all of this information and see what everyone else thought of the various areas and learned about six months I suppose I'd gotten to all of that in a steep learning curve but then I was starting to function reasonably well after that so uh so how does that differ because because you seem to have even though the technique and the findings are different here than they were in Alberta your role is very similar well the role the role is very different because you know when I'm working for an oil company I'm actually trying to do projects where we go up and shoot seismic data then we interpret the data and make recommendations to buy this piece of land or to drill on it mostly about drilling when I was with the province they're of course into regulating the industry and so the industry is feeding them information and they need technical people to tell them what it means so that they can't be misled if somebody says there's five million barrels in a field well they need to have some independent assessment of that so they need to have some geophysical and geological skill in-house and engineering skill in-house okay yeah and uh how long did you work for their government I was there for 20 years okay yep I wasn't uh I wasn't intended to stay there for 20 years not that there was anything wrong with the government but you know you you can work so long in a situation and then it's always nice to do something a little bit different after a while but the industry really slowed down here after 1985 what happened was the price collapsed and then expiration pretty much went down it went down and stayed down starting to come back a bit now but it had gone through a really active phase in the early 80s and then it went down and stayed down so there wasn't really a lot of opportunities in the private sector not that I actually I didn't even look to tell you the truth but when I was working at Amaco there wasn't a month went by that you never got a phone call from somebody trying to hire you away from them now that happened maybe a few times when I was with government but it was nothing that was attractive enough to take me away so I stayed there and it was around 2005 that the price of oil started to go up quite a bit you know it had been 20 to 30 dollars a barrel seemed like for 10 years or so and then it was hitting 60 to 70 and expiration started to pick up certainly in the onshore which was part of where we had expiration here too and so some opportunities started to come along there and I took one of them it was a consulting opportunity and at that time I was also starting to feel like I was starting to stagnate a little bit you know it was time to do something different so I took that opportunity and I kept pretty busy as a consultant for several years were you were you a consultant with a specific company or by yourself it was mostly for mostly for one company a company named Volton Minerals they're called Volton Minerals but they were involved in oil and gas but I also did work for other companies as long as it wasn't didn't look like it was going to be any kind of conflict of interest you know if I'm doing work for them and there's another company that's going to be bidding against them on some land or something I I couldn't do consulting I actually turned down a fair bit from others who are looking for people but you know you've got to be careful in this in this game especially when there's just a few companies involved it's not like there's thousands of companies that are not not competing in the same pool yeah so yeah I was mostly for that company but other I took on other jobs as well that were not related to that area it was mostly that company and at the same time I started you know I was actually I was already teaching courses before then they continued to do that yeah tell me a bit about about that as um you're kind of you train and not only consult that you're training people from is it the private sector or yeah it's uh it's wide opens mostly the private sector the way that came about actually was while I was still working for the province probably around you know 1999 I got invited to go and speak at a high school at a career fair or something like that kids wanted to learn a bit about the oil industry so I put together about a 45 minute presentation explaining some of the different types of things the industry was doing and so that kind of cut on the next you know a couple weeks later I was asked to go to another school and then I was asked to present to a rotary group and about once a month the invitations were coming to start giving this particular presentation people were hungry for information to understand the industry because it was still it was a growing concern hibernia had just come on a couple of years before that and people wanted to learn about it so that they could they could start doing business in the oil industry and so it struck me that there was a market there to put together a course so in my evenings and weekends over the course of several months I put together a full day course on it and that was in 2001 I started offering that course I teach it a few times a year I was still working full time but I'd take a annual leave day and teach a course here and there and that that's gone on pretty steadily since then but in the last two to three years I've sort of cut back a lot on the consulting and I put a lot more effort into developing new educational materials so now I've also developed a course called oil and gas for investors so that's meant to be for people in the financial industry who they probably got people coming to them to raise money for some exploration project or something so I wanted to say look here's some of the things here's some of the questions you should be asking this is some of the technical backgrounds you need to be able to assess what they're saying to you and I've also developed a course called introduction to petroleum geology and geophysics and I've got a one day two day and a three day version of that depending on how much detail people want me to go into and you know expanding materials plus expanding the markets you know outside of the province and outside of the country as well and you said you had given that talk to high school kids yeah so what kind of content do you present to the kids yeah I was teaching them about what we call the upstream part of the industry so the different stages you'd go through if you were an oil company you know the first thing you want to do is look at the geology to see if these rocks are the right kind of rocks to have on the gas in it and then you go in and do some geophysical work and how do you figure out where you might want to buy a land or where you might want to drill and then explain the drilling process and