This is the memory palace. I'm Nate Demet. The world zigged, and zigged, and zigged again.

Roger Bapson's act. That's how he did things. He was a maverick, or so he'd tell anyone who would

listen. He didn't take no for an answer. He turned nose to his. He flipped the script, he'd think

outside of the box. Or whatever it was that people said back when he was cutting his teeth in

the investment business, at the turn of the last century. He was an iconoclast. He had been,

he would tell anyone who would listen, since one day when he was a boy. And his sister drowned

in the salty water of a tidal river that flowed into Ipswich Bay in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Her death gave him a purpose and a drive that led him to MIT and to Wall Street. And when he was a

young man and a doctor told him that he had tuberculosis, that he should quit the business and move

to the southwest, where the desert air would revive him. Roger Bapson's act. Instead he moved to

the top of the Wellesley Hills, outside of Boston, theorizing that he didn't need drier air.

He needed higher air. And he needed a lot of it. Everyone did.

He founded a company that did statistical analysis of financial markets. It was the kind of

Wall Street work one could do without actually working on Wall Street. His office was not only

outside of New York. It was outside. He thought fresh air was good. And in winter he and his

employees would wear sweaters and layers and tap away at adding machines with freezing fingers

that poke through holes that cut in their gloves. This was the late 1920s. And as this is, at

least in part, a story of Wall Street. You know that the crash is coming. But here's the thing.

So did Roger Bapson. Throughout 1928, in the first half of 1929, when the markets kept climbing,

Roger Bapson was telling people to sell. It kept zigging and zigging up and up. And Roger Bapson

was one of the only, literally, one of maybe two people out there telling people this egg.

There was going to be a crash. He told anyone who would listen. And then there was.

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