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
Don't do it, Ida.
They'll ruin the magazine, he told her.
She did it anyway.
And while she sharpened her tools, the man she was about to take apart was quietly starting to unravel himself.
For most of his life, Rockefeller had paid no visible price for the way he worked or how the public was treating him and the company.
But starting at age 40, he had grown gaunt and was eating celery for what he called nervous difficulty, lying awake over a business that had never once failed him.
He had kept up that pace for another decade, but by 1891, at age 51, with the public learning more and more about Standard Oil and the man behind it, it caught up with him.
Influenza put him down that winter, and then afterwards he had trouble breathing for weeks.
Then came liver trouble, and then his digestive system stopped cooperating.
He was soon pale and haggard man who had subsided on milk and crackers.
His doctor said it plainly, a little more of that would have killed him.
Rockefeller was close to the edge of a breakdown.
It was the giving as much as the empire that broke him.
While the country was learning to hate him as a money hoarder, his gifts to charity were actually doubling and doubling again, from $124,000 in 1889 to more than a million dollars three years later.
But writing checks wasn't enough.
Rockefeller took to giving the same way that he ran his company, by knowing every detail.
By his own account, he worked himself almost to a nervous breakdown in groping my way without sufficient guide or chart through the ever-widening field of philanthropic endeavor.
So in March 1891, sick and stretched thin, he sent for a Baptist minister named Frederick T. Gates.
Gates was an ex-preacher in his late 30s who had impressed Rockefeller during a recent campaign to build a Baptist university in Chicago.
"'I am in trouble, Mr. Gates,' he told him.
Showing 1981–2000 of 20,679 · page 100 of 1034
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