Who is Dr. Phil, and what is he doing in Greenland?
The American television personality has traded daytime therapy for Arctic oil, fronting a docuseries about a Texas company’s push to drill in East Greenland.
If you follow Arctic energy news, you may have noticed an unexpected name attached to Greenland Energy Company over the past few weeks: Dr. Phil. Not a Dr. Phil. The Dr. Phil.
Phil McGraw, the 75-year-old psychologist who spent two decades dispensing blunt advice to guests on the daytime program that bore his name, has announced a partnership between his media company and the firm preparing to drill the Jameson Land basin. The centerpiece is Arctic Wildcatters, a six-part documentary series hosted by McGraw and slated to premiere late this summer on his Envoy TV, following Greenland Energy as it attempts the first modern onshore oil drilling on the island.
To understand how a talk-show host ended up narrating a hydrocarbon exploration campaign above the Arctic Circle, it helps to know where each party stands. In an episode of The Dr. Phil Podcast, embedded below, McGraw hosts the men behind the venture as they make their pitch. It is worth watching for anyone curious about Arctic oil exploration, or after a revealing insight into Trump’s incessant interest in annexing Greenland.
Who is Dr. Phil?
McGraw built his fame on Dr. Phil, the syndicated talk show that ran from 2002 to 2023 after he was introduced to American audiences by Oprah Winfrey. At its peak the program made him one of the highest-paid figures in daytime television.
When the show ended, McGraw moved into ownership. In 2024 he launched Merit Street Media, a cable network built around his brand, in a joint venture with Trinity Broadcasting Network. The venture collapsed. Merit Street filed for bankruptcy in July 2025 amid a dispute with its broadcast partner, and in October 2025 a federal judge ordered the company wound down and its assets sold off.
The court found that McGraw had created a new company, Envoy Media, a day before Merit Street filed for bankruptcy. It is Envoy that is now behind the Greenland docuseries. McGraw’s team has said it will appeal the ruling. And Envoy, a young network in need of programming, is where an Arctic oil adventure comes in: exactly the kind of content that fills a schedule and, presumably, helps pay for it.
Alongside the move into ownership came a political turn. Over the past two years McGraw has become a vocal supporter of Donald Trump, particularly on immigration, appearing at a Trump rally and hosting border czar Tom Homan on his podcast. In January 2025 he embedded with ICE agents during immigration raids around Chicago, describing the targets as “known criminals and terrorists,” and broadcast the footage on Merit Street.
Greenland Energy sits in the same orbit. Republican mega-donor Kenneth Griffin, the Citadel founder who gave $1 million toward Trump’s second inauguration, bought a 9 percent stake in the company in April, adding to a roster of Trump-linked figures attached to the venture. Some shareholders have reportedly discussed the prospect of a presidential endorsement so eagerly that they have taken to calling it a “Trump pump.”
Why Greenland?
The rights that underpin the story are murkier than the podcast suggests. Greenland Energy is buying into exclusive licenses covering the two-million-acre Jameson Land basin, among the few that survived the moratorium the territory imposed on new oil exploration in 2021. But holding a license is not the same as being cleared to drill. Greenland’s resources ministry says there are no active permissions for exploration, that drilling needs environmental approvals the company does not yet have, and that any extraction would require a further, separate green light. The company’s public statements, the mineral resources minister said, “do not always reflect the actual situation.”
Price sells the project hard, claiming a trillion dollars of crude could lie beneath Jameson Land and pointing to an independent estimate of up to 13 billion barrels, all before a single well has been drilled. Greenland’s officials have tried to cool things down. As Arctic Today reported in June, a senior civil servant noted the company’s application covers only preliminary geological surveys, with actual drilling coming in a later phase and environmental assessments alone taking around two years. Price and McGraw prefer the bigger frame, tying the venture to European energy security and the Strait of Hormuz.
The podcast
In the podcast, McGraw sits down with Price and with Larry Swets, the investment banker who took Greenland Energy public and rang the Nasdaq opening bell in April. It is, unmistakably, an infomercial. McGraw breaks from the Arctic discussion to promote an AI business tool he has partnered with, directing viewers to his own branded web address, and later pitches a gold-and-silver retirement product through a second branded site, before returning, without apparent transition, to questions about polar bears and seismic data.
For his part, Price is candid about the odds. Asked about the chance of a successful well, he does not dispute that skeptics put it low, and instead argues the basin’s five-formation structure gives the first well a strong shot.
Whether the drill bit finds 13 billion barrels or nothing, the cameras will be rolling. McGraw has promised weekly updates, live reports from the drill site, and what he describes as a round-the-clock drill cam. For a man who spent twenty years on the air analyzing people, he has found an unusually frigid place for his therapeutic talents.
