Chuck Yates Got A Job

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;22;25
Unknown
I always say these things kind of wind up having a natural energy of their own. I've dropped a five minute podcast. I've dropped a three hour podcast. If we're going through three hours, we probably will board every one to the tears. They actually say the ideal podcast is 46 minutes, because that is the average workout time. That's the average commute.

00;00;22;29 - 00;00;46;28
Unknown
Know how much validity to that? There is. But, you listen to a lot of podcast. I do, you ever listen to one that's 46 minutes. Now that you said that, probably not. Because to me, they're all 2 or 3 hours and you almost like maybe you chunk them out and 46 minutes or they're, you know, a bit under an hour in the 20 minute variety.

00;00;46;28 - 00;01;11;20
Unknown
And so it's just a funny thing about averages. No, you're right. I think everyone's gotten they've gotten used to just chunking it out. Kind of kind of when they can my, my Sunday morning, I usually go on my, on my long walk. So I'll walk 3 or 4 hours on, on kind of Sunday morning. And that's when I catch up on, on podcasts.

00;01;11;20 - 00;01;40;25
Unknown
And like it's also when I have my bagpipe players and. Oh yeah, yeah, I've down in Richmond, Texas in this park that try to cross the tracks to guys meet and play the bagpipes. And it used to annoy me to the bagpipes. Let's, let's be honest, are disgusting, right? But, anyway, so it's it's they me they play used to annoy me, but then I just kind of, like, came to Zen with, you know, this is their jam.

00;01;41;01 - 00;02;03;16
Unknown
This is what they want to do. Their wives don't want them in the backyard. So now I listen to bagpipes. They usually pay about an hour and a half, and I'll just, listen to bagpipes. So, tell me about, like. Okay, so my my shtick here that I use a lot. And unfortunately, it may be true, I think I have one listener and it's mom.

00;02;03;20 - 00;02;31;29
Unknown
So tell mom who the hell you are. Introduce yourself. Sure, mom. For sure. Leon, co, I am the founder, and I run Amplify Intelligence. So we're an AI consulting firm right now. We're specifically focused on executive AI coaching. So that's my primary thing. What? What is that? AI coach, executive AI coaching. Give me an example a little bit like executive coaching okay.

00;02;32;01 - 00;03;01;15
Unknown
But exclusively focused on AI. And so what it what it practically materializes as is we get on a call I share a little bit about AI, but then we just open up your apps and start trying to build stuff for your company, or do things, make mistakes, whatever. Right. So so we're just on a call working together, but the explicit purpose is to level up your AI capability.

00;03;01;18 - 00;03;27;03
Unknown
And it's not for that ultimate end. The actual ultimate end is you start to get a sense and an understanding of what AI is and how it works, and all these different sub capabilities such that you can lead your company and your organization in a better way. So it's so it's starting with the singular direct experience such that you can lead the team.

00;03;27;07 - 00;03;55;05
Unknown
That's the biggest problem that I see, in AI right now is executives. They don't use it actually personally or it's too difficult or it feels too technical. It feels like something that they can delegate. Yeah. I wrote a blog post on how to get started. And one of the things I kind of said in there is you almost have to meet people where they are and if someone's avoiding it, it's like literally you just need to sit them down and say, all right, we're going to download ChatGPT.

00;03;55;07 - 00;04;19;20
Unknown
That's it. That's exactly what makes a good question. You know, that's exactly what we do. And so for me, I've been in AI for ten years now. And so I'm old enough that I called AI statistics. Sure. Yeah. Right. You know people people go back and they're like oh da da da. And I'm like, you know, is this when I was first getting in, which ten years is a long time, but also not a very long time, it's like the capabilities.

00;04;19;20 - 00;04;48;26
Unknown
It was much more machine learning. Right, is what people call AI. And then and then when I was first getting into it as conversational AI, which not technically but philosophically morphed into this generative AI thing. And so I got really lucky because this conversational AI that I was trying to work on and build applications for, its kind of spiritual successor, came out with ChatGPT or really with the GPT series of models.

00;04;48;29 - 00;05;09;10
Unknown
So, so getting back to that, the first thing I do amplify intelligence executive AI coaching, right, helping executives understand AI. Second thing I do what many more people know me for is running the Houston AI club. So we're Houston's largest AI community. We meet up, twice a month on the first and third Thursday of every month.

00;05;09;13 - 00;05;33;00
Unknown
And, we have virtual AI lightning lessons for a half hour every Thursday. And so our objective is to show people what's possible with AI at a practitioner level. That's it. That's everything that we do. And it's part of a broader idea of, of how AI is going to ripple through the entire economy, in every industry. It's not isolated.

00;05;33;02 - 00;05;58;06
Unknown
And the fact that Houston is a massive economy. And so we're deeply understaffed and under capability and under resourced. And so that's kind of my way of trying to expose AI to people. But not just beginner level. I like cool advanced stuff as well. Right. Interesting. Yeah. So is that you said it's online, so we meet twice a month in person.

00;05;58;10 - 00;06;19;06
Unknown
Okay. First and third Thursday of every month. Got it. And then every week, every Thursday for a half hour. Okay, I got you. Oh, cool. Very cool. The, dftba. Membership fee. How does that work? Everything's free. No people. So we just get sponsors. So if you want to sponsor Lee on it, you snag club.com, you go right?

