The Dumbest Business Ever... Shipping Melting Ice to Calcutta.

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Dumbest Business Ever... Shipping Melting Ice to Calcutta"

Business History - Pushkin Industries
Hosts: Jacob Goldstein & Robert Smith
Release Date: May 20, 2026

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Overview

This episode tells the bizarre yet groundbreaking story of Frederick Tudor, a Bostonian who, in the early 1800s, resolved to solve a global problem: delivering ice from the cold lakes of Massachusetts to the sweltering tropics, including all the way to colonial India. Despite seemingly insurmountable odds, ridicule, and repeated bankruptcy (plus some time in jail), Tudor’s relentless pursuit turned “the dumbest business idea ever” into a global industry—while teaching us crucial lessons about opportunity cost, logistics, and entrepreneurship.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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The Origins: Ice, Opportunity, and a "Dumb" Idea

• Setting: Boston, 1800s, where ice was plentiful in winter but absent in the tropics ([03:13]).
• Frederick Tudor's Background:
  • Born to a wealthy family, dropped out of Harvard at 13 ([04:47]).
  • Grew up enjoying ice cream on the family farm, which had an ice house and access to winter ice ([05:15]).
• Notable Observation: Boston ships often returned empty because of a trade deficit, packing rocks as ballast ([07:35]).
• Genesis of the Business: Tudor connected the dots between unused ice, empty ships, and the desire for coolness in the tropics ([07:51]).
• First Diary Entry: Tudor started an "ice house diary" in 1805, declaring his intention to export ice to the West Indies ([08:17]).
  • “Have this day determined to get together what property we have and … embark in the undertaking of carrying ice to the West Indies the ensuing winter." – Robert Smith, reading Tudor ([08:24])

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"This Will Never Work": Skepticism and Obstacles

• Universal Ridicule: The idea was considered “so utterly absurd by the sober minded merchants as to be the vagary of a disordered brain.” – Robert Smith ([11:41]).
• Logistical Issues: Merchants wouldn’t charter ships, insurers wouldn’t insure, and sailors wouldn’t transport it ([12:17]).
• Persistence: Tudor’s tenacity led him to mortgage land and buy his own ship—the Favorite—to carry 80 tons of ice to Martinique ([14:02]).
  • "He is absurdly persistent. He seems truly not to care that everybody thinks his idea is just a bad idea." – Jacob Goldstein ([12:21])
• Arrival in Martinique: The trip was, logistically, a marvel—most of the ice survived the journey ([15:33]).
• Reception: Locals didn’t know what to do with ice; much was wasted/melted ([17:15]).
  • "It's water, but colder." – Robert Smith ([17:15])

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Early Failures & Relentless Grit

• Financial Ruin: The first voyages were commercial failures; Tudor grossed $2,000 but lost far more ([18:03]).
• Personal Hardship: Tudor was repeatedly in and out of debtors’ prison ([25:55], [27:45]).
• Endless Optimism: Even after seven years of failure and jail, Tudor wrote, “my affairs are looking well at last” – Jacob Goldstein ([27:01]).

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Lessons in Economics: Opportunity Cost & Efficiency

• Defining Opportunity Cost: “It’s the highest value option that you do not choose. It’s the second best thing.” – Robert Smith ([48:24]).
• Why It Worked:
  • Empty Ship Space: Ships were leaving Boston anyway, so ice-as-cargo had an opportunity cost near zero ([49:00]).
  • Cheap Labor in Winter: Farmers had little to do in winter ([49:57]).
  • Free Resource: Ice from ponds, otherwise unused ([49:31]).
  • "He is taking underemployed people to harvest an unused resource, free resource, really, and put it in an empty ship and send it to somewhere where people really, really want it." – Jacob Goldstein ([50:01]).

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Building a Global Industry: Innovation & Expansion

• Innovation:
  • Engineer Nathaniel Wyeth devised a horse-drawn ice plow, revolutionizing harvesting ([37:29]).
    • “You're essentially turning the pond into a giant ice cube tray.” – Jacob Goldstein ([37:46])
  • Ice was now cut and lifted industrially, vastly increasing supply.
• Growth: After initial successes supplying Havana and New Orleans, demand exploded ([34:29]).
  • Anxiety diary entries show Tudor’s stress in scaling up supply ([33:44]–[33:45]).
• The "Cold Chain": Tudor’s logistics solutions were early precursors to modern refrigerated supply chains ([18:29], [18:20]).

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The Ultimate Gambit: Shipping Ice to India

• 1833: Boston merchant proposes using ice (instead of rocks) as ballast for ships heading to Calcutta ([42:13]).
• The Voyage:
  • Tudor outfits a ship with 180 tons of ice, carefully insulates it ([42:57]).
  • The journey: 16,000 miles, four months at sea, over the equator ([44:38]).
• Reception in India:
  • Calcutta residents and the press initially thought it a prank ([45:14]).
  • Newspapers clamored for fast unloading as word spread that the ice was real ([46:04]).
  • When the shipment arrived, it's hailed as a major achievement:
    • “The names of those who planned and have successfully carried through the adventure … deserve to be handed down to posterity with the names of other benefactors of mankind.” – Calcutta Courier, read by Robert Smith ([46:17])
• Impact: Ice became essential for colonial elite—rationed, prescribed for fever, and embedded into local society ([46:43]).
• Profit: Tudor eventually had a monopoly and earned hundreds of thousands in profit ([47:00]).

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The Ice Rush and Lasting Legacy

• Boom: Success bred imitators—ice cutting expanded to Walden Pond near where Henry David Thoreau lived ([51:22]).
  • Thoreau’s description of the ice harvest: “It looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of azure tinted marble, the abode of winter.” – Robert Smith, quoting Thoreau ([52:27]).
• American Industry: Natural ice became integral—refrigerated railcars for meatpacking, residential iceboxes, even beer production ([53:37]–[54:56]).
  • “I invented this machine that makes things cold. And they’re like, yeah, that’s called ice. It’s free.” – Robert Smith ([55:55])
• Innovation Outpaces It: Only in the 20th century did artificial refrigeration finally eclipse the optimized, immense ice industry ([55:59]).
• Big Idea: The show closes by urging listeners to look for overlooked "latent capital" today—just as Tudor did with ice ([56:01]).

