Chuck Yates Needs A Job

0:21 All right. I know where you're going to start with. Well, no, that's what's so funny is like, I've been, we got you booked and all and literally could not have a better setup than the idiots in

0:34 cold play. Oh, yeah. But I got no joke for that. I've been thinking all weekend. So nothing. But what were they thinking? Well, they weren't thinking, right? Well, that's true You know,

0:47 and it happens. You don't want to be in leadership roles and having it happen. And of course, it's a big kick in, you know, the trust and ethics part for the company for the leadership for the

0:56 board

0:59 for HR. We live by credibility. So she just shot herself in the foot. And I guess she comes from a very, well, she's married into a very prestigious family up in the Northeast. So she probably

1:09 also, you know, kicked herself theirs from a personal standpoint, as well as a professional standpoint. So she's probably done, she's on leave of absence. He's There's three times. resigned.

1:20 Have a new interim CEO. Yeah.

1:25 So what is the practice today? Are executives allowed to date? Was it just that they hadn't disclosed it? Or what do people think out there? It depends on the company. Generally, you don't want

1:41 your leadership dating someone within the company because of the implications of when it goes south or if it goes south with harassment, other things like that. So you might not want to be dating

1:53 someone. A lot of companies allow for it. I've worked at companies that allowed for it. There were some mishaps at that company as well. So it wasn't always a perfect system. But it depends on

2:03 the company. So I mean, I discourage it. But it happens. I've had leaders and other members of my staff date and so it's best practice to disclose if you're going to do that. So you can not have

2:16 them reporting to each affecting each other's pay or favoritism kind of situation. So I went back when I was at Caine.

2:27 There was just something going on in the office and I didn't know what it was, but that was kind of par for the course that you get 25 type A personalities running around. A lot of my job was just

2:40 to fair it out. What is actually going on? And there was something weird. So I was kind of like, go to my assistant and say, hey, what's what's going on? And we had just had a new secretary or

2:52 assistant transfer in from the Chicago office. And she was really good looking. And our intern that summer was actually Brandon Brooks, the offensive guard from the Houston Texans. Oh, wow. He

3:06 had randomly gotten my phone number, call me, hey, Chuck, I want to learn about private equity. I'm like, this is like really Brandon Brooks So I thought Brandon and Lexi might be dating. And I

3:18 was going, okay, well, physically he's six, six, 300 pounds and she might weigh 100 pounds. But at the same time, I mean, she's an intern. I mean, she's an assistant, he's only an intern

3:33 and I don't even think we're paying him at the time. So I'm going, well, that's probably okay. And so anyway, there was a, and Stacy's like, Well, I don't know anything going on. And I asked,

3:43 you know, a couple other people and I went on, finally, I just kind of called Lexi into my office. She's like, Oh, yeah, I'm dating Todd. And I'm like, Oh, okay. She was dating, just not

3:55 the guy you thought. Yeah, and so anyway, it was so funny, Stacy came into my office, Oh, I'm sorry. I've never lied to you in my life. I didn't know what to say. I was like, I'm not the

4:06 enemy here. Let me just go figure. So I actually called, and there was a policy on this at Kane, it was

4:15 people in the farm are allowed to date each other. I don't know if there was a disclosure requirement to it, although that would make sense, but the key was the person in superior position could

4:29 not have any input into the compensation of the other person. And then kind of the HR person who I just loved at Cane, she was like, and the other thing is,

4:46 Lexi's got to be free if they break up to come in and say, hey, I'm getting harassed in some way, shape or form. So she can talk to me, she can talk to you, just make sure she knows that. And

4:60 so anyway, they wound up getting married. So it wasn't an issue, but yeah, I know it was. I've had that happen where they got married. And then I've also had happened where I had two people that

5:10 were married and having an affair And, you know, I called him in my office and said, you know, It's what you do in your time is your business, but you're no longer being discreet and it's

5:21 disrupting the business. So now that you're, it's affecting my house, we have to have a conversation. And so from what I understand, he left my office with tears in his eyes 'cause I was pretty

5:30 harsh, but, you know, it was like, you know, what you do in your time is fine, but it can affect work and it's affecting work 'cause they were two senior leaders. Yeah, all right. So if I'm

5:41 running a company these days, what do I need to be thinking about kind of HR wise? What's top of mind

5:49 these days? Probably AI is a big one just because everyone's afraid of being out of a job sooner or later, right? So that's one thing. And people are using it for different aspects. So some

6:00 companies use it for recruitment, some are using it for decisions and compensation and in performance reviews. So there's a little bit of, you know, fine line a tool. I think it's a great tool.

