The David Knight Show - Interview: Dan Doyle: How America Can Break Free from Middle East Oil

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Dan Doyle, oil entrepreneur and author of Of Roughnecks and Riches, brings a ground-level view of what's actually happening in the American energy industry — a rig count in freefall as of February that flipped to a boom overnight when Iran closed the Strait, well costs up 65-70% driven by steel prices, and a shale sector that can't survive at $50 oil. Doyle and David Knight walk through the strategic logic of Venezuela — three million barrels a day under Nixon, now barely a million after socialist confiscation, with Exxon and the major service companies now quietly circling back in. The bigger picture is a potential Western Hemisphere energy bloc: U.S., Canadian, Alaskan, and South American production that could get America off Middle Eastern oil entirely — if the political class doesn't kill it first, the same way Biden cancelled mandatory BLM lease sales on day one and the same way New York bans Marcellus shale extraction while 26% of its children live in poverty. Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code “KNIGHT” For high quality made in America products go to HomeSteadProducts.shop and use promo code “Knight” for 10% off your purchases Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Joining us now is Dan Doyle. He is someone who has decades of experience in the oil industry, has started a couple of companies himself, and he has written some op-ed pieces about what may be happening in Venezuela, what may not be happening in Venezuela. But I thought it would be very interesting to get a perspective from that. And, of course, he knows some petroleum engineers in Venezuela as well. He wrote a joint op-ed piece with a petroleum engineer from Venezuela. well about what is needed down there. But I think it's also interesting to take a look, step back and take a look at the oil industry itself. And I think that he's got a very interesting personal story as well. He wrote a book of roughnecks and, help me hear, Dan,

of roughnecks and riches. Yeah, that's the other part. We want to make sure it's the riches that are there. Yeah. So that's his book of roughnecks and riches. And his name is Dan Doyle. Thank you for joining us, Dan. Thanks, David. Sure, appreciate it. Tell me a little bit about how somebody who has, I saw a little bit about your biography, your film school graduate. How did you get into the oil industry?

That sounds like a story. Well, I started into the oil industry. Then I, you know, I started out with the study geology undergraduate and down at Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh. And I was down in Texas, drilling well, some group of guys from the steel business said, hey, here's a young kid. You know, he'll get us started in an oil business. So I went down and I was acting more as an operator than a geologist, but we were drilling

outside of Abilene. And it was going well, but then we went into, you know, this cyclical decline in the in the 80s. I'm dating myself, but it was in the 80s. I remember that time well, yeah. Oh, terrible. And, you know, it was such a, if you go back into the 70s, a little bit like now, it was a big oil shock.

Oh, yeah. There were a couple of them. And everybody got in the business, everybody. The rig count was, you know, in the 7980 era. Rig count was 5,000. You know, it's all verticals then, you know, so you need a lot of rigs. But everybody was getting into it, all sorts of investor programs. It's funny when you're looking over and.

area, especially out west now, you see all these wells that were drilled back during this time. And it was just sort of a boom. And when the boom came off was about when I was getting started and gradually oil price, you know, a good price then was 25, but it was trickling down and down and down. And finally, it was a bust. And I waited around Texas for a year or so. A young guy, you know, are we going to go or not go? What should we do? Finally, there was nothing left. That moved back home to the Pittsburgh area and a friend of mine, kind-hearted friend of mine, started giving me work producing his commercials. And so I'm doing that and I'm thinking, oh man, I can do this for a living if oil never

comes back. And so I ended up at NYU's New York University's graduate film school. And I kicked around into movie business for a while. I had some success. You know, it was at Sundance, that kind of thing, had an agent and all that. But it really, it wasn't for me. I just, you know,

the sleeping on floor things. And ideologically, I probably was a misfit. Oh, yeah. And so, yeah, you know, met some great people, though. And eventually I started a, I thought, okay, enough. So I scrapped together with little money I had and didn't have and started a rental company up, and I started buying equipment and renting an auto movies and commercials and a little bit of construction work and got into cameras and generators.

We got pretty big, and I used that to leverage my way then to get finally back in the oil business, and that was to start a frack company, and it just absolutely went off the rails. It was just the worst time because, you know, just the same way that, you know, the 7980, boom, pushed a bust that I got caught up in. Now I got caught up. I started this in 2008, the frat company. I got caught up in the global financial recession and where the banks were failing

and too big to fail. Great book. The Andrew Rock, Thornton. And got caught up in that. And it was just a son of a bitch. Excuse me, but trying to get this thing going. I bet. And there's craziness.

You know, the guy pulls a knife on me in a trailer and he's my builder. I just gave a quarter of them. Yeah, just crazy. Then these crazy partners and, you know, I'd written scripts to make a little bit of money. And I started thinking, my God, I think I'm living a movie. And so I wrote, I started taking notes and eventually got around to writing the book. And so that came out a couple months ago.