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Notable Quotes & Moments, with Timestamps

• Opportunity Cost in a Nutshell ([48:24]):
  “If you are doing something, its opportunity cost is basically the highest value option that you do not choose.”
• On Tudor’s resolve, in jail ([27:01]):
  “On this memorable day in my little annals, I am 28 years, 6 months and 5 days old, scratching it out on the wall. It is a climax which I did hope to have escaped. As my affairs are looking well at last.”
• On entrepreneurial delusion ([28:39]):
  "It's not always admirable to keep doing a thing that's not working… most of them are terrible ideas… And so, you know, we don't tell those stories because, well, it's a boring story, it's a terrible idea, and it continues to be a terrible idea at the end."
• On turning a pond into a giant ice cube tray ([37:46]):
  “You’re essentially turning the pond into a giant ice cube tray.”
• On the successful arrival in India ([46:17]):
  “The names of those who planned and have successfully carried through the adventure … deserve to be handed down to posterity with the names of other benefactors of mankind.”
• On the resistance to artificial refrigeration ([55:59]):
  "I invented this machine that makes things cold. And they're like, yeah, that's called ice. It's free."

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• First Spark in Boston: [03:13] – [08:49]
• Mockery and Skepticism: [11:41] – [13:56]
• First Ice Delivery & Failure: [14:02] – [18:03]
• Debtors’ Prison & Persistence: [25:55] – [27:36]
• Early Modern Cold Chain Logistics: [18:20] – [18:29]
• Breakthrough in New Orleans: [33:06] – [34:29]
• The Ice Plow & Industry Scaling: [37:29] – [38:39]
• Shipping Ice to Calcutta: [42:13] – [47:00]
• Walden Pond & Thoreau: [51:22] – [53:37]
• Natural Ice Industry’s Peak and Fall: [53:37] – [56:01]

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Conclusion: Lessons & Modern Parallels

Main Takeaways:

• Tudor’s "dumb" idea only made sense because he recognized opportunity cost at every stage.
• Transformative business innovation often begins with connecting "wasted" resources, unlikely logistics, and persistent if delusional entrepreneurs.
• The story is a case study in survivorship bias, productivity out of resourcefulness, and the power of logistics to reshape industries.

Parallels Today:
The hosts invite listeners to consider current “latent capital”—underused resources (like Airbnb’s spare rooms or Lyft’s empty car seats), waiting for the next Tudor.

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This episode is a mix of humor, historical storytelling, and economic insight, making the saga of the global ice trade far more relevant—and fascinating—than you’d expect.

Transcript

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[Jacob Goldstein]

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[Robert Smith]

Pushkin too quick?

[Jacob Goldstein]

No, it was perfect. Push kit stop. You got it. I want to talk to you about Ice as in frozen water. Yes.

[Robert Smith]

I know what ice is.

[Jacob Goldstein]

In the year 1800 in the city

[Robert Smith]

of Boston, they have lots of ice in Boston.

[Jacob Goldstein]

They have lots of ice in Boston during the winter. And they have figured out by this point that you can cut ice out of frozen lakes in the winter, store it in specially built ice houses, and get it out in the summer to enjoy a cold drink or ice cream. They actually had ice cream.

[Robert Smith]

Love it.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And so you could sit there eating your ice cream on an August day and staring out at Boston harbor, and you would see ships heading out for the world. New Orleans, Havana, Calcutta.

[Robert Smith]

Ah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And you might think, oh, I bet those people in Havana and New Orleans would kill for some ice right about now because they're so hot. I bet they'd pay out the nose for it. And then you'd think, oh, no, that would never work because.

[Robert Smith]

Because ice melts.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Ice melts.

[Robert Smith]

You can't get it there.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Or can you?

[Robert Smith]

What?

[Jacob Goldstein]

I'm Jacob Goldstein.

[Robert Smith]

I'm Robert Smith. And this is Business News, a show

[Jacob Goldstein]

about the history of business today. On the show, there was, in fact, a man from Boston. Sounds like the beginning of a limerick. But it's not. Who set out to see if he could build a business, an industry, really, by shipping ice halfway around the world. And the story of that effort is about what I will argue is the most underrated idea in economics. And this industry was started by a guy who got thrown in jail, who annoyed Henry David Thoreau.

[Robert Smith]

Easy man to annoy, pronounced Thoreau, and

[Jacob Goldstein]

who everybody thought was a joke.

[Robert Smith]

I don't even know his name yet.

[Jacob Goldstein]

His name was Frederick Tudor. He was born in 1783 to a pretty rich family. His dad had been George Washington's Judge Advocate General in the Revolutionary War. Everybody called him the Judge. It's like the way people who are ambassadors always get called ambassador for the rest of their lives. And they had a house in Boston and a country house on a farm outside of town. And Frederick was supposed to go off to Harvard like his dad, of course, but he thought school was boring. So when he was 13 years old, he dropped out and hung out on the farm, hunting and fishing and eating ice cream in the summer. Living the dream, because the Tudors had this ice house on their farm. And when the pond on the farm froze in the winter, workers would cut blocks of ice out and put it in this house. And the house was probably built a little bit underground for insulation. And they would put, like, peat or hay or something on the ice to keep it cold. They had like drainage out of the ice houses so that water wouldn't puddle up. And this is really thing one, step number one, he knows about ice and ice cream.

[Robert Smith]

You forgot step number zero, which is if you're gonna try a crazy business, have a rich dad. Yes.

[Jacob Goldstein]

An excellent, excellent way to this day. Yeah. If you wanna be an entrepreneur, taking. Taking a flyer.

[Robert Smith]

Yes.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Have some money to fall back on.

