YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Yergin

lines on the record: 102
first: 2024-09-18
most recent: 2024-09-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You know, and it isn't just oil and it isn't just money. There are other things that are involved as well. I mean, clearly, there was a huge religious reaction led by the Alatoya Khomeini against modernization, against the role of women. I mean, the Shah was, you know, saying women should, you know, can get educated, play major roles in their economy. And that was not something that the very conservative clerics could stand. So it isn't just about oil and just about money, but it's part of a larger mix.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it is. If you have that huge inflow of money, it really can create a lot of distortions. And, you know, I think if you look back at the events that led to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, I mean, things don't happen for one reason or another. He probably had cancer for two years and was losing it. And he also had been so arrogant that he'd kind of alienated people and he had his secret police and so forth. And then in this pale rush of overspending created inflation, dislocated the economy. So, I mean, it's a good. Question for study.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we need to explain the Dutch disease, which means that you create an inflationary economy and make yourself make businesses uncompetitive. The heart of the Dutch disease. And of course, that concept was invented for the Dutch because that happened when the Netherlands became a big producer of natural gas. So I think it is a cautionary tale. You want to, as I say, sterilize some of the money that comes in, put it into a sovereign wealth fund invested overseas. And then you want to put money into education and health and those basic human needs create, I mean, you want to turn, I guess, financial capital into human capital.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, but you do want to diversify your economy. You want to bring in investment. And there's also another critical need. You need to create jobs. And the oil industry is a capital intensive business. It's not a labor-intensive business. So you need to bring in other kinds of industries as well because if you look at your population, maybe 60% of your population just roughly is under the age of 30, something like that. So you have a real need, a real job creation need.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's very interesting in Saudi Arabia. It's a question whether you use that money as a national development bank Which is one thing, which is quite another thing to use it as basically as a global diversification investment vehicle. And I think in Saudi Arabia, what's called the PIF, the public investment fund, is doing both. I think in Abu Dhabi, they've differentiated the roles of these different funds as to what is a global fund. But I think the argument is the same argument that you would get from a financial advisor in the United States, which is diversify.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think most if you look at Norway or if you look at the Middle East, there are offshoots of oil. Singapore's, of course, is the offshoot of hard work.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very good question. And how people looked at oil independence, I don't have a good answer to that because it also, I mean, there's oil, but there's also religion, there's also the Arab-Israeli conflict. There's Iran, which is really, in some ways a neo-colonial power in the Middle East. I mean, it has probably, if you look at its proxies, 250,000. Troops and other countries who belong to various militias and so forth and Iran that it's interesting when sometimes when I'm in the Arab Gulf countries they don't refer to Iran they refer to the Persians In the sense that Persia wants to dominate the Middle East.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And make them not just dependent upon the price of oil because you don't know where technology is, where the markets are going to be. So, you know, the Shah of Iran used to say who fell from power in 1979 used to say that he wanted to save the oil for his grandchildren. Now the grandchildren are in charge in many of those countries. Not his grandchildren are somewhere else. That's right. But on the Arab side of the Gulf, and they're focused both on continuing that revenue stream, but needing oil in order to diversify their economies away from oil. I mean, that's interesting. Like Russia is still, at the end of the day, heavily dependent upon oil and gas. And, you know, that's a distorts their economy.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the country that has done the best, it was not a big player then, is the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi. They built probably a sovereign wealth fund that's worth a trillion dollars diversified their economy. A couple of years I looked at it. More than half their GDP was no longer oil. And that's what Saudi Arabia is trying to do today to diversify their economies.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, yeah, so I certainly speak in that part of the world. I mean, it's pretty much, you know, sometimes I joke. Best thing about the energy business if you're a curious person, it's global in some ways it's the worst thing because it involves so much travel and so much jet lag. But I certainly will spend time there. And of course, for me, it's a constant process of learning because you have to show up to. To get the perspectives and understand what's in people's minds.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Equity fund, many of them, you know, their number one place to go to raise money today is not necessarily the pension funds of various states in the United States. These private equity funds or venture capital funds are going to the Gulf countries again because that's where the money is.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think these countries did assert their political power. Certainly, again, it was very different to Iran, but the Shah of Iran Until he fell, he got sick and then he fell asserting we're players in the world economy. Suddenly people, you know, Saudi Arabia had been a country that people didn't think much about in the United States. Suddenly Saudi Arabia became really important. And you had this huge flow of money that went into these economies, you know, what were called petrodollars. And that made them, you know, was a whole other source of influence. You know, in the book, I talk about Richard Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, who had to quit. He actually resigned because he was corrupt and even had people paying for his groceries. And a couple of years later, he shows up in Saudi Arabia as trying to do business as a consultant. I mean, people went there. That's where the money is. If you go today, if you're a private...”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think that goes back to the centrality of oil as a strategic commodity. Japan had basically just switched its economy from coal to oil. Europe was switching from coal to oil. And it was just such a high dependence. I mean, markets did eventually respond. I mean, you had a price collapse in 1986. Which was the result of that. I mean, in the early 1980s, people were saying, oh, the price of oil is going to go to what in today's dollars would be $200 or $300 a barrel. It collapsed. And so markets do respond. It just took longer for that to happen.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, OPEC was saying, you know, was setting prices, but then the market responds, demand goes down. And in fact, that's exactly, you know, what OPEC did with its prices, it created incredible incentive to bring on new supplies and to be more efficient. And thus, it ended up undercutting its own price. I mean, one of the things I really carried away from the prize Is there, as you know, there are hundreds of really interesting characters in the book, but the two most important characters, one is named supply and one is named demand. And that's something that you've got to keep in mind with all the other drama that goes on.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knowledge and transparency. I mean, it was just, and you had what were called integrated companies, the same company that produced the oil in the Middle East, put it on their tankers, and sent it to their refineries in the United States of Europe, to their gas stations. And that system's, it's gone. When you see the names of big oil companies on a gas station, You're not driving an electric car and you pull in odds are that it's not owned by that company. It's a franchise.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was completely unprecedented, unexpected. So it created a panic, and it was also right towards, you know, as the final months were coming of the Nixon administration. So it got all tangled up. And then we had the system of price controls and allocation controls, which made it much harder for the market to adapt. I mean, one of the lessons to me from the prize is actually enabling markets to adjust because when governments try and control them and make decisions and allocate and governments, even in the United States and some states want to do that today, it accentuates shortages and disruptions and price spikes. But the tendency is to Want to control them, but I think there was just there was far less knowledge about the market where supplies were. There was no sort of coordination. Now there's much greater”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In 1973, finally, the U.S. government did give an antitrust waiver to the companies to try and have a united front in the negotiations. But remember, it got all tied up with geopolitics. It got tied up with Arab-Israeli wars and so forth. So it wasn't just about oil. There were other things going on.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that was part of your way of trying to embed yourself there to bring them in so that you were not this isolated island. And, you know, if you do look at Venezuela and nationalized the oil operations, but by that point, they had people who were very well trained at running refineries, at drilling, at finding oil. And they still carried some of for quite a number of years carried some of that DNA with them in their operations until the complete nationalization and Chavez came to power.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think the governments did back up, and I think the British remember the British owned big share of British petroleum now BP until the late 1980s. So, you know, the British government was in there, but then you had the nationalization of what was then called Persian Anglo-Iranian oil, which became BP. So I think it was inevitable, but I think the governments did try and support, but there were limits that they could do. I mean, but the question of access of maintaining the supplies then and now remains that question of access remains crucial today. I mean, you have the U.S. Navy today trying to Push back on the Houthis in Yemen who are attacking oil tankers.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, probably. I mean, obviously, you work really hard on government relations, but the countries are generally poor and they say, well, we just want it's our resource. We want our share of it. So I think over time, now what you have as a company then, you had the access to the market, you have the refineries, you have the tankers. So it isn't like they can just take it over and they don't necessarily also have it takes time to train your population to develop your indigenous oil people who can run it. But if you look back on it, Think you just say there was inevitability to it, which also had to do with the consolidation of nation states.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a mentor and an economist named Barry Vernon who came up with this term, the obsolescing bargain, which is... Dorcas oil invests in such and such a country, and you put $2 billion in there, and it's great, and everybody's very happy. Governments change or times change, and people forget the risk that you took to do it. And they say, we want a different deal. And that just happens again and again and again. It happens with all natural resources, with oil, with minerals. And then it was also you had, you know, it was the end of colonialism, countries becoming independent. Today, if a company makes a deal with a country to go develop oil, the country will get gets 80% of the profit.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that then led to, but no one knew how much or anything, but they knew it was a strategic resource. And by the way, they didn't want it to fall into the hands of the Russians. That was a concern. Sometimes people, most people don't know the first post-war crisis with the Soviet Union was over actually Iran. And the Soviet Union making a grab for a part of Iran. So, you know, after World War II, there was this real sense you've got to secure oil supply because it's such a strategic resource. And the Middle East now suddenly becomes much more important as a source than anybody that thought about it. Really, the only person, the only place producing oil in the Middle East before then was Persia, Iran. Oil was discovered in 1938 in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and then got bottled up until after World War II.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it was after World War II. I mean, people had begun to know it, but during World War II, a famous geologist named Everett de Gallier did a trip to the Middle East on behalf of the US government and came back and said the center of gravity of world oil is shifting to the Middle East.