>> Manuel Roig-Franzia: My name is Manuel Roig-Franzia. I'm a reporter at the Washington Post. But much more importantly today, I am the designated introducer of all Lawrence's. I was on this stage just a couple hours earlier to introduce Lawrence Jacksons, Author, Professor and now it will be my privilege to introduce you to Lawrence Wright. Before we get started, we just wanted to thank the co-chairmen David Rubenstein for his support and if anyone is interested in supporting the festival I would direct you to your program where you can take a look at that. Also, Lawrence has agreed, this Lawrence has agreed to answer some questions afterwards about this book "God Saved Texas". So why have I read Lawrence Wright overall these years in the New Yorker and in his books? I would say it's because he has this special gift among American writers to provide historical context about complicated topics, to placing perspective things that are very urgent and relevant right now in our lives as he did in 2006 with his Pulitzer Prize winning book "The Learning Tower", about the attacks by Al-Qaeda on September 11. And in this book he is turning his eye for detail to the place where he lives, the state of Texas, which I would argue is also urgent and relevant at this moment. And he does so with his quintessential ability to spot important detail. And he does so with an unstinting, unremitting desire to get at the soul of this place and it's not all great, right? There's - it's a place with its triumphs and it's also a place with its vanities. And he talks about it with well I would say empathy. Just wanted to, before I had the podium over to him, share with you one little passage. "Houston is the only major city in America without zoning laws. You can build pretty much anything you want, anywhere you want except in designated historical districts. You'll see some odd sites such as a two story family home adjacent to a roller coaster, or an erotic nightclub next to a shopping gallery, or maybe and this was my favorite, a house made of beer cans." With that, I give you Lawrence Wright. ^M00:03:16 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:23 >> Lawrence Wright: Well thank you very much. It's a delight and an honor to be back at the National Book Festival, which was founded by Laura Bush by the way. And you know she started the Texas Book Festival first. And she was a librarian from Midland Texas and her influence over books and authors and libraries is really a great legacy. First of all, I better ask if anybody here speaks Norwegian. There's a maybe here, all right. Well I'm going to try this. [Norwegian] I'm told by a Norwegian friend it means it was totally bonkers. If you are a Texas you've quickly learned that everybody in the world has an opinion about Texas. And, good or bad, but everybody has an opinion. When I was - I think it was partly because there's this huge myth that surrounds this state, almost unique among our American states. But as a young man I taught English at the American University in Cairo. And I used to go horseback riding out at the pyramids. And I grew up in Dallas, I'm a city boy, I'm not a cowboy. But the owner of the stable found out that I was from Texas and he began calling me Texas. And then one day I went out and he said, "Oh Texas we've got a horse for you." Three guys bring this rearing stallion out, his nostrils are flaring, his hooves are ripping the air. It was terrifying. But because I was Texas I had to get on this beast and he took me half way to Libya before I could get him to turn around. But I felt I was literally astride the Texas myth. You know there's a difference between the way Texas see themselves and the way other people see us. For the most part Texans think of us as confident, hardworking and relatively non-neurotic. People outside of Texas tend to have a different view. They see us as mindless individualists, people who hate government, braggarts and exaggerators, people who are careless with the truth and with money and with our personal lives, we're insecure but obsessed with money and prestige. It seems a little ironic to me that the person who perhaps most exemplifies these values is a certain narcissistic Manhattan billionaire now living in the White House. I've often wondered what it would be like for Texans if Donald Trump was from Ft. Worth rather than from Queens. The way that Texas was taken down during the Johnson presidency and the Bush's. I wonder if New York will ever be held to account in the same way for the values that he represents. Now another thing about the views that people have towards Texas is that they tend to break down along political lines. Liberals look at Texas with dread. As far as they're concerned it's the most heartless of societies. It is the kind of ground zero of Daddy Warbuck's predatory capitalism. And conservatives view Texas as the promised land of entrepreneurs. Minimal government, low taxes. And