By Porter & Co. - February 16, 2025

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.

But Gates didn’t mention search engines in his book. Or social media.

Even though Gates knew more than anyone else in the world, he couldn’t foresee either of the most valuable and important applications of the internet.

Google was founded two years later. Friendster, the first social network, was founded six years later. In less than 10 years, social networks (Facebook) and search (Google) were worth more than $100 billion. And today, almost 30 years later, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google combined are worth more than Microsoft. But Gates never invested in either!

Today, more than 80% of Gates’ wealth is invested in only four companies: Microsoft (MSFT), Berkshire Hathaway (BRK), Waste Management (WM), and Canadian National Railway (CNI). Talk about life being stranger than fiction: Gates only became a major investor in Apple (AAPL) because of Warren Buffett! Buffett famously refused to buy any tech stocks for decades despite being close personal friends with both Gordon Moore (founder of Intel) and Bill Gates!

So the next time you think you’ve played your hand poorly in regards to missing great opportunities to invest in new technologies, just remember that Bill Gates owns more of a garbage company than he does of any internet business. Gates was like a squirrel watching a bank robbery. He saw the entire thing happen, start to finish. And didn’t understand any of it. On the other hand, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was a Series A investor in Google, an investment that has, most likely, earned him almost as much as his ownership stake in Amazon.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate to get to meet and spend a lot of time with so many of my intellectual heroes, who are legendary thinkers, writers, and investors, over the past 30 years: George Gilder, Jim Rogers, Doug Casey, Bill Bonner, Craig Venter, Michael Lewis, P.J. O’Rourke, Ron Paul, Jim Grant, David Lashmet, Erez Kalir, and Steve Sjuggerud.

Something they all have in common? A tremendous humility about the future. And a clear recognition of the limits of their own knowledge. These people say “I think,” and “I believe” a lot. They very, very rarely say “I know.”

This fundamental difficulty – to ascertain the true meaning of events to have any idea, at all, about what the future will bring – explains why doctors are usually lousy pilots and lousy investors. Doctors believe they know. They conflate the certainty of their ego with actual certainty in the real world. And those two things are miles apart.

Good pilots know the plane will eventually break. They know the unexpected will, eventually, occur. And the weather forecast is almost certainly wrong. Likewise, good investors know the most likely thing to happen next is the thing that’s least expected.

And so, as I sit here today, I know the most dangerous aspect of what I’m about to tell you next is that I am so completely certain about it.

The coming revolution isn’t technological, like the internet revolution. The coming revolution is . . .

[SNIP]