How Can AI be Part of Bringing Deliberative Democracy to the Masses? w/ JAMES S. FISHKIN
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There's three ills of democracy that I propose to address with this method that we've perfected. First, democracy is supposed to make some connection with the quote-unquote will of the people. But how can we estimate the will of the people when everyone's trying to manipulate it? The public is subjected to misinformation, disinformation. The second problem is that the way our

political communication systems have evolved, we get more and more extreme partisan polarization. And the divisions have become seemingly intractable. And those divisions lead to deadlock and a perception that democracies cannot get anything done or people

at least lose faith in democracy. Dr. James Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communications at Stanford University, where he serves as a professor of communication, a professor by courtesy of political science, and director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab. He is best known for developing deliberative polling, a method applied in multiple countries around the world. He has also published extensively on deliberative democracy, including his latest book, Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?

Professor James Fishkin, welcome to The Creative Process. Thank you. This conversation comes at an interesting moment where we're witnessing a huge change in the political order and perhaps the world order. And your new book, Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy? I found it so compelling and timely exploring how deliberative democracy can address the polarization, misinformation and disengagement.

plaguing modern democratic systems around the world, not just in the US. So your argument that structured, informed discussion among diverse groups of citizens can lead to better policy decisions and a more engaged electorate, it seems like it might be idealistic, but it's also pragmatic as you write about it. In the book, you don't just

theorize about a better democracy, you present real world examples where deliberative processes have led to more informed and consensus-driven decisions. And this has been your life's work. I mean, this is not just this book that you came out with, you know, and your work challenges the assumption that citizens are too uninformed citizens

or indifferent to meaningfully contribute to policy decisions outside of the usual rage to engage and fractured connections without silos. I mean, I have so many questions for you, but let's just start off with the core of your book. How can deliberation cure the ills of democracy? You know, how can we scale it and teach the public to participate in a deliberative society? And is AI part of this bringing deliberate democracy to the masses?

Well, that's a big question. There are three ills of democracy that I propose to address with this method that we've perfected now over the last several decades. And maybe 160 elaborate projects are...

First, democracy is supposed to make some connection with the quote-unquote will of the people. But how can we estimate the will of the people when everyone's trying to manipulate it? The public is subjected to misinformation, disinformation. Our public sphere has decomposed into...

filter bubbles or enclaves where people hear like-minded voices because they find them congenial. Algorithms of social media make that convenient to get information that way. So finding the will of the people is the first problem. The

The second problem is that the way our political communication systems have evolved, we get more and more extreme partisan polarization and the divisions have become seemingly intractable. And those divisions lead to deadlock and a perception that democracies cannot get anything done or people at least lose faith in democracy. That's the second big problem.

The third big problem is that for democracy to function, citizens need to make a connection between their considered judgments about what needs to be done and what the parties are offering in elections. But our voting patterns become more and more tribalistic based upon identity. People will support their party right or wrong, and they won't think about it. Party membership for leaners is

Even for supposed independents, most independents are leaners one way or the other. It's the party identity that is decisive. We need more

deliberative voters, voters who will think about the issues and exercise their choices based upon the issues and not merely party loyalty. This has been argued to be a folk theory of democracy that's a kind of idealistic pattern that used to be celebrated. It's part of our folk wisdom, but it never happens. It's as rare as a unicorn. Well, we have shown

with applications of deliberative polling in controlled experiments, some of them national, some of them quite visible, some of them televised, some of them featured in major media like the New York Times and others, that the design of organized deliberation solves all three of these. So then the problem is, what do you do with that? Is there some way of scaling it? And I would say first,

There are many occasions when deliberative polls by themselves have been used to solve major public problems at the national level and at local levels and in various parts of the world. And those are very interesting developments because many of them are unexpected. But secondly, there's no reason why the deliberative process could not be scaled. You don't need a constitutional amendment for it.

which a constitutional amendment in my country, in the U.S., is almost impossible to get, as you know. But it's a question of collective political will, if we would like to scale it. And it has lasting effects. So I want to spread deliberation in the schools. I want to spread it for certain important occasions, maybe national elections. There can be mass deliberation. And we've created a

platform working with Stanford colleagues here in engineering, which has now been used in about 60 countries around the world in various languages, even for a global deliberation. So it's been used and it's very effective and cost effective. And it does exactly the same thing as with human moderators. The key elixir

is moderated discussion with diverse others in a context where people have access to balanced information for policy choices and the pros and cons of those that have been vetted so they have good information and an opportunity for one day, two days to engage in depth.

