Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
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.

**Daniel Yergin** (0:18)
Glad to be with you.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:19)
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?

**Daniel Yergin** (0:33)
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. 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 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.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:25)
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 Cochran'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.

**Daniel Yergin** (1:58)
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, I 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 and in this larger context of the 20th century. And because it made it clear how central oil was as a way to understand the 20th century.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (2:54)
Yeah, so we'll get to the new map and the contemporary issues around energy later on. But first, I want to just begin with the beginning of the history of oil. One of the things you noticed, not only in the early stories of oil with people like Drake and Rockefeller, but also even very modern, like the frackers like Mitchell and so forth, it's just that you have these incredibly risk-taking and strong personalities who have been the dominant characters in the oil industry. And I wonder if there's a specific reason that oil attracts this kind of personality?

**Daniel Yergin** (3:22)
Well, I think maybe it attracts those are the ones who are successful. It takes a lot of willpower and perseverance. I mean, clearly Rockefeller had an idea of what to do, but he was also creating a new kind of business organization. He's doing it in a new kind of industry at the same time that he was doing it. And then if we jump ahead to this guy, George Mitchell, who's more responsible than anybody else for the shale revolution that has transformed the current position of the United States in the world. He, I mean, he kept at it for 18 years when people told him, you're wasting your money, you're wasting your time. He said, well, it's my money and I'll waste it. But one of the things that comes through in the book is the power of willpower.