Off Plan

Free golf gets turned down, an $80 lunch buys an hour of complaints, and one prospective client allegedly wants a brand-new Dodge Challenger before handing over his contracts. Lord Bailey Midkiff joins Tom, Stephen and Terrell to talk about selling in the oilfield and what actually happens when everybody says business is “all about relationships.” Bailey explains his Lord title, remembers the boom...

Terrell is MIA, so Tom and Stephen start by figuring out what jobs they could actually survive in at an oil and gas operator, which somehow turns into Wyoming, fake Native American memories, AI slop, Facebook bot garbage, whether AI is going to kill everybody, why politics feels more like a soap opera than government, and why nobody gives a shit about the potholes until they destroy a wheel. Somew...

Terrell and Stephen can help drill a multimillion-dollar well, but neither one can tell you the temperature at which water boils. Episode 11 begins with an eighth-grade final exam and quickly goes Off Plan. The guys compare college degrees with field experience, debate whether they would take a $150,000 job they hate or an $80,000 job they love, explain their smartest and dumbest oilfield purchase...

What does a twelve-hour shift on a drilling rig actually look like when nothing is going wrong? It turns out there is a lot less nonstop action than Hollywood would have you believe. The boys break down the strange reality of rig life: five minutes of responsibility followed by forty minutes of waiting, command-center cooking, energy drinks, endless scrolling, toxic coworkers, and the friendships...

Enron somehow leads us into career luck, exotic dancers, drill pipe ownership and whether half the people running companies just happened to be standing in the right place at the right time. Then we get into Hollywood's version of the oilfield. Armageddon , Landman , Deepwater Horizon and There Will Be Blood . What did they actually get right? What is complete bullshit? And why does every pers...

Enron didn’t collapse because nobody was watching. Plenty of people were watching. The problem was that almost everyone believed the smartest guys in the room knew what they were doing. Tom Burghart joins Off Plan to talk about what Houston felt like during Enron’s rise, why seemingly everyone wanted to work there, the warning signs he remembers from inside the energy business, and how a company w...

The oilfield is full of people you’d never meet anywhere else, and somehow those are the people you remember most. This week we start in Wrong, Wyoming, trade stories about the hands who were unforgettable for all the right and wrong reasons, and get into the strange brotherhood that comes from working weeks at a time with complete characters. Then things take a turn: driving on ice, losing friend...

Our first guest, Juan Macias, joins the show to talk about life across wireline, frac sites, oilfield sales, and sand operations. Juan shares stories from working every schedule imaginable, traveling across Appalachia and Canada, living out of hotels, running gyros, handling explosives, and dealing with the occasional drone-related frac shutdown, because apparently normal hobbies were unavailable....

This week on Off Plan , Tom, Stephen and Terrell compare the oilfield towns where they have worked, eaten, drank and occasionally questioned every decision that brought them there. From the Fire Burger in Pinedale and the Rig Lounge in Tioga to poutine in Canada, overwhelmed grocery stores in Pecos and the confusing geographical appeal of Jal, the guys rank their favorite places to work and explai...

The technical work was rarely the hardest part. The real challenge was spending 12 hours a day, sometimes for weeks at a time, five feet from people you never chose and could not escape. Tom and Terrell break down what MWD hands and directional drillers actually do, the strange hierarchy between them, the stereotypes attached to every job in the command center, and why being liked can matter almos...

This episode goes straight at the stuff the oilfield usually avoids until somebody says it too loud in the doghouse. We talk about women in the field, why so many rigs still feel like a 1990s office photo with newer polos, and why the question is rarely whether women can do the work. The harder question is whether the industry can stop making the environment harder than the actual job. Then we get...

Episode 2 of Off Plan gets into the weird little economy of the oilfield: vendor lunches, steak bribes, company men who refuse to be bought, field hands getting squeezed, holidays spent away from family, and the kind of theft that somehow includes pressure cookers, air fryers, wallets, gloves, Sharpies, and apparently every loose item in a staff house. Tom, Stephen, and Terrell talk through the di...

In the first episode of Off Plan, Tom, Stephen, and Terrell talk through the three things that explain a lot of oilfield life: money, sales, and company men. The guys get into big checks, bad spending, oilfield debt, missed holidays, rig-life burnout, 54 days in North Dakota, company men who run the show, company men who probably shouldn’t, steak-dinner sales, fake relationships, and why the oilfi...