particular relationships. it means if you don't develop animosity with one particular judge it could affect a decision and you don't want that to happen in. . .

this program is about an hour here we are with the secret world of oil, your new book on the oil business. i'm going to ask the first question that you are sick of answering. why did you decide to write this book lacks >> guest: well, i've written about the oil industry for a long time, for over a decade. and i've written about the corruption of the oil industry and the way the united states maintains close relationships with various unattractive

regimes and the basis of the relationship so for example when i was at the los angeles times back in 2002 that's when i first started writing about it and if the equatorial guinea which is a small west african country, nobody knew about it or cared about it. it was a pariah state, terrible dictatorship and dirt poor. and then in the mid-1990s, exxon found a lot of oil and other american companies poured in and suddenly the relationship changed and it was no longer a pariah. they had a friendly relationship because it was a little too embarrassing but there was a re- approach meant and now he comes from washington to time to time.

it was a coincidence and i was looking at another story whose firm got a private contracts to help develop a coast guard. i thought how interesting and i started writing about that and probably spent a lot of the past decade writing about the similar topics in kazakhstan. like a lot of journalism stories you get onto a topic and you keep writing on it. >> there's a lot of talk and economic developments and we saw that firsthand with the family and others that are discovered that discovered oil or natural gas or other resources. can you talk about what does it do to a country, designate them

better off or does it make them worse off because it frees up the brewers and any sort of accountability at all? >> guest: in general that has made countries worse off. if you suddenly find only all in a country where there is really no form of democracy, no history of democracy like equatorial guinea where they gain independence it's like a colony of spain until the 60s, 1968 they gained independence and then there's literally character who was a complete lunatic takes power, terrorizes the country and then 11 years later his nephew executes them, overthrows them and has had power ever since there is no tradition of democracy so you can go in that environment when a government gets its hands on that sort of legal wealth that is almost inevitable that it leads to corruption and very little improvement for people.

so, in nigeria for example, nigeria firms have been pumping oil for nearly half a century now and the country itself is certainly worse off, not better off. i remember talking to the former cia official who had traveled to nigeria. he wasn't stationed there at the perks of the office of transnational threats he went to nigeria and he said he concluded on the basis of conversations with people that the country would have been better off if they never discovered oil. so, in a lot of places, as i note in the book the former vice president cheney once noted god didn't see fit to put put legal only oil only in democratic countries friendly to the united states where the boy was found in kazakhstan or azerbaijan or equatorial guinea or chad or

cameroon the odds are that it's not going to do people a lot of good. there are some countries, norway which has a long history of democracy -- norway has done pretty well on a legal. so it's not automatic. it really depends on the context of the environment. the united states is a mixed bag in some ways. you know, certainly -- then again let me refer to a conversation with the former chevron executive who now i think is at the center for strategic and international studies and he talked about the difference between development of oil resources and specifically about central asia and azerbaijan where they have enormous concessions and they obtain them when he was at chevron. he says both the difference

between kazakhstan and the united states is in the u.s., the oil resources are not owned by the state. the individual land owner in texas or louisiana gets royalties. the companies pump the oil and the landowner gets the money and sometimes there isn't a huge environmental footprint. the companies are making money and create jobs and create some wealth. the country has a lot of oil wealth but it hasn't been shared very well and in terms of social indicators louisiana runs pretty well on just about everything and in terms of health and education and per capita income.

