You're listening to the Oil and Gas This Week podcast with Mark LeCour and Jake Corley.

This is the show for busy oil pros who quickly want to keep their finger on the pulse of the industry.

Welcome back to another episode of the Oil and Gas This week podcast. You're listening to episode 181. What's up, Mark? What's up? What is that 19 before 200? We need to put some type of special event for our 200th episode. We're going to do it. Yeah, if anybody in the audience wants to help us to that, want to be a partner with us and maybe sponsor, it would be some great exposure.

So just reach out to me or Jake and we'll share the details. Not that we know the details yet, but we'll share them by the time you reach out to us. The other thing I want to mention real quick is thank you for everybody that entered our contest for the oil and gas offshore podcast. We had a tremendous response. We broke LinkedIn for a little while. Our one mistake that we made was that

we had a lot of people say, hey, I don't want my employer to know that I'm interested unless I win,

then I'll cross that bridge. So besides the 20 or so, you'll see on LinkedIn with the hashtag,

we had pretty close to 100 more sent to me direct. So it was really hard to pick a winner.

But congratulations, Andy Lash is the winner of the August Offshore Podcast. He actually was with Page Day training. We're hoping to kick that show off by the end of September. So people stay tuned. We got a new show joining the family. And Jake, for the first time, guess what? No new reviews. No reviews. Come on, people. We sometimes get, you know, 10, 20, 30 reviews a week.

We didn't get one in the last week. So one of y'all spend the three minutes to give us reviews.

We'll give a big shout out in the show. But this is first Friday Q&A, like Jake said. And it's time for the question. So Jake, let's get into it. All right, first question is from Brandon, who works over at Slumberger.

It writes Jake mentioned on episode 180 that Slumberjay and Halliburton, as far as I know,

had not announced any layoffs either.

When discussing NOVU and current... who works over at Slembegé, writes Jake mentioned on episode 180 that Slemburge and Halliburton,

as far as I know, had not announced any layoffs either when discussing NOVU incurring cost due to early retirements and severance payments. However, Halliburton announced on July 22nd that it cut 8% of its North American workforce during the second quarter of 2019. Yeah, and I know actually quite a few people at NOVs, you know, it's a hard thing for

a leader to do is having to make a choice or put together a process. So the process makes a choice

of who they need to get rid of who they don't. In this low crude price environment they're in right now,

the service companies are no longer cutting fat. They did that years ago. Now they're figuring out which toes and fingers have cut off. And I know several of my close friends at NOV took an early retirement package because it was offered to them and it just made sense and it was the right thing for them to do for the company and for themselves. The thing I'm curious about, Jake, is what do you think is happen to this talent that's being dumped on the market? Do you think other companies that go pick it up, the ones that are doing well, or you think that we're just going to lose this talent in this part of the workforce? I think it's going to shift. I'm already seeing this. I've had some conversations with some other individuals in the space on the technology side. I think you're going to have a lot of these subject matter experts that are very valuable to tech firms across the industry. You know, they have all the technical talent that they need, but they need more subject matter experts to help them build whatever their products or services are. I've already seen firsthand this. I mean, for example, companies like Corva are just scooping up drilling engineers left and right that have all been laid off. They're scooping up reservoir engineers or skipping up all sorts of people from companies like Anadarko, you know, with all the layoffs. So other than that, I honestly don't know yet. And I'm a little, I'm a little concerned. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. You brought that up. So our sponsor, IBM, big shout out to them. They're great, great company doing great stuff. If you want to see what AI really looks like. PING IBM, go talk to Watson. It's amazing. But you know, Jake,

IBM has

petroleum engineers, reservoir engineers, mechanical engineers, structural engineers, project managers,

all with oil and gas experience. And you're right, they hired them because IBM understands the

technology, but IBM needed help to understand the culture and the process and the workflows of oil and gas. So I think they did the right thing by hiring oil and gas experience. So you're right. If you're out there and you're listening to this and you're one of the people that took a package or unfortunately, you might be when people got laid off. Don't just look in the oil and gas industry. Look in the big tech companies. And I mean, you know, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Amazon, you know, Salesforce, all of them, Google, all them have dedicated oil gas sales practice. So they would value your expertise and your knowledge. So, you know, unfortunately, if you're one of those people that got laid off, you know, it sucks. But at the same time, there's other avenues that you can pursue. And I really think that tech pursuit is a better long-term game because somebody like, or maybe Corv is a bad example. So somebody like Microsoft or IBM really doesn't care what the cost of a barrel accrued is, right? They make their money different ways. So you don't have those big ups and downsings you see in upstream in the service companies. All right. Next question is from Chris Maloney. I was a consultant. He writes, I really appreciate your work. The team puts in into the podcast each week. I recently completed my MBA Capstone project working as a consultant for a business in the oil and gas industry. And I've been listening for a few months to help understand industry trends and learn the language of the industry a little better, and it's

been very helpful. In doing some research about the industry, one of the topics of conversation

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