6:13 I use it every day. But it's

6:17 That's kind of top of mind for a lot of people. 'Cause so we're an AI software company now as opposed to a media company. And so I run around and Jake said, I'm the world's go to say, I software

6:29 salesman. Of course, I keep notes on paper and, but the thing, and I don't know, I can't remember if we talked about this the other night, but the thing that's kind of getting me on the HR front

6:41 about AI is, and let's use lawyers just 'cause it's obvious, you need the old crusty lawyer to sit there and say, Eh, yeah, acceptable risk, or, No, I wouldn't run that risk, but the way they

6:55 got to be that old crusty lawyer is literally they spent five years

7:02 proofreading documents. Yes. And AI does that so much better today, that where are you gonna get the training so that you can become the crusty old person. And I don't know how to think about that.

7:19 Well, I just, I was just watching the news and Altman was on and talking about AI and I think it was a Federal Reserve Conference, but part of the issue is younger people don't know how to think.

7:31 They depend on AI to do their thinking, right? So they ask, like, I didn't realize this. They have almost a relationship with AI and they ask good questions. And any kind of decision they're

7:39 going to make, they bounce it off of AI. Well, critical thinking is going out the window with that regard, right? You have to be able to look at things and make decisions and you don't want to be

7:49 dependent on AI for all of your decisions and for your learnings. And for deciding, you know, if there's three options, you know, what are the ins and outs of each option? You just don't go with

7:59 the best option because there could be things, trailing items that you want to consider. So it is from a development standpoint, it's an interesting thing. I think of AI as a tool. I want to

8:09 utilize it. I do utilize it practically every day,

8:13 Number one, you wanna check the source. I can't remember what I asked it the other day, but it referred to our president as former president Trump. And I was like, this is wrong. So you know,

8:23 the data isn't always correct. So I tell people, make sure you get the sources and check the data. But then also, what is it doing in the minds of younger people or people that depend on it, just

8:34 like a calculator, right? We went to using calculators all the time. Nobody has had to do math in their head. Nobody's going to know how to think about resolving an issue or solving a problem in

8:43 their head without going to AI. And I think that's a little disconcerting. Yeah, and I was talking to my brother about this. And my brother, since he graduated from college, whatever, 25, 30

8:56 years ago, has always been at what I will call compact computers. And I think now they're HP. But whatever iteration of the company it was, he's been there He's always worked on storage type stuff.

9:12 And what he says, the interesting dynamic is AI is just probabilities. I mean, if you got really, you know, somebody jokingly said, eh, he's called it statistics.

9:28 And that's based on an old crusty person's view of the world today. So they're building AI models based on that

9:40 And they're sort of capturing everything the old crusty person has. But if we get rid of the old crusty person and we don't train them, are we then in effect training people on a faulty or a

9:53 slightly off view of it? So that was one thing. And then another, there's a large independent oil and gas company that's really advanced on AI. So we're up there sharing notes with them and I

10:05 bring up the same topic And someone at HR, who's very powerful in the companies, Screw it. Let all the tribal knowledge go. I want fresh eyes looking at this stuff. So I don't care if we don't

10:19 have the old crusty person around here. I'm just going to take some young, smart people, have them look at data and we'll just start all over with it. So that's, that's, well, that's an

10:30 interesting take. I, so I think about things like the, what is it? Apollo 13, where they had the failure and they literally had to take whatever was on the spaceship to make up what they needed

10:43 to be able to get those guys home. Well, is AI going to be able to do that? I mean, or is that going to really take someone who's tried and true with the engineering and understanding and say,

10:53 yeah, that, you know, yes, it could run the probabilities, but is it going to be able to design that? Maybe. I don't know that answer, but I just think that the, that the, you know, I think

11:02 in oil and gas, the old hands, right? The, the roughnecks that can, can solve something with a paperclip and a piece chewing gum like my guy who did. They put their hand on it. Yeah, this is

11:12 what's wrong. Yes, and so, I mean, there's a lot to be said for that. So again, I use AI regularly, what it can do and from a, you know, building something new, yeah, I think it does do

11:24 great things with building something new. But what if you only have these four things and you need to build something with it? Can it do that? I don't know. I think that the ingenuity, I think

11:35 innovation comes from the human mind. Computers can come up with ideas, but what kind of ideas are they coming up with? And I learned something recently about AI that I found was interesting. So

11:45 Kathleen Pearly, she's a professor at Rice, and she's very interesting and she's written a book on AI, but AI was built off of the English language and the English, the American, almost way of