But it's called a Rob Max and Riches, a startup in the Great American Pracking book. Well, and, of course, one of your reviewers said it was a rollicking ride. and that was a Wall Street Journal that review that you had. I imagine just from that little bit of a taste that we had there, I imagine it is a rollicking ride to find out how you got into that. If you started a couple of companies and you did it successfully, I'm sure that you wouldn't have finished with the film crowd. No, no.

It was a different kind of culture, I think, completely. I get a kick out of, and I like a lot of these guys, but I get a kick out of, you know, the awards. There's always somebody, I think someone on the back are always an award. It's always about their bravery. But, you know, in the film business, you're such an echo chamber. It's like you're just agreeing with everybody, these films that, you know, get this kind of,

these kind of accolades or these directors or writers or producers. Truthfully, the real courage would be a conservative trying to make a movie in Hollywood. There's not a chance. As soon as you go there, you know, I'm a big fan of James Woods. I loved his movies. It'd be like oil and water, wouldn't it? Yeah, yeah. But there's a guy that just shot himself in the head when he came out with his own opinions

because they just won't have him. And he knew it. He knew it. Yeah, and he was a great, great actor. Well, when I look at the Oscars and things like that, what it reminds me of are these cliques that you used to see in high school, you know, and they'd vote for people for prom queen and that type of thing. It is a popularity contest.

And it seems like you succeed in. that if you're going to try to appease everybody's feelings and flatter them and that type of thing. So, you know, if you're about something that's serious and literal, that would be a difficult ride to a hoe. I remember the 80s. And, you know, interestingly enough, Dan, my wife and I, we went to, our first job was with Texas instruments in Houston. And so we got there as everything was blowing up in 1980. And it was a boomtown. And then we got kind of tired of it. We wanted to back home. And then we couldn't sell our home.

I mean, it was just everything was free fall. It was collapsing. It was amazing what happened to it. You know, the boom and the bust cycles that happened with that. But of course, we've seen that a lot with the oil industry itself. I mean, when you look at the boom with the OPEC embargo and everything, you saw oil go up. And I've talked about this a lot on my show in terms of what's going on with the Strait of Hormuz right now with just that partial oil embargo.

It was only against OPEX oil to the United States. We saw the price of oil quadruple. And so, you know, we look at it and, you know, if something like that is going to happen now, of course, there's a lot of other variables here. And that's one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was Venezuela. And what's going to happen there? One of the things that just happened this week started floating the idea of making Venezuela the 51st state. And I guess Canada. It was so...

Fifty-second. Don't forget to get Canada. Yeah, that's right. I guess we forgot about Canada, but in the meantime. Yeah. And where does Greenland fit in? Are they number 53? Oh, I know.

Maybe Trump's going to get in the flag business, you know? Yeah. Trump land. You know, I get it, though. I kind of, actually, I'm just, you know, I write these pieces and I'm just about to give one to the publicist. I'll send it out today. And I don't know where it lands. You know, they shopping around.

What it's about is, you know, he is, you know, love them or hate him, wherever you stand. He is sort of in the beginnings of remaking the global oil industry and really where we buy our oil and gas. You know, we consume 20 million barrels a day of crude. And I know we like to say, oh, we consume everything we have. But, you know, that's kind of a, you're taking B2 equivalencies from natural gas per person. production and that's not, you know, it's, yeah, it kind of is true, but, but truthfully, we need 20 billion, 20 million barrels of crude. And if you look, you know, I don't know if it was by plan or what, but Trump comes in, he's talking drill baby drill. And that was the campaign rhetoric. You know,

really we are going into kind of a rig count freefall, not free fall, but it's really coming down because oil prices were really bad. So we were in a bust in February. And by, by about the 5th of March were in a boom because of Iran. And the beginnings will probably be a boom. And so, you know, but there's been, the administration's done a lot, a lot to help U.S. producers. And we're taking advantage of some of that. It's tough to do with BLM spacings and surface facilities and all that. It's really helpful. So he's kind of changing the bias from what it was in the Biden administration to oil on instead of oil off. to the federal.

So you have that. And then you have Venezuela. And Venezuela at best was, you know, three million barrels a day back when Nixon was president, you know. And it's down to, you know, about a million barrels a day. And it's kind of funny because I was visiting a friend at Colorado School of Mine, a professor. And I'm looking around for him.

And I walk into an office. And it's another professor. And we just start talking. And he's from Venezuela. And his wife worked on Lake Maracaibo for the Chinese. And we started talking and I get a call from the publicist for the book. And she says, hey, I need a story in Venezuela. I go, what do I know about Venezuela?

