His new book expands everywhere from russia to london to broadway at one point, and its a pretty interesting read. I dont want to give too much away, so without further ado, please welcome peter. Thank you very much. [applause] great. So this is, this is actually a really big pleasure for me to be here at kramers books. It is, in many ways, the culmination of many years of research and efforts to put together what ive always an answer to a question that ive always wanted to ask, and that was who were the other guys and gals, who were the other people who compromised this story of oil. A lot of times we know about john d. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world when he was alive. And today of all days for the release of the soft cover of breaking rockefeller is important because i did not pick this day. But may 23rd is the 80th anniversary of rockefellers death. So 80 years ago john d. Rockefeller on this day died. Some historical symmetry there is always great for someone who likes really good stories about history. Interestingly enough, on the day that he died rockefeller failed to achieve what was essentially the biggest goal of his life. Sure, it was to get rich. Sure, it was to become this very powerful oil magnate. But as he aged ask as he achieved his first goal, his new goal emerged, and that was he truly wanted to live to be 100 years old. This was going to be the accomplishment of his life. And so when he died on may 23rd, 1937, he was two years i counted can two years, one month, 15 days shy of his 100th birthday. Sadly, rockefeller failed. But in the process, he died a great philanthropist. And its interesting because on the very last day of his life, one of the very last things that rockefeller did was to a pay off the mortgage of the euclid Avenue Baptist Church back in cleveland, ohio. The place where he had his first very powerful religious experience, an experience that would not only define his life, define how he viewed himself and those around him, but create one of the greatest ironies of this man. And that is that every sunday rockefeller would belt out hymns from the pews and considered himself a very godly man. Ask yet he was and yet he was ruthless in those who he went up against. He was utterly ruthless in destroying all competition, and he created elaborate explanations in his own mind for why his wealth was a sign of the blessing from god even though the people he destroyed viewed him as the darth vadar of his age, as the true villain of his time. And so i wanted to tell a story about those upstarts and underdogs, some who rockefeller crushed, but ultimately, those who found a way to beat rockefeller at his own game. And that, essentially, is the departure point for this story. A couple points were raised already, and it is fascinating to really understand the stakes of what the, these upstarts and underdogs were up against. So after he died on may 23rd, 1937, the New York Times went out and actually dug up one of his old tax returns and tried to answer the question, how rich was rockefeller truly . And it turns out that when you, you adjust for inflation at those scales and time differentials, average inflation adjustment just doesnt do it justice. So one of the things that i did was i used some excellent scholarship from some other economists, and i calculated how much would rockefeller or have been worth at the peak of his power in todays money. And it turns out that rockefeller was not a rich man. Rockefeller was an incredibly wealthy man. When you do the calculations, it turns out rockefeller was worth 357 billion by todays calculations. By comparison, the richest human being on the planet today, bill gates, is worth around 80 billion. So compared to the blazing fire of rockefellers fortune, bill gates have a smoldering ember. This was the accomplishment of his life. And it is in looking at how rockefeller systematically collected that wealth and in the process not only took his company a company known as standard oil into becoming the largest refinery in the oil business, standard wasnt even the Largest Oil Company in a sense in the oil business. Standard at peak of his power was the oil business. And that is when the story begins in breaking rockefeller. Thats the moment, in 1889, when rockefeller is essentially the king of broadway. He has created a luxurious headquarters for himself on 26 broadway. You can still go there today. And in, at the top of odd broadway of broadway, rockefeller ran one of the largest Oil Production, refinery and Distribution Companies in the world. Yet there was a problem. And that is that rockefeller was a monopolist. And rockefeller systematically destroyed any other form of independent competition. At its peak, standard oil controlled, essentially, 80 of all the oil on the planet. If you can stop and think about that for a moment in our own day and age, yes, things are different today, but think about one man or one company that controls 80 of all the oil on planet earth. That was john d. Rockefeller. And it also gives you an idea about the stakes for those who went up against him. And 1889, as the story begins, the world is making its transition from coal to oil. And the individuals who would help push that transition along, who would help make the world that we enjoy and live in today had a problem. Rockefeller was their problem. And from that problem, we saw the outbreak of what is, essentially, the worlds first great oil war. And from that war we have a lot of, a lot of important things come. First of all, that war transformed rockefeller from being that rich man into the wealthiest human being who has ever lived. That war created the Global Energy market as we know it, because it created a global price for oil. Today the price of a barrel of oil is the same in shanghai, essentially, as it is in london, as it is in moscow. Theres a reason for that. And the reason is the war to break rockefellers empire. It helped create this global price for oil. And it gave us a lot of legacies; legacies of science, legacies of innovation and legacies of government regulation that we still live with today. I wanted to tell this story because i wanted to show those end enduring links between oils past and our present. And so the stakes for and more importantly the lives of individuals who helped make that possible. So who were these central figures . I started digging into it, and it turns out there are some rather colorful characters. The first one in the center of this story is a fellow named Marcus Samuel jr. Marcus samuel was not an oilman. Marcus samuel was, in a sense, an east london merchanttrader. He didnt know very much about the oil business, but he knew the east asian import export business. His early rival in the oil industry, as story unfolds, was a takenoprisoners Oil Executive named henry debtording. He had, essentially, inherited a company from his mentor who abruptly died and left him as the interim director of a company known as royal dutch. Samuels company would eventually become known as shell, and it was that herculean rivalry between Marcus Samuel and henri which initially defined the early part of hair relationship. They were, essentially, frenemies in the modern sense because they were enemies who also got along, but at the end of the day, we were enemies. And rockefeller was benefiting from this rivalry. Rockefeller was taking advantage of the fact that instead of fighting him, the main source of competition to standard oil spent all of its time fighting each other. Mainly across the vast ports of the far east in asia. And so as im unpacking this story through my research, i suddenly hit upon an interesting idea, and that idea defines the narrative and the story structure for how i tell this history of the war to break rockefellers empire. And that idea was this in almost every single previous historical treatment of this fight against rockefeller, henri, the unproven, takenoprisoners Oil Executive, always gets top billing. Marcus samuel is always at the bottom of the marquee. And the reason is actually quite simple. Because, in the end, henri defeated marcus, in a sense n their commercial competition with even other. With each other. And that defeat resulted in the combination of two powerful companies known today as royal dutch and shell, or the shell oil group. Marcus was always getting second shrift. And i thought to myself, why not tell the story upside down . Why not look at hamlet from the perspective of horatio . Why not tell the story of don question owe today, but in this case look at sancho panza as the true here reof the hero of the story . And marcus was the true hero of the story. In order to beat rockefeller, in order to outflank the most powerful oil monopoly of his time, marcus had to unravel a complicated, fivepart puzzle of distance, geography, risk, technology and greed. And in doing so, he did a lot of Amazing Things such as kick start the innovation that would lead to the modern oil tanker, developments and breakthroughs that are still used today, in todays oil tankers. Finding a way to finally open up the recently or most recentlyinaugurated suez canal to oil shipments, shipments which still transit the canal today. But it was not until Marcus Samuel found a way to make it happen that the oil world changed permanently, that the balance of energy power on planet earth was fundamentally shifted thanks to marcus. And i start unpacking all of these things, and i think to myself this is a story that has to be told. It is a story that really has to be told right. And along the way there was not just marcus and henri, but there were a whole cast of characters, many of them forgotten. People who were forgotten to history. Heroes who made their contribution, contributions we all actually enjoy today and yet we dont even know about it. There were amazing figures such as the bespectacled italian geologist who is, essentially, reinventing petroleum geography one shovel scoop at a time in the wilds of sumatra. There was the onearmed prophet of oil in spending top, texas, a guy who couldnt have been more wrong about absolutely everything he ever touched and yet thanks to patillos failure, we actually have the kickstart of the texas oil boom, an event that redefined the state of texas as we know. And, frankly, American Power as we know. And we also have amazing, trailblazing female an amazing trailblazing female journalist such as ida tarbell, a woman whom rockefeller destroyed. Rockefeller broke idas father both financially and, frankly, psychologically, certainly emotionally over the course of his attempt as an independent oilman in the wilds of pennsylvania. Rockefeller broke, broke idas father. And ida couldnt do much as a result. She was only an adolescent at the time. And so ida did the only thing that any woman in western pennsylvania could have done at the time, and that was to get out. In order to get out, she had to get an education. And so she became the very first woman in her graduating class of Allegheny College to graduate from college. She traveledded across the atlantic, studied at the sorbonne and eventually met a fellow with a fabulous moustache, an incurable taste for floppy bow ties, and he had just created this new magazine that he was very humbly going to name it after himself. His name was sam mcclure, and he was, had started mcclures magazine. The the pair it was the pairing of mcclures magazine and ida tarbells savage wit, her Meticulous Research and her mission in many ways to essentially affect her final revenge against the man who destroyed her father, john k. Rockefeller. And so in john d. Rockefeller. And so in telling that story, i actually get to the heart of the real problem that we face in todays day and age, a problem that defines our current policy debate. And it is traveling the country and talking with folks from the atlantic to the pacific, especially around the oil industry, the revitalizedded oil industry of the United States. And it is this. There is a question, and it is an unsolved question in the american body politic and it is a question that breaking rockefeller wades into. And that is, do you need just the courts to protect you against monopolists . Is the Supreme Court and the federal government alone enough to protect