of course both of these things are absolutely true. Now one thing everybody would agree on Texas is growing at a break neck speed, twice the rate of the United States as a whole. People thing of Texas as being kind of a rural state, but three of the top 10 largest cities in America are in Texas. And the 11th largest city in America is Austin, where I live. Far cry from the little college town I moved to in 1980. Houston and Dallas are projected to each have 10 million people by the year 2030, that's just 12 years from now. Just to put this into perspective, New York City, the largest city in American has eight million. There are 29 million Texans right now. That number is projected to almost double by 2050 at which time Texas will be almost as large as New York and California combined. The next census Texas will add four congressional districts giving it a total of 42 electoral votes. Now California, the largest state has 55 electoral votes, but that number hasn't increased since 2003. And it won't in the next redistricting. New York has been losing population, congressional delegates and electoral votes for decades. So like it or not the future is Texas. Now how did Texas get to be so important? I can answer that question with a single word, oil. Texas would not be where it is today or anywhere close to it if it weren't for three wells that I'm going to tell you about that made Texas what it is. And start back in the turn of the 20th century, there was a little hill outside Beaumont in East Texas. It was called Sour Spring Mound. It was gassy, school boys used to set it on fire every once in a while. And there was a con man, well as an aside; con men play an unusually large part in the history of Texas. But this particular con man was named Patil O'Higgins. He had lost an arm in a gunfight with a deputy sheriff and he decided that he could find oil in Sour Spring Mound Hill. And he predicted that he would discover oil at 1,000 feet down. ^M00:10:14 Totally made up figure. The one thing that he did that was an act of genius was he hired a Croatian American mining engineer named Captain Anthony Lucas. And you have to understand, back in that day wells weren't really drilled, they were pounded into the earth. Captain Lucas adopted a new innovation called a rotary bit, so that as a first time wells were actually drilled rather than pounded. And the other thing is underneath Sour Spring Mound was quick sand. So whenever they pulled the pipe out the hole would collapse. So Captain Lucas started pouring mud into the hole and it formed a kind of concrete that preserved the integrity of the hole. That's beginning - that was the beginning of the modern drilling industry. Now Patil O'Higgins was hoping for a well that would produce 50 barrels a day. On January 10, 1901 at 1,020 feet, 20 feet away from his estimate the well suddenly vomited mud and then six tons of drilling pipe flew up into the sky over the derrick. It was terrifying. The roughnecks all scattered and they waited for things to quiet down and then began to creep back to where the - to well to try to clean things up and suddenly there was a roar from somewhere deep, deep in the earth from another geological age. And oil spewed up 150 feet into the air, it was the first gusher. Nobody had ever seen one before. For the next nine days until this well was capped, the well came to be known as spindle top, spewed out 100,000 barrels a day, more than all the wells in America combined at that time. You'd have to take yourself back to Texas at that moment. It was an entirely rural state. The money that was there was from cotton and timber and cattle. Spindle top changed all that. The real wealth poured into the state. Houston became the - is anybody here from Houston by the way? Well at the very beginning of this Houston adopted the motto, Houston gateway to Beaumont. There was already a little bit too much self-city pride for that to endure so they captured the oil business and took it to Houston and then made Houston the energy capital of the world. And Texas as we know it was born. Now also born was a pattern with the boom comes a bust. Prices after Spindle Top crashed. In many places oil was cheaper than water. Now that was the first well. That was the beginning of Texas. There was another well that I'll tell you about that was in East Texas on the Daisy Bradford lease, Daisy Bradford being the widow who owned the land. There was a con man, Columbus Marion Joyner, fondly known as Dad. And he had been drilling on the Daisy Bradford lease for several years, two dry wells. He was broke. And so what did he do? He got some phony geological reports. And he went around showing these geological reports that said that they were going to tap into the greatest oil field ever known at 3,500 feet. Once again a total lie that turned out to be absolutely true. On October 3, 1930 there was a gurgling at 3,456 feet. Thousands of people gathered. They'd