cause it turns out in the real world when you go to look for data and then put it in a report, the first thing you find out is the data is bad. The second thing you find out is there's no way to fix it. The third thing you find out is that management doesn't care. That'll set you straight.

People wonder how I became so distrusting of government and whatnot. That's what Dilbert's all about. Dilbert is a comic strip that started with the realization that everything is a lie. Everything your boss tells you, everything the company tells the customers, everything the customers tell the company, everything the government tells you. Everything. It's all a lie and always has been. It always has been. It's just that it works. You know, lots of times lying just gets stuff done and then stuff sort of works. I mean, we're still alive. We're still here.

I have a hypothesis. I can't remember if I told you this on the show or maybe only the Man Cave. About why civilizations fail. You know, throughout history there have been these big civilizations that we just find the ruins. And then what the hell happened to the Roman Empire? If you try to research why did the Roman Empire fail, it'll be all these weird sort of different reasons that don't quite map out in your head.

But here's my theory. My theory goes like this. That it's exceedingly rare for any civilization to become super successful. So for every Rome there must have been a thousand civilizations that were just small tribes and didn't make it. So the normal situation is that everything dies. You know, nobody really makes anything important. They live their life in a small world. They die. It's just the rarest thing when all the elements come together that something can form a big civilization. You know, powerful regime over maybe 100 years or something.

And the reason that they disappear is simple. They weren't supposed to be there in the first place. That's it. The only thing that made them so successful was the weirdest coincidences that came together at the same time. And there isn't any way that that can keep happening. It takes extraordinary luck to be in the right place at the right time with the right set of variables. And it just doesn't last. It has nothing to do with how hard anybody tries. Has nothing to do with, you know, did their society become decadent. None of that. It's just that there isn't any way that you could be so lucky for so long. It's just not possible. It's just reversion to the mean and there's nothing else to it. That's my theory. It's just reversion to the mean.

Because you really can't find anything in common with failed civilizations. It looks like it's every different reason, which means everything had to be right to get what you got.

Let me give you another example of that. When people talk about Trump getting elected in 2016, it seemed so highly unlikely. And then some people will say, well, the reason he got elected is X. And then somebody else was saying, well, I see what you're saying, but really the reason he got elected was Y. And it turns out you could do the whole alphabet as the reason he got elected. If you change that one thing, he probably wouldn't have been elected. And so my take on that is all those things had to happen. If you take any of them away, probably the margin of victory goes away.

So think about the coincidences that have to come together for a Rome. The coincidences that have to come together for a Trump victory. And now leading into my next point. Lex Fridman had a guest on and he asked him, talking about the simulation and do we live in the simulation. And the guest, I don't know his name. I see him on Twitter, Sarnic, maybe Saric. He said the odds that we're a simulation are nearly 100%. And one of the things that he offered as not proof but sort of a logical argument is what are the odds that we would be alive at this point in history with everything that's happening.

Have you ever said to yourself, what are the odds that you were alive when computers were invented for the first time? I was. Smartphones first time. AI. Robots. All in my lifetime. Doesn't it seem to you that we're in an insanely unlikely period of history? What are the odds? If you look at the entire history of humanity, not so good. And then I find myself working the exact job that I imagined when I was six. What are the odds of that? What are the odds that one day the president of the United States would invite me to have a chat with him in the Oval Office? That actually happened. What are the odds that I could post something on X and on any given day Elon Musk would retweet it or comment on it? The richest person in the world. Out of eight billion people. None of this seems possible. It really doesn't.

If you were to say does this seem more like a dream sequence or more like just the normal odds, it's way mo