weeks after two gushers were struck. These early days were characterized by extreme boom and bust cycles. Oil went for $16 a barrel in 1859, under 50¢ in 1861, and $8 in 1864.

The most value-destructive phase of a mean-reversion bubble arrives at the moment when belief and reality have diverged yet belief is still able to drive perceptions of reality.

Many of those who participated in the Bitcoin bubble can attest that a bubble completely warps one’s sense of chronological time, a feeling captured by a viral meme that likens experiencing the bubble to the experience of the two protagonists of the 2014 movie Interstellar when they arrive on a planet where a few hours correspond to a few years in

That risk was magnified by the nature of the Manhattan Project’s participants. The single most important secret in the United States was left in the hands of people whom the national elite were not particularly inclined to trust: academics who had flirted with the far left, assorted European refugees whose allegiances were unclear, and pure

This sentiment is beautifully captured by a scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film There Will Be Blood, in which the protagonist watches a fire from a gas blowout engulf an oil drilling rig against a gloomy sky. The

Older people tend to prefer fixed incomes, and new families need somewhere to live. When the population grows, the demand for new housing stock tends to raise long-term interest rates, while an aging population creates demand for long-term assets and therefore pushes those rates down.

As Chapter 7 shows, fracking, for all its environmental downsides, has largely liberated America from the dangers of being dependent on a static yet declining industry.

As the endless scrolls of Instagram, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter) illustrate so powerfully, the more we try to be different, the more we become the same.

bubble can be a collective delusion, but it can also be an expression of collective vision. That vision becomes a site of coordination for people and capital and for the parallelization of innovation.