Chuck Yates Got A Job

Houston has always run on optimism, spending everything to drill a hole where nobody has drilled before and then finding out what came back. Leon Coe, founder of Amplify Intelligence and the Houston AI Club, thinks that same instinct is exactly what AI needs. He and Chuck get into why executives cannot delegate this one, why augmentation beats automation, and why your own level of ambition is a hard ceiling on what the models will ever hand back.

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Everybody chases the drill bit, but the real money can hide in wells that have produced for years. D.J. Snyder left drilling and completions to chase what nobody wanted to touch: production. His company Vannevar builds downhole tools that squeeze more oil out of wells already in the ground, using a marginal gains mindset borrowed from F1 and the Tour de France. Chuck gets into frac plugs, pumper routes, why nobody shuts in a well to fix it, and how AI could give operators one source of truth.

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You can own the dirt under someone's ranch without ever setting foot on it and still collect a check every month while an oil company does all the work. Karl Brensike of Harvest Mineral & Royalty Partners calls minerals the single greatest asset class on the planet, and he makes a pretty convincing case for it. Chuck digs into how regular folks can finally get a piece, why people really decide to sell, and the apple pie scheme that squeezed a million bucks out of Chevron.

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What if you could stash a barrel of oil in a digital bank account and drop it in your kid's Christmas stocking? That's the wild idea Wil Harris of Energy Substantiation is chasing, building the stablecoin of oil. He breaks down how WTI coins work, why nobody had ever banked a barrel before, and Chuck puts on his critical investor hat to try and blow the whole thing up.

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Running data security for Candy Crush during a pandemic turns out to be solid training for almost anything, and Sam Texas brought that hard earned paranoia to Collide. From flipping thrift store suits on eBay to keeping the world's biggest mobile game alive from Sweden, his road to oil and gas was anything but typical. He breaks down defense in depth, SOC2, and why locking down AI inside a company becomes its own arms race once the machines start fighting the machines.

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Cority has been quietly building environmental, health, and safety software for forty years, and Amanda Smith runs the strategy keeping up with AI that changes every six months. She and Chuck get into why a system of record beats raw AI on life or death calls, how a 600 page permit went from months to minutes, the stat that 95 percent of employees are already using shadow AI, and the PDF problem that has every energy company stuck.

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Jon Slominski, Founding AI Engineer at Collide, sits down with Chuck to break down what it actually takes to build AI that works inside a real oil and gas enterprise. From agent hierarchies that read and write across legacy systems, to a mapping interface that lets you chat your GIS data into shape, Jon shares what he's building, what wakes him up at 4am, and why the biggest unlock might still be the 90% of oil we haven't touched yet.

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Most energy companies buying billion dollar assets get handed a stack of hard drives and have zero clue what's on them. Clay Branch, Technical Staff at Collide, joins Chuck to break down the unglamorous but absolutely critical work of document categorization, data extraction, and why clean reliable data is the real foundation of any AI strategy in oil and gas.

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TCU's energy internship program is back for round two and the results are kind of wild. What started as a summer experiment with business students who knew zero about oil and gas turned into kids giving no-notes presentations on legacy well economics in just ten weeks. Nikki Morris, Executive Director of TCU's Ralph Lowe Energy Institute, and Ryan Haggerty, Owner at RHR Oil and Gas, break down the field trips from Diamondback frac sites to 70 year old vertical wells, how AI is changing the game for young talent but still can't replace the crusty old timer making the final...

Canisius Rozario left a multi-billion dollar company managing 300 people to become employee number 12 at Collide. The CTO role at a seed-stage startup came with anxiety, stress, and constant noise about every new AI tool dropping daily. But it also came with the opportunity to build something real in an industry that solves actual problems, where bad answers don't just cost money, they kill people. Chuck and Canisius break down what it actually takes to go from a ChatGPT wrapper to enterprise-grade AI infrastructure, why oil and gas professionals are more impressive than tech bros, and how they're building models...

Most companies talk about AI strategy but freeze when it's time to actually implement. Collin McLelland shares how one E&P CEO cut through the noise by focusing on small, tangible wins—like automating regulatory filings that saved 1200 engineering hours. The real insight? Stop chasing sexy AI projects and start with workflows that deliver immediate ROI. Once teams see quick wins, adoption spreads fast and sophistication builds naturally.

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Collide basically did its own Spotify Wrapped and the punchline is simple: the community doubled, the conversations got more technical, and the team got way clearer on what Collide is now and where it’s headed. Crystal, Todd, Jacob, and Sydney walk through 2025 stats, why events evolved, how Energy 101 came back, what university partnerships unlocked, why Collider AI took a pause, and the platform upgrades and community goals lined up for 2026.

