This is the memory palace.

I'm Nate DeMail.

In Finland, so far from the house with a white picket fence near the banks of the Willemette

River in Oregon, where he went to live with his aunt and his uncle when he was nine because

both his parents died.

And so far from Stanford, where he went to school, where he came into his own, where he

came out of the sadness of his childhood, and began to become the man he became.

Self-made, he was proud to say.

With American grit and drive and vision.

But in Finland, so far from the Rockies in the Sierra's in Western Australia, from

the dank bellies of the mineral mines where he made his fortune.

His name became a verb.

Herbert Hoover was working in London when the First World War broke out.

He had found his calling first and extracting value from veins of ore that everyone else

had written off.

And then in administration, and all the big picture stuff, and financing projects and land

management and permitting and purchasing, and all the mountain moving you had to do before

the mining companies could move into the mountains and start making money.

In London was where the banks were, so that's where Herbert Hoover was.

He'd like to say that if a man hadn't made his fortune by 40, he wasn't worth much.

And in London, in his 30s, he had made his fortune, and was a giant in his industry.

And as he read the headlines in the Times of London about the war just on the other side

...