with other people from different points of view. And we found this method could be scaled and with a really representative sample, it represents what the public would think under these good conditions. We have found

that when others who hear about it or watch it on television or in the media or policymakers hear what the public really would think about an issue, it often has an impact. And we have found, secondly, that the supposedly intractable divisions between our political parties considerably diminish when people learn to listen to each other.

and their concerns. Now, if you just confront them with a different point of view, it may backfire. But if you have a civil discussion where over time people learn to listen, they open up and they begin to actually consider the point of view of the other.

And thirdly, we have found that even a year later, after one of these experiments, people vote according to their considered judgments that they've arrived at. And we found that on a number of issues. And we published this in the American Political Science Review. We published it in Perspectives on Politics. We published it in the major academic journals. And those conclusions are featured in my book,

So it's not a myth that voters can do this. Now, you say voters are ill-informed. Yes, they often are ill-informed.

because of rational ignorance. If I have one vote in millions, why should I pay a lot of attention? Particularly when I know everybody's trying to sell me something or manipulate me, why should I pay a lot of attention? Because most of us are too busy. We have to earn a living. We have to provide for our families. And the complexities of public policies are such that it's rational not to spend too much time on it. However,

If you get them to focus, they are perfectly competent to deal with the issues facing their communities and their countries. That's the difference. It's not that they're already informed, but if you have one voice in a sample of a thousand, which has been divided up into small groups of 10, your voice matters in that small group and you feel engaged there.

to listen and to think about the issues, particularly if you've got a good digest of the pros and cons and an opportunity to question competing experts. And that's part of our process too. So that's an outline. The hardest part is the scaling, but even if we don't end up scaling it, we could do a great deal of good to clarify what the people really would think. The book ends with a whole bunch of different applications for deliberative processes and

And here's the trick. Each of them is justifiable, but if you could do all of them, you would end up with a more deliberative society. You'd end up changing the way people relate to each other across difference, and you'd end up creating the habits of citizenship, which would lead to better public decisions.

Yeah, I think it was really interesting as well. You mentioned there that these samples that are 10 in a group, like we're talking now over Zoom, it could be AI-assisted,

and then you also have actual human moderators. And they're given these documents that are prepared, they're fact-based, they're empirical, assembled by experts, but they're not meant to push people in any one direction, but to make up their own mind. And I found it very interesting because you have a sample where there isn't a deliberative group, they just have their opinions, but then you pull before and then you pull after. And I imagine that many of the participants would have been surprised

how their opinion changed. You mentioned that sometimes it's quite substantial. When you pull them before they take part, it kind of lines up with, say, voting patterns. But then there's one example, the majority that Biden received in the election that he won against Trump was much more after a deliberative process. And did you find, in general, even though the information is not intended to sway, but once they really think about the issues and how it affects them and how their vote aligns

aligns with that, what they in fact really want, does that end up being more Democratic or Republican in the instance of America? Or which party is more aligning with what they think they're voting for? And then when they're informed, they find it's not lining up and actually they might belong in another party.

Well, we haven't had people changing parties, but we've found people coming to a decision about the issues. So the New York Times featured the changes, which I reproduce in the book, both among Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats changed dramatically in terms of lowering their support for the most ambitious and expensive social programs. The Republicans changed dramatically on immigration, where

Before deliberation, something like 80% of the Republicans wanted to send undocumented immigrants home. This was in the 2019 case before the 2020 election. 80% wanted to send the undocumented immigrants to their so-called home countries. After deliberation, only 40%. That's a 40-point drop. But the Democrats changed on some of the social programs by as much as 40 points, too. And there were movements, in other words,

on some of the economic issues by the Democrats in favor of things that were initially supported strongly by the Republicans. And when we did a later project on climate change, the Republicans moved from about

30% of the Republicans believing that climate change was anything important or a crisis to 56% believing that. And the same for a whole bunch of specific policies that might address climate issues. We had about 70 of them. And on almost all of them, the Republicans moved on that. So the idea that people are intractable in their views is

is misleading. If you put them in an environment where they have a civil dialogue and they re-examine the implications of their views and they get their questions answered and they have an opportunity to listen to some of the people who may be affected by some of the choices, they will often move

substantially. And that ends up depolarizing our differences. If people had the habit of self-critically thinking about the issues, and if they had more opportunities to talk to others who had different points of view in a civil way, instead of just shouting at them, we could end up with a more deliberative society.

