and i said, of course, i do. [laughter] nonotorious -- unchts you can watch this and other booktv programs from past 20 years, at booktv.org. type the author's name and word book in the search bar at the top of the page. good evening everybody my name is ben and i'm the general manager here at bookstore. and i want to just welcome you tonight and we are very excited to host bethany mclane, with author of saudi america her brand new book and tell you about her in a second but first i want to mention that if you

don't know much about it -- has been houston premier independent book sellers since 1947 and we host about 250 events each year if you're in houston, come back to join us for jose and ben fountain and god did i mitch and lots morehat is available as well as lots of other things on our website the bookstore. so now about tonight's author bethany maclaine coauthor of the best selling smartest guy in the room the amazing rise and scandalous fall with peter for second book which she coauthored with joe is all of the devils are here. the hissen history of the financial crisis. her most recent book, before this one tonight is shaky grounds strange saga of the u.s. mortgage giant. she's also a contradicting editor at vanity fair, and now lives in chicago. her new book saudi america reveals true story of fracking account ga on wall street to

economy and geopolitics top topic near and dear to our hearts here in houston and happy she's here to discuss with us tonight join me in welcoming bethany maclaine. [applause] thank you all so much for coming. so i'm going to talk for probably about a half an hour and i'll come back to the probably and open it up to questions. and the probably is from young age in grade school i detested speaking outloud to i speak as quickly as i possibly could. which means that i talk really, really fast because i can't seem to untrain myself so somebody in the audience yells slow down i'll take it as a helpful solution not as a rude intreption but i'll try. may be i wrote this book because i was really obsessed for a listening time with two thing one was what i see is this big dichotomy -- shale fracking getting oil and gas out of shale is changing the world. we've gone from congressional

hearings a decade ago about -- u.s. shortages of oil and natural gas to beeting our chest about american and energy independents even energy dominance president trump has calmed it. economists i spoke to for the book named eric summed that shale is one of the top five thing reshaping geopolitics and it is. you have seen news that u.s. is biggest producer of crude oil topping russia and scraib for first time since the 1970s. and you can look no further than saudi arabia which is seen unprecedented upheaval what was that palace coop and no small measure due pressure that low oil prices are putting on kingdom and low oil prices are a function of the amount of oil produced in the u.s. as a result of fracking. as to whether all of this is a good or bad thing for us i'm going to come back to them. as for my second obsession who wouldn't be obsessed with with alabama brie former ceo of

chesapeake love them or hate them and a lot of sentiments out there he's within of the remarkable characters that make -- business stories read like novels. one of those characters that proves the old ad is truth are of stranger than fiction over and over again you couldn't invent a guy like this. if you tried -- and he's like many of needs great characters in the business world a mix of really remarkable positive attributes with some really negative dangerous ones as well. i finished any very first story for vanity fair with a quote that i always think about and it is a quote from calvin and hob and calvin says to hobbs do you believe in the devil a supreme evil being dedicated to temptation and corruption of man. he say i'm not sure man needs the help. so i always love stories that bring out, bring out this complication. so i'll read a little bit from my book i wrote this about him no one was more right and more wrong bolder and predictions are

spectacular willing to risk other people's money and his own than aubrey or one banker puts it the world moved when people who like risk take action. he was born in 1959 when american oil still ruled the world. two years before opec was created. he died in the fiery cash crash four months after president obama lifted it the export ban. he was the good face of the industry, the passion, the creativity, daring a former investment banker told me but he was also the bad face and that duality makes her perfect personification of the fracking revolution and lottery contested subject. on march 2nd, 2016 after 9 a.m. aubrey slammed his chevrolet suv into a concrete duct on midwest boulevard dying instangtly. he was speeding wasn't wearing seat belt, and didn't appear to make any effort the to avoid the collision. just one day earlier, a federal grand jury had indicted for violating antitrust laws, during

his time as the ceo of chesapeake energy, and investigators ultimately ruled crash an accident. but rumors of suicide persist to this day. as captain of the oklahoma city police told the press we may never know 100% what happened in the fall of 2008, rank number 134 on its the list of the 400 richestmens with estimated net worth of over $3 billion. but because he borrowed so much money, and discovered business loans with personal guarantees, two years after his death lawyers were still ranking over remains of his estate trying to figure out which debt would be paid from 5 00,000 he owed boy scouts of america to 465 million he owed a group of wall street creditors including goldman sachs. wall street vultures hedge funds that defended buying teat for less than 50 cents on the dollar. essentially rendering a judgment meant that claims were not going to be paid in full and that his estate was essentially bankrupt

if he did broke it went out of character. during years as oil and gas tycoon he was on risk and fearless as he was wrathless and built empire that produced more gas than any other american company except exxonmobil. once investor asked on conference call when it enough. he answered bluntly, i can't get enough. many think that without his salesmanship astonishing ability to woo investors world would be a far different place today. story ace bound how century conferences major exxon would speak about mostly empty seats wheel people fought where they were holding forth and it was like camelot say henry chesapeake former general counsel there was a period of time that will never be duplicated with a company that will never be duplicated one of the first interviews i did for this book was with with a investment analyst in new york who is covered oil and gas for decades knows all of the characters and players and he was always really skeptical of chesapeake and really skeptical

and a little bit skeptical of the fracking revolution. for the reasons that we'll talk about. but he said i never let in tore for a meeting because i knew we would have bought a ton of stock and it would not have ended well. but he really tried and then many ways succeeded and reshaping the energy world. ever since i rad daniel you're against spriz a year ago i've fascinated by all things energy and although we don't think about it as much today as critical to national security, and to human history as it ever was. even world wars have been won and lost by those who had most access to energy and securist access to it. and we with don't think about it today but even that iphone you pull out to use, that so much a part of our lives even your electronic car is powered by electricity. which in turn requires, requires energy. and so while the world has changed so much in the production of energy isn't at the fore front of our natural conscienceness the way it was in

places outside of texas -- it is ever bit as important if not more so than it ever has been. and i've been fascinated by aubrey back to 2010, a long time source of mine in australian used to tell me that most important man in america, obviously, there's some degree of hyperbole at work in that. but what he meant if he was right and america could produce all of this natural gas, thanks to thed a vengt of fracking that would reshape our economy here and make us a low cost provider of business and relocate here that overs wouldn't be here and it would change geopolitics he was wrong on the other hand, then the united states qowld look far different going -- going forward. and that always stuck in my mind the most important man in america -- he isn't the pioneer he's not the person or people who figured out ow tow ho extract oil and gas from places in the eater that hadn't yielded it most people agree that the -- that combination of horizontal

drilling and hydraulic fracturing that we've come to know is fracking. while people were doing it for ages the person who figured out how to economically or how to get lots of oil and gas and gas out of the ground was a guy named george mitchell and for anybody ho is curious about history of this, greg a wall street journal reporter wrote a book called frackers which really covers the history of this. but he was a pioneer and other essential part of the business. which was raising money -- and i quote a guy in the book saying, as oxygen is to life capital is to oil business and founder and father of raising capital for shale in u.s. is aubrey. he himself said this to be able to borrow money for ten years to write out boom and bust cycles almost as important as horizontal drilling. he told rolling stone with typical inmodesty. this is true. that this industry is --

is a consumer of capital and requires an enormous both to initially drill a well and then to keep producing. so from 2001 to 2012 his company chesapeake sold i think these numbers are stunning 16.4 billion dollars worth of stock. and 15.5 billion of debt. and fade wall street more than a billion dollars in fee. and that's just what was public and less obvious ways, chesapeake raised at least another 30 billion dollars. by selling assets and doing these in run f deals dare i say it and in which company got what we're, in fact, loans repaid tbiewch sales of natural gas. and i think that fee number that one billion dollars is important because you always have to remember that wall street can make money even if the business is arrange funding for are losing money. there's a wall street gets regardless of the success of the business. look no further than sub mortgages either so my friend in australia john -- qowld have these debates with a

partner of his and partner would say oil and gas are real and john could say yeah but economic don't work. and this was certainly true of the company. before asset sales it never produced free cash flow and those who were not finance types think of cash flow as sort of key ingredient truest measure what have you can pay for without going out to raise more money from somebody willing to give you funds. it's a little bit like the income that you bring in from your job after expenses without having to go out to borrow on your credit card. and this -- turns out to be more broadly true of the industry as well. it wasn't just the company, it is actually the entire industry. friend of mine on wall street said alabama aubrey did what everybody did but on steroid but a quell known skeptic named davids and ironically enough he was the first to call the bankruptcy, back in the spring of 2008. went public and proceeded to

land fracking companies a financial and made this detailed -- case for betting against their stocks. he took a short position in the company called pioneer natural resources which he dubbed mother fracker his team looked at the financial statements of the 16 largest publicly trade companies including pioneer, and he found that from 2006 to 2014 the fracking firm spent $80 billion more than they have received from selling oiling and gas. this was even during a period when oil prices were over 100 dollars a barrel. none of them generated excess cash flow. in fact, in 2014 when oil was at $100 for heart of the year the group burned through $20 billion. so i quoted another well known short seller named jim, saying industry has a very bad history of money going into it and never coming out. and that's still true today and some of the most recent analysis i saw was that from 2012 to mid-2017, biggest companies in

the u.s. -- had negative free cash flow of $9 billion a quarter. and most recent report i saw was report in "the wall street journal," that in the first quarter of 2018 only five of the fracking companies generated any positive cash flow. let alone a return for investors. so it's weird because we're sitting here on the 10th anniversary of the financial crisis and most don't think that financial crisis has anything to do with fracking but actually the two are pretty intimately linked. because if it weren't for the federal reserves efforts to juice economy in wake of the financial crisis by slashing interest rates, there's a real debate as to whether fracking would have taken off to the degree that it did because any industry that needs capital, needs cheap capital and fracking firm had to pay more for their debt. there's a question as to what size and scope this revolution would be. i quote a guy who is a fellow at columbia university center and global energy policy, and he wrote in the report, the real

catalyst of the shale revolution was -- the 2008 financial crisis. and era of unprecedently interest rates and when you think about fracking most think of environmental controversies they don't think about the financial controversy. most people think the key ingredient is track and tracking chemicals but i think it is capital so my book ignores environmental issues by fracking not because this isn't critically important but a it is a mini book so only so much that you can cover 12340e pages. and just as inspiration friend of mine told me he read it on the the beach when was exciting for me. because -- never before has anybody called one of my books beach read so that's -- really exciting. [laughter] but as a result of it being a small book there's only so much you can cover. and that i think best portrait of the environmental side of this view come out in a pretty nuance way if you're interested i would recommend two book there's a book by another wall street journal reporter called

rustle gould called boom and gary called grown and black and both of these are nuance attempts to qaig some of the environmental positives -- for instance, the boom and natural gas and the incredibly cheap natural gas were producing is what has killed coal, and arguably that reduced our current so raise with negatives. so also i have to admit cynical and i do think there's truth to notion that money rules the world and as long as we need nun renewable like oil and natural gas and there is a big question which i'll come back to about how long that will be, i don't think environmental qrns are ever going to stop us from producing them. what will stop, the music is if the money stops flowing. and this industry is fragile more so than i think people want to remember in 2014 there was what people saw a concerted attempt to kill it at the annual meeting that fall scraib refused to cut production. prices were already falling and

idea what people saw saudi arabia refusal to cut production was a way of pushing oillet prices still lower. therefore reeking financial havoc on fracking companies people who know saudi arabia well have cautioned that you never know what's going on there and i'm sure multiple factors that played into decision some that covered in book but this was a concerted amendment to kill the u.s. fracking industry. and it almost did by mid-2016, american oil production had declined by nearly million dollars -- a million barrels a day. and some 150 oil and gas companies filed for bankruptcy. i am convinced that bust is part of why president barack obama overturned ban on exports. and it was remarkably quiet when this happened which is pretty shocking if you think about it. we had a 40-year ban on oil leaving this country. date back to the 1970s when widespread panic about oil shortages resulted in the passing of a series of laws that

culminated in a ban on exports and this ban on exports was persisted all of these decades despite fact that it flew in the face of our supposedly free market economy. and starting when fracking began to take off, oil and gas people gang to push for the ban to be overturned. i think there might have been a lot more opposition to it, and environmentalists might have prevented it from being overturned. but amid bust suddenly everything was quiet and people thought well this doesn't matter anymore because this industry is -- is going away. so i talked to the lobbyist who worked on the bill getting overturned and he -- he said actually many democrats in the obama administration were quietly in favor of it and they couldn't support it in any vocal way because they didn't want anger and environmentalists who were their constituents so it got very quietly tucked into the year and one point year in 20151.1 trillion spending bill.

and he this lobbyist told me that legislation passed the house and then the senate before noon on december 18th, 2015. by early afternoon, about president obama had signed it, and everyone raced out of washington for the holidays so this guy was left alone. so he took himself out by himself for stake in manhattan alone in a strawpght and he said i thought this was a big, big dole and worthy of celebration but it happened amidst this bust where everybody thought that fracking boom was over and so when aubrey died in the spring of 2016, it was almost like the punctuation mark underscoring end of this thing. it seemed it like absolute bottom. but it wasn't. like the per ashes didn't die but came back stronger than ever this industry more restill i can't than propoangts would have dreamed and believer argue this proves that they were wrong that means that david was wrong, and that all of the the skeptics were wrong and it --

looks that way. right now the firm lost a big chunk of its assets pioneer stock price is higher than it was when he called for a short. so thus far if you the to start a stack at a battle between the the skeptic and believers you would say believers tko. but i don't think it is that simple, and there are reasons why shale came back. one big reason is the perm i ban which i don't have to define to you guys no secret is that there was shale with a big boom almost a century ago but oilmen thought it was tapped out until entrepreneurs began to track around there in 2010 and scott former chief executive of pirn said it could hold oil second only to saudi arabia legendary war pearled. believes say that technology also a second reason that technology is going to dramatically reduce cost of fracking wells reshaping financial firm so that companies can make money even with low oil prices. and yet this --

this isn't happening yet companies are still losing money. and so it wasn't just a rediscovery of the restart oil boom after plunging prices will killed it. but most important factor is one that started business school in the first place and i quote jim saying it came back because wall street was there. and he pointed out in 2017 american fracking companies raised $60 billion in debt. up almost 30% since 2016. so i'm not smart enough to see how all of ends i think one of the humbling realizations in writing this book i set out to figure it out and when humbling things in writing this book any writing of a book is i don't think i could figure it out. i decided that the former math major may decide that it was like calculus like a complicated form it wasn't algebra and too many factors that go into determining whether this works or doesn't work. for me to be able to come up for e me to be able to weigh

believers to skeptics to come up with an answer and other part of it was humbling is that look at the history of fracking everybody has tried to predict it has been wrong and, in fact, looking at the history of oil predicting in trying to predict future direction of oil prices almost everybody who make prediction is wrong back to fears of peak oil in 1970s and 1980s. so i also profiled another company in my book a company located here called eog resources which people called harvard of shale or apple of shale with a flip side flip counterpoint to chesapeake as companies that shows that this business can be done. and at least sort of financially sound way. but what i would say is that there's reason to be worried about the industry. because to me the key question is how real is this revolution be if companies had to live with cash flow, if they could no longer raise all of the these billions tens of billions of dollars from a new capital how much oil and gas would we

actually be producing companies have to live on cash flow they could produce and there's no real answer. but even -- a big investor in the business said if companies forced to live in cash flow they produce oil would not be a factor in the rest of the world and grown at quarter to half of the rate that actually has. even beyond that, i came to believe that this whole concept of energy and dependence is pretty flawed and energy independents and a energy dominance in most robust form is -- kind of this argument that we can look at the middle east and say we don't need you anymore we don't need your oil we can supply our own we with don't have to meddle in your affairs anymore we change the game with with russia and china we now have leverage. but it's a bit of a fraud in a way. and the reasons are -- are a couple. but one is that price of oil is set globally it is not we can't turn the clock become to 1970s when the u.s. could control the price of barrel of oil it is going to be out of our hands regardless of how much oil we're producing.

it is beginning to be set by events arranged world including the situation in libya now, those things will affect drivers in the u.s. kiewrls in the u.s. regardless of how much oil we're producing. secondly, another thing we can't turn clock back on we live in a global economy where a lot of profits of our s&p 500 companies come from europe. and where a lot of the products that are companies need come from asia. so i found this really interesting analysis by a guy named angt thy, and he analysissed bureau data and found that 6 of the top 58 u.s. sources of imports are asian states heavily dependent on golf petroleum exports for instance 25% of u.s. imports came from china, and these imports include critical components usedded by technology companies like apple. so in other words, to risk asia economy by -- by having problems in the middle east escalate is to risk our own economy. so we can't afford to look away from the rest of the globe no matter how much we might wish

might wish that we could do so. and i guess going back to the beginning, if low oil prices do cause instability and regions of the world from saudi arabia to nigeria how is that good for us how is forget about the humanitarian question with. how is that economically good for us? lastly what i was really surprised by and working on this book was talking to not all the smart finance guys, but a handful of them who said they're actually no longer investing in oil and gas is reason why is they think age of renewable is closer than those people think. and i was really surprised to hear that i thought these guy would be hard core number guy who sort of poo poo renewables say they're not even close to competitive on a cost basis. but analysis was tweact the opposite they're investing tons of intellectual energy trying to figure out when this is coming and -- nobody can arrive at the an answer again it is based on so

many things. but the interesting way my prism on this -- of thinking on this shifted as i worked on this was reflengted in what one investor said to me it doesn't have to be the ends of the oil age we have to see what this is it could be 50 years out but as soon as we see when it is coming price of oil will go in decline and investment may dry up but oil for another 100 years and as soon as we see what the end game is it is over from an investing standpoint. and so -- i think that my talk about energy and dependence and belt our chest about how great we are, may give us some leverage in world as it is. but if we don't keep investing in the future, we may be losers in the world as a, itself going to be and i was struck by a conversation i had with with do you know who charlie is warren buffett side kick still kicking brilliant in his 90s and he's weighed in on this whole issue of --

energy usage, and i thought his comments were really interesting. and he believes that we should conserve what we have instead of drilling. because he argues that for all of the eventual certainty of renewables there's no substitute for hydrocarbon mainly transportation and agriculture. and he argued and i have not thought of it this way before that part of the why u.s. can see population is because increased so dramatically in mods earn era in large part due to fertilizer other agricultural products made through use of hydrocarbon and said to me we need to eat as far out as you can see. i like eating it is a serious problem and i think hydrocarbon is probably ire reare placeable maybe solar will work somehow but we need a new technology that doesn't exist yet. for now hydrocarbon are are topsoil iowa you wouldn't want to use it as fast as possible but slowly as possible. so -- the lovely thing about being a journalist is that i get to point out problems and i don't have to come up up with

solutions and -- i'm definitely not a policy wong but i guess if i had to make out policy it probably wouldn't be -- focused on here and now how great to be producing so much oil and gas but it would be -- on pumping from ground in ways that don't make money. for shareholders -- plenty of money for executives plenty of money for private equity firms, plenty of money for wall street, but not even money for shareholders. let alone let alone rest of us and perhaps think more long-term about what is conserving and worth spending now. and on that note i will have open it up to whatever questions you all have. and i spoke slowly enough maybe once -- [applause] yeah. hi. >> comment rundown i think i can add a few reenforcing thoughts i have lunch with gentleman named

george mitchell twice a month for years and years who developed horizontal fracking and so forth, and -- i can assure you that he would be roll aring over in his grave right now to see just how we overdosed the market and how prices have stayed, you know, very, very low. the other thing i mentioned is that, the oil and gas business is a negative cash flow business and front end loaded business for all costs going out front and it's negative for the first two or three years hopefully prices will bail you out. and third thing i would mention is that -- the way the stock market has been restructured by computerization and -- commodity and the like, what happens is you having gore traders about 400 in the market every day, in and out, in and out for instance, but these guys index price of crude to stock prices. mostly these people who do this

cannot tell you difference between a ham sandwich and refrigerator or whatever but they are index and if crude goes up and last two and a half years is gone from 26 to 80, major recovery in regardless of the economics and value that you impute to these companies. so it has become kind of a -- crazy quilt of computerized guys who are trade their brains out. and you don't get -- you get false signals as to what companies are really worth. anyway. enough of me. that's really interesting and worth listening to. john was early skeptic on iran so he's a guy worth listening to and while i know that i knew that wall street was playing huge role in this industry is, and ways that aren't appreciated, i did not know extent of it. interesting observation. ...

>> there's not enough debt to crash the economy this go around have you got any thoughts about that? there's enough debt out there that's being vaporized as we speak to precipitate another crisis. >> so i actually agree with that. [laughter] "the new york times" ran an op-ed based on my book a couple of weeks ago, and the headline, which is my fault, i think overstated the thesis of you don't get to see headlineses before they put them on pieces. if you read the piece, it's a little more nuanced than the headline said, but it said the next financial crisis lurks underground. i actually would not make an argument that the amount of debt in the fracking industry is going to cause a financial crisis. i think the repercussions, i think the issues are far more severe and far more existential

which is this whole issue of how much oil and gas would we be producing if companies had to live within cash flow, how real is this if the money were to dry up. that said, i do think there are, there is the potential for financial problems, and i pointed out in two ways. one is that fracking debt is part of a larger pile-up of debt that is a result of i ultra-low interest rates. and skeptics are looking at all sorts of ways in which that could the unwind. i think the only good news on that front is usually where everybody's looking for the next financial crisis actually isn't one. so if we all keep talking about it, we're going to push it off and make sure it doesn't happen. but the second issue where i do worry there could be wider spread financial problems from this is that in this era of ultra the-low interest rates, pension funds have not been able to the earn a return in traditional fixed income markets. and so they've been investing in riskier assets including private

equity and distressed debt credit hedge funds. and a lot of that money, in turn, is going into fracking, into shale. and so i worry if the returns aren't ultimately there, what that means for an already -- that that could exacerbate an already-severe or pension crisis which i think is a financial problem that the country is going to have to reckon with. so i think there could be larger financial repercussions, or it could be a part of a much larger financial reckoning that we're going to have as interest rates start to climb. >> so i think this is maybe a math question. [laughter] if you take, like, all the excess dollars that went into the fracking space and then you divide those by the extra barrels of oil that came out, have you ever run that math, and what does that look like? >> no, no. i don't know, i think that would

be a really interesting analysis. but hard to get at. and the problem with that sort of thing is that this is changing constantly because it's changing based on the price of oil, right? and it's changing -- the economics of this industry change every minute of every day. and that's something that why i realized it was so complicated, because you have additional profit opportunity from higher oil prices. at the same time as oil prices start to increase, service costs in this industry also start to escalate dramatically, thereby wiping out some of that opportunity for profits. and so i think it's very hard to arrive at a predictive analysis. >> did the you bring up in your book about the -- [inaudible] >> yes. so that's, so the key part of the economic argument for why this industry will never work -- and back the your point, john, about how, you know, you invest a lot of money up front, and then you cash flow in later

years? part of the argument why that will never work for shale is because the decline rates are so steep, much steeper than on vertical wells. so you invest a lot of money in year one, and then you have to invest a lot of money in year two and year three. so the question is when you can ever stop investing all of that money particularly if you're a publicly-traded company and you need to show growth in your production numbers. so, yes, you can make a good return on a single well. but if you're in a publicly-traded structure and you need to show growth to your investors, that growth come at an increasingly higher cost. and so the question is if new, if technology brought to bear in fracking ever starts to reduce the dethe klein rates to point where it starts to make more economic sense. and another ongoing question is if improvements in technology have definitely i increased the initial amount of oil and gas we're getting out of wells, but whether we're just pulling that

forward or whether there will actually be more production over time is another important question that, i think, is still unanswered. one of the challenges in this is that this fracking revolution is really only a decade do old. it's really not old at all in the scheme of things. and so we don't know that much yet. we're at the beginning. and all sorts of ways. and some of the ultimate answers could prove to be more positive than they look right mow, and some of them, i think, could prove to be more negative. i think one of the big lessons we have learned is that not all land is created equal, and so there used to be this belief -- and i write about this period in chesapeake's history in the 1990s when they were investing in this area and touting how great the wealth would be because one well was really good. and it turned out most of the other well withs were not good at all, and this one well was an anomaly. and despite that lesson, you see something of the same dynamics happening today where a company

will show investors, you know, 80% returns on one well that it drilled, and you're supposed to extrapolate from that one well and say look how great all of that land is. all of these wells are going to produce 80% returns. but then the fascinating things is in these companies' financial statements you go from the investor tech to financial statements where the company doesn't make a rate of return at all at the corporate level. it's like, well, what happened? what happened between these fantastic rates of return and in the negative rate of return at the corporate level? and part of the answer is, obviously, the corporate expenses but another part is that all wells are not created alike, and you're getting to see the one well that does really well but not all the other wells that didn't do as well. there's a question back there. >> [inaudible] was that the kind of thing that was your idea? was it the publisher's idea? should we expect to see more of that just in general? >> yeah. it's an interesting idea. so columbia university started

these, this mini book format a couple of years ago. the book i did on fannie mae and freddie mac -- which that is definitely not a beach read, you should no circumstances -- [laughter] was the first one they published. and the idea is with the decline in print journalism and the lack of budgets in most newsrooms, columbia was going to provide an alternative way for authors to take on important, hopefully global topics in a longer format that still wasn't book length. and so these are meant to be faster reads. in some ways that means that they're limited. i think this was, this was in some ways sort of a challenging topic for this format because there's so much i ended up having to leave out. but it makes it something that you can digest in a relatively short amount of time too. i think whether you'll see more of it or not to, i mean, i hope it works. selfishly, it's great to have an alternative out there where i can take ideas that are perhaps too seriousover wonk key --

serious or wonky for magazines. so i hope we see more of it. but i guess it depends on whether you all enjoy the format, right? [laughter] >> i would mention, if i may, just back to aubrey for a second, he was a great land man, but there's a gentleman -- he was a land player, pure and simple. everything else was secondary to him. a very good guy. but he hit overpass at 79 miles an hour with a huge insurance policy on him. you do the math, and i'm not going to say any of that. the other thing i was going to mention is if you ever want to get an interesting perspective on aubrey, there's a gentleman here in town whom i don't know but has run circles around aubrey. his name is joe greenberg. and you might really benefit from him, because he has hit so many land plays with perfection, you know, whether it's bakken shale or paynesville or

whatever. but he's, he's a home run hitter. the babe ruth of the last ten years. >> interesting. interesting. yeah, there definitely is, there's so many multiple facets to this industry that it's hard to find a character who end capps lates it all. -- encapsulates it all. so i used aubrey to illustrate one aspect of it which i think does have larger implications for the industry but by no means is the entire picture. so is go ahead. >> so, as you've been out talking about the book, you're at the petroleum club today, what have you gotten questions or comments that you went with, oh, wow, i maybe missed that or they give you a different perspective that you might think about anything a little bit differently? >> not yet. i'm sure that will, i'm sure that will happen -- >> it didn't happen today the at noon. [laughter] >> i've gotten, i've gotten

comments that have certainly revealed to me that even after spending a lot of time on this i don't know, i don't know everything i could. and that was another humbling thing about working on this book is that everywhere you turn is a rabbit hole that you could go down and never come out, but there's nothing about this industry that is simple. even trying to think about whether lng will be exported, lng will ever be cost competitive or what the real impact on russia will be of the u.s. being able to export lng or the differences in various type the of oil that are produced or other characters who have been instrumental in this story whose names i still haven't heard. there's so much more to this. and i think that was humbling during the process of writing the book and slightly scary and is still humbling today. i by no means feel that i know it all. but i think the financial facts of the industry are pretty indisputable. in the end, numbers are numbers. and even companies are quite aware of what's going on because

those frustrated investors have started to push back and say you guys need to produce returns, we're tired of this. so the idea that the industry hasn't made a return for shareholders is maybe something that executive the don't like to talk about, but they all know it's true. so i think that's, that's a tough pushback. and i think i am, i think if i were less nuanced about the outcome, i probably would get more pushback. but the ultimate kind of -- speaking of humbling was my inability to arrive at a conclusion. and it's either a strength of the book or a great negative in that i don't have a this is all a giant scam that is going to blow up in everybody's faces, or this is the future of america. to me, it's just not that clear cut. and so, as i said, that's either a strength or a weaknesses. but because i'm open to arguments about why it might change, i think it's hard for people to say that i'm, that i'm

wrong. in that way. if that makes sense. so, but thus far i think that the headline on my op-ed opened me up to the the most criticism that i've gotten, the idea that this was going to cause the next financial crisis. and i get headlines. [laughter] it got a lot of attention, that's for sure. >> i was going to ask if you'd given any thought to your future news novella being perhaps about where we're headed financially with renewables. >> yeah. i think that -- and to mention yet another kind of humbling area of all of this is every single renewable could be its own book from solar to battery to wind. i mean, you could spend years of your life trying to figure this out and trying to figure out when it's going to be cost competitive and what the future is and how soon that future is going to arrive. and it would make a great little book. the only surprising thing is i mentioned that i arrived at is that people think it's closer

than i would have expected. i would have thought financial types just would think that renewables were the province of wonky environmentalists and that they wanted nothing to do with it, and that is so beyond not true that it was interesting. should we wrap up? thank you. >> please, a round of applause for bethany mclean. [applause] thank you all so much for coming out this evening. have a good night. >> thank you all very much. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers.

here's tonight the's prime time lineup. at 6:15 p.m. each, the wall street journal's matthew hennessey examines the role generation x will play in america's future. at seven, eli saslow profiles a former white supremacist who disavowed his upbringing. and at 8:30, seminary professor bruce ashard examines the relationship between christianity and poll tibs. then on "after words" at 10, democratic representative jakemy raskin interviews african-american studies professor carol anderson about changes to voting requirements following the 2013 supreme court ruling, shelby v. holder. and we wrap up our prime time programming at 11 eastern with francis fukuyama's thoughts on how to move past identity politics and return to civil discourse. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. 48 hours of nonfiction be authors and books -- the

nonfiction authors and books every weekend. television for serious readers. a reminder that this weekend's full schedule is available on our web site, booktv.org. and now here's matthew hennessey discussing generation x. >> so this book started out as a city journal article. i don't know if you know that. it was first on the web site as a little bitty article, then it was a longer article, so i have to thank brian for allowing me to develop the idea. and i want to thank paul for listening to me rail about things like the universal basic income and the amazon echo in his office before any of it had any hopes of becoming a book. and i also want to thank my friends at encounter for giving me the opportunity the, of course. i know that a lot of you probably attended the james w. wilson lecture a few weeks ago in which harvard professor ed