She was, can you find someone? And I'm like, I'm sitting with this guy, Louis Zerpa, who's a PhD, you know, professor. And I'm like, Lewis, are you from Venezuela? He goes, yeah. He wants to write an article? He goes, yeah, sure, man. Let's write an article. So he provided the insight.

from, you know, hands-on in Venezuela and talked about the Rinko, I'm probably not pronouncing it right, you know, the super heavy oils. But what's going to happen down there is Chris Wright is doing a great job. I really think highly of Chris Wright. Anybody in oil business thinks highly of Chris Wright, the U.S. Energy Secretary, he started a couple companies. But the big one was Liberty. And it's a frat company, but it's a little more than that. And it's a bunch of really smart guys like himself, an MIT engineer, that put this together. And anyways, Wright is down in, you know, physically, but he's pushing, the first thing to do is we get the dilutants that are needed that were kind of embargoed out of the picture.

And those dilutons immediately boosts to that production by a couple hundred barrels a day. and now I'm hearing that Exxon, if you remember Darren Wood's comment, it's uninvestable when all the majors, the CEOs of the majors got together at their White House. Yeah, I remember. You know, he kind of broke ranks and said, hey, it's uninvestable. Now, now I'm hearing Exxon spoken around down there. So I think that they're going to end up pushing it. And if it doesn't go to hell, you know, who knows politically what happens down there. But if we can keep it together, you know, maybe that oil starts going to us instead of the Chinese.

The Mexican market is off a little bit. They're mine crudes, which are essential to our Gulf Coast refineries that require the heavier crudes, then the light stuff we're pulling out of shales. You know, there's a difference in gravity is a way to measure it. But very light, low sulfur crudes. But the refineries need some of that heavier stuff that comes out of Alberta or out of, you know, Venezuela or out of, but hopefully you can hear me that someone's mowing the lawn outside. Oh, yeah, that's fine.

But we, so anyways, collectively, you round up all this North and South American production and about 18 million barrels, and then you start adding in some other stuff. You know, maybe Trump's doing something here. And to his point, let everyone else fix the whore moves straight. You know, the Europeans and Japan and China that are using it. Because maybe he is, maybe the, ultimately what we end up with is regionalism in the oil market rather than globalism. And so instead of us buying, you know, fruits from overseas, we just keep it, you know, regionally. We keep it here, Canada.

Canada, we import about four million barrels a day. Alaska, Trump is opening Alaska. Hillcorp is a big part of Alaska, you know, Jeff Hildebrand, you know, another self-made, you know, guy like Harold Ham. And very big, he now owns the, the Alaska pipeline, this company. And so with all this going on, it takes a long time to build production. But we're sort of really truly knocking at that energy independence, you know, moniker. Kind of getting there.

I mean, it's a really, that's a really simple way to address a really complex problem. because oil flows everywhere. It's a real network coming and going and, you know, refinery capacity, everything else. But in the simplest of terms, numbers, we're getting with our production, Canadian production and South American production, we're pretty close, friendly nation production,

let's call it. We're pretty close to what we need to be self-sufficient. Well, let me ask you about that. Because, you know, when we get the, we get people like Biden in and these people who want to just keep it in the ground, they say, right? Yeah. And they are hell-bent on no matter what it costs, they want to shut down the production of oil.

And so there's a political component to this. Even if we get all this stuff running, they may wind up shutting it down at a later point in time. And that kind of brings us back to Venezuela. How much of the problems that we see in Venezuela, and they're setting on a massive amount of oil compared to any other country, and yet they can't get it out of the ground. And it wasn't because they didn't want to like it is with the American politicians, but it's a combination of politics, I'm sure, of socialism and confiscation, all the rest of stuff that happened with that. How much of that was a technical issue that could now be solved,

other than the fact that to build up infrastructure takes a time. You can't just turn a switch and have this massive infrastructure in place. Well, that's the problem. It's a big infrastructure built up. And that doesn't mean just surface. That means, you know, failed casing, you know, that keeps the integrity of a well-attacked on the ground. So it means a number of different things.

But I have found that the oil industry is really good at getting up and going. And I think it'll go along fairly quickly. I don't think it's going to solve all the problems in Venezuela. It's super heavy oil. It's very expensive to extract. That takes us to a separate issue. We'll get to oil prices, you know, I'm sure. But it's a, it'll be quick, you know.

But again, it's, you know, it's not, there's, there's, that's the one belt. There are, there are other, there are other crude, uh, there is other crude reservoirs in their basins in Venezuela, which are more kind of conventional and don't have that low eight degree gravity stuff, which is basically, you know, this, the, the majority of oil coming out of Venezuela will not float on water. It's very, it's really heavy. And so, so it's got to be diluted and refined. It's expensive.