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Catching yourself rereading last year’s VC emails while you’re back in Silicon Valley is a pretty good way to realize how wild the last 12 months have been. Colin, Chuck, Canisius, and Todd break down how Collide AI is turning fast POCs into real production workflows, why change management is the actual moat, and how a stacked forward deployed team plus community driven distribution is setting up 2026 to be the year everything scales.

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Collide AI 2025 Wrapped Part 1 turns into a real talk on why forward deployed engineers win where AI pilots stall, with Michael Cortez, John, and Nick Smart swapping war stories from completions, geophysics, and the startup trenches while they map out how Collide Enterprise moves past basic chat tools into search plus workflows that actually hold up in the real world.

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H2S gets the Hollywood treatment, and let’s just say reality has some thoughts. The crew tears into how *Landman* portrays one of the oilfield’s most dangerous hazards, separating legit risks from TV-level exaggeration based on real-world experience. Along the way, the conversation veers into iconic Billy Bob Thornton one-liners, unhinged family drama, and the kind of business chaos that makes the show wildly entertaining, even when it stretches the truth. Equal parts industry reality check and group chat-style commentary, it’s honest, funny, and exactly how people who’ve actually been around the patch talk about this stu...

Chuck, Matt, Gates, and Boar got together to unpack “Landman” Season 2, Episode 2, and it turned into the perfect mix of oilfield therapy session and comedy hour, calling out the ridiculous drilling logic, roasting Cooper’s disastrous money moves, and laughing through the show’s dramatic family moments. They riff on everything from cartoon-level oilfield economics to cartel side hustles and legal chaos, plus one absolutely unhinged analogy comparing modern extraction to a Whataburger milkshake. And of course, the infamous “sins of the father” moment sparks plenty of debate. If you’re into oil and gas or just love watching a good TV melt...

Bill Arend from Microsoft and Canisius Rozario, CTO of Collide, talk through the messy reality of deploying AI in oil and gas—why most E&Ps have gone all-in on cloud, how data security actually works when you're not training models on customer data, and why multi-cloud strategies are dying out. They dig into deployment models across SMBs and enterprise NOCs, the build-versus-buy trap that keeps operators stuck, and why agents managing other agents might be the wildest thing happening in five years.

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Aurian Norouzi from Kraken Oil & Gas walks through how they're using Collide to stop manually hunting through gas gathering agreements buried in file folders. He breaks down the acreage dedication problem, how they're automating stripper well applications to North Dakota, and why building third-party volume forecasts used to mean staring at maps and manually typing section-township-range data into Excel. Nick Smart from Collide explains how they iterated on chunk sizes and result limits to make the answers actually useful, and where GIS integration could let Kraken visualize dedication overlays without bugging their one GIS analyst.

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John Argo, asset manager at Continental Resources, breaks down the groundbreaking LifesAIver initiative, a multi-company effort to use AI for preventing workover rig fatalities. He walks through how six operators and service companies pooled data to create AI tools that give crews personalized safety insights before they hit the rig. Argo also shares Continental's perspective on recovery factors, why the U.S. is getting less than 20% of known oil out of the ground, and how AI could unlock massive reserves everyone's leaving behind.

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Todd Bush, COO of Collide, walks through real-world AI use cases beyond the hype—how operators are automating routine tasks like production alerts, capturing tribal knowledge before the crew change wipes it out, and optimizing capital deployment for equipment placement. He breaks down the regulatory filing workflow across Texas and North Dakota, why the non-op side is ripe for automation because teams run so lean, and how MCP servers let you query WellView and SCADA systems directly without building custom integrations. Plus the game plan for starting small on focused assets and expanding into five to ten use cases by...

Buck Crum from Winn Resources talks through how production ops runs lean and why that makes AI tools critical for smaller operators. He breaks down using Collide for well search to pull operational histories in seconds instead of burning a third of his day hunting through documents, and where he wants it to go next, diagnostic help, probing questions, and eventually a "Pumperbot" that pumpers can talk to in the field. Michael Cortez from Collide walks through the difference between finding information and actually using it, and why voice-to-text could capture the tribal knowledge that never makes it onto...

Bobby Neelon and John Kalfayan from Collide break down the messy reality of getting data ready for RAG, why PDFs are dumpster fires for unstructured data, how extraction changes depending on whether you're dealing with drilling surveys or handwritten logs, and why chunking strategy matters more than people think. They walk through embeddings, vector databases, MCP servers for pulling external data without leaking internal info, and why good metadata and folder structure actually make AI deployments way easier. Plus the hard truth that AI isn't a silver bullet for bad data management and the crap-in-crap-out problem is getting worse...

