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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
By the late 1860s, Rockefellers, Anders, and Flagler were well on their way to becoming the largest oil refining operation in the world.
It had happened in just a few years of borrowing, building, vertically integrating, and squeezing costs out of every link in the chain.
They made their own sulfuric acid, ran their own wagons.
They were building massive storage tanks to buy up crude cheap and hold it and wait out depressed prices.
And Rockefeller read his success the way he read everything, through his faith.
A few days before Christmas in 1867, he had missed a train that later wrecked and killed many of its passengers.
He wrote to his wife at once, I do regard the thing as providence of God.
The Lord, he was increasingly sure, was watching over his enterprise and approving.
And yet, in 1869, for the first time since entering oil, Rockefeller was afraid.
A disaster had arrived, just not the one he had been rehearsing on his pillow.
The oil fields had not given out.
In fact, the opposite had happened.
Refining had become so profitable that new people kept piling in, exactly the way drillers had once when oil was struck a decade before.
In came the tinkerers and the tailors and the boys who followed the plow, Rockefeller reminisced decades later, all eager for this large profit.
By 1870, the country's refineries actually had the capacity to process three times more crude oil than was being pumped out of the ground.
And this made the price of kerosene sink so low that by Rockefeller's estimate, nine out of ten refineries in the country were actually losing money.
His own brother saw it firsthand.
Refined cheaper than crude, William wrote to him one day from New York, meaning he'd seen the price of kerosene fall below the price of crude oil it was made from.
Refiners sold at a loss just to keep their plants running and service their debts.
And this is where Rockefeller arrived at the idea that would drive everything he did for the rest of his life.
Showing 1301–1320 of 20,679 · page 66 of 1034
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