This time it's different

In the late 1980s, legendary investor John Templeton warned that "this time it's different" are the most dangerous words in investing. Twenty years later, in 2009, right after the crash, two economists, Reinhart and Rogoff, proved him right: they dug through eight centuries of financial disasters, and before almost every one, somebody said those exact words.

Sometimes it really is different. Even Templeton admitted it: one time in five, the people saying it are right.

In 1999, people believed the internet would change everything. They were right. But they paid crazy prices for internet stocks, and in 2000 the market crashed almost 80%. Amazon fell more than 90%, survived, and became a giant.

Right about the future, wrong about the price. Today we hear the same words about AI.

Bubbles are how humanity pays for the future. Nobody sane funds a revolution at a fair price. You need a crowd of believers yelling "this time is different" and throwing money into the fire.

1999 proved it. The dot-com crazies laid fiber cable everywhere. Went bankrupt. Most of that cable sat dark. Then bandwidth went dirt cheap, and a few years later YouTube showed up.

The believers paid. We got the internet.

Same with AI. Right now someone is pouring billions into data centers that will never pay back. They'll go broke. And everybody else gets cheap AI built on their ruins.

So "this time is different" isn't a lie. It's a sacrifice. The crowd is always wrong about the money and always right about the world.

Somebody has to be the sucker. Just make sure it's not you. 😈