Demi Moore storms into *Landman* Season 2 like she owns the place, instantly shaking up the oil patch with a leadership style that’s equal parts steel and swagger. The tension snaps from the jump, boardrooms turning into battlegrounds, wildcatters taking big swings, and Cooper somehow leveling up in the most unexpected way. Tommy’s playing his own dangerous game, Sam Elliott shows up with that signature gravitas that makes every family moment hit harder, and the whole season moves with this “anything can happen” energy. It’s messy, bold, and addictive in the best way, with twists and dialogue sharp enou...

AI is shaking up oil and gas in all the best ways, and Todd Bush from Collide breaks it down like few can. He and Chuck dive into how automation is tackling tedious processes, think regulatory filings like W-10s and G-10s, and how AI is streamlining data extraction for mineral revenue statements. Todd shows off Collide’s enterprise AI system in action, revealing how it saves time, slashes costs, and helps operators make smarter, faster calls in the field. It’s a wild look at how machine learning is making oil and gas operations not just more effi...

Real-time frac data isn’t some future concept, it’s here, and it’s changing the way completions get done. Chuck Yates sat down with folks from ProFrac and Seismos to break down how AI, automation, and acoustic sensing are turning traditional fracking on its head. Matt Wilks and Panos Adamopoulos talk about ProPilot 2.0 and how closed-loop fracturing is giving operators instant feedback to fine-tune every stage. Then Larry Carroll and Steven Bourgoyne take it further, showing how machine learning and data-driven workflows are pushing completions toward adaptive, even autonomous, operations. From cutting costs to squeezing every drop of perfor...

This episode is packed with big-picture energy talk and some seriously nerdy (but fun) data breakdowns. John Kalfayan from collide. and Chuck start with what’s really happening in oil and gas today before shifting into the challenges of putting AI to work in the field. From there, things get deep: contract dedications, what RAG actually means, how data chunking works, and the never-ending battle with duplicate info. We also weigh the costs of storage, querying, and running models, plus the tradeoffs between RAG and foundational models. If you’ve ever wondered about vector databases, data strategy, or just why...

AI isn’t just a buzzword here, it’s reshaping how oil and gas gets work done. Collin McLelland breaks down what he’s building at collide, from tackling the nightmare of legacy systems to creating smarter, vertical AI tools that actually fit the industry. He and Chuck swap stories on why community and knowledge sharing matter as much as tech itself, how AI speeds up decisions and cleans up workflows, and what the future of jobs in energy might look like when machines and people work side by side. It’s equal parts practical advice, behind-the-scenes insight, and a good d...

Cemvita is taking microbes and turning them into an entirely new playbook for energy and manufacturing. Chuck sat down with CEO Moji Karimi and BioWell’s Paul Palmer to talk about how biology, AI, and genomics are teaming up to replace petrochemicals with bio-based alternatives. We’re talking everything from sustainable aviation fuel to biofertilizers to underground biorefineries that sound like science fiction but are already in motion. Along the way, they unpack how biomanufacturing could clean up supply chains, cut waste, and unlock new energy sources, all while building a circular bioeconomy that makes sustainability actually scalable. If you’...

Why can’t the energy industry simply ‘Drill Baby Drill’ anymore? Chuck Yates and guest Roe Patterson, Managing Partner at Marauder Capital, break it all down in this insightful episode of the Chuck Yates Needs A Job Podcast. From falling rig counts and oil market challenges to the impact of government policies and the evolving role of natural gas, they explore why the industry is shifting gears. Roe shares invaluable insights into production constraints, technological advancements like AI, and the critical importance of balancing energy independence with global demand. Packed with humor, personal stories, and hard-hitting industry truths, this episod...

Office flings, awkward disclosures, and dating policies gone sideways, Janell Zeug, Founder & CEO of P3 HR Solutions, unpacks the real stories that made HR sweat, including the infamous Coldplay incident. This episode is full of the kind of workplace drama that forces companies to rewrite the handbook, plus a look at how AI is creeping into HR decisions (for better or worse). We get into how different generations clash (and connect) at work, and what it actually takes to build a team that’s engaged, ethical, and not secretly dating in the breakroom.

