Oh, yeah, definitely.

Yeah, epistemic inclusion, like financial inclusion.

Yeah, That.

It’s very vertical, elitist.

That is really good. And it connects to the idea of epistemic injustice and how to correct that, which is, I think, a very good theoretical idea because it’s like lay governance, right? Just because people lack certain training and certain use of language doesn’t mean that they don’t have ...

Yes, in the Minderoo context.

This is what Google Jigsaw is now doing in Bowling Green, Kentucky, WhatCouldBGBe.com. That used this idea of committed listeners to the people’s wish in Bowling Green without a single triggering condition.

But I think this continuous horizon scanning is another model that we really like because then it doesn’t need to be urgent issue after urgent issue. Rather, exactly as you said, it could be part of the deliberative system that enables, for example, their city councils to just read what ...

When they ran their nationwide “What do you think, Finland?” consultation, that enabled them to very easily do a horizontal scan on upcoming polarization points. For example, I remember the most polarized point was older generations feeling that the language they were taught and used throughout their lives was now ...

Well, I think the World Happiness Report. We’ve been the happiest in East Asia for two years now. That was also why when I was in Finland, Sitra (Finnish Innovation Fund) people really wanted this connection, because Finland is, of course, the happiest overall. They also want their process to ...

Chapter 2-2. Economically, we’ve also done very well, and the Youth Development Administration within the Ministry of Education tackles issues like social housing, mental health, and many other things that young people feel are worthy of national agenda-setting. The young people themselves are the facilitators who conduct the broad listening ...

Yeah, so the Plurality book cites rigorous data on all these, especially affective polarization.

So in 2022, according to the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), Taiwanese 15-year-olds were top of the world when it comes to the feeling of agency, belonging, and care they feel around planetary and people issues. This horizontal trust, I think, was the most enduring legacy. The other ...

The point here is that instead of saying, “The young people have demands and the government should please them,” it flipped it on its head and said, “The young people have directions and the senior people should follow them and provide them with resources.” That turned out to be the ...

Yeah, I think one big part of it is the intergenerational pact. I was introduced as a young reverse mentor to the cabinet when I was 33. At the time, the central government institutionalized this idea of people under 35 mentoring cabinet ministers about where young people want to go. ...

It’s like the Tokyo Olympics 2020. They changed the Olympic slogan, which used to be “Faster, Higher, Stronger,” to “Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together.”

Yeah. That’s interesting. I think broad listening, of all those memes, has the most political potential to me, maybe not just in Japan and California, because that speaks to a real pain point of anyone working in politics today. Because the petitions, the people’s ideas, are now all AI-assisted or ...

Exactly. It’s all about broadcasting.

I think five years ago, around 2019-20, was the time that we really figured out scaling laws really work. So I visited OpenAI before the Anthropic fork. Jack Clark and others were writing very publicly about that, I think around 2019. So that’s when I realized that, oh, we’re eventually ...

No, not at all. Not at all.

Oh, very good. Okay. Yeah. I’ve been working with Lawrence Lessig of Harvard on Frankly.org, which used to be called Kazm. It is now an entirely open-source, out-in-the-open clone-ish version of the Stanford deliberative platform that we used in Taiwan. And so, yeah, because now any open-source project benefits from ...

As in video conference online?

Very good.

Not yet, no.

Yeah, I was interviewed by Rory Stewart, with Alistair Campbell. Before the interview, I read his longish op-ed about his experience in government and why he ultimately decided to step out. I think bandwidth saturation, although he did not use that term, was the main theme of that op-ed. So ...

Yeah, and I think that is partly because people associate deliberation, with good reason, with taking the time needed. People instinctively think that destruction is easy and coming to consensus is hard, so it takes more time. In Japan, when we say “broad listening,” we always couple it with the ...

Yes.

In a sense, populism, escaping vertical trust, is a direct consequence of people feeling closer together on digital platforms than through any intermediaries. Any intermediary, whether it’s BBC or CNN, that tries to do interpretive work necessarily relies on the broadcasting capability of vertical institutions that reach millions. Populism is ...

Yes. I understand populism as a way to bypass the vertical institutions of trust—whether it’s media, university, or the career bureaucracy—and go directly to the horizontal mode of trust, which is people essentially resonating with each other’s vibes. I hope that jives well with the British understanding of populism.

Yeah, I think there’s a fine difference here. Consensus sounds like people have to sign their name on it, everybody agrees, like a joint protocol or something. But bridging is more about consent, not consensus. It’s about, “Okay, we can live with it,” right? It’s not that I will sign ...

Not necessarily consensus; it could be just bridging.

So, to your question, I think there’s a model around uncommon ground, around bridging, and there’s also another model around the loud extremes. It really depends on whether the space is a broadcasting medium or a broad listening medium. Just as we, in groups of six or ten, would not ...

A couple months ago, I had a hour-long conversation with Laura Loomer, a prominent influencer of the MAGA right. She and her 60,000 live-stream viewers on X and Rumble. We very quickly identified the bridging sentiment as countering authoritarianism without sacrificing free speech and finding this uncommon ground. It’s also ...

Yeah, the surprising validators. Yes. And I think that is really the point. With language models, one can now identify, in a huge amount of text—a rant that is a personal attack, very toxic or whatever—the few words in it that can be construed as constructive and bridge-making. I always ...

Closing the loop—not just the sense-making/listening part, but the closing the loop part—used to be so time-consuming. It was impossible to scale, even harder to scale than the listening part. The listening part, at least you could use some sense-making coding and human ‘small language models.’ But closing the loop, ...

The point here is that they also realized it’s now much easier to close the loop. If you, inasmuch as you had an online conversation or typed in a few words and suggestions, and then the Tokyo Metropolitan Government decides to implement some of them—previously, all they could do was ...

So he used sensemaking tools introduced in the book, like Talk to the City and Polis to crowdsource his campaign. He live-streamed on YouTube 24/7. You could even call into a number to talk to his voice clone and ask questions, or maybe hashtag #TokyoAI to post your suggestion to ...

Yeah, definitely. So I totally agree. And I think the risk-reducing part is now widely understood because if you keep backpedaling, you don’t go anywhere. The risk of vetocracy is well understood. Although the time-saving part, I think, is not well understood. I always stress this, and it certainly resonated ...

Yeah, because in Taiwan’s experience, like 90% of people are ‘maybes’.

Yes, MIMBYs (Maybe In My Back Yard). I love that.

Um, so one clarification though: Engaged California is a general-purpose platform that any ministry within the state government, as well as potentially city-level or maybe even district-level governments in the future, can reuse to introduce their own topics. There are also conversations about enabling, like in Taiwan, a citizen e-petition, ...

So it’s not that we manufactured <em> that </em> urgency, but rather we put people in the mood of figuring out what the short-term urgency is—the thing that if we don’t solve, we stand no chance of solving everything else after that. Kind of like a blocker in the path. ...

Yes. So, by highlighting an urgent aspect—for example, for AI governance, which, as we just learned, is all-encompassing—if you ask people, “What do you feel about AI governance?” you’re not going to get very useful results because it’s just too vague. Instead, last January or a few months before that, ...

It’s like chronic?

You could highlight the most urgent aspect.

However, on the day of the intended launch, the LA wildfire happened. I was in California, so we did not launch the initiative then. On the other hand, the wildfire provided an even more urgent meta-context, which was not just how to build back better when it comes to policy, ...

In California, we’ve been working on the second enabling condition, which was a law passed by their legislature demanding the state government prepare social media codes for young people under 18. This came from a widespread understanding that kids are kind of being trapped in the social media landscape. While ...

The second threshold is that there needs to be “air cover.” Either the governor, the mayor, the city council—somebody needs to pre-commit to close the loop. It needs to be a pre-commitment; that is to say, no matter what result the people want, leadership should at least be accountable in ...

The trade deal with Beijing in 2014 was certainly of this shape. The first generation of AI manipulation algorithms in terms of Uber, social media, and so on was certainly like that in 2015; the pandemic in 2020, of course, was also of this shape. The reason why is that ...

I think there essentially need to be two thresholds, one after another. The first is a widespread sense of urgency about something the British call a “wicked problem”—like there’s not a single actor that can solve it in a Pareto improvement kind of way, but rather, it requires everybody to ...