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
He also funded Spelman, the Atlanta school for Black women that carried his wife's family name.
He had started funding it in 1882 when it ran out of a leaky church basement and he kept funding Black colleges for decades after.
Soon, the giving machine would be running at full power.
In 1902, a government scientist discovered that hookworm had infested the American South.
Hookworm is a parasite that enters bare-feet children through the soles of their feet and slowly drains them of energy.
By some estimates, two of every five Southern children at the time carried it.
The cure, it was discovered, cost just 50 cents.
Rockefeller handed the problem a million dollars and an organization, and had Gates run it the way Standard Oil would have run a new territory.
The money was levered to get state governments moving rather than to replace them.
State health boards were the ones getting the credit, and the Rockefeller name was kept deliberately quiet.
Young doctors were paid to fan out across rural counties with public dispensaries expanding from two southern counties to more than 203 years.
In five years, roughly half a million people were treated, and a regional curse fell to a minor infection.
Some southerners, sure there had to be an angle, decided that the wealthy Rockefeller was secretly getting into the shoe business.
The final and largest piece took the longest, and it was the purest version of the idea.
It was designed to be a permanent, professionally managed fund so massive that its administration would be a public trust itself.
In 1906, Gates wrote Rockefeller a letter that set the terms.
Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche.
You must keep up with it.
You must distribute it faster than it grows.
If you do not, it will crush you and your children and your children's children.
Showing 2241–2260 of 20,679 · page 113 of 1034
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