00;06;19;06 - 00;06;40;14
Unknown
And so and so that's really the vision of everything that we're doing is we're bringing people together. And we've been, I would say immensely successful, much more successful than I expected. When I started it about a year and a half ago, we had our first meetup March 2025. And the story I tell people as I had this idea back in October of 2024, right?

00;06;40;16 - 00;06;59;04
Unknown
I born and raised in Houston. I'm going to live here my whole life. I have this idea how do I meet more of these, like legit AI people? Not just like people like tangentially interested, but like really good, talented people. And I go, okay, math. I'm I'm pretty good at breaking problems. Back down into the basic math. Houston's got a handful of million people.

00;06;59;06 - 00;07;27;08
Unknown
It's got to be a hundred. Like really legit AI people, right? Let's just basic math. Right. And so I was like, okay, well, I'll start this community and try to get people to show up. And at the time there wasn't really anything like that for for general purpose AI. And I looked at the different meetup groups, how many people would attend, and I felt like a successful meetup group in Houston would be about 30 people on a regular basis once a month.

00;07;27;10 - 00;07;41;15
Unknown
So I said, okay, I'll fund this myself. For the first three months, sat in my own pocket because I was adamant you had to have food and drinks for people. You had to try to get them free parking like there are things you have to do right, right to make it successful. And so I was like, okay, I'll pay for this myself.

00;07;41;17 - 00;07;58;16
Unknown
And then if I can't get 30 people into three months, yeah, I'll probably just ditch it and we had like 60 people come to the first one. Oh, cool. And I was like, wow, that's crazy. And then I was like, okay, I guess I'm doing the next one. Scramble over three weeks to find speakers right? And then more people came more and more.

00;07;58;16 - 00;08;24;12
Unknown
And so now we're probably somewhere between 120 and 150 twice a month, regularly coming in person. So it's a huge community in Houston, and we're just incredibly grateful and thankful for people coming and giving us a chance, but also coming back, right. There's a lot of familiar faces. Well, you know, been the hub of the energy business. I think it surprises Silicon Valley when we go out there and say, oil and gas, folks.

00;08;24;12 - 00;08;50;13
Unknown
Been doing a lot of machine learning stuff for a long time, and I want to be very careful on how I say this, because, man, this causes a firestorm when we say it. But do you know what Dario's first job was? No. Tell me he was an intern at Schlumberger. Oh, yeah. That's you. You you say that. And everybody that was there is like, oh my God, he was not part of the machine learning.

00;08;50;13 - 00;09;14;19
Unknown
I know, I know, I know, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying he was in there building machine learning models or anything like that, but he did internet, at slumber. J so. Well, to me, I think what's special about Houston is not only the size of our economy and the fact that we're we're national or global leaders across two or 3 or 4 different industries, right?

00;09;14;22 - 00;09;39;20
Unknown
I mean, all of that's true and it's valuable. But I think the attitude and the disposition of people, right, when when people spend time in San Francisco or grow up or live in San Francisco, the the geography conforms their mind a little bit. Right? And I think for Houston, our slot and I think if you asked pretty much anyone in Houston what they think, where do we slot in in terms of AI, you could say, okay, energy data centers, blah, blah, blah.

00;09;39;21 - 00;10;07;22
Unknown
That's kind of obvious and topical. But I think in terms of our disposition, it's more about the application of a technology to solve problems for people, for companies, for all that kind of stuff. And so I think of Houston as really not really needing to do much on the innovation side of training models. But the actual application of getting things done, you know, kind of the getting oil out of the ground process.

00;10;07;22 - 00;10;34;11
Unknown
But across every, you know, business process, that's what I'm more interested in. And that's the kind of the ethos that the club in our content is, is built around. It's like, hey, getting exposed to novel innovations and technologies, but then actually figuring out how to apply them. The I always say three things about Houston, Texas when when people ask, I always go largest city on the planet that doesn't have zoning.

00;10;34;13 - 00;10;53;11
Unknown
Sure. Which is, I think cool and very because everybody's like, oh, Houston is so conservative. All right. No no no no no no, we're not a conservative city. We're libertarian city. I mean, right, we had a we had a gay mayor and she was the family values candidate, right? I mean, she and her partner been married 30 some odd years.

00;10;53;11 - 00;11;14;04
Unknown
And so, so I always say we're a very libertarian city. Also point out only major U.S. city never to have race riots. We had some skirmishes here and there. My running joke there is always, well, it may just be too hot outside to go out and really, really fight with people. And then I always bring this up, and I'm not going to do this.

00;11;14;04 - 00;11;47;25
Unknown
Just to sum up all the details, but The Economist magazine ran a survey of all the major cities in the world where they called citizens of those cities, and they asked a series of questions. Right. And the, and the greatest delta between the number one answer and the number two answer in the entire survey was to the question, if you work really hard in this world, you will succeed.

00;11;47;27 - 00;12;16;27
Unknown
And it was ridiculous. It was something like 90% of Houston had said yes to that. And number two was Hong Kong at 64 or something. And they just found it fascinating, this one outlier. And so they wrote a story about Houston. And I think, you know, it's always chicken. And the egg, right? I mean, if you think about the energy business, literally the most optimistic people on the planet, we spend all our money drilling a well, and then we turn it on and see what we got.