[Robert Smith]

Have some money.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Fair enough. So whatever step we're on now, step two, step three, however you're counting it, the next step came when he was 17 years old. In the spring of 1801, one of his brothers, his older brother, who was 19, got sick, and they decided to send him to Havana to recuperate. It didn't help him, in part because it was so hot in Havana, it was so unpleasantly hot. But in fact, Frederick's brother died before they got back to Boston. You know, it was tragic. Frederick was devastated. But he has now experienced, in a visceral way, just how hot it is in the tropics in summer. And the next thing, kind of the last piece of essential context for him, his dad gets him this, what we call an internship working with some merchants in Boston. And Boston, of course, a big trading town at this time. You know, the harbor's full of ships coming and going from all over the world. But crucially, Boston, in a kind of local way, has what we call a trade deficit at this time. Stuff is coming in from all over the world. You know, spices and tea and whatever, sugar. But not so much stuff is going out. Some stuff, you know, manufactured goods, some stuff is going out, but a lot more is coming in. And so because of this imbalance, a lot of the ships are heading out largely empty. Their holds are not full of stuff,

[Robert Smith]

which happens to this day. There are places who have to send back empty ships to China because they import more than they export.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yes, yes. And in fact, they had dredged Boston harbor to pull up rocks to put in the ships as ballasts so they wouldn't ride too high in the water.

[Robert Smith]

So he's sitting there eating ice cream. He's got his ice farm. He's thinking about how hot it is. And he sees empty ships.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah, he sees them paying essentially to get rocks to put in the ships. And so now it comes together for him, and conveniently for our story, we know this because in the summer of 1805, he's in his early 20s, he starts a diary, and he draws a picture of an ice house on the COVID of this diary, and he writes the words ice house diary. And he makes the first entry in the diary.

[Robert Smith]

Camera zooms in. Young man with a quill in his

[Jacob Goldstein]

diary and his other hand and dripping ice cream cone.

[Robert Smith]

Okay. Boston, August 1, 1805. Have this day determined to get together what property we have and. And embark in the undertaking of carrying ice to the West Indies the ensuing winter. I feel like he's already writing to future generations. He imagines himself as this ice magnet, and it's like, this is how it started.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I like the idea that whatever he's doing throughout this story, I'm gonna imagine him eating ice cream.

[Robert Smith]

He loves it.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I don't actually know if he loves ice cream.

[Robert Smith]

Everyone loves ice cream.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I love ice cream. I'll mention here, by the way, that the quotes from the diary in the show come from a book about Tudor called the Frozen Water Trade by Gavin Waitman. Great book. And, you know, when you think about this entry, like, it seems like Frederick deciding to get into the international ice business, but. But it's bigger than that because there is no international ice business. Right. Like, he is making up this idea for a thing that doesn't exist. But it is clear when you look at it that people in hot places had always really wanted to be cool. You know, it's not like, oh, now we have air conditioning and we're like, weak modern people. No, people always hated it when it was super hot. They always tried to cool off if they could.

[Robert Smith]

I mean, it's a biological imperative. We sweat because Our body is 98.6 degrees and does not like to be hotter than that. It's caused distress as long as there's been hot temperatures.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah. And there is evidence of this, right? People in the Andes would bring snow and ice down from the mountaintops to Lima on the coast. And the ancient Romans would bring snow down from the mountains and pack it into these straw lines. Pits to store it.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah, you've got always the emperor being fanned by those giant palm fronds.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yes, the giant palm frond. A classic sign that coolness is luxury. And my favorite, actually, that I learned about working on this show. I don't entirely understand it, but they did it in India when it got down not to freezing, but 40 degrees or something, they would dig a hole in the ground, line it with straw, and then take these, like, shallow, porous earthenware dishes, and in the evening, they would pour, I guess, boiling water into them, and then somehow, I don't know what, evaporative cooling. Something. Something in the morning, there would be like, A little patina of ice on it, a little, you know, a rind of ice. And they would collect a little bit of ice out of all these dishes and mash it all together. And like that is ice the hard way. They really wanted ice.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah, they dreamed of a land where entire lakes became ice.

[Jacob Goldstein]

So the point is they really wanted ice. And Frederick knows this. He has seen it. And he decides he's going to be the one to solve this timeless problem. Sets out to raise the money to do it. You know, I don't know exactly what his, his elevator pitch was, but I think it's basically I'm going to put ice on ships and then the ships are going to sail for like a month or a couple months. Something, something profit. And thanks for the check, dad. Thanks for the check, dad. So the judge's dad was out. And in fact the response he got was described by Frederick's brother in law who later wound up working for him. So here, read from that letter.

[Robert Smith]

The idea was considered so utterly absurd by the sober minded merchants as to be the vagary of a disordered brain. And few men would have been willing to stand the scoffs and sneers from those whose assistance it was necessary to obtain. Merchants were not willing to charter their vessels to carry ice. The offices declined to insure and sailors were afraid to trust themselves with such a cargo. Which is what? Because it's. Because it's gonna melt. Because it's gonna melt. The one thing you know about ice is like, you're hiring me to take this ice around the world to a hot place. There won't be any left and everyone's gonna blame me, the sailor.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And the whole point of a ship is to keep the water out.

[Robert Smith]

Yes.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Right. You don't put the water in, you keep it out. Not only are people not investing, he can't even get people to take his money. Right? He's saying like insurers wouldn't insure it because they're like, no, you're just gonna flood the ship. We're not gonna insure this. So one of the things that becomes clear about Frederick, you know, who is this guy who is the protagonist of this story, he is absurdly persistent. He seems truly not to care that everybody thinks his idea is just a bad idea. And at one point he actually writes on the COVID of his diary of the ice house diary, this sort of

[Robert Smith]

mott Robert Hugh gives back at the first repulse and without striking the second blow. Despairs of success, has never been, is not and never Will be a hero in love, war or business.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He is basically giving himself a pep talk in this kind of absurd, elevated language.

[Robert Smith]

Never give up is what he's saying.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He's saying, never give up. Today if he were, you know, an entrepreneur instead of a diary, he would be like a thinkfluencer with his own TikTok channel building in public.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah, definitely A TED Talk hero in love, war, in business.

[Jacob Goldstein]

So he is not despairing, he is a man of action. And he sends his brother in law and his brother, not the one who died, different brother, to Martinique, to the French colony in the Caribbean. And amazingly he tells them, get the colonial governor there to give us a monopoly on the ice trade. Here's a business that everybody thinks is terrible, but my idea is so right that everybody's gonna want in and we are gonna want a monopoly. Love it.