So it will play largely into our mix, but you can't have $50 or $60 oil for that to work. You just can't. And so just by way of example, you know, we're drilling wells in the Potter River Basin, with another company I started, another startup. But so we drill, we frack our wells back east and then, where we frack for hire back east and we drill our own wells out in Wyoming's Potter River. And, you know, the well cost primarily driven by steel prices is you run a lot of steel in horizontal wells, a lot, a lot of steel, miles of it. And you, it's going up about 65, 60, 70 percent, quite a bit. And we were a $50 oil.

So if you put that in the basket, so you've got the well cost of gone up an enormous amount. And then you've had, you know, a lot of inflation in the Biden administration. And so you put that in the basket as that relates to price, you know, pricing, to oil prices. And so you go back in time, and the $70 in a barrel, you know, we're all over the place back in 15 and 16 and 17. But we were, you know, $60 oil then was a lot better than $60 oil now. And, you know, and then you have more expensive wells.

So when Trump is pushing, you know, oil in the 50s and 60s, we don't survive. You can pump a well. You can pump an existing well based on what your lease operating costs are, when it costs a lift and transport a barrel of oil. You can do that. But to go drill it, it makes no sense. That's why the rec count was falling all through 2025 and was looking, and when it hit 55, everybody that I'm talking to, and I'm talking to all the other operators, you know,

are saying, that's it, we're laying down. Harold Hamm, up in the Bakken, has never stopped drilling for 30 years. And finally, I think it was in January, we said, that's it, we're laying rings down. We can't make money here. So you can't have energy independence without a decent energy. price. So I don't think anyone in my industry wants to see $100 oil because it's disruptive. Because $100 oil has always meant $50 oil. And $50 oil generally are always means $100 oil. You know, that sign curve of boom, bust. And so really, you know, I'm not the only guy saying it,

but we need something in the mid to high 70s, low 80s to continue going. And I'm sure Venezuela needs more. because it's more expensive than shale. Shale's really cheap. That's why all the majors started buying up, you know, Permian-based independence because shale cycles fast and it's cheap. It's a lot cheaper and less time-consuming than developing an offshore field. So that's why there's been a shift to it. But we can't survive at that.

So when we say we're going to cut the energy of prices in half and we're going to be energy independence, that's not true. You can't do it. Well, it is truly amazing. And you see this boom and bust cycle, and it's always political. I mean, it's either an embargo or it is centralized control and central planning that is killing the thing, or it's a war that is causing it to go up or something like that. But it always goes back to political. And I guess that's the problem. You know, it would be nice if they would just let markets operate, but they're not going to do that. We go back and we look at Venezuela. Tell us a bit about the political history of the wells from your perspective happening down there. I'm sorry, the political history? Yeah, the political perspective. You know, there was a lot of oil company assets that were seized by the Marxists down there and that type of thing.

And, you know, what was left in terms of engineers and people who could actually produce something? Did that drive them all out and go to other countries and that type? I know the oil companies themselves had their products, but what about the infrastructure of personnel that were there, your friend who's a PhD in petroleum? Yeah, I mean, you know, there's no jobs. And so, you know, it's the American influencer, you know, and Slombrichet, great company, services company,

which is a French company, but, you know, it's basically headquartered in Houston, but not really, but basically. And it's, you know, Halberton wasn't getting paid, you know, and they got caught up in the nationalization. There was two of them and maybe others, but two major ones in Venezuela. And, you know, Exxon lost a fortune. Chevron stuck around because they agreed to abide by, you know, what the socialist demanded. And, you know, total energy, you know, the, I think I and I might have, the Italian company might have. So they all got it.

They all, all the deals they had made to go down and spend money and extract oil were all nullified by, you know, Chavez and his socialism. And what happened is you had a three million barrel a day country go to, you know, some one million barrels a day. And from what I've heard, it was mainly the military was in charge of running those fields. So now you've got to get the service companies down there. And I hear they are. I hear they're looking again, but they're going to want to be backed off by the U.S. government. They don't want to go and invest again and have, you know, and have it taken away from them again. So there's going to have to be some work done, and it probably is being done as we speak.

I'm just not aware of it. But it's important. It's important because how many of the, what do we owe, $36, $38 trillion? Is that what our? 39. 39. I think we're going to be at 40 by the time we get to September, especially because he's got some new things he wants to buy.

Yeah, or maybe by the time we get off his call, you know. Yeah, that's right. You know, how much is that directly related? I mean, you know, a lot of it has to do with our social programs in the United States. I mean, that eats up quite a bit and creates a lot of debt. And if they're more efficient, that would be wonderful. but a lot of it, how much is it is directly due to the Middle East?

And I probably a lot. And if we could get away from it, I mean, you know, we won't have friends over there, but if we could keep our markets close to home, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing, you know? And I don't, you know, the Iranians are not the Venezuelans.

