All right, Kyle, thanks. It's a pleasure being on saltology and yes, welcome to my lovely home here in Pemberton, Western Australia. Favorite food. It would probably be a genre of foods. Curries. I love all curries, Indian, Thai, Malaysian. So that would definitely be my favorite food. Even better when I get to cook them with Tina. We love cooking together, so that would be definitely that that camp in terms of favorite hobbies, probably hiking, really enjoy that. Of course, we're in the beautiful southern forest, so it's right outside the back doors. Probably equal to that would be kayakin, I Kayak with one of my mates on the Black Wood River quite a bit. So we love that as well. In terms of favorite movie, I'm usually a sci-fi fantasy genre guy

Yeah, Star Treks are up there. Obviously the Star Wars are up there. The Marvel series I thought you were really good as well. So yeah, That's the sort of overall genre rather than a specific movie

Yes, I do do a lot of gaming, probably a little bit less than I thought I would in retirement. But yes, certainly all the way back to the World of Warcraft days. Yeah, yeah definitely loving all that

Oh yeah, yeah. No, definitely. Definitely enjoy the wine. Of Course you know, we're in an amazing wine region. The wineries right here, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in particular

Right so I ended up studying mechanical engineering. The reason that I actually applied and got accepted for engineering is it was one of the lowest averages to get in, which sounds weird, but in Canada they learned very quickly that your high school marks didn't correlate to whether you'd be able to finish an engineering degree or not, which is kind of interesting. My passion was always to have a career in the military. I was lucky enough to get accepted for the officer training program in the Canadian Armed Forces, accepted there they're into the artillery branch. However, about a week before we finished our general training boot camp, if you think of it that way, I had an asthma attack and the doctor, unfortunately, on the base, even though I'd been cleared by the previous doctor, didn't think that asthmatics had a place in the military. And so I was honorably discharged that day, which was a horrible day in my life. But on the upside, I still had a opening at a civilian university. So I had applied at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. And basically the military in Canada uses the civilian university system to basically do their academic qualifications. So just show them you've got accepted at a Canadian university, and that's the academic tick for the officer training program. So I didn't actually turn down that offer, I just kept it as a live option. So when I ended my career at the military, I had an opening for engineering and I didn't have any better idea. So I thought, why not?

Yeah, well during university we've got our summer breaks there and my original plan was to get into the defense companies like the Boeings, the Raytheons, however I was looking for summer jobs and it was with these old rolled recipe cards. This was before the bulletin board and the internet hadn't really taken off. And I looked at Esso, which is Exxon in Canada who had a opening for field operator. So driving around and making sure the nodding donkey is going up and down. But what really sort of took me back from that was the pay. So I called my dad, who owned a farm supply shop before retired in rural Canada and told them, look, this is what they're offering for three and a half months work and he said well I have never earnt that in a year. So I quickly changed my plans into the energy sector and then I got to job with Shell Canada after university, which was great. And how I kind of came to, to Australia. At the time Shell actually had their training center in the Netherlands, in Holland called Lord Viker Holt, and it was a global training center at the time. Woodside would also send its staff there. And so I actually met a I was on a reservoir engineering course and a drilling engineer was on the drilling101 course. Her and I got along really well together. And coincidentally when I flew back to Calgary, I had a job offer in my inbox waiting for me from a consulting company in Perth

It was absolutely a coincidence, yeah. Because at the time Shell used a very specific reservoir simulation program that was bespoke to Shell. And I was one of the few people in the world that knew how to program in that, in that language for that simulation package. And so I was quite in demand, unbeknownst to me at the time. And so I'd never heard of that company. So they gave me a job offer to move to Perth and be a consultant into Woodside because they use shell software. And so kind of those two events completely coincidental. Well clearly fate has spoken and so yeah I put together a backpack and sold all my stuff and moved to Australia

Originally a six month contract yeah. And I ended up working for this consulting company for two years and then Woodside gave me an offer. It was interesting I somehow got asked by our mergers and acquisitions team. It was because I actually had knowledge of carbonate reservoirs which were in Canada, but there were very little carbonate reservoirs here in Australia, certainly Western Australia. And Woodside's mergers and acquisitions team, were looking at taking over a gas asset in the Philippines and I had knowledge of those types of reservoirs. So I got asked to pack my bags and join the mergers and acquisitions team as a subsurface due diligence expert, and that lasted for many years. We were also in the Gulf of Mexico, but they didn't have anybody with oil trading experience on the mergers and acquisitions team. And yet we needed to know with different sulfur contents how I was going get marketing into the pipelines and all that process. And so I just learned - actually a head of BHP marketing in Houston was very kind enough and she taught me how that system worked. And so during the whole due diligence exercise I became a little bit of an expert in oil marketing in the United States. And so after when that deal concluded, or failed to conclude actually, the main oil marketing team offered me a job full time. It was a secondment from reservoir engineering into oil marketing trading at Woodside. Yeah, and so then the mergers and acquisitions team loved me then because I was actually a two for one deal, like having only one person to fly around the world to do due diligence. But I could do it on behalf of the, you know, the downstream marketing and trading and what could we get for these oil, you know, these blends or the gas markets and also the subsurface. And so that led to a full time career with mergers and acquisitions. So actually being the the person that coordinated the multiple aspects of the deal from the financial statements, the financial modeling, the environmental due diligence, the legal forms of the mergers and acquisitions. So managing that team that would put that together and then put together papers and transaction books for our board of directors to consider. And so I had my first board meeting on my 30th birthday. So it was kind of a, you know, a rapid learning curve, so to speak

