Chuck Yates is a self-proclaimed towering giant of the energy business who really likes to hear himself speak. As the Oprah of the energy business, Chuck hosts two podcasts — the most influential and popular energy podcast “Chuck Yates Needs a Job” an he’s the co-host of Digital Wildcatter’s “The BDE Show,” a weekly wrap-up of all things energy.

After graduating magna cum laude, laude daude we like to party from Rice University with a BA in Political Science, an MBA in finance and plenty of BS, he later ran product design for Apple where Steve Jobs proclaimed him so valuable that “if Chuck left I’d be reduced to wearing nothing but black turtlenecks for all time.”

Chuck joined the Houston office of Stephens Inc., the Little Rock Arkansas investment bank where he strove to do well, but not well enough to get promoted to Little Rock. After figuring out he was a really crappy investment banker, he moved to the principal side of the business where he fared not much better. But as anyone who has spent more than 30 seconds with Chuck knows, he did the legendary Silverhill deal.

Despite all of these achievements, in the post-COVID spring of 2020, Chuck was canned from his gig as a Managing Partner. It did make the Wall Street Journal so he at least had that going for him.