then explain what happens after you make a discovery what how do you get it under production and a little bit about refining the markets as well but mostly those those first parts that that upstream part of the industry I can't say that I know many high school kids myself included back in the day that that learned anything really remotely close to uh to that yeah yeah it was it seemed to be new to a lot of people where I started putting it together which which leads me to this do you think there's a I mean not just petroleum but the natural resources in general do you think there is a disconnect between the general public and the natural resources petroleum included yeah I I'd say yes but I'd even generalize it way beyond that I think there's a disconnect between science and engineering and the general public okay and you know you might even go wider than that you know the other sciences the biological sciences and medical science and such how so how do you how do you explain having a well disconnect between the sciences and because it comes back to the way that scientists communicate you know they they communicate with each other in a lot of jargonized language I mean I struggle to get through some papers and I've spent my whole life you know my whole life a large part of my career you know working in geology and geophysics and then I'll pick up a paper and I struggled to get through it and then I realized that this was really something simple it wasn't it wasn't difficult at all but it's just written in this jargonized language there's an attempt to be completely detached and makes for complicated sentences so there's this culture that you know we need to talk to each other and we need to sound like we know what we're talking about we need to sound sophisticated we need to sound scholarly and then that gets in the way of communicating effectively to the public now fortunately you have things like the discovery channel and national geographic channel and things that are doing documentaries and they're putting on lots of science on there but even those shows they they'll only take it so far and they don't really breach the gap in my view that really communicates really what's going on you know they'll throw out some something like well we think there are 10 dimensions and then just leave that hang in there and go on as if suddenly everyone should just accept that that there are 10 spatial dimensions or nine spatial dimensions another case might be and you know all these fantastical terms and they all sound oh wow that sounds so exciting now well what does it really mean and why do you think that and how can that be I see these things all the time and there's no attempt to really to really breach it make it make it mean something to someone who's never heard something like that before they have people have a certain knowledge in their brains that that they gather from walking around and experiencing their lives that has no connection to that whatsoever and so it ends up just becoming a mantra or or some kind of statement that you're supposed to accept because somebody said so I think it all has to be rooted connected together at least I know that you know there's just mathematical gap in between but I believe that we need to put a lot more emphasis on the conceptual side of things and connecting the concepts to why we would think that something like that might be true and do you think a lot of academia and the academics don't necessarily have to talk with all their very jargonized terms or do you think it's something they could easily oh I mean I I de-formalize their language I guess I mean I speak to different groups all the time and occasionally I'm talking to maybe it's all engineers sometimes I'm talking to people and it's mostly public relations people or maybe they're all accountants the first thing I do is find out who am I talking to am I trying to speak their language so yes if I'm giving a talk at the university to a bunch of PhDs in geophysics yeah I can I can talk to talk and I don't need to explain certain things but if I realize that half the audience are business people and they're here to understand what I'm talking about I don't care if the PhDs that are there I think you know I'm dumbing anything down or not I think that's a terrible expression anyway no you're just speaking to speaking the language that people understand so I will take the trouble and explain what a source rock is or what a reservoir rock is or whatever you know I won't just throw something out there and expect everybody to know what it is so just know who you're talking to it's like if you're talking to your kids you speak differently than if you're talking to adults it's exactly the same principle yeah you start seeing it a bit more in in at least I find with even the relationship between professors and your students more now it's professors I feel like they have to they feel less obliged to have to speak this very formal you know esoteric language and bring it down to the how students speak now I don't know you see it more and more but well I hope I hope that's a trend but I can tell you you know you go on go on wikipedia look up some topic that you'd never heard of before let's say something in physics see if you can pass the first couple sentences without getting frustrated and saying this person's not talking to me yeah and that's supposed to be for the public you know so there you go and there's there are other sources that are better than that but you know like I put down wikipedia I donate to them I think they're it's great what they're doing but it's just that that a lot of that stuff is written by specialists and that's the way they're talking yeah even though they're supposed to be writing for the public because everyone uses wikipedia it's not like you're writing just for the person across the hall and yet there it is you know so it's just all over the place you've got a long way to go to get past that well interesting answer thanks I guess different topic but could be could be seen as similar was there a part part of your life or one of your jobs or one of your projects even that sticks out as having been quite dysfunctional um I wouldn't say a project and I'd like to give a comment but I I don't want to talk about particular companies but I'll give you an example of something I witnessed early in my career before I even graduated I had a student job I mean before I get into that I will say that in various places that I've worked I've seen you know a group over here that was very functional I've seen little things that happened it was dysfunctional here and so I've seen lots of examples of it but this this was one that has nothing to do with the more of my main career it was something that happened