[Robert Smith]

I don't think there are other competitors, but not yet. Yeah. So the colonial governor's like, sure, have a monopoly.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah, I think they have to bribe him because why would he give it for free? But yes, and I will say, like getting a monopoly from the government is a thing at this point. We talked about it in the Match King show. So it's a, it's a thing businesses do. Now while his brother and brother in law are down there, whatever, bribing the colonial governor for the monopoly, Frederick is getting ready to send the merch, the ice, and nobody will let him pay for space on their ship because the water thing. And so he mortgages a piece of family land and buys a ship. It's a brig, which I believe is a two masted square rigged ship. But surely half of the people listening know exactly what a brig is. Email us at Business HistoryUshkin FM. The brig is called the Favorite. And on February 10, 1806, he sails on his ship full of ice for Martinique. And it's news. It gets written up in the Boston Gazette.

[Robert Smith]

I imagine the news reporter is like, oh, there's a ship full of ice. I gotta see this. And this is what they wrote in the newspaper. No joke. Seriously, they wrote no joke. A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique. We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Congratulations, Boston Gazette, you're so clever.

[Robert Smith]

To this day, if a ship full of ice left the harbor, they would be making the slippery joke for sure.

[Jacob Goldstein]

For sure. There would be a melt joke in there. There would be liquidity. I'm not even making any liquidity jokes. So the ship gets to Martinique about three weeks later, we don't know how much of the ice has melted, but a lot of it is still there, which is amazing. Right. And just to answer, like, the most obvious question, how does that work? Well, a, the blocks are pretty big. Like, I don't know exactly how big, but something like a foot by two feet by two feet. So pretty big. And they're all put together, right. So they're all kind of insulating each other. And then he works on insulation all through his career, tries different things, you know, peat and sawdust and whatever. So he's figured out enough at this point that there is ice there. Now, if you've lived in Martinique all your life, you've literally never seen ice, which is amazing, Right. It's like a moon rock or something, but weirder, because the moon rock just looks like a rock. And so Frederick gets there and he's like, get your ice, ice. Get your ice here.

[Robert Smith]

Everyone's like, what should I use this for?

[Jacob Goldstein]

What do I do it for? Yeah, nobody's got a refrigerator. Yeah. And it actually reminded me this part of Hundred Years of Solitude. You know, the Gabriel Garcia Marquez book. You know, the famous first line.

[Robert Smith]

Absolutely incredible first line. You have it memorized, right?

[Jacob Goldstein]

I do, but I also wrote it down.

[Robert Smith]

Okay.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Wendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. So without the firing squad, that's what's happening here, right? Like, some people are buying ice just to be amazed, just to be like, hey, son. Hey, daughter. Hey, look. Look at this. It's touch it. It's solid, but it's so cold.

[Robert Smith]

It's water, but colder.

[Jacob Goldstein]

So, yeah, they don't really know what to do with it. It's kind of a novelty. Frederic does take, like, 60 pounds of ice to a guy who runs some kind of little amusement park or something and shows him how to make ice cream. And as you mentioned before, everybody loves ice cream. Picture Frederik again eating ice cream, shaking hands with the guy. But there is this problem that he's up against, and the problem is physics. There's nowhere to store the ice, so it's melting. It's just sitting there, melting. He's selling what he can, but it's melting. And a few weeks later, he sails back to Boston, does get paid to carry sugar back from Martinique to Boston. And in all, he grosses about $2,000 from the trip. But that's gross. That's just the money that has come in.

[Robert Smith]

You Know, it does strike me that this is one of the first times we're talking about logistics with a cargo that really has a clock ticking on it. Right. I mean, all of world trade was designed being like, well, this is going to take months.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah.

[Robert Smith]

So let's, let's put things in that can last for months.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah.

[Robert Smith]

And so he's facing what will become a bigger and bigger problem in modernity, which is how do we get things to someone fast enough that it stays good?

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah. In a weird way, he's inventing the cold chain. Right. Today we talk about the cold chain of like whatever milk or a vaccine or something has to stay cold the whole time. The ice itself, which has a refrigerator. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is a profound logistical problem that he is up against. So as I said, he grossed something like $2,000, but that was not nearly enough to cover his costs, even if you don't count the cost of the ship. And so essentially what happened is what his dad, the judge and everybody else had said would happen. The ice melted and he lost a lot of money. And what does Frederick, our grindsite entrepreneur, do? Blames his employees, blames his, his brother and his brother in law.

[Robert Smith]

From his diary. They never entered into the undertaking with the ardor which was necessary to ensure success. In the outset of the business, they were easily discouraged and did not announce the thing with that confidence that defies ridicule and opposition, ensures friends and leads in every project more than anything to success.

[Jacob Goldstein]

They didn't believe. They didn't believe in the dream.

[Robert Smith]

They didn't want it enough.

[Jacob Goldstein]

They didn't want it enough. Frederick Tudor's ice has melted, but his resolve has not. In a minute, things are about to get worse for him.

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[Robert Smith]

And we're back. Staying cool, Robert.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I'm gonna give you a montage now

[Robert Smith]

because we need a hero.

[Sponsor/Ad Host]

Boom.

[Jacob Goldstein]

We're gonna cover a lot of ground pretty quickly. And the ground is basically mostly gonna be Frederick Tudor getting his ass kicked.

[Robert Smith]

Let's do it.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He sends his brother to England to get monopolies on selling ice in the British colonies in the Caribbean. You know, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados. The idea that you would need a monopoly on something as ridiculous as selling ice makes the British think the brother is a spy. A spy with a terrible cover story. It's like, come on, make up something better. Meanwhile, Tudor himself goes to Cuba, a much bigger market than Martinique, and builds an ice house. So now he can, you know, keep his inventory for longer. Starts selling ice in Havana, and it sort of works, but he's still losing money, still underwater, if I may. The world is just not cooperating with his entrepreneurial dreams. In 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signs the Embargo act, which I had forgotten about.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Amazingly, it bans the US from engaging in foreign trade in order to punish Britain and France for messing with US Shipping during the Napoleonic Wars.

[Robert Smith]

Who would ever hurt international trade in order to punish their enemies or their friends or themselves?

[Jacob Goldstein]

Imagine, in particular, this punishes New England Boston, which, you know, relies much more heavily on trade than Thomas Jefferson's Virginia. Right.

