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The Spice Must Flow... Now More Than Ever
Porter's Journal Issue #18, Volume #2
Porter Stansberry
February 14, 2025
How The Race To Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) Will Be Won With Electricity
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Table of Contents
Most of what you think you know simply isn’t so.
That’s a hard fact for most people to accept.
But if you are genuinely honest about your own beliefs, you’ll recognize how, over the course of your life, virtually everything that you thought you “knew” for certain turned out to be simply wrong.
Usually that was because the facts you’d been told were true weren’t true at all. Or were even deliberate lies. (Here’s a hint: everything the government tells you is a lie. Every. Single. Time.)
But, for some reason, the more obvious it becomes that a treasured falsehood isn’t in fact true, the more devoted some people will become to their lies.
A great example of that are the never-ending Malthusian myths, that for some reason people seem to always embrace – despite the fact that they’re always laughably wrong about their predictions. Remember Y2K? Killer bees. Peak oil. Global warming. It’s always something and the world is always about to end.
Remember the The Population Bomb? That was a 1968 best-selling book by Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford professor. He was predicting a global famine in the 1970s and the end of the world’s economy by the 1980s because, he said, the earth’s population was exploding and there wasn’t going to be enough food. Obviously, nothing like that came to pass – there wasn’t a massive famine in Britain, for example. But, when the professor appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes news magazine in 2023 did he recant any of his false predictions? Of course not! Ehrlich says we’re still heading for a “sixth extinction.”
Meanwhile, the real problem for the developed world is that we’re not having enough children. But being completely wrong doesn’t stop the media or government-backed institutions from promoting horrible ideas.
This kind of deeply irrational thinking isn’t the real problem for investors. It’s usually not that hard to spot ideas that are completely wrong. No… it’s not bad ideas that are dangerous to investors. It’s good ideas that are the real problem…
The real problem is when you’re certain you know something… and you’re right!
Here’s one great example. In his 1996 book, The Road Ahead, Bill Gates foresaw how the internet would become part of our daily lives. At the time, few people in the world knew more about how computer technology and communications networks were evolving and merging. Gates had a huge advantage over virtually every other investor in the world. In fact, there may have been no one in history, ever, to be in a better position to understand such a massive change in the world’s economy – not even Rockefeller.