This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly

Shane Parrish: Put this [AI] in historical context for us with other platform shifts. Everybody's saying this time is different, which everybody does at each platform shift, I would imagine. And what's the same?

Benedict Evans: Well, there's a famous book about financial bubbles called This Time Is Different because people always say this time is different, and it always is. Like the dot-com bubble was different from the late '80s and the Japanese financial bubble was different from any other bubble you want to pick. They're always different, but that doesn't mean they're not a bubble. And the same thing is happening here.

I have a diagram I use a lot from 1995. A research firm made a diagram of something they called "cyberspace" because it wasn't clear it was just going to be the internet. It was clear that everyone was going to have some kind of computer thing connected to some kind of network. Remember the phrase "information superhighway," which sort of conveyed that it would be centralized and controlled by cable companies and phone companies and media companies, which is how everything had always previously worked. It wasn't clear that it was going to be the internet. It wasn't clear the internet was going to be kind of radically decentralized and permissionless, and anyone could do what they wanted. It wasn't clear the internet was going to be the web and only the web because there were all these other things going on.