Yeah. And so what would your advice be to politicians seeking to find a way that deliberative democracy might be more fully integrated? You know, how does this play within traditional governance? What are some things that, you know, can really only be done by government as it is now? And how can we work hand in hand to complement the different aspects of democracy?

Well, I think we need to create more and more occasions where there is dialogue across party that is substantive instead of just

playing to create effective soundbites. And I think that we've got cases in the book in all kinds of countries where a deliberative poll was created with a national sample that dealt with some hard issue, the condition of the Roma in Bulgaria, whether Japan should change its pension system.

what Japan should do after the Fukushima disaster, what South Korea needed to do when they had some half-built nuclear reactors. The governing party of President Moon was an anti-nuclear party, but if they didn't finish the reactors, there were lots of implications for climate change and importing fossil fuels, etc. There are all kinds of cases around the world where the

Governments or civil society and broadcasters, with the cooperation of the governments, have organized national deliberative polls that were quite visible that made it clear the concerns of the public and the reasons for supporting a key policy choice. And that experience has led from one project to another, or what in Australia the policy should be towards the Aboriginals, or even...

whether or not Australia should get rid of the Queen, or all kinds of places where there are big choices that need to be made about the Constitution or about policy. And we foster these projects, which, because they're organized in a certain way, we have confidence in.

that we can really get the views of the public. So we need occasions. I wrote an op-ed some years ago in the New York Times that, you know, there are all these congressional town meetings. They called it town meetings by invitation. You ought to have town meetings with a representative sample and maybe representatives from different parties who will actually answer substantively the same questions.

along with panels of competing experts who represent different points of view. And then you see what a more informed and representative public

would think about a given issue. We did a project to try to stimulate ballot propositions in California because California is governed to some considerable extent by initiatives. But it's usually organized interests or very wealthy people who sponsor these initiatives because it takes millions of dollars to collect the signatures.

Well, you could have a system where public interest groups could propose initiatives and the people could deliberate and put those on the ballot so that the agenda setting was by the people. And then you could also have this to advise voters what the public really would think about these propositions because we're inundated with them. But in the UK, you know something about the dangers of referendums, I suspect.

Well, I'm not in the UK. I've lived there for a little while, but I'm in Paris. But yeah, we also are very engaged in Paris and in France, as you know. I think what's really interesting is that I hear so often so many people are in a state of despair, particularly in America, but elsewhere, because populism is on the rise, autocracy is on the rise, or, you know, some kind of blend of the two, corporatocracy, all these ills.

And I actually just spoke to a friend of mine who has to come to Paris every once in a while just to recharge and escape this despairing feeling he's from the Bay Area. And so he comes here to just regain his sanity and then go back. So I think a lot of people are not aware of deliberative democracy and how it functions or don't know anything about this platform. Maybe they've heard a little bit about sortition, you know, the random samplings, but they weren't aware that there are really all these tools that would enable the scaling up

Like, I'm so, so glad to hear about this. And I just want to say for those of you out there who are feeling like, how can we save democracy? Well, yes, there are answers. James Fishkin has just written about it and he's written about it in other books. And it's a deliberative democracy lab in Stanford has been devoted to this. So I think that young people are really eager to be engaged as well, but they don't quite know how. How can

they get involved in this movement? Even before their voting age, they're really curious about this. How do we like model it at that young age so that it really can have repercussions in decades to come? I mean, we have so many young people on our project from university level and younger, so concerned about the environment, the rise of fascism and everything. So how can they get involved? How can their parents get involved? How can it be even a way for bringing generations together?

Well, my colleague, Alice Hsu, has been meeting an effort to bring deliberation to the schools

and to universities around the country, and in universities in other countries as well. And a lot of these projects are on our AI-assisted platform because that makes it easy and also allows us to have projects where students from different parts are in the same small groups deliberating. But sometimes just in a given school system as well, we've done this.