00;12;16;27 - 00;12;47;17
Unknown
Yeah. And so I don't know if those people built Houston in that ethos or Houston had that ethos, and that's why we became the hub of the energy business. And it probably doesn't even matter. But those are always the, the three things I say about Houston, which I think fits I so well because, you know, the two things about AI that are really interesting is one for the first time ever, we have a dynamic software.

00;12;47;22 - 00;13;16;26
Unknown
I mean, the history of software was static piece of technology. You go learn how to use it. Now you've got agents, the self-correct, the software. You can build on top of this to to make your your software better. It learns. It's incredible. And so doesn't surprise me that a bunch of optimists that like to fix things would adopt that as a, as a technology.

00;13;16;28 - 00;13;48;02
Unknown
The other thing that's really cool about AI is, I mean, we do all our workflows these days based on wanting to go home at 5:00 or vacation for two weeks, or I don't get going to my third cup of coffee. And by the way, this is my second. So if I'm not on my egg. Yeah, but you know, agents will run 24 seven and and being able to, you know, and do just any number of calculations, searches, ordering, copy pasting whatever you want to do.

00;13;48;02 - 00;14;08;12
Unknown
So I mean, there's so many interesting things there. I mean, I, I went back through some old tweets, I think were sometime in early 2024. And at that time Cerebus had kind of like launched. So it's like the chip company, you know, doing custom chips, specifically to run at the time, open source models at super fast speed.

00;14;08;15 - 00;14;29;10
Unknown
And kind of my point with that is if humans can basically read at something between 40 and 70 tokens a second, what is Cerebus do? And making a thousand token a second chip. Right. And the point is it unlocks agents. Now that was 9 to 12 months before vibe coding was a thing that was needed, you know, all these different things.

00;14;29;10 - 00;14;53;16
Unknown
So I thought it was very interesting, but you could kind of see where all of that was going. But so go back to your previous point on, AI being a different kind of software. This is to me, I'm to me, I'm a technologist at heart. In the in the purest sense of the word is I'm interested in the technologies and the effects that they create, on the people and on the processes.

00;14;53;19 - 00;15;16;17
Unknown
And that's the founding of where I start. Our executive AI coaching sessions is AI is not an automation technology. It is an augmentation technology. Every executive comes to me and says, I want to automate da da da da da with AI. I want to automate this job. I want to do this process. And I say, okay, pump the brakes a little bit.

00;15;16;20 - 00;15;46;24
Unknown
We've had digital automation technology for years and years. It's just traditional software. It's just traditional code. That's what makes it good. Automation technology is it's deterministic. It's just like algebra. If you put in an X, you get the same Y each time. That's that's what makes it a good automation technology. What makes generative AI different? You put in the same prompt, you can get a totally different response each time.

00;15;46;27 - 00;16;14;08
Unknown
What does that mean? Well, what it practically means is how you apply it and how you use it. You can put AI into deterministic workflows, right? So back in 2024, it was kind of like you had automations. Then they called them agent workflows, which were just deterministic workflows with API calls to LM stitched in. And then you had the idea of agents, which actually is, you know, pretty deviated from what we have today of a true like giving an agent a goal and kind of recursive looping and stuff like that.

00;16;14;08 - 00;16;42;09
Unknown
But to me, understanding AI, understanding its impacts and effects is understanding the value that it's an augmentation technology, not an automation technology first and foremost. And that shapes the types of tasks that you give it. Right? Oftentimes when you're setting a goal that's just one time, it's really not the right shape for automation, but it's a perfect shape for augmentation.

00;16;42;09 - 00;17;11;20
Unknown
That's why I so valuable to me. Oh that's interesting. Yeah. No, it's it's been wild kind of my journey, going through this because I am the old guy here, you know, and, it's it's funny. I don't think I've built a model in Excel. You know, I learned on Lotus one, two, three. First off, anytime that coders tell me I don't know how to code, I'm like, oh, come on, that's, that was Lotus one, two, three.

00;17;11;20 - 00;17;33;18
Unknown
You know, it was keystrokes, backslash this and, but, yeah. No. So I've been I've been basically phone based and haven't really used, a computer in, in forever. And it's amazing because a lot of times the folks around here go, okay, we'll go club code that, but you're going to have to go to your laptop.

00;17;33;18 - 00;18;07;03
Unknown
I'm like, no, cloud will be ready soon enough where I'll be able to do that. There you go. And now it is. It's got remote control. And, I mean, I use Codex remote control. All the time, and it has kind of a similar functionality. And now with the speech to text becoming so good, you know, if you told me three years ago was going to be speech to texting at all, you know, my phone or whatever, much less my work, I would have thought, you're crazy, but, for me, being being in the AI space for such a long time, I've kind of seen these progressions.

00;18;07;03 - 00;18;29;06
Unknown
And so it allows me to kind of better think through why does something work the way that it does? And so I got access to it. Technically it was called Da Vinci. It's like the precursor to GPT three, or it was GPT three, and it was a true auto complete lab. Right. You started a phrase and it tried to complete it.

00;18;29;09 - 00;18;54;09
Unknown
And not too long after that, maybe 6 or 12 months after that, they trained the first chat tuned or rolled model. Right. And that kind of became the the ChatGPT style of family. And then that blew up and exploded. But my reasoning why I think speech to text is so powerful as an AI primitive is because these are tuned on conversations, right?

