Daniel Yergin: belief

Transcript context

…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 basically everything else in the world." I think of a couple of biographies especially. If you read Caro's biography of LBJ or Kotkin’s of Stalin, it is a history of the entire period in their country's history when this is happening. I wonder if this was the case for you. Did you actually just want to write about oil and you just had to write about what's happening in the Middle East, what's happening in Asia? Or no, you set out to write about World War II and World War I and everything? Geopolitics, narrative, storytelling, those are things that are very much in my interest. 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. As I was writing The Prize, I didn't intend to do all of that. But with the discoveries, one thing led to another. I would be amazed and think, “This is an incredible story and no one knows it. ” In my mind, I did not do a detailed outline, but the pieces came together in this larger narrative that located oil in this larger context of the 20th century. It made clear how central oil 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. There’s one thing you notice not only in the early stories of oil with people like Drake and Rockefeller, but also even with very modern ones like the frackers like Mitchell and so forth. You have these incredibly risk-taking and strong personalities who have been the dominant characters in the oil industry. I wonder if there's a specific reason that oil attracts this kind of personality.…

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