Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Kanakova.
And I'm Nate Silver. Today in the show, we're going to be talking about a certain man whose name rhymes with Dilon Tusk. You can probably guess what he is. He recently left the Failure. We're going to give a grade for Elon Musk's tenure in office. Did he help himself? Did he even help Trump? We'll discuss it all and what kind of decisions Elon made.
And then we're going to actually zoom out a little bit and address one of our listeners questions about how we can change our current system of government to allow it to make better decisions. So let's talk about Elon Musk and his brief tenure at the top as President of the United States as co President of the United States.
Yeah, I mean, so, first of all, one thing we might ask is who comes out looking better in this exchange, right, like Trump or Elon? Trump got what was at three hundred million dollars contributed to his campaign in various ways. Trump got to brand himself as a more interesting, kind of forward looking candidate, gets Elon to be one of the ringleaders of this faction of Silicon Valley and business leaders that gravitate toward Trump. I think from day one
in the White House that Elon was not helpful to Trump. Right. Although Trump is not popular, his numbers aren't that bad, right, especially they were covered a little bit since I mean, on any given day you never know what is the truth about what terroifts will be in place. But they've recovered since that reparations day what was it called? Not Independence Day? Either liberation Liberation day? There we go. Yeah, reparations Day would not.
Be a Trump No, no, I think I think if we had a reparations Day, it would have been canceled under a Trump.
But his number, says, have recovered, Elons have not. Let me look up the how popular is Elon Musk on the Silver Bulletin So forty percent favorable rating, fifty four percent unfavorable rating. At the start of Trump's term, he was a forty two and a forty seven, right, so his unfavorables really went up. People who were on the
fence about Elon Musk now substantially disapprove of him. And by the way, this affects his bottom line too, right, It's affected Tesla sales in Europe absolutely, quite profoundly, where Elon is not forty fifty five but twenty seventy twenty eighty unfavorable in these surveys. And then you know, look, he does interfere in certain ways with Trump's policy in two or three areas, right, one of which is skilled
immigration and one of which is tariffs. So I think Trump exits a little worse for trying this post election day, but Elon probably helped him in the campaign and during the campaign Eland was more neutral in terms of public image and so forth, and like, if you're neutral, but you raise three hundred million dollars and allow you can't it to rebrand himself and not such a bad deal.
So I think it's an interesting calculus, right, because Elon was definitely helpful in getting Trump elected, but then at some point he started being a liability because I think with Doje, even people who supported Elon, there were certain things where he was starting to get blowback, including from Trump who was like, oh, well, we don't really want to be cutting all of these things, right, we need
to win elections and people cutting things isn't popular. I think he said something along those lines, so I think that that was hurting Trump. And then we have actually the evidence of the campaign where Elon donated twenty million dollars, right, and it ended up with a huge Democratic victory because there was a backlash there was, yeah, exactly, there was a huge backlash the fact that he was perceived as
kind of meddling a little bit too much. And you also have these conflicting things right where a lot of the tariffs that Trump wants to pass hurt Tesla, right, and Tesla currently is losing a lot of the there's ev credits that are no longer a part of the big beautiful bill. So there are a lot of things
happening that are hurting Tesla directly. And people at SpaceX have been complaining that, you know, they feel neglected, that productivity is down, that innovation is down, that people are not motivated, that the you know, the work environment has been horrible because Elon has completely neglected his duties there, and so I think he's definitely suffering on those grounds.
I'm very, very curious to see whether Trump is going to persist with the Doge cuts and like double down, or if he's going to now like slowly try to walk it back as part of separating himself from elon.
What do you think, Nate, Well, look, if you look at bond markets, they're worried that we're going to run budget deficits because we'll probably cut taxes on rich people like Republicans like to do without cutting spending by enough, right, And where we have cut spending are in things like foreign aid programs that probably from like a expected DIYU standpoint, do a lot of good for the world. Yeah, but
aren't that large a fraction of the federal budgets. It's almost like the you know, it's like the canonical issue where if you pull people and say what percentage of budget goes to four and aid, they'll say fifteen percent instead of one percent or whatever it is, right, And so you know, it's where we kind of get a lot of bang for your bucket, and that's where where
there have been more cuts. But like, yeah, look, I mean Trump was never a fiscal austerity guy, right, and he differed from like the Romney Ryan generation of Republicans by doing less to target entitlement programs. Right. I mean, in principle he has an isolation a streak, But I don't believe we're cutting defense spending or anything like that,
and you know, with with legitimate reason. I mean, you know, things as we you know, you look at t happening in Ukraine, right and like how is our drone capabilities compared to China? And it could become a very dangerous world. But no, yeah, I mean what is Elon's legacy on the government. I mean I think it's like you know, cutting PEP far and things like that, and not a lot of other you know, and maybe maybe restraining Trump a little bit on tariffs at the end.
Yeah, that remains to be seen, right, But yeah, I'm looking at some numbers right now, and this is just one calculation that said that, you know, his at best, it seems like Doach has saved around one hundred and fifty billion dollars, but that's probably unlikely to stand, and that it the consequences of the cuts, putting the federal workers on paid leave, rehiring mistakenly fired employees, and all of that is going to cost the government as much
as one hundred and thirty five billion dollars. So nut it seems like very little has been accomplished except for things that you know, Elon is very big on innovation, right and American you know, American brain power, and he you know, he's been tweeting about SpaceX and all of this stuff. And one of the big things of his legacy is cutting all of the grounds too, as we've talked about on the show multiple times, kind of creating
this brain drain and this vacuum. You know, where the fuck is innovation going to come from if I also just leave the United States? And so I think that he perversely, it's not I think the associate with Trump. I think he has cost himself a hell of a lot of money in that sense, because the pipeline is going to dry up and this is going to be much harder to undo than rehiring federal employees.
Yeah. Look, I think he was coming from a paradigm where, you know, in the private sector, there's kind of a paradigm where like you accumulate fat in a corporation, Right, it becomes hard to fire people on a one on one basis for various reasons, right, I mean, a it's just kind of a challenging thing to let someone off of a job, right, And there can be union stuff, and there can be legal stuff and wrongful termination stuff
and all of that. Right, So you know, so so much in a corporation be like, Okay, we've been growing, maybe we're struggling little bit. Now, let's just take a scalpel and shave ten percent or whatever of our budget off. Right. It's like much harder to do in a US government sense, where like, like, look, I'm sure there is lots of waste, fraud, and abuse in the government. If you read the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, it talks about
some of that. There's some state governments too, and seems to be worse in blue states than in red states. Right, But like, you have a whole bureaucracy and a whole legal framework and for both apporporating funds to begin with, like and for cutting them, right, So you know, Congress
is supposed to control the power of the purse. Trump has not performed very well in litigation so far in a number of areas, and so you know, so that paradigm doesn't carry forward, and I think is like, look, I mean the basic critique that I find most compelling of Elan is not oh, he's a Nazi. It's that he's weighing over his head and doesn't seem to have this ability to differentiate issues that he knows a lot
about from ones where he doesn't. Like if Trump had appointed him instead of like David Sachs to be like the part time ais are. I mean, Elon actually is more cautious on AI, more concerned about AI risks than some other Silicon Valley leaders, Right, So like Elon, we want you to like and do what you can to ensure AI leadership in an intelligent way and leadership against China and technological leadership. And and now you know, look, I think the chance that China wins quote unquote what
do you want to call it? Porld War two has risen.
Gone up by a lot. I think that you just absolutely, like spot On, nailed the issue here in Nate, which is the overconfidence that Elon Musks has exhibited, right, the fact that he doesn't seem to grasp like he is so he is so enamored of his own intelligence that he doesn't seem to grasp that his deep knowledge of one sphere doesn't mean that he has qualified to be
an expert and have deep knowledge of everything else. And he's like, well, I can do the same thing to the government that I did to Twitter, and look at Twitter now, haha, fuck you haters. However, Twitter is not the government, right, and you can also like argue that, you know, Twitter is worse off now. We're not gonna I'm not making that argument, but you could. However, even if you say, okay, Twitter's better off. Now, everything's great.
You know, he understands business in a way that he does not understand government.
Right.
He doesn't know what he's doing, he doesn't know what he's cutting. He lacks that basic knowledge, and yet the confidence doesn't match up right with his knowledge. He's not the humility is altogether absent in the way he thinks about this. And this is one of the biggest problems with people who are very intelligent. It's actually in my
dissertation for when I was in grad school. This is what this is what we discovered, right that this is the Achilles heel of high performers, this overconfidence bias where they succumb to thinking that they know much more and are much more in control than they actually are.
And especially in his case, if first of all, Silicon Valley is kind of a no nagging culture, right, It's very self dealing in the sense I don't mean any correct way. I mean, like in a kind of little way of like everyone's getting in everyone else's different rounds of investment. It's a very tight knit community, so you can't, like it's considered uncou to like criticize another VC or founder. Right, you don't see a lot of that necessarily, That's one part of it. But also, look, he is on a
pretty amazing winning streak. I mean, you know, if you ask most investors at the time the SpaceX gonna work, assess is gonna work, they'd say no, right, probably not. You know, I do think that like he deserves some credit for like, you know, some of the dire predictions about Twitter were grossly exaggerated. Now it's business model isn't much good, but like it's remained an important part of the discourse. You know, I think that like xai is
taken somewhat seriously. It's not a category leader like open Ai or Nthropic or maybe Google. You know, it might be down in that third tier, but like still has a lot of interesting data to crunch from Twitter, data that is valuable. They're hiring good people, and like it's not impossible that that could be a big player, right, So like you have to give him credit for what he's done in business. And look, are are different types
of intelligence too. I mean the phrase I've used with Elon is spiky intelligence, which is just like very excellent in some areas and very deficient in other areas where he's like below the average showing some areas like emotional IQ probably right, and and that's but he's not like a calculating I mean, in my book you talking about the river, right, which are at least very competitive anarchical people. He's not like the calculating type. He's impulsive. He goes
all in on things. And yeah, you know, ocou say, it's like a pooker player that has a sun run and wins like three big tournaments in a year. There's like a little bit of that, But then they're playing some other game that isn't poker and they bet on themselves really heavily, and yeah.
Or even in poker. But the next year when their sun run is over. I'm thinking of someone in particular who's on the sun run a lifetime right now, who's going to be coming down to Earth at some.
Point, and we'll be right back after this break.
I think that spiky intelligence is a really important way to look at it because they're people who are generalists, right, if you think about it, you know, if you think of the fox hedgehog type of thinking. Have we talked about this on the.
Show We should's It should be a risky business core concept, but yeah, let's talk. Let's remind people what it is.
Yeah, So you have two types of people, the people who know who have the broad intelligence, right, who know a little about a lot of things, and then the people who know a lot about one thing in particular. And so those are kind of the two concepts. And some perform better in some environments, some perform better in other environments. Nat, I think you wrote about this in your book, right, And so these are kind of these two paradigms for high performers. And both types of people,
by the way, can be very high performing people. So this isn't a dang on any one approach, right, but it just depends on what the context is and what you're trying to accomplish.
Yeah, hedgehog knows one big thing, a fox knows many little things, right, And they're both types of intelligence for things like poker, or for things like making prediction, right, than this fox tendency to kind of calibrate and estimate and be pluralistic tends to be helpful, I think, right, if you are a founder of a company, then you might watch someone who goes all in and is very spiky hy variants right.
You want, you want that hedgehog. But a fox is actually less likely to be over confident than a hedgehog because the hedgehog is much more likely to fall for that bias, because the hedgehog knows so much about that thing.
And if it's a successful hedgehog, the hedgehog has been very good, right, and has been rewarded for knowing a lot, And so that then creates this false sense that oh, I'm just brilliant, right, I'm like naturally good at knowing things, whereas the fox, because the fox kind of knows about so many different things and might not be Like if the fox squared off against the hedgehog and the hedgehog's area of expertise, the fox would lose. But the fox kind of knows enough about the world that I think
the fox is more likely to be humble. It's a little you know, it's a little strange to think of a humble fox. But that's why the hot fox is able to evade traps. Right. If the fox became over confident, would be very easy to catch the fox, because you'd be like, haha, I know that the fox thinks that it's it's you know, the best in the world, and so I'm going to be able to catch it. Yeah.
And Elon also lacks a certain type of worldlyness, right. You know, look, say what you want about like Mark and Breeson, Repeter Teel, but they can write interesting essays about kind of world affairs and political philosophy and things
like that. Right, you get some founders. You know, Metallic Bouterin is the founder of Ethereum, and when I talked to him from my book, He's like, yeah, I thought there was a ninety percent chance that I'd fail, but I thought that the expected value was positive at the stage of my life. Right, that's a very risky business slash Fox way to think about things, whereas Elon would just be like, I'm going to fucking do it. I'm going to fucking do it. I don't even want to
think about the odds. I'm going to fucking do it. Right, so he's particularly you know, he lacks that roundedness I think, and and the self reflectiveness. And also he is has a lot of distractions. I mean, look in terms of the number of things things he gets done. I mean he's sort of in a half assed way, but maybe not completely. You know, he is running like a half dozen companies and being a special advisor to the president, and like fathering all these children and traveling around the world.
I love how you just threw that in there, and fathering all these children and in lawsuits about all of the children he's fathering. So that's actually it's a very it's an important point because that does kind of get his attention.
And you know, look, we all know okay, let me put this carefully. We all know how achieving defective people. I don't mean defective entirely pejoratively, right, but like people who have flaws that they're able to overcome because they have crafted a life to work around them, and or because they have strength that outweigh them, and or because they have enough like how our privilege authority and not get called on the problems.
Right.
You know, my experience with those people is that when you add other elements that careful balance can get out of whack, right, And with Elon, you're adding too. You're
not sending the government stuff. You're adding. According to a lot of credible reporting, maybe quite a bit of drug use, and not just weed, but ketamin in particular seems to have been a thing that he was doing, right, And when you have these reports there's one recently in the New York Times, there was one in the Wall Street Journal. I mean, so the reporting on that I'd gather is very deep, and like you know, Elon's life has taken I think, kind of a turn for the worse in this period.
Right.
He was at one point one of the most admired men or women for that matter, on Earth. Tesla had a very good brand. I mean, there are a ton of Teslas on the road, right, but like you know, part of the preme is like this kind he kind of spends neglecting. Tesla is a time when Chinese electric vehicles begin to gain a lot of market share, right where other American companies like Rivian begin to become more prestige, especially in the in the blue areas where ELI used
to be more propular. By the way using oftentimes like the charging network that like Tesla built. Right, Yeah, you know, you see a few cyber trucks on the road. I think that is largely not seen as a tremendous success in in driverless cars. Waimo is a category leader in the United States. Right, so all of a sudden, Tesla is like second best at a bunch of things. Its profit margins are down. Its stock did bounce back after Elon downsized himself from the government or was or was downsized.
But Elon might have concerns that you're playing catch up in various ways in this market now, and you kind of established the whole category by yourself.
Yeah, no, I think that he's he is playing catch up. And by the way, Nate, I've started noticing, I don't know if you have bumper stickers on a lot of Tesla's that apologize for driving a Tesla. So people are you know, people are saying things like I wish I didn't, you know, but I can't afford a new car. And I bet that the secondary, like the resale market for Tesla's is going to fall, which has traditionally been actually
incredibly strong right in the past. If you try to buy an old Tesla like the prices were ridiculously high, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if that secondary market also kind of absolutely caved in, And so you need to think not just right now, but ahead. And then you've got the lack of eb subsidies and kind of all of those credits that are going away, and so all of these things are sobering if you're an Elon musk and Tesla's kind of your your baby.
Yeah, Like, people are pretty rational about car purchases, right, They're often pretty go gageous for overall optimism about economy in the near term. Right, according to Google Gemini AI. You know, always caveats about this, but there's been a ten percent decline in resale values approximately so far instead of time when in theory, because of tariffs, you should have people moving into used cars, right, if new cars get more expensive. Yeah, And it's like no longer like
a flash. She used to be cool thing ne a difriend who would ride a Tesla. It was like a little bit like a friend who had a crypto punk right flex right, Hey, you want to you want to? You want to ride my Tesla to the poker tournament. It's like, Okay, Sure, yeah, and and they've lost that category leadership.
I think, yeah, yeah, I think I think that's absolutely right.
I do wonder whether something else will step in. I'm very curious to see what the next five to ten years in the US will look like in terms of EVS, whether someone else is going to step in, whether TESLA is going to rebound as Trump, you know, leaves office and Elanas further distance from it, or whether we're going to see just a fall a continue must fall in the share of evs, in which case I think it would be a lasting harm for for a lot of goals that Elon even has stated that he has in the past.
Now, look, I don't think we will. I think that will that will rebound, right. You know, look now every manufacturing and if you look at like what are Car and Driver's best electric cars testas Model three is still number one. You have Hundays, and you have Nissans, and you have you know, BMW's and American made versions and things like that, And like, I think the market demand for these cars is proven. And obviously Trump's probably gonna
roll back fuel efficiency standards in some places. But like, and by the way, I don't think I don't think Elon's position as a public figure is unrecoverable. I think it might have become unrecoverable if he'd remained in office. I guess, I guess he was in office. He was officially he was office for much longer. But people have like people have like short memory.
People have Oh my god, yes, can we just like talk about that for a second. People's memory is non existent, like people especially these days, Like I feel like the attention span is so incredibly short that like next week, if something else happens, you know, you will kind of go back to your priors and this will be kind of water under the bridge. Even though this kind of the circumstances might not have changed that drastically, the repercussions
might still be felt. I'm always shocked at just how short people's memories actually are.
Look I mean if he I mean part of premise, Like Elan I think does not believe in surrounding himself with like he has some PR people have tried to work with them before, but like not not many relative to a person of his stature. But like a good PR campaign, you know, you do the right interviews, you make sure you're not on Kenneman or something. When you're doing the interviews and like and like, and you can say, I try to stop Trump from mushrooms are okay? I
don't know, man, I tried not to. I tried to stop Trump from these horrible terrorists and X, Y and Z. I mean he has expressed so when we put up at silver bulletin the Elon Musk popularity tracker, he actually replied to me on Twitter and said, it's because the governments or the news media is biased against me. I'm paraphrasing, but also, hahaha, I have kind of fucked up some shit, right.
It was like surprisingly humble. I think it did register her to him at some point that like, you've burned a lot of credibility, buddy, with with a large mass of the American public that once hold you in high regard, including friends. And yeah, I mean I hope he has people in his life that can point him in the right direction. He has found a bunch of amazing companies.
And I'd rather have good Elon than evil Elon, I guess right, without wanting to precisely define what good and evil are, but he is like a world historically important figure. It'll probably be better if for the world, if you were making more I don't mean sober in a literal sense, but like more better, making better decisions more to use a taglen of the show.
Yes, absolutely, so okay, So summing up Nate, if we were to give him a grade on his decision making, I don't know do you want to give him a letter grade or a number grade, but let's give him a grade.
Let's do a number.
Yeah, okay, let's do zero to ten, with zero being absolute disaster, ten being you know, brilliant, best decision maker in the world.
And when's the start out? It starts out.
We're talking just the Trump tenure from from the moment he's appointed, and so.
We don't give him from a pure EVS play. You can give him credit for investing in the Trump campaign, right, Let's let's give him two grades.
Let's give him the grade from his decision to kind of pivot to Trump, let's call it that. And let's give him a grade for his tenure in the not his official tenure in the Trump administration. So two grades.
To pivot to Trump in the first place. And I'm going to ignore what my political preferences are personally from that kind of Elon's look, I give him a it's hard not to be results oriented, right, I give him a five, which is a boring grade. I mean, look, on the one hand, he did recognize that, like Trump is the rising ship in this election, right, I can have access to like a lot of power and a
lot of influence. I mean it's like tactically, it's kind of smart, right strategically in terms of what it means
for for his life and his brand. I mean, he has a very high opportunity cost, right, he has really cool jobs as it is, right, and you know, aspires of extending human life spans and traveling to Mars or building super indulgent AI and all these things, right, and so like you know, and you know, initially Tesla gained a lot of value in the stock market when Trump one and then Elam was brought in, right, and then lost all of that back basically and now has rebounded
some again. Right, So like, yeah, I don't know, you can't give him a high grade because, like I think you have to be a little bit results oriented. Right, he was not able to do it in a way that avoided massive backlash toward him and his products, right, and was not able to do it in a way that was sustainable really, but they did win an election. He was one of the key figures in winning a vital election at a vital time in world history. And so you can't go too low either, yep.
And what about during the administration.
I'll give him a two and a half, which is rounding up. I'll give him one point for one point for pushing back on skilled demigration, one point for pushing back on terras, and I'll give him a two point three and three tenths of a point for leaving when he did the reason three tenths because I think it was probably at least seventy percent Trump's decision. Where are your scores?
So I was actually going back and forth between lower and higher than a five on his pivot to Trump, And so I think I'll end up at a five, which is quite boring, but I'll explain what my thinking was. So originally I was going to say lower because he was one of the reasons that Trump ended up winning. I think like that support actually helped Trump at the beginning,
and that money helped Trump at the beginning. And I don't know, obviously this is speculation but had he thrown that support towards the Democrats, I think we might have seen a different election result. I don't know, right, this is a lot of a lot of maybe's, but so so on that sense, like it's very hard to disambiguit cause and effect here and figure out like was it
actually a good decision? Right? Would he have been better served if Kamala Harris had come to power and like he was able to align himself closely with that government, which was not, you know, a shit show, and the way that you know, Trump two point zero has been that might have actually been strategically smarter. And once again, it's really really hard to deal with counterfactuals. So so I don't know, but that's kind of it's pulling me
in different directions. The other thing I was thinking about was he reminds me of the Russian oligarchs who threw in behind Putin right, who helped get Putin in power and were like, this is this is what's gonna really help my business, and they you know, that was brilliant. They made billions of dollars until a lot of them started getting killed. And so at the at the end
of the day, like that wasn't nearly as brilliant. So at first, when I was thinking through it, I was like, oh, well, that can actually be strategically smart, so higher than a five. But most of them died and so so that's actually not a very good trade off, And that was the other kind of part of what I was thinking about. So I ended up at a five. Actually maybe even lower than a five, given that both of these end up net negatives. So I would give him a four
on that. Honestly, I'm going to give him a one. I don't think that in his time in the administration he has accomplished enough to warrant more than a one, because even the things that he pushed back on, like tariffs, I think that that wasn't him pushing back. I think that was popularity ratings and everyone else and Trump just going back and forth. And I think that we would be in largely the same place we are right now
even without Elon. So I'm not going to give him that much credit for that, And I'm going to give him a lot of grief for the chaos that he's caused and the brain drain that he's caused, and the downstream effects that he's causing for the country. So I think his decision making in this particular moment is like I feel like I'm being very positive not to give him a zero.
All right, plus.
Exactly, we're not failing him, but pretty damn close. All right, mister Musk, that's our report card for you. Let's take a break and talk about government in general. So we have a question this week from a listener whose name is Tyler, and he writes, how can we change our current system of government to allow it to make better decisions? Now, he wasn't coming at it from quite the angle that I thought he would, but it is a thought provoking angle.
So this is what he writes. He says, one thing I've been thinking about recently is the benefits of autocracy. I look at Putin and she and I'm jealous of their ability to do real long term planning. And so, you know, this is something that has caused Tyler to think, is there something that America can do to kind of go past short term gains and have more of a long term strategic mindset.
I'm a big believer in democracy. Yeah, Look, but this is this is a question. I mean, China can.
Clearly, China can do things we can't do.
Yeah, they can build. I mean their way ahead on drones, right, they're ahead or catching up on electric vehicles, they're behind on AI, they're way ahead on robotics. You know, for a long time people thought when you have a whole country become middle class, invariably you also have democracy go along with it. And China's like no, I mean you you know, you are getting closer and closer to free entrepreneurship in China. You are not able to talk about
Tannemin Square without getting in a lot of trouble. And they're and they're managing these issues in like very weird ways, are getting more progressive on like gay rights. But you're you're not going to You're not going to have a democracy, And like, you know, that's not a compromise that I'm willing to make it necessarily, right.
Yes, I completely agree with you, But I do want to kind of acknowledge that the question where Tyler's question is coming from is the question that people have been asking for centuries. So if we go back to Plato, right and the Republic, you have the idea of the philosopher king. So Plato ended up, you know when he tried to interrogate which system of government is best, and you know, rule by the few, the many, all of
these different things. He comes to the conclusion that we should have basically one person in power who's a philosopher, who has all of these different qualities that make him wise and that basically make him the best paternalistic ruler. He knows what's best for everyone, And it's kind of it's a scary thought if you actually try to think
through the implications. But this is where Plato came out as well, and that was one of the things that I thought about when I was thinking about Tyler's question. But yeah, I think that there is lots wrong with the US government, but not being an autocracy is not
one of them. I have always believed that we need to the two party system right, that we would actually be much better served if we had a more pluralistic system with more viable third party options and healthier debate, less polarization, right where people actually were able to represent more more points of view, which is kind of more of the parliamentary system that you see in a lot of European countries.
Well, look, our our system was designed in a world where you don't have terribly strong parties, what most of the founders assumed, because if you didn't, then, like then we'd have much more checks and bounces with Trump in the name of Congress in particular, the court I think largely has played the role that the founders envisioned for it. Believe it or not, right, but like, but Congress, you
know a lot of things Trump was doing. Again, Congress has power to restrict Trump on tariffs, which is both directly unpopular and indirectly hurting the economach will hurt all of their jobs, right, And they're not able to do it because there are Republican primaries where where they face far more threat. Most Republican members face more threat from losing a GOP primary challenge than from losing a general election. Right. I mean, I'm a little bit unclear kind of what
we're allowed to fee out or what we're not. I will say, sometimes you walk around New York, you know, nice spring day or whatever. You're like, I'm in all these buildings and parks, and you're like, I'm amazed we haven't just all killed each other by now. Right, Even being some have a long history of violence, they're able to get together and you know, countries have great epics and eras. Maybe the United States is out of its
great era in some ways. The fact that we can't build things as fast as we used to do is frustrating, I think. But you know, look, the checks and balances at the framers design isn't a bad system, but it's like deliberately a hard system to change. Right, the threshold for many of the constitution is high. And if you get into a lock in where you have extra i mean partisanship on the one hand, which makes it impossible to achieve super majorities on most things, right, then that
creates lots of problems. You know, I'm starting to sound like one of these middle aged guys who's more worried about like a debt crisis in the long term, right, markets are, and I tend to trust markets on that. You know, that's one problem that we face. I think the cuts that people are making to the to long term research and development and scientific programs right, the deterrent to the most talented people coming to the United States.
I mean, you know, all of these things I think are going to have long term consequences that reduce our leadership a bit. And America gets away with a lot because we have the world's most powerful military, at least top two and a half. Right, we have a world's leading currency, right, and we had a huge head start. I mean, everyone else kind of you know, Europe has had problem was China starting from a very low baseline. So we had a big head start and a lot
of advantages we have. You know, we're protected from from foreign invasions. Who a degree, you aren't if you're in Eurasia. Right, Our natural resources are very rich. If we had to become self sufficient, then we absolutely could. Right. We have a lot of soft power based on our creativity and our capitalism and our brands and and things like that. Right, And you know, it'd be kind of a shame if we've we fucked it up, right.
But well, we're on our way, rights, as you just said, we're on our way to fucking it up because a lot of those things that give us our power are under threat right now, and that is not going to help government. And having a putin in charge is certainly not going to help that situation. Because if in some ways, you know, what Trump is trying to do right now is not dissimilar from what happens in autocracies, right, with all of the executive orders, trying to circumvent the checks
and balance, says, trying to circumvent Congress. It hasn't worked as well because we do you know, we're not in an autocracy yet. But I'm saying that's what he's kind of if you look at what he's trying to do, that is kind of the the approach is, let me just executive order my way through this.
I mean, IFDR got struck down a lot by the courts, right, I don't know if Yeah, I think some people would say he had autocratic Oh.
Absolutely, FDR was a disaster in that respect. I mean he was. He's the reason that we have term limits on the presidency. He's the only one who did not bow to president. Everyone else willingly left after two terms and there was no need for a constitutional amendment. And it was because of FDR that we have that constitutional amendment. So, yeah,
Trump is not the first. So all I mean is that, you know, if you're looking admiringly at that sort of approach, you can see that there are a lot of issues with it. And by the way, you certainly do not want to be living in Russia right where right now, that is not a good state living and that is not a good society to live in. So you see kind of what ends up happening. And a lot of the things that we take for granted are kind of consequences of the fact that we live in a democratic society.
But yeah, would we be better off if we had a more more robust democratic institutions, right if kind of we were able to revive the critical thinking that I think has largely fallen by the wayside as people have become incredibly polarized. You know, we've talked before about how both parties are quite broken in different ways, and I think that if we're trying to have a better long term government strategy, we need to look to that and try to figure out, you know, how do we create
a system that doesn't reward polarization. Because one of the things you're talking about, Nate, is that you know, people want to win their elections, right, they're afraid to lose. They're afraid to kind of do things that will potentially make lose and it's a vicious cycle. So how do we break that, right, Like, how do we actually give them And this happens It's funny this happens in businesses too.
I just recently was talking to some business leaders who kind of asked how they can have kind of better innovation in their businesses, and I was like, well, you need to actually not just say that you reward creativity, but not punish people when they fail. Right, If someone who takes a risk and it doesn't work out, you fire them, then that tells everyone all they need to know about how you value risk taking and creative thinking.
And here we're kind of seeing the same thing where people are afraid of saying something, doing something, and then not getting re elected. They're afraid to speak up. They're kind of afraid of that sort of environment, and that is not a good state of affairs. I think that's something that we should work towards fixing.
Yeah, look, let me say a couple of things, right, Like, you know, one answer is maybe we need a contenst that we want to devolve more power to state and local governments, which seem to be more functional and are often less partisan. Right, they used to be seen as like Democrats didn't like that. They liked you know, they thought that states would take rights away that were conserus to protected, et cetera. But like maybe that just kind
of the equilibrium that would best serve everyone involved. I mean, look, I do want to put the brakes on. You know, we still don't know about like the long term future
of China or the United States. Right, you have countries that are quite harmonious wh they're going through this middle class stage and then reach like South Korea, right, And now South Korea is at a more mature stage where they have a GDP per capite's higher than Japan, for example, and they're having impeachment and political turmoil and people are unhappy there. So we don't know where China ends up,
and we don't know where the US ends up. I mean, you have seen some shifts in coalitions, right, Like, I think there are certain ways in which the response to Democrats has been a healthy response, right, Where Democrats have been complace and lazy about a lot of things. Right, Renominating Biden and lighting people about it was really pathetic. Right. They have taken for granted certain types of voters like
African Americans and younger voters and everything else. Right, and men, right, you know, they're losing grandival men and like, so they kind of deserve it. But maybe maybe there'll be some declined from partisanship eventually. I mean, all trends reverse themselves over some window. Maybe AI will radically remake the political coalitions in different ways. I mean, it certainly feels like a dynamic time, and dynamic means Hiberians and Hyberiants includes
good outcomes. But I don't know, I not feeling.
Yeah, yeah, I think, Yeah, Tyler, this was a really interesting question. We don't have an easy answer, right, We don't really.
Have like so look, people with the good guver will say, oh, you can have like more nonpartisan primaries and ranked choice voting. Actually good stuff probably does help. I mean, you know, and if we're gonna do like a New York mayoral episode ranked choice voting as a factor in the mayor's race here, you know, but like it's kind of because the constitution's hard to change, then you kind of have to change political culture and that's and that's difficult.
Ranked choice voting, Nate, I think, is a good example of things that could on the margin help. And as we know as poker players, on the margin is actually important, right, Elections can be one or lost on the margin.
Yeah, and the margin matters more when things are approximately fifty to fifty, right, you know, two Senate seats versus three next year for Democrats makes a huge difference as far as their ability to win a trifecta in twenty twenty eight, right. I mean it often comes down to just like one one seat, yep, yep.
So I think that this is all really important to remember. Thanks for the question, Tyler. We wish we had an easier answer, but this was a really interesting discussion. Let us know what you think of the show. Reach out to us at Risky Business at pushkin dot fm. And by the way, if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber, we have some bonus content for you that's coming up right after the credits.
And if you're not subscribing yet, consider signing up for just six ninety nine a month. What a nice price. You get access to all that premium content and ad for listening across Pushkin's entire network of shows.
Risky Business is hosted by me Maria Kanikova.
And by me Nate Silver. The show is a co production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Isabelle Carter, our associate producer is Sonya Gerwin. Sally Helm is our editor, and our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Bruger.
Thanks so much for tuning in to