11:59 doing things, right? So, well, like when my friends, I sat in Provence last year with a girlfriend and I was teaching her how to use chat at GPT, we put in exactly the same prompt. We were

12:08 getting very different information. Well, I've been a big user and she'd never used it before. So I thought that was part of it. But what I found out was it was having to take her prompts,

12:17 translate them from French into English, solve for it, then translate it back to France with a French. So then what are they losing in that translation? And what, you know, there are things that

12:28 are very different from a French perspective than from an American perspective. So is it taking those things into account as well? So it was a very interesting lesson to learn about AI. So I think

12:39 there's some gaps that aren't realized yet from a just knowledge-based standpoint of what is in AI, what, you know, how it's been built. So I thought that was interesting. So rice lore, my alma

12:52 mater is during the 1950s, that was a question on the space physics class. Final exam, you're stranded in space How do you get a rocket ship home? and the answer was you sling it around the moon

13:10 and you use the gravity of that. That was the A answer, but you know, it was a total show-your-work type thing. That's at least the lore, is that a lot of people sitting in at NASA when that were

13:24 going on were rice graduates who had had that question before. I mean, but think about it. I don't know if AI can solve for things that it hasn't been instilled in it, right? So it's probability,

13:38 it's coming up with information that's been input, but if nothing's been input about something, then how does it derive from it? And it also has to do with the prompts, right? Your prompt for a

13:46 simple question could be very different from my prompt, but we're looking for the same answer and we're getting different answers. And I mean, you definitely want different perspectives from people.

13:56 I have a team always that's very different. I want people having different ideas, different thoughts. Are you going to get those different thoughts and ideas from AI?

14:07 Let's bring it back to HR. What kind of policy are we writing today on that? That's a tough one. So you definitely - I don't even know where to start on that. Well, part of it is what your

14:19 business is, right? So I go to, I always partner up with finance and the legal teams when I'm in a company. And so right away I think about IP, intellectual property. So do you have a boxed-in

14:32 system that no one can see outside? Or is it a public access system? So that's the first question you solve for. If it's public access, you need to put some really big safeguards on how your

14:41 employees are using it. If it's private, a lot of companies, the ones that are really using it as a superpower have their guardrails in and it's theirs and it's in-house. So you can use it very

14:53 differently then because you own what's in it. So that's partly number one, right? How are you using it as a public or private? And then what are you using it for? I have a dear friend,

15:04 executive level HR, and - He, this was like three years ago, and he's like, yeah, I had it right. My, you know, border port in the voice of an ape. And I thought, oh, you're dumbing it down,

15:13 stop dumbing it down. So people can use it for fun, but then as it dumbing down, and it definitely has dumbed down what's in there since the start of it, right? It, when it was deployed, it was

15:22 deployed at a genius level. And now it's, you know, this back down, I don't know what grade level it's at now, but it's definitely lower. Um, so how people use it, what they're using it for,

15:32 um, you want to get rid of administrative tasks, right? You want to become efficient and effective. So I think that looking at that 25 to 30 that you're doing, that's administrative. Let's look

15:43 at that first. So I think looking at process mapping and how you can utilize it. Uh, I think that's important. Uh, I think there's so many uses and it really comes down to what the company is

15:53 trying to solve for. I would be trying to solve for how can we eliminate or reduce those administrative tasks, get your people focused on what, what part of the business really does add value for

16:04 you, what you can do to. to like the agents. A lot of people aren't using agents at all yet, and agents can respond to emails. They can do all those administrative tasks that many people have an

16:15 assistant doing, or they're, you know, put at the end of the day to do. So, I mean, it depends on how you want to use it as a company, and again, what kind of guardrails you want to put in

16:24 place. There needs to be governance and compliance documents around how you're going to use AI within the company. Yeah, it's been interesting. Out calling on oil and gas companies, we've

16:35 literally talked to some companies that won't allow chat GPT to be used within the company. Now, people are going to their own private accounts using it, exporting documents in. And then literally

16:48 this large independent that I was telling you about that's really advanced on AI. The CIO, this goes against every fiber in my being,

16:60 But he's letting people actually build their own code to create their own. a Genic workflows. Wow. I mean, he said, I'm letting him release it onto the system. And he goes, That horrifies me.