[Robert Smith]

Which might have been kind of the

[Jacob Goldstein]

point, might have crossed his mind. And in really particular, it hurts Frederick Tudor, whose entire business at this point is entirely dependent on foreign trade. So Tudor is falling deeper and deeper into debt. And in 1809, he is arrested because of his debts. And as you know, at this time, you could get thrown in jail for debt. Yes. But he manages to scrape together enough money to stay out of jail. But then a few years later, he gets arrested again for debt. And this time he is thrown in jail. And I guess they let him bring his diary to jail because he wrote about it.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah, debtors prisons actually did have often desks and writing materials so you could try and pay off your debts. From inside.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Would you, like, write to your family to ask for money or whatever?

[Robert Smith]

Yeah, yeah. You would write to, like, try and sell your property, try and cover your debts. From the diary. On this memorable day in my little annals, I am 28 years, 6 months and 5 days old, scratching it out on the wall. It is a climax which I did hope to have escaped. As my affairs are looking well at last. After a fearful struggle with adverse circumstances for seven years, the phrase I want

[Jacob Goldstein]

to note here, yes, my affairs are looking well at last. Man is in jail for debt. He's been at this for seven years, and he thinks it's just turning around for me. And again, I think this is a very entrepreneurial trait. Right? Like, to keep doing this, to keep failing for this long, you always have to believe, oh, I got it now. Oh, this time. This time I really got it. I bet at any day in those seven years he could have written in his salary, this is the moment. It's about to turn around.

[Robert Smith]

It's all upside from here.

[Jacob Goldstein]

So he scrapes together enough money to get out of jail, and he keeps going, keeps trying. And then comes 1812. You know what happens in 1812?

[Robert Smith]

There's a war named after it.

[Jacob Goldstein]

International trade basically gets shut down again. He gets jailed for debt again, Gets out, keeps going. And I think it's worth pausing here to talk about this trait, right? This persistence, this grit, because it seems admirable. It is admirable on some level, but it's not always admirable to keep doing a thing that's not working. There are thousands of entrepreneurs from history, millions maybe, who are doing a thing. And everybody's like, that's a terrible idea. And they were like, no, it's a great idea. I believe in it, and I'm gonna persist. And most of them are terrible ideas, are terrible ideas. And that's why everybody's saying it's a terrible idea. And so, you know, we don't tell those stories because, well, it's a boring story, it's a terrible idea, and it continues to be a terrible idea at the end.

[Robert Smith]

And we also understand ICE now, but looking back, everyone thinks he's a joke.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah.

[Robert Smith]

And he's proving it every day by being thrown back into jail.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah. And so I just wanna. And this is like a professional risk we have telling these kinds of stories, Right. Like, it's a survivorship bias kind of thing where we'll tell the stories where the terrible idea turned out to be great. But it's not obvious to me that a lesson to take from this is always believe in your dreams. Sometimes your dreams are bad ideas.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah, we're not doing a show about the guy who decided he was gonna put fresh air in boxes from the mountains and take them to polluted cities so that people would enjoy fresh air.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I'm interested.

[Robert Smith]

Okay.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Put him giving my email. So whatever the lesson is or is not, Frederick Tudor doesn't pivot. And I should say, and this maybe is a little bit more of a lesson, he is a meticulous businessman. His account books are stored at the. I think the business school library at Harvard. And there was actually this article in 1984 in the accounting Historian's Journal.

[Robert Smith]

What a great journal.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Why did you not tell me about this journal? You've been keeping it.

[Robert Smith]

Accounting Historians Journal.

[Jacob Goldstein]

So. So in this article, they studied his. His books, his ledgers, and they said he employed sophisticated accounting techniques to analyze and control transportation costs and the costs of product shrinkage, which is usually a

[Robert Smith]

euphemism for people stealing your product.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah, Shrinkage is like if it gets stolen, if it breaks, if it rots. That's all shrinkage.

[Robert Smith]

This is actual shrinkage?

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah. The ice is getting smaller. It's literal shrinkage. And in fact, all through this time when he's in debt and he's in and out of jail and shut down by wars, Frederick Tudor is trying to reduce shrinkage. He's trying to figure out how to get the ice to melt more slowly. And crucially, he's trying to figure out how to quickly build an ice house in some tropical foreign port so that he can store his merchandise without too much shrinkage. He gets his chance to really test all this out when The War of 1812 ends in 1815, by the way. Didn't know that. Should have called it The War of 1812-1815.

[Robert Smith]

Three Years War.

[Jacob Goldstein]

The Three Years War. War of 1812 is actually a good name. You know, when it was, for one thing, sort of. So he's still in debt. 1815. Running from the law. Step ahead of the sheriff. He gets on a ship bound for Havana, sailing with 159 cedar posts and a crew of carpenters who are going to help him build an ice house in Havana. The ice is coming on a later ship. They get there, they build the ice house. It's like a cube of 25ft on a side, and then on the inside, they build a little inner shell. Right. They're going to make it sort of like a giant thermos, in a way. And they put, like, sawdust and Peat for insulation between the inner and outer wall. And then up on the top, on the inside, there's like, the floor where you can hang out and whatever, do business. And they put a trap door on the floor, so you lower the ice down beneath the floor and raise it up out of it. It's a nice image. And now the ice gets there, and he's, like, frantically caring for it, measuring the runoff to assess how fast it's melting, adjusting the insulation, pitching the ice going to all the bartenders in town, giving it, like, first one's free kind of thing. Free subscription.

[Robert Smith]

Because even in Havana, they wanted refrigerated drinks.

[Jacob Goldstein]

You bet. You've been to Nevada? I've been there. It's hot.

[Robert Smith]

I picture they had a Cuba Libre, which is all sticky and warm and terrible.

[Jacob Goldstein]

They have a glass of warm rum, and they're like, oh, if only I had some ice, and somebody would invent Coca Cola. This would be amazing. They had a lime, probably. So it kind of works. It kind of works. At this point, it's like a proof of principle works. He's able to store the ice for months. They do like it in Havana. But he's at this point now where it's not entirely profitable. It's sort of working. But he's got the model. And so he's building ice houses now in other places, in Martinique, his original spot in St. Thomas, and also in the American south in Savannah and Charleston. And at the end of 1820, he sends another brother, his younger brother, to set up an ice business in New Orleans.

[Robert Smith]

Seems promising. New Orleans. If anyone loves a great cold cocktail, it's New Orleans.