And we also had, working with the Close Up Foundation in Washington, D.C., we also brought a national sample of young people to Washington to consider how they were going to vote. This is last summer before the election. And we had a

great sample from the nation's 40,000 high schools. We selected these people. And I must tell you that their enthusiasm had completely consumed the briefing document. We also have a video version of the briefing document as well to make it clearer and maybe more easily accessible, but they didn't need that. They knew everything.

they engaged intensively. And they changed their opinions on many of the same issues that the adults did in the original American One Room four years earlier. But the point is that young people, even if they weren't interested at all in politics before or public policy, given the opportunity, they took to it immediately and with alacrity. So I think that

young people are a very fertile area. Civic education, you know, is not working so well. And I think that instead of the traditional models of teaching, anything active where people are discussing is much more effective than being an audience before a great, even very talented teacher. If a group can engage to sort of teach itself by discussing the issues and in a context where they feel their voice matters,

you can get very effective results. And I include university students, but also in that sample for that American One Room project, we had non-college young people from all over the United States, red states, blue states, urban, rural, suburban. They came from everywhere all together. And that was part of the excitement. But you could do it in the schools. One of the reasons we do these experiments is to gather the data to show how effective it is

because we'd like to talk some schools and school systems into employing it more extensively. But we can't do everything at once. We're a small lab, and we've now been doing projects also on not only using our AI-assisted platform, but on AI issues. And my feeling is that as long as every project we do is rigorous and well done, we end up with the kinds of results that we've come to expect.

That's so interesting. And on that point of education, you grew up in a different time with its own set of problems. But the recent experiences, young Americans and young people around the world are confronting from gun violence to climate change, as you mentioned. What it means to be a young person at the cusp of adulthood, I think it's more challenging than many other times in history. So if you were a young adult today, what tools and skills would you be seeking out to help you navigate for your journey?

Oh, well, I don't know if I can offer general advice, except think for yourself. Question the news sources that you get exposed to willy-nilly by algorithms. Question the sources. And if you're interested in a topic, do some of your own research.

but do it with some validation. You know, the major newspapers have databases of claims that they've fact-checked, and there's so much misinformation and disinformation that you can get exposed to, and well-meaning people can turn into conspiracy theorists if they're not careful. So you have to be self-critical. The habits of thinking for yourself are very hard to develop currently, but that's what we need

of all citizens. Yes, exactly. And one thing, I mean, just to talk about the Trump presidency, and of course, Elon Musk has been brought in to power

On the one hand, take out the fat from the budget, which I'm not against that. There's a lot of areas where money is being misspent, overspent. I can see that the average American struggled to get by and they would look at the U.S. budget and find genuine areas. But I find it's a little bit much, say, with Elon Musk on the one hand, trimming the fat out of the budget, on the other hand, being a government contractor or benefiting from government contracts and other perks. So

I would much rather have that in the hands of the people where you can just look at a budget. And for me, it's military spend is too much. And I'd rather be spending on mitigating the effects of climate change or making health care accessible to all, education, these kind of investments in the future and in society and long term.

But yeah, how could even the deliberative democracy platforms be more involved in that decision-making process? Because when we vote with the one vote, or if we go to a by-election, you're voting on so many things, but in one symbolic person. I would just love that more participatory, deliberative democracy where we could be voting with common sense and eliminating the administrative overspend. I happen to think USAID is important.

And I'd rather go after the black budgets of military, but that's just my personal opinion injected in there. Well, with grants from USAID, we did projects all over Africa with a network of African universities and their public health professors. And we did two projects in Uganda, one in Ghana, one in Senegal.

