Is Every War About Oil? Pulitzer Prize Winner Daniel Yergin

8:09Daniel Yergin:I haven't seen that.

8:10Nayeema:Permian Basin.

8:11Daniel Yergin:Yes. The Permian Basin is very in now. I haven't seen it yet, but everyone is talking about this. You should watch it. Yeah. It's on Paramount, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, the fact that this industry is run not by people who look like George Clooney, but instead by a bunch of engineers is a good segue because I want to get into some of the kind of history here. The prize that came out in 1991. It's this amazing chronicle of oil, money, power. It's really consumerism, capitalism, politics, and the creation and endurance of something that you call the hydrocarbon man. Explain what the hydrocarbon man is.

8:48Nayeema:Well, the concept of the hydrocarbon man was the degree to which our world was changed by oil and how dependent we are in it, not only in terms of transportation, but in terms of, you know, of the building blocks. If you look around the room we're in, so many things will actually be based on an oil product. You don't think about it that way. Clothes. Is oil in everything? It's very pervasive.

9:11Daniel Yergin:I remember reading your book and thinking like, wow, it's in everything. Yeah, it's in everything. medicine, it's in your cleaning supplies, it's in your lip balm. I mean, Vaseline is literally oil,

9:20Nayeema:petroleum, jelly. So yeah, so it's very pervasive.

9:24Daniel Yergin:Yeah. Let's actually, I want to stop there and do like a 101 about energy. Because explain what fossil fuels are, and in a very high level way, and what the different types of fossil fuels are.

9:35Nayeema:Well, fossil fuels are the result of compression underground for millions of years of organic material, if I can use that. And they either become solid, which is coal, or they become liquid, which is oil, or they become natural gas, which is invisible because it's the gas. Those are the basic, when we say hydrocarbons, and it means that they're hydrogen and carbon composition.

9:59Daniel Yergin:Yeah. Dan, you have to forgive me here, but I'm going to ask you a question I asked Neil deGrasse Tyson in some form. But the fact that we power cars, trains, and automobiles with fossil fuels, a resource that came to be from zooplankton and dinosaurs who were destroyed, basically life that was destroyed by an asteroid. Do you think it's possible that we -

10:22Nayeema:Well, it's probably not quite that simple. It's not that simple. But it makes it more vivid.

10:27Daniel Yergin:Yeah, it makes it more vivid. But the fact that we power our world through these fossil fuels that are the result of organic life, zooplankton, dinosaurs, et cetera, that were destroyed by an asteroid. But doesn't this make you sometimes think we live in a simulation? I mean, this is a crazy reality.

10:43Nayeema:Well, I think the plankton, I mean, it isn't just whether the dinosaurs were wiped out by asteroids. I mean, it's plant matter and everything. But it feels like a video game. Yeah. I'm just processing. Processing, is that a video game? Well, you know, if this didn't happen, what would we do? How would we get around? And, you know, people would just stay in their villages and maybe go to the next village and that would be it. and you spend most of your time just harvesting food and trying to survive.

11:13Daniel Yergin:You cover a 140-year period in this book. We're not going to go through the full-time period here, but I want to do a bit of a lightning round through the major moments of the book.

11:21Nayeema:I'd be very interested to find what you find to be the major moments.

11:24Daniel Yergin:I will tell you which ones stuck out to me. So the first is, the book starts in the 1850s and this dude discovers that this thing, rock oil, can be refined into kerosene. That was the first major moment for me. I know I translated it in a smart girl, dumb questions kind of way, but faithful.

11:39Nayeema:Yeah, that's right.

11:40Daniel Yergin:And you call this the age of light.

11:42Nayeema:Because the first 30 years or so of the oil industry, first 30, 40 years was really an illumination business. People know the name John D. Rockefeller, and he was the richest man in America in his time. He made his money as an illumination merchant. He was selling light. He was selling kerosene. A lamp guy. A lamp guy, because up till then, people either use candles. If they had money, they bought whale oil, which was used for illumination. Or they went to bed really early.

12:11Daniel Yergin:They live and die by the sun. Yeah. Yeah. And basically, this innovation actually helps save whales in a way. Yes. This thing that we think is so dangerous and harmful for the environment now at the time.

12:21Nayeema:Yeah, because, you know, Moby Dick, people were going out getting, why did they want whales? They wanted it for the whale oil. It was so valuable.

12:26Daniel Yergin:And the whale oil came from like whale sperm, right? And they made the whale oil. And they would kill a whale to get this light? Yeah,

12:33Nayeema:this was not good for whales.

12:35Daniel Yergin:The second part, and I'm very sorry, because I mean, it's a beautiful book and everyone should read it. But the next key moment for me is all of a sudden we move from the age of light to age of mobility. Because all of a sudden, Germany, Detroit, I mean, the car business starts taking off. So I guess, is Detroit responsible for that shift?

12:51Nayeema:Well, not Detroit per se, but, you know, the lighting business is going to go downhill like that because electricity. electricity because Thomas Edison in 1882 put wires under lower Manhattan and showed that you could turn on a light switch. That was pretty amazing. But just around that same time, people were starting to innovate with these internal combustion engines and led to the automobile. It's interesting, partly how one innovation can lead to another. I mean, you've spent time in Silicon Valley, one thing. So bicycles helped pave the way for automobiles because you had people who were working with tires and things like that.

13:30Nayeema:And so the car automobile comes along. And of course, what Henry Ford does is he makes it economic and then sales really start to take off. So - And what year is this? Well, it's 1907, 1908 is the period when the Model T's first start.

13:46Daniel Yergin:Okay. And John D. Rockefeller at this point, he's like cashing it in, right? Because he He formed Standard Oil in the 1870s. Yeah. Is that correct?

13:54Nayeema:Yeah. And then he, yeah, by then he sort of is stepping aside and his successors are taking over. I mean, he'd built this company that dominated world oil. At one point, it produced 90 % of U.S. oil and world oil until you had these upstarts come along like companies with names like Shell.

14:13Daniel Yergin:Yeah, Shell, right? That really threatened Rockefeller's global monopoly. And then, of course, there's an antitrust suit. Yes. In the 1910s.

14:20Nayeema:Leading to one of my favorite quotes, which was, this suit has gone on for a long time. There's a famous, very brave woman journalist named Ida Tarbell. And she set out to tell the story of Standard Oil. And she wrote this book. It was incredibly influential and led to this lawsuit to the breaking up of Standard Oil. So the guys, the directors of Standard Oil are standing in the office at 26 Broadway. and over the tape comes through the report that the Supreme Court has broken them up. And this guy named John Archibald, who's Rockefeller's successor, is standing there and he starts whistling and then he said, life's just one damn thing after another.

15:01Nayeema:And he starts whistling again. But you know what? Breaking it up made John D. Rockefeller a richer man. Yeah. Because once you broke it up, as happens sometimes today with companies, you break up a company and the parts actually are worth more than the whole.

15:15Daniel Yergin:Of course, yeah. And biggest anti-monopoly or antitrust suit in American history.