00;18;54;09 - 00;19;18;08
Unknown
It's so it's so I have this phrase that I teach, it's like, if your conversations with AI are a monologue, not a dialog, you're in trouble. Right? And monologue does not mean you to the AI. Typically it means the AI to you. Yeah. Right. Right. Like and you hate that in your work where you see someone and they're just like, responding all their emails with like, you know, 5000 characters of just straight copied and pasted clod.

00;19;18;08 - 00;19;41;02
Unknown
And it's like, you know, it's a back and forth. Right. And so to me, the reason that I think speech to text is so powerful is one everyone speaks faster than they type. Two, they make less typos because the speech to text like whisper Flow or whatever are much, much better at correcting grammar or doing capitalization or all that kind of stuff.

00;19;41;07 - 00;20;07;15
Unknown
But three is it allows you to get the depth and color of context required before you get bored and press enter, because if I'm typing for a task, I'm like, help me to make $1 million and make no mistakes and don't commit any fraud, right? Or if you're like sitting there in front of a podcast mic or something similar and you're like, hey, so I want to make a lot of money, but here's what I got.

00;20;07;21 - 00;20;38;06
Unknown
Here's what I'm working with. I've got these marketable skills, I've got these connections. You start to totally change your interaction mode right before you actually hit enter, and you build up higher quality context faster. And I think it's more attuned to the model actually being able to process that and give you a better outcome. So yeah, I wrote so last week's blog was talking about writing my blog, and I learned to write before we had word processors.

00;20;38;06 - 00;21;07;20
Unknown
So I literally wrote outlines, Roman numerals. You wrote multiple drafts, and I think the line in the blog was, when you went to the typewriter or the ink on, paper, it was like defuzing a bomb. You know, you had to be so careful because if you made a mistake, you had to start over, right? And I don't the word processors probably popped up when I was in high school.

00;21;07;20 - 00;21;32;14
Unknown
Certainly in college. I wrote on them, but my mind set did not shift, you know, and so I was still kind of I was still kind of working on the front end. So I always felt like I was a really good writer, but it just sucked. I hated doing it. It was painful. Because I would write each line kind of as I go and stuff.

00;21;32;14 - 00;21;59;05
Unknown
And to your point, the dialog, being able to just talk to Claude or ChatGPT and iterate back and forth with, has been a game changer. It's still takes me the same amount of time. So the the blog I sent you that, I think we're going to post it today or tomorrow, but the blog I sent you, I mean, that was 32 drafts and took me, I don't know, 8 or 9 hours, 12 hours.

00;21;59;11 - 00;22;18;05
Unknown
So it took me the same amount of time. I just enjoyed it, you know, and and I think it, I think to that end one, I will do more of that because I enjoy it too. I think it's actually a better product. The, the dialog piece. I'm glad you kind of said that because it's so difficult to communicate to this.

00;22;18;06 - 00;22;41;16
Unknown
People are just getting exposed to AI and they go, wow, I can create slide deck in ten minutes, right? And sure, your time to first pass on pretty much anything has now dropped to like, you know, very, very fast in additionally in arguably even more important your your mental load to be able to get to that first version is very low.

00;22;41;16 - 00;23;04;27
Unknown
Like you could say, hey, here's my presentation, here's my slides, here's a call. Transcripts like, here's here's what I'm thinking. Go do it and then go scroll Twitter right. But what I'm more interested in once again, and I've been talking about this with clients and with people for for a handful of years now, is most people, when they think AI, they think from almost like a private equity mindset.

00;23;05;04 - 00;23;39;13
Unknown
Okay, I'll go through the business and find the core workflows and automate these things and we'll get more profits. And you know, sure, like you can do all that right. But you're capped in a certain sense, in terms of the amount of upside, what I think people should be doing and thinking about, especially with the framework of AI as an augmentation technology, is what could I do for my clients now with my AI capabilities that literally was impossible or too expensive.

00;23;39;15 - 00;24;05;29
Unknown
Okay, what could I do? A new, new product, a new package, a new frequency of engaging with them? Okay, how much could I charge for that? Because everyone likes new revenue streams, but everyone's been taking AI in a in applying it to cost savings. And it's like, okay, well whatever. You know, most companies, if they're honest, like if you're a growth stage company who cares about cost savings, you know, give me new ways to make money.

00;24;06;01 - 00;24;37;02
Unknown
Right. Well, and it requires the creativity. But it also requires the revisions. And and to go through 32 versions of a blog previously were taken like maybe months. Yeah. So you just wouldn't do that. Right. So but now you can go through 32 reversion revisions in a day or two days. So it's actually worth it for you economically to put out a better quality product that's better for everyone.

00;24;37;04 - 00;25;04;21
Unknown
Yeah. So my version of that and I love you saying this, my version of that is there are pick a number 500 workflows that an oil and gas company does every week. I mean, 600, 300, whatever. Something like that. Every one of them can be automated to some degree to help with savings, etc. that's great. That'll save money.

00;25;04;21 - 00;25;35;22
Unknown
I think that's ultimately going to wind up being table stakes. The real prize here is will you get 5 to 10% of the oil and place out? Let's go. Now that we can do just an inordinate amount of calculations, we can test physics in terms of, okay, you know, let's press against every assumption we've ever made. I mean, the shale revolution was basically some dude sitting there going, man, let's slap some baby powder in a sauce rock and see what the hell happened.

