joining me for a preview of "hunt for oil" is alex chadwick. good to see you. hello, chris. thanks for inviting me. >> you know, none of us is immune to this talk of oil now. all of us have to put gas in our panics and just got through the home heating season. tell us a little bit about what the whole idea was behind this, doing this series. >> well, it's just that energy is such a central part of our lives today and the economy. it just drives so much. and when you add kind of the carbon consequences of what we're doing now and what will happen in 20, 30 years, it just seems like a topic and a subject that we need to explore more and we need to know more about. so that's the idea behind this new public radio series, burn. and this show that's airing over the next week on various public stations around the country is about petroleum which is really, really central to the question of how we are going to solve this. >> it started out as a $160,000 hunch. it ended up being worth $10 billion. how does that happen? >> right. this is just the way the oil business ope