Yeah, stayed in mergers and acquisitions and a combination of that and then strategic roles for about four or five years before then moving into more asset management or profit and loss of groups. So I was the business manager for all of the Australian oil at the time we called it, but it was all in non-LNG, so all the FPSOs and onshore. And so I would manage the business aspects of all that, the business decision making of all of that. So definitely more profit and loss oriented. And then after that, it became the same role having all the commercial marketing governance strategy teams report and I was part of Pluto and Pluto business unit. And so yeah, that was sort of my career at that point. And then my wife decided to retire from Woodside at the end of 2013 and I asked for and Peter Coleman our CEO at the time was quite gracious and allowed me to take a year of leave without pay so we could live down here in Pemberton, get trained up as firefighters, host my family down here, all of that sort of stuff. And as Tina transitioned to the next stage of her retirement

Look, I think it was in the beginning was definitely an emergent strategy. But I found out that I really loved the diversity of problems that I would get in those sorts of roles. So it's not like a deep technical role, but, you know, in 30 minute increments during your day, you'd be negotiating, you know, particular thing with governments or community groups that may have been impacted. Or then in a business decision, the reservoir engineer is telling one of the drilling engineers to keep drilling but the drilling engineer say well we run the risk of the borehole collapse and so navigating all those complex business decisions I really liked. And sort of during that era also under Don Voelte 2, I got given the tag of the the Mr. Fix It person and would get introduced to Richard Goyder as Mr. Fixit or anything like that so a lot of these various problems that didn't fit into any nice category. I remember one of the big ones is the Premier of Western Australia, Mr. Carpenter and Don Voelte. He got into a quite a public stoush over domestic gas at Pluto. And of course then the Premier said, well how to break this? He appointed Jim Limerick, who's the head of the Department of Mines and Petroleum at the time. And Don picked me and we had to jointly come up with a solution that would actually satisfy Woodside, it would make still make the project economic go ahead and contributed massively to the economy, but then protected the interests of the Western Australian people as represented by Jim. And so that was a fantastic negotiation, but it was actually joint problem solving between the State Government and ourselves

The reason we took a year off is Tina was on an executive contract and it had an end date. And of course, that meant that all of her long term incentives would be vested, her other alternative was to go to full time, which you don't have any control of necessarily when you leave anymore. And so she just said, look, she had been working for Woodside for 24 years, direct report to CEO, you know she ticked every box so she decided that was going to be enough and just confluence of timing. And then our financial planner, who was the architect of what we call "the plan" (trademark), which, was our long term life plan, which was to retire down here

Yeah, thank you. Actually he said, well, you guys can afford to hit your plan goals and still take a year off, like nobody gets this opportunity to do this. And so, yeah, we lived down here in Pemberton. My father and his all of his siblings came here to visit and that was a huge bonding moment for my aunts and uncles. We traveled to Canada and just really sampled life, what it would be down here, you know, we volunteered and got trained up as bushfire fighters, so it was just a great year off

Absolutely what it could look like. And a little bit of just you know, these were all pretty intensive jobs and a little bit of a recharge time, so I highly recommend it

Probably not. I really enjoyed it, but I probably needed the break. So yeah, I think the biggest thing is when you really need a break, the first thing that your brain is unable to do is know that it needs a break. And so yeah, it was just it was just really, really good timing. You know, it was really interesting. I remember it was like the last day of work before I actually had the year off. And Sean Gregory, our senior vice president, said, Russ let's go for coffee and so went for for coffee with him. I still remember exactly where we went on the terrace and he said, look, in a year or so, you know, the CEO and I are thinking about starting up an artificial intelligence data science team. Would you be willing to come back and lead some of that for us? And I remember just looking at him and saying, you bastard. I'm about to have a year off and you got me excited about coming back, because he knows I'm a geek. We used to play video games together

He absolutely knew what he was doing. During the time off, I had to tell our then CFO, Lowrie Tremaine, that I didn't want to come back as a commercial person. Yeah. And I think he really thought like I was kind of rejecting his tribe. Yeah, but he was really questioning that decision and then talked to Rob Cole and said, no I think this is really, you know, who gets an opportunity like this in their life, right? To learn about some of these emerging technologies that people are almost thinking is a joke right now. I remember, you know, head of artificial intelligence, it got snickers in 2015. How times have changed, right? So I came back sort of being a one man band in terms of our artificial intelligence work and eventually getting a few people Luana Barron and Caitlin Bushell to help out. And you know, we were able to work with IBM, do some pretty innovative work, I put some of the LNG contract terms in to this AI work, we don't know if this is going to work or not. So we, we got that contract done and it wasn't it wasn't going completely well in the beginning

The relationship with IBM and Woodside over with the first month or so, we struggled. We struggled until we got to the point where we actually left their sales and pre-sales and marketing people behind. And once we started talking to the detail technical people, I remember, you know, Zena Washington from IBM was there and I was asked some basic questions because I didn't know anything about machine learning at the time. And she was very truthful and honest, like "no, one instance can't learn from another instance" and things like that. So that really quickly established a trust. And as soon that clicked, I mean we had our first operational AI up and adding value within months. Yeah. 300 Woodsiders volunteered 3 hours each to do some of the training. Yeah so that was certainly the Watson era

