Boom Quotes

“Technological innovation is more driven by excess, exuberance, and irrationality than by cost-benefit analyses, rational calculation, and careful and deliberate planning.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“But even if its long-predicted demise finally comes to pass—if the computing advancements of the future are instead the result of novel hardware architectures and paradigms—the legacy of Moore’s law will endure. In a very real sense, Moore’s prediction helped create the future it imagined.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“TSMC’s approach borrowed some elements from the Fairchild model. While TSMC didn’t design chips, it did recognize that making chip design easier would be a competitive advantage, so TSMC worked closely with chip designers to ensure there was plenty of demand for its foundries. The company also strove to commoditize the design business—if there were more companies inventing new chips and fewer companies manufacturing them, they reasoned, the manufacturers would be able to set their own price. TSMC’s strategy effectively redefined the market, creating a separation between the capital-intensive business of fabricating chips and the more asset-light business of designing them, a model that was ultimately embraced even by Intel. Today, the industry comprises a complex supply chain, in which multiple companies at multiple steps operate at the frontier of what’s physically possible.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“The Limits to Growth, a report commissioned by the Club of Rome in 1972, ran a more complicated set of extrapolations, projecting sudden declines in industrial output in the early 2000s, followed—again—by poverty and starvation. But one shining exception to the general rule against graphing recent historical data into the future is Gordon Moore’s 1965 paper, “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits.” Moore looked at the transistor density of four recent chips released in the prior three years and observed that it had doubled every year. He argued that this trend could continue for at least the next 10 years. A decade later, he revised his prediction, speculating that chip density would continue to double every two years.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“By the mid-1970s, chips were revolutionizing existing products and enabling unique use cases for NASA and the military. Jay Last, a member of the traitorous eight, called them “the vitamins of the entire industrial system,” 225 while commentators in Japan referred to them as “the rice of industry.” 226 But the true impact of the chip would only occur with the arrival of a new Intel product that would set the industry’s course for the next five decades.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“Initially, Moore and Noyce wanted to name the company after themselves and flipped a coin to decide whose name would go first. However, realizing that “Moore-Noyce” sounded like “more noise”—a poor omen for a business that would sell components for precision instruments—they opted for the vaguer “Intel.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“This is a common feature of new technologies. The initial killer app may have little to do with the ultimate use case, but it provides enough demand to scale production (and convince the creators they’re on to something). The first use case for the steam engine, for example, was pumping water out of flooded mines, not transportation. The early model for the automobile and personal computer industries was hobbyists, who weren’t looking for a practical device but something that was fun to use. Airlines in the 1920s made their money hauling mail for the US government, not passengers or other forms of freight.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“Texas Instruments partnered with a company called Industrial Development Engineering Associates (IDEA) to produce the first commercial transistor radio in 1954. Soon after, Sony persuaded Japan’s powerful Ministry of Trade and Industry to let it invest $25,000 in a transistor license so the company could build its own transistor radios. First-year sales for the Texas Instruments/IDEA transistor radio were a disappointment. As a result, neither company was anxious to pursue the project further. However, because Sony faced a greater amount of existential risk—it had the attention of Japan’s powerful industrial planners, who would be anxious to see a return on the investment in a license—the company worked harder to sell the radios, which became a breakout export product. Although Texas Instruments didn’t directly profit from the radio, the product was a gateway to a much larger payoff.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“In the summer of 1958, Jack Kilby, a talented engineer at Texas Instruments, embarked on a one-man mission to reliably produce transistorized components at scale. He had joined Texas Instruments in May and hadn’t earned many vacation days, so instead of taking August off like the rest of his colleagues, he researched the problem. He hit upon his solution while reading about a failed dental appliance that used sand to blast away decayed teeth.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“Instead, we need to compare the Saturn V rocket, which carried the first humans to another heavenly body, to the monuments of past civilizations.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“In the late 1960s, visionaries like von Braun predicted that Apollo would promptly usher in reusable spacecrafts, lunar colonies, manned missions to Mars, and space-based industries. 205 Today, Apollo has become an icon of nostalgic futurism—an artifact of a past in which the future was expected to be radically different from the present. If we want to understand and recover the symbolic meaning of Apollo, and the Promethean ethos that underlies it, we shouldn’t focus on its minor material spillovers, like the popularization of Teflon, Tang, and Velcro.