00;25;35;24 - 00;26;02;08
Unknown
And guess what? I say this with love to all my engineering friends. The engineers were all wrong. You know it worked. And so being able to do those type things, which I is going to empower, that's going to be the cool stuff that's going to be the game changing type stuff. And what I'm telling, telling clients is, yeah, look, you need to go automate your coding of invoices and things like that.

00;26;02;08 - 00;26;22;02
Unknown
Absolutely. You need to do that, but you need to change that mindset so you can go attack more oil place. And and to me it's a distinctly Houston and Texan type of mindset. But it's also shared with Silicon Valley. I think it's why it's all kind of coming together in this way, which is you talked about, oh, if you think you work hard, can you be rich?

00;26;22;02 - 00;26;45;26
Unknown
Can you be successful in Houston? Houstonians say, yes. Well, why is that? Because you're just like going through rock. And then all of a sudden you're a center millionaire. You know what I mean? It's if I keep putting in the work every single day and I do it honestly, and I do it in a way that's valuable to other people's, there might be some extremely asymmetric upside.

00;26;45;28 - 00;27;15;06
Unknown
Just, you know, it's kind of like the picture of the guy with the pickax and he's about to hit that road, right? And some people turn around and some people go, one more strike, and then they've kind of hit it big. I feel like it's the exact same way, but much of the eye spin today is actually and I would argue I don't have statistics, but but my general intuition is like probably 70 or 80% of it is, is this form or less impactful from a value perspective?

00;27;15;09 - 00;27;54;13
Unknown
Hey, how do I do my job easier? How do I, you know, versus how do I accomplish the businesses goal or the customer's goals or help them better? I think a big cultural challenge we had is the companies have gotten so big, people feel really disconnected from customer satisfaction, and so they have to relearn. My actions have an impact on the customer and re derive satisfaction from that and move away from their satisfaction or lack dissatisfaction mentality, being whatever my manager thinks that day.

00;27;54;16 - 00;28;27;05
Unknown
Yeah. Right. Right. So what are what are some other, things you get with executives? What are kind of the, the common kind of questions are, are, you know, fear and loathing in the executive suite when it comes to I they have lots of questions and I love working with them because they're extremely incentivized and they're coming to me because they recognize there's a ton of value in AI and they're not getting it right.

00;28;27;05 - 00;28;52;02
Unknown
Right. So it's almost like a self-selection to working, working with us of I'm someone who wants to figure this out, right? I get the opportunity, and how it kind of naturally progresses. We kind of do an initial session that's the same across all of them, right? Getting everyone on the same page, on the same nomenclature, exposing them to real vocabulary, to where if they went and ask ChatGPT, they would get an authentic answer right?

00;28;52;02 - 00;29;17;02
Unknown
Not just like sugarcoating it, but not just getting into the weeds of how labs work on a functional level. Then we start introducing them to our six primitives, right? Here's the foundational elements that if you kind of understand these six things from a vocabulary standpoint and apply them over the course of our sessions, you're the eyes are going to start to click for you.

00;29;17;05 - 00;29;46;23
Unknown
Personally and across your business. And as they start doing that and we have these conversations because they're all one on one, just virtual or in-person, they start asking questions like, okay, so I got my token bill. What should I do about that? You know? Right. It's like we're spending a bunch of money on cloud subscriptions, but like, does everyone need Opus or Fable or do some people need stuff and and so it turns into a lot of like governance and then strategic right.

00;29;46;26 - 00;30;19;26
Unknown
Or who's responsible for like AI transformation within my company. You know the overwhelming majority companies don't have anyone responsible. And I love that you bring that up. I literally was texting with a CEO this morning and what we've seen, a number of clients do is create head of AI, of course. And in one case, it's a, I will say, a software forward looking software dude who's, who's taken on that role.

00;30;19;28 - 00;30;46;15
Unknown
In another case, one of our clients took a petroleum engineer who was running the marketing department, but it just thrown himself into AI. And it's it's interesting because in in his case, he just the light clicked on. Here's how we can automate things. Here's how we can do it better. So and here's what I'll tell you. Here's why we do executive AI coaching.

00;30;46;15 - 00;31;10;25
Unknown
Because I think it all tied together. When I started amplify in the summer of 2024, I was doing workshops, education, teaching people stuff, employees and stuff. And that went okay. Like they were good. But there were some challenges with that. And my short term objective was do the workshops so we can do this big, you know, business process re-engineering, transformation in 2025.

00;31;10;27 - 00;31;27;22
Unknown
That's how silly I thought, you know. Right. Right. I was like, okay, I'll do this and we'll get these reps and we'll have a better understanding of this adoption process. And then 2025 is kind of my same pattern to getting the Victoria's Secret model as my second wife. Yeah. So I feel you on that. We can come back to that one.

00;31;27;22 - 00;31;52;23
Unknown
Yeah. So I was like, oh, I was a touch ahead of the times on that. Potentially. But that's okay. So what I saw unfold was in 2024, all the companies just got done banning AI. Right? We forget about this, but they were. If you're using AI da da da da da, you're fired. You know? And not just like pockets of companies, like a large number of companies.

00;31;52;26 - 00;32;12;24
Unknown
Then in 2025, they all reverse course and we're like, we're buying copilot. We're throwing it on you. And I think the thought process from the executive mindset was like, oh my gosh, okay, this is for real. Like we got to get in the game. And you know, all these CEOs have promised us all this profits and all this amazing ROI da da da, right.

