Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Those are the ones who are successful. It takes a lot of willpower and perseverance. Clearly Rockefeller had an idea of what to do and how. But he was also creating a new kind of business organization as he's doing it, and a new kind of industry at the same time that he was doing it. 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 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. One thing that really struck me is how fast things kick off. In 1859, Colonel Drake hits the first oil well in Pennsylvania. In less than a decade, you have many oil boom towns and oil busts and Standard Oil is formed. Millions of barrels of crude are being pumped out 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 the 1920s, it’s kind of like what we saw with the internet at the beginning of the 21st century. Another example that always struck me is the movie industry. At one point, you have guys who are showing these silent movies in vaudeville houses for five cents. 15 years later, they're living in mansions on Long Island and have chauffeurs. It is striking to see these businesses that come from nowhere and then they just take off and gravitate and develop so quickly when people grab hold in 10 to 15 years. I was writing something comparing the energy position of the United States in the eighties and today. It's a while back certainly, but there was no tech. Nobody talked about tech. It didn't exist. Now we talk about Big Tech, the way people talked about Big Oil.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.