Surviving 40 Years in Oil & Gas

The oil and gas industry is the worst marketing industry on the planet. They're horrible.

Troy W. Eckerd is chairman of the board at Eckerd Enterprises, a family-owned energy company with over 4 decades of success. Troy brings extensive experience in finance, oil and gas, economics, and tax strategy. Over the course of his career, he has established a proven track record in building long-term value and guiding accredited investors through opportunities in energy and real assets.

We know the industry is extremely vibrant. It's got massive amount of potential. But even today, with President Trump saying drill baby drill, we're laying down rigs, private equity money money's not coming in. It's more favorable to go buy an electrical grid or an AI data center.

I wonder if along the way you didn't go, maybe I should get out of oil and gas.

I don't know of anybody else who raised private capital in the high-net-worth market like I did. If I wrote a book on it, it would make Wolf of Wall Street look like a church picnic.

You're still dealing with individual investors. What's the end game? What do you want to do?

Here's how I see it.

By virtue of being 4 or 5 years older than you, I started in financial services in 1980 with Dean Witter Reynolds. Gotcha. I relate to the journey that you've been on, but it seems like you've had a number of iterations where you've learned and, you know, grown from something and then pivoted. Can you kind of walk us through how you started in 1985 and some of those points along the way?

Well, like I tell everybody, sometimes when you're at the, uh, the very bottom, you're looking up to see the curve. So I was living in a travel trailer with more holes in it than a radiator with me and the other guys that didn't speak English, were mowing grass for a living. I was so poor they didn't rob me. They felt sorry for me. They left food at my door. In 1985, I had a stepbrother owned a small boutique regulation firm, FINRA firm in Dallas, came by. I hadn't seen him in 4 or 5 years. He goes, man, you're pathetic. You're skinny. You got fever, you're broke. He goes, why don't you come finish college off up in Dallas? I said, what am I going to do? He said, I'll get your license, you can become a broker and learn how to sell investments to millionaires. They go, I can't get $50 out of my parents, what are you talking about? So fast forward, I ended up getting my license in 1985, worked for a small firm. Uh, 2 years later I realized they were nice, my stepbrother had good intentions, but he couldn't find oil in a Jiffy Lube. So I decided to break apart, go do my own thing. 2 years later I had my own investment firm called Eckard Investment Services, built that firm out. Raised about $100 million from 1992 to '95. The sponsor I was representing sold out those assets to a public company. And then I started my own first oil company in 1995. And then that evolution began with the idea of how do I capitalize on the gas projects when you're dealing with much larger, much more mammoth-sized companies. And let's face it, oil and gas from the retail side is a dirty business. It's mostly full of liars, crooks, con artists. If you go down to Hoosoo the last 30 years, Dallas Tollway was called Con Man Row. You know, 500 companies in town, you know, 450 of them had their desk on wheels because they were moving from office to office when the SEC showed up. So it was a tough business. But from a pure industry side, it was also extremely tough because by the time we got to 2005 or '06, we were probably drilling 60% dry holes. And then on the 40% you hit, Maybe 35% were being mechanical failures due to incompetency. I was about to go start mowing grass again like I did in college. And so the iteration in my business has been the tenacity to stay the course, the open-mindedness to see the macro view. And having gone through several technology changes and looking at where the industry was, I was always a firm believer that if you could find out how to get traction, if you could find a path to take, The profitability for your investing partners and for your company would be enormous because the attrition rate was substantial. So you saw one attrition rate in like 1985, everybody got the big boom, went away. Then you had the early 1990s, everybody went away. 3D seismic came along, everybody got excited again. In 1997, crash occurred, another 30% went away. By the time I got to 2008, probably 60% of the professionals I knew and friends that I had were retired broker driving his trucks. You know, they were done. And that same thing has occurred again in 2015, again in 2019 and '20. And right now you're having another massive amount of people, intellectual assets leaving the industry. Because when Exxon bought Pioneer, they said, hey, thanks guys, we don't need 150,000 people. Here's your retirement, go away. So having that foresight, I said, what I've got to do is I've got to be the middleman between private capital, private investors, and the industry. We're very tiny as individuals, but if I can aggregate that capital, I can probably go toe to toe with a lot of the bigger companies. So we did that for about 15 or 20 years. We just couldn't get traction. I used to say to my staff all the time, I said, if we could control the product, money's no question. The money's there. It's just the product's terrible. You can't just keep drilling dry holes. People just get really tired of losing money. And the good deals never left Houston. The good deals were between 3 oil companies. So you tried to work your way into a good deal. It was either front-loaded with cost, seismic, lease, and you just couldn't afford it. And so whatever crumbs fell on the table were actually crumbs, and they weren't very good. So I've had a lot of successes, had a lot of failures, a lot of dry holes. And finally, with the shale and the fracking, I could see back in the late 1990s when George Mitchell started discovering the Barnett Shale here under Dallas, I said that technology is going to work and that technology is going to change the industry. But it's big, it's expensive, and it's really early stage. So I participated a little bit. I watched it evolve, and by about Probably 2014 or '15, I said, that's the direction I'm going to go. I just couldn't figure out how to get my toe in the water. It was just enormous in size. The shift was just off the chart. Finally, when the crash occurred, 2018, when everybody was told by their bankers, all your capital is being cut off. You're no longer going to go drill wells. You're going to drill them, complete them, put the value to the books, pay your dividends, pay off your debt, and lift the value of your company. No more of this delay, delay, delay. And I could tell you about why they delayed later. I saw that as a massive window of opportunity. So all my competition was just told, you get no more allowance until you go clean your room, clean up your balance sheet, pay your dividends, pay down your debt. And so now the acquisition field was wide open. And that was because I had 35 years of experience watching the door open and shut. And this time when the door opened, when I started in 2018 on this particular iteration, I might be offering a price for a million acres, there might have been 15 other offers higher. I said, man, we're never going to get in this door. Within about 6 months, I'd sent an offer out and it was accepted. I go, why? Well, you're the only one that made an offer. I go, I went from 20 to 1? What happened? And then COVID really opened the door for us. During COVID was the, was the, the window was wide open and that's when we hit the ground running. So in 2019, I had about 120 private partners. I had 8 employees. We were in a room about this size. And when COVID hit, we got to work at 6 in the morning. We worked till midnight and we cranked and Here we are 5.5 years later, going on 6 years. We got $1.1 billion of assets we've acquired. We got interest in 8,500 wells, 90,000 net mineral acres, have our own exploration company drilling wells right now. We bought a pipeline company in the Gulf of America last year, and we're on target to do about $300 million this year. And our short-term goal is to do $5 billion over the next 4 years in private capital. So that's a long way from 5 years ago.

Well, congratulations. That's, that's extraordinary. So Clearly, you had the talent to go raise capital. You said $100 million maybe in that first 10-year period?

No. Well, you're talking about way back in the '80s and '90s or what?

Yes.

Yeah, no, I had a financial firm. I had a FINRA firm.

Right.

I've always been street smart. I was a college dropout. I just never finished.

Like Bill Gates.

I had like 5 classes left. I had a new baby and $500 in the bank. And I said, college sounds good if I can pay rent. Yeah. But I've always come from a background of I'm a solution-driven person. I'm really, really good at reading people. I'm really good at reading the room. And I knew there was a massive defect in the oil and gas industry, which still exists today, by the way. The oil and gas industry is the worst marketing industry on the planet. They're horrible. They let everybody else decide what the oil and gas industry looks like. So as I talked to all these millionaires, they kept saying, well, I like oil and gas, but I don't like the way they treat us. I don't like their terms. They disrespect our money. And so the only people we can invest with are all these charlatans and crooks because the big guys won't let us in. I said, well, it's not just that, but your $25,000 doesn't even pay for the cattle guard at the front gate. So your money, not to be disrespected, can't do much. But if you and 20 of your buddies put up $1 million or $2 million, well, now you can have a bite at the apple. Well, I don't know 20 guys that are willing to take the risk I do. That's why the big stake tables in Vegas are empty, right? Because nobody can stand very long, right? But I knew that if I could understand what the money needed in terms of transparency, communication, dialogue, and investments, and then if I could learn the oil and gas side, so I had both sides of the equation, I could become that centerpiece. And that's what I've done for 40 years. I've become the centerpiece. And so that has allowed me to raise capital extremely easy. I don't know of anybody else who raised private capital in the high-net-worth market like I do. Yeah, I just don't know of anybody.

It's interesting you brought up about that, the marketing side of oil and gas, because I dabbled in oil and gas for like 6 months because a friend of mine was like, hey, go work at this. I won't name drop because I think it was in that corridor. Yeah, but it was like, but I was horrible at it because I was, I was, I was hired on to be a phone jockey, but I was horrible at it because I'm a, I'm an in-person relationship guy and they wanted the whole 'Come on, Troy, you really need to talk to your wife. Just pay the $200,000. Don't be a wimp. Just pay it. Really, really.' And I'm like, I don't have that in me to be that guy.

Neither do I.

And it was just dirty and gross. So it's great to hear you point out that.

