e business world, and I love the fact that he says directly that ESG could be one of the things that's destroying the world. You know, it's on his list with some other stuff. And he calls it a mass demoralization campaign against progress that has lasted 60 years. But he calls out everything: trust and safety and tech ethics and social responsibility and basically all these well-intended things are basically destroying the world.

But I would like to add my own theory about why empires rise and fall. This will be the best theory you've ever heard. So you heard Pat Buchanan's theory that it's war, that all the prior empires were destroyed by war. But I get that. I mean, it's highly correlated. I've got a slightly different take that you're going to like better. It goes like this: all empires are luck. That's it. You have to be lucky to become an empire in the first place. It's not just that you had some good leaders and you performed well or you had a good system. It's luck. And the one thing you can guarantee about luck is that it doesn't last. That's it. That's the whole description of empires.

For example, it was lucky that the United States was geographically protected from World War II. Nobody planned it. People didn't move here because they said, oh, in case there's a World War II. It was just luck. Yet I also consider it luck that our founders were alive and in America at the same time. I mean, what were the odds that Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Monroe, Hamilton, what were the odds they would all be alive at the same time and have the same purpose? What were the odds that Steve Jobs would meet Woz? What were the odds? If you don't put those two together, there's no Apple computer. There's no smartphone. Maybe. Who knows?

So my take on America and all the other empires is that something weirdly rare had to happen for any empire to form in the first place. But that level of luck that it takes to stay in power can't be sustained. Just nobody can be that lucky for a thousand years. Now, once you are successful, you can do what any monopoly does. You can put up walls. So you can last way longer than you should because you can put up ways to protect yourself. But in the long run, it's still luck. Maybe there's a climate change thing. Maybe there's somebody's nuclear bomb goes off by accident. There's a pandemic that one person mismanaged but another one didn't. I think it's just luck.

So that would suggest that every empire goes away eventually. But I wouldn't worry about ours right away. That is so weird that your comment said something about the Warren Commission. That was something I was going to talk abou