[Jacob Goldstein]

It's New Orleans. They're about to love a great cold cocktail. So he figures if they can sell $10 a day worth of ice in New Orleans, that'll be a good business. And at this point, even our guy, even our fight on persistent grindrepreneur is getting nervous about this. One day, his entire diary entry is in all caps, and it's one word. Anxiety. Oh, next day, what does he write?

[Robert Smith]

Anxiety.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Anxiety. Next day, anxiety. This is the most relatable part of the diary for me, I'll be honest.

[Robert Smith]

This is often Jacob's Google Docs when he writes the shows. Anxiety, anxiety.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And then I don't despair, though. I don't despair. I keep making shows. And then In July of 1821, after a decade of failures, the breakthrough finally comes. Frederick gets a letter from his brother in New Orleans. And remember, they'd hoped for $10 a day in sales the brother says they are now selling $40 every day in ice. New Orleans is going bananas for us.

[Robert Smith]

The parade is going down.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Jazz hasn't been invented yet, but they're

[Robert Smith]

playing it second line. They're all drinking hurricanes in one of those weird long, tall glasses.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And that's cool. It's a pure anachronist. And time is running forward and backwards.

[Robert Smith]

The bachelorette parties are so happy at this point.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Frederick Tudor is 37 years old. He has spent his entire adult life trying to sell ice. And now finally, he's doing it. It's happening. It's a real business. He pays off his debts, he buys some land on this little island next to Boston. And now, interestingly, he has a new problem. It's a good problem, much better than, you know, getting thrown in jail for debts, but it is still a problem. Demand is outstripping supply. He doesn't have enough ice. And this one, you're trying to be

[Robert Smith]

the ice king and you're like, I mean, he wasn't prepared for it after all these years.

[Jacob Goldstein]

It is so. You know, I've interviewed lots of startup founders basically, and they talk about this a moment. I remember the American giant guy in particular. You know, the sweatshirt, American made sweatshirts. He talked about having this moment where there was this article that just made his business take off. And it's not great. Right? Like, he hated meant he couldn't give people this thing that he wanted to

[Robert Smith]

give them because he's not trying to sell ice as a luxury product.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah.

[Robert Smith]

He wants to sell commodity ice around the world. And he's a logistics man and logistics is really hard to pull off.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah.

[Robert Smith]

And so you can't just turn one ice lever and double your supply.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah. And I mean, when you're saying he doesn't want it to be a luxury product, you mean he can't just jack up the price. Right. Because the kind of mechanical econ 101 thing is like, oh, people are buying more than you have. Just jack up the price. But you know, in general, people don't want to do that because business is a many time game. Right. You want loyal customers, you want them to love you. You don't want them to remember you as the guy who tried to gouge them when you could. So often entrepreneurs don't want to just jack up the price. What they want to do is increase supply by increasing efficiency. And, you know, getting the ice out of the frozen lakes is actually quite inefficient at this point. It's all guys out there with Saws, basically sawing blocks out of a frozen lake. And it's hard to get it up out of the lake. It's hard to saw it. It's all hard. The guy who was going to solve this problem is actually a guy who works for Tudor, a guy named Nathaniel Wyeth, who had grown up on this little lake outside of Boston called Fresh Pond. His family had a hotel there. They cut their own ice and Wyeth becomes a supplier to tudor. And around 1825, he has this idea where he builds this thing with metal blades that you can attach to a horse. So like think of a plow, right? It's like a plow, but for the ice.

[Robert Smith]

And you push the horse out on the ice.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I love it. You actually, you put spikes on the horse's shoes. And so when the ice is thick enough, important, the horse pulls the plow across the ice and it cuts it.

[Robert Smith]

So logical.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He actually figures out you have it go at like 90 degree angles, you have it go one way and then you have it go at a 90 degree angle. And you do this all across the pond. And you're essentially turning the pond into a giant ice cube tray. If you're old enough to remember ice cube trays. Welcome to business history. He has this other innovation that I love, which is after you've cut it, it's still hard to get the ice up out of the lake. And he figures out some kind of a system with like pulleys and horses pulling on ropes where the pulleys are actually lifting these ice blocks out of the frozen pond so they can be put into the ice house.

[Robert Smith]

Like industrial ice.

[Jacob Goldstein]

It's industrial ice. That is exactly what it is. Frozen by nature. So now put that on the label. Yes. Our hero has what he needs. He has demand. He has supply. Ice is going to the moon. Woo. Or at least it's going to India.

[Robert Smith]

Long way away after the break.

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This episode is brought to you by Navy Federal Credit Union. At Navy Federal Credit Union, May is your favorite month. Even though they support the military community all year long. Military Appreciation Month is their time to celebrate all those who go above and beyond because they know all members of the military community protect our country at home and abroad, take care of their families and volunteer in their communities. That's why it's been their mission to help for over 90 years. As a member owned credit union, they invest in their members with lower rates and fewer fees. Navy Federal Credit Union also supports the military community through their partnership with Higher Heroes usa empowering transitioning service members, veterans and military spouses to succeed in the civilian workforce. And many of their employees are part of the community they serve, so they provide families with personalized financial guidance and award winning 24. 7 support. To learn more, visit navy federal.org celebrate and from all of us, Happy Military Appreciation Month. Navy Federal Credit Union Navy Federal is insured by NCUA Running a small business means every hire matters. A bad hire can cost you time, money and momentum. A good hire? They can help grow your business. But finding great talent isn't easy, especially when you don't have the time or resources to sift through piles of resumes to find the right fit. That's why LinkedIn built Hiring Pro, your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you. So instead of sorting through applications, you spend your time talking to candidates who are actually a good fit. You know what? This makes me think of my beloved Boston Celtics. Three years ago they chose a new coach, Joe Missoula, who was like the third or fourth assistant off the bench, never had any NBA coaching experience. Everyone was expecting him to fail. And you know what? Turns out he was one of the best coaches in the game. And without him, there's no way the team would have made the playoffs this year, let alone be contenders for the Finals. Sometimes the right hire makes all the difference with Hiring Pro, you can hire with confidence, knowing you're getting the best talent for your business. In fact, Those hiring with LinkedIn are 24% less likely to need to reopen a role within 12 months compared to the leading competitor. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire get started by posting your job for [e-mail] Pushkin terms and conditions apply.