17:14 But, you know, somebody's like, Hey, I wrote a frack interference model. And you know, boom, I'm sharing it around with everybody else. Everybody else is starting to use it. And so he's kind

17:24 of like, you know, he keeps coming back to, if you have the right people, if you have the right culture, you have the right training, you can trust your people with a lot of stuff. But it's - I

17:33 think that's amazing I think that you can build like task force or cohorts to kind of review and not put a review process in place for it, right? So that you are catching something before it goes

17:43 out there, either with faulty information or something that again has proprietary information, you don't want outside the box. So I think that you could do that to really help provide some

17:53 governance over your processes and your systems. I love to hear that oil and gas is using it that way 'cause I think I was in the patch for a long time and it's very old and crusty, right? So a lot

18:03 of things, I mean, I walked into one company. 2007 and they had literally sent their first email the prior year. There were still select electric typewriters in every office. And I was like, are

18:13 you kidding me? Like it was so scary. Yeah. No, that's oil and gas. Yeah. No, well, and I have the, I have a whole theory on this. The, so I always believe that oil and gas is

18:26 technologically the most innovative, most advanced industry on the planet If you have a shot of getting rich with that, you, you have a lottery ticket. If it's saving nickels and dimes, you don't

18:43 do it. So your land files, digitizing those to make them cheaper to store. And that's nickels and dimes drill a three mile horizontal. Frack it and cause miles and my, or acres of acres of shale

18:58 to produce where it never had produced before and get freaking rich doing that Yeah. So it's the lottery ticket and. At least now, my view is I think oil and gas companies for the most part are

19:11 looking at AI as that's a lottery ticket, you know. I think it's a game changer for sure. Yeah, totally. Yeah, but again, it's, and so I understand, especially if that HR person was an oil

19:23 and gas, I kind of understand where she's coming from because everything has been done the same way. And think about drilling has been drilling has been drilling, besides the horizontal, what's

19:33 really changed in the last 70 years The first horizontal off, well offshore in 1937. So I keep, you know, I didn't even know that. So I knew that horizontal was - Did John Wilkes Booth did before

19:45 you shot Lincoln? No. He was actually a fracker. He threw dynamite down well-bores and blew it up. So he was technically fracking it, bro. Don't, sorry, audience. Don't use that against this

19:59 Greta Thornberg's right in that. I'm right in that down. No, I didn't, I did not realize that. No, I was, I've been in Borneo where they shall drill their first well and it's interesting. I

20:13 just don't think that the way they've done business has changed a lot over time so they haven't changed the way they've done business. So I think AI is a disruptor. I think it's a positive disruptor.

20:24 I think that companies again need to determine how they're going to use it and then how they're going to protect themselves when they use it. I don't know that there's a lot of technology that's not

20:35 known or shared within the pack. I don't think anybody has any real true IP secrets out there unless it's like I was in seismic and we built almost drones for the sea, right? Little flying drones

20:48 for seismic. And that was, we had a lot of IP around that. Now I think there's a ton of companies out there that do it. Is there still, you know, you still want to protect that property? Yes,

20:57 it's still fairly new, from the drilling standpoint or is there really, you know, are they doing anything different? Is one drill or doing anything different? Is transotion, do we think

21:05 different from, you know, NSCO? I don't know. Well, this is my one great AI story. So when you're selling software as I've come to learn, you don't do anything in the demo that you haven't done

21:18 before so that you know it haven't, not me, I'm just, I'm like - Let's play, let's play.

21:25 So, you know, part of my shtick is, hey, you're still the domain expert. This is helping you search, helping you get your answers, but at the end of the day, you're still the domain expert.

21:36 It's not telling you where to drill, but you can formulate that by getting your answers really quickly, getting your data. And the other pitch I make is any time you connect these disparate data

21:48 sources together, you find relationships that exist that you never knew existed before. So, I'm sitting there giving this pitch and.

21:59 a geophysicist looked at me and said, Okay, Chuck, I hear you on these two things. Like, I can't wrap my head around those, both those concepts being true. Help me out. And I go, Well, let's

22:09 just try it. So we had Collide pulled up and we had probably six different well files just to use as a sample. And it had all the stuff well files having it, you know, Well view, it had pre and

22:26 post job reports. I think it had all the drilling reports, you know, all the typical stuff you'd see in a well file. And so I went, how could we compare and contrast all the wells in this

22:38 database? And boom, pops out formation. Okay, well that makes sense. Completion recipe, you know, basically what you do. Okay, that makes sense. It did, you know, casing design, all the

22:51 stuff that you're like, okay, that all makes sense. Then it threw out, you could compare these wells. by vendors that worked on it. I kind of went, Whoa, hold on. 'Cause what we did at Caine,

23:04 we did early stage assets. So I probably did 125 lease and drills in my career. We could go drill the first horizontal well in a county. And the way you did that is you created this massive

23:17 spreadsheet of your quote unquote analogy wells, and you kind of eyeball regress, oh, the best wells used fine mesh sand in the fracks or the best wells, you know, use this many pounds of sand,

23:32 this many barrels of water, whatever the case may be. And you'd figure it out, I've never looked per vendor. If you ever looked per vendor in the geophysicists was like, No, I never, I never

23:45 would have thought to do that. So I go, there you go, there's an example. You're gonna be the domain expert. You're gonna go figure out if that actually matters or not, that it pointed out a

23:54 relationship that may exist. And what was crazy about it is I was talking to this old school and gas guy,

24:03 like two or three days later, and I was telling him that. He goes, Oh, I always run EOR by vendor. And I go, Really? How'd you know that? And he goes, 0809, financial crisis. Oils at 30.

