Toward the end of my more than hourlong interview last week with Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and space entrepreneur, there was a comment that struck me — that’s been rattling around in my brain for days.
“I gave up on being well understood a long time ago,” Mr. Bezos said. “To be understood is too difficult.” He added: “It’s hard enough, by the way, to be well understood by your loved ones, by your kids and your closest friends. It takes a lot of energy. If you think you understand any public figure, you probably don’t.”
It was a profound thought because so much of what the public does on any given day is try to take the measure of our world’s public figures — and the institutions they run. We judge them. We are constantly assessing them — online and off. We try to determine whether we like them, whether we trust them and whether they deserve our hard-earned dollars.
This is particularly true of elected officials, but it is increasingly true of the leaders of our nation who are unelected — who run the companies that touch our lives in various ways. We read about the rankings of the Forbes and Fortune magazine lists, and we look at their philanthropic efforts as a sign of both their success and, perhaps, their humanity.
All of this is being processed through human sensibilities that are both imperfect and increasingly polarized by politics and a bubble of social media feeds.
Underneath conversations about geopolitics, our global economy, artificial intelligence and more at this year’s DealBook Summit with some of the most consequential individuals in the world, there was a pervasive sense that trust at any level was becoming harder to come by — and that the rules of how people comport themselves and even judge the truth had shifted.
Prince Harry said, “I do really find myself even more so now wondering how or why people trust the information that they’re given, how they trust it and where they’re getting it from, and how any form of accountability can actually happen.”
The point was made personal when Bill Clinton spoke about how Americans think about the character of their elected leaders — a particularly poignant moment given Mr. Clinton’s own moral failings as a result of his affair with Monica Lewinsky during his presidency.
“Nobody is running a perfect life,” he said. “And people are determined to keep score. But I bet my definition wouldn’t be the same as a lot of other people.”
He said that “the voters have a deep-seated suspicion of letting anybody, including the press, tell them how to define character and what matters.” He asked, “Would we disqualify Eisenhower now? Would we disqualify Roosevelt? Would we still let Harding run?” (All three had documented extramarital affairs.)
Alex Cooper, one of the most successful podcasters in the nation, said that “the public is constantly being told: “Believe this, believe this, believe this.” She added: “People don’t want to be told what to do anymore. I think Gen Z, the minds of young creators and adults and young individuals, people want to figure it out for themselves. They don’t want to be told what to do.”
This moment appears to be a switch from the past: Perhaps the most trusted individuals and companies are ones that don’t preach a particular mantra. After a period in which companies have taken to espousing — and marketing — a “mission” that often extended beyond its direct purpose, it seems that the public has decided such efforts are either polarizing or disingenuous.
Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google and Alphabet, said that his company, which had been known for almost being like a university campus when it came to employees’ speech, had shifted. “As a company, I feel like the values are enduring, but your culture kind of needs to evolve with time, right?” He added, “The company is not your personal platform.”
One of the big revolutions that we’re all grappling with — and trying to figure out whom to trust — is around artificial intelligence. We’ve been besieged by questions of safety — with even internal employees going public with their concerns over the technology.
Mr. Pichai spoke about the decision by Geoffrey Hinton, one of the original artificial-intelligence scientists at Google, who won a Nobel Prize, and ultimately left the company, publicly declaring that he regretted his life’s work and worried about the dangerous implications of it.
“He’s definitely of the opinion we need to think deeply about this technology as early as possible and get it right for the benefit of humanity,” Mr. Pichai said. “And I think he has concerns we may not and he’s speaking up about it.”
“So look, I’m definitely on the optimistic side,” he added, saying that he imagined that the technology would help “tackle problems like cancer and vaccines and so on.”
Sam Altman, a co-founder and chief executive of OpenAI, made a strong case for the way in which his company had rolled out ChatGPT quickly and perhaps early, despite some of the concerns from those who worry about the safety implications.
“We believe and, you know, this is an opinionated stance, that this idea of iterative deployment is really important,” he said. “We’ve got to put these systems out into the world. Society and technology have to evolve. You have to start while the stakes are lower. You have to understand how people are going to use this and what it doesn’t work for, what it does.”
In other words, he suggested, the only way society is going to learn to trust artificial intelligence is to use it as it gets more sophisticated.
And so while we may not trust each other, will we trust the technology instead?
A different kind of trust issue arose at one of the four DealBook task forces, one titled “Women, Power and Money” and moderated by a New York Times reporter, Jodi Kantor. Thasunda Brown Duckett, the chief executive of TIAA, suggested that part of creating a sense of trust is the simple act of listening.
“It’s not about being right. It’s about just being heard,” she said. “And I think whenever you hear a roar, it’s about, ‘Do you hear me?’ And I think we also can’t ignore why people are roaring.”
Perhaps nowhere is trust — or the lack of it — going to be more consequential than in the economic fate of the world. The Federal Reserve is one of most powerful and independent institutions in Washington that has uniquely relied on being trusted for its entire existence. Its independence has been a cornerstone of that trust, but one that increasingly may have to be earned given the skepticism that has bubbled up in this moment of distrust.
“We’re not in the Constitution,” Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, said at the DealBook Summit. “We’re a creature of statute. So that’s what independent means. And that gives us the ability to make these decisions for the benefit of all Americans at all times, not for any particular political party or political outcome.”
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