Chuck Yates Got A Job

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 r...

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...

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. Click here to watch a video...

 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 compan...

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 t...

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...

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. Click here to watch a video of this e...

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...

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 spre...

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...

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. Click here to watch a video o...

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...

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...

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...

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 keep...

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...

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...

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,...

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 t...

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...

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 sig...

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, a...

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-tun...

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 w...

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 workflow...