Yeah, the way I approached it is I said, I can't get my dad and mom to give me $20. Not only are they broke, but they're going to go, what do you need it for? Because it was important to them. They didn't have money. So I started off in the '80s, no cell phone, no internet, basically the old Southwest flights where two rows were sitting together smoking on the plane. And I told my boss, I said, I don't know how I'm going to ask people to invest if I don't know them, what they want, and they don't know me. I don't know how it works. Shut up and get on the phone. I go, if I pay for my own flights, do you care if I fly? I go see this guy in California. If I go to Maryland, I go to Detroit, they go, It's your money. You do what you want to, but I think you're an idiot. I go, well, then the idiot's gonna go try this cuz I personally don't know how anybody's gonna ever trust me. So I got on a plane back in the days when you had a paper map and pay phones and quarters going in dangerous neighborhoods trying to find businesses and houses. But it was specifically somebody who had an interest in investing. And I'm like, well, what if I came and saw you and we sat and I talked? He goes, nobody comes out here. No, nobody ever calls me that would, is willing to come spend the time. I said, I am. I will.. And that's what I did for my first 20 years of my career. And then I decided that if you're gonna get to know people, well, then that gives you a, an advantage in that I know what this person needs. I know where they're going. I know their business. Now I can give correct information about what the oil and gas industry can or can't do. And as I continued to build upon that, it became very clear to me that no one else does it. And if I can match the ability to find great assets, money's easy to find. I always tell everybody, I said, Money is so easy to find, it's just, it's unbelievably easy to find. A good deal is damn near impossible. Finding a legitimate investment that meets the standards of success is almost impossible. Money is super easy to find. So I've been really good at finding money. The product side is where I have been deficient the last 20 years, and I finally found the right mix in the product.

And so— And that deficiency was related to drilling. It was everything. You know, wearing my financial advisor hat from back in the day, I would say, well, you need X number of wells, you got to try X number of times so that the math works out. What you said earlier was, I raise this capital, but the number of dry holes and the number of holes that were drilled that then had mechanical issues, the failure rate sounded extraordinary. So you were great at raising the capital, but the problem was delivering the investment returns consistent with the expectations because of the way the industry was sort of structured that kept you out.

Is because the industry itself was predicated on a food chain where everybody in that cycle made so much money before the investor got there, they didn't have to have the well be successful for them to make money. So the landman would go buy a lease for $100, sell it to the oil company for $500. He's made money 5x, and he's out of the picture. Doesn't matter whether the oil company sells it for $1,000, for $5,000 to the investor, he's made 5 to 1 before the investor gets in. He's carved off a 5-point override. He owns 5% of the well, good or bad. He doesn't care. He's already made 5x. The geologist goes out and does his thing. He says, you know, I'm going to drill a well right here. This is all the reserves. And the oil company says, well, that's not enough to drill. He goes back and maps it out 3 times as big and gets $100,000 more prospect fee and an override. He doesn't care. And then you go to 3D seismic, which was a big deal in the 1990s. And now you have, you have 4 or 5 geologists that I wouldn't use to go find oil in a Jiffy Lube. My comment is always that, right? And next thing you know, there's 4 oil companies at an exploration table. The guy wouldn't trust it. Now, exploration manager for Company A, exploration manager for Company B, and they're recommending wells. I go, you guys are idiots. Why would I drill? You want to drill. Why? Well, they're on a computer with 3D seismic. They're embellishing what should be a well that's uneconomical. They're making it look bigger. And they're saying out of 5 of us, 4 of us want to go drill. I go, have at it. Go drill. So the layering of misrepresentation, the layering of self-gratification was so deep that you couldn't get past it. And you couldn't get into the Exxons and the Shell deals because they were out buying $10 million 3D seismic programs drilling $4 million wells. And you're like, man. They're like dinosaurs. They're going to run me over. So what you had to do is what I did is I hired my own geophysicist, hired my own geologist. I hired my own guys. I'd pick them out of Exxon or Conoco. But you know, one of the things I learned about that is the geophysicist at Conoco, he's been staring at a computer screen for 20 years. And you say, OK, well, I'm glad you told me where the oil is trapped. Can you tell me how the oil got there from a geological perspective? Oh, no, no. I just know geophysics. I don't know geology. You've been with Conoco for 30 years and you don't know how to find out the geology? And you don't know how to read a well log? No, I don't. I'm like, oh my God. It was so isolated that you had such specific training. You didn't have the aggregation. So I spent hundreds of hours driving to the rigs, sitting on rigs, listening to the drilling foreman and the guys on the rig, how it works, why it works. I'm very visual. I'd go spend hundreds of hours sitting there in 3D seismic rooms with geologists and geophysicists saying, OK, tell me how it works, why. And I was always the guy saying, I'm not going to fix the car when it doesn't work, but I want to understand the parts of the car. And I want to know who is the guy that's going to fix the car. Car. So I became the aggregator of information on the industry side. The capital side was easy. I just had to find people who truly wanted to make clients money and they weren't a bunch of liars, cheats, and cokeheads. I mean, if I look the last 30 years, most of the people I knew that were liars, crooks, and thieves are either in jail, dead, or committed suicide. You know, they jumped off buildings. They all end up in the same bracket— dead, overdose addicts, jail. That's about it. I can probably name 4 people that are still in business after 35 years, and I still think they're crooks. You look, they just say one shady hair left of the line of being legal and not criminals, right?

Again, going back to my limited experience in that world, when I first got hired at that firm, you know, they pulled me aside and they said, hey, what is your vice? I'm like, what do you mean? Well, is it booze? Is it women? Is it drugs? Because whatever it is, you will make so much money that it'll play out. And again, I was just so naive to that world But again, hearing what you're talking about, it play— it makes so much sense because it's that Wolf of Wall Street thing, like you just said, where if you, if you have a drug addiction, here's all the money, go have at it, or, or women or booze or whatever it was.

So it is literally like Wolf of Wall Street back in the '80s and '90s. They would go to strip bars, spend $10,000 at lunch and hire the bartender and hire the two bouncers because they're making $30,000 a year. You make $30,000 a month. Why don't you get her to shut up, get on the phone and do what I tell you to do. Right. It's— if I wrote a book on it, it would make Wolf of Wall Street look like a church picnic. I mean, truthfully. I mean, it's that business. Now, where things have progressed is 2008 was the big game changer. 2008 on the oil and gas money-raising side has changed because so many Ponzi schemes and failures occurred across every industry that FINRA and the SEC came in and started closing people down. People are turning themselves in for Ponzi schemes, et cetera. So I had an investment firm. And the guys with FINRA came in. They go, Troy, we've known you for 20 years. You've never had a violation, et cetera. You know, off the record, our job is to grind on you so hard you give up. And I go, why? He goes, because we all want to be in big offices like at Chase Bank. We don't want to be out talking to small broker-dealers like you. And I go, that means I have no upside. I don't have any brokers anymore. It means my life is going to be miserable, pretty much. I said, OK, I'm going to resign being a broker. I don't broker deals anymore. I'm basically buying assets. So I shifted. Well, all those guys that used to raise money under FINRA and licensing and registered, well, they came out with that Dodd-Frank Act and said, now you can— You can publicly advertise selling alternative investments. Well, that was just the Pied Piper. So all these idiots and crooks came out and put billboards and signs and advertised. They go, oh, there you are. And there you are. And they rounded them all up, put them out of business, right? That was great. That was great by the SEC because they said all the crooks have been looking for now came out and started advertising. Well, there they all are. But from my standpoint, what it did was it cleaned house as far as the thousands of promoters and oil and gas guys. He got rid of probably 25,000 registered brokers who couldn't make a living anymore because There was no more commission deals, et cetera. And now it's just a matter of the isolated little non-legal crooks, liars, and Ponzi schemes that are out there. And the investors had at least less people chasing them, but they still had some pretty bad cats out there, right? And for me, I just hunkered down and focused. I just— look, I just focus. I'm a pretty private guy. I do a lot of videos to help my partners get education. But on a personal side, I'm not a member of a country club. I just— I don't have a lot of friends. I either with my family or I'm thinking. And that's pretty much— I'm pretty boring. I'm pretty eccentric in the way I live my life is from the standpoint of thinking. But what I did is I said, OK, if there is this gap from about 2008 to now, how do you fill the gap? There's still the hunger and appetite for individual investors that make a lot of money, have a high net worth, that want to be in the oil and gas business. And they don't want to buy in a public fund or partnership or ETF. So it still was tough until shale started coming around. So 2010, I put together my first initiative up in the North Dakota Bakken. And it was unbelievable. I could literally buy leases with Continental Resources and the big guys, same price, same deal, same wells. I'm like, whoa. It was really, really good. And then 2015 occurred. And I've never seen more billion-dollar companies go broke in less than 12 months. I'm like, no other industry I know of has that many billion-dollar companies go broke. And you're like, who's at the top watching your books? And I can give you all the reasons why they went broke. So I stood the course. Expenses got high. Oil prices were down. I had partners that said, man, it was going good. Now it's not going good. I said, I'll buy you out. So I just bought everybody. I used every dollar I had and bought all my partners in. Whoever wanted out, I gave them fair market value, engineering value. I bought them all out. I said, you're making a mistake because these shale basins are the absolute holy grail of the US energy. And it's going to be the only place we drill the next 50 to 100 years. Whatever you own now, you'll never not want to own in the future. They can't— investors are very short-sighted. I call them Google smart. Starting in 1999 during the dot-com, if you needed open heart surgery, you use Google. It says cut here, open up. They're doing open heart surgery themselves. They don't trust advisors. They don't trust their bankers. They don't trust their CPAs. They're all Google smart. Now AI is going to make it worse. Now AI is going to tell them how to do everything. And the problem is that sounds really like a great objective way to do things. If you don't have the empirical expertise and experience, you're never going to be successful. And that's why you got to associate with successful people. You got to almost be addicted to your job. You talk about an addiction, I have an addiction. So I used to drink heavy until about 8 years ago. And the reason I drank was I wasn't an alcoholic, but I'd drill a dry hole and go, tonight we're going to slam that bottle of bourbon so I can get the courage to go drill another one. I mean, I was losing $1 million to myself for a while. I was losing $500,000 per well. I'm like, how long can I do this? It's nuts. And so drinking was my fun. My wife says, well, you're an alcoholic. I go, I'm not an alcoholic. I just like tearing shit up when I get drunk. And she goes, well, you have grandkids now. I go, I know. Now I gotta quit drinking. So I just cold turkey one day stopped after 4 years of drinking and said, here it is. She goes, now what are you gonna do with all this spare time? I said, now I'm gonna focus. I'm gonna focus on the industry. I'm gonna focus creating wealth for us and I'm gonna focus on creating wealth for my clients. And that's when I started in 2018, what I have now. I'm just thinking, gosh, if I'd done that 35, 40 years ago, where would I be? It'd be crazy, right? But back to the point, there still is a complete separation between money in the oil industry because you're talking $10 million per well. You're talking drilling 5, 10 wells per location. You're driving West Texas and you think you're going down a gravel road. You have no idea that you're looking to the left and that's $250 million investment. If that were a traditional vertical rig today, you'd have 5 parts like this and go like, wow, that's impressive. It's all under the ground. So the game is bigger. It's more massive. But the window is wide open for anybody who can aggregate the capital. I mean, there's 250 million net acres in all these basins. Exxon has 1.9 million. Big deal. There's so much opportunity. Problem is, you know, it's like fishing or going hunting. You and I walk up and we want to go bear hunting, right? We walk up and there's a young guy, got a brand new truck, got a brand new rifle. He goes, yeah, I charge $4,000 a day. You and I look over there, some old crusty guy, you know, got a scar on his hand, got his hat on sideways, got about a 20-year-old rifle. You and I would go, we're going with him. He's been doing it for 30 years, he's still alive, and he'll find that bear like that for about $50. The guy with $4,000, he's never going to find us a bear. If it does, it might kill us. And in the meantime, he's going to buy a new truck off our money we pay him. I like to think old school because old school still works. I need great geologists. I understand the geophysics. I need to understand the land side. I need to know the accounting. I got to know the contracts. But you're looking at 200 million acres in the United States. Where are you going to put your tent? You just can't throw it to the wind. You're going to be in the Pennsylvania Marcellus. You're going to be in North Dakota, West Texas, Permian. There's a new discovery every other day as far as new zones. So I went back to the traditional basis. I said, where is the best place that my money and my private investors won't lose money? So I changed my directive in 2018. I said, I don't want to lose a dime. On any— that's my number one priority. Don't want to lose money. When you take a different approach— because I'm 50— I'm 61 now. So I was probably 54. I'm like, how many more times can you get punched in the face before you don't want to get up again? I'm like, I don't think I want to do that too much more. So because I took that approach, it really tightened all of our directives. It tightened our image. It tightened what I want to do. It tightened what kind of clients I wanted. I don't want crybabies and whiners. So I just— I mean, I fired a lot of clients. I said, you're not the right person. Yeah, I've got this much money. I go, sounds good. I don't like your personality, and I'm not going to do business with you. Why? I said, because you want me to like you and you want me to work hard for you and I don't like you. So I'm going to find a dry hole specifically to sell to you because I don't like you. It's like my lawyer. I have a great lawyer. He and I have become good friends over 20 years. And I said, you would not represent me if you and I were not— had not become good friends and we didn't know each other really well. He goes, I'd represent you to the extent of my obligation.