>> host: but they don't have a problem believing in the government, just broadly there is a lot of production and it's very different from the rest. it's a political culture in louisiana and it does seem to be very different in other states in the u.s.. so is it when you look at texas and in those places do you see the same level or is it -- >> no it is the political context. louisiana has been the tory is us for some time. so, end of the united states we have all sorts of political problems that we are not kazakhstan just yet and so yes the wealth generated by oil has been better certainly than it's been for the residents of legal rich west africa for the political context is very important for just love to say that it's not created problems as well as everyone knows from environmental problems would be the main one people think about

and i guess that would be the main one in the united united states but people worry about the most. >> host: you don't talk much about speedy web in which surprised me -- fracking which surprised me. did you think about giving more on that order that the focus was on conventional legal? >> guest: the focus of the book is looking at the middleman because we are succeeding in some extend shining a light on the part of the oil industry and the natural resource industry that doesn't receive a lot of attention which is the role that the traders and intermediaries and the middlemen or whatever you want to call them, these are people that sort of our between the companies and the governments in some of these more corrupt countries where

it's not like you submit a bid and then the government needs access to see what is going to be the best deal. you have to grease the wheel and there is no other way of doing it. you can't make the government officials while v.. the old model was let's transfer some money to the bank account and now it is a lot more complicated if the company is a sadly not correct in spirit, they are all corrupt but you know, you cannot do business in many races of the world and especially oriel is such a sensitive commodity. you know, oil and weapons are the two most important commodities to any government. you can't run your economy without oil or defend without

weapons and partly because of that there is a very centralized decision-making. only a few people are in on that and again, because the countries i keep referring to in central asia and west africa where you have dictatorships or authoritarian governments, however you want to put it you have people making decisions and so, the key to getting the deal is often having the right fixture, having the right of middleman. you can't do business in some places without a door opener and the door openers typically a person who has over the years built up trust and confidence and access to senior government officials or the president often and can get you in the door. as i said, the old model was just what is your swiss bank account and now in equatorial

guinea exxon and chevron and other oil companies got deals over there and they were investigated by the u.s. government and never charged for reasons that i find surprising because they enriched the government and the president. as far as i know they didn't simply by your cash but for example they bought land from the president. we want to build our compound but you owned the land. is that right? they hired a security firm in several of the companies hired a security firm to guard their compounds and installations into the security firm is owned by the brother of the president who was identified in the report as a torturer.

you know, several of the companies made him a partner on the business deals where he mysteriously didn't even have to put any money down. they said they will give you a cut i think exxon gave them a 20% cut of the oriel distribution business. but it wasn't there. it wasn't the oil concession itself but it was an oil distribution company. i think they gave him 20% for nothing down. after you pay for your share out of the prophet then it'll just goes to you. >> host: i want to ask about this because these deals are being structured that way precisely and some people would say this is the price that we are going to pay and only always been discovered in more developing countries.

in other places now with fracking it is less true true but you have true that you have the countries whose borders were drawn by colonial powers and no institution before the european powers pulled out. it was often with cross-cultural borders that bisect ethnic groups and say in these weak institutions date you are going to get corruption and the price of getting the oil is being willing to pay, why should we hold that u.s. companies accountable to the higher standard and let them go in and find anybody they want what would you say to this? >> guest: the question is fracking is now developing and it is a new form of development and there is -- is in the international business as well but i was looking at those that are ranged between the oldest of

which patterns that have never been -- boast of the industry now is expanding but a lot of the business is domestic. you don't have the middleman here at least not in the same way. in terms of the other question that you asked about why shouldn't we -- we just have to tolerate corruption because it is part of the environment. and to a certain extent that is true. there is no way unless you are willing to say we just won't, we will survive without that footage is not going to happen, you have to be practical and realistic to a certain extent. i am not saying and i don't think that anyone can argue let's just not do business anymore with saudi arabia's

>> host: the french would buy the oil and we would buy it from them. >> guest: it's not just a past relationship that we develop the fields and take the oil. it's much more complicated and entrenched than that. they come into sight in equatorial guinea where you come to a country like this which is dirt poor and you can say you can't do business there without somehow making the government officials happy. while committee made him very, very happy. he's one of the richest in the world, one of the richest rulers in the world at this point. his son who has had a

