Lord Browne Discusses the Equilibrium of Engineering

the environment. If you're interested in what it's like to run a company, what it's like to lead a double life, what it's like to be at the vanguard of engineering, then you're going to find this to be an absolutely fascinating conversation. So, with no further ado, my interview of Sir John Brown. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today is the Right Honorable Lord Brown of Mattingly, better known as John Brown.

He was the CEO of British Petroleum from to two thousand and seven. He is also the former president of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Since two thousand and one, he has been a member of The House of Lords. He is the author of five books, most recently Make Think, Imagine, Engineering, The Future of Civilization. John Brown, Welcome to Bloomberg. Very good to be him. So you have a fascinating background and and quite an interesting career. But I have to

go back to your education. You you earn a degree in physics at Cambridge and then you get a MS degree in business at Stanford. What was it like going from the UK to California. That must have been a little bit of a culture shark. It was very different. I found the whole It was ten years after I graduated from Cambridge. I went to Stanford. And I went to Stanford because everybody said, don't go to Harvard. It's just a pale shadow of what Cambridge actually is. Founded

by someone who graduated from Cambridge. So go somewhere years ago. They have a very short memory of long memories, I should say. So I went to Stanford, and of course I found a completely different set of people, a very great set of people, entrepreneurs even then. This was in the late sevent the early eighties, and they were fascinating and the teaching was interesting, the leading edge thinking was interesting, and the quality of people both the students and faculty

was something you couldn't see elsewhere. I don't think so I'm gonna I'm gonna cross Harvard off my list, second year school, Cambridge and Stanford. That's what wouldn't have send the kids. So you graduate, you literally joined BP as an apprentice while at university and you were a mean with the firm your entire career. That that's fairly unusual these days tell us about having a career with a single company. Well, in those days, it wasn't that unusual.

I have to say. I joined I technically joined BP in nineteen sixty six the day I went up to Cambridge University. They helped pay for my studies, which was very important. In fact, I paid for myself entirely from the age of eighteen for everything I did by winning a couple of scholarships to Cambridge, one which was involving the across disciplinary approach if you were a scientist who had to write a thesis on something to do with arts, and I wrote a thesis about Iran where I had

lived at the Safavid architecture of Isfahan. So I won a lot of money and that kept me going through university. But I joined, and about every year I thought i'd leave, and so I be offered jobs, and somehow BP offered me a better job, and every time I was thinking of going, I had a bigger and bigger challenge. So I I went to Alaska in nineteen sixty nine because

I had asked to go to the United States. Alaska was not quite what I had in mind, but I found myself working two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, near Point Barrow on the testing oil wells, which turned out to be the Prudeo Bay oil Field, one of the greatest oil fields ever discovered in North America. So that's what I did, and up from field work it graduated. One day my I was about to leave my Bosque aim In and said, um, would you like to come

to New York with me? I said, when do we pack? Uh? And off I went to New York and for four years and life carried on from that. Our weather in New York is not great, but it's certainly better than than the Arctic Circle. You mentioned the work you did

in Iran. I'm reminded of of some of your travels in your book Beyond Business, where you describe meaning some of the world's let's call them most colorful despots, Colonel Kadafi in Libya, Vladimir Putin at his country, Docta, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, as well as UH communist despot despots in Kazakhstan and secret meetings with Russian oligarch's. The obvious question is why this motley crew? But I think we all know the answer. They seem to be where the

oil is correct. I mean it's I think someone said once that God had played a joke on people and put the oil in places where people didn't want to go. We can't find oil under London, it's probably very good thing. We would never be allowed to produce it, or or in New York. You can find oil in California, and it's very difficult to develop and produce. There's plenty of oil in the North Sea, so you have access not

too far fur not, but not enough. It was a very important discovery the North Sea, both in the UK and Norway, and it's still producing quite a lot of oil and gas, but there's more oil and gas outside those areas. And and in those days, of course, the Permian, the Permian Basin was a place which was declining. I went there for field training when it was sort of on decline, and you were taught how to save one cent because that made all the difference to the profitability

of a well. So it really taught you the basics of act. But now, of course it's a tremendous place where everybody wants to invest and growing like gangbusters. And that's strictly because of the new technology of fracking and the ability to take what was previously not productive fields and turned them to giant winforce. So it was a way of releasing what geology put in place, what history

put in place that couldn't flow naturally. So this is so called hydraulic fracking, hydraulic fracturing, a technique which I may say was invented by one of the companies in the bp group, by AMCO, the Standard All of Indiana, which is part of bp UH. And so it's a it's a very very h the likely used activity until suddenly the Permian appeared and when it was became a very heavily used and quite controversial technique. So one of the things you mentioned in in I believe it was

beyond business. Vladimir Putin was one of the few people you said you were determined to say goodbye to before leaving BP. Why is that? Well, I think I had Whether this is the Stockholm syndrome working, I'm not sure, but I'd spent so much time with him. Recall that we're pulled together a big deal in Russia called t NK BP, and we were the biggest foreign investment in Russia and also the fastest growing or in gas company

in Russia. We applied modern management, contemporary technology to some very good assets that were declining under the Soviet Union's rule. So I met him at least once a quarter and we had a standard agenda which I went through to tell him how well we were doing, and he would always say you must do more, and then we would

have a discussion about who owned it. And I did a deal, a very important deal which said that BP and and the Russian part and Mr Putin always said that will never work, it will blow up and really should be and I'm Mr Putin want fifty one, and so when Mr President, I want the other way around. So that's why we're fifty fifty. And actually it worked

remarkably well. Now things a number of people have over the years have complained that it's very challenging to do business in Russia, that the rule of law is not the same as it is in Europe or the United States, that you can't rely on contracts, that there is a black market as well as an underground that makes business challenging. There. You guys seem to have done pretty well there. What why? How?

