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Today, I have the pleasure to chat with Daniel Yergin. He is literally the world's leading authority on energy. His book, The Prize, won the Pulitzer Prize about the entire history of oil. His most recent book is The New Map, Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Yergin. Glad to be with you.
My first question is a book like The Prize, it's literally a history of the entire 20th century, right? Because everything in the last 150 years involves oil. That's happened since then. How does one begin to write a book like that?
I think you begin by not realizing what you're doing. I mean, I agreed to do that book. I said I'd do it in two years. It took me seven years. And the stories just became so compelling and it became woven in with the history of the 20th century.
And the funny thing was that some years before that, a publisher had flown up from New York to see me when I was teaching at Harvard and said she had a very interesting idea for a book. And I said, what? And she said, a history of the 20th century. I said, that's an interesting idea. And I thought to myself, it's... rather broad and actually the century wasn't over yet at that point.
But I think somehow I think that was kind of in the DNA of the book. And so as I told the story, it really was looking, it was not the history of the 20th century, but a history of the 20th century.
I found that there's a lot of books which are nominally about one subject, but the author just feels a need to, like, if you really want to understand my topic, you have to understand basically everything else in the world. And I think a couple of biographies, especially, if you read Kira's biography of LBJ or Calkin's and Stalin's, it's just like,
It is a history of the entire period in their country's history when this is happening. And I wonder if it was for you. You actually did just want to write about oil and like you just have to write about what's happening in the Middle East, what's happening in Asia. Or is it just like, no, you set out to write about World War II and World War I and everything.
I think it's also, I mean, because I think geopolitics narrative. storytelling, those are things that are very much in my interest. And my first book had actually been a narrative history of the origins of the Soviet American Cold War. So I brought that perspective to it. And as I was writing the prize, it was just...
I didn't intend to do all of that, but the discoveries, just one thing led to another, and I would just be amazed and think, this is an incredible story and no one knows it. And I did see how somehow in my mind, I did not do a detailed outline, but the pieces kind of came together in this larger narrative that located oil in this larger context of the 20th century.
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