one in Malawi, and we also did a national project in Tanzania. And I think many of the results of these deliberations were actually implemented. So I have great respect for the work that USAID does

to help both in disease and problems of food security. And now with a different set of collaborators, we've just completed some deliberative polls on a big public health issue facing the world that nobody thinks about, which is resistance to antibiotics. And we've done six countries with that. And my medical colleagues presented the results at a high-level meeting at the UN a few months ago. So we think that there's a great deal of

work to be done. And the decisions of the people are usually quite smart, even in places where the level of literacy is low. Indeed, we think we had an effect on child marriage, on the education of girls, and on public health things like in Ghana, they were using untreated wastewater for gardening because there was a water shortage. And they found other ways of finding water, rainwater harvesting, and

being more efficient with the use of water to prevent disease. So the people, if given collective choices and options, will make not only sound decisions, but they will have reasons for those decisions. Now, we need that everywhere. So deliberative democracy is itself, when properly done, a kind of democracy that can speak to the interests of a community. And we need that

all over the world. Before things tightened up in China, we were even doing projects in China with local governments, one of which was featured in Time magazine. And we published the results in the major journals. So I think that all these cases are instructive. But in order to save democracy, people will have to believe in it. When they deliberate, they tend to believe more optimistically that

democracy can be made to work. I'm sort of like a Johnny Appleseed spreading this message around the globe of when the opportunities arise. Of course, you've spoken about the different projects you've done around the world. And I'm wondering, you know, how large populations such as China, but America also has a large population, and India and other places. So people had reservations about deliberative democracy being able to represent such a large group of people.

Now, in the instance of China, you have what seems like a very strong, successful capitalism, like endless growth for the last 30 years, coupled with state-controlled socialism. How might deliberative democracy models or platforms help be more representative? I mean, I know their model is one of policy elites, and it works well for a large population population.

but with reservations. How could that be more integrated? And not just for smaller countries, but those like China who face those issues of governance, but how could it find some of that nuance to represent the average person? Well, our experience in China was at the local level

but it could have been replicated, and it was in various places. So there was a local party leader of a township who heard me speak at a conference in China and said, well, we could do that where I am. And we organized a

a meticulously well-developed, deliberate poll. He said, I forget the exact number. I've got 30 infrastructure projects. Most places, the party leader would just decide himself and people would assume he was getting paid off by organized interests that wanted to build this or wanted to build that. Here's a list. They're all good projects. What should we do? Let's pose that to the people. And it turned out that he had

expectations of which were the best projects. They were going to build a fancy town square to show how prosperous they were becoming. He thought that was the best project. But I asked him, don't tell the people that. Let the people decide for themselves. And when it came to it, the people wanted clean water. They wanted sewage treatment plants. The fancy town square went near the bottom of the list. And he abided by that.

because the understanding was they had the budget to build the top 10 projects, and they did. The people got clean water. He became very famous all over China. In fact, so famous, they rewarded him with sending him to America so he could learn English. And he came to visit us at Stanford speaking English. I was amazed.

The point is that that could have been a benefit to local governments all over China. And so the vision would be from the bottom up. I was flooded with applications of graduate students from China, and we accepted a number of them, and they were great students. And some of them went back to China's leading universities and have done some things there. So it would be quite possible organically for this kind of thing to spread. The

The local party leader in China had the same problem as the mayor of the capital city of Mongolia, which ended up leading me on an adventure in Mongolia. But he said that, you know, he's got all these choices to make and he only gets to talk to the lobbyists and the interest groups. How can he actually talk to the people? And in this way...

We had a deliberative poll for Ulaanbaatar. He thought that what the city should do was build a subway and borrow a lot of money from the Japanese. But the city was already burdened with debt, so the people didn't think they should build a subway. But Ulaanbaatar is the coldest major city in the world and the capital city of Mongolia. And the children were in schools with inadequate heating. And so for most of the year, they were on shifts in the few schools that actually had adequate heating.

So that turned out to be the top priority of the people. They wanted adequate heating in the schools so their children wouldn't have these crazy shifts. And this was a big success. And there was a whole bunch of other projects. And I'm going to Mongolia and Medellin.

in May for a celebration of 10 years of deliberative polling in Mongolia. And it's the only place in the world that actually has a law requiring that they do it for changing the constitution. And the last change in the constitution brought in a change in the electoral system. So now they have a major element of proportional representation because people didn't want just two major parties. They wanted an opportunity for third parties. Then they used the new system and that's what they got.

So that was a major constitutional change. And they brought 800 people selected meticulously by the Census Bureau of the country. And it was a great sample that came from

to the capital city and met in the government palace for two days, which is the parliament house, with a big statue of Genghis Khan overlooking all the proceedings. And in any case, Mongolia is a relatively recent democracy that has actually led the way in instituting deliberative polling. I'm not one of those people who thinks that these methods should replace democracy of elections.