Yeah, look, I mean, that was absolutely correct. So what we ended up doing is forming a joint sort of early studies group with ourselves and the AI machine learning natural language processing experts from IBM. We held workshops with a predominantly three groups and we wanted to make sure that any successes we would have would be material to a, you know, tens of billions of dollars company. Well, that very quickly narrows it down to operations, major capital projects and probably marketing. Yeah. So those were the big levers so we sat down with with those groups of people and we iterated around what the problems were versus did the technical people on the IBM side truly believe we have a chance of solving this? Most AI systems are deep and narrow so they can recognize cat videos. Right so its seen a lot of cats and so it can pick out cats from videos. One of the approaches we took is, could we turn that on a little bit on its side and say, look, can we just have a natural language query system that could look over all of our static documents for all of our major capital projects? Because each capital project probably has 25 million reports associated with it. Nobody could ever read them all. And unlike the technology that Google has, it's basically, you know, answering questions based on geographic area. So if you look for local cafes and you know who pays the most and how popular is that website? Well, none of those techniques work for internal documents. And so we were making the same mistakes over and over again. We weren't learning from, you know, even simple questions. How do you deter birds from the helidecks? That was one of the first problems that this natural language system was actually able to solve. And it would say you've already solved it before. You already paid $20 million to solve it. But it was in a report you never would have found for the text search

Yeah, so we were in a lot of work with the IBM Watson Development Labs in Austin, Texas. And one of the avenues that was emergent, we actually jointly went looking at could an AI be more than just a question and answering tool? And with two grads that we had seconded over there and the IBM staff, we eventually just developed a system where you could control a robotic system just with voice, you know, robot raise your arm. And the robot would reply, I don't know how to raise my arm. That's okay. I will teach you. Raise your left arm. Open your left hand. Lower your left arm. That's how you wave. Oh now I know how to wave. So you taught a robot a new skill and it kinda sounded cute but both IBM and ourselves realised this is a massive breakthrough. We taught a robot a new skill like you would teach an apprentice. So now rather than just the 0.001% of the population that can code in ROS, now anybody can teach a robot a new skill. So that was point number one, point number two was that ability to wave is independent of a robot's body, so any robot with arms can learn to wave. So if we opensourced this technology you could teach any robot in the world to wave. It wasn't long after this I was back in Perth and literally out of the blue, had a cold email, hello Russ Potapinski, my name is Julia Badger, you don't know me but we've heard of your work. I am head of robotics at NASA Johnson Space Centre, do you think you could to JSC and see if there's something for us to collaborate on. So talk about a highlight of careers, normally NASA doesn't cold call you, so I was one of the lucky few people in the world that that has happened to. And so this is a bit above my pay grade so went up to see Sean and Peter and Peter was just like yes

Yes. The answer is yes. Russ Now fly over there and figure out what I just said yes to. Yeah. Okay. So it was nice feeling to be supported from the from the business. So Shelley Kalms and myself, we headed over to Johnson Space Center and we met with a group, one or two people in head of robotics at the time, and then we went on a bit of a tour and we really didn't probably realise we were getting interviewed because after the tour of the High Bay and all the different robotic systems and we were explaining our new use cases versus what they need them for. We got back to a meeting room and the meeting room was full of NASA people. Okay, so clearly each time we had an interaction, somebody would go back and talk to the different teams and we walked out of there with more things on our plate than we could ever do in human lifetimes. The ability for robotic systems and for remote sensing remote operations was vital to both organisations. And to be honest, the personalities clicked

Which is half that. And we had the same passion, enthusiasm and same value structures there. And then so over the next six months, some very fine people at the International Affairs Office in Washington DC out of NAS and then ourselves, we negotiated and this is where my history of being a negotiator really helps. So we negotiated an International Space Act agreement which would have staff secondees which would have technology sharing, which would have hardware such as the robonaut sharing. And we got that done within about four or five months. And of course, it had to go to the highest levels of NASA because we are a foreign company that does compete with American companies. Yeah, but each of them had had the opportunity and for whatever reason decided to do their own thing. And hence the relationship with NASA was born robonaut was shipped over. And it was funny. Rachel Cooke, she was the Consul General to Western Australia at the time, invited myself and Julia over to the Culture General's office in Perth and she said, you've got this agreement, an international agreement done in five months. She said, you need to let us know who in the State Department helped facilitate that because they will literally get a medal. And Julie and I just look at each other. It's like we didn't actually have any help by anybody. We just did it ourselves. And so I think that had a good laugh and we were able to get on and really jointly lift the game in terms of the skill sets of both teams, actually. I think the you certainly know in your interaction with the NASA staff how many of them said when they get seconded over, it's the most intense learning of robotics they get because it's in a different environment, different context. And certainly when we had the initial team put together in the AI/robotics area, I couldn't do anything, I'm not a roboticist. I couldn't help them train up. And so we negotiated with NASA and we did a three months secondee of my team into theirs, into their area. And so they could learn the basics of ROS or affordance template technology 2 , autonomous manipulation of objects, that sort of that sort of thing. So that worked out really beautifully

Or somebody from Karratha. So it was interesting when they brought down the robonaut that was on the International Space Station, so they needed to upgrade its power supply and do some repairs on it. And so they asked us, do you have any technicians available? And so Pickles, Michael Peters, he's a he's a comms tech up a Karratha, born and bred and a really nice, great guy. Everybody loves pickles. And we said, look, can you go to NASA Johnson Space Center and help repair the on orbit robot. Sure, and he absolutely loved it. So Andrew Corrigan went as an electrical engineer and Pickles went as a tech. And of course, you can imagine how much interest then you get when actually somebody that's on the tools up at our operational facilities is actually getting these opportunities and actual NASA secondees coming back. Logan and Christa. So Logan was a robotics engineer now, so he subsequently joined a startup and his wife Kristen. Kristen actually is the head of the flight deck for attitude and altitude control. So basically her job is to certify and watch over the people that fly the space station. Yeah so they got to talk to all the kids at Karratha. So it was really, really good. We could show the TAFE and the high school and even the children of employees the robots we were using. I think that really engaged the people and it also it also settled any arguments or any worry that the robots were going to take people's jobs. Because they're tools, these are not going to replace humans