00;32;12;27 - 00;32;36;20
Unknown
And now we find ourselves in 2026. And my nuances, they bought access to AI, but not AI adoption. They thought they were buying the adoption. And so now what they're going to do is they're going to go back and pick up my 2024 playbook. But let's train these people and they're going to get some generic off the shelf, you know, insert big consulting company name here, right.

00;32;36;22 - 00;33;08;19
Unknown
Who probably doesn't have the the internal AI capability to really personalize it or address it or talk at a deep level in your company. So you're going to spend, you know, hundreds of thousands on that. And adoption is going to like wiggle a little bit. But ultimately it's going to come back to those individual people. And so what I think is going to happen is once we go through this cycle, the executives are finally going to get the token bills that are increasing because people are using it more, just not more judiciously to the companies end.

00;33;08;21 - 00;33;31;26
Unknown
And they're going to go, I'm putting my foot down, founder mode back on. What is going on here? Are these people actually using it, or are they just using it to make their lives easier? Right. And so we kind of just jump to the end and go, okay, well, I don't understand how you could make good decisions on AI from a strategic corporate perspective over the next 5 to 10 years, which every CEO would agree.

00;33;31;26 - 00;34;02;26
Unknown
Any company AI is a strategic imperative, if not number one. How are you going to make that decision if you don't use it personally? Well, they they don't have time to learn it. They're wall to wall, 8 to 8 meetings all day. The models are changing week to week. So what we do is essentially we are their avenue to carve out time to figure this situation out and apply it and buy their own time back productively, but also invest in their company and where it's going strategically.

00;34;02;28 - 00;34;39;04
Unknown
So that's why we start with the executive AI coaching is I don't think that they can make great strategic AI decisions. And our big kind of belief is you can't delegate this, right. It's not cybersecurity. This isn't like some other random software thing. This is like a transformational phase change. And so if you don't have a level of like touching the technology and interacting with it and experiencing, oh, I asked it to build a presentation that did in 15 minutes, but then also having the same experience of, okay, I did that, but then I worked on it for another two hours and it still isn't right.

00;34;39;06 - 00;35;26;14
Unknown
You have to have both as a CEO to now set new goals and objectives for your team that are both ambitious and reasonable, right? So there's like a lot of change that has to happen. And we think it starts with the executives and the C-suite understanding and using AI from a direct experience perspective. I would also add this, and it'll be interesting to see what you say is, if you can take some of the mystery out of AI for the C-suite, I mean, the big thing that employees are just looking for is, quite frankly, permission, you know, and, at least what I've always said about the oil and gas business is you have to

00;35;26;14 - 00;35;45;22
Unknown
be out over your skis to make money. And I don't mean that as a negative. I mean, when you buy an asset you paid more than anyone else. When you drill a well, you are literally putting a hole where no one else has ever put a hole before. And that's kind of out over your skis. And I think you're going to have to do the same thing with AI.

00;35;45;24 - 00;36;09;19
Unknown
Yeah, you have to go through the challenges of AI doing something wrong or against your intention to understand that, like there is a level of waste, right? There's a level of waste. But if you go through this whole cycle and then at the end, you clamp down on everyone's budgets and you institute this like fear cost, you know, versus abundance kind of mindset, opportunity oriented mindset.

00;36;09;21 - 00;36;38;15
Unknown
I think it's going to go really, really, really bad. Right. And that's why they have to have that firsthand experience with AI. Well, and you know, we talk about the waves. It feels like everybody needs their copilot experiment. And then everyone needs an enterprise account of ChatGPT or Claude. And then you get some folks that are moving on to Codex or Claude coding, and they're they're building their own applications.

00;36;38;17 - 00;37;03;17
Unknown
I actually think this, you know, I had one CTO that very progressive said, yeah, but I had three guys building a frack interference application that's so wasteful, all the tokens, I said, but it's good signal that is now important. Maybe that's the one. We get a committee together to go build the right application for it, because if three people are building it, that matters.

00;37;03;17 - 00;37;23;03
Unknown
Once again, you have to move out of the assembly line mindset. I think so many CEOs think of their company as assembly line, right, that the sales team goes out and the marketing team supports that and that it and and it all kind of makes sense because their, their main interaction mode is spreadsheets and on paper and more conceptual than anything.

00;37;23;05 - 00;37;51;00
Unknown
I'm not saying that's negative, that you just have to recognize how you're technologically engaging and processing the company. Right. But to get the most out of AI, you have to think of it like an abundance technology, like software, right? Why are all these software guys in San Francisco so out there and, and kind of hippie and optimistic and all these things, what's what everyone always says, like, we we shape our tools and our tools shape us.

00;37;51;02 - 00;38;19;17
Unknown
What's the amazing thing about computers? If it doesn't work, throw it away, start over. It's not even a piece of paper to crumple into the trash. You don't even need to worry about it, right? Just like boom. Oh, that code didn't work. Move on to the next one. That's their mentality. But it's that abundance mentality that's actually very similar to oil and gas of oh, but if I keep digging, the oil that I strike is gonna outweigh all the sins, all the strikeouts, everything else.

00;38;19;19 - 00;38;51;11
Unknown
Right? It's the exact same mentality. Most companies don't run on that mindset well. They're very stable. They want they want batting average. Right? Right. But but Silicon Valley and energy are all about slugging percentage. It's all about how many Grand Slams. But a Grand Slam isn't worth four runs. It's worth 4 million runs right now. I love that I love that the, so, one of the I mean, you could say clearly say Hall of Fame.

