Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…You begin by not realizing what you're doing. I agreed to do that book and I said I'd do it in two years. It took me seven. The story just became so compelling and it became woven in with the history of the 20th century. 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. She said she had a very interesting idea for a book. I said, "What?" She said, "a history of the 20th century." I said, "That's an interesting idea." I thought to myself that it's rather broad and that actually the century wasn't over yet at that point. But somehow that was in the DNA of the book. As I told the story, it really was not the history of the 20th century, but a history of the 20th century. 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.…

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