Byrne Hobart

Financial writer (author of the newsletter The Diff) and co-author, with Tobias Huber, of Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation — the pro-bubble book arguing that financial bubbles, far from pure pathologies, can be the coordinating mechanism that funds ambitious, definite-optimist projects and breaks technological stagnation. In Kyle’s notes the book is read through threads like Progress Studies, Historical Futurism, Mimetics, Nuclear Energy (nuclear as the “purest apocalyptic-technology case study”), and Thymos. That last one carries into Kyle’s We Need a Renaissance of Rhetoric research, where Hobart is cited for the argument that technological innovation is driven more by thymos — “spiritedness,” a relentless drive to transcend the listless present — than by rational cost-benefit analysis.

Hobart’s other recurring role in Kyle’s corpus is as a sharp financial detective. In VC Contagion - Research, Kyle leans on Hobart’s The Diff reporting on Palantir’s “roundtripping” — booking revenue from non-government SPAC customers that Palantir had itself invested in (money sent out so it could come back and be booked as revenue) — as the cleanest example of the circular-capital dynamic the essay tracks (“turtles all the way down”).

Context: Byrne Hobart writes The Diff, a widely read newsletter on finance, technology, and markets. Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation (2024), co-written with Tobias Huber, sits in the progress-studies / definite-optimism orbit associated with thinkers like Peter Thiel.

Where this appears

• Boom — Bubbles & The End of Stagnation — co-author; the pro-bubble, anti-stagnation thesis Kyle annotated.
• We Need a Renaissance of Rhetoric — cited for thymos/spiritedness as the real driver of innovation.
• VC Contagion - Research — his The Diff reporting on Palantir’s “roundtripping” anchors the circular-capital thread.
• Nuclear Energy — the Boom framing of nuclear as the purest apocalyptic-technology case study.
• Tobias Huber — his co-author on Boom.