30 million-dollar home in malibu there is an asset forfeiture in the u.s. government and he commissioned at $350 million. he is like a 45-year-old do-nothing kid whose father installed to head the department of the environment of people jokingly referred to as the department of chopping down trees so she's making money off of the timber trade and then the appropriating money from the oil well. so, you know you can say we have to tolerate a little bit of corruption but they are not just tolerating, they are facilitating mass corruption and beyond that, they then they hold their interest there and they didn't lobby for these governments. so you have the american oil companies that are actively promoting the beyond as a reporter that is just preposterous.

they are trying to develop a relationship on the basis of fraud. he has held power since 1979. he has been reelected three times the last time i believed was 99% of the vote. >> host: i wonder why that one person. why not just go all the way? >> guest: it's just incredible. but you know, so you build a relationship and become a partner so it it isn't half the relationship. so that's part of it and i also think you see repeatedly time and time again, you know i don't reduce american foreign policy. i think that is too simplistic. at the same time, anyone that looks at american american foreign policy and ignores oil, that's equally preposterous. you look at u.s. history and the relationships we have developed and it's not like there hasn't been blowback in some of these

cases. we have a deep and long relationship. post-9/11 there was a reason we have to move away from the middle east oil because look at all the trouble it's caused. we will look at central asia. those are stable good governance. so if you think there is an ethical argument, honestly there is no way that one can simply say we have to have a perfectly ethical energy policy because assigning of their governments don't play that way but they are also practical considerations and it's definitely been costly in many ways to the united states and the public to maintain these relationships with some of these countries. >> host: talk about some of

the costs at what cost to the american public. >> guest: if you look at the middle east what is the basis of the relationship with these various middle eastern countries? it's pretty much all you'll. again i don't want to reduce that, but there is a former -- that is definitely part of the relationship that in fact it is our closest ally in the region that is oil rich so there is a strategic energy related hugh but it isn't strictly oil, definitely not. however, it's important. it's very significant. you have a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who's at the center for american progress who once said if the

exported artichokes we wouldn't have a close relationship with them. that the war in iraq. once again yes it isn't purely about oil but is there anyway that the architects of the war in iraq are sitting around the room thinking about whether to invade or not, well it is a major -- they do have major reserves. >> it would have to be almost because of course the original invasion of kuwait was about arguments over that reserve of who is draining too much from the reserve in the iraq border. so i agree it always does come back to the oil. what should we be doing differently? >> guest: while certainly

there isn't a grand theoretical argument. i've worked as an investigative reporter and i am not, you know, i don't want to promote myself as a huge -- that's what i like to do. i like to write about things i find interesting and i hope other people do, too but too mac but in terms of what we should be doing differently, obviously i don't think that anyone would say even the oil companies wouldn't say we are dedicated to the idea, but to the extent that we are reducing the dependence on fossil fuel it's better. you have all sorts of reasons for the empire and mental global warming. there are all sorts of negativity from our dependence on oil. everyone talks about it.

every time there's a presidential election, both of the candidates talk about how we have to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. and even in general, there's now a consensus that we should be using less fossil fuel. so coming you know, is that a cure-all? of course not. but i do think as i write about in the book, oil is certainly by almost any measure the most corrupt industry in the world. the energy industry there's a variety of reasons for that. one of them is as dick cheney pointed out there's a lot of oil that is in corrupt countries. that's just the way that things happen. or if you belief that god planned it, i don't know. but that's where a lot of it has traditionally been found. but also because oil is if you

are looking at an oil company by american, chinese, french, whatever and you're looking at a deal in kazakhstan, it's going to matter to the corporate bottom line for a long time and any significant way whether in a significant way whether you get the deal or not. it's not like we sold stock and lost that he'll to provide 10,000 pairs of socks. an oil concession talking about tens of hundreds of billions of dollars, and so the incentive to get the deal is huge. and the incentive to maybe cut the corners oil but is also huge. so. so coming you see if you look at the number of foreign corrupt practices, but corrupt practices and cases by any measure the industries, p.o. box weapons and oil. and partly because the deals are so huge and partly it is because

as i referred to earlier, you typically have very few decision-makers. you don't need it to gain the support you need to get the minister and the way to do that typically -- >> host: it is so fungible and i was fascinated into getting out of the work on the economy and iraq after the invasion and the ways in which the pipelines were carried out and running at half normal capacity because they drilled holes in the pipeline and the oriole would disappear and what gets transferred somewhere else and of course it is theoretical possible to trace the chemical signatures to figure out where it came from but once you moved it out of the country and got it into the market is a valuable commodity that is pretty much untraceable. so you're always going to have quite a lot of incentive i would think.