15:22Nayeema:Yeah, it's the landmark case. The guy who had legal for one of the big tech companies that was involved in antitrust told me that he read the prize because it was the analog to what they were going through. When I was writing about that period, late 1890s into the first decade, it felt far away. But you know what? It felt very funny because it also felt close. and the kind of spirit of innovation, kind of what we have today.

15:51Daniel Yergin:The next, I think, big moment, you get into World War I. That's when we kind of see how important energy is for innovation, for national security. And then your book goes through World War II, which I'm not going to dig into in great detail here. But what was shocking is that you say six out of seven barrels of oil for the Allied forces were made in the U.S. at that time.

16:11Nayeema:Made in the U.S. The U.S. had a tremendous, it was that it was a tremendous advantage. It took real effort because ships would get sunk by U-boats and so forth. But it was the U.S. oil industry that really fueled the Allied war effort.

16:27Daniel Yergin:Yeah. And this gets us to what I thought was another kind of pivotal moment in the book, which is toward the end of that war, actually in the last year of that war, in early 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt, on his last few months of life, or last couple months, I think, says he has one more deal to make. and goes out to meet with Ibn Saud.

16:48Nayeema:The king of Saudi Arabia, yes, in the Suez Canal.

16:52Daniel Yergin:Yeah, it's a little bit of like you bring your crew, I'll bring my crew, we'll rendezvous at the Suez around two kind of vibe.

16:57Nayeema:And we'll promise to get along with each other. If you go to Saudi Arabia today, they still invoke and have pictures of that meeting of King Ibn Saud and Franklin Roosevelt.

17:07Daniel Yergin:And why was that meeting, I mean, you describe it in the book, but share with our audience, why was that so pivotal? And what was the deal that FDR was trying to broker?

17:16Nayeema:Well, I would say it was more like a relationship than a deal. But it's funny. Somebody was saying to me just last week, energy security always comes back because there's a war or as a result of a war. And World War II had driven home the importance of oil. Because as we say, there was this oil war within the larger war. And it was a huge advantage for the Allies. And it was really one of the keys of victory. That said, there was this feeling that, oh, the U.S. was going to peak out because that was one of those periods. And there was this geologist named Everett de Goliar who had gone during World War II, had made an expedition to the Gulf, Arab Gulf, Persian Gulf countries and came back and said, there's a lot of oil there.

17:59Nayeema:and this kind of led to a rivalry between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill for the affections of King Ibn Saud because after Roosevelt met with him, Churchill rushed out to meet with him as well because who was going to get there. Oil had been discovered in both Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in 1938 but hadn't been developed because of the war but the recognition that oil was there and it was going to be really important and so that was the beginning of a relationship that was heightened by the Cold War, by the fear that the Soviets, who had actually seized at the end of World War II, seized northern Iran and tried to incorporate it into the Soviet Union, that the Soviets would capture this oil.

18:40Nayeema:And so this goes to the point you were making, that at this point, you know, this oil is seen as a geopolitical prize. Who was going to develop it? Who was going to own it?

18:49Daniel Yergin:Right. And that relationship, you know, gets fraught through all kinds of tumult in the 1970s, Yom Kippur War, et cetera. We won't get into that. But I think that is very important to kind of establish how we came to discover this resource. And then also how it became, as you say, the hydrocarbon man, how we as a species became so dependent on it.

19:10Nayeema:Right. And that's, of course, after World War II then, you have suburbanization in America. You have, I mean, we've already had a lot of motor cars, but around the world transportation, you know, coal, which had been the dominant energy source, gets pushed aside and becomes oil. The Industrial Revolution was based upon coal. I mean, that was a great energy source. And then oil, it was only in the 1960s that oil, this goes back really to what you're talking about, hydrocarbon man, overtook coal as the world's number one energy source.

19:42Daniel Yergin:And then, of course, later on, and this is covered in your next book, The Quest, you get into fracking, and that obviously creates a whole new opportunity for fossil fuels in our environment. But what I think is really powerful is like, you describe how this resource becomes a swirl of capitalist motivations to keep on innovating and monetizing this resource and this product and all its downstream uses.

20:04Nayeema:But that's not only capitalism, there's a Soviet Union doing it too.

20:07Daniel Yergin:Sorry, there's the business imperative.

20:09Nayeema:It becomes a really big global business.

20:11Daniel Yergin:Right. It becomes hyper consumer driven as well. It's like we feel all of a sudden hydrocarbon man, we can't live without this thing. We want more and more of it.

20:18Nayeema:Go to your grocery store, your supermarket and try and, you know, you wouldn't have the products there.

20:23Daniel Yergin:You know, we have been told that we would hit peak fossil fuel demand in 2030. That was some of the estimates that we would see from the International Energy Agency or Goldman Sachs. Those predictions have been revised now. And you have Goldman saying we're at least a decade away from our peak fossil fuel moment. I think the IEA has one scenario where it'll be 2050. And so I feel like I'm part of a generation. And I heard you describe this in 1991 when your book was published. You were interviewed by the LA Times. And you talked about your son being part of a generation that believes in recycling and that they're growing up differently with a different kind of education and awareness about these things.

21:01Daniel Yergin:It feels, Dan, like we've moved backwards. Or at least we haven't moved forward in the ways that we believed we would when it comes to the energy transition to sustainable.

21:11Nayeema:Yeah, so I think we should, I think that's what we need to get thinking about. But let me say that one of the things, you know, I think we could have peakology, because there was both peak demand, and some people thought it was 2019 or 2030, and then does it fall away, or is it just kind of plateau? And then there was peak supply, because we go through these panics. and I remember one panic ago that we were running out of oil and I remember being called, you know, oil prices were going up and called to testify at Congress and they like had so many people there. I mean, they didn't all get their questions in and everything because everybody wanted to get on it because prices were up.

21:55Nayeema:Of course, the next year prices went down, but that's what happens. So I looked back in the prize and found that there were at least five times when the world was going to run out of oil. It's just a recurrent.

22:07Daniel Yergin:So don't be worried. Well, I'm less worried about running out of oil, and I'm more worried about how do we think about this energy transition that we were sold, our fears about global warming, climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, the need to become greener. And you talk about this in your book, The New Map, and you also wrote, I thought, an excellent piece in Foreign Affairs early last year about how the energy transition is not going to be some linear thing.

22:35Nayeema:I mean, there became this kind of single-minded, it seemed to me, focus on climate as the only issue, forgetting these other things like economic growth, energy security. I think some of that changed on the morning of February 24th, 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and suddenly energy security is back on the agenda. Suddenly, the Chancellor of Germany, who had been leading the Green Revolution, is going to Senegal and Canada, asking them for LNG, liquefied natural gas, and going to Kazakhstan, asking them for oil. That suddenly you realize these things don't move, as you say, in a linear fashion.

23:14Nayeema:And I think then the second is just the recognition that, in fact, a lot of the thinking about the energy transition and how easy it would be was shaped during COVID when prices were down and demand was down. The other thing that led us to write the article is we did a series of roundtables in developing countries, and we found, listening to people, not talking, listening to them, that they were saying kind of a different thing. And it was brought home to me when we did a conference in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, where the prime minister of Malaysia said, we're concerned about climate. We're also concerned about economic growth.

