Hi everybody. So bad news up front. I hate to break it to you, but we’re all living a lie. Some of us may be living more than one lie, but I want to focus on one in particular as social change communicators, which I think actually distorts and undergirds a lot of our work. And it’s a lie that we all learn in grade school, actually. It’s a lie that we can even hear in the founding document of our country. We hold these truths to be self-evident. There it is. The lie is truths are self-evident. Or we hear it again in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous idea of the marketplace of ideas, where the best truth rises to the top. I think it’s safe to say a year into the Trump administration that this is not happening. The truth is not rising to the top. And instead, it’s being distorted. It’s being stepped on. It’s being watered down and distracted from. And it’s a crisis. And I think Barack Obama talked about this in his farewell speech to the country when he said that our inability to agree on a set of facts is actually like a crisis for democracy, because democracy depends on an informed public that’s coming together across different viewpoints and finding some kind of sense of common ground and truth together. And if we can’t do that, then this whole project kind of starts to wobble. But I think if we’re in a crisis, we’ve been distracted about what the problem is. So we’ve heard a lot about fake news and about Russian bots and about disinformation campaigns. And I think all of that stuff is creepy, it’s scary, it’s sexy, but it’s not the problem. The problem’s deeper than that. The problem is that the truth isn’t loud enough. And unless we confront this problem, I don’t think that we’re going to actually kind of make headway. We could get rid of all that fake news and still not be where we want to be in terms of moving toward a better society. It’s kind of like trying to deal with a heart attack with a bandaid. Wrong solution for the problem. So I want to argue that the problem, the thing that’s causing this fundamentally is that the marketplace of ideas that we’ve all heard about, it’s been rigged. The economics have changed in a way that has distorted what information gets to whom. And that if we want to build a system that makes the truth louder, we’ve got to address that problem. And this isn’t like a bum out talk. I have a theory of what we could all do together to actually address this. But first, I want to actually talk about what the problem is, because I think it’s only by diagnosing it that we can kind of get to that solution. So a little bit about me, I kind of come to this from a funny point of view. I started as an organizer, became the executive director of Move On. And at Move On, we could always see, I think it’s funny to be in conversations with social change communicators who say, does media even really matter? Does it move people? I can tell you as an organizer, yes, it does. It does. And we could see it, because we could see the response rates going up by 3x the day after something hit the New York Times front page. So that’s actually what got me into this question in the first place. And I got interested in this problem of, OK, we can see this kind of cause and effect relationship. But what happens as we see people’s attention shifting from the New York Times to the Facebook news feed? What’s going to happen then in terms of how people are primed to take action? And so I started doing this little research project that turned into a book called The Filter Bubble, which was kind of my attempt to grapple with those problems. And then I was going around talking about the book, which is kind of this critique of social media. And people were like, ah, you’re such a downer. Like, what are you really going to do about it? I was like, OK, I got to take the bait. I’m always one for a challenge. I started a company called Upworthy that was attempting to kind of solve some of these problems. So I come at this from three perspectives, as someone who has been an organizer, who’s been a media critic, and then tried to kind of build some media properties and learn about the dynamics and the challenges with the dynamics in media. So I want to talk about sort of three dirty secrets that we have to confront in order to find the right shape of the solution. And the first secret is that we’re living in a landscape where some people’s attention is more valuable than others. We all kind of know there’s been this enormous shift in how we communicate. But I want to take us back to the 1970s and think about the kind of economics of information then. So you’re a local TV station in 1970, and you have this antenna, and it reaches a geographic area. And there’s zero marginal cost to reaching more people or less people. It doesn’t matter if 50 people tune in or 500, right? And your advertisers want to reach a small subset of that group of people. But in order to reach that small subset, they have to go through you. And if that small subset is going to really be interested in news, then the news goes on at 6. And on the other hand, if you’re not interested in news, but you want to watch TV at 6, there’s only one thing to watch. So it’s worth saying this was not a panacea, as we all know. And there were a ton of people who were completely left out of this conversation, women, folks of color, non-straight foot. Basically, everyone but straight white dudes were not heard in this ecosystem. It wasn’t great old days. But what we saw was a bell curve of political informness. And this is from research by a guy named Marcus Pryor. But basically, because if you were really, really interested in news, you still could only watch the news every day at 6. And if you weren’t interested at all, sometimes you ended up watching it anyway, you got this kind of average of political informness. So along comes the internet. And it’s worth saying, what does technology do? One of the main things that technology does is make things more efficient. So Airbnb makes the housing market more efficient, or the bed market more efficient. Uber makes the car market the taxi market more efficient. What market does Facebook make more efficient? Facebook makes more efficient the selling of valuable attention to advertisers, emphasis on valuable. Because we’re talking about the attention economy all the time. But I don’t think we really grapple with this truth, which is that some people’s attention is more valuable than other people’s attention. And I ran a little experiment just to kind of demonstrate this on Facebook. So I actually just took this very scary article about the CDC losing funding and boosted it to two groups, rich white dudes on the coast who have college degrees. And Latino women who are lower income. And you can see, like, the rich white dudes command a 6x premium over the Latino women. So is it any surprise that there are a whole host of media entities that are going after the rich white dudes and not a whole lot of media infrastructure that’s aimed at Latino women? And meanwhile, we have this shift from a bell curve to a power curve, where you have a small group of people who has gotten hyper informed in this moment. And probably a lot of you are in this room. But it’s worth remembering, most people do not consume very much news at all. They consume less than they did before the internet. That’s crazy. And so you have kind of rising information inequality. So what sort of comes to mind is that we’re seeing this kind of fabric that we depend on as a democracy eaten away. And we’re starting to see the creation of these kind of narrative deserts, environments in which the ideas and the news that people need in order to be informed, engaged citizens, simply aren’t part of the environment. William Gibson once said that the future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed. And I want to say, like, the truth is here, but it is very unevenly distributed. And because of these economics, it’s getting more unevenly distributed. So the second piece is, these changes are also reshaping at the same time who we trust. And this isn’t a coincidence. And I want to suggest that we’re seeing this massive crash and trust in media. But it’s kind of like this, we’re not understanding it correctly, because we’re not understanding kind of where the trust came from in the first place. So it’s worth saying, what we believe, mostly we believe from other people. We think we know these facts, but very few of them have we objectively experienced. We know diamonds are made from coal, and we know Napoleon was short, and we know the Great Wall of China is visible from space. Except diamonds aren’t mostly made from coal, and Napoleon was taller than average. And if you can see the Great Wall on this map from space, you’re a better wall viewer than I am. So why do we think these things are true? We think they’re true because someone smart told us they were true, and we relied on that person. That’s how we come to believe what we believe is true. And we had this sort of weird 50-year period where there were these, to tell people things, you had to have access to a lot of capital to build a printing press or to build an antenna. And those people who had that access to capital decided that in order to push ideas through, you had to subscribe to a set of norms. And so we came to believe that people trusted those norms, but they didn’t trust those norms. They just thought they did, because that was the way that they got most of the information. And basically, we don’t have faith in journalistic process. We thought we did because there were local media monopolies. And when we think about how trust works on a human level, we all kind of know intuitively that this isn’t how it works, that we don’t trust the person who is cold and punctilious and perfect at dotting every eye over the person who cares about us, who is warm, and who has our best interests at heart. And so I think we’ve seen this kind of collapse in trust, because in part, media really hasn’t had a lot of people’s best interests at heart. It hasn’t been actually interested in taking care of us. And now there’s an easier way to do it. We’ve all got Facebook, and we can get information through our friends. And that’s actually a lot more comfortable and natural as human beings than it was to rely on these intermediaries. People talk about journalism as the immune system for democracy, right? And I think we’ve got an autoimmune disorder. Like, we’re eating ourselves away from the inside. And so this brings me to the third piece, which is kind of like, not news to people who have been at Frank. But what we believe isn’t rational, and the more of a rationalist you are, the more you have to agree with me on this point. Because there are thousands of studies that Anne and other people can tell you about, about how what we believe is not the function of rationally adding up numbers. And so we know a bit about what actually people come to believe. And it’s about repetition, and it’s about recency, and it’s about emotion, and it’s about storytelling, and it’s about trusted voices. And I just want to reflect on this for a minute, because if we really believe all of these things, then the shape of the solution to our truth problem is really different than the kind of media that we’ve had in the past. So to recap, the economics have changed. There are these new narrative deserts. People no longer kind of trust or need traditional media for the things that they thought they needed it for. And the way people internalize ideas looks really different anyway. And so I think that the question, the challenge in front of us, is like, what is the right response to this set of large scale challenges? 50 years ago, this year, Congress created the public media system. And if you look back at the charter for the public media system, it’s really pretty awesome. It is in the public interest to encourage the development of programming that involves creative risks and addresses the needs of underserved and unserved audiences, particularly children and minorities. It’s like, not bad. And so I think we need a new public media ecosystem for the digital age. So I wanna talk about what that might look like. And to be clear, I don’t have an institution on building, but I think all of us together need to be thinking on a kind of scale and in its shape to address this challenge. So I think we need a new ecosystem of community focused, impact oriented digital media channels and entities. And I think we need a network across that ecosystem that helps us learn together and helps us grow and adapt as the environment changes. And I think these entities need to look a little different from like our traditional sort of media and news gathering and even storytelling entities, because I think they need to bring together three discrete kind of skill sets. So there’s this skill set of finding what is true. And then there’s