[Jacob Goldstein]

We're back. It's 1833 and a Boston merchant comes to Frederick Tudor with an idea. Boston has this booming trade with India. All this stuff is coming from India to Boston, but not that much stuff is going from Boston to India. There is a trade deficit basically. And so what that means, and I mentioned this earlier in the show, is, you know you have ships coming in from India with whatever cotton, spices, and then going back largely empty. Ship owners remember putting rocks in as ballast in those outgoing ships. So this merchant is like, Frederick Tudor,

[Robert Smith]

what if instead of rocks, we had frozen ice?

[Jacob Goldstein]

The only kind, the best kind of ice. What if we put ice in there and sent it to India? And Frederick Tudor was like, where have you been all my life? Yes, yes. A thousand times, yes. And so they make the deal. Tudor is going to send 180 tons of ice on a single ship. This is farther than he's ever sent a ship full of ice. It's going to be very hot. It's going down across the equator around the tip of Africa. And so he starts going down to the ship multiple times a day, builds this what he calls a sheathing of boards. So sort of, again, like kind of trying to turn the hold of the ship into a thermos, builds this sheathing of boards around the ice, insulates it with hay and tan, which apparently is ground up bark on all sides.

[Robert Smith]

Okay.

[Jacob Goldstein]

He says the insulated.

[Robert Smith]

It's like Styrofoam, right? Because it would be light and it would have lots of little pools of air in it.

[Jacob Goldstein]

I guess so, yeah. He calls the insulation an unbroken stratum on top, ends, sides, and bottom. And he hopes that something like two thirds of the ice will make it. He knows a lot's going to melt. The ship sails out of Boston harbor on May 12, 1833, bound for Calcutta, which today we call Kolkata. And Tudor at this point is too old and, frankly, too rich to go by himself. Sends somebody in his place and his ice sails off out of Boston Harbor. Like to picture him standing there eating an ice cream cone, watching it until it sails over the horizon and, you know, goes across the Atlantic, down around the tip of Africa, up through the Indian Ocean, 16,000 miles or so. Four months at sea.

[Robert Smith]

It still amazes me that in the 1800s, you could do the trick.

[Jacob Goldstein]

It shouldn't work. It shouldn't work. It's 90 degrees when the ship gets to India, and the ice, of course, is melting fast. And Calcutta is like 70 miles up this river from the sea. And as the ship with the ice is coming up river, people in Calcutta start hearing this rumor, basically, that a ship from Boston full of ice is coming up the river. And there's an article about it in this newspaper called the Calcutta Courier, which is the paper sort of of the British colonialists in Calcutta.

[Robert Smith]

The Yankees are so inventive and so fond of a joke at the Expense of the old country that we had some misgivings about the reality of Brother Jonathan's frozen manifest and suspected him to be coolly indicting A hoax. So easy to laugh at.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Slippery, slippery. They can't resist. They can't resist it.

[Robert Smith]

I feel like I would have covered this back at the time. Like, it's ice on a boat. It's so crazy.

[Jacob Goldstein]

It's a perfect story for you. They think it's a joke, but they find out it's real. You know, it's still coming up the river. They find out, yes, it's real. And once they find out it's real, they're like, get that ice here right now. The newspapers actually start a campaign to send a steamship to tow this sailing ship up the river so it gets there faster, to waive the customs duties when it arrives so they can unload it before it melts.

[Robert Smith]

The clock is ticking.

[Jacob Goldstein]

The clock is ticking. The ice is melting minute by minute. And in fact, it all happens. They do tow the ship up, they do waive the customs duties, and the ship arrives and. And there is ice left. We don't know how much left, but there is ice.

[Robert Smith]

The newspaper Calcutta Courier writes, the names of those who planned and have successfully carried through the adventure at their own cost deserve to be handed down to posterity with the names of other benefactors of mankind. The importer of the potato into Europe, the disseminator of useful plants in regions where they were unknown, and the authors of every species of discovery. They're saying this is one of the great human achievements, ice to India.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yes, yes. In fact, the colonial governor in Calcutta gives Tudor's guy some kind of, like, specially engraved silver cup, like a trophy kind of for this incredible breakthrough. And they become, in Calcutta, dependent on ice. When a shipment is late or doesn't arrive, it gets rationed. People will get a note from their doctor, like, if they have a fever, which people got a lot, they would use ice for the fever. So it becomes this necessary part of life there. And Tudor gets a monopoly on the Calcutta ice trade. It's still got that same move, and it works for him over the next few decades, you know, he keeps selling ice to Calcutta and he makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit, which of course, would be, you know, millions in today's money. And so Tudor has done it. He has turned this thing that sounds like a joke into a great business and seems to have a nice life. He gets married at 50, has kids and is like a happy rich guy in Boston as Far as we can tell. And so there is still kind of this question, which is how does it make sense? How does this work that you can send ice from Boston to India and it takes four months and it's still a profitable business.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah. In other words, what did he see that no one else saw?

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, at the beginning of the show, I said that the story of the ice trade is at some level a story about the most underrated idea in economics. So here it is. The idea is opportunity cost.

[Robert Smith]

Love opportunity cost.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Give us, give us the definition.

[Robert Smith]

If you are doing something, its opportunity cost is basically the highest value option that you do not choose. It's the second best thing.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Uh huh. You mentioned, when I brought this up the other day, you mentioned business school. You said they always tell you this on the first day of business school.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah. Because if you think about it, there is the cost to go to business school, which is high in tuition, but really the opportunity cost is even more significant, which is if you are sitting in business school, you are not working at Goldman Sachs or at JP Morgan Chase where you might be making 200, $300,000 a year. That is your opportunity cost for the education that you're getting.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And so think about opportunity cost in this story. There's the most obvious one. Those ships sailing out empty. Right. Like the opportunity cost for that space is zero. Essentially a merchant is going to sell space to the highest bidder. Right. If nobody's bidding, you can get that space real cheap. But it's not just the ship itself. Right. There's the ice. The ice that is just sitting there on a pond in Massachusetts in January.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah. There is no value to that ice other than ice skating.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yes. Which nobody's going to pay for. They weren't paying to skate on Ponds in 1830. There's a third kind of opportunity cost play here as well, and this one is a little more subtle, which is labor. The workers cutting the ice. Tudor mostly hired farm workers. They're doing this work in January and February. What's the opportunity cost of the time of a farm worker in January?

