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
I wish I had the brains to think of it.
It was Mr. Henry M. Flegler.
Rockefeller was Baptist down to the bone, watchful and suspicious of anything that announced wealth too loudly.
Flagler started out that way but drifted the other way, toward the bold and expansive and finally the gilded.
Standard Oil was an exhibit of both at once.
Rockefeller's economy of self-command and Flagler's hunger to build something grand and visible.
Their friendship, Rockefeller said, ran a lifetime without a single interruption.
Later in life, Flagler ordered his Standard Oil correspondence burned.
Almost everything he wrote in the company's early years went up in smoke.
What survives comes mostly from other men's letters and from testimony he gave under oath.
He was trying to disappear, and it worked.
Ask anyone today who built Standard Oil and people will say Rockefeller.
They should say Rockefeller and Flagler.
The company could not have grown nearly as large without both of them.
On paper, Cleveland didn't look like the best place to refine oil.
The raw crude came from Pennsylvania, 100 miles to the southeast.
A city like Pittsburgh made sense as it was closer to the oil.
And then New York City was closer to the customers and the ships that could bring the refined product to the world.
For these reasons, many thought Cleveland would have a short life as a refining town.
But Cleveland had something important, water.
Showing 1241–1260 of 20,679 · page 63 of 1034
← Previous
Next →