E71: Risk Taking, Contrarianism, and Growth [Byrne on Interintellect]

"The Riff" with Byrne Hobart and Erik Torenberg

In this episode, Byrne Hobart joined Matjaž Leonardis in Austin for an Interintellect salon — a platform for 21st-century intellectual discourse—to discuss his new book Boom: Bubbles at the End of Stagnation, exploring how technological advancements, market paradoxes, and historical and modern financial bubbles — from the Manhattan Project to cryptocurrencies — reveal the complex dynamics between innovation, ideology, ambition, and hyper-financialization in a nonpolitical, high-quality conversation among leading and emerging thinkers.

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Highlights from the Episode:

• Two Types of Bubbles: Extrapolation bubbles predict transformative future changes unlike the past, while mean reversion bubbles project an intensified continuation of past trends.
• Financial Markets and Risk-Taking: Financial markets can both encourage and inhibit innovation.
• Talent Allocation: The sectors where talented individuals choose to work—shifting historically from government to the private sector to finance—profoundly shape the direction and nature of society’s major innovations and projects.
• Different Investment Approaches: George Soros - Identifies momentum and rides bubbles up, then exits when sentiment changes.
• Bubbles and Progress: Many transformative bubbles involve building multiple things in parallel that wouldn't make sense individually.

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LINKS:

Byrne’s writing: https://thediff.co

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