skill set of how do we actually get it in front of people, marketing and distribution. And then there’s a skill set of like, but even if we got in front of them, did they actually internalize it and does it change their lives and did they do something about it? And these things live very far apart. And I think this gathering, which is not a conference, is one of the few places where they’re coming together. But I think we need to build institutions, entities that do this every day. So I was trying to think about sort of what populates a narrative desert. And I came up with this acronym of an oasis. And I think the first letter is actually the most important, which is that it has to be ongoing. I’ve been a campaigner. I’ve done one off viral videos. It’s all cool, but it’s not enough because we actually have to be in people’s lives every day if we’re gonna wanna have the kind of scale and reach that we want. It has to be audio centric, which means built off the needs of the audience where they are. It has to be story-based. It has to be iterative and constantly learning. And it has to have some mechanism for some self-sustaining. I’m not arguing, and in fact I’m arguing explicitly, that we can’t do this through a pure market-based solution. But that building in some of the economics of what we’ve learned in media could actually be helpful. And I think there’s a huge opportunity space here because we’ve seen the rise of some really powerful and exciting new experiments in ProPublica and the Marshall Project, but these things are generally focused at elites. And they’re focused at changing decision-makers’ minds. They’re not actually focused outward at changing culture, at building a more engaged public or publics. And I think that’s the place where there’s an enormous opportunity. So what does this look like? It’s gonna look different for each population because people consume media differently. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution here. The National Domestic Workers Alliance is launching a new podcast called, I think, Sunshine or Sunshower, which is like the view for domestic workers. And the idea is that as you’re cleaning, you’ve got your earbuds in. And every day you’re getting in this conversation that’s providing you both with a sense of how to be better in your job, but also actually connecting you to the things that are going on in the world. So that’s one version of what it looks like. So it’s gonna look different for each different group. And in fact, probably within each narrative desert, within each demographic area, you need multiple of these things working together as an ecosystem to actually make this work. So you’re probably thinking to yourself, like, this sounds awesome, but impossibly expensive. And I would argue, like, this is a real, like this doesn’t come cheap. It’s probably $500 million or something as a way to get started, right? And so $500 million kind of sounds like a lot of money, it is a lot of money. But wait, is it a lot of money? Because what we’re trying to do is change culture. And Coca-Cola’s advertising budget is $4 billion every year. And that’s one company. And $500 million is a tiny fraction of $4 billion, right? So if we’re serious about this project and about the scale of the crisis and about the scale of the challenge, like, we gotta find a way to do this. And the other piece is actually, I think when we back out the math, and I’m a nerd, so like, I actually did the spreadsheets to start to work on this, like, we find that actually this way of reaching people is way, way cheaper than the advertising that we spend a lot of money on. For the simple reason that if you hire 100 creatives versus putting that money into advertising, like, the cost per impression is literally 100 times less. So I think the key thing here, though, is that we can’t just let 1,000 flowers bloom. And that’s for a very simple reason, which is that flowers don’t bloom in the desert because there’s no water. So if we just let the market try to take care of this, it’s not gonna work because the places where this is most needed are the places specifically where the economics actually are kind of the most challenging. So you might be thinking now, well, Eli, this sounds great, but I don’t have $100 million to give you right now. So how can I help? I’m not asking, by the way, but… I’m trying to just… Well, I don’t have a thing to give it to you. I think this is something we all gotta do together. And I think part of the answer is, we’re all involved in these organizations that also play a critical role in building these new ecosystems, right? So you look at an organization like Planned Parenthood or do something, and there’s probably like 100 examples in the room of organizations that already have these relationships with built-in bases that could actually kind of start to conceive of themselves as media channels, as much as organizations that are moving people to activism. And it requires a different set of muscles, but I think we’re starting to see some organizations really figure out how to do this. That’s a big piece of the puzzle, too. So if I leave you with one thought, I wanna leave you with this thought, which is that I think we have to reckon with the fact that the truth is not gonna distribute itself. And it needs help. It needs our help. And I don’t think you would be here in this room if you didn’t believe this. And I also think you wouldn’t be here if you thought it was all kind of working okay. And you thought we were kind of addressing these problems on the scale that we need to address them. And I think within this room and beyond it, there’s a whole group of people who, if we get together and we think about the shape of the solution and we think about the shape of the scale, we can actually build something that does address this at the scale that we need to. Because at the end of the day, this is a pivotal moment. And it’s not just a pivotal moment for us in this room or even our country. It’s a pivotal moment for the whole project of democracy. It’s a pivotal moment for this question of can people, can ordinary people come together and self-govern? Can they find common ground? Can they find facts that they agree on? That’s the project that we have to focus on. And that’s the moment that we’re in. And so I wanna get building this thing. And I hope all of you will join me because I think this is the central thing that we need to work on. Thank you. Thank you.