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
But Rockefeller didn't bat an eye.
Around Cleveland, he began telling people exactly what he intended.
The Standard Oil Company will someday refine all of the oil and make all of the barrels.
Almost nobody took him literally.
In the last days of November 1871, Rockefeller checked into a hotel in New York City and disappeared into a series of meetings with the most powerful railroad men in America.
He was 32 years old at the time, and he would be gone for weeks.
He wrote home to his wife almost daily.
The letters show a man who knew he was walking a line.
A man who succeeds in life, he wrote to her, must sometimes go against the current.
Here's what was being drawn up behind those closed doors.
There were three railroad lines now carrying oil east.
They were the Pennsylvania, the Erie, and the New York Central.
And they could not stand each other.
They were forever at war over rates, each cutting prices to steal the other's traffic.
Sometimes one would haul freight at a loss just to keep a rival from getting it.
Then, exhausted and broke, they would all shake hands and agree to hold raids steady, dividing the traffic evenly.
But soon after, someone would always cheat and the war would start again.
A railroad has enormous fixed costs.
Track and cars must be paid for, whether they run full or empty.
And this is why guaranteeing volumes was so important to them.
Showing 1341–1360 of 20,679 · page 68 of 1034
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