First of all, how accurate are those descriptions? And second why was BP able to succeed where lots of other companies were unable? So I think the description is accurate, but it changes over time, you know so, because Russia doesn't stand still either, so it gets better and worse depending.

So I think the most important thing about this sort of business that BPS in or any other company like that, is you have to be sure you're wanted and you're doing something that the country really wants you to do. And so that's what kept BP in the position that it could do business the way I wanted to do it, because Putin said, I see I need a foreign investor, I need to demonstrate to the world that these people

are doing good things. I'm growing, I'm modernizing, And BP did all those things, and as a result, we were able to with scale, with the big scale that we had, and with our partners, who were pretty good, they're very good, we were able to navigate a path which kept us on the straight and narrow, and that's really what we did. Do you still have a good relationship with the Putin or has everybody's interests move on and they've all moved on? I mean, I haven't seen Mr Putin since I left BP.

And what what he was by that point in time? He was President of Russia? Yes he was, Yes, I remember he. I first met him when he came to London. Let's see, I think in late nine when Yeltsin was the president and we were all looking at Mr Putin saying this is a young and refreshing person who talks about the rule of law and getting things done, and we thought this was terrific. Um. And actually his first

term that's exactly what he did, quite quite quite interesting. UM. I wanted to bring up something you had said in an interview not too long ago along the those lines you mentioned you would like to see more scientists and engineers in top corporate and political positions. Explain you're thinking behind that. I would like to see them in these positions because they're trained in a way of thinking that is different from being trained in economics, that sale, political science,

or journalism. It's very different. It's a it's a very different way of looking at facts and building theories and testing them, and very practical too. Engineers, after all, have to get things done and they were and they have to get them done, and they have to work without beyond a shadow of doubt. I mean, you don't want to walk across a bridge which has a fifty probability of standing up. It's not a good idea as opposed to the forecast of the average economist may or may

not career remotely. You can't do that. So it's a different way of thinking. It's a practical way of doing things, and it's actually a very truthful approach. I think most scientists and engineers are taught that in the end, you have to say that you have to talk about the truth. You have to be fact based and you can't spin anything or add a layer of complexity to it. So people can't quite understand it in the end, because advances about challenge, and it's about challenge and testing, which is

based on facts and truth. So perhaps that explains why there are so few scientists and engineers as politicians. It's possible, it's possible without the spin, it becomes very much a challenge to get elected. If you're telling the truth and telling people what they don't want to hear from time to time. I suppose that's called a technocratic politician. And

sometimes they work, sometimes they don't, uh, you know. For example, Italy has had a series of when they really get into a trouble, they have a technocratic prime minister and Monty, for example, Mario Monty work pretty well, sort of dow a lot of stuff. Very unpopular though, because he kept talking about the truth. And I have to start with the quote of yours early in the book. Engineering is wrapped all around us like a protective and life sustaining blanket.

Explain which is what I firmly believed. Let me say so, I like to start a little bit back from there. Everything you look at in the way the progress and civilization, civilization, progressive civilization of humanity is based on engineering. Whether that's the flint ax, you know, hold a massively beautiful objects in your hand, was very important to begin to think about how you carve up an animal and how you change the way you survive through to looking at something

which opens the imagination, like the James Web telescope. Butut Godard Space Center, this is an amazing thing. We're going to fire it into space a million miles away from us, the so called Second Grange in Point, and it's going to sit there unfold like a piece of ore gamy, a hundred and forty folds, and then it's going to

look towards the beginning of time. Now that's incredible. It just fires the imagination to think you could actually look towards the beginning of time and you might actually see some planets on the way, you know, and they might actually tell you something about life. So I think I find that very exciting. That's about civilization. It's wrapping our mind. It's giving our mind a blanket which allows it to think securely and imagine, which is what human beings do.

So I think engineering is the is the golden thread through everything. It protects us, of course it does. It protects us from disease. You know, we all get healthier, we live longer. It protects us from poverty. You know, were world is getting rich less, people living in in in extreme poverty. And actually it protects us from violence as well. When I was writing this book, what I found fascinating was the world has actually become less violent

the more advanced the weaponry has become. And so that's a protective blanket. It's the engineering has allowed everyone to say, Okay, I get it. If we start doing something, someone will do something to us. It's not necessarily mutually assured destruction. Not it's not, but it's a deterrent. It's it's mutually assured disturbance, you know, big, big disturbance, And that's what keeps us in equilibrium. And and engineering does all of that.

And remember it really is something about safety, because I contend that engineering engineers have saved far more lives than all the physicians in the world because of the ability to public health engineering, molec fuels, engineering drugs. Go to a hospital, Look at the kit, look at the equipment, m R eyes, cat scans. Uh. You know what's in an intensive care ward robotic surgery? You know, which is

you don't damage the nerves. You know, much more precise than much more precise the knives that cut the flesh, that immediately can detect whether they're close to a canterrous cell. So all of this is amazing stuff. And I I love when I spoke to Robert Langer at m I T it's a great inventor. He's called the Edison of medicine. Is is this the Da Vinci machine. No, he's the one that thinks of blood as a great chemical engineering experience and tries to get get drugs to the place

they should go rather than throughout the whole body. So rather than chemotherapy going through the whole body, actually using the blood him to get something to an exact place. And I thought his phrase was wonderfully said, you know, my ambition is just is to reduce suffering, and that's what engineering allows me to do. That. That's quite fascinating. Your throughout the book, you you reference the reduction of things like not only war and crime, but the increased longevity.