23:52Nayeema:We're also concerned about reducing poverty. We're also concerned about improving health. And I think you know from the peregrinations of your own childhood growing up that those are very big concerns in the developing world.

24:03Daniel Yergin:The north-south divide is very clear on this issue of the climate imperative. I mean, a lot of countries think this is ridiculous that the rest of the world got to have this kind of industrial revolution develop in all these ways. And now when it's their turn, they have to all of a sudden go green.

24:17Nayeema:You said it. You said it. It's a north-south divide on this issue. This prime minister says we're going to pursue our path and we're not going to be dictated to by Northwest Europe and North America.

24:27Daniel Yergin:But do you think it's important, Dan, that the West has an obligation to do its part to correct the damage that has been done historically, even if other countries that are earlier in the development cycle don't? I mean, I'm asking you a normative question. Do you think that we as kind of consumers in the West should be thoughtful about this or our government should be thoughtful about this? Yes, absolutely.

24:48Nayeema:I think that's it. And I think it's addressing, but I think it is understanding also the perspective of the global south on these issues. And that, you know, countries in Africa don't want the European Parliament telling them you can't build a gas pipeline when they have gas pipelines all across Europe.

25:05Daniel Yergin:Yes, I understand that. But that's a very different situation than, say, consumers or manufacturers in the United States saying, don't tell me I have to sell an electric vehicle, which was kind of the Biden push, right? You wanted 50 % of newly sold vehicles to be electric by 2030. Obviously, that's gone out the door right now. But do you think that those kinds of objectives are important for us to maintain?

25:31Nayeema:Well, I think it is. I think energy security, as well as addressing climate and environmental concerns, is diversifying. And one of the things I would love to see is that we take the ideology out of energy choices. that, in fact, the U.S. faces a really big challenge in electricity now, in delivering electricity. And it kind of shouldn't be either or. I mean, solar has a role to play. Wind has a role to play. Natural gas has a role to play. And if we don't bring all of them into the mix, then we're actually going to have real problems with our electricity supply. So I had this hope that just kind of could put the ideology out of the discussions.

26:11Daniel Yergin:Yeah, that's what I want to do here, because I think that's why I'm talking to you because you've advised the Department of Energy under four different presidents, two of whom happen to be Republican, two of whom happen to be Democrats. But you're kind of focused on how do we build American energy and economy moving forward and diversify that and make it sustainable.

26:31Nayeema:And also make it affordable. I mean, as we're going to see, certainly going into this election, the November election of 2026, it sure looks like affordability is a very big issue. And we were talking before about people being concerned about gasoline prices. They're really concerned about their electric power prices. Their Con Edison bill. Yeah.

26:49Daniel Yergin:Yeah. Well, and you notice that one. You notice that one when it comes in. So let's talk about this because most of us are not going to make big decisions to go into war or not. But most of us as consumers are going to make big decisions about how we live and probably most important to the topic of kind of sustainability, how we move through the world or mobility. I'd like to talk about different technologies. And I'd love you to tell me kind of three things. What they are. So, you know, how do they work, basically? What's their promise? And what's in the way? So the first is battery electric vehicles.

27:22Daniel Yergin:This is a technology we've seen a lot, as opposed to the combustible engine.

27:27Nayeema:And the way they work is with batteries. Yeah. They're electric.

27:30Daniel Yergin:Yeah. So it's about minerals, not oil.

27:32Nayeema:Yeah. And we should come back and talk about minerals.

27:35Daniel Yergin:We will do. And what's their promise and what's in the way of kind of electric vehicle development?

27:41Nayeema:Well, I think, you know, a big issue has been range and a big issue has been cost. But, you know, a lot of Teslas have been sold in the United States. I mean, you know, some states more than others. So China has gone all in on EVs. I was driving in Beijing with a woman who works in our Beijing office. And I was in her Tesla. So I asked her, why did you buy a Tesla? And she said, oh, I have a four-year-old daughter. So I said, what does a four-year-old daughter have to do with buying a Tesla? And she said, well, she goes to nursery school five days a week. If I buy a gasoline car, I'm only allowed to drive it by government regulation four days a week.

28:20Nayeema:And my daughter's stranded. So the Chinese have really driven that. And they've really done a lot of innovation. They've brought down the costs. I was talking to a colleague who's in Karachi, and he was raving about his Chinese SUV that he bought that was$15 ,000. So EVs are not selling in the United States very much. They're selling somewhat in Europe. But around the world, I looked at these numbers, just to put numbers around it. Last year, about 16 million new cars were sold in the United States. Around the world, 23 million EVs were sold, a lot of them in China. So, you know, that's bigger than the entire U.S.

29:02Nayeema:So EVs are coming. They're part of the mix. Hybrids are part of the mix.

29:07Daniel Yergin:What about hydrogen? Can you explain the technology? It's like literally hydrogen. It's water?

29:12Nayeema:Well, yeah, yeah. Hydrogen, you know, you split it. You split it and you get hydrogen and oxygen. Yeah, yeah. And then you can convert it into ammonia if you want to transport it. Hydrogen was a really hot subject, that hydrogen would replace natural gas, and people rushed into it, big incentives from government to do it under the Biden administration. And then it turned out that actually it was expensive, you needed new infrastructure. So people are still working on it, but it's lost a lot of the momentum that it had three years ago. Hydrogen is used actually in oil refineries. The other thing it's used is to make fertilizer.

29:55Daniel Yergin:Oh, interesting. But there are hydrogen vehicles coming out. I think Toyota and BMW, which is one of the sponsors of this show, they're invested in this new IS-5 hydrogen hybrid. Yeah.

30:10Nayeema:Are you bullish on it? Well, I'm neither bullish nor bearish on it. I didn't know they were doing that. I know that BMW has worked very assiduously to bring electric cars.

30:22Daniel Yergin:Two other technologies that have less to do with carbon capture. What's up with carbon capture?

30:28Nayeema:So carbon capture, the idea is, okay, CO2 released into the atmosphere, climate change, concern about it. So can you capture that carbon and either inject it back into the ground, or can you capture it either with basically machines that pull it out of the air or just from industrial processes or use plants to, you know, plants are a great way to capture carbon. So, I mean, so that's progressing. But again, cost and scale are the challenges. The challenge there.

31:00Daniel Yergin:Yeah. And what's up with nuclear? Because that came up in your kind of energy transition piece.

31:06Nayeema:Yeah. Nuclear is back.

31:09Daniel Yergin:Yeah. It's hot.

31:10Nayeema:Yeah, hot in a good way, not in a bad way. Nuclear, after the accident in Japan, in Fukushima, people backed away. And then the other thing with nuclear, building plants in the United States was very expensive, took twice as long, was twice what was budgeted, went through a lot of permitting. But I think one of the reasons it's come back is because the big tech companies, which are now called hyperscalers, have embraced it because that gets to the electricity challenge that the United States is facing. And that comes particularly with data centers. And they see nuclear as a zero-carbon energy resource.

