Dwarkesh Patel: prediction

Transcript context

…People think of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil and they go: gasoline. It had nothing to do with gasoline. John D. Rockefeller was a lighting merchant. What they did is that they rolled back the darkness with kerosene, with lighting. Before that, the number one source of lighting was candles and whaling. The whaling industry was delivering lighting. For the first 30 or 40 years of the oil industry it was a lighting business. Then came along this other guy named Thomas Edison. Suddenly you have electric lights and you say, “That's going to be the end of the oil business.” But by the way, over here is Henry Ford and others. You're creating this whole new market in the 20th century for gasoline. In the 19th century gasoline was a waste product. It went for like three cents a gallon. One of the things I learned from The Prize, I didn't appreciate before. Before the car was invented, when Edison invented the light bulb, people were saying Standard Oil would go bankrupt because the light bulb was invented. John D. Rockefeller became the richest man in the United States as a merchant of lighting, not as a merchant of mobility.…

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