early in my career and it made an impression on me I got a job a summer job working on a loading dock for a large company I won't name that company either and there were three full-time employees working there and it was me as a student to help out for the summer out of those three employees there was one guy who was working his butt off all the time up going he if there was nothing to do he'd go find something to do the other two were sitting in the office mostly reading magazines and stuff like that I mean today you could pretend you were working because you could put a computer there in front of you and you could you know you could put on a pretense but there was no way to hide it there were just reading people magazine or whatever most of the day and so you know I'm new to the workforce so I asked it around so what's going on here and they said well these guys got seniority this place is unionized and you know they got senior they got nothing to worry about and so I thought well something wrong with this equation I mean I'm pretty naive at the time but I thought you know I can understand the necessity for unions you got to be able to protect the worker but this side of the equation didn't seem to be getting balanced out against it so it gave me a very negative impression of unions at that time so I thought that that was dysfunctional and that this company if this if I could take this extrapolated over you know a few thousand people working for this company then it's probably not going to last and sure enough that company did not last there I heard about it a few years later it was struggling to get by and trying to win concessions back from the union and stuff but if everything was had been hopping along efficiently like that one guy yeah then I don't think you'd run into those kinds of problems so you know I'm all for fairness for everybody but since I see people taking advantage that that's dysfunctional thanks next question is a it's a broad question but there's no wrong answer I can repeat it if you like it it's a it's an helpful but in your opinion are there any events people inventions contributions disasters I mean we can think of a very important one here the ocean ranger anything whatsoever that that you believe must be mentioned when talking about the history of the natural resources in Canada yeah during during my career and I'm gonna stick keep the oil and gas sure yeah yeah that's what you know it's what yeah the the biggest development in my field would have been three-dimensional seismic now seismic data the way it works the simplest form is that you laid out a bunch of listening devices in a straight line on the ground or if you're offshore you're towing it in a straight line behind a boat that's a single line and you set off some charges let's say you're on land once again if offshore you'd use something called an air gun just to make a noise you have to make a noise and so those noises go into the ground and the echoes come back and you're picking it up just on a sort of single line like that that was most of the type of work that I did when I was working at Amaco it's a two-dimensional type work and that gives you a slice into the ground but a single slice like a cross-section but in the meantime when you set off those charges you know sounds are going out in all directions we'd like to think that it just comes from directly underneath but you're getting all this interference from all directions so really fuzzy it makes this kind of a fuzzier image than it should be so when the technology started to come along where you instead of having laying out a single line you have a big grid and so you capture all the echoes coming from every direction and you're able to create a three-dimensional image of the subsurface that required a lot of computer power and new algorithms and things to make it work efficiently and new equipment as well for the field to be developed and when that became really economic to be doing at an exploration stage and it became commonplace that really revolutionized the industry and at the same time everything was becoming computerized so you start off I started off if I was making interpreting a seismic line I'm going to make a map everything was by hand I took a crayon and I colored the section and I took a ruler and I measured things and usually I had someone to help me with that to take all the numbers that I measured and put them on a map somehow and then I would make a contour map now you sit at a computer you've got a couple two or three big screens there you can do literally 50 times the work that you could do by hand with computers and I'm sure that applies in almost every field but certainly in geophysics that's revolutionary the other thing is the coming of the internet around 1995 once that came you had access to all this information efficient communication with your peers wherever and plus now you've got the ability for people whether it's an engineer or geologist or geophysicist to be having a live feed right from the drill bit in the ground feeding right back to your computer so within seconds of you know say hitting a reservoir offshore the data is coming up on the screen and they can react to it right in the office advise what's going on that's that's revolutionary nothing like that has ever happened in history before we're really just at the beginning of it it's really the wild west still for for the internet I mean where else have you seen billionaires by 26 years old things like that never before in history and so young people come to me and say whoa what's the area to go into I'm thinking anything to do with the internet if you can create something there and you like that kind of thing yeah yeah it's true but it is it is a in a way it looks a lot like the natural resources industry in terms of it's very cyclical like it's uh it's it's uh it's up and down a lot yeah well you'll find you'll find that in everything but you know any great innovation is still going to be where there's a lot of there's a lot of yeah and some some smart kid in the basement can can create a revolution you know because it's it's software it's not all about hardware you know it's ideas and they can be converted into code and they can be worth millions very quickly yeah more billions as we've seen billions as you've seen yeah yeah absolutely um question uh regarding uh women and and that's I often ask I ask uh everybody this question and that's how present or absent were women when you started working and uh if that's changed and how that's changed that throughout your career well in the in geophysics and I'll say geoscience here because working with teams when I started out at anima cope uh there were a fair number of women there but still it was dominated by males percentage I I'd say maybe 20 percent women back in the day uh yeah this is background in 80 okay that's that's uh more than a lot of other areas in the industry yeah I I you know I I could be wrong in the number but it seemed to me like about one in five of the people that I was dealing with were females and they weren't all necessarily geologists and geophysicists we had a lot of technologists and quite I know quite a few of them were female and they you know these were very very important jobs that they were doing very technical jobs and for some reason that that seemed to be more females who got into the technology side but uh no I worked with very accomplished women from day one you know certainly in the office in the fields very low percentages of course on seismic crews and drill rigs that probably still the case uh you know there's more of a movement towards a gender equity these days and so that the companies actually have programs where they're trying to increase the numbers uh later in my career well I went back to to do a a masters actually back in 06 and I would say half the class was female so I'm guessing it was a masters in what and geophysics so I you know I was doing geology and geophysics courses and I would think at least half the class is half in the class were female and so I'm assuming that you're getting a lot more equity in the field these days um next question we can split it into uh what are you proudest of in life and then we can also say uh professionally yeah well there's nothing that really jumps out to me like if I didn't went to the cure for something I would be an obvious thing uh but uh I will say that throughout my career you know whatever skills I had whatever knowledge I had I I tried to bring it to bear and do the best job I could I often get put on the jobs that probably I wasn't the best person to be doing and the skills that I had but I uh I went at it as best I could and tried to give uh give the best result that I could to anyone who hired me and not only professionally but if I was volunteering for a group or whatever and you know I talked about how hard my parents worked so I was always a hard worker I was never never lazy or unmotivated um but uh thinking about some I guess it's maybe a skill that I think I've developed that that I'm proud of and um that's in where I'm doing my training courses of course you know you're on the front line and if it's not working it's not working and you're not going to be getting people signing off your courses so I really put a lot of effort into uh being effective in that area that and the feedback I'm always asking for feedback and give up the forms and I take it very seriously I go through every comment and generally it's pretty positive and the most important thing I ask is was the information presented clearly and concisely and I'm thinking about 99 yeses on that one and so that's mostly what I'm trying to accomplish and um I think that I'm able to do that partly because when I came into the industry I didn't know much about the industry I knew what it was like to come into an oil and gas office and know nothing about it you know coming from a completely different field and I suppose you know you go back at far enough in anyone's history they didn't know anything about it but I was very much aware of uh being surrounded by people who knew a lot more about it than I did and so that was burned into my brain what it was like not to know and so I still remember that very clearly it's what I'm talking to someone and I'm trying to explain the tune I know I think I can get inside their head and I know how they're feeling and how they're reacting to what I'm saying and and what it is they need to hear for to make sense to them so I'm proud that I'm able to do that and be affected in that way thank you and uh last question and that's if you had someone much younger and you probably had with the students so if you were talking to someone like a student what uh what would be the one life lesson or piece of advice you would choose to give them regarding their future career perhaps well looking back at my own career again uh I mentioned one guy who was a mentor to me and his guy Jimmy Hodgson I had another really good mentor by the name of Michael Anikescu he was a I got a g-physicist to work for Husky for many years and he came and was a professor here at Memorial he's a guy talking to going back to the masters he became a very important mentor for me and that I think that you know those two characters have had an impact and certainly helping me in my career so I would say find good mentors whatever it is you're going into you know on gas whatever it might be find really good mentors because they're gonna save you a lot of time and they might even save you a lot of frustration where you might give up on something because they'll point you in the right direction and prevent you from maybe going down some dead ends but on top of that and this is critically important as well as that you know learn everything you can but question everything that you're ever taught I'm not that whatever your mentors and whatever question everything you ever taught about your profession or whatever across life I would apply that but about your profession because you not only do you want to know what works but you want to know why it works and you also want to know and this exists for every generation what are simply the prejudices that are being passed down like the rules of thumb and things that probably might have made sense at some point you don't necessarily make sense anymore so you want to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff of what you're being given and for that you got to be questioning things all the time thank you is there anything else you'd like that to the interview um but maybe just give me a second sure take your time I would say cultivate good habits this is more of a life lesson lesson not not just about work yeah you know cultivate good habits they don't good habits for health good habits for your career good habits for your relationships for sustaining your friendships your personal relationships because these things don't necessarily happen automatically and I'm talking about things like you know getting up at a certain time eating a certain way making sure you get enough exercise to keep good health and that kind of stuff that there's a lot of natural tendencies to kind of drift away from that it's it's sort of given to you when you're a kid that you've got to do this and you got to do that but once you put on your own you've got to steer yourself in those directions because if you start getting into into bad habits they're they're heard quit yeah all right let's die hard yep well thank you all right