31:52Nayeema:So there are existing nuclear power plants in the United States. Some are being closed down. They're now being brought back. And then there are what are called small modular reactors. And that gets a lot of discussion. People look out for those initials, SMRs, small modular reactors. And they've been under development for several years. And the idea of those who are the proponents of it is that because they'll be smaller and replicable, that you can sort of reduce the cost by just keep building the similar ones over and over. But it's still, again, early days, and we probably won't see the first ones in the United States in place or North America till somewhere between 2030 and 2032.

32:36Daniel Yergin:Yeah, they still feel like they're more on PowerPoint than in real life.

32:39Nayeema:Yeah, and let me say, you've seen a lot of investment coming from the big tech companies into these areas.

32:47Daniel Yergin:Well, they've got to feed the beast.

32:49Nayeema:Right, exactly. The beast is hungry.

32:52Daniel Yergin:The beast is hungry with AI. We're going to get to that. I want to shift our conversation into, well, updating this idea of the hydrocarbon man.

32:59Nayeema:Well, first of all, I wouldn't call it a hydrocarbon man today.

33:01Daniel Yergin:Well, I did read in this LA Times article that you were worried that the term would be seen as sexist. Yeah. Did I even say that then? You said it in the piece. Yes. I mean, obviously - You said hydrocarbon woman person didn't have the same effect.

33:12Nayeema:I mean, what I was doing, you know, it was obviously what I was doing was playing off Neanderthal man, Cro-Magnon man, you know, those charts we'd see of the different evolution of humanoids.

33:22Daniel Yergin:So are we ever going to become a renewable man or a renewable person?

33:28Nayeema:I think renewables are going to continue to be part of the energy mix. It's a question of timing.

33:33Daniel Yergin:It was crazy to me to read in that piece you had in Foreign Affairs that, I can't remember the timeline, but it was like, I think since 1990 to the 2020s, we had only gone from 15 % diversification away from hydrocarbons to 20 % diversification. Well, no deal with that.

33:46Nayeema:If you look at total energy, we were maybe at 82%, 83%. Hydrocarbons were probably today like around 80%, 81%. So with all the investment. Now, I will say that last year, over 90 % of the new electric generating capacity put into the world was either wind or solar. So that's continuing.

34:08Daniel Yergin:I mean, all these new technologies that are being developed, things that seem, you know, maybe that they're not in our close future right now when it comes to small modular reactors for nuclear or hydrogen. You know, do you see those coming kind of becoming mainstream one day? Cliffhanger. We'll be right back. Do hydrogen cars hydrate themselves? This is a sponsored dumb question brought to you by BMW. Lately, I've been hearing a lot about hydrogen cars, and I started thinking, how does this technology even work? It turns out, unlike battery electric vehicles, hydrogen cars are fuel cell electric vehicles, which sounds fancy, right?

34:41Daniel Yergin:But basically it means that they have this stacked technology that combines hydrogen and oxygen to make electricity. And the only thing that releases in the process is water and heat, which is a lot better than greenhouse gases. So do hydrogen cars hydrate themselves? Not really. You still have to refuel, but that tank lasts longer and can refuel quicker. That's what she said. And hydrogen isn't just cool tech. It's part of a broader strategy to explore options that keep us moving, reduce emissions, and have us not relying on a single energy source. That's why companies are investing here, like the new BMW iX5 Hydrogen, which is due to be on roads in 2028.

35:16Daniel Yergin:The race is on to make hydrogen cars more mainstream, affordable, and chic. Like this BMW iX5 Hydrogen? It's pretty chic, right? You can learn more at bmwgroup.com or wherever you get your BMWs. I mean, all this episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company. No matter how you do game day on the couch, in the crowd or manning the snack table, athletic brewing fits right in with a full lineup of non-alcoholic beer styles. You can enjoy bold flavors all game long. No hangovers, no buzz, no subbing out for water in the second half. Stock the fridge for tip off with a variety of non-alcoholic craft styles available at your local grocery store or online at athleticbrewing.com.

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36:54Daniel Yergin:These new technologies that are being developed, do you see those coming, kind of becoming mainstream one day?

37:00Nayeema:Well, I think that nuclear probably will come back as a more, you know, it now has positive support. It lost positive support. And it has it. And I think there's a lot of momentum there. We did at our energy conference last year, we had a panel. The Super Bowl. The Super Bowl of World Energy, exactly. We had a panel with this guy who started a fusion energy company, which always was 50 years away, on the panel with the head of the big electric utility in Virginia and the governor of Virginia. And they're saying, oh, by 2032, we're going to have a fusion machine. Fusion, which was always something that was 50 years away and you did a lab somewhere, has gotten$7,$8 billion of venture capital money.

37:45Nayeema:You never had venture capital money going into nuclear before. Oh, my gosh.

37:48Daniel Yergin:So this idea of the transition, it's an extremely expensive enterprise, right? It would cost something like, I think you had written, trillions of dollars.

37:57Nayeema:Five, six, seven trillion dollars a year if you're really going to get to that 2050 goal.

38:02Daniel Yergin:And global GDP is how much?

38:04Nayeema:About$120 trillion.

38:06Daniel Yergin:Yeah, I think between 110 and 120 trillion dollars. So you're talking about 5%, 6%, 7 % of the global GDP being spent on getting to sustainability targets. Yeah.

38:18Nayeema:The country that's really run into problems in the region is Europe, because they have been so focused just on driving energy transition investment that they've really driven up their energy costs, deindustrializing, losing jobs, and, by the way, fueling the rise of a populist right for whom this has become, you know, who are anti all of this. But Europe now has this problem about competitiveness. They need to restore it. And they're supposed to go from like 1.5 % of their GDP on defense to 5%. So Europe is in a really tough position and is struggling to how to redefine its objectives, some of which are locked in laws, which are going to really hurt their economies.

39:02Nayeema:And I think that one of the things that wasn't anticipated was the political backlash.

39:06Daniel Yergin:Yeah, the political backlash has been real. In the United States, we've seen President Trump's EPA retract a bit of the endangerment finding in the Clean Air Act, which allows the government to regulate emissions effectively, decide what kind of car you're driving. Is that kind of policy change, do you see that as a response to something or do you see that as driving a change?

39:24Nayeema:I think it's a response. I think, you know, we've gone from 180 degrees change from the Biden administration to the Trump administration. If they said yes, they said no. If they say yes, they said no.

39:35Daniel Yergin:But what's the right answer in all of this?

39:37Nayeema:Well, probably the right answer, which in our policy is somewhere in the middle. I mean, it will sound funny to say most people don't think about this, but you pour too many regulations on and it becomes difficult to get things done. But on the other hand, you take away too many regulations and you create a lot of problems.

39:55Daniel Yergin:Yeah. Well, China is definitely a different ecosystem to test or laboratory to test this in. But they have made tremendous headway with their regulations. As you're saying, the woman driving in the car five days a week.

40:04Nayeema:They have five-year plans as they're in December. They're working their new five-year plan. It's the roadmap. And you get on that road and you go down that road because that's the road you have to be on.

40:16Daniel Yergin:It's in their interest to do that. I think that's the interesting thing about the sustainability agenda. It's very different to the prime minister of Malaysia saying to you, you know, I can't do this. I got other priorities. I got to figure out how the economy works. And the Chinese are saying this is good for our economy.

40:29Nayeema:Let's go back to electric cars again. And I think China, I don't think, I think their drive for electric cars was partly about air pollution. It was partly about, they import 75 % of their oil. Their oil comes from the Middle East, a very substantial part of it from the Middle East. So they're living with that threat today. And that oil also traverses the South China Sea, where during World War II, U.S. submarines sank Japanese tankers.

40:59Daniel Yergin:Torpedo them. Yeah, exactly.

41:00Nayeema:So they've made the determination that they can't continue to grow their oil demand. So they do that. The other thing is they said, we can't beat Detroit. We can't beat Japan. We can't beat South Korea. We can't beat Germany on conventional cars. We're going to just go on EVs. And that's where we're going to win. And we're going to be the big exporter. So they have adopted their EVs. Batteries, they're by far the leader in batteries. I mean, when a battery company is like 20 ,000 engineers, And it's interesting, often these Chinese companies were actually not government, but they were started by sort of individual entrepreneurs who just built these huge companies in a very short period of time.

41:41Nayeema:And, you know, like 90 % of the world's solar panels come from China. And so they have said that we're going to dominate that and we're going to dominate kind of the new technologies. And, of course, you know, to call it industrial policies is an understatement. It's a five-year plan.

41:59Daniel Yergin:Yeah, they've got the ability, that state society dynamic where they're able to kind of drive that down. They've also been thinking about their supply chains and their kind of investments in Africa and how they're going to fuel these batteries for themselves. So we should come back to that. Because my question for you is when you look at the development of the world that we've come to from the 1990s when this book ended to the 2020s where we are today, in that 30-year period, it's like, do you think we're going to continue to be hydrocarbon man 50 years from now? Or do you think we're going to become hydrocopper man because we're so driven by batteries or something else?

42:33Nayeema:Well, I think we are going to be more electrified. Yeah. Hydroelectric man? Hydroelectric man.

42:40Daniel Yergin:Hydroelectric chick also. Right, exactly. The smart hydroelectric chick, dumb questions podcast.

42:46Nayeema:Smart girl, that's right. That's it. The electrified smart girl, right. That's the next show.

42:51Daniel Yergin:That's what you think we're going to become.

42:53Nayeema:Well, I think electrification is a big direction, and that's what got me so interested in copper as a metal and all the demands. People never think about copper, and we just take lighting and everything for granted. but then started to look and say, well, the second demand that's coming is from energy transition, what we've been talking about. And that was one of the things that was left out of the thinking about energy transition. It's very metal intensive. An EV, an electric car, uses 2.9 times more copper than a conventional car. Photovoltaics use copper.

43:31Daniel Yergin:What is a photovoltaic? Solar panels.

43:33Nayeema:Oh, solar panels, sorry. Yes, I should know that. So you have that demand growth. Then you have this data center revolution, which only really took off in November of 2022. And then you have defense and the electrification of the battlefield that we can see in Ukraine. And then walking down the street are humanoid robots. And we talk about people being wired. Those are really wired. They're very copper intensive. So suddenly you have this demand for this metal, for all these things.

44:06Daniel Yergin:We're literally going to become hydro-copper man. Yeah, so it becomes a metal man.

44:10Nayeema:So metals become much more important. And we saw when Donald Trump had his Liberation Day with tariffs, China was going to be a big recipient of tariffs, but it turns out China controls these things called rare earths. And China says, well, you're going to do that to us? We're going to restrict rare earths, and we're not going to let you use it in military programs. And so there's now this recognition of mining and minerals as essential both for national security, but also energy transition.

44:40Daniel Yergin:Let's talk about AI, because that is, as you've said, the hyperscalers. Nobody's talking about it. No one's talking about it. We couldn't possibly leave. I mean, you did bring up humanoid robots, which I feel like is the gateway drug for AI hyperscaler conversation. I mean, there is a huge race between the U.S. and China to power the chips right now. Will AI prolong the fossil fuel era, or do you think it will drive innovation in new forms of energy development?

45:09Nayeema:Both. Both. Let's put it this way. You need a lot of electricity for data centers. Data centers in the United States today are about 4 % to 5 % of our total electricity consumption. It looks like within five years, it'll be somewhere between 14 % and 17 % of our electricity. But the Biden administration wanted to get all hydrocarbons, all natural gas out of electric generation. Sorry, it's going the other direction. It's increasing now because if there's a race for AI, there's a race for electricity. The CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, said the main constraint on AI is electricity. Yeah.

45:45Daniel Yergin:So I guess here's a smart girl, dumb question. Is it possible that there is not enough energy in the world to keep feeding us? Like, I don't mean feeding us food. I mean, powering our consumption desires.

45:56Nayeema:Well, I think that, you know, if there isn't, then you'll do less of it. Is it possible that that's the constraint? I think right now we're living in a time where people are really scrambling to meet this growing electricity demand. In the United States, at least for about 25 years, electricity demand didn't really grow. They added electric equipment of everything, but we became more efficient. Suddenly you have demand growing for electricity, and people are scrambling to how do you meet it, and the data centers are at the front of that. If you want to order a natural gas turbine today for electric generation—

46:29Daniel Yergin:I ordered one yesterday, so I'm good. Well, exactly.

46:31Nayeema:It's not going to be delivered overnight. It'll be delivered in five years.

46:34Daniel Yergin:Yes.

46:35Nayeema:I mean, when I came up, I noticed some Amazon packages in the elevator, but none of them looked like a natural gas turbine.

46:41Daniel Yergin:I don't know. How big would that be? How big is a natural gas turbine?

46:43Nayeema:It'd be pretty big.

46:45Daniel Yergin:Bigger than the studio or the room that we're in. Okay. That's interesting. Elon Musk says, you know, he might just be talking his own book here because he wants to be out in outer space developing the place, but he says that we'll soon be making chips that we cannot turn on, that we'll have more chips and electricity and that China is not going to have this problem, but that Americans are going to have this problem. His natural conclusion to that is build, baby, build, but build in outer space. Yes. What do you think about this? Well, there are two parts of it.

47:14Nayeema:It is true. China does not have a constraint on electric power because they've built so much and they have much more generating capacity than we do. And by the way, they can do things really quickly that they're building nuclear power plants quickly and everything. They're doing everything. They're doing wind and solar. They're building new coal plants. They're using natural gas for electric generation. And they're also building nuclear at a pretty rapid rate. and so I think there's a general view that we have a problem about sufficient electricity he has said and others have said about data centers in outer space I have you know no expertise to speak on that but it certainly has gotten people's attention yeah somebody who worked for Musk said to me the other day he's very prescient in what he says he doesn't just always get the timing right.

48:06Nayeema:But given what he's, you know, the things he's done, A, with Tesla, and I wrote about that a lot in The Quest about, you know, where did this all come from? Because electric car was considered dead, you know, how it all came together.