People have died for the opportunity to vote in elections, but we can make our elections more thoughtful and we can make our constitutional processes more thoughtful. And that's what deliberative democracy does. Yeah, definitely more substantive and, you know, remove some of this emotional voting, this political theater that's, I think, unnecessary. And it just gets in the way of critical thinking and these, you know, critical times.

As Fishkin points out, today's democratic institutions are in a precarious state, and it's no secret. Since the late 2010s, we've been flooded with studies and reports warning us about a global crisis of faith in liberal democracy. As that crisis went unaddressed, we've watched it jump right off the page and into our backyards, fueling insurrections, waves of populist fervor, and the rise of a new technocracy. Now we're like T.S. Eliot at the end of the First World War.

fishing for solutions with the arid plains of a dying democracy behind us. Or like John Adams, quietly agreeing that there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It's tempting to side with Adams and let history take its course.

Yet by doing so, we'd be forgetting our own agency in shaping that history. Democracy's demise is not inevitable. Rather, as political agents, we determine whether it ultimately takes a plunge into oblivion or not. The trick, at the end of the day, is staying engaged enough to be ready to act when that choice needs to be made. Not just by perusing the news app, but by actively affirming our commitment to the possibility of realizing democracy's promise.

Sure, our institutions might be flawed, but they are nevertheless tied to the transcendent ideal of a self-governing collective will, the ideal of a governing structure created for and by the people. Participating in deliberative democracy and striving through discourse to form a collective will means renewing that commitment, even if we ultimately fail to change our political preferences or achieve consensus about policy issues.

Because it's not these one-time failures that murder democracy, nor is it through single successes that we resurrect it. In the end, it's the strength of our faith in its ideals that matters. Just as we've seen skepticism nudge democracy towards Adam's grim prediction of self-destruction, the inverse must also be true. We can secure the longevity of our democratic institutions by believing in their potential, and in the process, motivating ourselves to undertake the ongoing collaborative work of deliberation. Put differently,

There's a Kantian-style practical imperative to act as though a self-governing collective will is possible, even if we don't yet see conclusive evidence for it. It's a bit like Pascal's wager.

By assuming democracy's potential and working towards it, we stand to gain the many benefits of self-governance. By giving up on it, we risk losing far more. So now we return to the state of affairs we started with. Looking back like Eliot upon the arid plains and standing like Adams on the brink of oblivion, we have to ask ourselves, what fragments of belief shall we shore against our ruin? Do we heed Fishkin's call for the daily grind of deliberation and bet on democracy's potential, or let skepticism snuff out its promise once and for all?

And now back to the interview. Yes, I completely agree Mia. I'm very interested in deliberative democracy and I wanted to ask about the role of agreement or consensus in your model of deliberation, especially since as some critics note, emphasizing agreement can lead to problems like manipulation and coercion and discourse or even lead to undermining the political agency that minorities draw from solidarity groups. So with that in mind,

How do you frame agreement in your model and how do you reconcile the pursuit of consensus with the need to avoid these issues? Well, there are two models of deliberative democracy. One is consensus-driven, where the product of the deliberation is an agreed statement like a jury verdict or a written statement. That's what the assemblies do, including the Citizens' Convention on the Climate that was in France.

We don't do that because all the critiques of deliberative democracy come out of the jury literature. The jury is one of the most studied deliberative institutions in the world. And the social pressure to get a verdict or a consensus distorts the process. So we get our results in confidential questionnaires before and after. People don't ever have to say,

how they come out on the issue. There's no show of hands. And so if a group has views that are different from the others, they're perfectly free and should feel perfectly free to express those in the questionnaires. And so we get the exact state of opinion before deliberation and after, and we have large enough samples

that we can study it in a statistically meaningful way, as opposed to citizens' juries or even the so-called citizens' assemblies, which often have 100 or maybe 150. We use larger numbers. And we also have control groups so that we can compare the people who never have to make the effort to spend a weekend deliberating or make a trip to the site, whether it's Washington, D.C. or the capital city of Mongolia or whatever.

The control group just has to answer the questionnaire before and after. So in that case, we leave room for dissensus. But if there is a consensus, it comes out in the results. It comes out in the data. And very often there is, but it's not a forced consensus with the social pressure of people feeling they have to go along with the rest of the group.