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Nuclear is back, baby! But there’s a catch: the world is hungry for uranium, and we're running short. Turns out, countries like China, India, and Saudi Arabia aren’t waiting around, they’re ramping up reactors faster than you can say "energy crisis." Small Modular Reactors (think mini but mighty) could totally flip the script on how we power cities, AI data centers, and your neighborhood coffee shop. Our guest knows the ins and outs of uranium investments, the weird logistics of mining, and why nuclear might just be the unsung hero of clean energy, controversial, sure, but imposs...

Family offices are rolling into the energy game in a big way, and Chuck sits down with a couple of guys who’ve been right in the thick of it. We’re talking old-money families, London power players, and some seriously savvy strategies, like continuation vehicles, that are flipping the script on traditional deals. Keith and Brad from Stephens Inc. break it all down: what’s drawing these investors to oil and gas (hint: it’s not just the money), why Europe’s cash is flowing stateside, and how the secondary basins are getting their glow-up. If you’ve ever wondere...

Energy deals are popping off left and right, and it’s shaking up the whole industry, so I grabbed a few friends who know the game better than anyone to talk shop. We broke down why all these mergers keep happening, how creative insurance strategies are giving companies more wiggle room, and where natural gas fits into this ever-changing picture. Plus, we got into some juicy topics like why AI is suddenly the hottest hire in energy, the real story behind ESG investing (hint: it might not be what you think), and even how big tech might soon be co...

She went from pre-med dreams to rocks and rigs and didn’t stop climbing. Nikki’s path took her from being the first in her family to graduate college to running the Ralph Lowe Energy Institute at TCU, with stops along the way in oilfields, private equity boardrooms, and global energy hubs. This episode is full of stories about pivoting careers, saying yes to wild opportunities, and mentoring the next wave of energy pros. She’s big on merging business sense with technical chops, tackling water issues, and rethinking how universities plug into the energy world. If you care about...

Think emission credits are just for tree huggers and big corporations? Think again, there’s serious money on the table, and most folks in oil and gas, manufacturing, or even landfill operations don’t even realize it. We're talking \$300K-a-ton kind of money. This episode pulls back the curtain on how emission reduction credits actually work and why so many small and mid-sized businesses are missing out on a goldmine sitting right under their noses. From shutting down old gear to investing in cleaner tech, there's a legit way to make money just by playing smart with emissions. It’s a no...

Petrohawk wasn’t just another company, it flipped the whole shale game on its head, and we’ve got the guys who lived it telling the real story. From throwing out the old playbook and betting big in the Haynesville and Eagle Ford, to building a culture where collaboration actually meant something, Dick Stoneburner and Steve Herod spill the good stuff, wild deals, big risks, and billion-dollar wins. They talk about navigating private equity, spotting opportunities no one else saw, and what today’s energy world looks like compared to the wild west days of the shale boom. Plus, they s...

Chuck gets the real story behind one of the wildest chapters in Australian history, the 1942 bombing of Darwin, where more bombs were dropped than on Pearl Harbor, and the government kept it all under wraps. Mark Monaghan spills some jaw-dropping details: how the Tiwi Islanders warned of the attacks before radar even existed, how Australia’s first POW was captured, and why this moment mattered way more than people realize. But the past isn’t the only focus, we jump into the present too, talking critical minerals, energy, and why Darwin’s becoming a serious player in global strategy. From m...

Jupiter Power is shaking up the Texas energy game with massive battery storage projects, and we got the inside scoop straight from the top. From wrangling too much wind power in West Texas to running nine projects that pump out 1,500 megawatt-hours a day, they’re proving storage is the real MVP of the grid. We talk about building the company from scratch, the chaos and rewards of entrepreneurship, and what it really takes to raise the kind of money that turns a wild idea into real impact. Throw in some sharp takes on AI, electrification, and the bottlenecks holding ba...

AI is flipping the script on venture capital, and Blair Garrou has a front-row seat to the transformation. Chuck Yates sits down with the Mercury VC partner to talk about how AI is slashing startup costs, reshaping investment strategies, and fueling a new era of lean, high-impact teams. From generative AI and robotics to fintech and space tech, this conversation dives into the trends reshaping the future of work, investing, and innovation. Plus, Blair shares his wild ride from scrappy angel investing to building a powerhouse VC firm, and what he sees coming next.

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Betrayal hits different when you're a guy, especially when nobody's talking about it. This episode cracks open that silence with the "Betrayal Shrink," a therapist who’s been through it himself and now helps other men navigate the gut-punch of infidelity, shame, and heartbreak. We’re talking about the real stuff: what it means to be vulnerable, how toxic masculinity screws with healing, and why sharing your story might be the first step toward getting your life back. Plus, he walks through a no-BS recovery model from his book that helps men rebuild without losing their minds, or their dign...