“Big technological advances are not made by PhDs in white lab coats. Innovation in the oil and gas industry is rarely about quantum mechanics or higher math. Innovation in oil and gas is about brawn.” 

Maddow often returns to this idea. Sophisticated science takes the backseat in the oil industry, because what matters most is a relentless work ethic and interminable ambition.

“For all the far-flung experimentation, by the mid-1990s the basic idea of fracking was pretty straightforward: inject enough fluid into the rock, at high enough pressure, to open up some narrow escape pathways for the stuff you wanted to capture. What should be in the fluid? That was the gazillion dollar question.” 

This passage illustrates the almost haphazard way that slickwater fracking came into existence, at least in how its formula was put together. The exact components of the ideal slickwater formula was a “gazillion dollar question.”

“A new genie was out of the bottle. It’s hard to say, even today, if that genie is a friend. But he has had effect.” 

The genie referenced here is the method of fracking, combined with horizontal drilling, which skyrocketed the production of natural gas and opened new doors to Big Oil and Gas. The effects of this new “genie” are complex, as it created countless more jobs in the industry, but perhaps at the expense of the environment.