24:18 He goes, I had 10 leases that I'd drilled wells onthat I had to frack to maintain the lease, and I didn't have a choice. Halliburton was literally the only fracking game in town. So I call them up

24:32 and say, I need some wells for him. They send over their sales guy who goes on and on for about 30 minutes about, Oh, we have this special additive we put inand it makes the rock more brittle. It

24:43 fracks better, you'll get better performance. And the dude was like, I don't care. You're the only game fracking. Go frack these wells. So they go out and frack 10 wells for him He said a year

24:55 later, 18 months later, he's up. maintenance reserves. And he goes, dang it. They were 20 to 25 better. He said, so I paid that I paid Halberton 10 more on each frack job going forward because

25:08 I was picking up 20 more oil and gas. Wow. And he said, so I've always looked at that per vendor. Lesson learned. Lesson learned. All right. There you go. That's amazing. Yeah, you know,

25:20 again, okay, so AI gave that option. But he's been doing it for, you know, how many years. How many years is that right? Because because he had to, right? So that would love. Because he's

25:31 going to recognize you're not that old. You're older than me. But you know, when you have to get, you know, when you're when you're pushing a corner, when you know, humans are pushing a corner,

25:40 we're going

25:42 to come up with ideas, right? And in their brilliant ideas, can AI help, you know, make that go faster? I think so. But then are is it going to as they're going to be blind spots? Yeah, I I

25:54 think so, 'cause I think there's blind spots in the data. I think what's in there, so. So what else is front and center in HR world? And I guess I would have this question about HR. Has there

26:07 been a shift kind of post-Trump getting elective 'cause you kind of feel like wokeness to some degree has been pushed back upon. Are we seeing any of that in HR or? So yes, I would say so So I

26:27 struggled, I never put my pronouns out there and I heard from plenty of my peers that you gotta do that. I'm like, I don't believe in that. And so I struggle from my personal convictions and

26:40 beliefs and aligning that with HR. And I took a job with an ad company during, so we sold my poor geophysical company. We, all our contracts were put in force majeure. no revs for about eight

26:54 months, so we ended up going under. We sold off our assets, got our people hired, and I had to move on, and I thought, Okay, maybe it's time to get out of oil and gas. So I went into Ag, and

27:05 I went to this company that was really amazingly, the Ag world is similar to the

27:12 oil and gas world in the people. I think the people in oil and gas are amazing, salt of the earth people, and across the world, just good people want to work hard for the company, generally loyal,

27:23 well, Ag has very similar attributes in their people, and I took that job because they didn't require the vaccine, and I was like, I'm not doing that. And so

27:34 I sat in the middle on that issue as well, right? I mean, all my, I had friends out there that were like, we're mandating it in our company, and that's how it should be, and I'm like, I don't

27:44 think it should be mandated, and I was one of very few in the city. I'm in a group of HR people in the city on a board, you know, they were all like, What? What do you mean? And so I just quit

27:56 talking about it because I was definitely the minority.

28:01 And so the woke that was happening was troublesome to me. And I kind of just didn't talk about it a lot. I talked about it with my friends, didn't talk about it among business, but I chose a

28:10 company that was very much within my wheelhouse of values and purpose and where I line. So they didn't ask me about my pronouns, they didn't ask me for my VaxCar, they didn't ask me any of those

28:22 things and I thought, these are my people. So now, you know, fast forward COVID's happened and it has, you know, people aren't necessarily putting their pronouns out there. I'm about, you know,

28:33 diversity. I totally believe in that. My little geophysical company, we had 28 countries represented out of 280 employees, but we didn't go out and say, we're hiring because this person is, you

28:44 know, of this race or ethnic background. We hired the best people that were out there. And there's a lot of great people across a lot of different spectrums. So. I think that for me, you know,

28:54 not having to focus on some of these things that have had so much like just microscopic views over the last few years has been kind of, you know, I'm able to breathe a little easier these days. I

