Daniel Yergin

Of course, you never have all the information.

You certainly don't have all the time and you surely don't know the outcome.

And I think that sense of contingency

which is such a part of human history.

I think, I feel I tried to capture, I think that is one of the things that made the prize distinctive, that makes the new map, that makes the quest distinctive.

I mean, in the quest, the middle book, you know, it was a question, where the hell did the modern solar and wind industry come from anyway?

And, you know, it's sort of entrepreneurs.

And so I, you know, because I have been an entrepreneur, you know, I have a...

feeling for it i mean you're an entrepreneur in terms of what you're doing with podcasts you you sort of invent it as you go along yeah and uh i tried to capture that at the same time i love writing narrative well the thing i'm curious about is if um let's say you meet another analyst who doesn't have a vivid sense of narrative history

Well, sometimes, I mean, I will have great respect for them and I have great respect.

I mean, I also love, you know, reading the monthly energy review from the Department of Energy, which is only statistics or the statistical energy review.

So I love it.

But I think what you may miss is...

the contingency, the human agency, you know, the decisions that went on to things, the right decisions that were made, the mistakes and the things that you missed that, you know, that you were wrong about or that would have been wrong.

So I think, so it's,

You know, it's the texture.

I mean, there is a tendency to think that things are inevitable, but you know that the world can change from one day to the next.

That's what happened on December 7th, 1941, September 1, 1939.

It could happen any day in the Middle East right now that you could go from one day to the next and it's a different world.

Yeah.