“This has been said so many times that those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. … And I am here before you today to say, even if you know your history, you're doomed to repeat it. Because when you're in the moment, you have no historical perspective. You see things in terms of your impulses, what's good for you. You have no sense of where things are headed.”

…do it and the rest will fall into place. And with no sense of, hey, we're going to stick around. And the thing is, we're going to move on. There was an expression after me, the deluge, we'll just move on. And boy, that sounds familiar when you look at the current gold rushes where. The middle of.

…the railroads and sort of creating this class of tycoons and robber barons. We always look back on it and we go, okay, that was too much too fast. We needed to rein it in. And then it's so interesting in the present moment, we are just always unable to learn that lesson or recognize that pattern.

You had a chance in the early days to do something about this, and you let it spin larger and larger and larger until it was unstoppable.

Yep. And that is the story of humanity, particularly when it has technology at its beck and call. That's where things accelerate. I mean, that's what happened with the gold rush. You had the impulse for wealth linked to these new technologies that made things happen so quickly. Government couldn't…

think anyone who's trying to figure out what's happening in the world right now should read this book because you see it happen twice. First, all the money and power from the gold rush tries to take over the political system. That's the slave powers heading west and trying to continue to hijack the…