what is the most outrageous or interesting thing that you came about? >> guest: the most surprising thing talking to oil company officials with the middlemen who were focused at the book when talking to the industry insiders and a lot of them would talk off the record but not all, there were a number of people in the book that did agree to talk on the record, the sort of casual acceptance of corruption was sort of surprising to me because i guess i didn't expect people to be so forthright about it because publicly nobody ever says what they say in private. but coming you know in this case in private the companies would never say of course we can't

work in equatorial guinea without paying off senior government officials. i mean, give me a break. but in private, that was the attitude. you can call it corruption that it's part of the system. and so there was just an openness about it that in some ways was surprising. and people talked about i was even intrigued and interested to hear that the new forms of corruption where people said we can't just have a bag of cash under the table anymore or wire the money in. so that's got to be much worse much for sophisticated. so, you have the oriole minister's nephew opened a company in the british virgin islands which can't be traced to them normally anyway and that company is hired to do some consulting service which they are not doing anything.

they are just a recipient of money but somehow it will find it's because the minister. so with the openness. >> host: we do hear a lot in the developing world the corruption on the grounds there was a joke that went around about hillary clinton talking to a foreign minister who said you can't corruption and we call it family values. but in fact in this society this sort of thing in some ways if you don't have the ability what you end up with this corruption to the people of. is that at all fair that these are states that don't have the power and corruption is what they have instead? >> guest: i think it is a bit self-serving and an apology for behavior that really most people

wouldn't find acceptable. i wouldn't say that it is entirely false. i mean i certainly heard another oil trader and talked to in switzerland said he made this argument. he said look in the united states, you know, you pay, you make goldman sachs makes political contributions and it's just based on money, same thing. i don't think one can dismiss that argument. we have a different way of doing things, but it is legalized corruption in a sense. but it doesn't hold up if you travel to these countries. i've been to a number of countries in western africa and yes it's true that money is distributed by the head of the clan but you can see with your

own eyes the president of the country is living in a mansion overlooking this sprawling slum. >> host: i have to stop for a short break and we will be back in a few minutes. >> host: we've been talking about the countries and the corruption there and now i want to move on to the people in the middle because you have some very theatrical characters who are facilitating all of these contracts. he talked about the traders and the sixers. what is the difference between the fixer and the gatekeeper?

>> guest: there's not a huge difference. they do similar things. basically, you have -- the sixers it's been a traditionally smaller group of people. maybe a dozen or a few dozen people who have in various parts of the world have access to the president of the top government officials that you pretty much have to do business through them. so if you want to get a deal in nigeria, for example, for a long time there were a few people you could go to. one of them is a longtime friend of bill clinton to the clinton foundation and had pretty close ties to the democratic party and

the clinton years and nobody knows exactly quite how he did that he had access to the senior government officials in nigeria. so it wasn't just a whale because he had all sorts of relationships and would broker a lot of deals but you go to shorey and hired him as a consultant and you miraculously end up with big contracts over there. this is an interesting story. jim defend who was well-connected in the former soviet union from the very beginning, from the very earliest post-communist period so he was actually indicted by the u.s. justice department in charge with i don't know if they were bribes -- this was about

ten years ago when he was charged and he had been hired by u.s. oil companies as a consultant in kazakhstan, and he was charged with filing i think $80 million into -- this was the old model -- into the accounts controlled by the prime minister and president of kazakhstan. and, you know, he was a guy that had very a very close personal relationships with the president. you know, he had a house in the fanciest neighborhood of the capital in kazakhstan. when the president came to washington, he would show him around to meet with washington officials. you could end hoped to do business without hiring him as a