You know, it's, I don't see him stopping. I don't, I would love to see the Straits of Harwich. who's opened up today. I really would. I mean, the longer stays close, the better it is. But I also don't want to see the world go recessionary. And, you know, I don't want anyone to die, you know, any of that. But I just, I would like to see, you know, stability over there. But I don't know that it's never seemed to be possible.

Oh, yeah. There's other issues, yeah. And, you know, I start this article I'll put out, you know, the best, you know, the best way to solve the Middle East problem is to leave the Middle East problem. And it doesn't stop. I think the Zionists have some other ideas about that, though. Yeah. Dragging is back in. Well, when we talk about political stability, what does that look like in Venezuela?

I mean, you worked with Luis Zerpa writing that op-ed piece. Did you guys talk about what is the, you said the military was running the fields there? And what about the military? just in general, the Venezuelan people, what is their attitude towards this American companies? I think the Venezuelans love it. I think they had their fill of socialism and they had a dictator. And, you know, it's just crazy. We have Sean Penn going over and, you know, talking up Chavez and, you know, it's a thug. And the people suffer under him, you know, impoverishment. you know, killing with a human spirit, which is socialism.

And anyways, it's, you know, I think the administration, I think our network is growing there, and I think it's going to stabilize it some, but I don't know, you know, who knows what comes of it. And Venezuela is good for a million plus a day, but the United States is good for 13 and a half a day, a little more. And my concern is what happens in 2008 when there's another presidential election? What happens, you know, if Trump doesn't or if Republicans don't prevail and keep the House, we're just going to go to, you know, standard playbook of impeachments.

And that's disruptive. You know, they'll try to impeach him again, you know, all of that theater. It's just stupid. You know, and of course, when you look at an oil-based economy and you look at how it has been used, I mean, they're coming after Volkswagen again. This time it's coming out of Europe instead of out of America, hitting them with nearly $2 billion in fines because they're not getting their corporate average fuel economy up or whatever the European equivalent is of that. So you've got these European countries, which I will put the Democrat Party in that same basket. It's almost like a suicidal death watch in terms of energy. They want to shut that all down and prohibit it.

And so there's that kind of political instability that's here at home in addition to like Vin as well. But you're talking about the people tired of living under socialism. I imagine that they are and they would like to see some jobs and economic activity. But what about the military that was running the, the well fields prior to that? I don't know. I don't know what's being done. I would guess if Exxon and, you know, Chevron has always been there,

but they're maybe increasing their presence of just citing what I've read. So I would say that, you know, there's something in place that's going to allow Halliburton and Slumbergay and other big service companies to get in there and the military to cooperate. But, you know, we all know everybody, the only person gone from Venezuela is, you know, Maduro. everyone else is in place. So it's kind of hard to say what happens.

I think the longer we're there with peace, the greater, you know, the U.S. influences, at least in energy business. And hopefully the greater production results from it. But what I was getting at before is back in the States, when Biden was elected, you know, the first thing he does is he makes, he immediately, tax fossil fuels. We couldn't release land, federal lands, for a couple years. It might have been a little shorter than

that. But there's a mandatory Minerals Act, from like 1914, whatever it is. You know, mandates, there's a law that every quarter, there are BLM lease sales. Biden comes in and cancels it, you know,

and just, and you couldn't lease lands. And you know, then the people go in and they sue the federal government over, you know, grasslands or a waterfall or, you know, birds, you know, predators, you know, birds of prey, different things. And they hold it up even longer. That works both ways, though.

It's not always detrimental to us. Sometimes it allows us to hold leases longer. So in a way, what they're doing is they go to harm the oil industry, but sometimes inadvertently they help it. And what would be better is to say, okay, let's look at New York. Okay, you guys want to kill off fossil fuels. In New York, the cost of electrical electricity is about 40% higher than the national average. This is another article I wrote a bit ago.

It was in Fox, I think. Yeah, it was in Fox. And it's 40% higher than the national average. Natural gas prices are 23% higher. The child poverty rate, childhood poverty rate in New York City is 26%. 26% of all children born in New York City, the five boroughs, are born in the poverty. And in the meantime, they won't allow a shale gas extraction from the Marcellus, which is a gift. All this natural gas.

And, you know, it's clean burning and, you know, this and that. And, you know, a friend of mine is a diesel fuel provider. and the, the, a lot of these data centers are being run off of power from the grid, but they're backstopping with diesel. And I just need so expensive. But, but that's always the case where I'm actually all the above. I think if it makes sense, use it because we need it. Yeah.

So I don't mind wind, I don't mind solar. It's just, you know, you know, we can't pay for it. You know, it's got to stand on its own. And, you know, oil gas get certain benefits for, you know, you know, tax benefits. And I believe any industry, if one gets it, they all should get it. If one doesn't get it, none of us should get it. So it should be fair.