Nice.

I'm like, yeah, that means I'm going to get minimal service, but you're going to do your job. I think life is still about relationships. You know, you and I are older, right? I think people today don't think relationships. It is incredible. The relationships really create the opportunity. Yeah. I mean, I go to the oil and gas down in Houston. I walk down the roads. Here comes my old exploration area. Now he's like 72. I promise you, last year when I saw him, I hadn't seen him like 8 or 9 years. He went off, got another job, which was fantastic because he got a great offer. And we're still very good friends. And I see him walking out. He looks at me. I go, why are you— you're still alive, buddy. What are you doing? He's like, yeah. He goes, you're still alive. Yeah. But I mean, I've lost so many friends. And that's the scary part about our industry is there's not a lot of gray hairs left. It is probably 85% sub-40-year-old. And they're good at what they do and they're smart and know computers. But will they know how to deal with money? In my own company, I got 55%, 60% of my employees are sub-35. They have no idea how to talk to money. They have no idea what money wants. So there's a huge gap between what you do and how you get the money to do it. And they don't know it. That's the problem.

I like the analogy about the old crusty bear hunter and the young guy with the expensive truck. And it reminds me in traditional financial services and the '08-'09 debacle, the mortgage bubble, the average mutual fund manager's tenure as a mutual fund manager, 2.8 years.

Oh, that's comforting. Right. That's comforting.

So all these people that have $1 trillion invested in the capital markets have a guy that has 2.8 years of experience. Experience, and they're making judgments about how to respond to that environment. Scary.

Yeah.

And then you have some of the gray hair. You have a lot less than I do. I don't even see a lot less hair. Yeah. You know, that had been through lots of different circumstances. And I think, as you said, you know, I certainly have a different view of risk and risk tolerance and timeline today than I did then. What strikes me in listening to your story is you beat your head against the wall of a flawed industry where it was tough to deploy capital. You clearly had a talent for going out and connecting with people and sourcing capital. And I wonder if in the back of your mind you go, if I had just instead of putting it in oil and gas and spent 30 years trying to figure this industry out. Now, obviously now you, you, you are in sort of the catbird seat because of what you know and you're now positioned, but I wonder if along the way you didn't go, maybe I should get out of oil and gas.

I have thought about that. Actually, in 1985 was the big RTC days, right? Resolution Trust Corp, right? Real estate. And I literally had a guy sitting next to me who said, I'm no longer going to sell oil. I'm going to go start picking up distressed real estate because they're giving it away. Now, my loyalty to my stepbrother, because it was his firm, was, well, I'm going to be loyal to who hired me and trained me. I'm not going to look over the fence because I'm a very honest, loyal person. I've looked back for 41 years going, God, what if I'd gone left? Yeah. How much easier. But I don't like the real estate market for this reason. You get 1,000 millionaires in a room and you talk about real estate, 999 think they're experts and you don't have any arbitrage. Right. Everybody can get an appraisal done. Everybody can get, you know, to find a golden nugget on the ground in real estate is incredibly difficult. Right. The nice thing about oil and gas is it's a very very intense game that you have to navigate. I say it's like real estate is checkers, oil and gas is chess. Sometimes you get checkmate, sometimes you, you get on the wrong side of checkmate. So when I made that decision, trust me, in late 1997, I'd go to the expiration meeting, late 1997, when oil prices fell back to $11 a barrel and gas was just at a pitiful price. I go to the expiration meeting, we had 5 people in there. I go back to me, it's just me and you. And I go, well, where's Johnny? And where's Tommy? And where's XYZ Oil Company? Broke, broke, bought out. And he goes, I had 10%. You had 15%. Now you have 85% and I have 10%. I go, how do I have 85%? He goes, if you want to drill the wells, you got to pick up their slack because they're all broke. I'm like, let's do it. I drilled more wells in 1997 than I ever drilled ever in my career because drilling prices were in half. Everybody quit and gave up. We had like 85% success that year because it's all based on new technology. And I caught the wind of high gas prices in 2000, 2001. I looked like a genius, right? But it's very difficult to go tell a bunch of sophisticated people with money that, hey, trust the guy that's just a knucklehead college dropout. I'm right. They're wrong. And I can always look back over my career. Many decisions I made in the early part of my career, I made it being timid. Well, I don't want my investors mad at me. Well, you know, you gave up and you gave up. They're two smart guys and one gas. Well, I better acquiesce and give up. And I can look back over multiple different scenarios where I was sitting on $100, $250 million worth of assets. 'cause I followed those assets and I looked back on those assets. In fact, Jerry Jones is coming out lately with his Comstock, talking about all these big stuff he's discovered over in East Texas in this expanded Haynesville. I literally said, don't tell me those are the leases I used to own. They were literally the leases I owned in 1999 and 2000. But of course, you know, it is what it is. So what you learn from all that is you've gotta decide the confidence in your own decision-making. And that's where I really started growing about 18 years ago. I decided, you know what? I have a lot of petroleum engineers, geologists, geophysicists, president of oil companies, CPAs that are my investors, people in the business, which is a compliment, right? Well, Troy, I think you ought to do this and this. I really appreciate that, but I'm not listening to your advice. Why? I have a whole team. That team's got us where we're at. Although I don't want to disrespect you, for 30 years, I kept digressing on the right decision. And I left myself in a bad position. I'm going to win or lose this on my own accord. I know where I'm going. I know my plan. And I'm not buckling. And I'm not moving. If you don't like it, get off the boat. That boat's going that direction at this speed. Like it or lump it. Now, rich people don't like to be told that, right? And so 10% or 15% go, well, I don't like the way you talk to me. I said, well, good. Don't call me and I won't talk to you. You dialed my 800 number. I didn't dial yours. I'm not that arrogant, but that's really what I mean. And I just tell them, look, I'm going to tell you what you're doing. You're a big boy. You're a big girl. This is the way it works. If you don't like it, go do something else. But you're not going to find anybody else that gives you what I give you, period.