Reminded me a lot of Stephen Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature or is it the other way around? Better Nature of Our Angels? Um Better Angels of Our Nature, which talks about what the media doesn't, which is wherever you look, whether it's literacy or childhood, hunger or just come up with a list of markers of human progress. We've done really well over the past thousand years. Certainly

I agree. I mean I took a very broad sweep, and I took also somethings where today I would say to say that they're really good is controversial in many sectors of society, for example, oil and gas, for example, facial recognition for example, the social media, and the issues to do with privacy. There are many good aspects to all this. There are also some bad ones, but it it raises the more general point that all engineering has great intended consequences that most de great, sure, but also

unintended consequences. And the question is how do you balance this, hope, And that's been happening since people first made a piece of kit for anything, for sailing, So it's the balances is partly about rules and regulations you don't use it for this, partly about education. You know, it's not right that engineers should say, let's do it because I can do it, should stop for a moment and say should I do it? Should I do it? And in corporations that's of course the role of boards and leaders, But

it's also about engineering itself. I think, you know, in my area energy, I don't believe anyone purposefully decided to create an unstable climate by pumping c O two into the atmosphere through burning hydrocarbons. What they wanted to do was to give people light, heat, and mobility better than burning well oil as you or wood or cutting down forests,

but also giving people a very different modern way. So, but we've created a problem, and I've been on this point for almost a quarter century now saying you know, it's the oil and gas industries that's created this problem, and we need to fix it. And the way to fix it is not to stop in engineering, is to

apply more engineering to solving the problem. And actually in this area, I would say that we have already all the engineering processes to stop pumping as much as the CEO two into the atmosphere, and actually even to clean up some of the CEO two. The problem is that the processes, the engineering products are too expensive until they are rolled out in massive scale, because isn't that a chicken and egg problem? Meaning this is where policy comes in.

So in other words, policy has to push these these new engineered products to the point where they become more economical exactly. So you can't say, oh, well, we have to invent all that. You don't have to invent. We need to apply. And this is where engineering is very good because as you apply more and more, so the unit cost comes down. We know that for sure. So

but you need a policy lever my my. When I look at all the policy dvas, I say, the biggest policy of you need is a price on carbon carbon taxes. You probably need other things as well, but it's going to be priced high enough so that people can actually do something to get it out of the system. Quite interesting. I very much like the way you structured the book

via the chapters. The titles are progress, make, think, Connect, Build, Energize, which we were just discussing, move, defense, Survive, Imagine that that was really um quite interesting. One of the things that really didn't get a lot of UM pages was modern food and agriculture, which is really how we're going

to support eight billion people and keep them fed. What is it about agriculture that seems to be so different from the other technologies you discussed, because clearly there's been men this progress in terms of yield per acre and how much a single farmer can produce, so in choosing what to write about, I only wrote about things that I've been involved in, and because otherwise I can't actually write.

I'm not I'm not someone writing a survey. So I'm writing about things I've been involved in one way or another. You know, whether it's being on the board of Intel or Damond Diamond Bentz, or whether it's being on the board of the Creek Institute, the biomedical Research facility. It's all these sorts of things. So I said, I've actually got to have some connectivity here. I used to be Norman Foster, the Great Architect's chairman at one stage when

he was thinking of taking his company public. So I've been involved in and out with all the things that I've been talking about, and I've never actually done anything in food production or agriculture. And so I said, there are plenty of people who will talk about that. Let me talk rather selectively because I get as the author, I get to choose, and I chose the things that I felt comfortable to talk about because I've had some

hands on experience. I had actually met the people I've been involved and so it allowed me to speak from the first person quite quite interesting. I want to talk a little bit about a book you wrote in the Glass Closet, and that's only five years ago, but it seems like so much has changed in in half half a decade. In the book, you point out coming out of the closet is good business. Explain what you meant

by that. What I meant was that when people can be themselves in the place of work, they bring their whole selves to the work and they can feel included rather than separate and apart. And one of the things that I think every CEO knows in their heart and they statistically is that if you can build teams where people really feel included, the actually go and work to the purpose of the firm. When people see people being excluded, it creates a lot of grits in the system. People

don't actually give their whole cells. They say, well, I could be excluded too. So inclusion is really and part of inclusion is being yourself and coming out. I would say that that's not a piece of advice for everybody because you have to be a situation sensitive. So coming out in Uganda not I think be a good idea or Saudi Arabia, you know, because it's against the law or it's against norms with tremendous punishments, sometimes death, so

you have to be sensible about this. But in in the society of the United States, the United Kingdom, most of Europe, then it's something that absolutely people can choose to do, and when they do it almost certainly it produces a better result than staying in the closet. So is, when the book came out in the United States, this was not the top of the agenda for then President Barack Obama. In fact, he was not the most progressive

person in terms of his views on marriage equality. And I think it was then Vice President Joe Biden who sort of accidentally forced the issue, and Obama stepped up and the forecasts of uh royling society turned out to be completely wrong. It was very quickly accepted and wreck It's only five years ago, but it just seems like a given. What was the experience like in the UK. I know you worked on some legislation similar to the