But a lot more subsidies go into renewables. And they just don't really, all the money that's spent, they really haven't pushed oil and gas out of the way at all. In fact, we're burning more coal right now, not as a matter, not as a, not as 5%. but in terms of tonnage, we are burning more coal right now than we have ever burned. And that's because we have to backstop this grid. And you need that the power that comes from fossil fuels to do that, on demand. You just don't get that.

Yeah. Well, I've been pointing out for a long time people that I worked with. You know, it's kind of like the difference. You've got to backstop, as you point out, the solar and the wind, with something that works all the time is always there. It's like driving a car in stop and go traffic

versus driving it at a steady speed on the interstate. You're going to use more fuel and you're going to generate more exhaust and all that. So yeah, it really is ideological, really, the opposition to this. Whether it is a communist ideology

or whether it is some kind of a green agenda ideology, it is political and it's not practical in terms of looking at this. But it'll be interesting. to see what happens and what comes out of all this. Let me ask you, you know, we're talking about the Strait of Hermuz and what's going on with Iran. And, of course, part of the problem is not simply just oil.

But now we've seen that there's secondary and tertiary things that are also produced there. Helium, for example, fertilizer, things like that. Is that a factor coming out of the places like Venezuela? Is that always there whenever you're doing oil? Or is that something that's unique to the Middle East? What is that? I think it's unique areas, you know. I'm not, I can't put myself on the, I can't say much about it because I don't know much about it.

But it is particular, certain areas. We don't see any healing in where we work. But it's, it's, you know, in some areas, you know, some areas are well to that. They do well. The fertilizers, that's, I think that's a byproduct of refining. And that's, you know, I'm an upstream guy. That's a downstream issue. So I'm not really sure, but I know it's all getting affected.

And what's really interesting, what I can speak to, outside of oil gas, traversing the straits of our moves are, is natural gas. You've got a big LNG trait coming through there. Iranians, Qatar, natural gas production is huge. And so what's interesting is natural gas prices are still sub-3 in MCF. That's nothing. It's like 280 morning. That's a really, and you know what, I think a lot of the reason why is shale extraction has kept natural gas prices so low. You know, you bring on a Marcellus or Utica well in Pennsylvania nowadays, and you're talking billions of cubic feet of reserves that come with those wells.

They're just enormous. And so we have a boom in oil right now, but I don't want to call it a bust in gas because gas has not been doing well for years. You know, if you remember Aubrey McClendon from Chesapeake, he used to do. commercials with T-Boon pickings and and you know is crazy wild west times of oil and gas production because just week was more gas but you know gas prices were $10 an MCF pre you know inflation that we've seen in the last couple of years and now you know it gets as low as a buck something you know and you know right now at 280 you know people make it work at 280 but but we produce a lot of natural gas in America an enormous amount. And we should be using it because it's clean. But you know,

you have all this pipe. Natural gas requires pipelines, not trucking. And so we have, you know, all these lawsuits stopping, stopping it. And, you know, it could be piped up in New York City if they would do their own drilling. The state would do really well. You know, they could maybe create a fund for the poor or help the poor in some way. You know, I don't think given money a way is ever a way to solve anything, but opportunities, you know, and they won't do it because of the climate activist, and it's, it's only harms poor people. It does nothing for the climate. They do nothing. Absolutely. I just, I just want to add something. You want to talk about true, true toxicity. Start talking about battery production and acid rain and everything comes with it, you know,

smelts horrible, horrible industrial practice, but necessary. But, but, But when you start talking renewables, you start talking battery production, and you talk about strip mining and everything else. And you drive past an oil well or a gas well, and there's cows a few feet away from it eating grass. You talk about a solar field producing the same amount of energy. And it's a death zone. It's a fenced-in death zone where the ambient heat is too high for birds, for really any living. You know, you don't see life around solar fields. There's no life.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. And then, of course, the windmills do a job on anything that flies, especially the bats try to fly through that rapidly changing air pressure. And it blows them up just like a diver who's trying to come up too quickly from underwater. It just explode. So, yeah, it is. Everything's got a tradeoff. That's the reality of this. And rather than trying to make things work, with incremental improvements, because everything is so focused ideologically, they just come in and one just do blanket bands or whatever. And it's not just ideological either. It's the people who are allied for financial reasons with one industry or the other, of course. And so all these things

are in play. But let's get back to your book a little bit because we didn't talk too much about what it's like to be out there in the well field. I mean, you're taking a big risk whenever you're looking for something like mining or any kind of oil or anything like that. I mean, that's a very, very risky business. It takes a particular type of person, I think, to do that, doesn't it? Yeah, it's a, it's a little, you know, you feel like a pirate sometimes. Maybe not, sometimes a pirate, sometimes a gambler. But you try to, you try to risk off as much as you can. And there's a lot of really smart engineers, you know, and financial people, that got together, you know, found a way.

