"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..."

"John D. Rockefeller became the richest  man in the United States as a merchant   of lighting, not as a merchant of mobility. In some of the earlier chapters, you mention   that Rockefeller was especia..."

"stronger industry. Of course the other thing  that happened as a result of the breakup of   Standard Oil was that these individual parts  got valued in the marketplace. Lo and behold,   as a result of..."

"He became the very epitome of the monopolist.  A famous woman journalist, Ida Tarbell,   wrote a book about the Standard Oil trust. She  said it was a great company, but it always played   with loaded..."

"Let's go to World War I and World War II. A  couple months ago, I interviewed the biographer   of Churchill, Andrew Roberts. As you discuss  in your book, he discusses that Churchill was   this sort o..."

"was based upon the railroad and inflexible.  Suddenly you had trucks, motorcycles, tanks,   airplanes. A war that began with cavalry ended up  with tanks and airplanes and trucks. World War I,   in my..."

"certainly the beta test for new technologies. Let's go forward to World War II.   Why wasn't Hitler able to produce more  synthetic fuel? Because it seems like   he could have won if he had more synth..."

"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 ..."

"oil operations. But by that point, they had people  who were very well trained at running refineries,   at drilling, and at finding oil. They still  carried some of that DNA with them in their   opera..."

"markets to adjust. Because when governments try to  control them and make decisions and allocate—and   some states want to do that today—it accentuates  shortages and disruptions and price spikes.   T..."

"as a strategic commodity. Japan had basically just  switched its economy from coal to oil. Europe was   switching from coal to oil. It was just such a  high dependence. Markets did eventually respond...."

"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  ..."

"There's also another critical need: you  need to create jobs. The oil industry is   a capital intensive business. It's not a labor  intensive business. You need to bring in other   kinds of industries..."

"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..."

"to how India has become so much of a bigger  force in the world economy today, as opposed   to being a sort of enclosed and closed economy. So in 1973 you have the oil crisis. Before that,   if you lo..."

"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..."

"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  ..."

"That's why when the Japanese prime minister  was here for a state visit a few months ago,   they were expressing great alarm about future  LNG exports. For them, being able to import   energy from the..."

"No one would be happier to see a ban on US  shale production than Vladimir Putin. I have   firsthand sense of that. In 2013, before he  annexed Crimea, I was at this conference,   which was his versio..."

"was right about both of them. When he invaded  Crimea, I don’t think he never imagined that   if he cut off the gas to Europe, that  Europe could survive. Europe survived.  The Prize especially, but a..."

"in and people love stories. I started writing when  I was a child. My father had an old typewriter.   He'd been a newspaper reporter and I would hunt  and peck and just write stories. In high school, ..."

"was a question. Where the hell did the modern  solar and wind industry come from anyway? It's   entrepreneurs. I have been an entrepreneur, I have  a feeling for it. You're an entrepreneur in terms   ..."

"in the Middle East right now. You could go from  one day to the next and it's a different world.  Just reading it, you can tell. It's hard to  understand many of the things if you don't have   an unde..."

"the vulnerability of importing 75% of their oil,  much of it coming through the South China Sea.   They know the story of what happened with World  War II with Japan. For them, the shift to electric  ..."

"And that gets back to the data centers. You're  going to need to bolster your electricity power   system. How much can you do with batteries  and how much can you do with natural gas?  Wind and solar ..."

"in what I call The New Map, the movement to the  great power competition. The US just put 100%   tariffs on Chinese electric cars, 25% tariffs on  Chinese storage batteries. We recently had this   bil..."

"It certainly will grow very fast. I just heard  this when I was at this utility commissioner's   conference. There’s real tension between states  and localities. The states want to push it, but   loca..."

"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..."

"can increase supply if you want to. Because  of these new flexibilities we have, is there   going to be a lot more elasticity in demand? And also, maybe the main thing with AI and   compute is that yo..."

"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 ..."

"so interesting. One of the things that is fun  when you're writing this is when you have these   oversized personalities. There may be obnoxious  people whom you would hate to meet in person,   but ar..."

"lot of time probably. I would just immerse myself  in something and get it all in my head. My mother   was a painter and I would watch her sketch.  That's the image I have is that I sketch it out   an..."