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we finally get to the crisis, the famous oil crisis of 1973, which probably opened the modern age of energy, well, what's going on at the same time? This political crisis in the United States called Watergate and the front page of the newspaper is not about we have tight oil supplies, we're running risks, it's all about what did Nick Richard Nixon do in terms of subverting the election, subverting the political process. So there was just sort of inattention, and I think that's one of the risks. I think a lot about energy security as an issue. And it tends to fall off the table until it hits you in the face.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“U.S. had been this huge supplier, but after World War II, we had economic growth, we had highway systems, we had the suburbs. Oil demand is going way up, and we outrun production. So the U.S. becomes 1946, 47, 48, an importer of oil. But modest amounts. But then as we go into the late 60s, you have this global economic boom. And Japan is suddenly a vibrant economy. Europe has recovered a vibrant economy, and oil demand is shooting up really rapidly. And the markets that were quite amply supplied become very tight. In the United States, people didn't realize that we were becoming the world's largest importer of oil. They just weren't paying attention to that. And it was thought, well, you know, there are only limits to what...”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think after World War I, it clearly was on the agenda in the way that it hadn't been before. And you had governments. Much more engaged in supporting U.S. companies. There was also this vision that the U.S., which, by the way, the US was so dominant as a producer. Remember that six out of seven barrels of oil that were used by the Allies during World War II, six out of seven of them came from the United States. But after World War I, you had these fears of running out. And so that was one reason the U.S. government Supported American companies beginning to go into the Middle East because governments recognize you needed oil.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Precise The US put an embargo on them and one of the Japanese admirals said, you know, without the oil, our fleet will become scarecrows”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor as Admiral Nimitz, who was the naval commander, said if they'd come back a third time and hit the oil tanks World War II in the Pacific would have taken another two years. General Rommel in north of Africa runs out of oil. He says, he writes his wife, it's enough shortage of oil. It's enough to make one weep. General Patton's lunge in 1944 for Germany is held back by oil. And the U.S. is going after the oil lines that are supplying the Japanese, attacking them to basically drain the oil out of the Japanese war machine. And one of the things that was a real eye-opener for me, you know, people have heard of the kamikaze pilots who would fly their planes Into the aircraft carrier. One big reason they were doing that was to save fuel so they wouldn't have to fly back.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think you would have needed to get to a scale that they could never get to. That was one thing, the synthetic fuel, which meant making oil out of coal using a chemical process. And the other thing is that the Allies bombed the plants as well. But the way I thought, you know, I intend it when I wrote the prize to write one chapter in World War II. I ended up writing five because it was just so amazing. World War II was not an oil war, but there was an oil war within World War II when Hitler invaded Russia. He was not only going for Moscow, he was also going for the oil fields of Baku.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, people say that the Spanish Civil War in the second half of the 1930s was the dress rehearsal for World War II, where a lot of technologies were... And techniques of warfare were developed. And I think, sadly, if you look at Ukraine today, you see that happening today. Because on one hand, it is the advanced technologies that is information technologies, cyber warfare, and it's, of course, drones. In a way that hadn't been conceived hobby drones could become agents of war. Obviously the automation of the battlefield, but it's also World War II war in that there's been tank battles and it's a World War I one in that it's called positional warfare, trench warfare. So you have like a whole century of warfare there, but it is certainly the beta test for new technologies.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's extraordinary. I think in 1912, the head of the Italian military said planes are interesting but of no use in war. And the war did begin with cavalry charges. And it began the German military position was based upon the railroad, inflexible. But I was, you know, as people said, suddenly you had trucks, you had motorcycles, you had tanks, you had airplanes. And so a war that began with cavalry ended up with tanks and airplanes and trucks. And it turned out that it was World War I. my reading and the writing of the prize is what really established oil as a strategic commodity. And the person who became the Britain's foreign secretary, foreign minister, you know, said that the Allies floated to victory on a sea of oil.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because that's what we said, and then I just made it the prize. But he saw that during World War II, he promoted another military development. I'm forgetting what it was called initially, but it eventually became known as the tank. I mean, so he really did kind of constantly push technology. Why I don't know, I mean, he was not educated as that. He was educated in the sort of in classic. That's why he wrote so well.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think Churchill was the first Lord of the Admiralty And he saw that if you can convert all the naval ships at that time ran on coal, which means you had to have people on board shoveling coal, and it took a long time to get the coal on board. And if you switch to oil, you would have faster, the ships would be faster. They wouldn't need to take the same time. They wouldn't need to carry the same people. And so he made the decision, obviously others like Admiral Jackie Fisher were pushing him to convert the Royal Navy to oil. And people saying this is treacherous because we'll depend upon oil from far away from Persia rather than Welsh coal. And he said this is the prize of the venture. That's where I got my title from. Originally it was going to be called the Prize of the Venture.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But let me mention, but I do know that one of his guys who was running the company went to see Theodore Roosevelt and brought him copies of Roosevelt's books, especially bound in leather, thinking he could win over Roosevelt, didn't do any good.