[Robert Smith]

There's nothing for them to do while there's snow on the ground and ice on the lakes.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Huddling by the fire to keep warm until spring is not a job. They're not giving up a lot of money to go out and get paid to cut ice. And you know, adding all these things together, I thought of this business cliche that I generally don't care for, which is adding value. Everybody's always talking about how they're adding value. What's the value add? But Tudor really is like he is taking underemployed people to harvest an unused resource, free resource, really, and put it in an empty ship and send it to somewhere where people really, really want it.

[Robert Smith]

It's the combination and the logistics that makes it valuable. It makes it immensely valuable.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Immensely valuable. Which is why once he figured out how to keep the ice from melting, he built an industry and got rich. Now, despite his best efforts to get monopolies in all those places, he didn't have monopoly everywhere. And lots of other people got into the ice business. Cause they were like, oh, there's just ice sitting there. Let's go cut that ice. And eventually that pond where Wyeth, his innovator, was cutting filled up with ice cutters. And so they moved on. It's an ice rush. Yeah, there was an ice rush. So they moved on in 1846 to a pond a little farther from town, a pond called Walden Pond, one of

[Robert Smith]

the most famous ponds in American history. Because this is where Henry David Thoreau, or how do you say it?

[Jacob Goldstein]

I guess Thoreau, somebody told me. But I kind of like Thoreau.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah, he's living by himself and contemplating nature, the nature of humanity.

[Jacob Goldstein]

This is the year when he lived on Walden and wrote the famous book Walden Pond. And in fact, amazingly delightfully, in the book, in Walden, there is this scene where one day a hundred gods show up out of nowhere and start cutting blocks out of the pond. And they called blocks at the time cakes, by the way, he's going to call them cakes.

[Robert Smith]

Cakes of ice. Okay. This is from Henry David. And these cakes of ice being sledded to the shore were rapidly hauled off to an ice platform and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle worked by horses onto a stack as surely as so many barrels of flour. And they're placed evenly side by side and row upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile 35ft high on one side and. And six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla. But when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss grown and hoary ruin, built of azure Tinted marble, the abode of winter. So that's a guy who did go to Harvard. Just saying. I'm just saying. He did not drop out of Harvard to become an entrepreneur. Did he drop out?

[Jacob Goldstein]

He might have dropped out to become a writer. I don't actually know.

[Robert Smith]

I think Henry David graduated from Harvard.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Well done. I don't know if Tudor ever read the book. I don't know about the timing. I don't know if he encountered it. I don't know what he would have thought of it. But he seems to be doing fine. He's a rich old man, mostly living with his family on that little island off Boston. He does actually make some kind of little amusement park there and sell ice cream again, still eating ice cream to the end. And he dies in 1864. And by this time, ice just naturally. Frozen ice is this major American industry

[Robert Smith]

because like any technological innovation, it makes other innovations possible.

[Jacob Goldstein]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, I knew a little bit the story of like Swift and Armour and the sort of growth of the, of the meatpacking business when they figured out that you could transport meat if you put it on refrigerated rail cars. Yeah, but I assumed that was, you know, whatever. Artificial refrigeration. No, it was ice.

[Robert Smith]

It was pond ice.

[Jacob Goldstein]

It was the ice industry. And in fact, along the railroad tracks, the big meatpacking companies would have these ice houses where they would store the ice so they could replenish the ice in their refrigerated ice cars. Similarly, you have the beer business taking off in the later part of the 1800s with this wave of German immigration to the Midwest. And so Milwaukee, German immigrants are making, I guess it's lager, right. German style beer. And German style beer needs to be refrigerated. So again, ice industry, you get a residential ice industry. In cities like New York and Philadelphia, people get little ice boxes in their house and they get daily ice deliveries. And in fact, they come to rely on it to keep food fresh. And so now in the winter, everybody in New York and Philly is paying attention to, like, how thick is the ice in Boston? How thick is the ice in Maine? Are we going to have an ice famine come summer? They need it now.

[Robert Smith]

The only place ice didn't go was the cafes of Paris, where they still look down on you. If you ask for ice in your

[Jacob Goldstein]

water, it is water. You want ice, ice additive, it is dulot dulo. People are developing artificial refrigeration, you know, around this time. They're working on it. They're actually Figuring it out. But there is this interesting a business idea really here. And I've encountered it interviewing people who are doing, like, energy transition stuff, you know, coming up with kind of clean energy alternatives to existing things. And that is a lot of the time they've figured out the new technology. They can do the thing, but it's more expensive because the thing they're going up against is this optimized, hyper efficient giant industry. And that is what natural ice is by the end of the 1800s. It's big and it's efficient and it's cheap. And so, in fact, you don't really see artificial refrigeration displace natural ice until like into the 1900s, because you're like,

[Robert Smith]

I invented this machine that makes things cold. And they're like, yeah, that's called ice. It's free.

[Jacob Goldstein]

It's literally free.

[Robert Smith]

Yeah.

[Jacob Goldstein]

And so, yeah, it has to. It has to be cheaper and better before it gets widely adopted. To finish the show, I want to go back to that idea of opportunity costs, to Tudor's real insight of stringing together these essentially unused things. You know, ice on a pond in February and idle farm workers and empty space and ships and building an industry around it. And, you know, I want to think about what is that today? If you go back, What, I guess 10, 15 years at this point, it was actually the original inspiration for, I know, for Lyft and for Airbnb. Right. Originally, Lyft was like, well, you're going there anyways. You're just a normal person. Give somebody a ride. Airbnb was, you know, it's your house. You got a spare bedroom. Rent it out now and then. Latent Capital. So here's a question. What is that now? What is the thing that is just sitting there waiting to be turned into a business? If you're listening, go out and start the business. Or if you don't want to do that, tell us, write to us. We're at BusinessHistoryPushkin FM. If you want to listen to the show ad free, you can do so by subscribing to Pushkin Plus. You can go to Pushkin FM plus to do that. Our showrunner and editor is Ryan Dilley. Our video editor. Yes, we're on YouTube is Matt Nielsen. Our producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang. Our engineer is Sarah Bruguerre. I'm Jacob Goldstein.

[Robert Smith]

And I'm Robert Smith. Thanks for listening.

[Jacob Goldstein]

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