29:06 think for a lot of HR people, they want to lead the way, but you have to lead the way. I believe you probably most of the time should take a more moderate approach and not go too far either way

29:17 like, you know, you can't be a leader if you don't have followers Well, that's true. I mean, a lot of people believe that. Yeah, a lot of people believe that. And I, I tend to lead from a

29:28 perspective that I want people to, I want people to bring their best selves to work. I want them to work great for. I want to be able to be able to develop themselves as well as add value to the

29:38 company. And I think HR is a value at business. We should be adding value. If we're not, then there's a problem What are the key value ads from HR? So, okay, so people are your number one

29:49 expense. most of the time at any company, right? So it's usually payroll and benefits. So, you know, understanding, those are the administrative tasks, but understanding where that fits in

29:60 your model, right? And especially like if you're doing acquisitions, if you're, you know, private equity going in, you need to understand you're bolting on a company or, you know, acquiring a

30:09 company, what does our compensation structure look like? What does our benefit packages look like? Those are things that cost you a lot of money, and you want to make sure you're aligned when

30:17 you're bringing in outside companies, adding to yours. I always used to joke that when someone switch, switches companies, one of two people made a mistake. They either overpaid them, or the

30:32 existing company should have paid up and kept them. Yeah. You know? No, no, I think, I mean, pay has a lot to do with it, but more than, the pay is kind of the backside. I think that feeling

30:42 valued is really what people want. They want to feel valued. They want to be paid for their value. But comp and bin is a big one.

30:51 But I also think that engagement, offering, I just met a small business owner this morning. And when you're a small business, it's all about keeping your people engaged 'cause they're gonna hit a

30:59 wall. You can only go so high in a small company 'cause there's no other jobs above that unless you're gonna be the CEO. So you have to learn how to engage people and everybody's different. I mean,

31:09 you might prefer the money, I might prefer the time off. So it's finding out what your people, what turns them on, what gets them excited. Some people like development, they wanna keep learning.

31:18 So what is that? And he had a challenge, and we talked about how do you do that for especially some of your aging managers in place. I said, a lot of them like to train, they like to give that

31:29 knowledge that they'd gain, like an oil patch. I had an engineer that was hitting 70, and he wanted to keep working. And so we said, would you be interested in managing our engineering intern

31:38 program? And he loved it, and they loved him, and it was great. It was awesome. Yeah, cool. Yeah. Cool. What are the biggest pitfalls? we see these days where and maybe I'll phrase it this

31:52 way is if I have HR problems today and don't really know about them and they they explode on me what are those type things? So I mean I know you've heard EQ right the emotional intelligence I think

32:09 that again it's people higher for like you hire people that look like you that that have the same beliefs as you that's a lot of times I coach managers hire for what you don't have I always say

32:20 there's one of me that's enough of me I need people on my team that don't think like me that aren't gonna come to the same conclusion so that's part of it the other side of it is that empathy that the

32:30 trust the communication I think that has a lot to do with how good of a leader you are you can't always tell everything all the time but you can say you know what I can't share that with you right now

32:40 I can share that with you later or having that difficult conversation you know I can't say check your an nice hole, but I could say, Hey Chuck, you know, you need to learn how to work with

32:55 you know, Lucille over here. And I think learning about people's styles and how people work is really helpful in the business because how I approach an engineer, manager is very different from how

33:01 I approach like an artistic manager. 'Cause one's gonna want all the details, right? He's gonna want everything, you know, the whole list. The artistic person's gonna want the idea. They're

33:09 gonna want the, you know, they're gonna want a little bit to be able to grow and really think on something. So it really does depend on the person And I think emotional intelligence around how you

33:20 manage people, how you deal with people, how you deal with different types of people, right? We have a lot of people today. I'm Gen X. I don't know what you are, but - I am Gen X. Okay, so -

33:29 Five, three years. So Gen X. So I'm not technically a boomer. So we tend to be direct in how we deal with things as generationally, very stereotypically speaking, right? Some of the other

33:41 generations are, you know, we never needed to save space at college And, you know, we've got lots of. out at the house when we were, you know, young and it's like, okay, we'll see it dark.

33:50 And they reminded our parents that you have children or they at home with you. The kids today are like, they want safe spaces. They want, you know, they want to be able to bring their authentic

33:60 selves to work and, you know, the work is the work. And I agree that you need to keep your authentic self, you know, you don't need to be somebody you're not. But your job doesn't need to cater

34:11 to you You need to come up and show up to do the job. So I think that there's some empathy that needs to happen, but there also needs to be some checks and balances for the people sitting in the

34:21 chairs doing the work. It was funny. So we brought Todd on to be chief operating officer and he had been working with us for the last 18 months as we're building our AI models. And so he'd kind of

34:36 been a consultant. We wanted to bring him on full-time and we were talking to the venture capital fund that invested in us and. They turn to me and they go, Well, Chuck, what do you think about

34:47 this Todd guy? And I was like, Well, everything you hate about Colin, you'll love about Todd.

34:56 And to his credit, we'll give Colin credit. Colin is for all the bravado, and I don't know if you follow him on Twitter, but he's frack-slap on Twitter. For all the bravado, very, very

35:10 self-aware. When Colin and I would disagree on stuff, he'd always get really curious. All right, Chuck, what am I missing? What did I do? Tell me why you feel that way, blah, blah, blah.

35:22 Then he figured out at some point, I just argued with him to argue with him, just to make, like, a lot of times I agreed with him, but I also know that neither one of us had thought it through.

35:31 So I would just take the other side, just argue, just for the - That's not a bad thing. I've had managers like that. They came to me for the opposing view. 'Cause I like to, well, I just like

35:40 to consider things that others don't always consider So there you go.

35:46 CEO, we're a young, I say we're a young, we're four or five years old. I think Colin started digital wildcatters full time January of 2020. So we're five and a half years old. But relatively

35:60 speaking, young in our development as a software company, what's the big advice for us?

36:09 Big advice for you. Well, I mean, I always think about if you're planning the long term succession, right, who's going to succeed where? So I talked to somebody recently about identifying your

36:20 like five key key roles. And you know, who's going to get or if someone gets hit by the big red bus or somebody leaves, you know, who's going to fill that gap? How are you going to fill that gap?

36:31 So I always think that's important for young startup companies because that tragedy can strike at any time, which is unfortunate, but also people can get, you know, get offers and walk out the

36:41 door and to leave you high and dry. So I think that's always a big one. I think figuring out how to keep your team engaged so that you don't have key people leave outside of those top five or three

36:52 or however, I don't know how large a company is. We're up to almost 20 people. Oh, wow. Isn't that crazy? Wow, that's awesome. That's fantastic. Yeah, no, it's kind of crazy. So the funny

37:02 thing on that is when I got fired, one of my best friends, Thomas Ackerman, over at Carnelian, he said, okay, what I want you to do, particularly if you had a glass of wine or two, is text me

37:15 what you want to do next. And when anything hits you, you just text it to me. And what we'll do is in six months, we'll sit down, we'll read all these things over bottle of wine, and we'll talk

37:26 about it, and we'll figure out what you're going to do. And what was funny about it is when we had that bottle of wine, and we're going through all this, he goes, Chuck, you texted me 27 times.

37:36 I will never manage people ever again in my life. Ah, well, that's funny that you say that, You hear that, especially among young people that are, you know, moving up in the role and you're

37:46 like, what do you want to do next? I want to manage people. And I'm like, you really don't. They're going to take up 80 of your time. They're going to be the pain point. And I tell people,

37:54 well, if you want to see how people manage people, if they have children, look at how they parent. Because parenting and managing is very similar. Oh, that's it. It's so true. I had a lot of

38:04 that. So I have a dear friend, she grew up, she always screamed at her daughter, and then when I got to work, 'cause we worked together, she was screaming, You can't scream at your employees.

38:12 You can't do it. But that's how she managed her daughter. So that's how she managed her employees. And it's like, there is a direct correlation, I do believe. I have not done any studies, but I

38:21 believe there's a correlation. So yeah, people are hard. I mean, because we're all wired differently, all bring different selves, we all bring different perspectives. I think that's the good

38:30 stuff, I think that's great, but it's managing it that's hard, because it's hard to manage how you don't think, right? It's hard to manage what you don't know. There's, that's where I go back

38:41 to the empathy and, you know, again, within reason because you have to get things done. So you don't want to spend your time babysitting or handholding. You know, you need people to come and be

38:49 responsible for the work without needing to have a safe space.

