"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. It's about   the entire history of oil. ..."

"I've found that there are a lot of books which  are nominally about one subject, but the author   just feels a need to say, "If you really want  to understand my topic, you have to understand   basica..."

"was as a way to understand the 20th century. We'll get to The New Map and the contemporary   issues around energy later on. First I want to  just begin with the beginning of the history   of oil. Ther..."

"every year. I don't know if there's been any  deployment like that since. What was it like?  When I think about what we saw with the oil  industry, then what we saw with the automobile   industry in t..."

"It's far away and yet it felt contemporary  because you saw a very similar pattern. You   saw booms and busts. You saw trees that were going  to grow to heaven and then fell apart. And then   those pe..."

"you a good sweating—drive down prices  and force you out of business—or force   you to sell to him or amalgamate with him. What can we learn about management today from   Rockefeller and the way Stand..."

"There were also scientists who came up  with a new way of refining gas, right?  Exactly. Because things weren't centralized,  there was more room for entrepreneurship,   experimentation, research, and..."

"suspicion that it wasn't only economic monopoly,  but about the political muscle that came with it.  The thing I'm curious about is, it seems like they  really messed up the PR, right? Theodore Roosev..."

"Churchill was the First Lord of the Admiralty. All  the naval ships at that time ran on coal, which   means you had to have people on board shoveling  coal. It took a long time to get the coal on   bo..."

"commodity. The person who became Britain's  Foreign Secretary said that the Allies   floated to victory on a sea of oil. Even the Germans said, “We would have   won the war if it wasn't for the tank,”..."

"When Hitler invaded Russia, he was not only going  for Moscow, he was also going for the oil fields   of Baku. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor,  Admiral Nimitz, who was the naval commander,   sa..."

"you had these fears of running out. That was  one reason the US government supported American   companies beginning to go into the Middle East,  because governments recognized you needed oil.  After W..."

"When we finally get to the crisis, the famous  oil crisis of 1973—which probably opened the   modern age of energy—what's going on at the  same time? There’s this political crisis in   the United Stat..."

"When did we realize that there was  just a ton of oil in the Middle East?  It was after World War II. People had begun  to know it, but during World War I a famous   geologist named Everette DeGolyer ..."

"place producing oil in the Middle East before  then was Persia, Iran. Oil was discovered in   1938 in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and then  got bottled up until after World War II.  When I read in The Pri..."

"with minerals. It was also the end of colonialism.  Countries were becoming independent. Today,   if a company makes a deal with a country to go  develop oil, the country gets 80% of the profit.  So i..."

"Why didn't the US government—or the UK  government or so on—do more to be like,   "OK, you guys are companies. You guys can't  negotiate that hard. But we really care about   making sure that America ..."

"Thinking purely from the perspective of  the companies, if you were in charge of   one of the majors, would you have refused  to train domestic workers in the expedition?  No, I think that was part of..."

"Let's talk about the oil crisis in 1973.  One thing I was surprised to learn is that   the supply of oil didn't actually go down  that much. Global supply declined by 15% or   something. Why did it ha..."

"greater knowledge and transparency. You had what  were called integrated companies. The same company   that produced the oil in the Middle East, put it  on their tankers and sent it to their refinerie..."

"characters in the book, but the two most important  characters, one is named Supply and one is named   Demand. That's something that you've got to keep  in mind with all the other drama that goes on. ..."

"Let’s say you were in charge of one of these  OPEC countries in 1973. You realize that you   have a tremendous amount of leverage  in the short term on the world economy   because everything's at a st..."

"That made them a whole other source of influence. In the book I talk about Richard Nixon's vice   president, Spiro Agnew, who had to quit.  He actually resigned because he was corrupt   and even had p..."

"The Shah of Iran, who fell from power in 1979,  used to say that he wanted to save the oil for   his grandchildren. Now the grandchildren  are in charge in many of those countries.  Not his grandchild..."

"neo-colonial power in the Middle East. If you look  at its proxies, it has probably 250,000 troops in   other countries who belong to various militias  and so forth. It's interesting. Sometimes when  ..."

"In Saudi Arabia, what's called the PIF, the  Public Investment Fund, is doing both. In Abu   Dhabi they've differentiated the roles of these  different funds. As to what is a global fund,   the argume..."

"Why is it so hard to set up a stable oil  rentier state? Theoretically it seems,   you've got trillions of dollars  of wealth right under your feet…  Some have, some have not… But if you look at the e..."

"just about money. It's part of a larger mix. Why is Aramco so much better run than other   basically nationalized oil companies? There are others that are well run,   but Aramco is a very well run com..."

"and then I just remember his remarks: "We need  new thinking." Those simple words have pointed   to how India has become so much of a bigger  force in the world economy today, as opposed   to being a ..."

"We’ll come to it in terms of AI and electricity. I  need to reflect on that. But it doesn't seem to me   that the cost of energy is a general constraint  on the economy. It is probably somewhat of a  ..."

"but that's a very specific problem. There's been different projections made   about how much energy will be required for AI. The  big thing is they need these big training runs,   and they keep gettin..."

"Some will say the answer to that is innovation.  Chips will become less electricity dependent or   data centers will operate differently. So  the demand will not grow as much. There are   those who sa..."

"How mad are the frackers that they basically  solved America's main geopolitical problem,   but they were so successful that  they've competed away their profits?  That was a period up till about 2017..."

"shale is almost a mature industry. I think people  don't understand how transformative it's been. The   US was the world's largest importer of oil. We  were only producing 5 million barrels a day of  ..."

"of NATO. It's really different. We're talking  about the geopolitical significance of US shale.  No one would be happier to see a ban on US  shale production than Vladimir Putin. I have   firsthand se..."

"happening and that makes it more vivid for me. I also think that there are more and more things   you're competing with if you're a writer. You're  competing with TikTok, YouTube and everything  Podca..."

"that. At the same time, I love writing narrative. Here’s something I'm curious about. Let's say you   meet another analyst who doesn't have  a vivid sense of narrative history,   but just knows the fa..."

"You take California today. People think wind  and solar is advanced. It's true. They are 25%   of electric generation in California, but 43%  of electric generation comes from natural gas.   And that ..."

"it. Is there anything—when you look through  the history of The Prize or the history of   energy—comparable to this scale of deployment?  Maybe initially, you could say electrification?   Or is this j..."

"small. It's a fraction of GDP. Oil is 3% of  GDP. Obviously the entire world depends on it,   but you wouldn't see that in the GDP numbers. It used to be a much bigger share of the stock   market, Dow..."

"and technology. I think that's what's driving it.  I have the view that people have had too simple   notions of how the energy transition will work. That's one of the things in The New Map. If people ..."

"We did the study and said, “Okay, let's take  the 2050 goals. And if you want to achieve them,   copper supply has to double by about 2035.”  What's the chance of doing that? It takes 20   years to op..."

"that you can see coming or the ones that come  from left field like fracking or grasping what   AI is going to mean for how our economies work.  But I think you made a very important point and   that ..."

"The one thing I've learned from doing these books  is the 3x rule. However hard you think it's going   to be, it's going to be at least three times as  hard to do. I started off with really unrealisti..."

"that some crisis was going to come. I had a sense  of that and that drove me. Otherwise there's this   danger that you just keep working on it. Okay, I think that's an excellent place to   close. Than..."