us . I argue in breaking rockefeller that the answer to that question is, no. That you actually have to have both the shield of federal regulation represented by the courts and the sword of competition. You actually have to have both competition and protective regulations in order to protect consumers from companies that would otherwise just take advantage of them. This is actually an unsettled question right now, and it is one which i think we can learn from in tying that connection between oils past and our present. And along the way, you get to have a fantastic, riproaring, good story in the guise of breaking rockefeller. That was perhaps, i think, the best part of writing this book, was in going back and systematically recreating some of the most famous and often vanished places that Marcus Samuel and john d. Rockefeller would have known, but today theyre completely gone. And so the story, for example, in showing how the world made that important transition from coal to oil, breaking rockefeller actually recreates an original journey on the Orient Express leaving from paris and traveling east. Because at the time, that was the fastest way to get to the oil fields of tsarist russia. I even found an actual menu that was used on the outbound voyage outbound journey from paris and got to follow step by step, station by station what a rider would have experienced mainly through the diaries and reporting of actual americans who had just come back from a ride on the Orient Express and talked about the horrendous experience that it was. Because at the time, this was not the gas oil excuse me, this was not the gas and electric Orient Express. They werent burning fuel oil and electricity. Fuel oil allow for more powerful engines, greater horsepower, heavier train carriages, more luxuries. But at the time, the coalburning oil in Orient Express was something of a rink key dick affair. It was still luxurious by the standards of day if you were european,; if you were american, it was actually a disappointing experience. So in showing how the world was before oil, you get to actually explore the experiences of these people. Traveling through the jungles of sumatra and actually following the trek of these trailblazing geologists who, for the very first time, managed to take the ideas of science and make them practical for oilmen who were actually not really they didnt care about science. They just wanted to know, okay, wise guys, how do i use your science to find the next big gusher or the next flowing well . Turns out geologists, like scientists today, could do a really good job about telling you exactly why oil had appeared in a certain place. But up until the jungles of sumatra, no one had been able to to use science to to say this is where you will find the next major oil discovery. This is where the next major gusher will be. Not until the bespectacled italian and his german colleague named dr. C. Schmidt actually undertook it to do just that. Financial necessity drove them to that. They actually achieved something great. To this day, the language of geology and science permeates the oil industry, and it is thanks to the trail blazers and these unknown figures that we actually enjoy the benefits of hydrocarbons today. And finally, there was the ports of the far east. Then, as now, the oil world and the energy world hung on chinas insatiable desire for energy. In answering that, in quenching that desire today just as back in Marcus Samuels time great fortunes can be made or lost. And so as im telling this story, im starting to uncover a lot of these connections. And for me, thats the most important part about breaking rockefeller. Because i love history, i love a great story, i love a great narrativedriven story that features real people up against somewhat daunting but real stakes. They have to gamble big. Sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed. Thats why i go out to read books. I always love to find that book. And in writing breaking rockefeller, i wantedded to write the kind of book ive always wanted to read. History is all well and good, but unless we can learn from it, then its just a good story. So the final part of this story and this conversation is about how do we learn from it. And in doing so, i thought i might do Something Special for this audience. Not only folks who got here early, but the folks who are crammed in the back there. Once were done, id encourage some of you to sit down, and we might do some q a. But in doing this, i thought i would talk about the controversies, the heresies and the legacies of breaking rockefeller. Things that are emerged in conversations with folks around the country as ive been discussing this book. First, the controversies. A lot of people have said and i think its a good point well, wait a minute. Breaking rockefeller isnt youre not really talking about breaking the man. In fact, rockefeller did great. The breakup of his oil empire, thanks to the Supreme Court decision of 1911, was a bountiful shock wave. It was in breaking up this giant monolith into smaller pieces, each one rockefeller became the majority owner of, and once those companies were listed on the new york stock exchange, rockefeller the wealth of rockefeller proliferated. Wasnt breaking rockefeller actually a good thing . And the answer is, sure. In some sense. This story is not about breaking rockefeller, the man. This story is about breaking everything that he stood for. Because in business rockefeller always won even if he had to cheat. Thats not good business. Thats not fair play. And in dealing from the the bottom of the deck to best his competitors, rockefeller created a monopoly that was a predator, a monopoly that preyed upon average people. Thats bad. And so breaking rockefeller, the idea breaking standard oil and breaking a company that views its customers as prey is actually something that i stand by. And i, im encouraged by the fact that the upstart, these upstarts and underdogs managed to accomplish just that. Some heresies as weve heard about, i mentioned earlier this idea that the federal government is enough, that all you need is a studious legal c