consultant, so he was indicted and charged in the case dragged on for years and years and he basically used the defense. i don't want to say that he acknowledged that he had made payments to the president although it is clear that he brought the president and his wife matching snowmobiles and jewelry for the wife and they paid the tuition of a daughter that attended the college here in college here in the washington area. but in the end, he basically said everybody knows what i'm doing. this isn't a mystery. i was talking to the state department and the cia and everybody knew what i was doing and what my relationship was and so why are you bothering me? and in the end, he basically got off and the judge in the case

said you've been persecuted. i think that he even used the term american hero. he said you were helping the u.s. oil companies and get concessions get concessions that were important to the united states and so it became known as the gate but in the end he was never charged. so he was one of the interesting characters in the book. >> host: it isn't clear how one becomes a fixer. is there an application process, competition and? how do they get the connection? i suppose it is a shadow that we do not really understand to enable them to be trustworthy.

it is pretty corrupt but one way that the people become fixers fixtures i think is becoming trustworthy in that they do have the access and you can arrange deals and that you are good to your word. so one of the people i write about the contacts and the influence in nigeria and i talked to them extensively and as i acknowledged in the book i came to like him and be friends with him and he is a really fascinating character, very hard not to like. one of the things there is no job application but one of the things i think is part of the -- you have to be relatively charming.

>> host: [inaudible] >> guest: his father's -- the family of the lebanese origin grew up in nigeria and he told me that he had initially how he got into the business was that his family was wealthy in nigeria and they had a peanut business or something and decided someone who was a friend or related to his sister from the middle eastern airline said we are looking for a business and we need an introduction and he knew everybody. he was in the business.

he wasn't -- it was the peanut processing business but it was his second business still. so come he knew various government officials and made the necessary introductions into the deal struck and he said, you know, why in my dealing with peanuts when i could be paid to use my context. it's hard to know exactly unless people are willing to talk about it what is the origin of the relationship, but when you do business in a country like equatorial guinea or cameroon if you are a prosperous businessman , you tend to know government officials and you can make use of that. >> host: they are cambodian or

is it someone international for some sort of communication or trust -- >> guest: partly because you are talking about middlemen. they played a role play the role to broker introductions in the company and the government. and in part certainly the american companies because of the foreign corrupt practices act wanted to have a certain distance, you want to be able to deny the plausible deniability about the relationship with somebody. so, you hire somebody also who is not accountable to the corrupt practices act so you hire a european or middle eastern or who wouldn't

necessarily -- >> host: i have no idea why it was so expensive but it is the best place to put the headquarters so that's what we got. >> guest: there are now a lot of local middlemen who've gotten very while the broker deals with the government. that initially in a lot of the countries countries when you go into a place where you're not familiar, you are looking for somebody that can give you the lay of the land and i'm sure they have their local context but often within angola or bp got into a bit of trouble because they hired someone to be the spokesperson who was a senior government official or was related to a senior government official, but often you want somebody who is a bit

of a outsider but does the country and can point you to the right people. >> host: what about the traders? we haven't talked about them yet and that is a big chapter in a big part of the oil market. and you talk about one quarter of the huge commodity operation. what role do they play in this? >> guest: is an enormous company that a lot of americans haven't heard of. >> host: they've heard of marc rich though, the founder of the company. >> guest: that's right because he was famously pardoned, he was charged with trading the enemy and he fled to the united states to have an indictment and then on the last day in office he was pardoned for reasons that have never been fully explained.

