YouTube Deep Summary

The idea of Elon creating a third party is for any other human being like absolutely absurd and ridiculous. Elon has obviously done incredible things. So dismissing anything he's touching is a bad idea. However, I think the best metaphor I've seen is it's a little bit like Michael Jordan tried to play baseball and became a replacement level baseball player, which actually really hard to do. By the way, Elon is probably a replacement level politician. Um, he's Michael Jordan for entrepreneurial stuff, but the third party stuff is not going to work. First of all, um there that chart is misleading. It's a flaw of average. It's both badly designed and it's a flaw of average. Trump is incredibly popular among Republicans. He actually has the highest approval rate of any Republican ever measured in recorded history. It's 95%. Reagan was peaked out at 93%. It's just Democrats don't like them, which is perfectly fine. Being polarizing is is an ingredient to being successful, including with people on the show. Like the point of accomplishing things in the world is you don't really care what half the world thinks. You need to make sure that there's a lot of people who like you and really approve and are enthusiastic about what you do. And Trump is about as popular with his party as anybody's ever been ever. Period. No exceptions. Secondly, um there's MAGA has kind of already uh changed the Republican party. Trump is sort of like a third party takeover of the Republican party. And so it's kind of already happened and maybe you can do this every 20 years or 30 years. I don't think you can have like this kind of transformation on one party within a two compressed period of time for a lot of reasons. Third is um really smart parties absorb the lesson of political science. Unfortunately I studied political science. I wasted kind of my college years and instead of saying CS and you know maybe then I'd be coding stuff and doing physics like Travis. But one thing I did learn is smart parties absorb the best ideas of third parties. So the oxygen is usually not there because there's a darministic evolution of if you get traction on an idea, it's really easy to conscript some of those ideas and take away the momentum. No third party candidate that's a true like third party has won a Senate seat since 1970. And that's actually Bill Buckley's brother. So he has him name ID. The other thing Elon I think is missing and the proponents of what he's doing is people vote not just for ideas, they vote for people. It's a combination. The product is what do you what do you believe and who are you. And you can't divorce the two. Trump is a person and that generates a lot of enthusiasm and it's one of the reasons why he has challenges in midterms because he's not on the ballot. His ideas may be on the ballot but he is not specifically on the ballot. So unless because Elon can't be the figure head of the party, he literally can't constitutionally, you need a face that's a person, Obama, a Clinton, like there's reasons why people resonate Reagan. Without that personality, specific ideas just are not going to galvanize the American people. Okay. So the counter to that and what people believe he's going to try to do is win a couple of seats in the House, Travis. win maybe one or two Senate seats if you were to do that. Those things are pretty affordable to back. Couple of million dollars for a House race. Senate maybe$25 million. If Elon puts, I don't know, 250 million to work every two years, which he I think he put 280 million to work on the last one, he could kind of create the Joe Mansion moment and uh he could build a caucus, a platform, Grover Norquist kind of pledge along these lines. And so what do you think of that. If he's not going to create a viable third party presidential candidate, could he, Travis, pick off a couple of Senate seats, pick off a couple of congressional seats. Okay. So, first I have this axiom that I'm making up right now. Okay. Okay. It's called Elon is almost always right. Okay. Okay. All right. Elon was right about everything. I mean, seriously, let's just be real. And like honestly the things he's upset about and that he's riled up about especially when you look at the deficit like man I am right on board that train. Part one. Part two. We've never had somebody with this kind of capital that can be a quote unquote party boss outside of the system. Right. And there's a lot of people that agree with the types of things he's saying and he knows how to draw, you know, he Elon in his own right kind of has a populist vibe like he does his thing and he's turned X into what it is and he's he's a big part of X and so I think it's the I think it's great and honestly there's there's the moves you can make on Senate and House and just having a few folks and and being you being levers then to get the things you want done. That's part one. And then part two of that is the threat of that happening can make good things happen separately even if it doesn't go all the way. I just love it. I'm I'm on the train. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm in love with this role for Elon more than picking a party because he's picking a very specific platform that I think resonates with folks which is just balance the budget. Don't put us in so much debt and let's have some sustainable energy, you know, job done. Great job. The problem with that is like he's actually wrong about the reason why we have a deficit or debt. It's not because we're undertaxed. It's we're massively overspending. If we just No, I think he believes we're overspending. They should have been supporting the last, you know, beautiful bill because if you just held federal spending to 2019 levels, so 2019 is not like, you know, decades ago, literally with our current tax revenues, we would be in a surplus, 500 billion. Yeah. So there all we need to do is cut spending. Now I admit that there's Why didn't that happen with the big beautiful bill. So this is where details do matter. I think there is a willingness and a you know discipline problem on both parties and I think maybe he can help fix that. The second thing is that we have these arcane rules particularly in the Senate that you need 60 votes in many ways to cut things except through very hacky methods and that's a reality. So the best thing truthfully he could do is help get a Republican party to 60 votes and then in then in theory he could be absolutely furious if you didn't cut back to 2019 levels. But it it's very tricky. Or you can just overrule like this. The filibuster is an artifact of history and at some point some majority leader is just going to say we're done with the filibuster and just steamroll through all the cuts at 50 or 51 votes which you can do. There's no constitutional right to a filibuster. It is an artifact of centuries of American history and at some point it's going to go away. So maybe the time is now. Maybe we should just fix everything now. I think you're exactly right. I think that the filibuster it's just a matter of time. I think it's on borrowed time. And I think in a world where it is on borrowed time, Jason, I think your path is probably the one that gives the American party, if it does come into existence, the most leverage, which is if you control three to five independent candidates, you gain substantial leverage.