Daniel Yergin: belief

Transcript context

…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. The analogy of the internet is interesting. With the internet in the 90s, you have this big Internet bubble, the dot-com bubble, and a lot of people lose money. But they were fundamentally investing in something that actually was a real technology and actually did transform the world. In many cases through energy you have investors who go broke, but… Fracking is a particularly good example of this. They've changed the geopolitical situation in the United States, but they've been so right that they've eaten away at each other's profits.…

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