>> guest: that might have something to do with it and there were extensive campaign contributions that she made. and certainly i think that it would be naïve to think that that didn't have something to do with the pardon. i do hope to be writing another story about that though and there are other interesting reasons as well. >> host: are you allowed to dish on c-span? >> guest: it is a good story but i do not want to be telling it sometime in the next few months. it's ironic is an old story but part of it is very, very interesting. and i will only say that favors that they did for the government overseas -- >> host: you are killing me here. >> guest: it is a good story. >> host: have to watch out for that on the media. so, you've got these -- one of

the things that you suggest is that they could be manipulating the oil prices. you have a passage where you say the price of oil has been swimming wildly in the band-aid act and after floating on the $40 per barrel range it started to decline sharply in 2005 when it cost $70,000 inspect at 140 in the middle of 2008. but then the price fell off the cliff and the road within six months and tripled again. do you think that is the role that it's sort of the predictable response of getting to the production frontier where you are extending it a little bit but it seems to have been collated and the in the amount of oil they can possibly produce and how much do you think they

play? >> guest: certainly as the oil roles to say that it's purely a function of penetration of the market is just wrong there are all sorts of things that benefit the impact in oil. the war in iraq for example or, you know, the chaos -- )-right-paren others all sorts of things that are impacting the price of oil. but there have been periods where traders certainly have accelerated trends either upward or downward. people do make money on this business. you are making money at the margin. i talked to, you know where if the price per barrel changes by a small amount if you own enough barrels or trade enough barrels it is very profitable to be on the side of the curve. >> host: they are also

possible to be on the wrong side of the curve. >> guest: there was someone who told me that had been talking where they said when bidding on the price of loyalty to love, you don't want to be betting on it to go down. so i think there is a contributing factor into their been times when the traders have certainly influenced the prices. i did talk to another trader said look, you know, when i started in this business, the paper tray to versus the physical trade -- >> host: the right to buy. >> guest: he said that it was 1-1 and that it's more like 40 or 50-1. there is a huge paper trade and it is subject that 40% boobs 3%

of the daily oil trade and it's not even the biggest there are other firms that are bigger. so, you know, there is an ability to manipulate markets which i think it's happened at is happened at times. >> host: and, you know, what -- how do you see that? doesn't show up in the swift movement for does it show up in a movement of one direction or another? >> guest: i think as i said, it is not ever going to be the one factor -- you're not going to see that because of the manipulation of the market but if you see the market going like this naturally you might see it coming a little bit sharper because of the manipulation of

oil prices. >> host: said that accelerates whichever way the market is going. >> guest: i wouldn't say that it is all the time but there have been times where the traders have -- it appears they have certainly contributed to the downward and upward movement. >> host: talk about what they do all day. >> guest: the actual oil trader it's like going to a wall street firm. it's not that exciting. i went to a couple of these. they are hyper corporate. very fancy. one of the firms i went to in geneva was a little bit more polished here than the c-span studio. they have the furniture was polished and i believe when we opened the conference it or it was an electronic door that you

were looking at a computer screen and you are looking at the price of oil. so i think it is a lot like being a wall street trader. >> host: they are so quiet. they were not in the '90s but that the world's largest bond fund that is totally quiet. >> guest: that's pretty much what i saw. it was not hugely exciting. but it was interesting because i did talk to the traders about what they did that night which was more interesting when they were wining and dining. i talked to one trader said he was selling refined products to buyers in asia who needed large

quantities. so, they did a lot of entertaining in the evening and he said that, again that is part of the way business is done. we take them out and discover that's how they got a lot of their contracts. >> host: that sounds very similar. that is the central part of the business i think. >> host: by as the paper trade increased? why is everything happening in paper? >> guest: i.e. can't give you a detailed answer on that. i got a little bit of speculation and develop.

it was a central part of the book. maybe you should have been because there is a topic that was interesting but i think it's in the same way that wall street trading, so much of the trade now with these highly sophisticated products that nobody really understands, and i think it is probably just followed if a similar trend, but i can't give you a good answer. >> host: how different is this from other kinds of lobbying? is it special or is it basically the same dance that is done in every state capital in every country in the world? >> guest: well, i wrote in the book a little bit about federal and inexpensively at louisiana and the situation there. research extent yes it is the

same old deal. you have got the oil industry is very powerful and influential, it's not a stand-alone issue in that regard obviously. it is one of iowa's state is one of the more powerful lobbying forces because it is a huge industry so they do but other industries do they just do more of it. they hire more lobbyists. they pay more money. they get more meetings. and they do have an advantage in that because oil and gas are central to running the economy and its frequently plays a it frequently plays a role in the foreign policy. people in government are very open to arguments about the need to help out the industry. so over the years the industry has done quite well in washington. in louisiana, i think because

the industry has always been so influential that the state level and if you include the offshore, i think it is still the biggest offshore per capita producer and as we discussed earlier, louisiana really does have a particular culture. and it's an interesting place and a fun place to report from. you can't go wrong reporting from louisiana. you always meet interesting people. and eat great food as well for the most part. i spend my fair amount of time in the strip malls meeting people there. but the situation in louisiana is i think it is clearly one of the states with the most influence and when they want

something they tend to get it and i went and i told the story in the book about getting a couple of very lucky breaks in louisiana. one of them is that i went to interview a lobbyist, one of the more powerful lobbyists in the state certainly and we had a long conversation during which she was extraordinarily forthright about the influence of the industry and how they were able to gain support and layouts to me the details of how they had pushed the bill through the legislature in the previous session and i kept thinking why are you being so forthright with me ask >> host: i told you i was a reporter and i was going to write this down. >> guest: that is what i kept thinking and it's not like i was taking notes but it turned out that at the end of the interview

we talked for several hours and when i got the bill and was given my credit card to pick up the tab, they said you really don't look anything like i expected. and i immediately knew what had happened. ken silverstein was based in west virginia but writes about about the oil industry and the trade industry publications and i would say much more sympathetic to the industry in circumspect so i felt obliged to say i think there's been a misunderstanding. but because of that misunderstanding i did hear a lot of very interesting stories. and to the great credit even afterward, she was surprised when i said i'm not that kenneth silverstein. but she continued to talk with

me all along even though after that it was originally the chapter was based on the piece for harpers magazine and i hadn't spoken with haven't spoken with her much before that. >> host: neil bush, you close with him. why? >> guest: was really and truly it is an interesting story. neil bush is the brother of george w. bush and the son of george bush senior of course and he just had a curious and really astonishing career in the oil industry which doesn't appear to be based on his success because he has failed repeatedly time and time again. he would say the track record unblemished by success. yet people over the years continuously partnered with him and it is really hard to understand why it is because of his family name. certainly he hasn't done as well

in the obama years that but if jeb bush were to become president again i think that his star would rise. i thought that it was a funny story and an interesting story and a reflection not just of the oil business where it's the way the world works but it's the way the business world works. >> host: the clintons had a number of career opportunities and a starting edge. >> guest: getting paid an astonishing amount of money. but i thought that it was a funny story. the truth is my editor and i discussed and we didn't want to lose it. that's when when they do not did america become the last chapter. >> host: you've got a lot of people to talk to you on the record. how do you make that approach? >> guest: i don't know. i'm always surprised why people

talk to journalists although i often think it is a smart thing to do because, you know, while even though i'm critical of the industry, i generally was good tonight word with people. i told them if they asked i'm pretty critical of the industry. i also think i spoke to a lot of people who are confident and powerful and don't have an some ways a lot of doubt, but it also feels like they've done a lot of interesting and important things and they are not interested by what they've done and they feel like they have a good story to tell. but he may be writing a story and think why even bother. i will never get the call returned or he or a table being greedy or it will be no comments so why bother with people talk to you for a lot of different

reasons. sometimes it is anarchy or pride or just because they are open-minded. sometimes because they are confident, usually it is a combination of things. so, that's far outnumbered the ones i did talk to me. >> host: i always loved the excuses and i once had a company tell me every single person that worked for the company would be traveling the next month and a half. i would talk at 3 a.m. and they would say no everyone is traveling. very busy schedule. what was the best turned down you got for an interview? >> guest: mostly i just never heard. i requested interviews and they were very busy so