Daniel Yergin

And I think also because like today with gasoline, it's the one thing everybody buys.

You and I don't go out and buy steel, but you go to a gasoline, 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.

But it was a monopoly and we have an antitrust law.

And I think there's also the suspicion that it was not only the economic monopoly, but the political muscle that came with that.

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 know, you would have a PR advisor tell them that's not really the right stance to take.

But at that time, you know, it probably also came from the arrogance of having created this huge company with its, you know, running a global company from an office on a 26 Broadway.

You know, you did have a sense of power.

Oh, but let me mention, but I do know that, you know, 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.

Because Roosevelt, it was, you know, he was the trust buster.

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.