This Time is Different?

We all die. In some ways, that’s a good thing; including in my case, though I would like to stick around long enough to see how this latest chapter of human folly plays out. 

Without the quiet exit of one generation, the world remains cluttered with entrenched interests and ideas that have outlived their usefulness. Old structures, like stubborn weeds, choke off the sunlight needed for fresh growth. Renewal demands space. Innovation requires plenty of oxygen in a less-crowded room. As Joseph Schumpeter understood, progress arrives through “creative destruction.”

That said, old age brings more than hair loss and a sore back. It brings something the young, in their boundless enthusiasm, often fail to appreciate: wisdom distilled from lived experience. The kind of wisdom that comes from having watched markets rise and fall, trends come and go, manias ignite and collapse.

There are many perks to being a dinosaur. We’ve seen it all before. We’ve bought the T-shirt, attended the funeral, and studied the names on the tombstones. We are not easily excitable. The louder the cheerleading, the more skeptical we become. We long ago developed the patience to watch things play out before jumping in with both feet.

This is not nostalgia talking. It’s part intuition, part pattern recognition, and part a quasi-canine nose for bullshit that grows keener every year. Youth drives raw innovation: openness to novelty, less risk aversion, and a willingness to challenge conventions and leap where others hesitate. But untempered by experience, that energy can tip into recklessness, hype cycles, and painful misallocations of capital.

History is littered with examples. In the South Sea Bubble of 1720, speculators chased the promise of vast colonial riches, convinced financial innovation had rewritten the rules. The story repeated in the Railway Mania of the 1840s. Technology would transform everything, claimed the entrepreneurs — until overbuilding and unrealistic projections led to widespread failures. Railways ultimately succeeded, of course, but the short-term mania destroyed fortunes.

The Dot-com Bubble of the late 1990s followed the familiar cycle. Younger tech visionaries proclaimed a “New Economy” where profits no longer mattered. Warren Buffett, then in his late 60s, and Sir John Templeton, in his late 70s, stood apart, cautioning against such euphoria. Templeton called “This time is different” the most expensive words in investing. 

The Nasdaq crashed 78%. Fortunes evaporated. Buffett’s and Templeton’s restraint was again vindicated. The internet did indeed change our world, but not necessarily in the ways we expected, and not exactly overnight. It took 15 years for the Nasdaq to regain its previous high. Some of the companies that survived the bust became among the most valuable on the planet. Wonderful for them, not so much for the countless enterprises that crashed and took investors’ money with them. 

Which brings us to artificial intelligence. The parallels with the Dot-com era are striking. The promises to reshape the economy. The extreme valuations, detached from near-term profitability. The massive capital inflows (for fiber optics and servers then, data centers and GPUs now). The FOMO-driven cultural euphoria. The risk of infrastructure overbuild. And the productivity paradox: enormous investment has yet to deliver broad, measurable gains. And, of course, the older skeptics dismissed as dinosaurs while the young Turks proclaim that this time is different.

Yes, AI will revolutionize our world—it is already doing so—and the winners will generate eye-watering profits. (Elon, are you ready to play “Who Wants to be a Trillionaire?”) The upcoming IPOs of SpaceX and Anthropic tend to make investors lose sight of the fact that 90% of the companies in this space will disappear from Bloomberg terminals in a few years.

The advice of Wall Street analysts and economists will, as always, provide little protection. Their track record on market direction hovers around 47% accuracy.You may as well have a chimp place your bet on black or red at the roulette table. 

Professional forecasters often display optimistic bias. Wall Street, in the business of selling products and financial innovations, hires cheerleaders. “Bulls get promoted, bears get fired,” as the saying goes. Fear of losing your job rarely produces reliable guidance. The pros miss 12-month price targets more than 70% of the time.

Younger minds bring cognitive flexibility and fresh perspectives. Breakthroughs by people in their 20s and 30s — Einstein’s miracle year at 26, Werner Heisenberg at 24, Niels Bohr at 28 — had some of the most important discoveries in in the history of physics while in their 20’s. They, and countless young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, remind us that progress needs daring. 

Pure disruption, however, risks fragility and repeating mistakes. Gerontocracy risks conservative stagnation. This tension is productive when properly managed. Wisdom without innovation becomes a museum. Innovation without wisdom becomes hype cycles and fragility. 

Successful societies and companies bridge this gap through mentorship, advisory roles, and structures that empower young talent while respecting experience. Japan’s postwar blend of elder respect and rapid innovation offers one model. Berkshire Hathaway, with Buffett’s long view alongside younger operators, offers another.

Larry David captured the comedic side of elder skepticism in that infamous crypto Super Bowl ad. Playing his curmudgeonly self, he dismisses the wheel, the fork, the toilet, the light bulb, and finally crypto itself: “Eh, I don’t think so. And I’m never wrong about this stuff. Never.” 

The tagline? “DON’T BE LIKE LARRY.” After the collapse of FTX, the irony was as rich as Sam Bankman-Fried used to be—before he went to jail.

Over the past six years, I’ve taken great pleasure in calling out Bitcoin maxis for their price predictions: “It’s going to $1 million… or $13 million…” Recently, one of these Bitcoin pumpers called for a $50 million Bitcoin price. Looney Tunes. 

Bitcoin maxis respond to my posts with generational jabs: “Boomers having tantrums… hurry up and die.” “I meet broke boomers all the time… ‘if only I’d bought Bitcoin.’” And the classic “Old man yelling at a cloud.” When the price of Bitcoin is falling, as it is now, the vitriol gets worse and very rude. 

Mark Twain observed with characteristic wit: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

The ideal lies in intergenerational collaboration. Death and retirement create space for wisdom to be transferred through teaching and advising. New innovators rise to test ideas against reality, grounded by elders’ hard-earned experience. Awareness of mortality itself spurs urgency and meaning. 

We need youth for energy and openness, age for pattern recognition and patience. When markets get crazily overvalued and the zealots promise “This time is different,” the old-timers’ skepticism serves as a vital counterweight. Many audacious new ideas succeed and transform society. But distinguishing the pepper from the flyshit, as a friend puts it, requires the wisdom that only time and experience can impart.

We all die. Philosophical traditions from Stoicism to existentialism remind us that finitude is what makes life precious. The inevitability of death encourages creation before time runs out.

Recognizing our own mortality fosters humility and gratitude for our brief span of time on the planet. The dinosaurs aren’t here to block the future. We’re here to remind everyone that patience, skepticism, and a keen nose for nonsense have their place — especially when the music is loudest and the valuations most absurd.