48:19Daniel Yergin:It also came together from taxpayers, right? Came together from policy, not just from him.

48:24Nayeema:Well, that's true that people don't, that a lot of the profits of Tesla came from people having, other automobile makers having to pay credits to them.

48:35Daniel Yergin:Whether we build data centers in space or we see them kind of pollute or populate our world, there's also another question that I think AI has raised and climate change has raised for a lot of people who are millennials, maybe Gen Z as well, which is there's a population problem in the world. There's a replacement rate issue that we're seeing across various countries, including the US, including South Korea, where people are not having enough babies. And part of the reason that people are citing for not having children, I think, has historically been climate change. You can see a negative outlook on the world.

49:08Daniel Yergin:And now I think there's a big question of with AI coming and with this energy challenge and this push away from sustainability, people are worried about having kids. And I wonder what advice you would give to them? Well, I think, you know, I know it became in some circles in maybe North

49:30Nayeema:America and in Europe, women say, I'm not gonna have children because I'm worried about climate change and this kind of apocalyptic view that the world was going to end in 2030. But I wonder if, you know, but if we look at birth rates in South Korea or Italy or, you know, elsewhere or Japan, And is that the main reason that, you know, people and women are not having children? Or is it age? Is it profession? What do you think?

49:59Daniel Yergin:I mean, I talk about it a lot on the show. And I think that it is part of the shift in gender roles. And, you know, the idea of a working woman, a woman working through a career, I think it's the kind of independence culture and the hyper-individualized society we live in where everyone needs to have their own car and their own X and their own Y that we've just pushed away from family. I think it's a reality that we just as a society haven't absorbed yet. And it's going to take multiple generations to figure out how does this man-woman thing work. I do think the climate change, like if you look at the data and you really push on people, that wasn't often the reason people weren't really having kids.

50:33Nayeema:Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask and ask you. I mean, it got a lot of attention. And you heard women on the West Coast saying that. Yeah. But I just didn't seem that that would be the main reason.

50:41Daniel Yergin:I think it's a global issue. So I think part of it is, I think having a negative outlook on the future is a real reason. There are a lot of people who look around the world and say, do I want to bring a kid into this world? And maybe it's always felt this way. I mean, you have a longer view of history than I do, both because you've lived more years and because you added an extra hundred something while writing this book to your portfolio. But I think people are really worried about the fate of the world. And I think there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty that probably isn't even captured in this book.

51:15Daniel Yergin:It probably was there before the Industrial Revolution or around the time of the Industrial Revolution of what's the future of work? What's the future of humans? There is an AI slop video that exists where it's a documentary, a mockumentary made 20 years into the future. And you have kind of like Sam Altman having gained a few pounds and Jeff Bezos no longer going to the gym. And they're talking about how the world has changed. Then you see a bunch of human beings at what looks like a Peloton, like rowing for energy. And they're like, yeah, we've had the humans, you know, we've made it their purpose that they will go to work to work out to power the data centers that we need to consume.

51:52Daniel Yergin:So there's a really dystopian vision in some people's minds.

51:56Nayeema:What's often cited now is, you know, the economic prospects of younger people as to at what age you're able to buy a house and all those things. the affordability issues there as well.

52:07Daniel Yergin:Yeah, I think it's a real challenge. And I think that's part of the problem of the energy transition has been when it's more expensive to do a thing. Right. When it's more expensive to do the right thing or the green thing or, you know. But I think it is a combination of like all the things that you're talking about countries feeling. They worry about their own security. They worry about their own economies. They worry about their own ability to innovate. And I think humans at a personal level, we have all these questions about our changing futures. and what will happen. I think the data is a little bit out of whack with the vibes right now.

52:39Daniel Yergin:There's this huge sense that people have that the world as it's projected to us or told to us as it is, is not actually how it is. Every government, whether it's this one or the one that was previously in power, will tell you that the numbers are better, that the prices are getting cheaper, that the world's getting better. And I think a lot of people just haven't internalized that to their own life.

53:00Nayeema:Yeah. I think that's, yeah, I understand what you're saying, that there isn't, you know, optimism about the future.

53:07Daniel Yergin:Yeah. Do you think that's unwarranted, this pessimism about the future?

53:11Nayeema:Well, I think it's better to be optimistic than pessimistic. It's better for your health to be optimistic than pessimistic. But there, you know, there are questions out there. I mean, one of the themes I talked about in the new map, with the end of the Cold War, we kind of thought, okay, the risks of world war, that sort of thing is over. we're seeing these wars are going on now and we see that uh china and the united states are in rivalry and see people building up their militaries against each other so there's that to worry about then clearly and i think we'll see that in the election in november a lot of anxiety about the

53:45Daniel Yergin:impact of the ai on jobs yeah that's i mean that i think is a big question for people about i mean take away what what kind of job your kid's going to have are you going to be able to have your job to keep, you know, having kids. Yeah.

53:58Nayeema:You know, blue collar jobs partly got exported, but also, I mean, there's still a lot of them, but they were also automated away. Right. You know, new factories are going to be much more automated than in the past and robotics. But I think that now it's, you know, kind of the white collar thing. There's that newspaper in Cleveland, which has hired a new reporter, which is AI, to do the reporting.

54:24Daniel Yergin:I mean, so many people, a Claude Cowork is a whole thing, but everybody who runs a business, their expense for tokens is going through the roof. I mean, they're spending so much money. And there's a lot of thinking that, oh, the future of work depends on when are the tokens that are required to do the task, the job description of a human, going to be cheaper than the human.

54:43Nayeema:Right. I think that is an anxiety. I don't know where you would put your finger on it, but I think it's the last eight months or so that it's become more pervasive.

54:55Daniel Yergin:There are a lot of viral blog posts about the future of work and AI that are being circulated in kind of millennial, Gen Z, Gen X, probably group chats, and people are freaking out.

55:06Nayeema:And you do hear that young people who are getting out of school now are finding it more difficult to find jobs.

55:12Daniel Yergin:Yeah. I mean

55:13Nayeema:and one of the things also just to note that like I heard an engineering company say well we'll eliminate our our younger people but then you won't then you won't have people who have been apprentices to be able to to take over

55:25Daniel Yergin:we'll just have the robots do it we'll just have the robot CEO yeah I mean we know some people

55:31Nayeema:who are robotic but they're not yet robots we do

55:34Daniel Yergin:do you want to name some no not

55:36Nayeema:later

55:37Daniel Yergin:later off off the cameras but let me ask you then again I mean again you You have lived more decades than I have, and you have studied 140 years prior to the 1990s. So you've looked at history from the mid-1800s to today. Does this moment feel scarier than anything you've seen since 1850?

55:59Nayeema:No, I think this is a scary moment in many ways, but we've had scary moments before. Living during World War II, people didn't know how that war was going to come out. with the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, people worried about nuclear war. We used to, in elementary school, we used to have drills of what to do during nuclear war. I think there have been other periods of great fear about the future of the United States, whether a country would hold together. That said, I think in some ways this is a scary time because we're looking at a whole new technology that only really, although it's been in development a long time, only really burst on the scene three years ago.