00;38;51;11 - 00;39;13;08
Unknown
You might even say top ten of all time venture capitalists was a guy named Burton McMurtry. And, Burton. It's a long story. But anyway, my parents went out to a bar mitzvah in Silicon Valley, and my brother Bobby was sick. And I came home from college to stay with brother Bobby while my parents went out there.

00;39;13;08 - 00;39;35;05
Unknown
And I told my dad, I said, okay, I'll do this, but you have to come back with Burton. McMurtry's card. So my dad walks up to Burton McMurtry and goes, hey, I'm a little embarrassed by this, but you're the only reason I'm here. My son Chuck is taking care of, son Bobby, who was sick so we could come out here, and he said he'd only do it if I came back with your card.

00;39;35;05 - 00;40;04;18
Unknown
And Burt kind of laughed and said, I don't know that I brought a card, but tell your son to call me. So Burt was on the board of rice, and I was a young sophomore at rice, and, anyway, we, he was kind enough to, go eat breakfast with me a few times. And one of the things he always said that I thought was really good, and I think it speaks to your point, is he always said, hey, if an engineer walks in and tells you they can build something, they can.

00;40;04;21 - 00;40;32;10
Unknown
I mean, it may take longer, may cost more money, but they'll always get it built. Your job is the investor is to say, well, who really cares? You know? And that's your abundance mindset. I love that story. One because it's like very, analogous, you know, to the childhood Steve Jobs story. You know, where he calls up, HP yeah, whatever company it was and gets an internship when he's like 14 or 15 years old, very similar.

00;40;32;10 - 00;40;57;20
Unknown
But it's also something that is kind of come up as a theme. Over the past few weeks, in my conversations around goal setting and vision. And what I'm kind of trying to put out there to people is how most people set goals. This is actually like really, suboptimal. How I think most people set goals is they go, okay, what can I accomplish or what is reasonable or what can I do?

00;40;57;22 - 00;41;34;26
Unknown
And then they make about a million compromises, and then they make a bunch of, mental excuses for themself about how whatever they ended up accomplishing, which is never the actual end goal from even that low bar, was actually sufficient. Right. To what I think you should do is basically imagine what is an absolutely amazing and transformational outcome and then try to make as few compromises as possible, and you will make a couple because they might just be impossible or incredibly difficult or jeopardize other parts of the goal, but you'll end up being way ahead.

00;41;34;26 - 00;41;56;24
Unknown
And the reason I kind of to tie it together to your story is like you kind of gave an unreasonable goal, right? And then they were forced to be like, if you said anything else, like, dad, can you get his card? Yeah. You know, it's like, sure, son. And that doesn't even talk to the person, right? Right. But you're like, no, you have to get this person's card.

00;41;56;24 - 00;42;16;17
Unknown
And then they communicated that like, this is a single minded, like I'm either walking away with the card or like you're going to be embarrassed about this conversation, right? Right. And so and it's once again, it's like, you know what? What would you have? How would your life have been different? If you're like, dad, I can't be there, but I need a job from this guy.

00;42;16;20 - 00;42;36;28
Unknown
You know, that's like going one step further, like he needs to pay me, right? And kind of like, you know, just thinking at the at the maximal level of ambition, as much as possible at all times. And I think where we are with AI today is, is people will figure this out hopefully soon, but they probably won't.

00;42;36;28 - 00;43;01;10
Unknown
But your level of ambition and goal setting is actually a technical limiter on the capabilities of AI, right? That's like like if you ask AI to make $100,000 or make a plan to make $100,000, just like any plan a human right, it uses certain techniques. But if you ask it to make $100 million, it's not just going to do like more of what it does.

00;43;01;10 - 00;43;30;23
Unknown
It's like, well, we have to completely decompose and recompose the problem in a totally different framing, right? Because that's what it takes for it to be reasonable. And so if you lack ambition or belief or the ability to communicate your goals of a sufficient size, you're you're literally limiting what the, the quality and the output of the response that I can provide you.

00;43;30;25 - 00;44;08;28
Unknown
Yeah. No. And, let's tie that back to my, my dating life is you're never going to get the Victoria's Secret model. I should go fire your shot. You're so right. It's totally. It's crazier things have happened. Totally the same. Totally the same. The, I used, I don't even remember where I got this, but, the concept was just nothing can happen unless you speak it into existence, so I totally, I totally agree, and I think it's really, it's important point for people to kind of almost take a step back and sit within, internalize.

00;44;08;28 - 00;44;35;22
Unknown
I had this process, similarly, where I was kind of forced to take a break, from the business, about a year ago because we had our second son. And so it's like, okay, well, I mean, there's just practical limitations. So I said, okay, I'm gonna orient away from the day to day and to the strategic. And I think many business owners find themselves, you know, in this day to day, and they're grinding it out and they're doing well.

00;44;35;24 - 00;44;57;03
Unknown
Right. But you have to work yourself back to the strategic. Where does I make the most sense? It's amazing as a coding agent, right? That's pretty obvious, but I think it makes even more sense in why we do what we do for executives. As a thought partner, as an intellectual sparring partner. Right? Just like what you did, you went back and forth with cloud, right?

