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
And here's the part his enemies would never give him credit for.
A standard swallowed the chaos of the industry and squeezed the waste out of the trade.
The price of kerosene fell and kept falling until the light that had once been a luxury was something almost any family could afford.
And true to their name, the product had gotten safer.
Kerosene had long been dangerously inconsistent, with bad, over-volatile batches turning lamps into bombs that could burn a house down.
A barrel that carried the word standard increasingly became a promise.
This oil would burn clean and not blow up the lamp.
On July 8, 1879, John D. Rockefeller turned 40.
He was now one of the 20th richest men in America,
And almost nobody in America knew it.
And that was just the way he liked it.
When a newspaper that year guessed his fortune, it said $5 million.
And he didn't correct them.
He never did.
But we know now that a Standard Oil stock alone at the time was worth about $18 million.
The press had really only just discovered Rockefeller.
The year before, the New York Sun ended his obscurity with the first real profile of him ever printed.
Exposing his monopoly, it called him one of the great commercial intellects of the country.
But it also concluded that his success rested on some secret bargain with the railroads that people could sense but never quite prove.
That double image of genius and suspect would follow him to the grave.
Showing 1681–1700 of 20,679 · page 85 of 1034
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