When Rachel Maddow, host of the Emmy Award-winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, set out to research her latest book, "Blowout," she wasn’t necessarily looking to write about the oil and gas industry. Instead, the question she was asking was this: At a time when democracy is falling and authoritarianism is rising globally, what do we do?

In October of this year, Maddow gave a lecture and had a conversation with multi-media journalist Joni Balter at a packed Benaroya Hall. From man-made earthquake swarms in Oklahoma, to Ukrainian revolutionaries, to Russians hacking the 2016 election, Maddow unwinds the skein of the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry worldwide, and warns us what’s at stake if we leave the industry highly subsidized—and largely unregulated.