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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
It sat on Lake Erie, with the Erie Canal feeding east and the Great Lakes opening west.
And water freight was cheap, far cheaper than rail.
When the canal and the lake were open, Rockefeller could float his oil to market for something close to half of what a railroad charged.
And the railroads knew it.
So when they quoted Rockefeller a rate, they were really quoting against the water.
Rockefeller had first learned this at his job at the commission house.
Rockefeller played them both against each other.
When the water was open, they shipped more by boat and let the railroads watch their traffic float away.
When the winter came, the canal iced over and the lake went to a gray slab.
They moved everything onto rail, and the railroads, who had spent months hungry for traffic, were glad to have the business back.
When one road dropped its rate, the firm shifted its cars to it.
When the others matched, they shifted again.
They built themselves into a position where they could not be pinned down by anyone.
A competing refiner in Pittsburgh, on the other hand, had only one option, the Pennsylvania Railroad.
They had no other way to move their oil, so they paid whatever rate the railroad set.
And they shipped only when the railroad said so.
Rockefeller never wanted to be at the mercy of others.
He and his partner sitting in Cleveland, in what was supposed to be one of the worst of the three refining locations, had the most options of anyone in the trade.
And the more they grew, the more each carrier valued them as a customer and the harder they competed to keep them.
Flagler turned that logistical advantage into a weaponized system.
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