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
The cost of building the machine was starting to show.
He had been losing weight and was now lean to the point of gaunt, and his family had to remind him to buy a new suit when his old one got shiny.
"'I'm eating celery,' he wrote to his mother in 1878, which I understand to be very good for nervous difficulty."
Decades later, as the richest man in the world, he admitted what those years had actually been like for him.
For years on end, I never had a solid night's sleep worrying about how it was to come out.
All the fortune that I have made has not served to compensate for the anxiety of that period.
His wife said he was paying too.
In 1876, the doctors diagnosed her as consumptive and the family began organizing itself around her fragile health.
which is part of how they came to buy an estate called Forest Hill.
Rockefeller had bought the land in 1873.
It was 79 wooded acres on a hill east of the city of Cleveland, with ravines and gullies and a view of Lake Erie.
Starting in 1877, the family began spending whole summers there, partly in the hope that the lake air would do Seti good.
It was a rambling house that had been built as a hotel, and critics would later mock it as a monument of cheap ugliness.
Rockefeller didn't care.
Oh, I like Forest Hill very much better than any other home, he remarked.
Forest Hill became his favorite place in the world, the place he started spending more and more time at.
One summer, he dammed a stream to make two lakes, one for boating and one for swimming, and on hot days he swam the mile-long circuit with a straw hat perched on his head to keep the sun off.
Then in winters he flooded a pond for skating, and as many as 50 people, many of them strangers from the neighborhood, would skate on it.
Since his faith would not allow the pond to be flooded on this Sabbath, he sometimes rose after midnight on Sunday to direct the workmen in preparing the ice for Monday.
One of the richest men most Americans had never heard of, knee-deep in January, supervising his skating pond at one in the morning.
Showing 1701–1720 of 20,679 · page 86 of 1034
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