Chuck Yates Got A Job

Five lessons pulled from a junior high dance floor, a Wall Street Journal firing, and a weekend in Battle Creek learning to code. Chuck Yates, co-founder of Collide, takes the Ion stage and argues that energy's AI problem was never the tech. It is permission, labels, and an industry that named its flagship product West Texas Intermediate. Plus a serious ask about being better people on the way there.

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00:00 End of the world as we know it
03:00 Bobby Joe and the 1982 church dance
07:46 Labels matter
11:54 Why energy is bad at marketing
14:41 Building distribution before a product
16:22 The clock reset
18:58 James Broach
21:18 A weekend of Claude code and David Lee Roth
23:48 Houston, freaking Texas

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A garage full of Ethereum rigs once set a house on fire, and that was only the warmup. Rakesh Agrawal and Lloyd Kirchner run Piping Technology & Products, a 50 year old Houston manufacturer where 100 employees now build their own AI agents and a welding cobot just got unveiled to 450 people on the shop floor. Cut cables in West Texas, new collar jobs, Pope Leo, and why the guy with the pickup truck had every reason to be nervous.

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00:00 The house fire
05:07 A cryptic DM about dad's company
06:15 What Piping Technology makes
09:56 Family business and the second chair
12:43 Every tech wave since dial up
17:02 Getting AI to actually spread
20:14 The guy who cut the cables
24:04 Unveiling a welding cobot
26:16 Pope Leo and new collar work
35:32 Agents on the quoting desk
42:22 The CIO problem
44:22 Letting Claude psychoanalyze you
49:04 Guardrails and permissions
53:11 Five years out
57:56 Intention and action

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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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00:00 The perfect podcast length
02:03 What executive AI coaching actually is
04:48 Building the Houston AI Club
08:50 Why Houston is wired for AI
14:29 Augmentation, not automation
18:29 Talking to AI instead of typing at it
22:41 Cost savings versus new revenue
24:37 The real prize in oil and gas
27:54 What executives are actually asking
31:52 Banned in 2024, bought in 2025
33:31 Why you cannot delegate this one
38:51 The Burton McMurtry card story
40:32 Ambition as a technical limiter
44:08 AI as a thought partner
48:23 The September 3rd operator spotlight
50:24 Where to find Leon

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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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00:00   Meet D.J. Snyder
01:05   From drilling to the overlooked world of production
02:47   Old tech, new problems: gas, sand, and horizontal wells
06:24   Physical widgets and the marginal gains mindset
08:32   Why there's no one size fits all
13:00   Heresy: actually watch and fix your wells
16:57   The AI promise of one source of truth
18:43   Rethinking the pumper's daily route
22:57   War stories, the Bakken, and naming tools
25:18   ROI, payback, and how you really sell it
28:25   Who to call, what it costs, and building a company
36:03   How AI reshapes the work itself
38:16   Robots, drones, and the future of the field
40:14   Why boards say yes and value beats cheap
44:53   Wrap up and where to find DJ

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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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0:00 - Mineral versus royalty, explained for mom
1:23 - Why US mineral ownership is uniquely American
4:28 - The first oil lease and the Far and Away land rush
8:11 - Splitting estates and why mineral owners keep multiplying
9:25 - Karl and Chuck's history and the 2014 Thanksgiving crash
10:43 - Why people actually decide to sell
11:55 - The early days of investing in minerals
14:46 - The Caritas run and the perfectly timed 2008 hedges
22:17 - Buying ahead of the drill bit with Haymaker
23:33 - Why everyone should own some as an energy hedge
26:08 - The four kinds of buyers and the grassroots game
27:22 - The thesis behind Harvest
44:46 - Crazy mineral stories from the field
48:09 - The Toby Bean apple pie story

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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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0:00 - The barrel of oil coin on Chuck's dresser
2:08 - How Wil ended up bridging crypto and oil
4:03 - What a stablecoin actually is, explained for mom
10:05 - The minus 37 dollar day, USO, and True Tracker
12:21 - Banking a barrel: minting, redeeming, the bank of oil
19:25 - Critical investor mode: what protects your money
24:08 - Credit reviews, unencumbered barrels, and ABLs
28:50 - The reverse Dutch auction and the trading platform
32:16 - A brand new form of capital for producers
36:06 - Crypto adoption, 700 million accounts, and the Yeezys story
38:34 - Selling the company, line fill, and credit over time
45:59 - Who they want to hear from and WTI as the world standard
48:34 - Still early days and how to reach them 

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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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00:00  The Candy Crush guy comes to Houston
02:07  eBay suits, semiconductors, and a detour to Sweden
04:50  How a LinkedIn DM turned into Collide
07:13  Going all in on Claude and chasing SOC2
09:40  Security explained, Fort Knox style
12:42  What's set in stone, what's in flux
14:29  The AI versus AI arms race
15:04  The Mythos model and real reasons to pay attention
16:32  Big brother advice for adopting AI safely
20:00  Data exfiltration and what keeps him up at night
22:30  The next 30 to 60 days at Collide
24:39  Securing the bleeding edge for an industry that skipped SaaS

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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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0:00 The Cority story and 40 years in EHS software
2:30 How the software shows up on a rig and in the office
5:45 The SaaS apocalypse question and why context beats raw AI
9:30 Amanda's family mining history and why this work is personal
11:00 Recruiting AI talent to Houston and the six month change cycle
15:00 Shiny objects versus solving real problems
18:00 Auditability, HIPAA, and the black box problem
19:30 Where Collide is heading as an operating system
23:00 Employee resistance and the friction point playbook
27:30 Six hundred page permits, 3000 filings, zero mistakes
30:00 Agentic workflows as the new source of record
34:30 Correlation, causation, and the shale revolution lesson
37:30 The PDF problem and using 2 percent of energy data
41:30 Learning to drive as the AI adoption analogy
43:00 What we are not talking about today that we will be in five years
48:30 Ninety-five percent of employees are using shadow AI

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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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0:00 - Intro and Jon's background
1:30 - How Collide has evolved since Jon joined
4:00 - Agent hierarchy explained
6:10 - The hard part: taking AI from POC to production
9:30 - Auditable search and why citations matter
10:00 - What Jon is most proud of
11:20 - The mapping interface coming to Collide
13:50 - What keeps Jon up at night
16:50 - Using AI to unlock the 90% of oil still in the ground

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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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0:00 Clay's background and how he ended up at Collide
1:34 The reality of energy data: hard drives, banker's boxes, and chaos
4:47 Building document categorization tools from scratch
8:52 Handling duplicates and the shared drive problem
13:57 Why data reliability is the foundation of AI
17:21 The last mile: getting from 80% to 100% accuracy

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