You know, them thinking they know what they— what the industry is. Now you have media like the show like Landman. Yeah. And you have people that are like, oh, Yellowstone, Landman, Taylor Sheridan, whatever. And they watch some episodes of that. They're, you know, big fans of that. Do you think that is, is, uh, integrating, or is you think that's entering your world of where now you have like even more armchair experts because they watch TV show?

From my clients personally, they all call me and says, oh my God, it says Billy Bob stole your line, because I was saying that 5 years ago. Everything on this table, everything you eat, breathe, drink, walk on, your computer's made from Oil and Gas. I think he's funny as heck in the show. I like the approach he took. I didn't like it progressing so much to the mom and daughter and all the slutty stuff. I was like, yeah, let's focus on oil and gas. There's a whole other Dallas series coming out of that if he were to take the right direction. But he's the genius of movies. But what it did do is I think the last 7 years has been a complete evolution in the private investor's mindset about oil and gas. Because they spent 10 years being told fossil fuel is gone. Green energy is the way, oil and gas is dead. We won't have oil by 2030. And that was my biggest objection I had for probably 5 years is, well, what's going to happen when oil and gas goes away and all your mineral rights are oil and gas and your wells are mineral rights? And what's going to happen when we don't use oil anymore? And I go, well, you're going to be naked on a dirt road using sign language, which is everything else is going to have a barrel of oil. So I don't believe that's going to happen. But you got to be a contrarian and you're not being a contrarian. You're being a sheep and you're following the media, which has no clue what they're talking about. I listen to podcasts all the time. And they'll get experts on their podcast. And the guy's 9 out of 10 of his answers are dead wrong. I knew how bad the media was back in like 2015 or '16. I'm sitting in Houston at a dinner. And the guy sitting next to me says, I'm with the Houston Post or Houston newspaper. I'm the oil and gas expert for the paper. And he starts asking me questions. I said, well, you know, the AFE is this, this, this. He goes, what's AFE? I go, what? You're the oil and gas expert in Houston, Texas, the oil hub of the entire North America, and you don't know what the— Authorization for expenditures, for AFE, for a budget for a well? Well, I don't know what it is. I'm like, we're in deep trouble. And so the thing is, is that I think the— here's the first thing. I don't think the average investor understands you can actually own oil and gas directly. They don't respect it. They don't understand it. And they don't even know how it acts as part of the seesaw in their portfolio. I don't care whether you buy public stocks, ETFs, or bonds, when oil does great, stock market doesn't do so great and profit margins get thin. If Biden and President Trump aren't trying so hard to keep oil prices suppressed, we'd probably be at 7% to 10% inflation right now. I still think we have inflation. I think they're lying. They say if you don't count energy and food, you don't eat or wipe your butt, we don't have inflation. OK, I'll try that for a year, see how that works out. So for me, I was in Buffalo, New York last Thursday night. I was invited up there by one of my partners. Very highly paid surgeons in the room when they hear about oil and gas and how it works. So I asked the first question, does anybody in the room own oil and gas investment? Have you ever made a direct oil and gas investment? Not one hand went up. That's the problem. No one knows about it. No one knows they can invest in it. The power of that knowledge is incredible. The problem is, back to my example, if you put 1,000 millionaires in a room and I finish talking about the risk and the rewards and the illiquidity and everything about oil and gas, 50 would stay to hear the next version. 950 would walk out the door. Of the 50, maybe 10 would invest. I consider it pocket change investing. When I've done my bonds and my stocks and my retirement, my house and my crypto, I got some money left. I'll throw it into my gas. They do not have a clue how it's a counterbalance inside of a portfolio to some degree. But I, you know, I'm like you. It's really weird. When I turned 60 a year and a half ago, I decided I'm gonna stop being Mother Teresa. I'm gonna stop saving the world. I have got my clients back millions of dollars going after Ponzi schemes and fraud. I'm, my cell phone's open to my clients. I probably get 250 texts a day. I'm on the phone to midnight helping them collect money and answer questions. And I said, you know, guys, I'm not an advisor. I'm an oil and gas guy. You're asking me a question. I'm telling you this is what I would do if I were in your shoes, but I'm not an advisor. But I said, I'm worn out, to be honest with you. And that sounds stupid to say on a podcast or video like this. It's like, you know, hey, I'm worn out, but here's the deal. I think from my standpoint, I'm not worn out on the industry. I'm not worn out on the excitement. I'm worn out on investors who don't have the common courtesy to do the basic due diligence. So they'll invest, they get burned, they walk away. They go, oil and gas is a horrible industry. It's a horrible product. To be truthful, this country should be more excited today about oil and gas than they've ever been in the history of this country. We're not running out of Tier 1. We're not running out of Tier 2. You know what makes the difference between Tier 1, oil and gas minerals in Tier 2, pay me more. We have all the oil and gas we'll need for the next 500 years. But I can only drill this well today at $65 oil. I could drill 100 more wells like that at $75 a barrel. So we know where the oil and gas is. We know the industry is extremely vibrant. It's got massive amount of potential. But even today, with President Trump saying drill, baby, drill, we're laying down rigs. Private equity money is not coming in. Investors aren't investing in it because it's more favorable to go buy an electrical grid or an AI data center. So what's the shiny nickel today? Well, that's why the Google smart $19.99, I say, is because they're like, what's the top 10 investments you're going to invest today? Well, AI says I should buy an electrical grid. There are Ponzi schemes out there right now raising money for data center racks, data center flooring. And they're raising $10, $20 million. They're all Ponzi schemes. But that's the new ticket is let's go get the hot shiny nickel and go sell it.

You go to these conferences and then there's 100 people in there and none of them done oil and gas. And then you also talked about that one person that lost all their money and then didn't do anything. I would argue that it's probably similar to when people invest in movies where they invest in a movie, they got burned, and not only did they lose the money on the investment, They told all their friends. Exactly. So like, you know, the oil guy that they invested in oil, they got burned, or maybe it was a legitimate burn, maybe they just lost the investment, whatever. But they're not sleeping on that information. They're telling all their friends as well.

It was, it was rampant. It, it was rampant. So what happened in the last 8 years? Everybody took the big windfall after the '08 crash, bought all the cheap real estate, multifamily, self-storage stock where everybody made a lot of money. So anybody that was an idiot could have made 20, 30%. They sold out of that, double, tripled down and brought all their dentist buddies, doctor buddies, farming buddies, and they all invested in groups of these so-called masterminds, which are 99.9% frauds. And they all invested into these guys. Just my group alone is about 2,500 millionaire clients. I bet you they're at $1.5 billion in losses, just my guys. And they bought in stuff you and I could look at it in 5 minutes, you go, let's bond this game. And they threw millions and told all their buddies and friends. Now it's carnage. I just talked to the SEC last week. SEC contacted me on a group that has a whole bunch of medical professionals in it. I'm trying to keep it neutral. Medical professionals in it. I quit the group a year and a half ago because I said, this is going to explode. This is not a deal that's going to work out. And sure enough, now the SEC is investigating him, representing all these guys. And in talking to the SEC, they said, can you tell us what you think is happening? I said, well, my lawyer says to tell you, facts, not opinion. But I'm kind of an opinionated guy. So just ask the question. I'll tell you. And they did. And I told them, I said, it's rampant because the access is so easy. They go raise money at $50,000 clips. Who can go get $50,000 and tell a lawyer to go get $50,000? You'll spend $50,000 to collect $50,000. So it's rampant. There is no punishment. The SEC has been a little bit hamstrung because of much bigger cases. The feds, the FBI are chasing drug laundering, money laundering, drug deals. They don't have time. I went after a group 7 years ago because of a $7 million theft they took. The FBI said, we really don't chase any deals below $10 million. I'm like, what? So back to, back to the whole point of this is, this is a great industry. And it is so vibrant with so much opportunity. And when I look at my career, what's been most exciting about what I've done is that when you own a particular oil and gas interest, No one else owns it. It's not replicatable. No one can say, well, you own a self-storage, I buy self-storage just like that. No, you don't. It's, it's unique. It's different. It takes real art to understand the dynamics and the economics and the drilling and the cost. How are you gonna get your product to market? The pipeline, the infrastructure. So it is really a very high-level game of chess and the chess players are the best in the world. So I'm just trying to navigate to be with them in their deals, next to their deals, under their deals with minerals. And I have a very simple saying in my, my line of business. Everybody says, well, where's the, where's the best place to drill in the country? Exactly where the 549 active rigs are drilling today are at. That's the best 549 locations. And next week when they all move, that's the next best 549 locations. The idea is, how do you know where they're moving? And if you can figure out where they're moving, if you figure out why they're moving and the economics of that, you're 5 steps ahead of them. You'll be in the best locations oil and gas-wise and minerals and working interest. In the entire country because you understand who's moving. So I'm studying the players, the jockey, not the horse. And that's the key.

Your discussion about investors and their decision-making certainly resonates with me because I spent 30 years as a wealth manager. You saw it. And I dealt with this every day. And when I went to work at Dean Witter Reynolds in 1980, I remember the chairman of the firm at the time, Robert Gardner, gave us a speech. And he said, look, you need to figure out what motivates your clients It's either fear or greed, right? One of those is the dominant force at any given time. And I was always, like you, so frustrated by bad decision-making, repetitive bad decision-making. Sell low, buy high, and then just repeat that cycle over and over again, regardless of the asset class. I completely agree with you that a long energy play is a great complement to traditional stock and bond portfolio. I, too, though, couldn't figure out the best pattern. Path to get to oil and gas in a way that made sense to me because I saw those layering of fees, right? And it was like, I'm too far downstream, no pun intended, you know, for this to make sense. From the Ponzi standpoint, I'm running a wealth management firm in Memphis and a group called Stanford Financial opens an office across the street from me in Memphis. Allen Stanford, who's now, I guess, spending the rest of his life in prison. And they were offering In a 6% rate environment, they're offering 12%, 13%, 14%, 15% CDs. Well, they were certificates of deposit, but they were on a bank in Antigua. And so they weren't backed by any government, right? There was no— but it was a certificate of deposit. It was Antigua-based. So, I met with Stanford's team, his CFO, his chief investment officer at their offices because they kept coming after my clients. Clients were like, well, you're not making me 13% or 14%. And I was like, they aren't either. And so, I met with them to say, okay, how are you generating a 13% to 14% return on a certificate of deposit? I was the chairman of a bank at the time. And so, this is my cost of capital. This is how I can loan the capital out. This is my net interest margin. So, this is how much I can afford to pay to get capital in the marketplace. It ain't 13% or 14%, right? There's nothing left. Because I got to then make— I got to make money on top of that. Doesn't exist, right? So, I asked them, I said, well, how do you get this rate of return? And they said, well, we invest in alternatives. And I said, okay, well, what happens since, you know, because you've got somebody that's loaned you that money, what happens if your rate of return is below the committed rate that you're offering them? Well, that can't happen. And I said, well, how can it not happen? Well, we're hedged. I said, how do you hedge to a 13% or 14% return? At that point, they no longer wanted to talk.

Don't you smart for them. Right.

Well, obviously, you don't understand. No, I don't.

I don't understand.

Please help me out. So I was telling my clients, I don't know what's going on. All I know is that there is no way to invest the money to generate a 13% to 14% return to investors. And of course, it It blew up, as did Madoff. We had a hedge fund portfolio. We didn't invest in Madoff. We didn't know that he was a Ponzi scheme. But at the same time, we were looking at his returns. He said, I run this split strike conversion strategy. I'm basically buying a stock, selling a call, buying a put.

Taking the spread. Right.

And we looked at the other 25 hedge funds that were doing the exact same strategy, and they were all over here and he's up here, no risk, all return. It's like, OK, so you're positively correlated when things are good, and you're negatively correlated when things are bad. You aren't doing what you say you're doing. We don't know what you're doing, but we just know that you can't be using this strategy because you couldn't get that rate of return. But what we saw is investors chasing those schemes because they want— they're greedy. They want that. Not trying to be judgmental, they're just, they're just greedy.

It's the FOMO factor. So like, so like being an entrepreneur. So one of the things I've had to do is, is I've had to go, you know, there's much bigger companies than me and this company sold out and this one sold for a billion and this one sold, XTO sold for $44 billion to Exxon. You hear all that glamor and you go, well, that's fine. My job as an entrepreneur is to stay the path, collect the data, do a postmortem every day and what we did the day before and sharpen the knife every day. And then you go to the market, the capital markets. Like we have a lot of people that want to give us money right now. We have all these guys, hey, I want to give you $50 million. I want to talk to family office. I want to do this. I'm like, no, thank you. No, thank you. No, thank you. Why? I've been offered $100 million, you know, 8 years ago by a bank. Said, we want to do it. And I looked at the terms, the covenants of their loan. And I went, I'm going to work for you for the next 8 years. And I doubt I'm going to make a dime. And you're going to take all the decision-making away, which you don't know what you're doing. The answer is no. And so for me, when I look at being an entrepreneur, It's maturity. It's allowing yourself to make mistakes, get back on your feet, correct it. It's being candid with your capital partners. It's being forward thinking in the market. It's having the hunger and the desire to look way, way beyond just what's in front of you and dig. That's why I used to spend hours on rigs. I used to go to the field and I go, I want to see the well. I want to see the location. I want to go see the site. I want to go spend time in Houston in these geological data centers. And as an entrepreneur, what I've learned is that if you do that and you decide to take your bandwidth and go, this is what I'm focused on. Look at Warren Buffett. I think he owns 52 stocks out of 4,200. You look at Elon Musk, he's got 3 enterprises, right? These are the richest guys in the world. They don't own all this. And so I'm finding it really difficult as a personal investor. I'm looking at all kinds of stuff. I know I can make $100,000 on that. I can make $1 million over here. And I'm going, nah, I'm staying right here. Part of the discipline the last 8 or 9 years has been the maturity in myself to recognize I don't need to try everything on the buffet. I know I like lobster and I definitely like, you know, prime rib. I don't need everything else. I mentor a lot of, a lot of my clients. They have their own businesses and they're— it's amazing to me the simplicity of these solutions in front of them and they don't even know it. Like, well, here's my business, here's what I'm doing, here's my assets and I don't know what to do. I'm like, Well, why do you own that building? Why don't you sell the building, take the cash and buy that? And they're like, I didn't think of that. I'm like, but it's what happens to all of us. I mean, '08, I almost got wiped out. I was a partner with the McCombs family in a real estate transaction, had a bunch of real estate doing my own money, tons of oil wells, pipelines, had all kinds of stuff going. I thought, man, I am well diversified. I'm probably 4 or 5 years away from retiring. Life is good. I told my wife, if things get bad, I can always sell cars and mow grass. Well, '08 hit, and I would say within 6 months, I lost 85% of my net worth. I mean, I had 3 out of 5 banks went insolvent, called all my loans due because of lack of covenants. I go, what do you mean by lack of covenants? Well, we base the loans on your oil income. Oil went from $145 to $35. You're out of covenants. We're calling all your loans due now. I'm like, yeah, that ain't happening. What are you talking about? So, you go through that realization from thinking you're on top of your game, about to retire, to you're back to square one. And then you dig out of it, I think those road scars can never be replaced. You don't want to do it, but I think it's made me a much better entrepreneur. It's made me a much better leader as far as leading my clients and my company. I'm a lot more cautious. I haven't given up being a risk taker, but now it's a very calculated risk that has a very specific minimal downside to it. And all that came for a reason. So here I am 15 years later, I'm extremely happy. I've increased my net worth substantially. Substantially. I'm so proud of what we've done as a company. I've hired tremendous employees. And honestly, it took 40 years. You know, you go, thank God I lived long enough to see it. So many people I know never quite get there. They— there are a lot of grown men get to be 50, 55, and you can just see depression in their face. And I have people call me and ask for advice, and I go, I think it's very common. Typical males get to be about 50 years old and they decide This is all I'm going to be. I've tried, I've failed, I've tried, I don't have enough gas left in the engine, I don't know how to get over the hill. And then they become very depressed and they divorce their wives and they just give up and they lose their health. And, or, and this is a very key fact, I would say 85% of all Ponzi schemes I know of are white males between 50 and 65 years old.

It's a fact. That's their last shot, right? It's the Ponzi scheme.

They think by the time I get caught and fired, 5 years and then I get arrested, I'll probably be dead before I go to jail. And I swear it's like 85% fit that profile. It's unbelievable, right?

And there's a high suicide rate. You mentioned that. Well, they all kill themselves when they get caught. Men of that age group, of which we're part.

Well, I've had a lot of clients that have killed themselves in the last 5 years. They get to a point they're depressed. I mean, I say it all the time, 85% of my investors seem like they're depressed to me. I'm like, you're rich. You have money, you have assets, you have kids. You look like you're scrubbing around looking for a dollar bill. They may be worth $10, $20, $50 million. You think they have no money at all. And I think the problem is FOMO is rampant. FOMO was FOMO before we knew about FOMO. FOMO was back in the '80s and the '90s. And it's like, well, you have a bigger car, you have a bigger house. I live in Bentree, you live in Bentree. I live in a better neighborhood. I have a newer Mercedes. When I was in Dallas back in the '90s, I said, Dallas is so pretentious. Everybody's Mercedes at the light all have clocks in the back. Why? Because it tells the time they bought their Mercedes, and mine is 2 minutes newer than yours. And I said, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to live my life based on what other people have. I'm going to be prudent. I'm going to build my business. I've never missed a payroll in 40 years. I've never had a default on a loan. I've never had a bank foreclosure. I've never had a regulation with the Securities Exchange. I have had zero on my record in 41 years. And the reason I did that is that I said, as an entrepreneur, I must protect the core of my entrepreneurship by being prudent and savvy and diligent in what I do. And that makes my investments to my partners that much safer. But it takes a lot of discipline. I think there was about 5 years there back in the, after the '08 crash, I went about 5 years. I didn't take a paycheck or make any income outta my company. I dumped in millions and kept it alive. Yeah. And I had a CFO goes, you're an idiot. Just keep the money you have, close your business down. I said, See, that's the difference between you and me. You're a quitter. You think you should hoard the pecans that you have for winter because you're a squirrel. I think I should plant the pecans that I have to grow trees next year. And I'll live off 2 of the pecans. That's why you're never going to be a true entrepreneur. But you're a great CFO. But you'll never be at the top. And that's how my brain works.

So you've turned 60.

61.

61.

64 weeks ago, yeah. I feel 25, though.

Yeah, right. Yeah, 61 is the new 25. And I'm 60. '66, and so 60 was the first birthday I can remember where there was a bit of melancholy, right? I mean, exactly, 50 maybe a little bit crept in, but 60 was kind.

Of like— 60 was stark.

