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- [00:11]
A
Hello, and welcome to the God Save Texas edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm joined as ever by Anna Shymansky.
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B
Hello.
- [00:27]
A
Hello. Hello, Anne. I'm joined as ever by Emily Peck of the Huffington Post.
- [00:32]
C
Hello.
- [00:34]
A
And quite amazingly and awesomely, I am joined by Lawrence Wright, the famed author of. You have written how many books?
- [00:43]
C
11.
- [00:44]
A
11 books of which you are still being hunted down by a Scientologist.
- [00:49]
C
Yeah, well, if you Google my name, you'll see attack ads and occasionally they assign a private investigator, apparently to call people that I used to know.
- [00:59]
A
You wrote the definitive book on Scientology. You wrote the definitive book and a wonderful book called the Looming Tower about Al Qaeda and basically how 911 happened and many more. And you are a staff writer for the New Yorker.
- [01:12]
C
Yes.
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A
And the author of your new book.
- [01:16]
C
Is called God Save Texas.
- [01:18]
A
God Save Texas. It's a rollicking, rolling. How would you describe this book? It's just a series of stories, really.
- [01:28]
C
Yeah. It's personal history. It is history. It is a travelogue and it is a prayer embodied in the title God Save Texas.
- [01:39]
A
I am here in Texas, in Austin at the KUT studios with Larry. We are going. We have a jam packed show. We are going to talk about oil, of course, because this is Texas. We are going to talk about the tech boom in Austin. We are going to talk about zoning laws in Houston. We are going to talk about climate change. We are going to talk about wild hogs. We are going to talk about the price of Emus. You have no idea what we're going to talk about. We are going to have a Slate less segment about Matty McConaughey, whose name I just today learned how to pronounce. So all of that is coming up on Slate Money. Given this week's news, we should really lead with Apple because we just found out that Apple is issued basically an earnings warning, a profits warning this week because it said that for all that its American revenues were fine and healthy, they'd somehow managed to fall off a cliff in China. This came after their big announcement that they were investing a billion dollars in Austin, Texas to build a whole new campus here. They're not doing anything stupid like calling it an HQ2, but kind of feels a bit like that they're going to create thousands of jobs and Austin is. Which seems to have totally ratified the idea that Austin is a genuine technology hub. And when did that happen?
- [03:14]
C
You know, it really began in the 80s when this MCC, the Microchip Consortium, chose Austin as its center. And, you know, there had been Dell. You know, I guess you could really date it to the freshman in the UT dorm. Michael Dell, who decided, decided to start putting computers together in his dorm room. But the kind of acknowledgement that Austin was a coming tech center really began then when IBM and other high tech organizations got together to try to recreate chips and have an innovative center here in Austin. And a lot of other companies began to come to Austin to be a part of that.
- [03:58]
A
So it predates what I think of as the big sort of boom in Austin, which is like, Austin has grown insanely over the past, what, decade or so.
- [04:09]
C
You know, the truth is Austin has a history of steady growth. It's just gotten big enough that people are beginning to notice, and it still is. You know, when I moved here in 1980, it was still a little college town, but it was, you know, it had been growing, but it was growing from a really little college town to a little college town. And now it's gotten to be the 11th largest city in America.
- [04:32]
D
Is there any worry in Austin the way there was when Amazon announced it was coming to Queens? There was a lot of fretting about the effect the big company would have on the city and rising rents and pushing poor people out and that kind of thing. Is there any sort of equivalent sounds being made over there?
- [04:51]
A
Gentrification words.
- [04:52]
C
Gentrification words. Oh, yes. My sense of Austin is that the city actively really didn't want Amazon. The city did make a bid, and it was an honor to be on their list, but there was no frantic courtship. You know, it was funny when Amazon made its decision, I was reading the Austin paper and the Dallas Morning News, and in Dallas, the reaction was, what's wrong with us? Which is a typical Dallas neurotic, Where did we fail? And. And the headline in the Austin paper was, who cares? But there is a lot of anxiety about the city's loss of diversity, plus this immense crush of traffic. Austin has some of the worst traffic in the whole country, and it is a terrible burden. So, you know, we feel like we're because of our success, and this is a problem we shouldn't. You know, if you're going to have a problem, this is a nice problem to have in many respects. But Austin really is suffering from its growing pains. The infrastructure, the traffic, and the loss of, I think a lot of diversity in the city has taken a toll.
- [06:07]
B
And the traffic issue, isn't that also somewhat related to what has made Austin So attractive to a lot of businesses, which is lower taxes. But then the result of that is that you also have lower tax revenues and less spending on infrastructure and public transportation.
- [06:22]
C
Well, I think those are not priorities of the state government. That's one of the problems. You know, it's true that, you know, my feeling about Austin is that when we were here in 1980, it was still not a very diverse place. You know, there was a Hispanic population, a very small black population, but of the cities in Texas, it was one of the least diverse. And it's gotten less diverse over time. Hispanic population has increased somewhat, but the black population has essentially been pushed out of East Austin, which is historically the black part of town. And, you know, I mourn that because I think that Austin gets a little less interesting when it gets less diverse as it is now.
- [07:13]
A
Although that's a perennial complaint in Austin, isn't it, that it's becoming less interesting over time.
- [07:18]
C
Well, you know, everybody who moves here, two weeks later, they mourn the loss. Loss of the Austin that used to be. And along with Cedar Fever, the nostalgia for the past is a characteristic Austin response.
- [07:35]
A
But the tech aspect of Austin has been here for decades, and it's kind of uniquely Austin. There's nowhere else in Texas which has that, right?
- [07:45]
C
Well, Dallas has a big tech center, but Dallas has a much bigger economy, and it's a larger city and a more diverse city in many respects. So it doesn't feel as the presence of. It doesn't feel as significant as it does in Austin, where it is the major economic factor in the city.
- [08:03]
B
And I'm curious about what you think about the future of tech in Austin, because on the one hand, it's great. You have Apple, you have Google and Facebook all located there. But I know in the book, you also talked about the lack of investment in education, and I'm wondering how that could play out in the future if you don't have a really educated populace. Not to say people aren't educated, but just lack of investment in public education.
- [08:29]
C
I worry about this more than any other thing in terms of the future of Texas. You know, we spend $2,500 less per student than the national average, and it shows. The nation's report card that came out last year showed that fourth graders in Texas were, like, 48th in the 45th, I think, in the country. And that, you know, that lack of investment. These are not just our children. They're our future. They're the workers of the future. And all these tech companies that we've been Talking about they come here because they want educated and talented people to work for them. And if we don't provide them, then they're not going to come here anymore. In fact, they may leave. So, you know, I worry about that not just for the future of the tech industry, but these are children that we need to take care of and it's our responsibility.
- [09:26]
A
So explain that then, because Texas has by far been the choice of companies wanting to build new headquarters in the US Wanting to expand in the US there's insane amounts of growth, not just in Austin, but also in Dallas, as you were saying, and really across the state. And that's been going on for a while now. How does that square with what you're saying, saying about an absence of an educated population?
- [09:56]
C
Well, we have a lot of colleges in this region, you know, not just we're sitting here at the University of Texas where we've got 50,000, you know, young people studying. But that's not, you know, it's one of many colleges in the region. It probably has more colleges per capita if you take the whole region than practically any other place in this part of the country. So there is a reason people come here for that kind of education. The K12 is where we're falling down. And this has not been, you know, this has been a historic problem, but it's become a deeper problem recently, and that's why I'm concerned about it. The state of Texas has forfeited its responsibility and its contribution to public education. It used to contribute more than 50%, 62% under Mark White, governor, when we reorganized organized school finance previously, but now it's like 38%. And the terrific burden on tax for homeowners and so on. Our property taxes are very high despite the reputation of Texas as being a low tax state. There's no state income tax, but the burden gets pushed onto property owners.
- [11:10]
A
And the other big problem of K12 education is just the sheer number of kids in poverty. Just because it's basically impossible to educate a kid if they're hungry.
- [11:24]
C
Yeah, we have a high, you know, California and Texas have a lot in common. And you know, we have very different models, but the outcomes are similar. Our demography is very similar. And so, you know, we have a lot of non English speaking students that come into our schools and that poses a challenge for public education. But that's the reason we have public education is to educate them into speaking the language of the culture and acquiring these skills. But we've pulled back so much on our contribution that I think that it's really beginning to show in the outcomes. And this is going to be something that companies in the future are going to be looking at when they consider whether they want to come to Texas. Will there be a workforce that's adequately educated when they arrive here? And that's, you know, right now we're about to have. Our legislature is about to go into session again. We only do it every other year. And so this is the main subject that's going to be addressed this session is public school finance and how do we go about financing our public schools and how much the state contribution should be.
- [12:38]
A
That's an excellent segue into the broader question about the climate for entrepreneurship in Texas and which is. Which is in the national imagination and certainly in the Texan imagination, that one of the defining sort of characteristics of Texas is this kind of ability to just make it on your own. The American dream. Very individualistic. And it's not just entrepreneurship. It's big multinational corporations. It's like Toyota set up its American headquarters in. Not even in Dallas, but just like in the northern suburbs of Dallas somewhere, and which I know quite well because I wrote a big piece about the Dallas Cowboys organization, and they set up their headquarters in Frisco, which I think, like 10 years ago was basically a dot on the map and is now one stoplight.
- [13:34]
C
Yeah, I remember that. Now they're like eight high schools, you know.
- [13:37]
A
Yeah, they're growing at, like. No, I think they're growing at eight high schools, like, per year or something. It's absolutely insane. They have a little stadium there which the Dallas Cowboys built, a small stadium by Texas standards, just for the high schools. They have four or five high schools which play there. But these companies, the amount of growth that you're seeing for an investment that you're seeing in Texas dwarfs what you're seeing in certainly in New York or many other richer states. And there's this idea that that's related to taxes and low taxes and also to, I would say, to housing affordability. There's no zoning, that people can just put up housing. They can grow Frisco from nothing to enormous in no time at all. There's no one going to stop them. There's no NIMBYs. And that means that immigrants, both from other countries and from other parts of the country, can move to Texas, have a relatively high standard of living at relatively low cost, and that just fuels more and more growth. Is that working?
- [14:55]
C
Well, Houston is the embodiment of that, and Houston decided to have no zoning back in the 50s, because they thought zoning was a communist plot. And it was an odd thing because Bill, the former mayor, said that, you know, liberals looked at the situation, you know, the proposal to eliminate zoning, and they thought, well, maybe this will help with integration. And so they. They did not pose an objection.
- [15:25]
A
And did it?
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C
It did. It's. Now Houston is considered by some measures the most diverse city in America. And part of that is because of the absence of zoning, I think, because affordable housing is so much more easily built now. There are weird things, and when you go to Houston, you'll see, you know, erotic nightclubs next to a shopping center or a house made out of beer cans and, you know, just things people feel free to express themselves. You have skyscrapers and neighborhoods and, you know, that kind of thing. On the other hand, if you are, you know, the property values are much lower. And if you compare it to Los Angeles, which is the easiest comparison for Houston, because they're both big, sprawling entities, housing prices in Houston are about 40% of what they are in LA.
- [16:19]
A
And that's good, right?
- [16:20]
C
It's good because it keeps the city diverse and energetic.
- [16:24]
B
But isn't there also a bit of this kind of paradox here where, on the one hand, the lack of zoning laws allows for tremendous amount of housing to be built, however, it also result in housing being built on floodplains. So on the one hand, they're very good things, but also some pretty dangerous things.
- [16:44]
C
Well, you know, there should be some, at least. Buyer beware. A lot of those people that bought those houses on in the flood plains had no idea what they were doing. Some in the hurricane Harvey, for instance, you know, there was housing built in what was supposed to be a catchment basin for a flood. And what happened? Of course they were flooded, but many of the homeowners later said we had no idea. I think government does have a role in protecting people from that kind of catastrophe.
- [17:17]
D
Yeah, it does seem that the lack of zoning laws and the sort of lax attitude about regulation is going to bode really poorly, I mean, for the whole country. But. But for Texas specifically, as climate change becomes more and more of reality, what we saw with Harvey, it seems like one of climate change kind of hangs over the whole state, kind of in the book a little bit.
- [17:41]
C
Yeah. It's one of the things that's a problem for the state to be led by climate change skeptics means that there'd be little incentive for them to dedicate the kind of money that would be needed to protect our infrastructure, especially our coastline, where our most populous city is and where our most precious resource, the ports and the refineries are located. And that, I think, is a tremendous liability for the state in the future.
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D
And you really do see echoes of it nationally, too. I think the reluctance to deal with reality, and you would hope a state like Texas would sort of lead the way instead of denying reality. And it could just.
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A
I think you see it in virtually all coastal states is this reluctance. People want to live on the coast for a million obvious reasons, and the government is very reluctant to tell them they can't do that, even though living on the coast in this day and age is inherently dangerous.
- [18:40]
C
Yeah. Yeah, it is. And insurance companies, you know, have a rider which allows, you know, people to buy insurance at a reasonable rate when you're living in a perilous situation, not just in the. On the coastline of Texas, but, you know, for instance, in California, where, you know, fires routinely crop off these developments and people move right back in.
- [19:01]
D
Yeah. And some of the stories you tell in the book about living near areas where there's fracking going on were sort of horrifying. You know, people. Kids coughing up blood, I feel like, was one of the stories.
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C
Yeah, the nosebleeds.
- [19:15]
D
Yeah, the nosebleeds.
- [19:16]
C
Thank you.
- [19:17]
D
Yeah.
- [19:19]
C
Well, you know, Texas isn't, you know, the number one energy producer. And, you know, fracking is fascinating. You know, we've had an experience, you know, three times in our history in Texas of totally changing the world economy and the American economy, of course, because of our oil discoveries. And, you know, the first one was at the turn of the 20th century when this con man named Patillo Higgins decided to drill a well near Beaumont in this gassy hill and predicted that he would find oil at a thousand feet, which was, you know, he made up this figure, and yet. And he wanted to produce a well that produced 50 barrels per day. And so he drilled this well, and sure enough, at 1,000ft, there's this huge roar, and, you know, all this drilling pipe flew up over the derrick, and it was terrifying. Nobody had ever seen that before. And the workers, the roughnecks, crept up to clean up the mess. And then suddenly, this giant gurgling sound and rocks spewed out, and oil came out 150ft into the air. It was the first gusher. And for the next nine days before they capped it, 100,000 barrels of oil a day was coming out of the well called Spindletop. And that. That totally changed. It was more than all the oil produced in America at the time. And the Same thing happened again in East Texas in the 1930s with the East Texas strikes. And then finally, when you get around to fracking with George Mitchell, who was in many respects, I think, a tragic figure, one of the greatest wildcatters Texas ever produced. But he had the idea that you could get gas and oil out of what he called tight rock, which is shale. And it took him 250 wells that he tried to frack and make it profitable before he finally did produce a fracking well. That, in his opinion, was going to save the planet because he saw that oil was running out and coal was the only alternative and that would ruin the atmosphere. And so he decided natural gas was cleaner.
- [21:48]
A
And.
- [21:49]
C
And so if he could find a way to frack out the gas from the fields in North Texas, he would be able to save the planet. Unfortunately, he wasn't aware of the kind of greenhouse gases that were going to come along with that. And of course, the lack of regulation and oversight has made that problem even worse.
- [22:07]
A
So Texas is also the, I would say, arguably the national leader in clean energy, though, right?
- [22:14]
C
That's the paradox, isn't it? And one has to credit Rick Perry to some extent when he was governor. You know, Texas already has the installed capacity for 24% of its energy needs coming from alternative energy. Most of that is wind out in West Texas and along the coast. And if you drive out, even in the Permian Basin, which is the headquarters of the treasure trove of oil and gas in Texas, you'll see pumping jacks and windmills. They're together in the same field in Dallas and some other places in Texas. You can choose your energy program. You can decide where the energy comes from that you use. And if you choose alternative energy, which may be more expensive, but at night it's free, because the wind blows at night, and they have to have some way of unloading it, so they let you have it free at night. And I think. I think it's kind of hard to.
- [23:16]
A
Beat free, especially if that's when you're recharging your electric car.
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C
I think that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So I think that with all the talk about energy and oil and gas, Texas has really forged ahead more than any other state in creating alternative forms of energy.
- [23:36]
A
So let's talk a little bit more about this. It's an energy economy. By far the biggest industry in Texas is oil. I would guess that healthcare is a distant second. And it has been, as you say, for 100 years. And how has that shaped. Because it is growing Insanely fast. You have a projection in your book that's going to have 50 million people in a few decades. It's going to be the degree to which Texas and Florida combined are going to dominate. The future of the US economy I think is under appreciated. Tell me a little bit about the status of oil in particular in creating what it means to be Texas and how that has shaped the state and what that means for the whole country really going forwards.
- [24:31]
C
Well, oil is a part of our economy and it's a part of our culture and you know, the economy going back to the turn of the 20th century. You know, oil at that time, before we really had any appreciable oil, the money, to the extent that there was any money in Texas came from cattle and timber and it had a very small amount of oil as a part of it. Oil changed that. Oil created millionaires and that was the beginning of having those oversized dollars for sale at the airport. And the stereotype of the Texas millionaire.
- [25:14]
A
Which is a very different kind of millionaire to the east coast millionaire or the west coast millionaire, there's more kind of, I guess some weird combination of luck and bravery and it's not really a skills based thing.
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C
Right. It's a gamble.
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D
Growing up in the 80s, I mean there was the TV show Dallas and every time you talk about the Texas millionaires and oil, I can't help but think of Larry Hagman in a big 10 gallon hat. But go on. Sorry to interrupt.
- [25:46]
C
Well, one of the keys to I think understanding the Texas culture at the time is that getting rich in terms of cattle or oil was not a matter of education. You know, it was a matter of drive and persistence and luck. And we valued those things and do still value those things. You know, those are good qualities but they're not essential necessarily for a high tech economy. And you know, so we're transitioning. We are in a stereotypes, the legend, the myth of Texas still lives on and I think it will always endure.
- [26:30]
B
Texas reminds me of a lot of countries that have just a tremendous access to resources, which on the one hand can be great, but then on the other hand it can cause a lack of investment in other industries and as you said, things like education, infrastructure.
- [26:47]
A
So yeah. Is there a resource curse in Texas? Does it risk going the way of, I don't know, Nigeria or Venezuela rather than Norway?
- [27:01]
C
No, no, Texas has navigated past that and I think that that's to the credit of the leadership of the state, not just the political leadership, but the business leadership.
- [27:10]
A
And you actually have a Little baby sovereign wealth fund. Right. You have like $10 billion.
- [27:15]
C
Well, it's going to be $11 billion this year. The thing about Texas is that with oil, we lived in a boom and bust economy. And I think one of the reasons that people hated Texas so much, and many still do, was that when Texas was booming, that meant that oil prices were high, which meant that it was hard for other people. Inflationary experience for most of the country, but Texas was always doing well. Whereas when oil prices were low, Texas economy was flat and everybody felt great. But you know, in 2006 we had, you know, oil prices going under $30 a barrel and 70,000 jobs were lost in energy jobs in Houston alone. But the economy of Texas did not go into a recession. And that was, I think, a turning point to demonstrate that the economy in Texas has become diversified and that we're not relying entirely on the oil sector to keep us afloat.
- [28:22]
B
And I think this is also interesting moving forward because if you look at what's happening now, I think people say similarly, like, oh, with shale oil, is there going to be this similar boom and bust structure? And you know, obviously at some point prices will. We've already obviously been seeing price declines. But if you look at the financing that people are using now for, for fracking, it is quite different than it was in say the 80s, when in the 80s it was much more reliant on these kind of local thrifts, savings and loan for financing. Whereas now it's more on the capital markets through high yield issuance of high yield debt or from private equity. So it's much. It's spread out across essentially the globe as opposed to being just kind of consolidated in Texas, which makes the banking system far less vulnerable.
- [29:07]
C
Yeah. I mean, because the 80s was a catastrophe for Texas because those SNLs that you're referencing were giving out these absurd loans. You know, they would. People were buying condos for $200,000 in the morning and it'd be resold three or four times by the afternoon for a million. It was nuts. People went to prison for it. And it was a very, very crazy period of time in our economy. And I think having a more reliable base of and responsible base for financing is very helpful to the state and to the economy.
- [29:43]
A
So the growth of Texas, looking forward, it looks maybe more like the growth of Florida. The myth of Texas will endure and Texans will be very proud. Texans even before they're proud Americans. But the sort of reality on the ground of what people are doing and how they're behaving is going to. It's not going to be that different.
- [30:10]
C
You know, I think people are drawn to Texas for many different reasons. And, you know, the legend, the myth that we're talking about is part of it, and that's. It's an asset, it's a burden sometimes. I remember when I was a young man, I was teaching in Cairo, and I went out to the pyramids, and there was a stable there. I used to go out and ride. Although I'm, you know, an urban cowboy, I grew up in Dallas, and I was not much of a horseman, but I would go out and they found out I was from Texas, and they used to call me Texas. And, you know, one day I went out there and they said, oh, Texas, we have a horse for you. And two guys bring out this rearing stallion with his paws ripping the air and his nostrils flaring. And, of course, being Texas, I had to get on this beast, and he took me halfway to Libya. But I felt I was literally astride the Texas myth, that it was so vivid in their minds that I was the kind of person that could do that. And it's a challenge, but it's also. It beckons to people, and it's exciting, you know, in many respects. And I think that's part of why people are drawn to the state. There's a kind of vitality about it and a sense of freedom that it emits, and that is the lure of the state. And, you know, I think that's, you know, one of the reasons I feel optimistic is that, you know, if we fail, for instance, to educate our children, that would be untexan of us.
- [31:45]
D
This is a business podcast, but I did want to ask you. There's so much talk now about Texas maybe turning purple, turning blue. I mean, you compare it to California, everyone compares it a lot to California, which used to be red and now it's turned blue.
- [31:59]
C
Yeah.
- [32:00]
D
Is that ever going to happen, do you think? And if it happens, it's going to be. What's that going to mean for the country?
- [32:06]
C
Well, it will happen. The growth in Texas is largely in the cities and the suburbs. And what was really striking about this last midterm election is that the suburbs, which had been so red, turn purple. The cities are blue. Every city in Texas is blue. So the demography of the future of Texas is Brown. We have 40% of our population now is Hispanic. The white majority days of that are over. But the demography is changing. And I think that the Republican Party in Texas especially, hasn't come to grips with the future of the state and they're fighting a rear guard action instead of going out and actually recruiting, you know, the kind of candidates that would appeal to this new majority. And, you know, I think that, that, you know, so is there are other people moving to the state who come from different political traditions. And you know, when our family moved to Dallas in 1960, we were a part of the change that turned Texas red. My father was a Nixon man and he, you know, Dallas was the first city in Texas to elect a Republican congressman. So, you know, that demography, that turnover is what turned Texas red back then. And I think the demography turnover now is what is turning the state purple and will eventually turn it blue.
- [33:46]
B
And I'm kind of curious, just in terms of the economic policy of like these candidates that are Democrats that are doing a little bit better in Texas, do they tend to support the type of business friendly policies that people associate with Texas or don't they?
- [34:01]
C
Yeah, they do. I mean, I don't think that there's much of an agenda for people that are not at least encouraging of business in Texas. There are people that, well, take the example of Beto o'. Rourke. He has some very progressive views that would ally him with some of Bernie Sanders type people. But essentially, if you want to get elected in Texas, you have to make some kind of accommodation with the fact that Texas is a business oriented state and that's our identity now. And I think that's what most Texans want.
- [34:44]
A
And Beto, of course, I, I wasn't planning on asking this, but I feel I have to. Is he was the congressman for El Paso, which is in my mind, very special city because it really does straddle the border. It's like two halves of a city. One half is in Mexico, one half is in the United States. And it used to be pretty porous, and obviously it's much less porous now. But is there a sense in which Texas camels should be getting closer to Mexico?
- [35:25]
C
Mexico is our primary trading partner. So we have this relationship with Mexico that only border states really understand. And the closer you get to the border, the more you realize that the border itself is a kind of separate entity. And, you know, people who live on the border identify themselves that way. And they have, you know, there are people that go back and forth every single day. They're workers and they're students and so on. So there is an integration that I think the further you get away from the border, the less you understand that. And that's why People who live on the border, like Will Hurd is a Republican who's district is on the border. It's larger than the state of Indiana. And it' syou know, he is not for a wall, for instance, although he's a Republican. But you know, there are other ways of dealing with it that I think people who are actually living that experience of, you know, the interaction of the border, the vitality of the border, commerce, it would be terribly ruinous to the Texas economy to shut that off.
- [36:39]
A
I don't know if you know about the slate money numbers round.
- [36:43]
C
Yeah, I was warned about that.
- [36:45]
A
You were warned about the sleep money numbers round. Do you have a number for the numbers round?
- [36:51]
C
42.
- [36:52]
A
Oh, I like that one. It's the answer to life, the universe and everything.
- [36:55]
C
Yeah, pretty much.
- [36:58]
A
What is 42?
- [37:00]
C
It's the number of electoral votes Texas will have after the next census, which will be four more than we have now. And the reason that's important is that, you know, that's growing faster than any other number of electoral votes anywhere else. California is the largest state, it has 55 electoral votes, but it's not going to get any new ones. And it hasn't had any new electoral votes since 2003. And, and new York, for instance, has been losing electoral votes and population for decades. And Florida and Texas, as you pointed out, are really the future of the country. And I think, I don't think Texans have fully taken on the responsibility that they have for leading the country. It's one thing to be a semi apart from the country as Texans often like to think of themselves, but it's another to realize that we have the responsibility of leading America. 1 out of 10 school children right now is a Texan Anna.
- [38:09]
B
So My number is 50,000. This is a statistic from Lawrence's book which I found really kind of fun. So this was the price of an emu. In the 1990s, there apparently was the. This emu bubble.
- [38:27]
A
There was a llama boom. And it wasn't llamas, it was emus.
- [38:30]
C
Emus, yes.
- [38:31]
B
I really enjoyed this and I actually looked up some other articles on it. This is like bizarre bit of economic history. There were like government loans to kind of encourage breeding. There was like an avian punzi scheme. It was amazing. But alas, then the price fell.
- [38:46]
A
What happened to the price of an emu?
- [38:48]
B
And well, apparently, I'll be perfectly honest, I do not know where the price of an emu is today, but apparently in the very late 90s, it went to something like you know, $5 an emu, so.
- [38:59]
C
Oh, you can't give them away. And there was, after people just opened their gates and let the emus out. And there were, in some counties, there were emu wranglers to try to round them up. And they're pretty difficult birds to capture.
- [39:13]
A
And what are these crazy, crazy feral hog things which you apparently.
- [39:18]
D
Oh, yeah, we should have talked about that.
- [39:20]
C
Oh, the hogs are a terrible problem in. Not just in Texas, but all over. And some hunting enthusiasts somewhere along the line decided to cross breed them with Russian boars. So they're huge. They weigh more than a deer and they have these huge tusks that come out and they can run, I've forgotten, very fast. And they can smell seed corn planted, you know, and they'll dig it up right after you've planted it. They just ruin farms. And so, you know, trying to. Trying to eliminate or trim the population of feral hogs has been a goal of our political leaders. And in the last legislative session, they passed a law allowing people to shoot feral hogs from balloons, which I'm sure will be a new sport.
- [40:13]
A
This is the bit of the book which I was just reading out loud to my wife, and I was like, wait, do you realize there are 2000 wild tigers in Texas?
- [40:22]
C
That's right, pets.
- [40:25]
A
It's just like, yeah, this is the state where keeping tigers as pets is just. Yeah, it's something people do. Emily, we kind of got off track. Do you have a number?
- [40:34]
D
Yes, my number is 17. It's also a Texas number that is the number of black female judges that were just sworn in in Harris county in Texas, which is apparently the nation's third largest county, which includes Houston. And I don't know if anyone else saw the picture of them taken before the election, but it's just really inspiring. All these women, they were all running kind of separately, but then realized that they were all running for office and sort of campaigned together. And their slogan was black girl magic. And it's really cool. They all have four year terms.
- [41:09]
C
It's really an interesting phenomenon. And one of them beat Ed Emmett, who was a long standing county judge there. Probably the most important official in the whole Houston entity. And she's a graduate student, she's 28 years old.
- [41:24]
A
And is she gonna now basically take on that job of being the de facto mayor of Houston?
- [41:29]
C
She is. It's her job now, so I hope she takes it on.
- [41:34]
D
And I think they had record voter turnout from people of color in the county, which I think you mention in the book, like if people of color turned out at higher rates, then the state would flip faster. So it sort of seems like a.
- [41:48]
B
Kind of bell we're going to.
- [41:49]
C
The key to that is having candidates like those judges that really appeal to people. And I think that was transformative, especially.
- [41:56]
A
In Houston, talking about like changing demographics and the way that it there's this lag with which elected representatives seem to catch up and that lag can be decades. The title of your book is God Save Taxes and it is a deeply religious state. My number is 23%, which is a national statistic, which is the proportion of Americans who identify as either atheist or agnostic or having no religion at all. The proportion of Congress who identifies as Such is like one. It's not even 1%. It's just like 1%, 1%. Kyrsten Sinema, I think is the only member of Congress who will say that. And that one I'm fascinated to see when and whether that becomes politically acceptable in a candidates for office up and down.
- [42:58]
C
Well, we'll have to move through the sea of hypocrisy. We have to paddle across that great body of water because there are so many people in public office right now that we know don't believe what they say, but they cater to the popular whims. But one day there will be a candidate who doesn't express any kind of religious leanings and won't be hypocritical. And then you'll see that there'll be more people in office like that, but it'll be a long time before they come from Texas.
- [43:37]
A
Lawrence Wright, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming on Slate Money for greeting me. I have to, I have to explain that, you know, Larry is a, I would say like medium well done celebrity around these parts. Everyone in Texas knows him and as you will understand when you read the book, he's, he's, he's been everywhere, knows everyone. It's been a privilege to have you on Slate Money. Thanks for coming in. Thanks to all of you for listening. Thanks to a whole host of producers who have made this one possible today. There's David Alvarez here at KUT in Austin. There's June Thomas in New York. There's Max Jacobs in California somewhere. So thanks to all of them and we will talk to you next week on Slate Money. Sam.