Exactly and everybody loves to play with one on the spot dogs

I think, you know, having been involved with profit loss asset management, so it's my job to make sure these assets are as profitable as possible, you start to very quickly learn where the levers are. And I think that that was what I could add most to my team. So everybody else on my team, you would have heard me say, I work very hard to make sure I'm the stupidest person on my team. And so they're all brilliant technical people, but they don't know the value of solving problem X versus problem Y. And so that's where I could add value to the team is to help them prioritise that. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa now if you can actually solve that, that's game changing. Yeah and a lot of times it would be that simple $100 sensors could solve a lot of problems. And we sort of came up with a what's the minimum viable technoloy, let's just solve the problem. Because anytime you make it more complex, it's harder to maintain or replicate. So I actually think the key to success in hindsight was putting a business person in charge of that technology group because it just allowed us to prioritise and get the wins on the board. As soon as we had the wins on the board. You know, Sean often told me I've never had to argue for your budget Russ, because every time somebody would say did they need that much? Everybody around, whether it was, you know, our chief operations officer, Meg O'Neill at the time, now CEO, they would be the people defending it

Well, I think the biggest thing is realising that your job is actually to develop the capability to enable robotic solutions. So, you know, while the the robots in the lab and, you know, the site trials we did on these particular individual physical robotic bodies added value and shaped the vision for the company. What I was really focused on is to make sure Woodside had a robust capability to continue to develop robotic solutions. So I think that's the thing that a lot of people, when they visit the lab missed. It's like they see the physical robots, they see it turning valves or they see it doing some surveillance work or the sensors adding value, creating that sort of digital twin. They saw that, but I don't think they really realize that those are individual solutions at a point in time. But really, what you need to focus on is, does your organisation have the capability to work with these technologies and implement them. Because there is no potential future world where the increased automation, increased data science, AI is not playing an important role in any business. Yeah. And so you need the capability to keep up with that technology and and implement those solutions

But we did also you know, we needed to have quick wins. Yes. So it's not necessarily billions of dollars value adding. But this is a practical technology, we aren't just sitting in some robotics lab theorising over potential slam models or whatever that particular thing is, we're actually getting value add. Yeah. And that was nice when Jason Crusan had joined Woodside, certainly the ability for us to showcase our capabilities helped, you know, these advanced technologies got the interest of all of the oil and gas, defense sector, space sector, and that actually opened up new alliances. Australian Submarine Corp, you know, and all of a sudden you're getting this more and more diverse skill sets. So, you know if you can get to a point where people understand with the vision that you're creating it is going to actually add tremendous value. Plus then you're actually paying your own way ten times over with problems you're solving. Then, yeah, no end of what resources are made available to you

Well, I think being able to... There is a big difference on building a business relationship and building a strategic alliance. Alliance partners go above and beyond what's ever written in the contract to help each other out. And I was very keen to make that happen because we can't move into this world at this stage ourselves. It would take decades to build up the capability required on machine learning and robotics and all of the many fields that support those sort of two endeavors. And it was also the identification of where we are actually working all on a very, very similar problems. So Rio Tinto with the remote mine sites, you know, Woodside with assets hundreds of kilometers offshore with nobody on that platform. We have increasing automation of the Defense Force and I'm not talking just the famous drones that everybody knows about, but, you know, crewless surface vessels, submarines. And so we really realise that we're all basically working on this same problem is how do we operate these assets remotely, more remotely, or at least have our cameras and our robots and our sensors be able to inform the maintenance crews before they fly a three hour flight and then a two hour helicopter ride offshore to realise they don't have the right parts. And so everybody sort of really realised this was a common problem. And I said, look, we can all bang or heads against it separately but I suspect as a collective, you know, whether it's NASA and Woodside and our joint venture partners, we've already solved the problem. We all have the pieces, but it would each take us 15 years to find all the other pieces. Yeah. Or we could just look at each other as puzzle blocks. And you know, and we don't compete, NASA's not going to compete for oil and gas contracts and we're not going to necessarily launch rockets to the moon, so why not work together?