heard about Spindle Top. Farmers in bib overalls and ladies in dresses sewn out of Sears Catalog patterns and they were waiting for what would happen next. No doubt they were thinking that soon they'd be rich. Soon they'd be walking down the Champs-Elysees buying furs and jewelry and considering their investments. The thing is this actually happened for many of them. The gusher comes, children - the black rain as it began to be called. Children danced in the rain and painted their faces. Nine months later there were 1,000 wells in East Texas producing half the total US demand. In one leased Texas town, Kilgore there were 44 wells in a since city block. You could walk through downtown Kilgore from derrick to derrick without your feet ever touching the ground. And of course prices went from $1.10 a barrel to $.13 and the governor had to shut down well production. Now the last well I'm going to talk to you about is more pertinent to your life right now. By the 1909's people were talking about peak oil. Peak oil is that moment when half of all the recoverable petroleum resources have been discovered and exploited. And from then on it's just a long downhill slide. And that's where people thought we were in the 90's. And into this period there's a man named George Mitchell, probably the greatest wildcat Texas has ever known. He was the son of Greek immigrants. His father had been a shepherd in Greece and moved to Galveston and opened up a shoe shine stand. And George Mitchell was a prodigy, acting on a tip from a bookie in Chicago. He leased some land North of Dallas. And he believed in by 1980 that American only had 35 years remaining of recoverable conventional sources of petroleum. And the only alternative that he could see was coal. Now Mitchell was an environmentalist and very progressive conservationist. There's a - you will know about the woodlands, they built a planned community outside of Houston that exemplified these qualities of environmental preservation and conservation. And he looked down the road of what was going to happen to America and the world if we turned to coal. Either we would have to sacrifice energy of our civilization or we would destroy our planet with the pollution. In his opinion the only thing that could rescue the planet was natural gas. It burns far cleaner than coal. And as it happened, he had 300,000 acres under lease and he also had a contract with the city of Chicago to provide 10% of that cities natural gas needs. It was a terrific deal when he signed it but his resources were continually diminishing, so he was facing bankruptcy. Now a mile and a half below this area that he had under lease 70 miles north of Dallas is a geological stratum called the Barnett Shale. Its 5,000 square miles in dimension. It covers 17 counties, most of them in Texas. And it was estimated and known to have the largest gas reserves of any on shore field in the entire United States. So everybody knew gas was there. There was a problem. Those other wells that I told you about were in limestone or sandstone and petroleum molecules moved fairly easily through that kind of porous rock. But shale is tight rock. In other words there's no place to move, it's like a prison; so how do you liberate those gas and oil molecules? Well dynamite. That was - they tried that. Bazookas, machine guns. In 1967 the atomic energy commission exploded a 29 kiloton nuclear bomb in Northern New Mexico 3,000 feet below the surface. And that was the first of 30 such nuclear devices that were used to try to free up the gas that people knew was down there. And actually did work, but the gas was radioactive, which as you know surprise, right? So a technique had been developed using fluid, hydraulic fluid to more precisely shatter, create little fractures in this rock. But it was just too expensive to work in shale. ^M00:20:00 Now Mitchell had the problem, he had the contract with Chicago. He had this quest to save civilization and he had a lot of gas that he had to get. So in 1981 he drilled his first hydraulically fracked well. Fracking comes from fracturing in the Barnett shale. It was CW Shay #1 and it lost money. And so did the next 300 wells that he fracked at the cost of 250 million dollars to his company. It was in 1998, 17 years after CW Slay #1 that the SH Griffin #4 was drilled. And through refinements in the hydraulic fluid it was finally profitable. And that's the day that fracking revolution began. It was the third time in Texas history that the state has transformed the energy business. Bear in mind the US industry was in a long decline. From 1970 which was the peak of our oil production when 10 million barrels a day were produced in the United States, the production had been declining and declining and that period of time many of you will remember was marked by oil embargos, wars in the Middle East, gas lines and the fear that the world economy was being held hostage by regimes that were often