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“writer Robert Heinlein put it shortly after the Moon landing, Apollo’s success was “the greatest event in all the history of the human race up to this time.” 203 The symbolic meaning of the program’s end shouldn’t be underestimated. Apollo was nothing less than an instance of the technological sublime. The Apollo 11 mission, and the technological mastery a successful Moon landing represented, elicited a cross-cultural spiritual reaction. Images from the mission were “surrounded with the aura of religion,” 204 from the silvery Saturn V rocket, which towered against the darkness of space before it lifted off and sent the first humans to another world, to the Apollo 8 crew’s reading from the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve 1968, to Armstrong’s footprints on the lunar surface. In the 20th century, the experience of the technological sublime was a recurrent phenomenon in America—think of the interstate highway system, the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan skyline, the atomic bomb, the jet airplane, or the Golden Gate Bridge.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“Eventually, as some fear and others hope, the super-exponential growth in compute could result in the Singularity, or the moment when machines transcend human intelligence. 199 If the Singularity does arrive, it will be traceable back to the Eagle, the lunar landing module’s onboard computer. In the mid-1960s, the only demand for integrated circuits that Moore identified in his paper was “Apollo, for manned Moon flight.” 200 By 1969, however, the year Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the lunar surface, the market for computer chips was 80 times larger than it had been in 1962.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“To return to Plato’s model of the soul, mentioned in Chapter 1, what was required wasn’t just logos (reason) but also thymos (spirit). 182 Apollo was, for many, the peak of human accomplishment—a triumphant symbol of the drive to conquer infinite frontiers. It was a radical but concrete vision that inspired and reinforced the enthusiasm, commitment, and risk tolerance of all involved. The goal was straightforward: to put a man on the Moon.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“Coordinating the efforts of researchers is always a tricky matter, since discoveries can’t be predicted. It’s hard to create an “insight factory” that can produce a certain quantity of good ideas every shift. But steady progress across multiple fronts was necessary to produce the bomb by a deadline, which meant researchers had to split the task into constituent parts and then attack them individually while sharing notes. This fairly horizontal process was then complemented by the more vertical process of converting complex simulations into a series of operations that could be performed on a mechanical calculator.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“The same holds true when applied to organizations, academic fields, and industries. When an organization or field is growing fast, young people join, the average age remains low, and the pace of advancement is high. When organizations and fields peak in importance and popularity, recruiting slows substantially, pushing the average age—as well as organizational risk aversion—upward. This is another bubble dynamic, and physics was in the early stages of that bubble when the Manhattan Project ramped up. The youthful, hungry team took numerous risks, from testing out entirely new bomb designs to performing their first test detonation before they’d definitively concluded that the bomb would not ignite a fire in the upper atmosphere.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“The Allies did not just race Germany to develop a bomb. They also sabotaged German efforts by, for instance, raiding the Vemork hydroelectric facility in Nazi-occupied Norway. The power plant was Europe’s largest source of so-called heavy water, a necessary input to atomic weapons research. (Heavy water is rich in deuterium, a hydrogen ion containing a neutron that doubles the mass of an ordinary hydrogen atom.) The Allies even sent Moe Berg, a professional baseball player turned spy, to Switzerland to listen to a lecture by German physicist Werner Heisenberg to determine whether it sounded like Germany would be able to develop the bomb before the end of the war. If the answer was yes, he was to assassinate Heisenberg.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“Borgias, and other ruthless types can satisfy their ambition by participating in positive-sum games. Indeed, there is a strong, empirically documented relationship between a zero-sum mindset and the economic environment: The more adverse the economic environment, the less positive-sum the thinking becomes. 151 Scarcity thinking kicks off a self-reinforcing doom loop, which results in more scarcity.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“Charles Dickens has a nice line about the importance of having a long financial runway: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” The same dynamic applies to companies and governments when it comes to growth.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“For example, consider how Paul Graham explained Yahoo’s valuation in 1999: By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo’s revenue growth. So they invested in new internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of “Eureka!” I was shouting “Sell!” 146”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“When investors debated the merits of Uber, the question was whether the company would be a niche taxi service worth perhaps a billion dollars or a transportation revolution that would create and capture trillions in value. Because these visions of the future are so radically different, there is no middle ground.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“By contrast, inflection-driven bubbles have fewer harmful side effects and more beneficial long-term effects. In an inflection-driven bubble, investors decide that the future will be meaningfully different from the past and trade accordingly. Amazon was not a better Barnes & Noble; it was a store with unlimited shelf space and the data necessary to make personalized recommendations to every reader. Yahoo wasn’t a bigger library; it was a directory and search engine that made online information accessible to anyone. Priceline didn’t want to be a travel agent; it aspired to change the way people bought everything, starting with plane tickets. 