38:56 The, the safe space always kind of got me. Yeah. Yeah. I just think about it. We called it a bar, a bar. There you go. That's about right. That's what we call it, right? The quad, the safe

39:04 space was going to debate it on the quad and figure out who is thinking what and, you know, I don't know That's what uni was for, it was for looking at all the different views and, you know,

39:14 figuring out which one you believed in most. Right. All right. So five years from now, we're doing this podcast again. What do we talk about in five years that maybe people aren't thinking about

39:27 today? Ooh. Is there something, I'm forcing you to look in your crystal ball And I've, I've actually got, I've actually got An idea on the saga first while you're while you're thinking, you

39:40 don't have to pay attention to what I'm saying I actually in a I'm not an expert on this. I'm just picking up anecdotal stuff from what I'm reading I'm actually amazed at how good robotics are

39:55 getting and I think a huge amount of our workforce in five to ten years is robotic type stuff and We're thinking through all the issues associated with robotics everything from legal liability when

40:12 The robot screws up and kills someone, you know who's liable for that. How does that work to the problem? We were talking about earlier. How do we train the old crusty? Person who didn't actually

40:24 work in the factory for 15 years don't know how it how it works versus What do we do with young people that don't have to think because of a eye and don't even have to go get a beer out of the fridge

40:36 because of. of robotics. So I think, I think HR issues surrounding robots is going to be a big deal. That is very interesting. So you didn't, you didn't go just Jetsons on me. You went iRobot.

40:50 Where are they coming to you? Exactly. Exactly. There's a whole lot of compliance and governance around that I could think of. I do think robotics is going to play a huge role in the workplace.

41:02 You know, you know, they said we were going to have flying cars by what year and we've surpassed that year. I do think I think your optimism is great that it's going to be five years from now. And

41:11 I do think there'll be robots. There's already robot vacuum cleaners in the home. There's already what robots delivering food for like like Uber Eats kind of

41:18 style. So they're already out there. Are they going to be in every household doing lots of different things or every company in five years? That's debatable. I think there's going to be some good

41:27 test cases out there for it.

41:30 I think, so you know, geophysically, or geographically speaking, and as well as from a political standpoint, you know, I think the the world is open, right? We all it's everybody's been lots

41:46 of places and worked across borders. I think that nationalism is getting a lot of countries to really focus on their countries. So, and for me in five years, it's going to be interesting how the

41:58 interplay and how the relationships across the world are working. Similarly, to what they're doing today, but not as similarly, right? Because we have all these open borders and we've all had

42:11 built all these alliances. But I think some of those are being broken down. And I think deconstructing to reconstruct can be a very good thing, because I think you can think about it, put

42:20 thoughtful, you know, ideas into play. And I think that that in five years is it's going to look really different. Our relationships from a global standpoint with with countries and companies are

42:32 going to look different than they do

42:34 Inga, yeah, no question. I mean, it starts with tariffs, but at the end of the day, I think you're right, fundamentally it's gonna be, you got a group of allies out there, let's lock arms.

42:48 Right, how are we gonna work best together? And still, as a country, whether it's, you know, England serving their citizens, a US. serving their citizens, you know, Italy serving their

42:59 citizens, you wanna put your citizens first, but you also wanna have good relationships across the world. And so I think how we work together, I think that a lot of countries are going to get

43:10 focused on their country first, which I don't think that's a bad thing, but then how do we, you know, build those relationships from a company and a country aspect, right? So how are countries

43:21 that are based in other places that have been maybe doing business, offshoring it, overseas, now they're bringing it back to the US, manufacturing those type of jobs So I think that there's going

43:30 to be a lot of changes

43:34 companies for a geographical standpoint, and just a way that they're doing business in the future. So I think it's gonna look very different in five years than it looks today. Interesting, I think

43:45 that's a good point. So give me this to wrap up with, do the commercial for what you're doing today. What are you doing today? Okay And tell people how they can get in touch with you. Okay, so I

43:57 have

44:05 P3HR solutions. It's a HR consulting business. And I focus around helping companies like with assessments. So I have about 28 box assessments from MA. You and I talked about to benefits,

44:20 compensation, recruitment, all the things from an HR perspective. Leadership development, I've worked a lot with, Executives that have stepped into enterprise level roles that have only worked at

44:31 that operating company level. So it's very different, right? Working at that enterprise level versus the operating company. I have, I do fractional HR support. It should, they need support from

44:42 a fractional perspective. I also help with projects, audits, that kind of thing. So I have a slew of services. You can reach me at p3hrscom. He's got it. I

44:54 went to the Coldplay concert last night. No, no. My favorite joke of all of those has been Dave Grohl sitting there going, how come Coldplay got so much more popular for having an affair? What?

45:08 Well, that start up, I mean. The new CEO said, Wow, we've gotten a lot of attentionto the startup, it might not be the best attention, but we've gotten attention. I know, Colin tweeted that

45:17 out. It's like, Man, I would have walked into the boardand say, I want to raise. I did 10x what your marketing department's doing. There you go, there you go. Not the kind of publicity you

45:28 want, but what is the old saying? Any publicity's good publicity? It's about your name correctly.

45:34 Well, you were cool to come on, I appreciate it. Thank you, appreciate it, you have me.