US Marriage Equality Act, it was the same. I remember this book was published in was actually written in so that was quite a bit of time ago. But I think things have changed dramatically. So in the UK I sat through big debates in the House of Lords about marriage equality. I heard bigotry coming out loud and clear. You know that gay people really make great decorators and entertainers, and my best friends are gay person but I have them as a token pet, you know. I mean, the

list went on and on and on. But actually when it came to the vote, I think at that time it was the single largest turnout of lords in the House to vote and it was overwhelmingly supported. I remember going through the lobby with some of the most important Catholics in England and someone said to me. One of them said, look to me. A friend of mine said, I'm going to burn in hell for this, but we're

going to get this done. And I thought that was a wonderful statement, to say, this is the right thing for the nation. And it really was. And I think it was a tremendous achievement that changed attitudes a long way. It loosened people up a bit, and and the Brits do need loosening avocationally, just to touch So so here's the interesting thing. In the United States, despite the legislation and despite a somewhat accepting society, not a lot of chief executives are either gay or if they are gay,

out of the closet. Probably the best known CEO is going to be Tim Cook of of Apple, a giant company. Venture capitalist Peter Thial came out, Um, sort of dragged out of the closet. I don't think he was treated fairly by some of the media. The CEO of Lloyds of London in the UK not too long ago, she she stepped down. Um, what does it mean that there are some high profile people who are LGBT as leaders

of company? How how significant is this? Well, look, I think I want to go back to what happened when I was a student. When I was a student, it was if you were gay and you actually had a sexual encounter with a man, you'd get a prison. Really, in sixty seven it was illegal in the UK. Changed, I mean it was by the way, lots of laws like that on the books in the United States. So the law changed. And when seven, it was ten years after the so called Wolfton report was put before the House.

It took ten years to persuade people to change the law. And when the law changed, nothing happened. No, no, no, no, Because behavior lags the law hugely hugely, and I think is that backwards behavior legs the law, the law legs actual behavior were both. So you change the law, the behavior that was established with the law still stays in place, and it takes ages for it to change. In my view, I think law is important and necessary, not sufficient obviously,

so I think people still there's a generation GAMP. I think there's also some other issues to do with boards of directors, probably quite conservative. Don't want to have too many what you might call floating variables around. You know, you want to you want to reduce your problem, as it were, to have a CEO that you know is just has no peripheral activity that might possibly get in

the way of the company. Does that help explain while why today there's still a very short list of CEO or I think it's a It could be one reason. We don't know what the real reasons are. I think that might be one reason. Another one might be people self selecting out, possibly saying actually I just don't want

the profile. Uh. Some there may be some basic hidden discrimination, very possible, but you're right, I mean, that's a handful of CEOs who are openly gay in the SMP invariably I think about maybe four or so, but you know, statistically we should have five to fifty. So something's wrong here. Either twenty twenty one to forty six CEOs are in the closet or something else is happening. So and and and that's worrying for the simple reason that it's so

important to have role models out there. Otherwise you don't encourage people. You can't say to people, well, you know, just come out, it'll be great, it'll be good for your career. And they say, well, that's very interesting, John, But show me where the c ears are. Show me where they are. And so that's why this is a very important point. So the question I have to ask you is, while you were CEO of BP, not being public about your sexuality, how did that affect the way

you want about your job? Not? It certainly affected it. I think what it did is it it It allowed me to focus only on my job at the exclusion of my self, basically my private life and developing who I really was. And I did that partly because my thought process got stranded. I when I wrote this book,

I had the story which always sticks with me. As I went to the hay Litty Festival to be interviewed about the glass closet in the Q and A a young man got up in the audience and said, I am in the say business as you for your competitor read Shell, you know. And he said, here's the thing, John, we all knew you were gay before you came out, but the only thing was none of us were brave enough to come and tell you that. And I thought

to myself, that explains everything. So I heard because I was a child of the sixties, because my mother was a survivor of the Holocaust, and she reminded me, never tell anyone a secret because they will surely use it against you. And never become a member, an identifiable vocal member for minority, because when the going gets tough, the majority always hurt the minority. So arm with those points, I said to myself, I'm going to stay in the closet forever. And so that's what I did. I ran

a double life. Uh. You know, when I was young, it was kind of fun, you know, you could, but that as as I got more and more well known, became more and more dangerous, and I had to go deeper and deeper into secrets. So uh, and then eventually I got out it but for all the reasons I explained in the book, and it caused me. I didn't know what it did do is it made me make some really bad judgments that I couldn't even believe I had done myself about you know, how to keep it

all secret. I had a relationship with an escort who I actually thought was a relationship. He was the guy who sold the story to the press, you know, sold it for money. I lied in a in a witness statement, not in a fortunately, not in court about how I had met this guy because I couldn't bring myself to explain what it was. These things I don't do. But the circumstances were such that they created some really bad

judgments in my mind. And I think I learned a lot about why it's so important therefore to be truthful and to be yourself, because the moment you get into a situation where you are dissembling, everything starts going wrong, and that I think is a very That's one of the reasons why it's so important whenever you possibly can to come out, you know, if if you're going to be hurt, if it's unsafe, don't do it, but but

think about it. Hard. The Glass Closet was quite a brave book, especially considering that which is only five years ago. But it might as well have been It might as well have been a lifetime ago. Any regrets about the book or you find it's freeing and you were happy you not put it out. I think a lot of people still want the book. They talk to me about the book. It's a topic which comes up again and again.

Actually when I'm signing my other books we had. I was signing the last book at Harvard Bookstore that second to your school, and a couple of guys came up and I signed the books of them, and then they rather sheepishly pulled out a very dog eared copy of The Glass Closet and said, we've lent this to everyone. I said, how dare you, you know, feel loyalties? But they said, could you sign it please? Because this is why we got married. And you know that's that's pretty good.

Quite quite, I think, if I may. I think one of the things to note why I think this book is so important is that things aren't always going forward. They also go backwards. And you look at some of the regularly the behavior in Europe against gay people. It's beginning to switch. With these right wing parties coming in power, there's a lot of re enactment of discrimination, and I think people need to be reminded that that's the place

we don't want to go to. So when you were a CEO at BP, an aired campaign was launched Beyond Petroleum. Tell us a little bit about the thinking there and and how it was received. What did beyond Petroleum mean for an oil company. So it's worth going back a little bit before two thousand. But by the BP, my executive team and I we had concluded that climate change was a real threat and we had to do something

about it. So I stood up at Stanford University at the Frost Auditorium and gave a speech about climate change, and I said, climate change is happening. We are responsible for this, and we need to do something about it. And I laid out an action plan. Rather than just wringing my hands and saying it's a terrible problem, I said, we're going to do the following things. In a trade carbon internally, invest in renewables, invest in alternative for fuels of art and measure what we were doing and seal

up all the methane. And we weren't leaking it because it's a bad greenose gas. So we did all that. It didn't go down well with the industry. I would say that's an British understatement. They the American Petroleum Institute said that I had left the church whatever that meant, the church of the Church of the API. I think the Church of the petroleum industry. Okay, well, and the question is was it the Church of the petroleum industry or the Church of global warming denialism? Which I think

it was that where the oil industry was in large part. So. But but then what had happened was we realized that we got such a huge support internally. It changed the way BP thought about itself, how it recruited, could get very different people coming in. And actually we realized that we were thinking beyond petroleum, what was going to happen beyond petroleum. So we decided that that was going to

be our strap line, thinking about beyond petroleum. And it was kind of neat because BP beyond petroleum a sort of worked together. And besides, we had to rebrand. By that time, I had undertaken a whole variety of massive deals, you know, merging with Amaco, with our co with Castrol, with Fabor. These were very big deals and it changed dramatically BP and we needed a new identity because everyone came from somewhere else. I remember the the Amaco deal

was just giant. It was the largest I think financial transact, industrial financial transaction ever at the time. Nowadays because the numbers are telephone directories, it's it's peanuts. But it was big and of course very complex because a lot of people, a lot of activities and operations and so forth. So we concluded that we may as well say what we were thinking, which is we were thinking beyond petroleum. Now I think that we were. I think the error I made is I think it was too early. Uh, and

we we took one step too far. We couldn't actually keep everyone out in the outside world with us. In the inside world. We kept everyone together, couldn't quite get it to gel with within the company, everybody was on the same stage. Well, well mostly when you say everybody inside an organization is the rule, Okay, that's everybody. That's that's that's that's by far everybody. It's slightly better than politics,

I think, but it's not a means. It's about and what was interesting was the quality of people who joined the company suddenly changed. I mean, we've got people coming to us rather than going to Palo Alto, so a competitive advantage. By embracing, we've got we've got some extraordinary people. And these extraordinary people are now in pretty important positions either in BP or elsewhere. So so BP, but I think it was a bit too early, that makes sense. Is it still too early? BP is is selling off

some of its alternative energy businesses. Well, they're reinvesting, so they're changing the portfolio. And I don't know in detail what they're doing, but they're one of several oil companies that are investing in startups in alternative energy or energy efficiency, and they're investing in solar and wind, and they're investing in alternative fuels, things made of a biological matter rather than mineral oil from the ground. So they're doing that.

A lot of people are doing this. I think the oil industry has to focus on the technologies that really move the needle, and they're beginning to think how we can how they can do that. One of the big technologies, of course, is the removal of carbon. If you think about it, if we could make hydro carbons free of carbon were left with hydrogen, and it's a tremendous fuel only powers the entire universe. Other than that, it's pretty good. Really, it's got a proven track record. As they say, so

we we need to do that. By burning hydrocarbons, you release cere too, So can you capture it and do something with it. That's called carbon capture and you either store it, so carbon capture and storage or carbon capture and use. You can use it. Now there needs to

be a lot more work in this area. We know the engineering can work, and we know it can be done, but it needs policy instruments to make it worthwhile for corporations to do so that if you put a price on carbon by taxing it, the more tax you will avoid, the better off you are. So if you can store it, then all is good and you can then begin to make carbon free hydrocarbons. Now one earth, carbon free hydrocarbons one on Earth. Would you want to do this? The

answer is it's very difficult to replace the hydrocarbons. We can't do it with renewable energy. We can't do it with alternative energy from sugarcane. It would destroy and have other unintended consequences. And you know, while renewables and I've been a great proponent of renewables. When I left BP, I ran private equity fund, the world's largest renewable energy private equity fund for enough billion dollars um. Why can't

we do it with renewables. The answer is because, after all this work that's been going on so far, renewables at best provides four percent of the energy in the world. Four it's going to take a long time for it to replace all the hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are coal, oil, and natural gas. Coal will be the first to go, probably practically going already not in the world, well in the US, in the US, but in India. In India, for example, it's expanding, and chin China, China's a bit it's moving

using a tremendous amounts. I think it's it shrank and then grew a bit u But certainly in in Europe it's it's going out of the system. Although Poland is still providing a lot of coal, and by unintended the unintended consequences of the German energy policy called enegy vendor actually increased the amount of coal Germany used for what was a policy designed to reduce c O two. They eliminated too many choices too quickly and relied too heavily on renewables. Germany uses a lot of brown winds and

a lot of solar and brown coal. And and is there such a thing as clean coal or is that an oxymot Clean coal is coal with carbon capture and storage. You can't clean it any other way. Coal burning has other problems. It produces a variety of very bad mineral solsions as well as of particulate matter soot which can if it's which can cause lung disease. So so, so it's not it's not very appealing. Really, So let's talk

about the end nearing um that you referenced earlier. I'm under the impression that a lot of these technologies are still a major breakthrough away from going from four to to But but you also suggested that a lot of engineering solutions already exist. Um, So let's talk about that what wet engineering solutions exist today to reduce carbon emissions and help prevent climate change. So we we know a lot about the improvement in renewables. So the cost is

coming down and the past going up. Now we know that for wind, we know that for solar, and actually in solar there's probably one more, very big scientific breakthrough which could make it even more interesting. It probably won't reduce the cost so much, but it will make each seller panel three or four times more powerful, So we don't more of the space, you know, So if you've had a roof of them, you could produce much more electricity. You have the same issue with battery storage, also need

