241. The Great Oxford Debate: “Energy and Aristotle" - Aug26

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
With Laurent Segalen from London and Gerard Reid from Berlin, this is Redefining Energy.

**Gerard Reid** (0:10)
Today on Redefining Energy, we're going to have a discussion that took place early in the year in Oxford University.
Laurent, Professor Jan Rosenow, had a lively discussion in and around the future of the energy transition. And sadly, I wasn't able to make it because I got a new replacement and I wasn't able to travel, but it was a good discussion, Laurent.

**Laurent Segalen** (0:34)
Yeah, I went totally off-piste because I had prepared something a bit philosophical to honor Oxford.
So I talked about Aristotle, I talked about Diocletian, but we managed to cover everything together and have a very, very lively conversation. Plus, it was in the beautiful library of the Oriel College. And really, I felt extremely privileged to be invited. I'm sorry you could not make it. It's a good way to take a step back and look at the big picture and discuss power, politics, the price of net zero. So let's listen to the conversation.

**Jan Rosenow** (1:20)
All right, let's start.
Welcome everybody. This is quite a special event. You're not be many times that we have had a public event in the senior library, I believe, in the history of the college. So it's quite a special thing for the college. Today we're doing a live podcast recording, which might be the first time as well in history that this has happened at Oriel College. I don't know.
You're very lucky to get seats. Within two hours, the event had sold out, even though there was no price tag, but all the tickets were gone within just about two hours. Just let me briefly say what we're going to do in an introduce the podcast and Laurent. So we have about 30, maybe 40 minutes for conversation, and then we have some time for more informal conversation that will not be as part of the podcast. Let me now introduce Redefining Energy and Laurent Segalen. So Redefining Energy is actually one of the world's top three podcasts on energy according to Google. So when you Google energy podcast top in the world, I think Redefining Energy comes up at number three, and you had 650,000 downloads last year. Yeah, last year. It's a great podcast. I've listened to it for more than, I think it's now eight years.
Laurent is here, you may have noticed alone. The other co-host, Gerard Reid, is not able to come today. He has injured his leg unfortunately and can't travel here. So it's just the two of us, but we're going to have a good conversation, I'm sure. Let me just briefly introduce Laurent. Laurent is a former investment banker. You've worked in finance for something like three decades for organizations like Lehman Brothers, PWC, Nomura and many others. And Laurent has traded, I think it was $1 billion worth of energy commodities over the course of his career, which is a huge number, of course. And you have set up several digital platforms for trading, renewable energy, electricity, battery integration and things like that. But now you are a professional podcast co-host, and that's why we have you here today. And we have sort of turned this on its head.
So the questions that we're going to discuss are actually from all of you, from the audience, and we have a list here. We have so many, we can't go through the 50 or so questions we received. We had to select and cluster them. We do our best to cover as much as we can. At this point, Laurent, I think I hand it over to you, and you hopefully don't tell me that I have misrepresented you in my introduction or Redefining Energy. And I think you have prepared a little bit of an introduction, and you want to mention Aristotle, I think, as well. That's what I heard from you before. So, let's see how Aristotle features in this podcast.

**Laurent Segalen** (4:06)
Yeah, first of all, thanks, Jan, for having me. You can hear from my voice that I had a very busy yesterday. The first thing I like to say is thank you all for being here, and it's for me, it's a great honor. It's very humbling as well. Now, as you noticed, with Gerard, we did 300 to 400 episodes of the pod. And what a journey, because at the beginning, we were just two bankers getting drunk in a pub near Piccadilly, and just saying, oh, we're so intelligent, we should record what we're saying, which we did, and the rest is history.
Now, before we answer to those questions, there's a question you need every one of you to ask yourself, and it's a question I also ask myself. Certainly, why are we here, but why are you here? How did you come to be interested in environment, energy, security, transition, technology, that whole umbrella? And this is where I'm going to use Aristotle, the famous triangle of Aristotle, Ethos, Logos, Pathos. So, Ethos, you read the Paris Accord, you want to save the planet, you heard Greta Thunberg at Davos, you read the Mark Carney, the tragedy of the horizon, it's going to be the tragedy of Alberta trying to secede, so basically we're going to give the oil industry everything they want. You had the Red Larry Finn 2020, the head of BlackRock Finance is now Climate Finance, everything is ESG, something he has now totally forgotten.