Shane Parrish
speaker
20,548 appearances
48 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 1 Sep
Shane Parrish’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
A refiner bought crude oil at the market price and turned it into kerosene, a product people needed to light their homes.
When crude was cheap, the refiner's margins got better.
The refiner was a step removed from the chaos.
They didn't gamble on geology.
The refiner had control sitting at the choke point between the raw material and the customer.
Rockefeller observed and thought this was the best place to get in.
The man who helped him get there was named Samuel Andrews.
Andrews was a chemist that Rockefeller had come to know from the Erie Street Baptist Church, the church he still attended and had been baptized at a decade earlier.
Andrews had learned to refine crude oil into kerosene better and cheaper than almost anyone else in Cleveland, and he was convinced that this cheap kerosene would soon light the world.
Rockefeller heard him out.
The numbers were incredible.
Crude averaged $2 a barrel, while refined kerosene sold for $13.
And a refinery could be built for $1,000 and run with just a handful of men.
He soon made his decision to enter.
In 1863, him and his partner Clark formed a new firm with a new name, Andrews Clark and Company.
Samuel Andrews would run the refinery and Rockefeller and Maurice Clark would handle the money.
24-year-old Rockefeller called this a little bit of a side hustle to their main commodity business.
It would not remain this way.
They found a three-acre site in Cleveland along the river, right where the Atlantic and Great Western Railroad met the waterway.
The rails could bring crude oil from the oil regions in Pennsylvania, and water or rail could bring the oil they refined to the eastern markets of New York.
Showing 921–940 of 20,548 · page 47 of 1028
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