and other batteries. Yes, we could do a lot with existing batteries. It's not ideal, but it would give us a good start. So lithium ion batteries clearly can be used and are used at the moment on industrial scales to store electricity. But electricity can be stored in different ways as well, through making the energy by using it to pump water up a hill and then letting the water come down. I've seen the bricks and the kinetic robotics. That's it creating towers of large potential energy and then

make a kinetic energy. So is that a viable storage solution. People are experimenting with it, and some sensible people have invested in them, and so I think it might you know, let's see if it works. There are plenty of these technologies, so but the main point I think is if we really push them out today, we're not dealing in most

cases with breakthrough discoveries. We are looking at engineering improvements, incremental incremental engineering improvements, which usually come only with application. So the more you do, the better you become at something, and the cost comes down both on the manufactured base and on the implementation. So that But that's a rule

of that sort a rule of engineering. I mean, I think it applies to actually everything, except for custom built nuclear power plants, which somehow seem to get more expensive the more you do rather than less. Although small scale nuclear probably is the breakthrough that we all are looking for. Small scale and I keep reading about thorium reactors, which the science isn't quite there, but but you don't end up with all of that highly radioactive waste, which certainly

seems attractive. It it does, I think I would not put all my bets there. I what I would what I what I do think is important is you know, what's good for the Navy is probably good for all of us. So small scale reactors built in a factory as opposed to built on site and come on the back of a truck and bolted together in a place where an old nuclear power plant was is probably a much cheaper way of going than building one from scratch.

So like aircraft carriers and submarines, that size we're talking probably a bit bigger, but you know, not not I'm in there're quite a whole some of those, but but that the idea is roughly the same. So a hundred megawatts probably is the size. And one of the things you mentioned, um when both in the book and when you discuss climate changes, you said you would love to be known as an engineer and a scientist. Explain of thinking there, Well, I would still really love to be

known as an engineer, period. I mean, I do think engineers are the people who look both ways in life. They look to the fruits of discovery from what happens in the lab and they look at it and say, yes, we need to do something with it. And they look to the market on the other hand, and to commerce

and say, this is how we make it work for humanity. Uh. And you know, I don't want to use one of the myriad apparent quotes from Edison, but I think he said something similar about discoveries with no market and not worth having. But or he may not have said it, but but but I do think that's why engineering is so important. It's Jane's face. It looks two ways, and it looks two ways in one person and create something great for humanity. And I think that's a really good

thing to do. We have been speaking with John Brown, former CEO of British Petroleum and author of the new book Make Think, Imagine Engineering the Future of Civilization. I feel odd calling you John, because you are a member of the House of Lords and and you've been knighted, and you have all of these British titles. I'm just a commoner here in the States, so I guess I'll have to get used to calling you John. There are a couple of questions I didn't get tole me, just

if I may go. My dear late father always said to me said, you know, whatever happens to you in the future, you were born John, and you will always be John. And he reminded me that, you know, he was a military man and worked for the government. He said, people have very complicated titles, but actually they're exactly the same as anybody else. And never forget it. Uh. He also told me, he said, when you go to a party, he said, you know in Britain they will dress up

with decorations, medals and things like that. He said, go find the person who's wearing none of that. Chances are he's probably the Prime Minister. I's remember that very well. So we didn't get to talk about a book of yours that I thought was interesting. Seven Elements that change the world, and you discuss iron and carbon and gold, silver, uranium, titanium, and silicon. I shared with you earlier this week's Business Week about what they called the greatest organizational chart ever,

the Periodical Table, and it's really quite a work. Every element in the Table of Elements has has a story about that. But I have to ask about seven Elements that that is a very science e material science sort

of book. Tell us about what motivated that. I wanted to write a book about the elements that I've been involved in and make it as interesting as I could, almost adventures in Elements, if you will, and talk about, you know, how they appear for the good and for the bad in the world, and tell stories about them. But I've been involved with the Kennicott Copper Corporation, which was a big golden silver mining operation. Obviously with carbon,

was silicon with intel. So again it was very much hands on experience and I just wanted to make it exciting. And I was writing, I think for a general audience who who never really thought about these things and thought that, you know, what are elements. I was I'd read a wonderful book which which is very different and I would never dream of aspire getting anywhere close to it. Primo Levies book on the Periodic Table. What was that was the title? It was called the Periodic Table, and it's

a Primo Levies ruminations on life generally. So some of these are pretty obvious. Iron had a huge impact on on warfare a few thousand years ago. Carbon obviously, anything with energy, gold, uranium, silicon. I have to ask about titanium. Why did you focus on titanium. It was the wild card. I've been involved in the mining of titanium, not least in Richardson's Bay in South Africa, and it's one of these things which is everywhere and nobody realizes it's everywhere.

Cell phones, titanium, toothpaste, white shirts, paint, it's everywhere because it's highly reflective and it creates that whiteness that we all like love having white rooms and white floors and white clothes. It's it's strange. It's very much a twenty one century thing. And and why silver? Since you have gold? What what made you include silver as well? Because silver has a gold actually you know, in the end, is something you mine and then you put it back into

a vault. A little a little bit of it is used for teeth and for jewelry, or at least it used to be used for teeth, and enough they're still doing that, not a lot, I guess it's now ceramics and things like that. But silver, of course was used for many other things because it's a reactive element, and it was used for photography. And I used a silver and photography as the point of connection there and the image,

and how we are so used to that now. Of course silver silver halide is no longer used in photography. Well it is by very few people producing beautiful results, let me say, But it's now all digital. But silver has different rules quite quite fascinating. Um, there are two other things I have to get to, which which are fascinating. So you were a CEO. Well, let me say it