But it's, you never know, you know, we're fracking a well right now in Wyoming. We had an issue and, you know, it could have been really, really expensive and really expensive with oil and gas wells is, you know, you touch and, you know, millions of dollars is really expensive. It's not $10,000. It gets really out of hand quickly. And so there's always, there's always worries like that. You know, I tell you, So it's, for me, you know, when I decided to do it, I was actually an English major in

Econ, my freshman year of college, kicking around. Back then, you could go to college and not know what the hell you're going to do. And now you can't. And so I got a degree. You don't know what the hell you're going to do after you get the degree. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, my dad, wasn't a rich guy.

He's just a hardworking guy with seven kids. And a good friend of his who was a rich guy. They pooled their money, and they went and drilled a shallow Pennsylvania oil well, and they really wanted to do it. And I started coming home on weekends. I grew up in Erie, and I started coming home from Pittsburgh on weekends. And we'd all get this, you know, seven kids, a couple dogs and my dad and his partner, my mother, and we'd all go to the well. And we would, you know, screw around the well, you know. And I'm like, my God, this is like legal.

and it's like treasure hunting, this is great. And so I switched up. I changed up to a geology major stayed in school for the remaining three years straight to get caught up. And then came out, and this is kind of in the book, but I came out, we started doing shallow wells. I found some investors.

I actually tried to do NASD. That was the first thing I did as I thought, well, I'm going to do these reg D programs. So I set myself up as a broker-dealer, NASD-S-S-E-C-registered broker-dea-S-C-registered, broker dealer and went all over the country talking to you know this old dodge duster talking to people about uh you know investing in getting their their clients to invest in it and i found a guy out in denver to drill and he'd let me drill with her you know and i said it was coming to go

bellwether exploration a great guy george obrie on 17th street in denver which used to be the western oil hubs still a little bit of us but not not so much anymore and uh he uh he goes okay I'll let you buy into these wells. And how much you're going to raise? I'm like, I'm going to raise two million dollars. And so I go away for three months and I come back and I raise like $1,0. He's like, oh, man, you're killing me. But he let me, he took the money anyways.

And that's kind of the start. And then I started drilling shallow wells with some guys in the steel business who backed it. And they said, hey, go to Texas and let's go after some bigger reserves. and I kind of talked about that. I went down to Abilene and we were drilling and then hit a horrible downturn. You know, did the movie thing, started a company up, running equipment to movies and commercials and other industries. And then I used that and, you know, started this company up and found a couple operating partners.

And they went down to Oklahoma with some builders. And it was an absolute nightmare. it turns out we wanted a specialty blender, my partners did. And it was, we didn't realize it was a patent protected part. And what we did realize, though, it was a Slumberjay patent, and these guys were stealing the parts from Slumberjay. It's funny, there's a guy, the engineer, I had to call and ask for permission. I'm like, sir, I know the patents expired.

He goes, so what? And, you know, this guy in plumber. And I'm like, could you see? Can we just do one? Because we're so far down this road. He goes, nah, I don't see it. And, yeah, it's funny. I just found him on, on, he's in, where the hell is he knows?

He's overseas somewhere. But I got to, I got to get the book to him. Anyway, after all these years, I found him. But then, you know, one thing, you know, one guy ripping us off, another guy ripping us off. And then my partners kind of went nuts. And it's just, you know, and it's really a story about, it's really just an entrepreneurial story. It's not about oil and gas as much it is about starting a business.

And it's really the through line it is. If you're walking through hell, keep walking. And you'll get there. So that's kind of what it was. Well, you know, whenever anybody becomes an entrepreneur, they start any kind of a business. There's always a lot of risk involved. But I don't think there's probably any business that is riskier than that. I mean, that's it on steroids, entrepreneurship on steroids.

You really are putting it all out there, aren't you? Yeah, it really is. It's so capital intent. It's really tough. Yeah, that's amazing. But, of course, the payoff can be there, right? So that's the thing that draws people in, you know? Big risk and big potential payoff if you make it.

Yeah, that's right. And, you know, it's a great group of people. It's a, you know, it's a brother and sisterhood, you know, everybody working together. and solving issues and it's just hardworking people. And you know what's crazy is we get so attacked from, you know, the hard left. Not everybody. I've got plenty of debt that realize we need it. But we go out there and you're on a job site and there's white guys,

there's Mexican kids, there's South American kids, there's American Indians, a lot of a large number of black, workers are out there, the guy pumping water force now doing all our transfers, is a great guy, you know, black guy just in a number of his crew, the same thing. And so it's this kind of melting pot. And it's, and nobody taught, it's just normal. And it's great. We're all working together and all this stuff you hear about has no application, you know, this social, this cultural stuff that, you know, one side of the spectrum wants you to believe is true. None of this true. It's just, It's just a great group of people working together.

And, you know, I was thinking a great picture would be all these guys. I mean, you'd have to ask the minorities to step out of the picture, but would be all these guys and have a picture and say, no white privilege here because there is none. These guys just grew up working. That's all they've done is work. And it's, you know, sometimes, you know, it's tough. I mean, the other night I had to sleep in the Chicago airport because everything was getting canceled.

And every hotel was booked. I said, okay, I'll sleep in a chair, you know. And that's kind of typical oil field. It's just the level of work and, you know, wonderful people and they've got family back home and they're taking care of them. It's sort of the American dream for a lot of them. Yeah. And it's really, it's just great to be around them. Well, and that's the thing.

You know, if we have freedom, then we have a chance to work hard. We have a chance to take risks. We have a chance to produce something. And that, I guess, is the thing that bothers me the most in terms of what I see here politically and ideologically is they just want to shut everything down. It's like, keep it in the ground, don't do anything. What are we supposed to do? You know, they don't want to build anything.

They don't want to grow anything. They just want to stop everybody else from doing anything. That's the thing that really bothers me when I look at this. Yeah, stop everybody and get everybody to fit into an ideological ball. walks. And, you know, just to pick up on the right privilege thing, as reading a book, a friend of mine wrote who's kind of a hard left guy, but a good guy, you know, is a good guy. And he, and he went to Phillips Exeter Academy. And it never wanted to tell anybody for the book that he went. And then, you know, that's, that is the direct pathway to Yale and Harvard and the Ivy's and,

you know, and Wall Street success and political success, you know. And so, Yeah, maybe for that guy, white privilege is a, I know we're talking about oil and gas, but sorry, sorry about it. Oh, yeah. For that guy, maybe that's true. That's true, you know, maybe that guy feels that. But that's a fraction of the conversation, a fraction. What about everybody else, you know, they aren't getting any of this, you know, there's no direct path to Yale or Harvard. There's just work. And that's kind of who ends up in the oil business. And, you know, like I said, that's represented by all ages, by all races, you know, by all genders.

And, you know, we don't see as many women out there is, you know, typically they're more managerial as engineers. But we've had women work as fracades, you know, and it's great. Everyone loves them. So they fit right in with everybody else. So that's what I love about it. Just like you're talking about your friend, I think there is, on the left, I think there's a lot of guilt that is there.

And they project that on other people. And that's the way they assuage their own guilt is by punishing other people who probably didn't have that same kind of advantage that they had. But they're going to make themselves feel better about that to try to compensate for what they were given. Yeah, it's it's this sliver of people that are so privileged to have been able to afford a $100,000 grade school education. But that is not America. That's not America. That's not these guys. we have a Kentucky camp.

A lot of our guys come out of Kentucky in the hills of Western Virginia. And these guys never got a break. They never, nobody else gave these guys a break. They just did it on their own. And they go away from home for a long period of time. But they're just, they're just wonderful people. Just wonderful. Well, it's no country for old men, right?

Yeah. I never saw that movie, but I know of it. Yeah. But so I don't know if that's a, if that reference is appropriate or not. But the book is of roughnecks and riches. And probably great story, a rollicking ride, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, of entrepreneurship, really. And something that I think really behooves us to have a perspective that is balanced and practical. When we're looking at drilling, we're looking at mining, I've talked to miners in the last few weeks about various minerals and things like that.

These can be very dirty businesses in terms of things. happen, but they are necessary and there are ways to control that and to moderate that. And we have to be practical about this instead of absolutist, instead of being ideological. So it's a great story. And it'll be interesting to see what actually happens in Venezuela. And I would be all for, as I said to you before we started the interview, I said, I'm all for oil, but I'm just not for wars for oil. So it would be nice to see if we could actually have some peace and prosperity, if we could have entrepreneurship, work, and manufacturing things, rather than all these political prohibitions and wars that are involved in all of this stuff going back and forth. But evidently, you know, when there's enough money and power and something, it's going to, the political class is going to be focused on that.

And that's one of the reasons why they focus on the core energy businesses that are there. But thank you so much for joining us. Doyle and the book again is of roughnecks and riches and you can find that Amazon and I guess everywhere. Do you have a website that you sell it directly? No, it's on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Simon & Schuster, you know, you can, any of the above. So great. It sounds like you've had a very, very interesting life and I hope it keeps getting interesting. I don't know. I don't mean that as a Chinese course either. Thank you very much.

Dan Doyle. Yes. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you. The common man. They created common core to dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary.

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