intensely anti-Western, anti American. So US production touched bottom in 2008 when only 5 million barrels of oil were produced in that year, barrels per day. And oil prices hit a record of $145.00a barrel. But the fracking revolution was already under way. By 2010 14,000 wells in the Barnett Shale alone US oil and gas production doubled in five years. It's the most remarkable thing if you look at a chart what you see is this long - just up like that. Now we're producing more oil and gas than we ever have and we're actually exporting - it's higher than ever. Now of course we all know as George Mitchell did not understand at the time that fracking comes along with its own environmental cost. And a lot of it has to do with the methane gases that escape from poorly controlled wells. Mitchell warned that this industry needs to be intensely regulated, but it is not. Comes the crash of course in January of 16 oil was under $30 a barrel and Houston alone lost 70,000 energy related jobs. But something didn't happen. The Texas economy did not crash as it had always done whenever oil prices had crashed in the past. It had become a much more diverse state economically which accounts for this amazing growth that we're seeing now. Now Texas is often compared with California. In fact, it works both ways. You - it's fascinating to live in a country that has two such dynamic but opposing models. Our governor Greg Abbot is constantly warning about the dangers of Californization. He's - in Austin where I live, he sees it as a kind of spore on the fungus of California that's destroying the Texas way of life. And the examples he cites are plastic bag bands and burdensome tree ordinances and lately its plastic straws that have been banned. These are all no doubt a serious threat to our democracy. But this whole idea that California is the enemy has taken root. And I'm in a band and our drummer has a sticker on his kit that says "Stop Californication of Texas music". I have no idea - I don't know what it means. But it's in his mind that Texas music is under attack. The gross domestic product of Texas is 1.6 trillion dollars. If it were a country it'd be the 10th largest economy in the world just ahead of Canada. Now California has 40% more people and its GDP is 2.6 trillion dollars about the same as United Kingdom. But Texas has been closing the gap. Exports from Texas nearly outrank those of California and New York combined right now, and Texas already outranks California in the export of technology. From 2000 to 2016 job growth in Dallas and Houston grew 31%, three times the rate in Los Angeles. In Austin that outpost of liberalism at 50% during the same period of time. Take that governor. 2017 the fourth quarter growth in Texas grew 5.4%; there wasn't a single other state in the entire country that was above four, except for Idaho. There must have been a run on potatoes, but Idaho did very well. California grew at 3.2% during that same time. Now these are two states that are so alike and yet so different. They're both a majority, minority prefiguring the country that America will someday be. They're kind of mirror images of each other. California is an entirely democratic state, at state level and Texas hasn't elected a democrat to state office since 1994, more than 20 years. They couldn't have been more different, and yet when I was a young man, when I was your age, Texas was a blue and California was red. Texas produced Lyndon Johnson and the great society and California produced Ronald Reagan and the modern conservative revolution. So these things are constantly in flux, but the ways in which California and Texas - kind of like the double helix or something. They revolve around each other always opposing in a kind of dynamic conversation. It naturally brings up the question and I've been asked this a million times. You know will Texas turn blue or even purple? And the answer is yes. It will. When is only the question. The growth is in the cities. The - even the suburbs which have been so - such strongholds for the republic party. New immigrants are coming in with different - all this growth brings in people who aren't a part of the Texas political culture. And they have their own histories. In fact working the opposite way was my family. We moved to Texas in 1956. My dad was a returning war veteran and like many people who had fought under General Eisenhower, he was an Eisenhower Republican. And so he moved to - moved to Abilene and then to Dallas because of the jobs. People don't move to Texas because of the scenery, but it's a great job producer. And it offered my father as it has offered millions of other people a chance to succeed, a chance to become the kind of person he always wanted to be. But he was an Eisenhower Republican and it was Dallas, the city that we moved to that became the first city in Texas to elect a Republican congressman, the first since reconstruction, after the Civil War. So I remember the turn. Now Texas is already far more liberal or progressive than our elected representatives would lead you to believe, the demography and the politics are at odds with each other. There was a figure - I mean the people who really count in Texas politics are the primary voters in the Republican Party. Up until recently and it may change, but we'll see it's been the Republican primary voter that has determined the outcome of the election. Now Wendy Davis who was the previous candidate for governor against Greg Abbot who was crushed; he beat her by 20 points. She made the observation that Texas is not a red state; it's a non-voting blue state. And she's absolutely right about it. Texas has always been at the very bottom or near the bottom in voter turnout. Now why is that? People often blame the Hispanics in Texas for not voting and it's true that they tend not to. But why would that be true? Well in my opinion where in California they do tend to turn out. ^M00:30:00 It's because they've never had a candidate who spoke to their needs especially the disenfranchised Texans that have never been that charismatic figure who spoke in a language they understood. Now it's going to be an interesting test this November, a very interesting test between Raphael Cruz who is Hispanic but born in Canada, no Texan can forget. Who Anglicized his name to Ted and who speaks rather halting Spanish and Robert Francis O'Rourke who since childhood has been known by the Spanish diminutive Beto, who speaks very fluent Spanish, and has been in every single one of the Texas's 254 counties, including all that border area where he speaks to people in Spanish? Whether Texas is red or blue or purple, the decisions we make in Texas are going to determine the future of America. Right now, 10% of all school children in America are Texans. But Texas spends $2,500 less than the national average per student; it's 49th out of 50. Fortunately not the 50th, it's a rich state, it's shameful. The nation's report card just pointed out that in the fourth grade Texas school children are 45th in the nation in achievement. Children are our future; it seems pathetic to have to point that out. But the legislature has been cutting back on its contribution to public education as a kind of war on public schools. In a state that's projected to double in 30 years, the challenges and infrastructure are overwhelming. They were not nearly beginning to meet that challenge. I'm thinking especially of our coastal areas, which just a year ago this week you know Harvey hit. And I was in Houston right after that and it's a question about the survival, not only of our coastal cities but the oil refineries and storage tanks and ports that are so essential, not just in the Texas economy, to the American economy. When we were led by climate change skeptics this places our state in a certain peril. Now I think Texas is a wonderful place. It's bold, it's created, creative - it seems to have a mandate to lead. And as Texans we need to make sure we're up to the challenge to do less I think would be unTexan. I'll be happy to take your questions. ^M00:32:59 [ Applause ] ^M00:33:10 >> Mr. Wright, thank you for your remarks. I know you didn't go to school here, but since you live in Austin I wanted to ask you if you have any comments about today's Texas/Maryland football game. >> Lawrence Wright: Well we were on a plane with a lot of them; unfortunately I was not watching the game. I actually - you know we came - my wife and I came yesterday and we went over to the Library of Congress and I looked out and there were thousands of people. And they were waiting to say goodbye to John McCain. And it was really, really touching to me so we watched the funeral this afternoon. It was a very, very moving moment. It could be who knows, a small turn of the screw in improving our Democracy. >> Thank you. >> Would you be kind enough to share with us your prediction of the outcome of the Cruz/O'Rourke contest this November? And then would you please give us a date when Texas will become purple and the date when it will become blue? ^M00:34:16 [ Laughter ] ^M00:34:20 >> Lawrence Wright: You know I can make up a figure about the odds and - because I still think that it's a climb for Beto, not only is he a Democrat, he's from El Paso. And for whatever reason we have never elected anybody from El Peso to statewide office. I don't know what it is about that place. And - but I met him only one time. It was at a Fox station in Dallas and I was promoting my book and at 7:00 in the morning we are in hair and makeup. And he has a kind of a Jimmy Stewart quality. He's a very ingenuous guy. But he's on first so we walk into the studio and the anchor comes over and I don't know if Beto had said anything, but the anchor says, "Well you're really handsome and you're kind of tall, aren't you? And you've got the charisma thing going". I thought maybe I'm underestimating this guy. This is a Fox station in Dallas. I think it's you know, people would say that he had no chance. And right now he's within single digits. There's - he doesn't have any support on the ticket and that's a problem. So you know, I would say 60/40 but now I'm thinking 55/45. It's just a guess. The day, if he is elected, Texas is purple. You know you can start - you can mark that down on your calendar. >> How about the date when it becomes blue? >> Lawrence Wright: I can't go that far. My crystal ball is all cloudy. >> Hi Mr. Wright, I actually grew up near Kilgore, so I'm very familiar with the history you gave. So this book, did it come about after having - after you wrote their long form article last summer? Did that - was that the genesis to then like deepen that article and then write this book? >> Lawrence Wright: Yeah I write for the New Yorker and my editor David Remnick asked me, he said, "Larry I want you to explain Texas". And because it is a little mysterious to people why I live in Texas. And I reminded him that I get paid by the word. It's a very big question you just asked and so I started writing and I couldn't stop. You know I had - I used to work for Texas Monthly and I thought I'll never write about Texas again. I don't want to be a regional writer. And - but I couldn't stop, so the book came out of that. >> Thank you for being here, I loved the book. I grew up in Florida but my brother goes to UT so I'm sort of Texas adjacent. My question is, I mean I guess you just sort of answered it but when you were writing this was the audience you had in mind sort of everyone else, or was it people in Texas or a mix and how did that shape you're reporting and the way that you wrote the book? >> Lawrence Wright: You know that's an interesting question. I - part of it, I don't ever really write for an audience. I kind of write to try to - I want to write the book I'd like to read about something. And the - in this case I had - I know instinctively what people think about Texas. Sometimes it's been stated very much in my face. But I wanted to address those things, but also I think you know I wrote - years ago I wrote a memoir about growing up in Dallas during the Kennedy assassination. And one of the things that struck me was Texas has rather impoverished literary archive and there just wasn't very much said about what it was like to be from Texas or from Dallas at that time. And your life is so enriched when you say you grow up in Paris or Brooklyn even. You have all this literature about it and it helps you understand the culture you live in. So part of my goal was to enlarge that archive and also I just had a really lot of fun doing this and so I - it helped me understand the place I live in and myself better in it. >> Thank you. >> Hi Lawrence, I have a question about your previous book, "The Looming Tower". So this is a book that outlines a bunch of the extremists who were fighting the Soviets in the 80's and then turned to the Americans in the 90's. One thing I have to still get a full grasp on is how these guys could suddenly in the late 80's and early 90's become so hostile and aggressive against the country that for a long time had been providing them arms and helping them achieve a major political goal? So could you speak to that some please? >> Lawrence Wright: Yeah, the turn against America - you go back to think about some of the Mujahedeen back then, there was a delegation that came to the White House and one of them tried to convert Ronald Reagan to Islam. Just think about how the world would be different. But at that time we were on good terms with the people who became the Taliban in many respects. But the - once the Soviets left there was really no reason geopolitical reason for us to be in; so we left the country. ^M00:40:10 And it was in chaos and it turned to Civil War, and then it turned into a Jihad. And I don't think we would have paid any attention to it really were it not for 9/11. You know Steve Cole was speaking earlier and you know if Taliban weren't on our radar, but 9/11 changed all that because they were hosting Bin Laden. They weren't participating in the war on America. But because they created a sanctuary that made it possible for Al Qaeda to train its soldiers. You know they had the opportunity to return him and they failed to take that opportunity, so the hammer came down. But now it's the longest running war we've ever been in. Wish I had a better answer for you then. >> Hi there, I'm from New Jersey but my first exposure to Texas was when I was six years old and I met Sandy Cheeks, SpongeBob's friend from Texas. People from my generation will probably understand where that comes from. But my question is you talked a little bit before about how California and Texas were mirrors of each other and I think that also kind of exists in the way those two states have handled their approaches to race and higher education. Have you explored that or can you comment about that whereas in California they can't use race to - as a consideration for the UC system or as in Texas it was kind of upheld that race could be used as one metric. >> Lawrence Wright: I thought the University of Texas had kind of ingenious idea about how to handle race admissions. They decided to take to admit the top 10% of all public school students who applied. And the assumption was that the schools themselves were also segregated, so they were going to be a large number of minority students coming out of minority schools. And it didn't work. The truth is minority population in the African American minority population in the University of Texas is very, very small. And then the Hispanic population has increased but it has not been effective and both of these school systems are circumscribed by laws that make it very difficult to entice or recruit minority students into those systems. And I don't know exactly how we're going to go about fixing because the court is fighting against it. And rules are really unclear. I think that's true in California as well. >> My question is about the Texas economy. You said the future is Texas and I guess that will be the case if the state's economy continues to grow at the rate that it has and people come there for the jobs as they have in the past. So I'm just wondering how much of - in your view how much of the state's economic growth is due to the low tax, low regulation policies that have sort of defined Texas's approach? Versus frankly just the good luck of having oil in the ground and natural gas in the ground? >> Lawrence Wright: That's a good question. As I say Texas wouldn't be Texas without the oil. And yet I do think that businesses migrated to Texas because they see it as a freebie in a way. So they're liberated from taxes and they don't - because most industries are not social welfare organizations. They don't care that much about the consequences of their behavior. And Texas is very stingy in terms of its social net. And if you subtract money from public schools, which is almost the primary organization of government, well then it's cheaper, right? Of course you're failing your children and you're not providing for the future of your own - your workers as a future. So it is a conundrum. Texas can afford to be more generous and more far sighted and that's what I'm constantly harping on. It's not - I think there may be some trauma left over from these many busts that we've been through and Texas was never rich in the ways that people think of it as being rich. I mean there are more millionaires per capita in - well certainly in Connecticut and Maryland, but there was one - South Dakota I think? Yeah some places that you think, really? But everybody used to - when good times are in Texas you would see these oversized dollars for sale in the airport. And so the oil is really flowing, but it never really flowed down to the people. But that doesn't mean that there wasn't money gushing through the state. And we'd be far - and also I think we've been in provident in our state government, California, the liberals they left their government with an 8 billion dollar surplus and Texas - excuse me, 6 billion dollar surplus in California and Texas has an 8 billion dollar deficit. So you wonder where the fiscal conservatives really are. Thank you. Can I just finish with these because we're the last speakers, right? So nobody else, but you guys I'll take your questions. Yes sir? >> You make a lot of point of comparing Texas and California. Being from New York and living a lot of my recent time in Florida I'm wondering what Texans think of New Yorkers or Floridians as in contrast to what they might think of California? >> Lawrence Wright: Well Florida is sort of equally crazy. So there's a kind of affection and tolerance I think of and it's seen as where a sunshine state and there's a consonants in our politics I think. Although Florida seems to be a little more influx in terms of its politics right now. New York, I adore New York and - but you know for a long time New York was seen as the embodiment of all the things that we're fighting against. And yet you know our country wouldn't be the same if it weren't for all these different entities that we management to create. >> My son graduate from Rice in May, he's a native Washingtonian. And over the four years he was at Rice our family really loved learning a little bit about Texas. I'm sad that we won't have a reason to go back there any time soon. But I'm wondering since we are at the book festival and since you mentioned that you felt as a Texas that there maybe wasn't a literary legacy for you. Is there a book that you would recommend, aside from your own, novel, history, anything that you would recommend to folks who want to learn a little more about Texas? >> Lawrence Wright: In my book I'd write about Stephen Harrigan who is my best friend and I think he's the best writer that Texas ever produced. And he has a novel called "Gates of the Alamo" that is just wonderful. But I've just finished reading a manuscript. His history of Texas, which is you know magisterial. And it's going to come out in the fall of next year. And its tentative title is "Big Wonderful Thing in the World". But it's - his book is a big wonderful thing. >> I should have said in addition - >> Lawrence Wright: That's fine; I marked you down right away. >> You mentioned that Texas used to be much more blue or just blue overall. Assuming that people don't move out in droves, does that mean - is the older generation also more progressive? >> Lawrence Wright: Well no, the primary voters, the Republican primary voters have been determining the politics of the state for decades. I read a figure that there are more of them over the age of 65 then are under the age of 50. Now that demarcation tells you a lot. You know there is a kind of dinosaur era that's moving into the past. And you know who will come in the wake of them? It's hard to say, but I don't think that the - I think that the kind of reactionary politics that we've seen in the state for a while are people are really tired of it. This attack on public schools at the same time that we were having this argument about bathrooms. And whether transgender people can move, migrate from one bathroom to another. That was the sole discussion about public education in this past legislative session. That's shameful. That's an avoidance of the responsibility that these people have. And I'm hopeful that you know in the next session which begins in January we'll have a more sober minded group of people there. But if not, believe me I'll be on their case. >> Mr. Wright, I grew up in California and then more recently spent 10 years in Houston. And actually loved it as well and was there when they actually elected a lesbian as mayor and when we moved there, there was an African American and currently there was another African American - I was wondering I you could comment on a part of the economy related to energy aside from the petroleum and gas industry, and that's the wind energy growth? >> Lawrence Wright: Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. Texas drives more power from wind than any other state. Currently 15% of the power in Texas comes from wind. And solar is coming along, not as quickly. I don't know why, we've got plenty of sun. But the - there's one very conservative town, Georgetown which is north of Austin which gets all of its energy from renewable sources. And Dallas and some other places in Texas you can choose an energy plan. And you can choose to have renewable only sources. And if you choose that the energy at night is free. Free. The wind blows more at night and they have to unload it and so it's hard to beat free in terms of pricing. But you know it's - I think it's - I have to give credit to Rick Perry, he's the governor that instigated that and I wish as energy secretary that he would remember some of the legacy he left behind in Texas. Last question. >> Well Mr. Wright, thank you for coming to this event. My mother recently moved to Houston, I'm from California, so I like and interested in this comparison that you're drawing between the two states. When I went to visit her in Houston the thing I noticed about Texans is they're the only state I know that wears earrings of their state. I don't notice people from Ohio wearing like Ohio earrings. But at any right, that aside, the first thing you mentioned was about Houston that they don't have a zoning policy. Can you elaborate? When I visit her I notice that and about how weird that makes "weird", how unique - I'll say it that way; how unique that makes Houston. Why doesn't it? Do you know the history - >> Lawrence Wright: Yeah it was to keep the companies out. >> Oh of course. >> Lawrence Wright: Zoning was a communist plot. And the 50's this was - ^M00:53:17 ^M00:53:23 In the 50's it was assumed that this was a real threat. And so they decided that there would be no zoning and the liberals thought maybe that's not such a bad thing. Because it will make it easier to integrate our housing. And it did. And one of the things about the no zoning things, Houston is constantly - it's like a school teacher erasing the blackboard and doing this again. So it's constantly erasing and creating but it has affordable housing. And you know, compare that to the city as most like Los Angeles, it's very difficult to find affordable housing there. So I'm kind of forgiving about the - it's an experiment. But you know it has its up sides. It can be - it can be kind of crazy, but that's - if you're going to spend time in Houston you have to get over that. >> Not going to get over it, it's unique and I can't think of any other - >> I don't think there's another - >> Wondering what the history was. >> Well listen thank you guys; it's been great talking to you. ^M00:54:44 [ Applause ] ^E00:54:46