00;44;57;10 - 00;45;20;27
Unknown
It's really it's a dialog. It's no different than speaking to another person, except it's always on. They give you instantaneous feedback. It's cheaper than driving somewhere. Right? So it's not a true substitute. If it was a true substitute, we wouldn't be here today. But it is a slightly different shaped substitute that is pretty good at us getting our ideas out there.

00;45;20;29 - 00;45;43;12
Unknown
And so I think for executives, if they got out of the automation mindset and got into how much would it be worth if I could make higher impact decisions, if my decisions were higher quality, if my negotiations were better prepared? For now we're talking about millions of dollars on the table, right? No one cares about the cost to the AI model.

00;45;43;12 - 00;46;11;12
Unknown
When you make a bunch of mistakes and then make $1 million at the end, right? We keep on coming back to this kind of like Houston oil strike it, strike a bit type of mentality, but I think you really do have to internalize that to get the most out of AI. If you're just trying to build little automations, you will clean up little things, but your ambition level is not particularly big, sufficient to ten x or 100 x or a thousand x your investment.

00;46;11;14 - 00;46;58;03
Unknown
And I'll just tell you, I sent you the the blog. This morning of what I did this weekend, and I'll drop it and whatever today or tomorrow. But what I was able to discover about myself that I didn't know. And I'm pretty narcissistic, I figure I know everything about myself. And to your point, I mean, being able to iterate with it and create a true strategic partnership with it, and that is literally hours of me feeding it information about myself, talking with it, instructing it on exactly how to interact with me.

00;46;58;05 - 00;47;19;27
Unknown
Because and that's going to be incredibly individualized, because Colin, my business partner Colin wants AI to say, oh, you're a stupid idiot and fight with him. I'm a little more sensitive. I need hey, Chuck, that's a good idea, but maybe we should try this. Yeah. So, so. And and once again, it's how AI's different than code. Code?

00;47;20;00 - 00;47;38;15
Unknown
It's assembly line. And they're putting the same tire on the same car. Did it? I it allows for extremely personalized experiences. Yeah. Which is really, really valuable. So then the question is okay, you've got that information. What's your action plan? What are you going to do about it. Right. Have you I mean, have you talked through it with AI?

00;47;38;15 - 00;48;04;24
Unknown
Have you had it make you a plan and how are you going to stick with it? You know, I was just listening to podcasts the other day of like, you know, doing certain things to improve your life. And it's like focus less on what you should do and more on what you would do. Okay, now I can go to AI and say, what could I build into my routine in my process that I would do every day to protect me from this downside?

00;48;04;26 - 00;48;23;22
Unknown
Right? Protect me from this personality trait? How can I how can I invert it and turn it into a positive? Become more sensitive? Understanding my own, you know, insufficiency or weakness or whatever, you want to think about it and invert that and say, how could I turn that into a strength? Because clearly I'm super well attuned on that frequency, right?

00;48;23;24 - 00;48;46;05
Unknown
Yeah. Good stuff. So what in the hell are you making me speak at? What's the September 3rd? September 30th? I operator spotlight at the AI on. So it's going to be 530 to 8 p.m.. Registration just went out this morning. And, it's going to be on the AI on steps. We're going to have obviously networking and some food and drinks.

00;48;46;05 - 00;49;13;08
Unknown
But then two fantastic presentations from yourself and then Charles Jessup, who, is rolling out AI to 100,000 people, at Raytheon right now. Oh, cool. So really, it's tying in everything that we've talked about, right? There are incredible AI people and operators in Houston and companies and we just have to put them in front of the audience to share.

00;49;13;08 - 00;49;43;12
Unknown
And now we can bring these lessons and these insights into hundreds of other companies across, across the, you know, Houston economy. Right. Wow. The, kind of reminds me of John Paxson story about, Michael Jordan. Have you heard this one? No. Tell me. So Jordan. Jordan became Jordan when he went for 62 points against the Celtics and bumped him out of the playoffs?

00;49;43;12 - 00;50;04;18
Unknown
That was, you know, young Jordan could score a lot of points, but could he truly win games. So that I think that was year three. You know knocked the old Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parrish, Celtics out of the out of the playoffs. That's really when he became Michael Jordan. And they were talking to John Paxson the starting point guard.

00;50;04;18 - 00;50;24;09
Unknown
They get tell us about tonight. He goes oh my God. Tonight. Such a great night. I'll always remember it as the night me and Jordan combined for 64 points to beat the, the South Texans. Yeah. Let's get it. That's what this night sounds like. But, honored that, you'd have me, have me speak.

00;50;24;09 - 00;50;52;01
Unknown
I'm really looking forward to that. How do people get in touch with you? The club. Find out more about it. Houston. I club.com if you search Houston, I. Yes, ChatGPT or the Houston club or Houston's largest AI meetup group. Over 5000 members. So you can find us on meetup.com and register there to attend. It's free to attend the event and free parking.

00;50;52;01 - 00;51;16;18
Unknown
And all of our events for attendees are free, right. There's going to be free food, free parking. Awesome presentation. So that's, Houston, I club. And then if you're interested in executive coaching or just talking, with me, if you want insight on how to bring and do your business, amplify intelligence, I or you can look me up Leon Co, Leon Co on LinkedIn.

00;51;16;21 - 00;51;23;10
Unknown
Cool dude. Appreciate you coming in. This is fun. Pleasure. Thanks for having me.