56:45Nayeema:And there is this growing sense that maybe this new technology is going to change everything.

56:51Daniel Yergin:Do you think it's going to change everything?

56:53Nayeema:Probably not.

56:55Daniel Yergin:I mean, the interesting thing, and this goes back to your book, The Prize, is that it's often not the technology or the resource that's changing it. It's the entire ecosystem of what's being developed around it. If rock oil were still the thing that the guy in the 1850s had, were it not for lighting, and then Thomas Edison discovering the light bulb and that becoming competitive, and somebody else coming along and saying, hey, cars, that's going to be a big thing, and that becoming an opportunity, the world wouldn't have shifted in the way that it did.

57:24Nayeema:Right. Well, I mean, we are definitely at a big shift in the economy, in the nature of work, in how we do things and in the relationship among countries.

57:36Daniel Yergin:Do you think that our system in the United States is able to govern through that change?

57:43Nayeema:Well, that is a very big question that I think our institutions are going through a period of testing. I mean, here we are at the 250th anniversary of the United States and thinking, well, you know, we made it this far, but how do we adapt to the world and how is it changing? and realizing the founders or the framers, as they call it, really did have this idea that you needed to deal with power, you needed to balance power. And I think that was kind of a fundamental principle. It's not necessarily the most efficient way to get things done, but it is a way to keep things in balance and the checks and balances.

58:25Nayeema:And, you know, that's the great art of American civilization.

58:32Daniel Yergin:Yeah, and those institutions are under threat right now.

58:34Nayeema:Yeah, definitely under pressure about that. And I think we're in a period of testing the resiliency of our institutions. So I think that's part of the uncertainty that's there too. But I think the dominant question out there is how does, you know, Does AI change lots of things or does AI change everything?

58:56Daniel Yergin:In 1991, you were quoted saying, what your book The Prize says is that it's not enough to have good science or righteous belief in the environment. You have to understand how power and economics affect policy. You must have perfected a battery for an electric car, but if you don't figure out how Wall Street works with Washington, you'll be sitting there with that battery until the year 2010.

59:16Nayeema:Did I say that in 1991?

59:18Daniel Yergin:Yeah. Do you feel prescient now? Do you want to pat yourself on the back?

59:21Nayeema:Yeah, I thought I was talking about batteries. No one was talking about batteries. I think that's what you said. Talk about looking down the road.

59:26Daniel Yergin:In 1991, how Wall Street works with Washington.

59:31Nayeema:That's right on the agenda today.

59:33Daniel Yergin:That seems very much on the agenda today.

59:35Nayeema:About 2010 was when the electric car started to prove its economic viability.

59:39Daniel Yergin:Yeah. That's a pretty good call. Pretty good call. But this also seems to be changing. I mean, the way in which Washington is doing business these days. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

59:47Nayeema:I mean, well, it even started under the Biden administration with industrial policy. I remember it was in Japan, because for many years, the U.S. had criticized Japan for having industrial policy where the state would guide investment and make decisions. And they were sort of now saying, well, now actually the U.S. government is doing that. And now, of course, it's on a wholly different scale.

1:00:11Daniel Yergin:Yeah, the Trump administration has its own form of, you know.

1:00:15Nayeema:It's super industrial policy and describing it as such.

1:00:18Daniel Yergin:Yeah. And do you think it'll pan out? Do you think it'll be successful?

1:00:22Nayeema:Boy, you're asking me to be prescient again.

1:00:25Daniel Yergin:I mean, you did it in 1991, Dan.

1:00:27Nayeema:Well, I think some things will work out, but I think things will take longer. I mean, it's funny. We're talking about employment and not enough jobs. Yeah. But actually, we don't have enough electricians. We do not have enough people to build things in the United States. that's an area that actually we need more if we're going to get these things built. And I am conscious how long it takes. I mean, if you decide you want to open a new copper mine and you have a discovery, if you did it on average around the world, it would take you 17 years. In the United States, it would take you 29 years.

1:00:59Daniel Yergin:So I want to end discussing domestic politics, because as we started off saying, is every war fought for oil? There's a question of, is every election one in the pump? and you discussed this. I mean, there is this idea of a strategic petroleum reserve that exists. And what is it exactly?

1:01:17Nayeema:The strategic petroleum reserve was an idea that originally President Eisenhower had it after World War II because he'd known how important oil was. But it was after the oil crisis of the 70s that said, we need to store oil. So if there's a disruption in some place like the Strait of Hormuz, we will have oil that we can draw upon that will last us 60, 90, 120 days.

1:01:38Daniel Yergin:And Biden drew down on that several times during the Ukraine war, effectively, right? And that was to keep the prices manageable at the pump?

1:01:47Nayeema:Yeah, that was to keep prices. I mean, it was a sort of form of price control, yeah.

1:01:52Daniel Yergin:And is there a lot of strategic petroleum reserve left for America right now? Is there like a limited storage?

1:01:59Nayeema:There are about like 400 million barrels, so it's there. And other countries have reserves too.

1:02:04Daniel Yergin:And then is it common for presidents to deploy that?

1:02:08Nayeema:It's only sporadically been used, but we do notice that sometimes it gets used invoking strategic reasons, but it seems to not be unconnected to the price of gasoline at the pump. Right. Because you have to be seen to be doing something.

1:02:22Daniel Yergin:Got it. It's like their version of monetary policy a little bit with oil. Yeah, that's right. Right. It's kind of like, but they don't need to go through the independent Fed.

1:02:30Nayeema:Yeah, that's right.

1:02:31Daniel Yergin:They just do it themselves. So now we find ourselves obviously in this pickle in Iran. Oil prices have gone wild in recent days. I'm curious when you look back at the Iraq war, past this book, part of the quest, there were a lot of theories then that we were going to this war for. I mean, we clearly weren't going there for the information that was presented by the Bush administration. 2003, not 1991, 2003. We clearly weren't going for the reasons that were presented by the then Bush administration to the United Nations. There was a theory that that war was about oil. Looking back 20 years, was that war about oil, and what was the consequence?

1:03:05Nayeema:Let's say, first, there was the Gulf War in 1991, and I think that was about oil. It was a question of whether Saddam Hussein would dominate. At that point, it was by far that we didn't have shale oil or anything.

1:03:19Daniel Yergin:Yeah, but this was 1991, and you're talking about it.

1:03:20Nayeema:Yeah, so I'm saying that was clearly about oil. I remember talking to one of the decision makers, and he said, well, it was the control of oil, What you're saying, the geopolitical importance of oil, that was there. But he said we couldn't say that, so he said jobs, jobs, jobs.

1:03:39Daniel Yergin:They said jobs was the reason that they went in to preserve Kuwait being annexed from Iraq? That was what was sold?

1:03:45Nayeema:Well, they said because otherwise, indirectly, because of oil, it would lead to grave economic problems. So 2003, that question is still there. I asked one of the key decision makers, I said, exactly why did we go to war? And he said, well, the answer is murky. But 2003 invading Iraq, you know, we'll never, I think, have a clear idea of whether it was just the unfinished business of 1991 where George H.W. Bush did not go on to Baghdad and they did. And then, of course, that's another example. I remember talking to again to somebody who said there had been this great confidence that oh in 10 weeks we'd solve the problem of Afghanistan it turned out we didn't and that led to this overconfidence of going in and you know overconfidence is is one of the big mistakes that people make but they don't know they're making it at the time.

1:04:46Daniel Yergin:So what are we overconfident about right now?

1:04:49Nayeema:Well I think.

1:04:51Daniel Yergin:That's going to bite us in the future.

1:04:53Nayeema:Yeah. I mean, I think as a country, I think that alliance system that we had in the past with NATO, with Europe, with Japan, and so forth, that's not what it was. And I think that was a real source of strength for the U.S. and a strength for Europe and a strength and a source of stability for the world.

1:05:12Daniel Yergin:Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, which one will have the greatest impact on oil prices?

1:05:18Nayeema:Absolutely. Iran will have the biggest impact because it involves all of those sources, such important sources of oil.

1:05:28Daniel Yergin:This is a scary time. Yeah.

1:05:30Nayeema:But we should also think about the things to be optimistic about.

1:05:33Daniel Yergin:Sure. There's lots to be optimistic about. We won't talk about them here. Well, no. But no, there's a lot.

1:05:38Nayeema:Podcasts.

1:05:39Daniel Yergin:Podcasts. The podcast market is booming. Everyone's going to have their own podcast. No one will be listening to anyone else's podcast. Yeah, exactly.

1:05:44Nayeema:But podcasts are great innovation. And they've changed the way we get information.

1:05:49Daniel Yergin:They have. Sometimes for good, sometimes in concerning ways. And I'm trying to be part of the good. Two last questions before we leave here. One, if you were to write, if someone, it won't be you maybe, I don't think, if someone in 140 years is going to write the book The Prize or 100 years from now, what do you think the prize would be? Is it still going to be oil? Is it going to be chips? Is it going to be?

1:06:09Nayeema:Well, yeah, some people describe chips as the new oil. I think it's probably, I mean, the story is going to be the story of AI. I mean, just how transformative, how it came about. And kind of not that it just didn't start in November 2022 when OpenAI did its release, but how long it had been. So I think that would be, the epic story of AI will be a very eye-opening and important story for somebody to write. Yeah, the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2130 will maybe go to that book.

1:06:43Daniel Yergin:I think it'll be shorter because the speed and the scale, the hyperscale.

1:06:46Nayeema:And books have to be shorter anyway because of...

1:06:48Daniel Yergin:Attention spans are getting less. We end every episode of Smart Girl Dumb Questions asking our guests who are so esteemed, so Pulitzer Prize winning, etc. What they are dumb about, a dumb question that you have that you haven't bothered or wanted to ask out loud.

1:07:02Nayeema:Well, I had two questions on my mind in the last week. why is interval training better than regular training? So that was one question.

1:07:11Daniel Yergin:You're doing a lot of high-intensity interval training?

1:07:13Nayeema:Well, I've just started to understand it. And then the other one, when you're in a skyscraper, just a question, how do they put this all together?

1:07:25Daniel Yergin:How do they build that?

1:07:27Nayeema:Yeah, how do they build that? So I was thinking, I should really read a book on engineering just to understand all the things that have to go into building something.

1:07:34Daniel Yergin:I mean, you probably know how long it might take to build that in the United States versus China, but you don't know how to build it.

1:07:39Nayeema:But all the people that you have to do and make sure. How is it that everything actually fits together and some things aren't orthogonal or something like that?

1:07:47Daniel Yergin:You know, some days, Daniel, I think that we are in a video game. That's what I was getting at with the fossil fuels powering the cars.

1:07:54Nayeema:Yeah.

1:07:54Daniel Yergin:You know this whole simulation theory argument? There's a whole universe of people. Not universe. It's probably too big. but there's a cohort of people who believe that we're living in a video game simulation.

1:08:06Nayeema:Right. Like the Truman Show, in a way.

1:08:08Daniel Yergin:In a way. So I think Elon is one of the people who thinks that might be possible, because it just seems so insane that all this organic life was on the earth so many years ago, and then it got destroyed over time. And then we discovered that that is fossil fuels, and that we use that, then we pump it into a car, like Mario Kart. It's like the mushroom gets bigger when it gets out of the block. And now we're thinking about exploring the edges of the universe, like going to space to build data centers. And I don't know. I think it's sometimes when I speak to people who cover technical topics like energy or AI or electricity, I find myself very curious about simulation theory.

1:08:48Nayeema:Right. Just that this is all, we're all living in a video game.

1:08:52Daniel Yergin:I don't know because it seems inexplicable.

1:08:54Nayeema:But it is, I mean, this question, why did all of this civilization with all these people rushing around and all these people doing everything, why did this all come about?

1:09:06Daniel Yergin:Yeah.

1:09:07Nayeema:Yeah. How did this all come about? Just what's the theory of how we got here?

1:09:11Daniel Yergin:Yeah. That is it. That's a good question. How did we all get here? How did we all get here? That's a good, but that's not a dumb question. That's a very smart question. Anyways, thank you so much, Dan Yergin, for being with me. I so appreciate you showing up and hanging out with us. at Smart Girl Dumb Questions.

1:09:26Nayeema:This was really great fun. This was fun. Very interesting and very probing and a lot to think about. So I appreciate the way you've shaped the discussion.

1:09:37Daniel Yergin:Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. That means a lot coming from you. I appreciate that very much, Dan.

1:09:45Daniel Yergin:Okay, a lot of history, future, car buying, career shaping, and baby making to think about after that conversation. But I went in kind of dumb about where we were going in the sustainability agenda, like what's happening with everything green. And I left feeling a lot smarter about what's practical, where we're headed, and why we need to keep trying to diversify, not just for sustainability, but also for energy security and innovation and the future of civilization and optimism, I guess. And I think I also left smarter and somewhat sadder about how some things don't change, like our 100-plus year lust for oil.

1:10:19Daniel Yergin:That will at least extend or expand wars, even if it's not the primary reason they all start. And OMG, I cannot believe that Daniel Juergen did not know about simulation theory, but I just love how he is knowledgeable about everything else except high-rises and high-intensity interval training. Next time, we're going to take the podcast at Barry's Boot Camp with Daniel Juergen. But I loved how he showed up. He hung out. He was down to talk through the minutiae and the kind of meta of life. I want to know what you think of this conversation, so please drop us a comment. Follow us on at SmartGirlDumbQuestions.

1:10:48Daniel Yergin:You can email me at naima raza101 at gmail.com. I will always reply. and obviously share this episode with your friends, your family, your mom, someone else who doesn't know about high intensity interval training and wants to come to Barry's Bootcamp with us. Anyways, we'll see you next week on an all new Smart Girl Dumb Questions. This episode was produced with Desta Wondrad and Melissa Gibson. It was edited by Darlena Chiem, mixed and engineered by Johnny Simon and I'm your host, Naeem Arraza. See you next week.

1:11:22Take care.