Yeah, it's like, oh my God, the next one's 70, and that sounds really, really old to me. Plus my parents both died before they reached 70. Yeah, so I think a lot these days about— I don't know how much time I have left. Is it 10 years? Is it 15 years? Is tomorrow, but now you have a different focus on that time. And so you're still dealing with individual investors, which sounds like maybe the bane of your existence is dealing with those individuals. What's the endgame? What do you want to do?

So I get asked that a lot from my partners. Like, when are you retiring? When are you giving up? I said, here's the deal.

I won't say giving up. Well, when they mean— I'll say transitioning to the next thing.

Yeah, they put it in different words to me depending on who I'm talking to. But here's how I see it. So we've had a great last 8 years and nothing makes me more ticked off than watching somebody who's had a great 5, 6, 8-year run and then they ride off in the sunset and they buy their plane or yacht and they live a great life and everybody else is going like, well, you're not— you haven't finished the job yet. Yeah. So I went out the first 4 months of this year on what I call a vision tour. And I went out and said, I have nothing to sell. I'm coming to tell you where I'm taking my company in the next 10 years, because I plan on being involved in it the next 10 years. To what extent depends on my health and condition, right? But I said, it makes me frustrated when you, you get me into these investments and before they mature, before you've reached the time period that you said it's going to take for these things to mature, you're already writing off like you're done and you're playing golf and sending me pictures of you at your lake house. Well, that pisses me off. So for me, because the way I was raised, I got my partners into this deal. I've laid the vision for the next decade. In the next decade, I think I'll have $10 billion of assets owned, cash, no debt between me and my partners. I think we'll be cash flowing $1.5 billion a year, 10% to 15% a year. And we will be a target for a buyout in 10, 15 years. When Exxon gets hungry again and they look around, there's not been very much in the way of new private equity capital the last 7 years into oil and gas because of all the anti-fossil fuel carbon footprint, blah, blah, blah. So all these guys got real hungry last year, and they bought each other out, $250 billion in acquisition. Well, now they've satisfied the hunger, and there's going to be some sub-billion-dollar deals. But when Exxon or Chevron or whoever's out there says, where do we get the actuary in our back office who's calculating how many drill sites I have? And they say, in 2040, Mr. CEO of Exxon, you're out of enough location to sustain your production. You're now in a decline. It's time to short the stock. So he said, we can't do that. So go buy Pioneer for $60 billion. He gave me 20 more years of running room. Well, in 15 more years, there's going to be a lot of hungry companies saying, our stock's going to plummet if we can't prove it up. They're going to look around for leasehold position, mineral rights, and wells, and drilling, and production. They're going to be like, that guy Eckardt, him and his partner are sitting on about $10 to $15 billion. Maybe we ought to buy them out for about $30 or $40 billion. So that's kind of my vision where we're going. We're going to do it one year at a time, one step at a time. Processes, systems in place, artificial intelligence, automation, all the things that should be done, we're doing right now inside the company. Now for me, stopped drinking, lost weight, got gluten allergies, can't eat anything fat or bad for me. I got to eat all this lettuce and chicken. It's driving me crazy. At the lowest weight I've been in a long time. I feel 100% fantastic. My blood pressure, I go in, is like, gosh, I think it's like 117 over 72. I haven't had that kind of low blood pressure. Unless I get hit by a bus or get in a road rage fight, I'm in pretty good shape. So the vision is how to become the single largest accumulation of oil and gas assets by a private group of investors in the country. And that's not out of ego. I just think that's the opportunity. There's a big difference. I don't have a big ego. I just like winning. Call that what you want. I think the window's wide open for private investors. And for those contrarian millionaires out of the 22 million millionaires in the country, probably only $500,000 belong directly in oil and gas. So my job is to introduce the industry, the education, the process. And those who want to look at it are more than welcome to talk to me. If not, there's a lot of people to invest with. But I think, I think the opportunity is easily $10 billion that small group like us can pick up crumbs off of very, very bountiful tables. And that's what I think we're going to do. We just closed on one in May. It was a $120 million transaction. We got it way below what the price should have been because nobody bid on it.. And the guys who bought it from said, well, show us your proof of funds. I said, I don't have proof of funds. I have a bunch of really loyal partners and we'll fund it in the 45 days. How do I know you're not a flake? I said, what deposit do you want? Yeah. Well, we need $10 million down deposit, non-refundable. Here you go. 45 days later, we're like, we're ready. You ready to close? We closed it. Yeah. I'm like, where do they get this money? How, how do they do this? My own bankers 3 years ago, you'll love this, actually thought I was running the Ponzi scheme because, because we went from 8 people and starting off with scratch. Yeah. I'll say we're moving $50 million, $100 million through in and out, giving distributions. They got me to talk to their board and they're like, you know, well, we're real concerned. There's some hanky-panky going on.

Too much success scares bankers.

Oh yeah. So we had my security lawyers get on the phone and go like, y'all are idiots. This guy's just got a great— he's built a great machine. Now they're like every day like, oh my God, you're our best depositor. You're our best guy. Yeah. You know, so it's been fun. I mean, I'd say there's been a lot of God's blessings in it. I mean, I'm a workaholic. But I've surrounded myself with really brilliant people. And that's the one lesson I learned as an entrepreneur. It was always the Troy show. I found the deals, I funded the deals, I ran the company. I finally said, I'm never going to be successful if I don't surround myself with people smarter than me that have special skill sets that will execute. When I finally stepped back about 8 years ago and I did that, we took off like a rocket ship. It was hard to let go of the reins. And now I look back and go, Wow, what can we really do? That was a very big lesson for me.

That is. I had the same lesson when I was running my wealth management firm. I read a book, I'll forget the title of it now, but basically was systems and processes driven, not owner dependent. And you don't have enterprise. I think the saying was, if the business doesn't function without you, you don't have a business, you have a job.

Correct.

And so that was the epiphany I had from reading a good book where I said, I need to build systems and processes. So I went from being an average wealth management firm to being the fastest growing wealth management firm in the country because I brought in a CFO and I brought in a COO and I brought in a chief investment officer. I had to delegate things that I didn't feel comfortable delegating because I thought nobody can do it as well as I can, which is the standard entrepreneur entrepreneurial tripe, right? Is, is, you know, I, I'm gonna let them do that.

I, you know, I don't do that. It's almost the hero syndrome. Yeah.

I can do it all. I was doing Excel spreadsheets to rebalance and calling in trades to Schwab, right? Well, I'm running a couple hundred million dollar wealth management firm and, you know, it was just like, but.

It took.

You know, a, a, a, a shift in mindset induced by reading somebody going, hey, you idiot, what are you doing? Um, here's the way you gotta do that. But I see that all the time. I run a, a, a middle market M&A shop sell side. And I run into businesses all the time that are worth $50, $75, $100 million, and they're all interdependent. They don't have systems and processes. They don't have middle management. They have customer concentration. And it's just, OK, step back. Take a couple of years. If you can sell at a 5 multiple instead of a 3 multiple because you can address these things, multiply your EBITDA by another 2 or 3 turns, right? Key man sensitivity.

Exactly. Yeah, that was my biggest concern, just we were ever going to grow. I had to realize, what if I got run over by a bus in the parking lot? What happens to the company? What happens to— how could you go talk to somebody about putting significant money in your assets that you're going to manage if they go, yeah, but that's the guy in charge and he drops dead of a heart attack or he gets hit by a bus? So I realized early on, if you're really disciplined on the vision and the plan, and then you go recruit the right people who have the skill sets, that also can see the vision buy in, what a powerhouse you have. Now you have the Clydesdales pulling your wagon, not a couple of donkeys. And that's what I did. And I passed off the CEO to one of my team, which was my son-in-law, Matt Marchiori. I surrounded myself with people in the office that are some of the smartest people I've been around in 40 years. I actually told my wife this when I turned 60. I said, you know, she goes, what? You have a tough time with your birthday? I said, no, it's not really my birthday. I mean, I don't like the number 60. You can't say 60 and not sound like you're old as a tree, right? I said, so, you know, it's tough to say the number because I don't feel that old. She goes, well, why do you look like you're melancholy? I said, I'm melancholy because I'm bored at the office. She goes, what do you mean? I said, I put all these people in place and they're doing such a great job. They're having acquisition meetings and management meetings and operating meetings. I go, and I'm not invited to the meetings anymore. So I go to work, I find stuff to do, and then I leave. And she's like, what are you doing? I said, well, I'm just talking to partners because there's nothing for me to do. She goes, why don't you retire? I go, oh, no, no, no, no. No, we're not going to retire. We're going to look at the next Mount Everest to climb. So that's when I came up with this vision tour. And so that's what I've been implementing. And I'm having the time of my life. But I think entrepreneurs have to truly look in the mirror and ask themselves a real question. And that is, what's the goal? What's the endgame? You got to have an endgame because one day— Mr. McCombs was my partner for about 15, 16 years. He passed away a few years ago. I really, really respect him. I really enjoy company with him and just watching, observing him. He wasn't doing what he was doing to make money, especially as it was who he was, is what he did.

Right.

And that's kind of how I am. I just love helping investors. I love the industry. I've waited 40 years to see the oil and gas industry this wide open with this much opportunity. It's like Easter Sunday and everybody else set their alarm for 9 a.m. and I got there at 7 a.m. It's just the field is wide open. It's how many eggs can I put in my basket. That's how I view it. That'll change. I don't think it's going to stay suppressed oil price. I think when President Trump finishes his term, I don't think the next president, Republican or Democrat, is going to be able to suppress oil price. When that happens, you're going to see a pendulum swing. And whoever spends the next 3 years really, really focused on the true underlying value of the energy space is going to be a massive winner the next decade. But you've got to really have patient money. And you've got to have people who are willing to listen. I think the phones, the internet, all the live streaming, I mean, the chaotic noise in the background for employees, for investors, for capital partners is so loud. It's like being in Vegas next to all the slot machines. You can't even hardly think. So what you got to do is you got to focus and put those mufflers on and just say, this is the right direction and I can't hear the noise. That's kind of what I've done. I just locked myself in and I'm going the right direction.

When you say noise, do you mean like the anti-oil and gas narrative?

No. You know, when I was a kid, he can appreciate— you turn on the news, it's either Walter Cronkite, ABC, NBC, or ABC, right? We're doing this for fun now. If you take the top 10 or 20 news publication media systems out there and every day you took the top 10 topics, it's 20 different answers. That chaos has investors nervous. Investors are more nervous today than they've ever been. Is the tariff inflationary, not inflationary? Is it going to happen? Is he going to do this tariff? Is inflation up? Is Powell in? Is Powell out? So when they go home at night and they sit over the weekend, by the time they come Monday, they're like a porcupine in a balloon factory. They're like, ah. So paralysis is what's killing the market right now. Uncertainty and chaos is paralysis. I can go to work in the morning and listen to Maria Bartiromo on Fox News. She'll have some guy talking about oil and gas. I'm like, that guy's completely backwards and wrong. He doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. He's never been in a rig. He has no clue. But she just told 20 million viewers and listeners, go left without having any kind of a blinker on. And the problem is, is the blinkers are rapid. It's every day is a different story. So do I get into Bitcoin? Do I get out of Bitcoin? Do I jump because the market's booming because Powell made the comment we might lower interest rates? And the problem is they stop trusting advisors. They stop trusting investment advisors. They stop trusting their bankers. The level of trust I think right now is as low as I've seen in 40 years. System-wide. System-wide. Yeah. They don't know if it's an AI voice on the phone. They don't know if you're real or if you're another. So the lack of trust is huge. And to me, I think there's a movement back to face-to-face. I think people are saying, yeah, I'll talk to you. Like the surgeons, the surgeons I went to see last week up in Buffalo, they're like, well, we'd love to talk to you. You can come here. And if we can see you and talk to you and know you're real and feel good about it, Maybe we'll talk to you further. So I spent the last 5 years like I did in the beginning. I've been on the road for 5 years. I, I would say, I think you'll love it, this at my age, I took off about 3 months ago and I took off like on a Thursday and I did like 4 presentations in 36 hours. I was in Anchorage, Alaska doing a presentation night. I left 3 o'clock in the morning, did a presentation in Southern California and Arizona and back home by Sunday morning for church. My wife goes, well, how was the trip? I go, I don't know.

I said, what?

I said, 4 hours and I travel like 9,000 miles. But I think that is the difference between building a 10-year plan and building a 12-month plan.

We talked about the money on the sidelines. I think the last time I heard or looked or it might have been a few months, it was like something like what, $13 trillion sitting on the sidelines?

It's enormous.

Yeah, there's a lot of cash. Family offices, whatever, just waiting for the opportunities. And it's just like, It just feels like every day, if you do turn on the news, there's another reason to stay on the sidelines.

I liken the market today like us three being on a railroad track as kids and we're on a bridge. And there's water on the left and there's rocks on the right and there's alligators on the left and rocks on the right are sharp and the train's coming. And we're like, what do we do? We just, we froze. We froze. You got to pick the best choice. The problem is they don't trust the advice anymore. They don't trust the media. They don't trust the news. They don't trust the advisors. The really good advisors are managing $10 billion. Right. The guys manage $100 million or $200 million. Well, $100 million today is like $10 million 10 years ago. It's a different dichotomy, right?

Well, I have a whole theory on all this and me, and it is self-serving because I am in the media and the video business. I think there's too many people that should be on the internet that aren't on the internet. You know, you take this entire complex, Parkland, everybody here is super secretive. They're not really on the internet at all. There's one firm I was talking to about potentially working with them. They have a homepage that doesn't say anything what they do. And it just has a contact us, their LinkedIn, and you're like, I don't.

Know what you do. Like, and they're not going to tell you.

And they're not because it's 100% referral business. But the thing is though, when you've got the real people on the sidelines who are super secret, maybe not telling everybody what they do, and then you've got the 19-year-old Bitcoin today, AI tomorrow, real estate the week after that, expert at everything. Unfortunately, they're the ones that are winning the internet because they're the ones that are getting the followers, the view counts, and sadly, the next generation of people don't really understand that the internet is.

Not necessarily always real.

No. Well, media in general isn't always real. That's a better way to put it. I learned that firsthand when I was running Sovereign Wealth management 15, 20 years ago. And somebody— I did a local news show and somebody reached out, a PR person reached out and said, hey, have you thought about hiring a PR firm and going on to, you know, national television? I said, I didn't realize that was a thing. And they said, oh, you know, you pay us $5,000 a month and we'll get you on CNN and CNBC. And I went, wait a minute, CNN would have me on their show? I mean, you know, I'm a property manager in Memphis, Tennessee. Yeah. Well, they don't per se get you on the show. We call them with ideas, or they call us and say, we're doing a segment on gold. Have you got somebody that'll say they like gold and want to buy it? And so I did that. I paid my $5,000 a month, and I would get a call, and they'd go, can you be at the NBC studios in 2 hours? And okay, what am I talking about? Well, they want somebody that thinks oil prices is going up. The producer would call me and say, Okay, we're gonna have somebody that thinks they're going down and you're gonna say it's going up. And so when I ask you this question, how are you gonna answer it? Well, I'll say this. Well, would you consider saying it this way? By the time I went on the show for my, you know, couple of minutes segment, it was all scripted. I knew exactly what I was gonna say. The producer had already vetted it out. They knew what I was gonna say. The only time I ever had an issue was they asked me the wrong question.

Questions.

And I was like, oh, wait, you.

Didn'T— This is not scripted.

So what I learned was these people are— it's a pay-to-play. Now, if you're Warren Buffett, you can go on CNBC anytime you want. But they got 24 hours of news cycle to fill. And they're going to pay schmucks like me who can hire a PR firm.

You underwrite all the real speakers that come on for free. Yeah. So Warren gets on free because you pay for him to get on free. Back to your point about even a place like this. So, the secrecy is good except one thing, that also lets the Madoffs of the world to get away with it, right? Yeah. You're right. So, the secrecy is good, which means you're satisfied, you're not hungry, you have enough referrals, you have all the money that you need, which means you must be performing at least now. But there's a very good chance that secrecy also means maybe you're not going to succeed and then that falls apart. We don't know you fell apart because we don't know who the hell you are. Right. You know, I've never been invited to big country clubs. I was a member of Glen Eagles back when I was a kid because I lived in Willow Bend I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know I was in that rich of a neighborhood. I didn't know, you know, all the cowboys were there. And my wife and I, we go there and she goes, God, there's like a bunch of athletes and stuff. I said, I have no idea why we're in this club. We don't belong here, you know, just because I'm a simple South Texas guy. But my point is, I kind of look at a lot of those high-level, you know, you got to open back in the day, you have a bill, you have to open the account with $1 million and $2 million. I'm such a contrarian. If somebody says that, even if I had the money and I liked you, I wouldn't do it just because you told me to. Yeah. I, I'm opposed to that. And that's kinda cost me some business in the years. But I, but I go back to your point and your point. I wanna go with my street smarts. I was a street smart kid. I was top of my class. Every extracurricular activity from sports to you name it, I did it. I was an overachiever. Everything I did, I had 3 jobs in college. I had a 3.3 GPA and I never studied. I never went to— I went to class and I, I was too busy working. But I've looked back and I said, what's kept me in the winner's circle and not had me in the loser's circle, and that is go with my gut instinct. And unless I can ask you questions and you're willing to participate, there's 100 that will answer the question. I don't need the one that won't answer the question. And I tell my investors that. I said, you're asking investors and financial planners and CPAs, you're asking them questions. Well, I ask the basic question like, can I meet some of your other clients? No. Yeah. So what I do every year, I have a partners conference. I'm the only one that does it. And I say, my richest client to my least rich client, you're all welcome to come to my annual conference. I pay for it. We spend 3 days educating you and talking about all your investment. You can get everybody's phone numbers because I have privacy access. I can't give it to you, but if you show up and we exchange cards, you have it. At the end of the 3 days, you're either gonna beat me like a piñata because I'm a liar and, and I'm a fraud, or you're gonna be my partner for life. Luckily, it's always been the second hand. I've been doing that since 1997.

Wow.

So I spend my extra money on marketing. On going to see people, educating in person, small conferences, and my annual partner conference, because I'm like, I want to know who I'm investing with. And I always say you can only be a good liar for about 8 hours. After 8 hours, you can't remember what you said 8 hours ago. So I think people need to get more personal. They need more relationship-driven. I think entrepreneurs need to go sit down and have lunch with other entrepreneurs. Houses don't even have porches on them anymore. We all have rear entry drives or high fences. We don't want to talk to our neighbor. COVID made it even worse. Well, how the heck am I gonna know what to do if I don't sit down with two people who've had experience and go, what do you think about getting a home equity line? What do you think about a line of credit on my business? What do you think about doing this? Well, I'm not telling you what to do, but I tried that and this is the results. Ooh, not a good idea. And I think that's the advantage I've had. I've had 5,000 successful entrepreneurs that I've been learning and absorbing from. And I'm like, I have learned a tremendous amount from those. I wish I had time to write all these books I need to write because The, the data is real. It's frontline feedback. And I think it would be so helpful to so many people just to feed this information back. I just gotta figure out when I'm gonna find the time to do it. 'Cause it's, it's really, when we closed on this big pipeline venture a long time ago, it was basically, uh, Mr. McCombs worth about $2 billion up against Rich Kinder worth about $16 billion. And I was a partner. I brought the deal together and I got to watch the final closing. I, I saw two bull elephants going toe to toe on a closing. On the last day, I'm like, now this is worth every dime to be front row in. So, you know, those are the kind of life lessons that make you a smarter, sharper entrepreneur. And it also makes you humble realizing I'm just a piss ant. I gotta stay out of the way.

What, what lessons did you get out of that.

Specific encounter? You think you're big, there's always somebody bigger. And it's not about being size. It's about being a better chess player. Knowing where you're gonna be in 2 moves, not the next move. And I think we had Mr. Kinder in a move where we had him 2 chess moves ahead. And we ended up winning the day, I think. And so in watching that whole— that itself should be an entire book, that whole transaction. But the one thing I did learn, billionaires think— this may be worth putting in for the last 2 minutes for my point. In 2007, I was in a real estate venture with Mr. McCulkes. He calls me on the phone and says, can you drive into San Antonio? I was in the Hill Country. He says, can you drive? I said, oh, absolutely. You're my partner. I'll drive in. You're the billionaire, I'm not. I'll drive in. We sat down, he had lunch at his desk. He said, Troy, everything's entitled in this project. We're about to build this big condo project in the Marine on the Lake. You're running it. Do you think we ought to go ahead and build that right now? So this is the guy with the money telling me, should I go ahead and authorize the $40 million expense? I said, are you asking me if I'd spend my $40 million right now? He goes, I'm asking you, you're my partner. I go, absolutely not. He goes, why not? I said, I think we're too late. I think the real estate market's coming down. It's crashing. Time we get it built, we'll be behind the eight ball. I think, I think the numbers have changed. I don't think we ought to spend the money. And he hit his hand on the desk and he said, and that's why you're my partner. And then he went on literally for about an hour, hour and a half, like Nostradamus, and told me in 2007 everything that was coming that happened in '08. By 8 months into '08's crash, I am getting slaughtered. I've lost so much money. I'm getting pounded on by the banks. This is like 8 months. He went from I'm going to retire in 5 years to I'm just getting slaughtered. He calls me on the phone, being Mr. McCombs, because he loved rodeos and he's got cowboy at heart, right? He goes, Troy, how you doing? I said, Mr. McConaughey, I'm tied to that bull and somebody forgot to get me off after 8 seconds. I'm getting the hell beat out of me. He goes, well, so am I. Why don't you come down and have lunch with me? So I go down to San Antonio. I have lunch with just me and him in his little Mexican restaurant next door. And this is the richest guy in San Antonio at the time. And he goes, well, here's the deal. I did this, this, and this. My guy said— I said sell 100% of that. He said, well, just sell half of it. He goes, nobody listened to me. So I probably lost $500 million just in equity alone in the last 6 months. It's been brutal. And I got all kinds of real estate projects that are in trouble. And I got banks calling me just like they're calling you. And then he gave me a lesson I never forgot. He said, you are my partner. I want you to honor that partnership and you do everything you can to pay off every loan, every bank. You answer every phone call and you stay in the pocket. You don't waver and you keep your word. 'Cause you're my partner. I want you to do that. And about another 30 minutes later, we finished up lunch. I left and didn't change my situation, but I paid off everybody. I never missed a payment. And then we ended up finding a great asset to buy about 3 years later. And he said, I'm in. Whatever Troy wants to do, I'm his partner. The lesson I learned in that is, is that your word is better than a contract. You either have a spine or you don't. And there's a lot of value in talking to somebody that's sitting with a 20-year-old rifle with the hat turned sideways. And that was Mr. McCombs. He, he had been through so many battles of significant size, buying the Minnesota Vikings and all kinds of deals. And to have the pleasure having that entrepreneur share time and time with me could never replace that. It was incredible.

Yeah. What a blessing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What a blessing. Yeah. He was funny. He has some great stories. I mean, I was like, whoa. His game was a lot higher than my game, but it was pretty funny to listen to what he did, the.

Crazy stuff he did. You know, it's funny. I'm listening to this and I think that is a good way to start wrapping up. It makes me think back to those 18-year-old, 20-year-old TikToker influencer of people that are walking around with so much arrogance and hubris and just— I hesitate to use the word self-confidence, but that's what it is. And it's like, that's what— that's the attitude you have when you're 14, when you don't know that you don't know, but you feel like you're right about everything. And hopefully you grow out of it. But like, it's almost like they are not— not only are they not growing out of it, but they're amplifying it. Yeah. And it's like, if you take one of those persons and put them in a situation like with a Mr. McCombs, would they understand the gift? And I understand, and I think the answer is no, because a couple months ago I was in a guest lecture with Julie Silcock, who, you know, billions of dollars worth of M&A activity. And all the old people in the room were just like on every single word hanging, you know, all the young people are, you know, on their phones.. And I was just like, what are y'all doing? What a gift to be in a room. And I think she was saying her friends and family consulting discount was $1 million. And I'm like, did y'all not just hear this? Here's a woman who's gifting her time for an hour or so for free. And y'all can't give her the respect. And I hope people grow out of it. I don't know if it's an age thing. I don't know if it's just the times, the social media, whatever. But I know that's not the basis of this podcast. But it just— I felt like I.

Needed to point that out. No, it's true across the board. It's true when you hire employees. You hire employees nowadays, and the first thing they want to know is, when's my vacation? When's my 9/80 workweek? What's the employee bonus? And we're like, well, first off, I don't know if I'm going to hire you yet or not. So why don't we get through whether you even qualify to be at this job? I don't think the arrogance is going to stop at that level or even on just normal employee level. Until there's a correction in the market. So I don't think the last 2 years has been really that much of a reset. I think we had a little bump in the road. I think it takes a 2008 to knock the wind out of all these people's sails. And those little TikTokers and stuff, you know, I've got $5 million, $10 million, I made $20 million on Bitcoin. They'll go to Ponzi schemes. They'll get ripped off. They'll make bad decisions. They'll owe the IRS. They won't pay their taxes. Maybe 5% make it through in 10 years from now. They still have most of their money. But the one thing about life is life is real. And the brutality of life can come from drugs and bad marriages and divorces and the same thing we've all gone through. Um, I kind of just keep a blind eye to it. It's kind of like, uh, when I used to go hunting, I was young, about 19, never been hunting before deer, because my parents had no money. These old crusty guys in the lease were like, wait, come here, city boy. You ever been? I said, well, I'm not a city boy, but I've never been hunting because I couldn't afford it. Well, we're going to tell you what to hunt and how to do it and all this kind of stuff. And the whole idea was. Said, we're smart and old. We're going to save you a lot of grief. They didn't do it in a disrespectful way. They said, we're going to save you a lot of grief. We're going to tell you how to hunt, how to be safe, what to look for, and how to be calm. I got 30 years of hunting experience from 6 guys who said, if you listen to me and not act like a little snotty-nosed 19-year-old, we're going to give you a great experience you can have the rest of your life. And I listened. Immediately they absorbed me in at the camp like, okay, you're not one of those snotty-nosed kids. You're, you're somebody who has some integrity and backbone. I think that's the problem. They don't have any integrity and backbone. They've made money so fast, they have no respect for it. No respect. And that doesn't last long. Maybe 2% get through the gauntlet. But I, you know, I appreciate you guys having me talk. I, I talk a lot. I have a lot to share, but it's just a, entrepreneurship is an incredible art and most people will never get the art that they think is gonna land in their lap. Nothing lands your lap when you're an entrepreneur. You gotta sweat. See it, want it, drive for it, keep your eye on the ball, be creative, and ask for advice. You got to ask for great advice.

From people who've already been down the road before. I published something recently where I was quoting statistics on successful entrepreneurs, and 50% of all startup businesses fail in the first 5 years. And only 5% of those that survive, so 5% of the 50%, 2.5%, get to to $1 million of top-line revenue. So, you know, if you think about the, like a business that you've created, the likelihood of starting that, surviving, scaling, growing, it is just this tiny, tiny fraction.

It is really damn hard. I wake every day and I tell my wife how blessed we are. I said, because there's 1,000 reasons we should have never made it through the gauntlet. And I said, and the good news is that God, great employees, tenacity got us where we're at. And, um, I'm super excited about where we're at because it has allowed us to benefit and to share this with so many other employees and watch their families. And they get to buy new cars and houses. And I see my 2,000 clients get their checks every month and revenue and are able to retire. And a lot of them have quit their jobs, retired off all the income we're making them. So to me, to be able to do that and get through the gauntlet and, and know that there's a thousand times I should have been down and out and to be here, I know I'm one of the very, very few in the oil and gas business that's been able to get this far. It is a brutal business.

It is a brutal business. Well, I'm looking forward to following your 10-year plan.

Yeah.

If I were a betting man, I would be betting on your success.

Well, let's have lunch every year and I'll give you an update every year. I'll come take you guys out for lunch and I'll say, here's where we're at. Absolutely. You can look at me and go, get busy, you're behind.

Let's go. Yeah. Well, thank you for sharing your time. Appreciate you guys.

Stories are great.

Good meeting both of you. I love your energy.

Thank you.

Yes, sir.

Thank you so much.

Thank you both.