Better to be lucky than good! Steven Startz is a drilling veteran with over 25 years of experience, and his next venture is Bionic Directional Drilling. His goal is to take his tribal knowledge and apply it to drilling with small to mid-size operators who need experienced hands. I'll state the obvious: Steven is a bit of a cowboy, and we're here for it.We kick things off with a war story that perfectly captures what it means to be a directional driller. From there, we cover his journey through the Barnett Shale boom, threading a needle under downtown Fort Worth with two 180-degree turns, to witnessing a 705 million cubic feet per day flow test in Papua New Guinea that shook his bunk like a 747 for two straight nights. Steven talks about why now is actually the perfect time to launch a directional drilling company, why experience matters more than ever when oil is trading in the $50s, and how smaller operators need people who can make decisions without constant hand-holding. He's also making moves into geothermal drilling in Nevada, Utah, and even Germany, where his wife is from. The guy's driven the Autobahn fast more than once (he's a car guy), and he prefers coffee over Red Bull. Visit localenergy.com for all the show notes. Highlights00:00 - War story: Stalling 86 times while drilling through the North American Ash bed in the Eagle Ford's "snowbank"05:46 - Threading the needle: Drilling the complicated Barnett Shale well under downtown Fort Worth with two 180-degree turns11:54 - The art of directional drilling: Why you can't just rely on the "magic box" and need to understand the physics15:18 - Standing up Bionic Directional Drilling Solutions to serve smaller operators who need experienced hands19:17 - Expanding into geothermal drilling and why the technology translates directly from oil and gas24:55 - How resistivity tools work and why they're critical for finding target zones in geothermal applications28:18 - The flaring problem in the Permian Basin and why we should be generating power instead of burning natural gas29:10 - The challenge of breaking into the industry when most contacts have retired or passed away