Daniel Yergin

I mean, but, you know, the question of access, of maintaining the supplies then and now remains, that question of access remains crucial today.

I mean, you have the U.S.

Navy today trying to push back on the Houthis in Yemen who are attacking oil tankers.

No, I think that was part of your way of trying to embed yourself there, to bring them in so that you were not this isolated island company.

And if you do look at Venezuela and nationalized its company, the oil operations, but by that point they had people who were very well trained at running refineries, at drilling, at finding oil.

And they still carried some of, for quite a number of years, carried some of that DNA with them in their operations until the complete nationalization and Chavez came to power.

In 1973, finally, the U.S.

government did gave an antitrust waiver to the companies to try and have a united front in the negotiations.

But remember, it got all tied up with geopolitics.

It got tied up with Arab-Israeli wars and so forth.

So it wasn't just about oil.

There were other things going on and the use of what was called the oil weapon.

Why did it have such a huge effect?

This was completely unprecedented, unexpected, so it created a panic, and it was also right towards, you know, as the final months were coming of the Nixon administration,

So it got all tangled up.

And then we had the system of price controls and allocation controls, which made it much harder for the market to adapt.

I mean, one of the lessons to me from the prize is actually...

enabling markets to adjust because when governments try and control them and make decisions and allocate and governments, even in the United States and some states wanna do that today, it accentuates shortages and disruptions and price spikes.

But the tendency is to,

want to control them.