this way. You weren't were not CEO when the deep Water Horizon explosion took place in the Gulf of Mexico, but you were CEO during the Texas City refinery explosion. That had to be a very trying experience. What what was that period was trying as an understatement. This was a terrible industrial accident, a tragedy where fifteen people lost their lives and many hundreds were injured in different degrees, some small, some bigger. And I remember so well what

what happened? And I was called and someone said, as they always do with an emergency, we think something's happening. It's not quite right, you know. And actually that's when people observed nine eleven. They weren't quite sure what was going on. You're never quite sure at the beginning. And I they rang me and said there's been an explosion, and I st I'm coming down. They said, hold on. So I got down to Texas City to find and I went round and there were fourteen bodies recovered at

the time, and I've never seen people so stunned. The workforce. I went around, spoke to the whole workforce and as we were doing that, we recovered the fifteenth body um and that that I think demonstrated that whatever this was, this was a human tragedy and those are the people we needed to worry about, their friends, their relatives. And then what happened. So at the press conference, I remember being advised by everybody to say nothing, and I said,

how can you possibly do that? And so I said, we're responsible and we'll take care of this, but right now we need to worry about the people who have been killed and the people who have been hurt. And so we worked diligently through this and we solved it. And what where money could make a difference, we did.

We solved it very quickly. We paid people appropriately. I believe the terrible tragedy they were involved in and it was our fault, you know, and so we um we learned a lesson, And I think the lesson I learned was, you know, however you look at a company, you should always look at its weakest link. You can't say it's about right. It's not about right when it comes to safety. And it was very clear that we hadn't integrated this

part of the company properly. Was this refinery and it was acquisition is part of an amacho, but it could have been anywhere, um and it wasn't integrated, and it actually had equipment in it that took too much skill to operate. You know, we should have had and that was the problem, too much skill and the person operating it probably didn't have enough skill. But that was probably an unrealistic standard to apply that they need to be

more modern equipment and we should have known better. So I think that was the point, uh, And it changed dramatically the way we thought about safety. It really did. We we prided ourselves with about safety keeping people safe, but what we hadn't really deeply got was the fact that all equipment becomes unsafe and must be looked at at all times to make sure it gets stay safe. And that's what we learned, and I think it's what everybody now learns. It's it's the big lesson of how

you keep processes safe as well as people safe. Quite interesting. So I have to ask one last question before I get to my favorite questions, which is, you're an engineer. You're a large embracer of science and scientific methods. Today there seems to be a deep distrust of science, whether it's anti vax ER's or climate change denihilis. There are even some flat earthers out there, which I'm astonished at.

What are we to make of this rejection of science which has given us all the benefits of of the modern world. People don't trust experts. They trust people like themselves. If there are people around who have a big, loud voice, then trust goes in the wrong direction. We need to do more. It's a it's a banal statement, but it's true. We need to do more in education. We've got to get people always thinking that they need to test the facts.

They need to test and go and search for the best answer, and then I think we'll get some better appreciation of why science and engineering is so important. So education is very important. I think we should publicize more, much more about how how does engineering actually work? How does science actually create something? How do we know something safe? Why?

Why is there the f d A there? You know, it was a great invention, right, the poison squad and all that sort of thing in the olden days tremendous to create trust. So we need to reinstill with people the purpose of these organizations, the purpose of standards. I think it's requires a very big effort to do that. We've taken it for granted and as a result people have ignored it. So the profits of the book go to the John Brown Charitable Trust. Tell us what the

trust focuses on and the areas you're emphasizing. So the trust started its life a long time ago in honor of my mother to educate women at Cambridge who had come from a broken human rights background, displace people from former Yugoslavia, for example, um Hungarians who were not settled properly. The list went on, but now it does education broadly. It tries to do the things nobody else will do.

I mean, I'm not going to compete with governments and with MacArthur Foundation and with you know, the Gates and people like that. But I can do things. I can fill gaps, which we do and then it supports the arts as well. So that's what it's doing. It's building up its strength. I wanted to be around for a long time. It'll probably it's got a outlived me. Of course it does. And as a result I've got some

quite young trustees which I'm much approof of. But it's it's it's doing things that other people don't do, and that's I think very important, quite quite interesting. So I know I only have you for a few minutes before you have to move on to your next event. Let me ask you some of our favorite questions we ask all our guests. We'll start with an easy one. Tell us the first car you owned? Year, make and model. So the first car I owned was a Feat six hundred.

It was I bought it in nineteen sixty six, when I was eighteen. I think by that time it was already six years old, and it kind of blew up when on a trip to London the engine block crashed. So it was a great car. It was very cheap and it was great thrill a D eighteen to have your own car. Tell Us, uh, who your early mentors are? Who helped shape your career? So in BP it was the latent great Dr Frank rick Would, a Australian geologist.

He joined BP having been the head of the Dean of Geological Sciences at the University of New South Wales. He's Australian and he clearly was a great influence in you know, vigor, how do you do things rigorously? How do you actually understand to apply what you the science and engineering to actual business problems. He was a great mentor. I think Andy Grove, who was active on the board of Intel when I was there, also a great mentor. I learned a lot from him on how do you

actually really do strategy? How do you think about competitors and what you do to survive? You know only the paranoids of Ie and Andy taught me absolutely that that was true. So let's since you mentioned Groves book, let's talk about books. What are What are some of your favorite books? What books had a big influence on you? So I have so many I think i've but by the way, this is the question people tell me. Keep asking people about books. I get great recommendations from your guests.

So I m so Over the summer I read a lot of books and to really stand out. The first is an English translation of a French book by Eric Rihard called The Orders of the Day. It's a short book and it starts on the twentieth of February thirty three, when national Socialism invited in the heads of all the German big companies to offer them assistance in return for support, and the story develops from there. It's air raising and

it's very short and brilliantly read written. Brilliantly written. I can't recommend it highly enough mm hmm Orders of the Day or by Eric van v v u I double L A r D. It won the pre Gone Corps in French and in France has recently been translated. I would expect it's a very well written book. I would expect the French to be quite impenetrable, and as you're a very good French reader. The other book. I've have a friend of mine in Venice, where I live part time, Italy,

called Donna Leon. She she's a mystery writer, a detective story writer, and she's written the same as she's written about the same detective Commissario Bernetti and his family. I think for twenty five or thirty years, one book a year. Interestingly,

they never age, but everybody else starts around them. She recently wrote a book which became in my Moon not no longer a detective story, but a novel um called unto Our The Sun is given remarkable book, remarkable worth I think reading for the simple reason that it's about human frailty and about why loneliness really does get to people who cannot have a family and the consequences of that.

It's an extraordinary book, actually quite extraordinary, and this is a big issue both in the UK and the US, the rise of loneliness, which some studies have found to be the equivalent of smoking it back a cigarette a day exactly, and it also leads to very bad judgments because there's nobody to bounce it off, and you can always hire people to give you advice, but the moment you hire someone, you've hired them, and the advice is not necessarily what you want tell us about a time

you've failed and what you learned from the experience. So certainly the biggest failure in my professional life would BP was the Texas City tragedy, and I think it taught me a lot about making sure that you you don't take things for granted and you don't get carried away with necessarily what people are saying. You check, you double check when it comes to things which are existential, and I think that was, in my mind, a very big failure,

very big failure. I think the second big failure was the areas of judgment I made with before I was outed, both in the way in which I told a lie in a in a witness statement. And the mere fact that I I, in order to hide away um fell hard and escort and thought it was a relationship could possibly be. So I think those things were very big failures of judgment error, and I've learned a lot from them. I can think of plenty of others, but they're smaller.

What do you do for fun when you're not reading or writing books? So I still have traveled for the whole of my life. You know, I was born outside the UK. I've spent my teenage years traveling. I think I was one of the first jets set kids because I was transported back to the UK from iran uh and Singapore to go to school. So I still like going to places I haven't been to. I've been that they're diminishing number. But I also live in Venice, Italy, where I adore it. I find it's a it's it's

such an unlikely place. It's a floating city, very sensitive, very extraordinary. People say killed by tourists. I don't agree. The tourists. They come in and they leave, and in the morning and the evening vene see is yours? And and who who are we to say that? People can't see what we enjoy. We can't do that very much threats by climate change, very much critain by climate change. There's a big barrage being built, a very complex piece of engineering should hopefully be ready next year or the

year after. So I enjoy those sorts of things. I enjoy making sure my keeping fit and I enjoy but most of all, I enjoyed the arts. So I've been you know, I've been a deputy chairman of the British Museum, chairman of the Tate Galleries, and I am chairman of the court Old Institute of Art. I adore those activities. I adore the theater. I'm chairman of the theater group called the don Mar Warehouse Theater. And I endored the opera.

I always go to festivals like the Salzburg Festival and set up by you know, I'm not set up, but made of course the headlines. When carry On was alive, I saw some fantastic productions over my life, and this particularly this summer. So and I enjoy people. I I always think my late mother always said to me it's very important to talk to people, and the best way to talk to people is invite them. For dinner, and

she said, and here's what you do. Number one, it's most important to have the right people, interesting people, and a mix. Number two have a great table and by that make it look beautiful. Number three have great wine, and number four maybe have some food. She said, In that order you can have a great time. That that

sounds like some some good advice. Um. Speaking of advice, if a recent college grad came to you and said they were considering a career in the energy industry, what sort of advice might you give them, I would say, go into the energy industry because there are so many challenges, so still to be solved. We have to replace energy. Over the life I'm of a new graduate. You know, the energy mix will change dramatically. So it's a an and it is, of course the most important motor of civilization.

Without energy, nothing can be done. I know people look at their iPhone and say, gosh, that's working in here. Actually it's working in the cloud. And the cloud is tons and tons of hardware using a vast amount of electricity. And so remember that's what we need, and that's a very important part of civilization. And in our final question, what is it that you know about the world of energy today that you wish you knew fifty years ago

when you were first starting out the environmental impact. I wish I knew more about the environmental impact when I started. I could see a bit of it. I kept wondering why, you know, when I when I was working in Alaska, you could you flew in by helicopter and or plane and you could see tracing of the on the perma

frost when it melted in the summer. And that was because people had just dragged equipment across the perma frost without protecting it and in some cases actually dynamited uh you know, bits of it, and so they've made big ponds.

I was one of why people did that. And I remember also learning a lot when you know, the Translaska pipeline system was not built for both environmental and native rights, and it was only past eventually with a lot of compromise in these areas, correct compromise with Spiro t Agnew casting the vote in the Senate. I remember that very well because we were waiting around in Anchoring, Alaska the North Slope and in New York waiting UH for approval to get to our business, and at one point there

was almost no money to pass. Wow, it was quite interesting, quite quite fascinating. Thank you so much, John for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Sir John Brown, former CEO of British Petroleum and author most recently of Make Think, Imagine Engineering the Future of Civilization.

If you enjoyed this conversation, well be sure and look up an Inch or down an Inch on Apple iTunes and you can see any of the previous let's call it two hundred and sixty or so such conversations we've had over the past five years. We love your comments, feedback and suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. Go to Apple iTunes and give us a lovely review. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack staff who helps put together

this podcast tasket each week. My audio engineer this week is Nicholas Falco. My producer is Michael Boyle. Our project manager is Zatika val Brun. My head of research is Michael bat Nick. I'm Barry Retults. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio