Before diving into today’s topic, I must highlight a persistent issue. Since at least 2015, People, Ideas & Objects has consistently urged producers to achieve financial sustainability through profitable production methods. Unfortunately, the industry’s entrenched culture shows an inability to embrace fundamental change and a lack of understanding of these principles. Operations consistently revert to increasing drilling activity while cutting costs—an approach already optimized to its limit, incapable of delivering true commercial viability. Concepts like competition and profitability remain absent, misunderstood, or actively resisted.
This mindset creates confusion among producers’ officers and directors when discussing competitive returns in North American markets or generating genuine profits. Given that investors have issued calls for action and the Preliminary Specification outlines the necessary steps, a critical question arises: How would additional investment in the industry today meaningfully alter its trajectory? Would it merely revive the early 2000s, with CEOs touting “well built balance sheets?” This outcome seems almost certain. But what further guarantees exist? After decades of questionable conduct by officers and directors, can we reasonably expect a transformation in their approach?
To claim that initiative and innovation would decline is an overstatement, as these qualities are already scarce. If investors resume funding producers, the prospect of future innovation would likely diminish further. When officers and directors dismiss or undermine efforts to introduce dynamic, accountable, and profitable operations, what hope is there for meaningful reform in any discipline? The market’s response to attempts to improve the industry remains uncertain, but challenging the status quo carries significant professional risk. Insulated by investor capital, producers would then be shielded from the consequences of their admitted missteps—such as “putting cash in the ground,” “building balance sheets,” or simply “muddling through.”
Software Development Approach
Our development methodology has often diverged from mainstream trends, drawing scrutiny over the years. As end-user and mission-critical tools gain traction, some overlook the critical elements missing from these alternatives. Today, I’ll explain why People, Ideas & Objects prioritizes an unimpeachable data set, precise applications, and significant cost and time savings in software development.
We are relational database developers—a choice some may view as outdated, but its significance is profound. Databases do more than store data; they ensure its integrity. Oracle’s database, for instance, enforces strict design and architecture rules, rejecting any data that doesn’t comply and requiring all expected data to maintain integrity. This rigorous process, defined by our user community’s data model and process selections, is costly and complex but essential. If data isn’t 100% secure, reliable, and unimpeachable, it’s worthless. This discipline forces developers and users to think critically about system design, implementation, and use.
Many tools bypass this rigor, offering quicker but less reliable solutions. For example, Palantir aggregates structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data from sources like relational databases and spreadsheets, using an object-relational model. This approach, once heralded in the 1990s with Java’s rise, proved flawed when it introduced “Null” errors in key database attributes, compromising integrity. While Palantir mitigates these issues with proprietary logic and sophisticated ontologies for user analysis, it’s not designed for ERP, accounting, or audit purposes, nor for industry-wide process management like our Preliminary Specification. Though an unfair comparison, Palantir underscores our focus on data integrity.
Palantir excels in analysis, not ERP or industry-wide process management. Its AI-driven insights may not address the industry’s core issues or opportunities, leaving end-users to interpret its outputs.
Application Precision
In an industry-wide ERP system like the Preliminary Specification, “garbage in, garbage out” takes on exponential significance. Data integrity is a cornerstone. Missing this once-in-a-century opportunity to build a robust IT foundation for the next 25 years would be a grave mistake. As industry data grows increasingly valuable, cutting corners is not an option. Our user community and developers must leverage their expertise to capture these requirements and accommodate growing data volumes and types. Rebuilding the industry on a foundation of reserves preservation, performance, and profitability is a transformative opportunity we must seize.
Our user community sets us apart, leveraging the proven quality of user-led ERP development. We’ve empowered them with exclusive Intellectual Property licenses to create derivative works, ensuring our developers take direction solely from them. Independent and budget-autonomous, the user community sells their IP to People, Ideas & Objects, making it accessible for all members of our user community. Ensuring they are not “blind, sleepwalking agents of whomever will feed them.”
Lowest Time and Cost
While our approach increases development costs due to its quality focus and broad scope—covering producers from startups to Exxon—it’s less than what each producer would spend on individual systems or manual processes. By applying Professor Paul Romer’s non-rival cost theory, we incur costs once for the entire North American producer population, distributing them via our Profitable Production Rights. These fund the Preliminary Specification development and long-term support for our Cloud Administration & Accounting for Oil & Gas software and services, making our per-producer costs the industry’s lowest.
Time is critical. The Preliminary Specification should already be operational, delayed only by the resistance of officers and directors. The industry faces two urgent issues: monthly losses of at least $20 billion and a potential decline in North America’s oil and gas deliverability. These time pressures seem to conflict with our quality goals, but any failure will stem from insufficient industry engagement with our user community, not our approach.
Industry must prioritize meaningful interaction with our user community. Relying on outdated tactics like issuing SLAs to hold vendors accountable is counterproductive and wastes time and resources the industry can ill afford. Collaboration is essential—we’re all in this together.
Artificial Intelligence in Oil & Gas Development
We believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will significantly enhance the quality of our products in software development. Our paper, "AI, IP and Hyper Specialization, highlighted how AI mastered games like Go and Chess, not only defeating human champions but also innovating within those fixed environments. We see similar potential in software development, given its increasingly well defined and fixed domain.
However, it's crucial to recognize AI's current limitations. While powerful for code development, its application to dynamic business models like the Preliminary Specification, which is highly influenced by creative changes, remains years away. Therefore, while we will leverage AI to assist user community members and developers, this will be done with a clear understanding of its weaknesses, the demanding needs of the oil and gas industry, and our stringent quality requirements.
Deployment of our user communities distinct competitive advantages remain irreplaceable. These advantages include the application of artificial intelligence, automation, adaptability, conflict and contradiction as analytical tools, creativity, collaboration, decision-making, deployment, and integration of task, knowledge and explicit knowledge, design, financing, ideas, innovation, integration, issue, identification and resolution, judgment, leadership, negotiating, and compromising, planning, performance, quality, reasoning, research, resiliency, spontaneity, thinking, vision and wisdom.
Intellectual Property and AI in Oil & Gas
In a future where individuals can easily build their own Preliminary Specifications, Intellectual Property (IP) will play a critical role in organizing and preventing redundant and duplicative work. Our paper, "AI, IP and Hyperspecialization," emphasizes IP's ability to streamline innovation through licensing and agreements. This ensures that efforts are directed towards developing new solutions for the oil and gas industry's complex challenges, rather than repeating existing work.
It's important to clarify that AI does not capture intellectual property; it flows to its user who has the right to create derivative works. Oil and gas producers must therefore ensure their chosen vendors are the rightful owners of the underlying software IP to guarantee legal use of the software.
We've also argued for increased organizational performance through hyper-specialization and the division of labor, a principle that has driven economic value since 1776. Today, the software an organization uses either enables or constrains this process. We believe that with the right approach to AI and IP, hyper-specialization can be managed with precision, allowing tasks to be distributed and processed efficiently—addressing the chaotic nature of speed and complexity that often impedes modern organizations. And will no doubt accelerate with the velocity of tomorrow's business pace.
A Call for Change in Oil & Gas
The oil and gas industry stands at a pivotal moment, with a unique opportunity to transform its culture. The focus must shift to reserves preservation, performance, and profitability, leaving behind the inefficiencies and decline of past decades. We're potentially witnessing the beginning of a precipitous decline in oil and gas production deliverability, a trend exacerbated by the inherent steep decline curves of shale that are, quite frankly, a rolling log gathering terrifying momentum.
The weight of this crisis is compounded by the stark realization that our reliance on what amounts to 25,000 man-hours equivalent labor per barrel of oil was, in large part, a self-inflicted wound. This profound misjudgment now rests heavily on the officers and directors of producer firms. Indeed, this era could very well be remembered as one of the most reckless and destructive acts in civilized history. For those of us who have done the calculation. At 25,000 man hours / barrel of oil equivalent. The total 8 hour equivalent labor each and every one of the 8 billion people on the planet benefits from oil & gas is 66 times their labor output. Since producer officers and directors were willing to sacrifice North America's output so willingly. And we should anticipate in the future the need to allocate supply. I suggest we begin by cutting oil & gas consumption in all its forms to those who had the fiduciary responsibility, the authority and the resources to avoid this, knew the risks, were advised in the most aggressive manner (their investors actions,) had solutions offered yet did nothing. The producers, officers and directors who ensured they have Directors and Officers Liability Insurance secured.
Before any effective changes can be made, the industry must organize itself for the significant challenges ahead. We cannot afford to cling to outdated methods or leadership. Even more critically, the industry needs to regain the trust and belief of investors, who abandoned it a decade ago after years of deception. That exodus should have been a four-alarm fire, yet the past decade has seen no action, leading to evaporated faith, trust and hope. Our first and most crucial step must be to immediately clean house.
Creating the Preliminary Specification will be a multi-year effort, but it’s critical for aligning and organizing our approach. Fortunately, the foundational work for the Preliminary Specification is complete, enabling us to focus on implementation without being hindered by intellectual property issues related to People, Ideas & Objects.
North American companies are at the forefront of the fourth Industrial Revolution, with investments in emerging industries and firms disintermediating those that previously disintermediated the market. However, the oil and gas sector, as a primary industry, remains focused on protecting its revenues to maintain the status quo resisting any and all challenges. This defensive stance has led to trillions of dollars in lost value, with shale’s wealth squandered and our advanced economy jeopardized due to declining energy availability.
Given the intense competition in other industries and the inability of North American producers to keep pace, it’s no surprise that producer officers and directors have conceded on their production deliverability. It’s time for change.
Post Script
The All In Podcast, released every Friday, is a must-listen for its cutting-edge discussions driven by the four self-made hosts. In the June 20, 2025 episode, they touch on software companies like People, Ideas & Objects and their relevance to the “S&P 493”—the S&P 500 excluding the MAG 7 stocks.
They argue that a complete “rip and replace” approach to rebuilding software is the only viable path forward, emphasizing a comprehensive, “soup to nuts” scope. Companies in the S&P 493 that undertake this full software rebuild are expected to outperform those that don’t.
This segment is discussed between 01:03:00 and 01:16:00 in the episode.
Listen here:
