Unless you understand the history of oil, you cannot understand the rise of America, WW1, WW2, secular stagnation, the Middle East, Ukraine, how Xi and Putin think, and basically anything else that's happened since 1860.It was a great honor to interview Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Prize - the best history of oil ever written (which makes it the best history of the 20th century ever written).Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Sponsors:This episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.This episode is brought to you by Suno, pioneers in AI-generated music. Suno's technology allows artists to experiment with melodic forms and structures in unprecedented ways. From chart-toppers to avant-garde compositions, Suno is redefining musical creativity. If you're an ML researcher passionate about shaping the future of music, email your resume to [email protected] you’re interested in advertising on the podcast, check out this page.Timestamps(00:00:00) – Beginning of the oil industry(00:13:37) – World War I & II(00:25:06) – The Middle East(00:47:04) – Yergin’s conversations with Putin & Modi(01:04:36) – Writing through stories(01:10:26) – The renewable energy transition Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
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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