Yeah, so the Australian remote operations for Space and Earth, it was really the brainchild of myself and Pam Melroy. So in our robotics lab, the Australian Space Agency was announced with the national robot in the background 3. It just makes too good television. So right from literally the beginning, had great relationships with the Australian Space Agency and was invited to when it was announced. Okay what did our strategic priorities need to be? Because it is not NASA, it is not going to receive $21 billion a year, it's not going to have the fundamental science research program. So there's just not that much money to go around. And so I was at a workshop in Brisbane and was talking about our relationship with NASA already and how the remote operations leverages the incredible technological advances that Western Australia and Australia more generally already have. And you know, the autonomous mining is well known. Normally uncrewed oil and gas facilities, well known. And you had companies like Boeing with their Loyal Wingman program in Brisbane, with the drone support fighter that flies along, you know, the human piloted aircraft. And so we have a lot of this technology and it's something that I think Australia can provide the international space community. And so Pam Melroy, former astronaut, colonel, test pilot in the US Air Force and she is now currently the deputy director of NASA, so she was President Biden's pick for that job. She was also at that workshop. Her and Doug were living in Adelaide at the time, they were doing some consulting work for Nova Systems, which is a defense contractor and the founder of Nova Systems and Pam were best friends who were test pilots together and so that's how that relationship went. So I was there and I kind of said this is where I think Australia can really add value to the international space faring nation. And I didn't know at the time, so in listening to Pam's speeches afterwards she said, I looked at that guy and I made a note, I need to talk to him because yes, there is not another nation that really provides the overall remote operations solution. Nobody else is stepping into that space as Australia does. And so Pam and I got talking at that workshop and then she flew over to Perth and we may have had a couple of bottles of blue in a state, Leeuwin Estate Art Series Chardonnay that we were having at the Indian Tea House. And I said, Look, what we really need is to get the Australian Institute of Remote Operations involved. And she's like what? There's such a thing? That's perfect Russ, why don't you tell me? I'm like, Oh, no, no, no, that doesn't exist. We're going to have to do it. Yeah, we're going to build it. And so, you know Pam and I drafted a like a little bit of white paper and never made beyond draft. We circulated it to several universities and governments and we very, very quickly realised we touched a nerve. Like this is something. And so Fugro was keen, Curtin University, UWA all wanted to get together and yes let's as a nonprofit corporation really take the bilateral collaboration that we were doing with NASA and Woodside and what if we made that national and international size? What if we just upgraded that to the next level and hence AROSE was born, received tremendous amount of support from the Australian Space Agency. We announced on their space conference in Adelaide on... it would have been in the Friday and we formally announced AROSE to the world on the Thursday and then we quickly got on a plane, flew over to Adelaide and you know, everybody at the space agency said well Russ you guys don't even have a table here and I was like you wouldn't have even had a chance to know. And the space agency rather graciously offered up half of their table. And so nothing they could have done would have actually showed support for AROSE more than that. And I think, you know, that was the nature of that. And so having somebody from industry here in Australia and somebody of Pam's background, well, this is it, you know, and I remember even when we had the launch of AROSE that Rio Tinto hadn't even formally joined, but their staff were helping. And so we had the foundation members, which was great. But then once we did form, we had many others, QUT joined up. We had MDA, which is the firm in Canada that builds, maintains and operates the Canadarm on the space shuttles and then subsequently the International Space Station. So it's it's really taken off, which I think people generally want to collaborate. But because the agreements and institutions behind allowing that collaboration to happen, you kind of need the innovators, plus the builders, the people that could actually get it done. And once the platform is there, everybody wants to pile in and contribute and it's running for not a lot of drain from the state and federal government but we can actually provide the best solutions for lunar rovers, etc., by using technology from all over. Some from NASA. Some from Rio Tinto, some from Fugro, some from Woodside, some from QUT, some from Curtin, UWA. So we put all that together and oh pretty soon we've got a real solution here

Yeah. So, no, I think I think that was really that was really, really good to start that up and then to see the level of support that people have given it has been great

You know, similar to all of the roles of had is what's the long term objective? What are we really trying to do, whether it's building capability in advanced technology, being able to leverage AI to transform our ability and lower the costs of our business or just not make the same mistakes again, at least make new mistakes. You know, so what is that? And being able to clearly articulate that lighthouse vision on the hill. You really need that if you are going get people on board. But then you also have to convince people that is not just, hey, I've got a cool idea, and wouldn't it be cool if we could execute it? Is turning that then into a rigorously detailed plan. Okay, maybe on a quarterly basis it's going to take three or four years to get here, but then commit to the board or to the members of AROSE. Here's what you're going to see quarter by quarter that will actually march us there. And so once people see a vision and they see that actually there's a plan behind the vision, then people get quite excited about that. And, you know, I remember every time a previous CEO came down a lot. Peter Coleman, last question before he left was always, what more do you need?

Is it money? I'm like, Peter, you could up the budget. But to be honest, we're probably we're at that cusp of not wasting it. You know, we could always go off different avenues of inquiry, but sometimes, throwing more money at the problem actually doesn't solve itself. And so being able to have those realistic conversations with your alliance members is important. And the thing is, you have to cultivate the alliance. So a lot of things we would do for IBM, let's say, for example, is we wouldn't necessarily have done for our traditional oil and gas contractors. We don't go to their conferences and show people what we have value added with their products. But remember how early days this was for IBM? We were more important to them as a showcase of actually industrial value add of the Watson AI family. They spent more money on marketing our use case or our success case than we ever would have paid them in fees. Yeah, but that was important because that's what we could provide them. They could provide us cutting edge technology that nobody else had

Access to the best teams worldwide. And by trying it by solving our problem we push their technology like their early Watson Natural language processing systems were never designed for tens of millions of documents. Never. Not even a fraction of that. They were designed more for chatbot style things where you know the short tail, if you're an AI person, a short tail versus long tail answers 3. Yeah and so that's the true nature of a strategic relationship, is where you go above and beyond for friends. And that's been that's been great

I think generally being passionate about that and caring for the people under your chain of command and genuinely wanting to make sure that there succesful, because you know, I don't know anything about to robotics or I didn't. So you're not going to be successful unless they are tremendously successful. You know, setting that strategic vision, as we said. But also, I was very passionate about not wanting to be just a business manager with a white collar shirt. And so in each of these cases, whether it was mergers and acquisitions, I got a very traditional M&A focused MBA. So you need to actually really learn all of these skills. And some people like that do that and some people don't. I remember getting the AI job and it's like, well I need to know how to machine learn. Like I need to know what this stuff is. And so I did one of the MIT classes Analytics Edge 12 week intensive course which is archived now but you know your very first week you're programing in R and finding correlations on infant mortality and then you are doing machine learning algorithms on trying to determine how a U.S. Supreme Court judge is going to vote. Pretty scary when my model got 98% accuracy. Or entering data science competitions online. So one of the ones I entered was from the New York Times and how to predict which articles, online articles are going to be popular. So many likes or so many shares. And you know, I think on that one, I came in, you know, 37th out of the competition, but there was over 3000 people. So I think, you know, I did not know it because I was never going to code in the AI team or in the robotics team. But I really needed to develop an intuitive feeling of what kind of problems these technologies can solve and what it can't. And if you don't go down that rabbit hole, when you change jobs into a new area, you are at the mercy for every snake oil salesman out there

Absolutely. Yeah. And so being able to actually have done it yourself does help you and it helps tremendously

Absolutely. So the problems they had, it helped me appreciate it. So number one, it helps you to to schedule work and like, oh, it's two weeks too long or too short. Yeah. Having some sort of intuitive feel on that. But I think what really it gives them, it gives them the proof that you are actually committed to them. Like you're not going to from scratch learn how a natural language processing engine works or classification system or linear optimization or any like you're not going to want to, you know, if you're not passionate about what they're passionate about, you're not going to do that. And so you offered them some proof of that. Of my convictions and also I think allowed me to do the translation between techie geek speak and business results, whether that's at the board level... So when I took the board on a tour of NASA Johnson Space Center, really I was able to speak both languages. Well, they loved it. Yeah. Or, you know, sending NASA secondees to North Rankin. You know, what are we trying to achieve here? Well, how I would pitch that would be different to both audiences because they speak different languages. So I think that really helps there as well

Well, a couple of things. I had the benefit of being at woodside for 22 years on these various roles. So I had a lot of trust capital

I did. I remember the first time we made the customer pay for an AI system we created and that was Fiona Hick. She was head of HSE at the time and she said what's the system going to look like? I don't Fiona. You know, our AI specialists and your HSE people will actually jointly create a system that doesn't exist and she says, well I've never signed up for anything like that. What's it going to cost with me? Told her the cost, X number of hundreds of thousands of dollars, X number of months? It was just we'll see where we get to. She said I wouldn't sign this for anybody else. But I've worked with you for 20 years, so I'm not trusting the contract, I am trusting you. Yeah. And so that helped. And the fact that we were able to deliver that for hundreds of thousands of dollars cheaper and, you know, quicker. And then we moved on to the next thing. So I think, you know, that certainly helps

So I did have that background. Yeah. But then partly because while I didn't communicate it well, I had the plan to retire. There was nothing I needed, I didn't need anything personally from this

No ulterior motives. I'm not trying to aim for the next promotion and the next job. I'm just trying to do good work. I love my work. I love the people that I'm working with. I need to prepare them because I knew in the back of my head I'm leaving. I needed to prepare them for the leadership positions when I left. And so I think all those things we naturally know we need to do anyway. But it ground home like it added a sense of urgency to me. So being able to develop the people, you know, like, you know yourself like Ali, you know, even giving people like Luana Barron and Caitlin a taster, even if this wasn't going to be their thing forever or all the way up to, one of my favorite things is finally getting Dee Jones as a lab manager, but then seeing her passion and her ability to work with her hands to repair these robotic systems, second her over to NASA to the technicians and have somebody whose job title used to be admin assistant, now it's robotic technician. I mean, you know, you hear CEOs and politicians and talk about the jobs of the future, but very few can offer a concrete example as that. And it sort of shatters the notion that this jobs revolution is only for PhD students and computer geeks. It's not. It is for everybody

No, you don't. And I think, you know, we're in the golden age of education where anybody, you know, you don't even need a high school degree. You can go on EDEX, Coursera, you can go on like the robotic operating systems. NASA's got such great open source things. You know, we're in the golden age of education where anybody can access this, in particular in a growing, you know, what's perceived as real in a growing inequality. So especially in a field for for, you know, people normal salaries in the United States where I remember going to one "low fee paying" university, and they were quite chuffed that they were only charging $40,000 a year tuition. USD. And so this whole growing divide of these higher education institutions are only for people with wealth - I'm talking predominantly United States. The HECS system here in Australia is fantastic. But the reality is the certification of talent is not the monopoly purview of the universities anymore. You have Google saying you can do a six month course, and we consider that equivalent to a four year degree. You have AWS, very, very similar. In fact, the more courses you complete with them, the more job opportunities internally open up with you. So I actually think that's probably more the wave of the future because you know. People graduating from, say, high school right now, they'll be doing jobs like nobody. We didn't have like machine learning people at Woodside, or roboticists at a mining company, you know, 20 odd years ago. Maybe Rio Tinto made moves so maybe them, but they're going to need to learn new skills that's going to be their superpower, not learn anythin in particular because all this stuff changes so rapidly. Even if we had to completely rebuild the first AI system, just because in three years it was completely archaic and so much had changed like we may as will been programing in, you know Egyptian hieroglyphics. The computer code crashed because it didn't you know, the line didn't end with men pouring water man pouring water little birdie that's that degree of change requires the ability to learn not a static knowledge set

Yeah, my style is probably speechcraft. So talking it through, you know, what is the vision? What are we trying to achieve? What are the quarterly goals? And then once you give people quarterly goals, basically they can solve, you know, the two weekly sprints by themselves. You don't need to really get involved with that. I think one of the advantages that we had in the lab is that got people so aligned to the vision is they heard it every second day as we had the tours because people like, why are you working with NASA? And it's all the same questions and this is why, remote operations and being able to prototype and you know, two weeks sprints and all of that sort of stuff and here's where we're aiming towards. And although we, we were very careful not to try to interrupt the people that are coding, you know, headphones and everything like that, you don't need to be interrupted because the minister is coming through. But hearing in the background that sort of same story and consistent story over and over again, changed subtly for the audience. Whether it's politicians, we talk more about jobs, the future. Where as with mining companies we talk more about the generic remote operations capability set that's required

Right because you have to explain the story. In the corner it's the analogy where you never understand something as well as when you have to teach it. So if you have to articulate the strategy, you probably know what it is. Yeah but the range of technology, that's not for me. That's so I think we had kind of clear everybody had a clear role in developing the strategy. This is what we want to achieve. Yeah. But then how we go about it, I don't know, that's for you to figure out

Yeah and look, I think the two week, the showcases and having each person being able to showcase to the rest of the team, the progress they made in the past two weeks of course. You know one of the results of that is an incredible pride in your work. And wow, we've cracked this problem and people, you know, getting literally applause from the rest of the lab. But then Sean Gregory might come down to just sit on that. So now you're showcasing that to one of the executives. Not too many people get to do that on a deeply personal this is my three or four person team accomplishments. And then but that also, I think, had a profound impact on bringing whoever the end users were going to be or whoever's problems you're trying to solve and having them demo, you know, having an HSE person demo this new, you know automated hazard detection or the drilling engineers. It's very, very powerful to suck them into it. And I remember when we with the geoscientists and the drilling engineers at the end of that three or four month build for their solution, they could talk machine learning, text annotation as well as anybody on my team could. And literally one of the IBM programmers, he would be 2 to 3 hours in a conversation about drilling engineering before you would realise he's maybe not a drilling engineer. So that depth of knowledge that both parties got really contributed to that shared vision I think

It's their product not ours

Yeah. Where we had an ops manager come in. Never seen the robot before. Beccarelli. And we set a challenge. I said to Mary, start your watch. He gets 60 seconds of training on how to drive this robot around offshore while he's in the Woodside head office. And so you kind of set that very visceral challenge. The UI, the systems have got to be that intuitive, you know, in the end. And the smile on his face, suddenly he had a great time

Oh, absolutely. And people actually got it, actually. You know, and he did. He said, look, what we really need on this thing is we didn't have it. We had microphones so we could hear, but we did have a speaker. And so he actually wanted to use the robot in a little bit of a telepresence mode and like, oh, well, that is trivial to do. Yeah, I said that would add so much value. So if, if we had like a killer rotating equipment engineer, literally telepresence robot up to an offshore and then being able to have a conversation with a technician that's right there. Yeah. He said, I'm like, this would save us millions of dollars in helicopter flights. Okay, trivial

Yeah, I think well, a couple of different things. So we certainly got to the place where we were financially independent. And we've always had the conversation between Tina and myself. You know, country we're both country kids. This is where we want to we want to live. And, you know, a couple of things like statistically that, you know, for you and me, anybody listening to this, this year is going to be your healthiest statistically. And so we don't know what's going to happen. You know, I've got Crohn's disease. You just don't know what's going to be around the corner. And so why would you want to die with more money in the bank? Is one thing. And you've been down here in my home, ten acres in Pemberton. Yes. I love my job, but I love her more, is the answer and I want to spend time with Tina. And also, I was smart enough to realise and self-aware that I am passionate, very passionate about the work that I've done. And so when I resigned from Woodside, I also knew that I had to resign from the chair of the Australian Remote Operations Space and Earth, so AROSE and found a replacement chair. David, if you're listening, thank you for taking the position, Leanne, thank you for taking the CEO position. Also, I resigned from the chair of the Defense Science Center. Kirsten Rose thank you for taking that position and also from the Australian Space Agency Industry Leaders Forum and some sci-tech boards and things like that, because I knew that I am passionate and so if I retired but still did all of that, I'd still be working ten hour days from my office here in Pemberton rather than really doing what I should be doing, which is okay, what is the next stage of life look like?

I think I'm most proud of the accomplishments of others that I've had that I've been able to positively influence. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I see Julia getting the job of, you know, vehicle systems integration manager for the Deep Space Gateway, when I see Pam Melroy being made deputy director of NASA, I'm not taking any credit involved. You know, Ali, Shawn Fernando coming in as an OIM and now knows robotics. And you know, Jason Crusan and being able to, to decide to move to Australia with his family. So, you know, I think the big sort of thing that, you know, you realize is whatever accomplishments I, I mean business accomplishments, you did a great deal here and you got Pluto to feed whatever, whatever those things are. Nobody cares. Yeah, nobody will ever remember. But the so there is no legacy in terms of accomplishments in that nobody will remember

But the people that you helped along the way, they all remember. And so that, you know, if you can focus your attention on making sure that, you know, the people's great values, great capabilities, rise and succeed in the world, then that's what you should be focused on. And there's nothing you can do that will make a bigger impact than that

That yeah I guess you know you're right I mean I guess, you know, and I'm awfully fond of Ali and Dee, you know, everybody yourself, everybody I've worked with as well. And it was hard and it was but it was it was the, you know, the videos from around the world, you know, people expressing like this is the impact you've had on my career, my coaching, things like that, that really hit home right and it's like yeah. Okay. You've left the world better than you found it

