what are the problems with this idea. But an analogy might suggest, oh, these other people tried to do that and they got this result, so maybe you should look into that. So it might be useful, the analogy, but not for winning an argument and not for predicting.

However the third party ambitions of Musk reminded a lot of people of Ross Perot. Now the Ross Perot situation had so many differences from what it is that we're experiencing that if your only analysis was it didn't work for Ross Perot, all he did was make it impossible for a Republican to win. So that's what Musk is doing. Same thing. Well I don't think you fully thought it through.

But it's possible. It's possible that the only thing that comes out of it is that it makes it hard for Republicans to win. It's possible, but as a prediction, it's not really a good prediction. It's not like one thing leads to the other in some kind of unstoppable line of cause and effect. There's a lot of variables here.

So I looked at Elon Musk's statements about his third party and I did a post in which I said the first thing you need to know, I'm paraphrasing, is that he's not saying he's interested in running a presidential candidate. He said he was interested in getting a handful of senators and House representatives who would be independent and not wed to either party so that for important things that matter to the country they might be able to sway the total vote. And then Elon retweeted my explanation that he was not planning to have a presidential candidate in his third party. And I thought to myself, "Oh, look at me. I did something useful." So people were confused about that question. And I accurately determined that he wasn't planning to do that because he retweeted it.

Well, was it maybe an hour later I found out I was wrong. So about it wasn't long, it was the same day. He said, just to clarify, again I'm paraphrasing, just to clarify, I might someday want to run a presidential candidate. To which I said, "Oh that's the Ross Perot problem. If he runs a presidential candidate, that's just the Ross Perot problem, right?" And it does seem more likely, although he's never said this, that he would pick people who were more likely to take votes from Republicans than Democrats. But he's never said that.

What if it's exactly the opposite? What if he went to get some ex-Democrats who people who were also Democrats didn't find objectionable because these ex-Democrats were not MAGA. So even hypothetically let's say they join the third party and they win their election. If you were a Democrat, you would know that they were not MAGA because they would never say any MAGA stuff. And you might say, you know what, I just can't vote for Kamala Harris, so I'm going to take a chance on this one.

So the first thing we don't know is if he's going to be picking people that Republicans will like better than Democrats like him, or maybe it's three of each. We don't know. I'm not sure he knows. It sounds like he's sort of figuring it out as he goes. So there is a hypothetical path where all he does is make the world a better place. And that would be if he stays away from the presidential choice and he gets some middle-of-the-road standard people who Democrats like and those Democrats say, "You know what? I don't think we should spend a lot of money on climate change." I'll just pick that as my example. But you still might get Democrats who say, "All right, but we like you because you used to be a Democrat and I can't vote for Trump or I can't vote for whoever replaces Trump and I can't vote for Kamala Harris or some other Democrat."

So there is a path where things get a lot better because Congress could make decisions and get majorities that match what the public wants. It's possible, but it's really possible that it goes the other way, right? That all he does is weaken the Republican party and then nothing gets done. It's just total skunk fight.

But the thing that amused me most, there's a number of people who are sure that although Elon Musk has conquered a number of unrelated fields that this would be the limit of his ability. That he could figure out how to put a rocket to Mars and build electric cars and put a chip in your skull. He could do all that but you know there's no way that he understands people. He only understands machines and software and hardware. Does that sound anything like true to you?

Do you really believe that the guy who's one of the best posters on X doesn't understand people? The person who made products that people can't resist, such as Tesla? Do you really think he doesn't understand the market or how people react? Do you really think he got all those people to have tents in the hallway at his AI company and they're sleeping overnight and he got that to work because he does the same thing. He just sleeps there until a problem is solved. Do you think that's because he doesn't understand people?

I would argue that he understands people as well as he understands hardware and software, which is a lot. I don't see any evidence whatsoever that he doesn't understand people. Now I do see evidence, certainly not conclusive, that there might be something bipolar going on. That every now and then he goes further than even he wishes he had gone and pulls it back. So there's something going on, but I don't think that that's new. And probably that's one of the driving forces behind his success that if you're bipolar, if you're having the manic phase, you can get a lot done. I know this because I'm a little bit bipolar. It doesn't affect my life because I don't get the down. I only get the up. But every now and then I'll get this what has to be a manic phase that lasts two or three weeks and wow, can you get stuff done? Unbelievable.

So I'm not sure that any of that's going to predict what's going to happen. But let me just give you this caution. If you believe that Elon Musk is brilliant enough to do all the things that he obviously has done, but you believe he has this one area that he's not brilliant and you know more than he does about it, you should check your thinking because the hypothesis that you know more than he does about anything is a little sketchy, right? And even if you do know more than he does about, let's say, politics, how long is it going to take him to figure out more than you know? An afternoon? Politics isn't that complicated. Neither are people. People are not terribly complicated. They follow incentives. If you knew that people followed incentives and they're also driven on envy, you would be almost done in understanding people.

How many times have I told you, "All right, let's predict something about this by saying follow the money." I say it all the time. I mean, I didn't invent it, obviously. It's an old saying, but it's an old saying because it works. Are people really that hard to understand that you think that Elon Musk is the only person who can't figure it out because he's some sort of a robot or something?

No, I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if he's bluffing. I don't know if he is really just trying to create some leverage to get a few things he wants. We don't know what's in his head and we definitely don't know how this third party thing is going to work out. If you want a take on it, I would say at the moment I'm not sold. So I wouldn't personally join it because I don't know what it's about or who's going to be in it. But could he upgrade it to the point where I would? Yes. It's within the realm of possibility. I'm not tempted at the moment because there's not enough clarity. But maybe someday I'd have to hear an argument I've never heard. And the argument I've never heard would be the one that says this is how this makes the world a better place. If he can sell me on that, that he's figured out some kind of clever workaround to make the world a better place with a third party, I'm all in. I'm all in. And I might be because the odds of him making a good argument are pretty good. The other possibility is that after he's struggled with it a little bit that he decides there's no path that makes sense. So that's possible. So either one of those is possible. So I'm going to reserve judgment. But no, I'm not thinking can't wait to join.

I saw a post on X by UmairH and the poster said, "Do you guys think the fall of the Roman Empire was also this incredibly stupid?" I've spent way too much time watching History Channel and YouTube videos about ancient civilizations that were dominant during their time and then just disappeared. You know, the Romans, the Incas, the Mayans, you could just go down the list. And it's very sobering because when I was a child, I believed that I would never see the end of the American Empire. But I'll bet you Great Britain once thought that too. Oh, we're conquering half the world. Probably the Mongols thought that.

So it turns out that most of the dominant civilizations eventually fall. Elon Musk answered this fellow on X when he said, "Do you think the Roman Empire was also this incredibly stupid?" And Elon said, "Yeah, they wrote about their own demise extensively." Did you know that? That you don't have to wonder what caused the Roman Empire to fall. They were writing about it as it was happening. And guess what? It was too much debt. Guess why? Because they needed too much of a military to defend themselves. And there was too much envy. I'm making up that last part. But in the sense the people who wanted more kept pushing for more and as they got more they ran out of money and then it fell apart.

Now I may be of course oversimplifying it greatly. It could be that other civilizations died because these Spanish conquistadors came over and gave them deadly diseases and then six months later they were all dead. So there are lots of reasons. Could be floods, could be natural disasters, could be wars, there are lots of things that can destroy a dominant empire.

But I'm going to summarize it this way. Given all of the civilizations around the world, if you think about all the countries and all the micro civilizations within those countries everywhere, there would be thousands of them, right? And there are only a few countries that have dominant civilizations. You know, US, China, maybe the European Union, maybe you throw in Russia, but they have kind of a tiny economy. So my take is this. It's very rare for all of the variables to line up for any one country to be a dominant civilization. In other words, it's like me hitting putts from 15 feet. Sometimes all three go in from 15 feet away. I did that the other day. But far more likely I miss all three or make only one.

So it could be just so obvious that what's going on is that if any civilization becomes dominant like the US is or was and the UK was that the odds of it staying that way are just vanishingly small because everything had to be right at the same time and that would be rare. So I'm not so sure that you can look at somebody else's example like Rome and say well Rome had this set of problems so we might but again it's an analogy so whatever problems they did have you'd probably want to look there first say well I got an idea what we should look at should we look at our debt and that's why Elon Musk's contribution is so important because we were sleepwalking toward complete ruin from debt. And he didn't stop it, but boy did he stop the way we talk about it and think about it and the priority we put on it. And look how hard he's fighting to try to reverse it.

So I don't know. Did Rome have that? Did Rome have an Elon Musk with the X platform and billions of dollars fighting as hard as he could to stop the spending from ruining us? Is it possible that we have the variable that fixes stuff and we're not the same as all those other civilizations that failed? It's possible. It's possible that we've attracted the right kind of people who are fixers. That no matter how bad the problem is, as long as you have enough time that you can pull together the right people and say, "All right, we're dead if we don't fix this." So then you fix it.

I don't know if Rome could have done that because they didn't have the right kind of communication to find the smartest people and motivate them, but we do. So I always think that the existence of the internet which allows you to gather resources and information and wisdom from far places and concentrate them where they need to be that it could be that the internet is a thing that allows a dominant civilization to stay there a little bit longer. You know, unless there's a nuclear war or new COVID that kills you, which might be.

Meanwhile, President Trump has threatened to impose a 10% extra tariff on top of his existing tariffs for any countries that align themselves with the BRICS. So the BRICS are those smalish, not small, but non-superpower countries. Well actually Russia's in there and China's in there so they are superpowers. Take that back. So there would be s