Off Plan follows Tom, Stephen, and Terrell as they talk through life, business, money, family, bad decisions, and the oilfield world that shaped them. The show comes from three guys with different backgrounds in the patch, trying to make sense of the industry, the people in it, and the strange way oilfield life follows you long after you leave location. It’s funny, honest, a little reckless, and built around the stories most people only tell in the truck.
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 years in North Dakota, and tells how sending a cake to a hiring manager’s house landed him a job. The guys compare notes on getting ghosted, entertaining miserable prospects, and losing to competitors with better seats.
17 Sept 2026
AI Slop, Corporate Life & the End of Reality
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. Somewhere in there Stephen fact-checks himself live, Tom asks ChatGPT who it would have voted for, and they realize they may have already screwed up their first sponsor deal. Pretty normal Off Plan episode.
10 Sept 2026
Are You Smarter Than an Oilfield Hand?
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 purchases, and consider what a 19-year-old would actually do with a $2 million NIL deal.
The conversation eventually turns serious as Tom, Terrell, and Stephen discuss ageism, disappearing field positions, experienced people struggling to get hired, and how the oilfield may have become efficient enough to drill itself out of thousands of jobs.
Education, money, careers, football, questionable arithmetic, and three men who should never be trusted with boiling water.
3 Sept 2026
The Other 10 Hours
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 that can make weeks away from home bearable. The conversation also turns serious as Tom, Stephen, and Terrell discuss isolation, broken relationships, mental health, and whether oilfield companies are doing enough for the people making their operations possible.
Then rapid fire closes the show with prison for $5 million, the biggest lies told on location, drilling crews made entirely of car salesmen, and the warning label every rig hand should be required to wear.
This episode includes a candid discussion of suicide and mental health.
27 Aug 2026
The People vs. Hollywood
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 person who has worked in an industry immediately hate watching Hollywood try to explain it?
We finish with a new rapid-fire round involving billion-dollar oil companies, useless expenses and what we'd be doing if oil and gas never existed.
Episode 9 of Off Plan.
20 Aug 2026
Enron: Big Checks, Bad Math & the Smartest Guys in the Room
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 worth billions unraveled almost overnight.
We get into corporate greed, bad incentives, yes-men, employees losing everything, the pressure to keep quiet when the money is good, and how intelligent people convince themselves that obviously bad ideas somehow make perfect sense.
Then we ask the uncomfortable question: if Enron happened today, would we actually recognize it before it collapsed?
13 Aug 2026
Everybody Knows a Guy Like This
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 friends on oilfield roads, why getting to the rig can be more dangerous than working on it, and the question guaranteed to irritate somebody listening: are MWD and directional hands overpaid?
No real plan. Pretty much the point.
6 Aug 2026
The Oilfield Follows You Home
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.
The conversation eventually turns to the part of oilfield life people rarely talk about: missed calls, unread texts, strained relationships, broken routines, and the guilt that comes with being gone for weeks at a time. We discuss what happens when workers return home expecting everything to pick up where it left off, only to realize their families have built routines without them.
It is an honest conversation about marriage, parenting, mental health, discipline, isolation, and the strange reality of feeling at home in the field but out of place when you finally get back.
29 Jul 2026
Poutine, Pinedale & the Most Underappreciated Jobs in Oil & Gas
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 explain why a good restaurant can become dangerously important during a long hitch.
The conversation then turns to the people who rarely receive enough recognition or compensation, including mud loggers, floorhands, solids-control hands, hotshot drivers and the HSE employees quietly preventing everyone else from creating an environmental incident. They also examine one of the oilfield’s greatest mysteries: the drilling superintendent nobody has seen in six months.
It is part travel guide, part rig-site sociology and completely off plan
22 Jul 2026
Trapped on a Rig With People You Hate
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 almost as much as being competent. They also get into disappearing rig positions, remote directional drilling, automation, stagnant pay, and whether years of field experience still carry the value they once did.
Then they try a new rapid-fire segment and give their unfiltered first reactions to some of the biggest directional companies in the industry. That goes about as responsibly as expected.
14 Jul 2026
The Oilfield Diversity Meeting
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 into ageism, disappearing experience, automation, shrinking rig counts, and the uncomfortable reality that oil and gas is producing more with fewer people while acting surprised that the talent pipeline looks like a crime scene.
It is funny, uncomfortable, honest, and probably going to irritate exactly the right people.
Off Plan: big checks, bad math, bad decisions.
7 Jul 2026
The Oilfield Theft Episode
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 difference between relationship-building and buying your way onto a ticket, why the “bribery” money always seems to travel uphill, and what it really feels like to miss holidays while everyone back home assumes you’re getting double time. Spoiler: you’re not. You might get ham, if the company man feels generous. Society continues to thrive.
Then it turns into rig theft, chain shack etiquette, command center food rules, and one unforgivable Crockpot betrayal involving a roast that Tom babysat all day and never got to eat.
If you’ve worked rigs, man camps, staff houses, or command centers, this one is going to feel personal.
29 Jun 2026
Money, Sales, and Company Men
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 oilfield has a way of making people rich, broke, tired, loyal, bitter, and hilarious all at the same time.
It’s not an industry lecture. It’s three guys with oilfield backgrounds telling the kind of stories usually saved for the truck, the trailer, or the group chat.
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
1 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
6 ratings
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