Absolutely. And, you know, and it's even nice to know that that impact is going to continue, you know? Yeah, various people in AROSE I think there have gotten opportunities that they never would have gotten without AROSE. And so I think that's, you know, certainly fantastic and it perpetuates. And, you know, some people will be benefiting from some of the alliances that you put together long after nobody remembers who you are

Well, you know, and thank you for coming in. So I know you had options, right. And we both know that you, you know, had options with other companies and, you know, and the best people always did. You know, the best people are always going to be highly valued by multiple organizations, um, and which is great. And being able to attract and retain them and have a bit of fun while we're working

Crazy people trying to solve problems that humans haven't solved yet

I think some of these technologies, I think the power to give everybody a truly equal opportunity. You know, because, you know, it isn't this. We don't have an equal opportunity. You know, my superpowers luck and luck governs. Luck governs 99% of how your life is going to turn out. And anybody that tells you otherwise is just trying to take credit for their own success, in my humble opinion. Yeah. And so being able to go online to some of these free things and just learn whether you're, you know, you're in a poor village in India, whether you're in New York City and, you know, unfortunately not born to rich parents and being able to then learn about AI or robotics or and it's not just the technology. You can go on and do Harvard Law. Yeah. You know, you're not going to have the degree, but you're going have the knowledge

Yeah, I think it can be I really do think and there's plenty of opportunities to do that. I mean, so that's that's one of the things I think really excites me. I think the other thing is really in the advancements in biomedicine, in genetic engineering, to me, I'm already personally benefiting it. So with my Crohn's disease has kept in control by injecting a biological agent into myself every week and that those are a whole class of treatments that years ago just simply didn't exist. Weren't even theoretically possible. And so I think we're going to probably see I think contrary to the current curve, everybody knows Moore's Law. But there's also Ohm's Law, which is the opposite. In medicine, it tends to be less and less breakthroughs for every billion dollar spent. But I think there's a chance that's gonna turn around with more of the in-depth, personalized medicine, AI helping that and also genetic engineering. So I think those are those are some pretty exciting things to watch. Look, and to me some of that stuff is even what's happening now. I mean, the StarLink system, suddenly everybody in the world that has access to power can have access to the Internet

We are on that Internet right now. Thank you, Elon. No, but I mean, I think those are pretty powerful technologies. You know, obviously I'm very excited about the Artemis program with the Australian Space Agency is supporting under NASA's leadership of, you know, permanent human settlement on the lunar surface. The moon base as a subsequent test base for Mars obviously. But you know, it's pretty exciting. That even the people in the Woodside labs were contributing to humans becoming a truly interplanetary species. And I will probably and you definitely will see that happen. So, you know, if you think about humans being an interplanetary species and we will see that with the moon base if you call moon base interplanetary... But that accomplishment in human history, I would rank as on par with fire, agriculture and the wheel. The written word. You know, it will be in the top five things that our humanity has ever done. Easily

And you get to see it. What an exciting time to be alive

You know, I'm tempted to say, like, you know, we've always got we're always focused about current issues of the day. So climate change, obviously that horrible situation in the Ukraine. If I could solve any problem that would have the greatest, probably. FTL. Faster than light. Right now it's not even theoretically possible. Yeah, there's two let's say non establishment theories, but unless we solve that one. We're stuck in a very, very tiny place of the universe forever. And that's not a we just have to wait till the next engine. That is literally forever. So I think, you know, if I could theoretically solve a "problem", it would probably be that or death, like the natural aging process. It would probably be up there. You know, obviously we've got the immediate of climate change. I'm hopeful that climate change with that, we are actually starting to really respond to that now. Is it too late for 1.5 degrees? I think it is too late, but at least it's now a serious topic. I mean, you could argue maybe not the Australian Government's most amazing policy area. But I think as a world, everybody's coming on board. Yeah. With that, you see everybody trying to do their part. And so we'll solve that. I'm optimistic because we've solved acid rain. We've solved the hole in the ozone. The only time now people go hungry on the planet is when people want them to, some despot or some warlord wants them to go hungry

Yeah. So we've solved some pretty big challenges, you know, Polio, a lot of the horrific diseases, mumps, they're gone. The Millennium Goals, we we're educating far more women in terms of the popular world population than we certainly were doing at the turn of the century. Far less people living in abject poverty. I mean, there's far more to go but we've done a hell of a lot. We have done a hell of a lot. You know, sometimes the younger generation, rightfully, I think, are a little bit miffed that, you know, obviously inaffordibility of housing, climate change, it's like you guys left us basically a pile of poo. Yeah, it's like, well, your parents solved a lot of problems, but we didn't solve all them

Yeah. Oh absolutely. Yeah. I think we will. Yeah. I mean I think we've got a fair pathway. I mean we have all of the technology we need to solve climate change, it's just question of will. We have in Australia, we have plenty gifted with plenty of uranium. We could have nuclear power plants all over if we wanted to. It is a choice

Yeah. I won't accept that. Yeah, but I know you would know that that was going to be my answer. It's like, yeah, it goes along with the theory of like, there's one thing that can inspire somebody and completely change their life. And that may be true, but I think it's more of a holistic context of everything that you've learned, witnessed, appreciated that can actually help you move your life. What I would say to people is, rather than read a story, write one. What do you want your life to be? Where is your happiness points? Where do you want to see yourself in 20, 30, 40 years? When you retire and you're in this chair giving this little interview

What do you want your story to look like? Plan it. And it's going to change, right? Yeah. But so many people just drift from day to day. Very few people have a plan. Yeah. So have a plan. Have an ambition. What is it?

Thank you very much. It's been great. Cheers. Thank you