Rob Armstrong

It was the biggest.

It was where they went the most crazy for it.

And I'd argue they literally made the United States.

The United States were not united until the railways came.

And this was a country that basically had a bit of like West Coast stuff, a big chunk of the middle that was just frontier country.

And it ran along a north to south axis.

But after the railways, you could suddenly buy like Maine lobster in California.

or California apples in New York.

You could literally travel across the country.

It's something that was unimaginable.

It was like Apollo.

Well, it's really like 20 or 30 Apollo programs, essentially.

Spoiler alert, though, you probably see it coming.

There were multiple busts along the way.

There was an epic one, just like a humdinger in 1873.

It was probably one of the first big global financial crises because it...

arguably was triggered by a crash in Austria that ricocheted over to the US.

It basically meant that lots of European investors lost a ton of money in Austria, and they had to liquidate their bonds.

There were massive investors in American railway bonds.

So these were some Dutch burghers, German nobles, British merchants, and they started liquidating bonds in the US, and then just everything just...