Yes, I think it's really exciting and thank you for that. I want to shift gears now quickly and ask about deliberation in the context of social media. So as social media platforms like X are increasingly used by politicians, are there issues with allowing them to occupy the same deliberative space as the public? I'm thinking along the lines of, you know, if representative and constituent voices become indistinguishable in this environment, what are the potential consequences for a democratic discourse? My concern is the spread of

disinformation and misinformation, some of it being quite intentional, the lack of any limits on the kinds of claims that people can make up and spread. And the more sensational they are, the more they spread virally. So I think in the long run, it's very...

dangerous. And I think we're going to experience the consequences, whether it's on vaccines or climate change or on the basic facts of international conflict. We need a fact-based dialogue. People can't just make up things and throw them in and then expect to have a constructive effect on public policy. We need more fact-checking.

And so the direction of social media is really something that has to be monitored and studied. And hopefully there have to be more opportunities to correct some of the misinformation. It's not an easy thing to do. In the deliberative polling process, we have vetted information for both sides of any issue that we use.

And indeed, we've done so many projects that we've now sort of got a library. And we eventually hope to have updated versions of that library so that any group, both a random sample of a population, but even other groups can deliberate.

with our platform and have a library of important current issues that they can go through. That's part of our aspiration. I think that the experience of deliberation is itself an antidote to the disinformation, both at the time and then as people come to consider judgments about an issue. You know, we had people who were completely disdainful of the idea of climate change, but

A year later, they ended up voting on the basis of climate change rather than other issues when we went back to them because it had a lasting effect on them. So the idea that climate change is a hoax is not only belied by the terrible weather events that we're getting all the time now, each year it seems is a record hot year compared to the last, but

Just being exposed to the information doesn't affect people. It's having the information in dialogue. That's where people begin to re-examine their views and come to informed judgments. So I don't want to condemn all social media, but some of the ways in which social media has opened the door to disinformation are very concerning.

Yes. And just quickly, is there a web link URL where you said that you share each of the deliberate democratic projects? Well, if you look at just deliberation.stanford.edu, our website, we've got most of the projects there and all kinds of documents about them. But in the future, we have this idea of having an accessible library and setting it up so that all kinds of people can get access to it. And

We can support dialogues with our technology. So we have a vision of how this could expand, but that's in the works now. Well, let us know if we can be of help because we're international and we have people from like over 70 countries who have taken part in our project. And, you know, the European Commission, if we can help to get different perspectives, I would be very open to helping spread the word because I just don't think enough people know.

that they can actually be empowered. And having the information is step one. And then, of course, this platform that allows these deliberative democratic panels and events to take place is the second. But I would just love to see if we can share it, if we can help. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for your interest.

And as things develop, we'll keep that in mind. Excellent. You know, another dimension to consider on this point of social media is the only clear differentiator between an established politician and your average Joe is that little blue verification checkmark, which, you know, all celebrities have. So in the context of your comments on democratic inversion, what do you make of the fact that we seem to be conflating politics with celebrity culture?

Well, this is not a criticism of the public, but if you have a largely and understandably uninformed public, they always use heuristics or shortcuts or shorthands for who they should pay attention to. Celebrity is an easy way to get attention. Sports celebrity, entertainment celebrities or whatever. So those people carry a lot of weight.

Whether they have views that are worth listening to or not is up to the viewer or the listener, but it's just a way of getting attention. What I think we need is for people to be thinking about the issues. And it turns out if you make it easy for them, they love it. And that's one of the things I'm counting on. But yes, we have a celebrity-driven political culture. It's not new. It's long been that way. And if people find it entertaining, that's fine.

But they shouldn't be making consequential decisions based on celebrity. Indeed. It's all a cult of personality and emotional decision-making. We're so lucky to have those deep thinkers like you who help us really get to the heart of the matter. Who were those thinkers? Maybe they were directly your teachers or those who you read that inspired you on your journey. And what were those important life lessons?