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The PR could have been better. Why does anybody need to know about our private business? Was his notion we're a private business? It's nobody's business. Today, you would have a PR advisor tell him that's not really the right stance to take. But at that time, it probably also came from. The arrogance of having created this huge company with its running a global company from an office on a 26 Broadway, you know, you did have a sense of power.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think there's also the suspicion that it was not only the economic monopoly, but the political muscle that came with that.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He became the very epitome of the monopolist. There's a famous woman journalist, one of the great woman journalists named Ida Tarbell wrote this book about him, about the Standard Oil Trust. She said it was a great company, but it always played with loaded dice. So he was a very embodiment. You had this trust-busting president, Theodore Roosevelt, and this was the most obvious trust. And I think also because like today with gasoline, it's the one thing everybody buys. You know, you and I don't go out and buy steel. But you go to a gas lease, unless you have an electric car, you go to a gasoline station to fill it up. And I think that was the same thing. This was the omnipresent product. But Rockefeller, his idea was to get scale and drive down the price, in a sense, expand the market. It was a monopoly. And we have an antitrust law.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he respected his competitors, particularly the hardy ones. And those were the ones who were players who said, okay, rather than fight you, I'm going to get on board this ship as well. And so he brought them in. all prospered as a result of that. They gave up they said, we're not going to fight you, we're going to join you.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. Because they're not centralized, there was more room for entrepreneurship, for experimentation, for research, for people to solve problems that people said, oh, you can't solve them”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A mistake. I don't know, it is the most famous antitrust case in history, and it reflected the times because you had these big trusts. And it was a mistake. I don't know. It broke up these companies and created more independent companies, provided more room for innovation for people to develop. So probably actually led to a stronger industry. Of course, the other thing that happened as a result of the breakup of Standard Oil was that these individual parts then got valued in the marketplace. And lo and behold, as a result of that, that John D. Rockefeller, as a shareholder, actually became three times as rich.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was really a waste product. There was not much to do with it because it was all about lighting. Today, of course, It's so much in everything. It's, you know, it's in your furniture. It's in your COVID vaccine. I mean, it's everywhere.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it was the discipline of the business. He really created a very disciplined business. They went out to two decimal points. And that was before, it was not even no computers, there were no calculators, but it was at rigorous attention to detail, but scale. But I think it was also boldness and being able to see where you needed to go next and then to implement it.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess because that was the control of the market, that was the access to the market. And so the producers needed John D. Rockefeller. I mean, there were a few other people, but Rockefeller had like 90% of the business. And he would either give you a good sweating, drive down prices, and force you out of business or force you to sell to him or to amalgamate with him.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“John D. Rockefeller became the richest man in the United States as a merchant of lighting, not as a merchant of mobility.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“30 or 40 years of the oil industry was a lighting business and then as long as this other guy, this other guy named Thomas Edison, and suddenly you have electric lights and you say, well, that's going to be the end of the oil business. But by the way, over here is Henry Ford and others, and you're creating this whole new market in the 20th century for gasoline. In the 19th century, gasoline was a waste product. It went like for three cents a gallon.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People think of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil. They think of gasoline. Nothing to do with gasoline. They were in John D. Rockefeller was a lighting merchant because what they did is that they rolled back the darkness. With kerosene, with lighting, before that, the number one source of lighting, you know, candles and whaling, the whaling industry was delivering lighting. And so the first...”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you saw that in the 19th century. I mean, that was one thing when I was writing about the beginning of the 20th century and the end. I mean, it's far away and yet it felt contemporary because you saw a very similar pattern. You saw booms and busts. You saw trees that were going to grow to heaven and then fell apart. And then those people who came in and either Had resilience or pick things up and carried them forward”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there was no tech. Nobody talked about tech. It didn't exist. Well, and now we talk about big tech the way people talk about big oil.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What was it like? Well, I think actually what I think about what we saw with the oil industry, then what we saw with the automobile industry in the 1920s is kind of what we saw with the internet at the beginning of the 21st century. You know, another example of that that always struck me is the movie industry. At one point, you have guys who are showing these sort of silent movies over vaudeville houses for five cents. And 15 years later, they're living in mansions on Long Island and have chauffeurs. So it is striking to sort of 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 or 15 years. You know, I was writing something comparing the energy position of the United States in the 80s and today, if you go back, which is, you know, it's a while back, certainly.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 what to do. But he was also creating a new kind of business organization. He's doing it and 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... Shell 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.”
2024-09-18 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Daniel Yergin — Oil destroyed Hitler, fracking destroyed Putin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source