David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…I think the best way to put it is probably, they became unsatisfied with what they had accomplished and they just kept pushing. This is probably the right transition point to what would have happened otherwise. What if the trust hadn't gotten broken up? I think we should examine it from Standard Oil shareholders’ perspective, which I think we're all going to say like, what would have been worse? Consumers’ perspective and then competitors' perspective? In part, maybe even before what would have happened if they hadn't been broken up, maybe we should examine what would have happened if they hadn't gone into nefarious business practices. What if they just were the leading innovator, they had the best operational excellence, and they were operating at a large scale so they could have legal scale dynamics out at play? Yeah. It's funny. My thoughts on this, we're talking about boiling points earlier in the episode. I think up to a certain point, as we hopefully laid out in Part I, what they were doing was—I don't want to bring morals into it, but it was a chaotic point in both American history and in the industry. There was chaos in the oil industry in the early days. It's Rockefeller's argument, we would have all beat each other to death. Maybe somebody, maybe we would have emerged the winner eventually, but we accelerated. It's like Foundation. For people who've read Asimov's Foundation, the whole premise is that there will be chaos for 50,000 years or 1000 years if we have the Seldon Plan to get everybody through to the other side, and it'll happen much faster and suffering will be alleviated. That's what Standard Oil did in the early days. I would say that there's a lot of merit to that. But once that happened, especially after Rockefeller left, Archbold and the other cronies kept using those tactics even after they'd already crossed the point, and that was bad. They were insatiable. Even some of the more nefarious tactics, you're right, probably lead to good things for everyone, especially for the people who did end up taking Standard Oil shares rather than being run out of business. But then, at some point, it doesn't accrue benefit to anyone in the ecosystem to keep pressing your advantage.…

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