Well, I had a teacher at Yale named Robert Dahl, who was a great thinker about democracy, and he wrote this intriguing last poem.

section of his book, Democracy and Its Critics, where he sort of mused about just two or three pages, what would a more advanced democratic society look like? And that's gotten me thinking. And in a way, my whole book is an effort to actually build on that. So he was a great influence on me. But I was also very interested and learned a lot from thinking about the Athenians, who had a system where deliberative democracy played a major role.

and figuring out how they created a government system based upon that, because they didn't actually have political parties or elections to any great extent. Now, I don't think we should get rid of elections. People, as I said, have died for the right to vote. What we need is to make our elections more thoughtful. But it was really interesting to come to terms with that. The other inspiration I had in the book was Madison and the debate over the American founding, because Madison was really concerned about

the mischiefs of factions or the passions or interests that could motivate factions to take away the rights of some group. And he hypothesized that deliberation would lead people to make decisions in the public interest. Now, he was only concerned with representatives, not the people, but he was trying to think about how to limit deliberation.

What George Washington also called the spirit of party. The beginnings of the American Republic didn't have political parties. Washington gave a warning in his farewell address that political parties were coming. And if the spirit of party took hold, what we would call now partisanship, in too deep a way, it could destroy the republic. But following Madison, he thought that deliberation was

could limit the spirit of party. And that's really a punchline that I end up puzzling through in the book. How could that possibly be? So those are some people who influenced me. Also, John Stuart Mill's ideas about thinking for yourself.

achieving what Mill called individuality, where instead of just believing what you were taught to believe as you were growing up, you reconsider. And we need a system of free expression that will allow you to be exposed to different points of view and think for yourself.

and find your own path in life. That's always been an inspiration for me. So those are sort of my intellectual heroes, if that's what you're asking. Yeah, those are great thinkers from your lifetime and from history. And often when I ask people when they've got their great thoughts, you know, the things that they pursued, they say that it comes from being in nature. There's something about the

clarity, the beauty of nature. You live in a beautiful part of the world in the Bay Area and yet beset by wildfires frequently and the effects of climate change. So, you know, perhaps you could share with us some of your reflections about the beauty and wonder of the natural world as you think about the future, the kind of world we're leaving for the next generation.

Oh, my goodness. Well, there's so much beauty that has to be safeguarded. I haven't been there in a while, but I love the American National Parks, particularly Bryce Canyon, which is just almost a sensory overload of images that are hard to imagine. Just look at a photo of it and you'll see what I'm talking about. Yes, nature is very inspiring.

But the act of trying to think and create is also very inspiring. I'm so busy that I don't get to see a lot of nature anymore, but I'd love to. Yes. And just in closing, as you think about the future, what would you like young people to know, preserve, and remember? They have to preserve democracy, and they have to think about the fundamental democratic values so that instead of just looking out for themselves, if they look out for their country, their society, and the world order,

We'll all be better off. And it's very hard in a time of inflation and maybe economic turmoil and recession. They're naturally focused on their immediate future, but they need to focus on

how they can find a path in life that they will find meaningful, which is why I'm always advising the students I come across. They need to find out what ideas will excite them instead of just being instrumental in terms of how they can earn a living. If they could be in touch with their future selves and the decisions that their future selves would feel are justifiable and that

were wise over the long term rather than just the immediate term. So the first thing is their identities are in flux. And so they have to learn to create themselves in collaboration with all the people around them and not merely just do what they're told or do what's expected.

Freedom is good, but it's even better if you use it, but in a responsible way. It's very exciting to be a young person, but it's very exciting to be older if you feel that you have projects that make your life meaningful. And I think that everybody should try to find projects that will make their lives meaningful. Maybe it's their profession. Maybe it's something they do outside of their profession.

Well, your life's work is certainly very meaningful. And I want to thank you, James Fishkin, for sharing your commitment to democracy and providing a foundation upon which a deliberative and meaningful democracy can be built, where everyone's voice can be heard and engaged in a more participatory society. We all live on one planet we call home. Thank you for adding your voice to One Planet Podcast and the creative process. Thank you.

The Creative Process podcast is supported by the Jan Muszalski Foundation. This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Virginia Moschetti with the participation of collaborating universities and students.

Associate interview producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Virginia Moschetti. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Katie Foster. Wintertime was composed by Nicholas Anadolos and performed by the Athenian Trio. We hope you enjoyed listening to this podcast. If you'd like to get involved with our creative community exhibitions, podcasts, or submit your creative works for review, just drop us a line at team at creativeprocess.info. Thanks for listening.