Shane Parrish
speaker
20,679 appearances
49 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 15 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 — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
He had a reputation along the waterfront for paying his bills.
He had a banker who had lent him money on a growing pile of warehouse receipts.
And he had a partner who was beginning to grow nervous about all of that borrowing.
And he was watching an infant oil industry that had no idea where it was going or what was coming next.
Rockefeller watched the oil frenzy for three years and didn't move.
He saw the pattern.
Drillers would punch holes in the ground and pray.
When or if they hit, they flooded the market and the price of crude oil collapsed.
Many of the men who had to borrow to drill then went broke.
A few months later, the survivors and any newcomer started the whole cycle all over again.
But the refining of oil was a different beast.
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.
Showing 1041–1060 of 20,679 · page 53 of 1034
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