140 If a mean-reversion bubble is about the numbers after the decimal point, an inflection bubble is about orders of magnitude. A website, a PC, a car, a smartphone—these aren’t 5 percent better than the nearest alternative. On some dimensions, they’re incomparably better. A smartphone is a slightly more convenient tool than a PC for taking a photo and quickly uploading it to the internet, but it’s infinitely better at navigation. A car is not just slightly faster and more reliable than a horse (although in the early days of the automobile industry, it was apparently common for pedestrians to yell “Get a horse!” at passing motorists); cars transformed American cities. Modern-day Los Angeles is inconceivable on horseback.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“By contrast, inflection-driven bubbles have fewer harmful side effects and more beneficial long-term effects. In an inflection-driven bubble, investors decide that the future will be meaningfully different from the past and trade accordingly. Amazon was not a better Barnes & Noble; it was a store with unlimited shelf space and the data necessary to make personalized recommendations to every reader. Yahoo wasn’t a bigger library; it was a directory and search engine that made online information accessible to anyone. Priceline didn’t want to be a travel agent; it aspired to change the way people bought everything, starting with plane tickets. 140 If a mean-reversion bubble is about the numbers after the decimal point, an inflection bubble is about orders of magnitude. A website, a PC, a car, a smartphone—these aren’t 5 percent better than the nearest alternative. On some dimensions, they’re incomparably better. A smartphone is a slightly more convenient tool than a PC for taking a photo and quickly uploading it to the internet, but it’s infinitely better at navigation.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“What’s especially powerful about these bubbles is that they literally change how we see the world.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“Optimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Speculation provides the massive financing needed to fund highly risky and exploratory projects; what appears in the short term to be excessive enthusiasm or just bad investing turns out to be essential for bootstrapping social and technological innovations. If we examine how progress has unfolded over the course of the past century, we find that in both hardware and software, from the Apollo program to Bitcoin, some of our greatest technological achievements are the product of bubbles.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“The “eternal present” is a phrase borrowed from Guy Debord, who used it to describe what he called “the society of spectacle,” referring to the phantasmagoric state of late-stage capitalism. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben radicalizes this critique even further. Agamben argues that the eternal present is characterized by an infinite deferral of eschatological redemption, perpetuated by an infinite government and economy—the economization of everything. He traces the permanence of the current secular political theology of management and administration, which expresses itself in a variety of secular ceremonies, liturgies, and acclamations, back to the Christian doctrine of providence. This infinite deferral of eschatological redemption results in a “model of contemporary politics… which pretends to be an infinite economy of the world,” which is “thus truly infernal.” In other words, the present—characterized by an abandonment of eschatology—doesn’t simply resemble the Catholic conception of purgatory; even more radically, our contemporary predicament equates to Hell itself. Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press: Black & Red, 1983); Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012), 41.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“As Feyerabend shows, a careful study of the history of science reveals that science, by rejecting non-standard modes of knowledge as heretical, has become uncritical and mired in orthodoxy. Instead of systematically studying the occult or obscure, the standard scientific reflex is to “simply curse them, insinuating that their curses are based on strong and straightforward arguments.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“But this is quite separate from the politically charged cultural perception that science has a monopoly on truth—one either believes reflexively or is accused of being a denier. 126 The cult of the scientific method demands the suspension of critical thought and the suppression of non-consensus ideas. At its core, this quasi-religious faith in science assumes that nature can be reduced and subjected to standardized procedures defined by the scientific method, a process that results in permanent progress. This dogmatic view of the scientific method, which has been referred to as “scientism,” is at odds with a conception of science as an activity geared toward the radical unknown and the truly novel, which cannot be routinized, rationalized, or ritualized.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“The reproducibility crisis again has its roots in bureaucracy. The field’s obsession with citation-based metrics to measure scientific productivity has spawned a plethora of peer-reviewed journals, some of which are of low quality. The scientific method itself has become a metaphysical abstraction that figures as an almost mystical source of epistemic authority—a process that is believed to automatically generate truth, understanding, and control.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

“Radical scientific novelty—which is uncertain and probabilistic, and as such lacks validation—is incompatible with bureaucratic rationality, which is geared toward repeatability, control, and procedure.”
― Byrne Hobart, Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation