Transcription
Okay, we're going to go ahead and get started. Thank you so much for coming to this panel on trust in American society. Uh, I want to just talk about what motivated this panel in particular. Uh, arguably, trust has been one of America's best superpowers. Historically speaking, trust is related to a variety of different outcomes. It relates to greater health, greater happiness, uh, greater life satisfaction. It's also related to economic prosperity, to better functioning democratic institutions, and also trust is related to resilience in the face of crisis. It's really the glue that keeps us together.
But what we know is that trust has been in rapid decline. In the 1970s, um, there was about um, a third of people, I'm sorry, was about um, a half of Americans thought that other people can be trusted. And today that's down to about a third. Also, alarmingly, only about 17% of people trust our government to do the right thing. And when we lose faith in other people, we start questioning, we start losing confidence in a variety of institutions from the news, the courts, uh, our communities, and even our leaders. And so today, we want to try to understand the multiple dimensions of this trust crisis and even more importantly, what we can do about it.
Uh, I am so honored to be um, on this really um, dream team panel with my colleagues and friends, and I want to go ahead and introduce um, our panelists. Uh, Larry Diamond over here on my left is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Moss Becker Senior Fellow in the Global Democracy Program at the Freeman Institute for International Studies or FSI. He also chairs the Hoover Institution Project in Taiwan and Indopacific Region and is Pac and is the principal investigator of the Global Digital Policy Incubator.
Um, next to um, to Larry is our um, beloved Margaret Levy, who is an award-winning political scientist. Um, she was the president of the American Political Association. She was also um, the director of the Center for Advanced Study here at Stanford of CASBIS, and she's a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the British Academy, and of the American Philosophical Society. Um, she focuses on what makes for trustworthy governance in states and organizations and what evokes citizen compliance or dissent.
What I'm going to do is um, in terms of the structure of this panel, I'm going to ask uh, a bunch of questions to the panelists, and then I will open up for questions. We have someone that will run around with the mic um, so that we can um, have—
>> You might want to introduce Tom.
>> Oh my gosh. Did I not? Oh my god. Tom, you are not chop liver. Oh my god. My beloved friend Tom Freeman. That needs no introduction, right? So, you know, it really needs no introduction. Is an internationally acclaimed author, reporter, and columnist for the New York Times um, since 1981, and the author of seven best-selling books, including *Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations*. And he writes a regular column about US foreign policy, domestic politics, the environment, economics, and energy. So, thank you. That was um, uh, that was very important. Also, introduction.
>> Can I make one request? Can they turn this clock? Can you just tell us when it's five minutes, 'cause it's got the seconds ticking off?
>> Yeah, it's a little—
>> Extremely annoying.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Maybe we could turn off this.
>> Uh—
>> We'll, we'll, you just tell us when we're almost done.
>> Yeah, we could put maybe a—a tablecloth on top of it.
So, I want to start with Tom. Um, you've argued that Americans can no longer agree on the basic facts, and that this is not by accident. Um, so we want to hear, what are some of the forces that have been challenging or shattering that that shared sense of truth, and why has it been so hard to put it back together? And that's a broad question, so I know you have a lot to say about this. Uh, so I'll begin with Tom.
>> Well, well, thanks, Michelle. It's great to be here and with this great panel and to be at Stanford. Um, uh, the way I've been writing about it, Michelle, is because I, I use nature a lot as a um, both a model and a mentor for my own thinking.
Um, and um, uh, people ask me, you know, how I'm feeling today. I said, well, you know, the worst thing that happened, I think, in my career as a journalist is that, as a country, we lost our mangroves. Um, and um, uh, I didn't know much about mangroves. I grew up in Minnesota. Uh, but in um, uh, the mid-1990s, I took a trip to the Atlantic rainforest with Conservation International, and I got uh, introduced to mangroves. And mangroves, these trees that grow right on the edge of uh, oceans and land, do four amazing things in nature. They filter toxins and pollutants.
They buffer storms. They um, uh, create nurseries for young fish to grow because they have very cable roots and large predator fish can't get in, and they hold the shore in place because their roots are actually interwoven um, and they also have aerial roots. So they're very, very stable. And the worst thing that happened in my career, I believe um, is that we lost our, our mangroves, but not just in nature. Uh, it used to be that if you had unprotected sex with a stripper, um, uh, a month after your wife gave birth to your son, you wouldn't be running for president.
Um, shame was a mangrove, and the mangrove of shame has really been been lost. That we live in this incredible age of uh, impunity. Um, elite responsibility was the mangrove. Uh, it used to be that if you got named to the august position of being a justice on the Supreme Court, your wife wouldn't be conspiring with the chief of staff of the president, um, in order to, um, uh, uh, extend his presidency or flying the American flag upside down.
Um, uh, civility was the mangrove. When I was working on this essay during COVID um, I um, uh, watched a lot of old movies um, and one of them was *Inherit the Wind*. Um, uh, and there's this amazing scene in there where Henry Drummond comes into the courtroom, and for the first time, it was the first trial, the Scopes Monkey Trial, that was broadcast live on radio.
Um, and he walked into the courtroom and said, "God." Radio. And the broadcaster says, "You can't say God on the radio." We just had a president who said, "Okay." Um, a complete loss of uh, of just decency and civility.
And, and in my business, small town newspapers were a mangrove. President Obama tells this story that when he was running for president back, he started his campaign in southern Illinois and went down to southern Illinois and would go to a small town, meet with the newspaper editor, usually conservative, usually a white guy, and Obama would spend an hour with him, and at the end of the hour, the editor would say, "You know what? I'm going to endorse the black guy. I'm going to endorse the black guy." Black guy is okay. Uh, well, today, that editor's gone. That newspaper's gone. That mangrove is gone. And now it goes, goes directly unfiltered from Fox or MSNBC into your living room. And so, um, uh, I believe these filtering institutions, Larry was just telling me how Madison and the Federalist Papers talked about the importance of filtration.
Um, they've been completely uprooted, and um, we need to figure out how to restore our mangroves. You can rebuild a damaged mangrove in nature, but you have to be very intentional about it. Um, and mangroves, by the way, are always—mangrove forests always have a diversity of species. Um, and the only way to restore them is to restore the diversity of species, and you need a neighborhood that's got its act together around there to sustain it. So, for me, it's an interesting and important metaphor for what—
>> Uh, that is an incredible metaphor. Just a follow-up question, and then Margaret, I'm gonna, uh, build on that with you. Uh, when do you think this started? Was there a period or a moment that you woke up in Washington D.C. and said—
>> Well, I—
>> I won't—I won't curse, but said that you started to realize there's a real serious erosion of mangroves of the societal mangroves? Is there any particular time that you thought, "Wow, this is getting to be uh, nonlinear?"
>> Yeah, I mean, I, I think um, I date everything to 2007, which is when Facebook was born. And I, I really think social media so disintermediated us from each other. Um, and um, there's literally nothing in the world worse than being able to be anonymous on social media.
>> Yeah.
>> Um, say what you will about the Chinese, but if you want to be on Weibo, you've got to be there with your name.
>> Yeah.
>> And um, when you grant people anonymity and then allow them to say anything you want without an editor um, uh, you know, intervening in any way, and we fell into this insane trap of conflating editing of any kind with censorship um, that I think that was a, that was a real moment. I know Jonathan's work also describes the moment of, of uh, social media as really a uh, a moment of decline. My, my teacher Fred Dove Sidman likes to say that um, trust is the only legal performance-enhancing drug.
Um, uh, it's the only legal performance-enhancing drug. When, when trust is in the room um, good things happen.
>> Yeah.
>> And when trust is not in the—it's like a hard floor. Even a short guy like me can maybe jump off a hard floor and, and I can't dunk a basketball, but maybe uh, get near the net. Without trust, it's like you're living in the Syrian desert. You can't jump a millimeter. There's nothing to pivot off.
>> Yeah.
>> And so, um, I think we've got all these—social media is just a giant trust-destroying engine.
>> You can destroy people's reputation from afar. You can lie from afar, and there's zero accountability. So, I've actually, in just, in my life, people know this, the New York Times. I've actually never looked at Twitter. I've never looked at Facebook. I've never looked at Instagram. I've never looked at TikTok. And I've never smoked a cigarette. And my plan is to die saying all five. So, if you're tweeting about me out there, you all have a good time. I'm not there.
>> You know, I think it's really interesting because really what you're describing is is a loosening of norms, and there's a latitude that's just unheard of from your first example of cursing on the radio to your example of social media. When you have anonymity or when you have uh, that lack of accountability, it really does um, start to cycle in terms of what, what are people really accountable for? Um, you know, Margaret, I wanted to to ask you, we're talking about the crisis of uh, truth. We lost our shared facts. We've lost our accountability. I know your lifelong work, you've been thinking about this from a different perspective, almost even perhaps um, the uh, reverse question, which is the issue of whether institutions have been trustworthy enough to gain our trust, to deserve our trust. Um, so I wanted to ask you, what you think makes institutions worthy of trust, and are they falling short today, and why? It's a big question, but I think there's different angles on this that we're trying to explore here that will be relevant for the kind of solutions that we propose.
>> Yeah, I'm going to get to that in a second, but I have to respond a little bit.
>> The cigarette question, or what?
>> No, I don't smoke cigarettes. I have smoked some illegally done.
>> But I, you know, I do think the, and we'll get back to this, but the erosion of the social infrastructure, I actually think predates social media. Um, and if we don't understand that and the kinds of things that um, happened during the Vietnam War, that happened with the decline of labor unions, PTA, a lot of different things—
>> Alone.
>> —that and more than bowling alone, but that the social media inh, you know, clearly aggravated that, accelerated that, but I wouldn't say that was the start. And part of my answer to how we restore trust is going to come back to some of the social infrastructure. There's another point I want to make before really delving into the institutions and how they gain trust, which is that we're overemphasizing, you know, distrust isn't always a bad thing.
>> Could be rational.
>> Um, particularly when we're talking about government, but even when sometimes when we're talking about other people. I wrote an article once called "Defenses Make Good Neighbors." I mean, distrust makes good defenses. Distrust makes good defenses.
Um, so that's, you know, one of the things that we were raised at in the American, American democracy is that skepticism can be healthy, that we shouldn't always trust our government. Um, and I think we're at a moment where looking at the extent of distrust of government may be a good reflection of how people really feel about the government that we should pay attention to, and it's not necessarily a negative sign in and of itself. That being said, most of my work, as you said, has really been on how we think about creating trustworthy governments and organizational leadership that will evoke consent and compliance rather than dissent and rebellion, right?
Um, and uh, where we get people to actually obey the law and do other things. And there are a couple of elements that are critical to that. One is that the government, uh, the people who run the government actually, particularly those who are elected by us, more or less keep their promises. Now, there are all kinds of situations in which they get more information and they may not be able to keep a particular promise, but that then they then have it incumbent upon them to communicate those reasons and to make that clear to us. But promise-keeping also requires delivery of what you've promised, and that has to be done in a way that's both competent um, and that also meets whatever the standards of fairness are in that particular place and time, that there's some kind of due process, that everyone's some getting some of that benefit or appropriately getting the benefits that they should get. Another crucial piece of it is that we feel confident that those who are free-riding and those who aren't obeying the law are actually going to get punished. Something else that's being violated at the current moment in a big way, I'd say.
Um, so it's not so much that you've got to get Tom to obey the rules. It's that you've got to make sure that when Larry breaks them, he goes to jail and stays there at least long enough to serve his—
>> They're best friends. I just graduated, right? He has—he does not break rules.
>> And I think the final thing I want to emphasize is that part of what in is involved in having trust in government or feeling that the government is trustworthy, which is I think a better way to state it, is that we actually believe that it's operating in the common good, that its commitments are to the common good, and that crosses partisan boundaries. I mean, there are a number of candidates who I might not have voted for, but I certainly believed that their interest was in the welfare of the United States and its citizens. And that's something else that I think undermines trust in government and trust among ourselves right now.
Um, so Mark, I just want to ask you, um, do you have an example of an institution because you've talked about trustworthy institutions beyond just the government, um, that you think is getting this right? Um, right now it feels like the post office is kind of high up on that list.
>> Well, not anymore.
>> Not, I guess maybe that's—so what if you, do you have any examples? It could be even in the US or or elsewhere, because we're going to actually segue to Larry, we're going to get into the global context of trust. But I'm just curious, is there any particular institution that you think is reliable, is benevolent, is following through on its promises? Um, or is it widespread this decline in trustworthy institutions?
>> I'm a comparivist. Yeah.
>> So, I mean, I think in the United States right now, given the current government, it's undermined almost all of our institutions. I mean, we have very little confidence in the rule of law. We have very little confidence in the post office. Um, you know, this thing about deliver, how are the votes going to be delivered on time if we do have the mail ballot um, continuing? But if you think about other countries, I mean, I've just been reading a lot once again about Denmark um, which has been producing a number of institutional arrangements around um, the environment, around a number of other things that are have led to incredible social welfare for its citizens that create a lot of trustworthy government and trust in the government.
>> Yeah. So there could be—
>> There are lots, there are lots of examples internationally. There are not, I mean, we're seeing an undermining of trustworthy institutions almost to almost every one of them in the United States.
>> Yeah. Well, let me actually pick up on that with you, Larry. You've been studying the world for years, studying democracies that falter, democracies that survive. Uh, and one of the early warning signs in uh, and the collapse of democracies is collapse of public trust in institutions. And I'm wondering, as you look at the data on trust in the US, whether it's in the courts or it's in communities or in the government, um, what are, what does it tell you based on patterns you've seen in the world? Are we in a danger zone? Are we catastrophizing here? Um, how would you tell, how would you place our, our democratic resilience compared to what you've seen around the world?
>> Well, um, I think there are a variety of reasons why we should be worried. Okay. And declining trust is intimately related to them, but it's not the only one. But first, I want to echo two things that uh, Margaret said. I think it's very important to underscore them. I actually went back over the long time period which you were doing as well, I think, Michelle, preparing for this, and um, you know, back in the Eisenhower days, you know, what trust in government, it was like 75%.
>> Maybe that's too much trust, right?
>> And we were blindly trusting.
>> And um, then we know what happened. It was Vietnam. It was Watergate. It was the multiple hits. Um, it was uh, the Iranian hostages. It was Carter's poor performance, and by the time Reagan came along, and it was morning in America, and um, well, until the uh, Iran-Contra affair, you know, he actually never hit higher than about 43% in terms of trust in government to do the right thing.
>> So there, it's—I didn't think it was working. So um—
>> Be of a good voice.
>> There was uh, uh, you know, there was a fundamental change at that point. But I think Margaret is profoundly right in saying that, and I would refer everyone back to a very famous quote from the late Hoover Institution, liberal democratic philosopher, Sydney Hook, that what democracy requires is not blind faith in government, um, but also not reflexive rejecting, >> of government either. He actually used the word "skeptical." Y—
>> Uh, it's an orientation that government, toward government, that is scrutinizing, skeptical, um, not blindly submissive, dismissive, and I think he used the word, not hostilely rejecting, but somewhere in between. Now, here's something that I found that's very interesting, and then I'll come to the international dimension. I was mentioning this to Margaret. I was stunned by it and shocked by it when I saw it last night. If you look at the Gallup uh, public opinion poll trends on trust in institutions, which Margaret, you say they're the same categories as the National Election Survey. Um, the Gallup categories are, if you have a great deal of trust or quite a lot of trust, that counts as trust, and if you say you have some trust or very little trust, they count that as distrust. In a lot of other surveys in the world, they count some trust as trust. The response categories are different.
>> And you know, maybe some trust is enough trust in the context of what you're saying.
>> Um, so in that sense, our situation in the US, >> depending on the type of survey you're looking at, may not be as despairing as it's sometimes presented. But I will say um, uh, one other thing comparing with our, our democratic um, uh, peers. When you use the same metric uh, for data last year in terms of trust in government, Margaret, I know will appreciate this. The European systems that have parliamentary rule, proportional representation, kind of inclusive representation, coalition government, they might look messy and slow, but they actually have significantly higher trust in government, not only Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, but also Germany.
>> Yeah. Uh, and you know, then say the first-past-the-post, more majoritarian systems of Canada, Australia, which are at about the 50% range, and then the US is way down there uh, at 31%. So something else is going on.
>> But they're also, there are also the social democratic systems.
>> Yes. Yes, that's right. Uh, they, they kind of go together. Uh, and then if you really want to know how bad it can be, have a look at Latin America.
>> Uh, where trust in institutions has been uh, extremely low for a long time. Uh, you know, what trust in uh, in uh, the parliament is in Brazil now? It's like, I don't know, 10% or something. And uh, the average trust in, in Congress in Latin America, it's a little higher than in the US, but it's only when you look at institutions that are essentially non-political, the church, the police, and the military, that you start getting in Latin America, middling or higher uh, trust in institutions. And that's true um, in the US as well. I also looked at the African data and um, again, it's when you get at non-political institutions, the military, and in Africa, very interestingly, traditional rulers um, who are separated from politics, like even in several African countries, on a, or the continent, on average, trust in local government isn't very high because they see local government as well, stealing their money. But when you're looking at a different metric, like traditional rulers, uh, it's very different. So the consequence is this: if you have chronic distrust as a result of chronic corruption and bad performance and failure to deliver, um, people get dissatisfied with democracy. And dissatisfaction with democracy in South Africa, for example, um, uh, well, let's put it this way, satisfaction with the way democracy is working in South Africa has fallen from like 60% under Mandela to 50% with his successor, and it's now at 29%. That's a democracy, in my opinion, the most important on the African continent, that's in really serious trouble. And I'll just conclude by saying, what do you get when you have declining trust across the board in institutions, declining satisfaction with the way democracy is working? You get people who want strong men, uh, who have the answer and can shortcut the institutions and claim to be above all the political muck. We know what we got in the United States. In South Africa, the danger comes from the kind of um, intolerant left, uh, in the form of um, uh, a radical uh, leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters party called Julius Malma. Uh, and if Ramaphosa and the um, the Democratic Alliance that he's gone into coalition with can't produce more inclusive economic growth and uh, less corruption, that democracy is not going to survive.
>> Wow. I, I think it's really interesting you pointed out this curve of linear pattern, right? It's too much and too little. Too little trust actually be problematic. I think economists have also shown that. Um, I'm wondering where you see as the canary in the coal mine, as another metaphor, of what the warning signs are in any of the countries you've been studying, and also why do we think this is happening? What, Tom, you've talked a lot about accelerations. The world is so much more complex than it was in the 1970s and 1960s on so many different dimensions. Your argument about Facebook, is it at also that people see they're making social comparisons around the world? They're seeing more that their institutions are failing them? At the same time, the institutions are dealing with so much more complexity. How do we connect the dots among the different sources that you're talking about?
Um, so I guess I'll just let Larry respond since I, I asked you the original, and then we'll go to anyone else in the panel.
>> So, um, I think what Margaret was talking about um, is is very true. You have to have a broad spectrum at any point in time in terms of um, institutional and social dynamics, and you also have to have a long historical span. But I'd say a couple of other things. Number one, to kind of foot stomp what Tom was saying, I think that social media are delivering a uniquely toxic and polarizing environment in terms of information flows because it is, it is ingrained in their business model. It is how they think they can maximize revenue. Uh, it drives their algorithms, which are driving what we see and what information circles or spheres we live in. Uh, and so it's overwhelming our mangroves to remove the toxins in our um, political and informational space. Secondly, uh, related to what Tom was saying about local media, um, I think the disappearance of local media uh, at the state and local level is like a really significant development. And again, just stumbling on the internet last night, I, I didn't save everything for last night, but I thought I'd give it one more try. And it turns out Reed Hoffman announced yesterday the winner of his $9 million challenge for who would get the grant to try and restore trust in our institutions. And the winner is basically a state-level uh, online, but you know, uh, hopefully to service local newspapers and institutions, uh, information network called Cal Matters, to report on state government.
>> And um, to uh, look at all the votes in the state legislature, all the decisions of state government, put them on online, track them, and make government at the California level more accessible and more transparent. And I think we're in a paradox in another way. One of the reasons we're in a challenging environment now is because there's so much information coming about corruption, self-dealing, um, you know, uh, sexual misconduct, uh, and so on and so forth. And it makes people cynical. But if you actually have large-scale systematic reporting, you'll also get good news about what's happening, and people will have enough news to put it in context and bring it back to the healthy midpoint that Margaret's talking about. I really urge people to look at the announcement from Reed Hoffman's initiative. Um, it's really kind of an uplifting and hopeful development.
I mean, Tom, I'll ask you to riff on that also. I mean, at the one point you're saying that social media and information could be really good, it can help us to keep uh, institutions accountable, and Margaret's language, trustworthy, but also could be just a, you know, sewer of uh, polarization. So, how do you make sense of that? And also the sort of acceleration point. I mean, you've written about different sources of acceleration and complexity. H—how much is that a big part of this problem of of institutions not being able to catch up that level of complexity? Um, and also it eroding social norms.
>> Yeah. On the, on the media, you know, we kind of went in, in our lifetime, from too little information to too much information.
>> Yeah.
>> And now the challenge is really um, what to believe. >> Really, you need, of course, is now in digital civics of how to, how to read the internet. You know, um, when the internet first appeared, people literally would say, you know, if you, if they said something outlandish, you know, um, they'd say, "Well, well, well, but I read it on the internet."
>> As if that settled the barbette, because it was cast in a patina of technology and modernity that now people obviously have gotten much wiser than that. But I think literally teaching people how to read, how to triangulate, how to check whether something is true or not, is needs to be part of the basic um, education from a very early age. You know, people ask me what I do for a living. I tell them I'm a translator from English to English.
Um, uh, I take really complicated subjects that I don't understand, and I have great tutors, people like Larry and and others, and um, and they break it down so I can understand it, and then I can translate it into um, for, for other people, because, excuse me, I live by Marie Curie's motto that "Now is the time to understand more, so we will fear less."
>> Because um, we live in an age where it has become a giant industry to make people stupid and angry. Um, it's just a vast industry now, and um, uh, and, and, and, and so I think that I find that as, as noble a calling of making things explicable for people, >> as uh, investigative journalism, you know, exposing corruption, because that people don't understand, they fall prey to what Marco, you know, autocrats and, and whatnot. And um, and this is such a dizzyingly complex moment that uh, I think you can't do enough of that.
>> Yeah. Um, you know, I want to get to solutions before—
>> Yeah. Please. Actually, Margaret, go ahead. What's your—
>> So, I, you know, I think the social media is important. I think information is important. I don't want to diss that at all, but I think we're not giving, not paying enough attention to the way in which democracy's institutions need repair. That they are 250 years old. Um, they haven't evolved sufficiently. Uh, one of the projects you're involved in is new forms of deliberation and engagement. I mean, we really have to think about the ways in which people's voices are heard, are respected, are responded to. And we're doing a very inadequate job of that as democracies, most democracies.
>> And I think that's part of the problem. We've also have lost, and this is related to the earlier discussion, many of the intermediate organizations of which the local newspapers are but one, that would help do what you do as an opinion writer, translate, say to people that you can't behave like that in this situation. This is our norms for this, whether it be traditional religious institutions or unions or um—
>> GFW—a whole bunch of organizations like that.
>> —post office.
>> So, the post office, right? So, I think we need to really think about, I mean, we, we came to the end of neoliberalism, and there wasn't really an alternative elaborated. Capitalism has gone through >> multiple transformations since the time of Adam, Adam Smith, and we're sort of stuck at the moment with an old form of capitalist democracy and capitalism. So, I mean, I think the institutions themselves need a refresh and a rethink, and that's more than the social media or information problem, or certainly they don't help, but it's more than that.
>> Yeah. I, I think, and it's both is really what the biggest problem is, right? It's the accountability of the institutions, but it's also the information ecosystem that's intersecting with that. I just, I do want to say one thing. Do I want to pick up on Margaret's mind because I, I sent my friend Michael Sandel a note this morning.
>> Yeah.
>> Uh, because Michael wrote a book um, on *What Money Can't Buy*.
>> Right.
>> And um, uh, so I was home last night in Washington D.C., where I live, and um, before I went to bed, I looked at ESPN and I saw that the Hornets and the Miami Heat were tied 114-114 at the end of their playoff game. So I said to my wife, Anna, said, "Honey, I, let's just go. I was just want the tie is overtime. So, let's go watch, you know, um, uh, the overtime." So, I went to my TV and I put on the sports channel, you know, that shows all the different games, and no game was on. And then I went um, uh, to the guide, and no game was on. So, I went to Google and said, you know, Miami Heat or its game, and said, "It's streaming on Amazon." So, what was a public good before, you could just turn on your TV, you now had to actually subscribe to Amazon Prime >> in order to see something that was actually thought of in the past as a kind of a collective thing. We all sat around our TV. We watched the World Series, you know, and the same thing happened with the NCAA women's finals. I would look, I was in New Zealand, and I wanted to watch the NCAA women's finals, and it was streaming on Paramount.
>> It is a—
>> And these are fracturing. These are these are many options, and we used to watch the same channel, you know, the same people together.
>> It's the skyboxification of, of just from a different perspective.
>> Yeah. I, I want to ask you before we start talking about solutions, I mean, we've been talking about this in the abstract, but we know that context really matters. And actually, we were talking about that when we had a call a couple weeks ago, that this collapse might not be playing out the same way for everyone. There are certain communities that are uh, where decline is much steeper, different institutions where where there's also problems. Larry, you mentioned Latin America as a good example. Like there's some institutions that are really distrusted, but there's a few that are not. Other communities that are really suffering in terms of how trustworthy they see institutions or whether they're uh, more uh, affected by the information ecosystem.
Um, so any thoughts from the panel on how context is playing out in terms of trust and trustworthiness?
>> It is, well, and this is the mangrove example, really. I mean, that you can change the context in a way that you undermine >> the, the, the ways in which the interconnections exist that make it a healthy situation. And we're seeing that in multiple communities that are really different from each other that are in the United States. We'll just take the United States. So, you know, southern white men feel highly dissed and disrespected. Um, Black Americans are complaining appropriately that they have not gotten all that was promised to them, that that that the inequality still remains. Um, their religious groups who feel that they're not understood any longer or respected anymore. So I think it's playing out in multiple, there are fractures in multiple places, and that leads to distrust of government and each other across those boundaries generally, but it also leads to distrust of different kinds of institutions by those different groups.
>> So it's not a universal thing. There is a context there, an environment in which things are growing or not growing.
>> Yeah. And that mangrove destruction seems like it's more or less severe depending on the context, >> and the poisonous plants are taking over.
>> Yeah. Larry.
>> So, um, I think we must go to work on the polarization problem, and we're not going to change the social media context, unfortunately, I think radically and soon in terms of being a driver of that. But I think there are uh, important things we can do and important shocks or moments uh, that we can exploit in the best sense of the word. And now I want to say to my dear friend uh, Tom Friedman, I don't think I've put it to you quite this way. My favorite Tom Friedman column of all time was your foreign reporting recently from Minneapolis.
>> Yeah.
>> About how trust emerged in Minneapolis.
>> Yeah. That's a great story. And um, I uh, before I get to the electoral institutional reforms that I think could help pull us out of this mess, I think you should say something about that because I think in the seed of that is is part of the hope for the future, and very much speaking to the social roots of organization and connectedness that Margaret also has in mind.
>> That emerged, right?
>> Yeah. It was, it was an, you know, I'm from Minneapolis, so I, I had a little advantage, you know, um, uh, appreciating it. Um, and, um, you know, it was an emergent event. None of them saw it coming.
>> Yeah.
>> But if you're from Minnesota, um, it was totally natural because, um, you know, don't come for winter people in winter. That's a just a general, uh, and, and we are winter people. And um, and winter people, Minnesota is partly the way it is because your car is stuck in the snow, and I dig you out on Wednesday, and then Michelle digs me out on Friday, you know, it just brings people together. But it surprised people there too, you know, and, and it, because it was not only emergent, but um, this sort of silly thing, I, I still, for all time's sake, belong to a golf club in Minneapolis, Interlachen Golf Club. Yeah. Very, very um, uh, Republican, conservative club, man. They defended their Hispanic employees >> just like everybody else. It was, if you're from Minnesota, it was a very natural thing.
>> And um, I've been thinking about, and I wanted to ask actually this question to you, Larry, you know, Minnesota and Hungary, you know, really, really interesting, you know, um, and this wasn't just like 51-49, it was slam dunk, you know, take that somewhere else, you know, and we aren't putting up with it. And um, it makes me a little hopeful for, for um, 2026, but I think that it shows that I've never bought into the affordability argument that Democrats should just run on affordability. How about we run in democracy? Yeah.
>> May actually a community, you know, it may actually be the winning ticket.
>> But can I—The other piece of Minneapolis and of Hungary is that there were organizations built on the ground. Yes. That already pre-existed, whether it be the golf clubs, or whether there was a child care association that was pre-existing what happened when ICE came in. >> And those people mobilized for each other. So there was this, or and was happening in Hungary, there was, there was really on the ground pre-mobilization. >> And I think we can't >> forget, and that is part of democracy, it's really getting people to participate and engage in a variety of ways. So when the moment, moments of stress come, you actually have a capacity to respond. You can't just, it, it seldom just comes up from the ground, or it can't be sustained that way. And what was remarkable about Minneapolis was how they played by a certain set of rules that kept them above, you know, you couldn't criticize them, really. I mean, they were, they were they acted legally. They were um—
>> Nonviolent.
>> —nonviolent.
>> They were articulate. I mean, it was really well done.
>> But M—you're very right about this. This is one of the things I discovered, which is that um, they actually studied what happened in Chicago, what happened in Portland. So the sort of social entrepreneurs were there ready >> to get it started, but then like so many people, my friends who had a restaurant, everyone was in a WhatsApp group, and then just suddenly it just mushroomed and proliferated. So the roots were there, right? I think of the Hungary example is similar, that there was a sense that this took a long time, but then suddenly there was this nonlinear dynamic.
>> So the roots were there where there was an civic associations. I'm wondering, Larry, you've done a lot of work on deliberative democracy in America in one room. I, I imagine that was having people from all over the country in one room to try to help create these civic types of norms. Is there some model that you think could be scalable in local communities to help really kind of accelerate what happened in Minnesota uh, in different communities? >> And tie in the Hungary thing too. I'm very interested in your take on what happened in Hungary and whether this is now a trend we're seeing.
Okay, I, I'll just start with Hungary by saying um, I think it's the most significant gain. Well, it's one of two or three of the most significant gains for democracy maybe since this whole awful democratic recession started around the time Victor Orban came back to power um, in 2010. Uh, I, I just can't overstate the significance of it, and um, it was uh, a tremendous coming together of people uh, you know, at the grassroots. It took leadership uh, of a very different nature as well. It took the European Union uh, cutting the financial uh, support for Orban. But I think you're going to see it iterate now throughout Europe and the populism uh, of this kind, and maybe beyond. Let's not uh, ignore the ties that radiate all the way back to the United States to to be on the run. So I think there's all sorts of of lessons here. I might note um, that uh, Majar didn't only talk about uh, democracy. Actually, he didn't talk that much about it.
>> He talked about corruption.
>> Yeah.
>> And he linked it to the miserable state of social services and the economy.
>> An affordability issue there.
>> Well, in a certain way, a fair, interesting, that's a better one.
>> Yeah, better.
>> I, I. So, two more points quickly. One is when you look at a lot of the comparative data, and here I really want to underscore sub-Saharan Africa again, a lot of cynicism about political institutions, parties, parliaments, politicians, and so on. You know, what they have much more trust in NGOs? >> Grassroots organizations uh, of a kind of Tuvillian nature, if I may use it that way, where people have come together to cooperate for a common purpose. Um, now with our, our deliberative democracy and our deliberative polling, but the real payoff is if we can um, enlarge deliberative polling to be beyond just drawing random samples and get large numbers of Americans deliberating together under what my colleague Jim Fishkin calls good conditions. And what are good conditions? Good conditions are, you, you have some structure to it. You don't just throw people together in a room. By the way, I'm very sorry to all of you who uh, where I've had my back turned this time. I feel kind of guilty, but this is the way I'm positioned.
>> Are they at the same seminar we are?
>> Huh?
>> You know, looking at them.
>> Uh, in any case, um, one of the good conditions is objective information, right? And another good condition is um, having fairly stated pro and con arguments. And the third condition is an ethic which is clearly established, whether it's a deliberative poll or a school deliberation or something like that, of mutual respect and um, you know, everybody gets equal time. We love the uh, uh, the online version that we have, which is enables us to scale it up, which was developed by the crowdsourced democracy group in the school of engineering here, because it has an automated moderator and it has a neutral administration of the time. You can see a clock uh, running around, and at 45 seconds, people are cut off. And when the faculty had to deliberate on the new school, the Doerr School of Sustainability, >> imagine >> they loved this mechanism 'cause it shut their colleagues up after 45 seconds. But um, uh, we find dramatic reductions in affective polarization in emotional uh, contempt for the other side ideologically or or uh, partisanly, after people deliberate. And so if we could find a way to promote deliberation in communities and schools or bring people together online, I think we could reduce polarization in this country and actually increase information about the issues.
>> That's just really incredible. Uh, I mean, it gives a lot of optimism. I do want to say we're going to open up for uh, audience participation in a couple minutes. I will say this room has a lot of GSB students, a lot of future leaders of the world, uh, and other policymakers, uh, and community leaders, and I just wanted each of you to maybe just give one piece of advice, if you could advise anything among for these future leaders to help create more trustworthy institutions, to create ecosystems that are more trustworthy in terms of information, and build up that shared sense of trust. One thing, what would you advise? I know there's a lot of things. Um, but any advice that you'd have that you hope for them in the future?
>> Sure.
>> Tom, you want to start?
>> Um, uh, mine would be the most important lesson I've learned, um, uh, as a journalist, and that's what you say when you listen. Um, uh, because, um, uh, I was a little Jewish kid from Minnesota who wanted to cover the Arab Muslim world in the 70s. That was not a natural thing. And um, uh, uh, the New York
Times had a rule: you couldn't be Jewish and go to Beirut or Jerusalem. Um, and I broke both those bands. Um, but I didn't do it by going out there saying, "You're all great. You're all wonderful. It's all the other guys' fault." My secret, um, uh, I think to to to surviving there was to to be a good listener because two things happen when you listen. Um, uh, one is what you learn when you listen. And all the stories I got wrong were because I was talking when I should have been listening. Um, but the second thing is even more important. It's what you say when you listen. Because listening is a sign of respect. And it's amazing what people will let you say to or about them if they think you respect them.
And if they don't think you respect them, you can't tell them the sky is blue and the sun is shining. So, um, uh, what you say when you listen is really the most important thing you can say, uh, at all.
Yeah. I find it so inspiring because we've been hanging out for many years starting in Washington D.C. and, you know, you'll go and talk to anyone. I mean, you literally will talk to anyone to listen to anyone. It's not just to listen to the high-power people. You're really, you know, equal opportunity listening. And there's also a deep humility in that as a leadership characteristic. And I think here at the GSB, we really do try to emphasize that. Uh, Margaret, any any words of wisdom?
Well, you know, I I think we've touched on one of the things I would say, which is building new kinds of communities that really um interact and listen to each other and have respect and have those capacities. But I thought I would give a concrete example of where uh trustworthy government was rebuilt or trust in a particular government institution. And that's in um Australia in the 1980s when uh Bob Hawke was elected as prime minister and he inherited a crisis around the tax system which had become corrupt and had was undermined by a whole variety of factors that I won't go into. So how do you rebuild confidence in the tax system? What he did was basically have a constitutional convention around it with lots of different groups represented. It was a form of of your kind of um American "one room." It was Australia in one room. Um, and actually the tax system that came out of that wasn't all that different than the tax system before. But it had people had confidence in it. They'd been part of a process in which they'd engaged, participated, and expressed their views and been listened to.
Wow.
So it's possible.
I love it. These examples are really helpful. And we could do it, right? I mean, some of those did it. We can do it. Yep.
Larry.
Well, um, before I say the one thing, let me say that um that was one of the most powerful things I observed in Dallas, Texas, uh in 2019 when we did the original in-person "America in One Room" is the power of creating something new just out of listening. I went I I went to all kinds of uh small group discussions. We they 500 people were broken up into uh small groups of about 12 and people were sometimes in tears at the end >> because they had listened to one another across incredibly deep divisions.
Yeah. And um if you are able to go to our website, American One Room, there's a four-minute CNN clip that followed one particular small group that I think is one of the most powerful visualizations I've seen of what you just said.
And so my one word would be: be a bridge. Um, step outside your comfort zone and bridge, you know, your information flows and social networks with uh a broader range of input. Uh, be a bridge socially to difference, political difference, social difference. Um, if we can't find a way to bridge our differences, uh, in the way you saw on the streets of Minneapolis, Tom, and listen to one another, uh, I don't think we're going to get out of the trust dilemma, and I don't think we're going to get out of the downward spiral of democracy.
Wow. Thanks so much. I I want to open it up for discussion. Be mics going around. I want to just mention another thing, Larry, that um relates to what you're saying is when we when leaders do that naturally, when they're bridging, when they're being courageous and they're uh vulnerable and listening and so forth, they're also role-modeling that behavior. They're setting the norms which have been so shattered as you talked about earlier, Tom. So, I think that's there's a contagion in showing that and role-modeling that that also um
They haven't been shattered everywhere.
Yeah, that's right. We're ending optimistic. Um, so, we have a couple of minutes for questions. Um, I can't really see much. We need like sunglasses up here. But see back there um and let us know um which panelist you think uh could address your question too.
This was terrific. Thank you so much. Um, I don't know who can answer this question but one factor that you did not bring up was the increasing uh economic inequity and uh concentration of wealth among a small group of people and I'm wondering how that plays into the topic.
So broadly speaking, inequality as yet another dimension. Anyone want to think >> any of us could answer it.
Yeah, Marvin, go ahead. It plays a role. Um, and thank you for bringing it up. I mean, and it's hap that is happening in many parts of the world where we're seeing reintroduction of a disparity of wealth. And again, if you go back to the statistics that Larry was presenting earlier, I mean, he was emphasizing parliament in those four countries where trust in government or is fairly high, but they're also countries that are relatively equal where they have dealt with those inequalities. I mean, they they're all countries that have done advanced innovations and technologies and have some very wealthy people, but they get taxed. There's a commitment even among them to the collective good to sharing the wealth to some extent. They might not have they might have kicked at the beginning but they've gotten used to it. Um, and we just don't do that's why I was saying that one of the issues is really neoliberalism and the end of neoliberalism and what it has wrought and we haven't really dealt with all those consequences yet of creating this unrestrained wealthy class going back to the Gilded Age. I strongly agree with that and it doesn't take a confiscatory wealth tax which I'm utterly opposed to in order to have a a truly progressive income tax which I think is eroded in the United States because of its practical implementation. The other thing is honestly I don't know I'm not an expert. I'm I'm not sure really any human being knows what the AI revolution is going to do to jobs in the US, in the world, but if we wipe out a lot of jobs that aren't going to be replaced, and we've got a lot of people sitting out there without job prospects, what you're seeing now in terms of distrust and alienation is nothing compared to what will be coming.
Yeah, that's a really important point because we didn't really have enough time to get into the AI dimension here. It could be something that could be furthering shattering of truth, but also it could be something that can help perhaps rebuild truth. There is a lot of research going on here at Stanford that's looking at how AI can help negotiate conspiracy theories among other institutions and help people understand that they're more similar than they're different. But of course, there's also the dynamics you're talking about both economically and also with misinformation. Any other thing that the panel wants to say about that? About anything on AI?
A lot to say about that, but I'm not sure I shouldn't start down that route. But I do think that, you know, we get over >> AI is certainly going to undermine jobs. No question about it. But there also lots of jobs. The big economy will be the care economy and the health economy. And we ought to start recognizing that, respecting the people who do that work and respecting them by paying them well and providing the training and support they need. There's also going to be conservation that needs to be done. We're having problems with I mean Maxine was who I think is still here was emphasizing in the last panel how we're losing all kinds of biodiversity. You were emphasizing it in your opening remarks. I mean there are jobs that are connected with that in rebuilding that environment in rebuilding that diversity. So I mean I think we can use the AI destruction of certain kinds of jobs to build a capacity to do some of the work that really needs to be done to rebuild our earth to rebuild our social infrastructure and to take care of all those people who are going to need care into the future.
And maybe we need that big conference like in Australia to try to coordinate this ahead of time. They're just allowing this to emerge >> uh without any kind of accountability for these systems. Tom, any uh any thoughts from you before we see if there's any other questions from the audience?
There was a question over here >> just on that subject. You can't inherently trust AI. I mean, the models today, right? So, you already have a on the subject of trust. You can't trust this model, the models that are generating this information, code or whatever. And so that is going to present a problem because a lot of times we just see a number on a screen and go we'll accept it and you really can't and that's going to get better but it's not going to be absolute.
Yeah. And it might be contextual. Some people I I see that there's a lot of people that use AI for various purposes including for therapy for connection. uh there's a recent paper that just came out here at Stanford showing how synopantic AI is and and people actually feel uh respected by AI in ways that is remarkable in in such a case where they're actually it's escalating their conflict with other people. So um that's also I think is also very nuanced. Uh anything else Tom you wanted to mention? Uh any final words? I know we're almost out of time and apologies. We'd love to be mocking everyone in this room for a couple other hours, but we we have to march on to the next event, but any any final >>
I I'm just want to come and say I'm I'm uh completely humbled by this moment. The way I think about this, I've written about it with my uh my tech tutor Craig Mundy is that um I think the simplest way to think about this moment is to divide the history of the world up into three phase changes. Um, and phase changes are very useful uh physics way of thinking about the world. Um, because so uh phase one is from uh and we use uh we treat humans as H2O molecules and technology is heat. So the first phase of human history is from the dawn of man to the printing press. We call it the age of ice or the age of tools because H2O molecules and ice move very slowly and they're very separated. That's what makes ice ice. Technology comes, the printing press, melts the ice, ushers in the age of water. Now ideas flow, people flow, capital flows, trade flows. They call it the age of information in the age of water. 2017 transformer algorithm, more heat, it boils the water into vapor. Um, a and we begin the age of intelligence or the age of vapor. You think of AI as a vapor, I think, is very useful because AI is actually going to go into everything unlike any other technology. Your watch, your your hip replacement, your car, your toaster, your refrigerator. Um, and when people ask uh Craig and me what time it is, we don't actually give them an hour. We give them a temperature. We say the time today is 211.9° F. Okay? We're one-tenth of one degree from a phase change from water to vapor. And the reason phase changes are useful as a metaphor is that they're nonlinear. That is when you're an H2O molecule is ice, you have no idea what it's like to be water.
And when you're water, you have no idea what it's like to be steam. And we have no idea what is coming when we hit 212 degrees F.
I think we'll end it on that note. Please help me thank the panelists. We covered a lot of ground today. Um, some of this was quite sobering. Um, but the good news I think that we heard from the panelists: trust can be rebuilt and I think we've come up with a lot of good ideas and I I really hope that we'll continue the conversation. So, thank you all.
Thank you again. Great job.