#1593 The LTA Survey and American Reflections

And once you've spent a year or two listening, how do you present what you've learned, in what formats and in what larger historical context? One thing is certain, all people everywhere are storytellers. And the question is how to hear those stories in a way that is useful to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. All that and more on this week's listening to America.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm joined by two marketing specialists, advisors about how to engage with the public. Luke Peterson of Washington, D.C. and Ricky Connery of Silver Spring, Maryland. Welcome, both of you.

Thanks. It's great to be here. Thank you. So, Luke, let's start with you. A couple of months ago, we reconnected and you offered to do a little survey of the people who are following, listening to America and so on, to try to determine how they're feeling about the United States.

as we approach our 250th birthday. Tell us a.

If Clay is embarking on this journey to listen to America and understand where we are here at the eve of our 250th birthday, I wonder whether there's a way that we can bring some empirical rigor to this experiment. I wonder if we could use some of the tools that I've got access to, to explore American attitudes around the state of their democracy, around the things that bring them hope. You know, we brainstormed a little bit about what would the key questions be that we might ask Americans, should we have an opportunity to do this? Landed on a draft. So, we asked a couple of questions.

So, first we asked, agree or disagree with these two statements. We, the United States of America, are doing well, but not without some concerns. And then, we, the United States of America, are going badly and it may get worse. So, we wanted to see the degree to which people agreed or disagreed with either of those things. And then, you know, Clay, I love the formulation that you use.

I've heard you drop this casually. We, the United States of America, muddle along, but we get there. And so, I thought, let's see how much agreement or disagreement we have with that question as well. We asked about whether Americans feel united, whether they feel like one united country, or whether they feel like they're part of a polarized experience, or whether they feel like they observe polarization, but they don't feel like they really fit either of those poles. We wanted to know where people were coming from.

So, we had a whole lot of questions around demographics, you know, what's your background, what's your income, gender, educational background, parental status, citizenship. We asked some questions about citizenship. We wanted to know whether you speak English at home or something else. We wanted to know your intention. Were you born in the U.S.?

Do you plan to stay in the U.

S.

? And I'd say, I think most importantly for what we'll get into in this conversation is we asked this standard battery of 21 questions called the Schwartz Portrait Value Questionnaire, which helps us understand Americans beyond partisanship, which I think is a trap that a lot of surveyors that look at public opinion get into, especially when you talk about things that have politics. And this is where Ricky's expertise really comes in. So, we worked together, Dr. Connery and I, at the State Department, when we were trying to understand attitudes of audiences around the world so that we could shape the big leaders of America, the way that we talked about public policy issues.

Because we wanted to make sure that the language we were using and advising our leaders to use aligned with the values and the storytelling frames that were going to be most interesting and engaging to the audiences we were trying to reach.

But you had to go through and sort of translate them into something that would actually work in a survey, because I don't think that way. And so, you clarified them and, to a certain degree, I think, simplified them or took out excess to make them answerable. Is that a fair way of looking at it?

So, when we're trying to help companies figure out how to position themselves in the market, for example, we may ask a question that deliberately biases the rest of the sample to find out how that affects their perceptions and their thinking. I think one of the things that we watch out for more often than anything else is backlash. So, we're trying to identify where a well-intentioned statement may inadvertently trigger an unexpected and very negative response and trying to cut down on those, right? So, we're off on a little bit of a tangent here, but there are lots of ways to use surveys and these online polls that now exist to try and develop insights and strategy and help you craft stories that most effectively connect with and move audiences in the way that you want them to move.

And then later he sort of takes down the gist of that conversation. and then that's what listening to America is. It doesn't seem to me necessarily the right path. If you really wanted to get the sense of where America is at 250, how are people feeling? What are their anxieties?

What are their frustrations? What are they thinking about? Do they plan to celebrate this? Are they even aware of this? What does America mean to them at this point?

Does America mean anything to them at this point? I don't know exactly the best way to find that, but I know I want to. And so I want to go in with a strategy for listening, but then you're looking at it also about a strategy for disseminating. So you listen, how do you then take that and package it so that it will have an audience, number one, and that that audience will be responsive, will think, well, that's interesting. I wonder how I feel about the military industrial complex, or I wonder how I feel about America's foreign policy, or I wonder how I feel about our displacement of Native Americans.

So I'm interested in figuring out how to really do this project intelligently, authentically. And I will tell you both, just as a, and this sets up, Ricky, so welcome, Dr. Connery. It's not that I'm suspicious of the kind of expert work you do. I'm not a bit, but I'm, there's a catch, because I think I just need to be authentically.

me, try to be the smartest person that I can speak in a language that people actually use. And that if you build a better mousetrack, they will come knocking at your door, but that's not really true. And so, Ricky, you're, you're a data analyst. Talk a little bit about the difference between good intentions and good results.

at Harmony. We study how audiences take stories on board. And you've said a few things that tell me exactly what audience you're in. And one of them is that you are information forward and you care about being smart, cogent, and well-argued. That tells me a lot about who you are and what you care about, what you value.

And those are important values. I happen to share them, but they're not the only values you can have and be a really important part of this American story, right? You can have a number of different values. We do not, as Luke said, use politics to organize or thinking about audience, because politics is way downstream of audience. Audiences seek out stories.

This is really interesting. So, like Christian rock and Metallica, both over index with conservatives, right? But not the same conservatives. You need to know something about what's going on for somebody as an audience, as a story seeker in the world, to understand who is looking at Christian rock and also seeking out, say, the YouTube channel, Gaither Vivo, and who's over listening to Metallica and building cars in their basement, or probably not their basement, their garage. So at Harmony Labs, we're a nonprofit.

And what we do is we just study how people consume the media. And we use an audience focus to do that. It's the challenge that you're going to have is in connecting your audience, whom I think you rep for really well. They too will care about erudition, about scholarship, about history, right? With all of these other values and perspectives and ways of being in a way that is additive, productive, creates a sense of what it is that we're all bringing to the story.

And that is really hard to do. But it starts with the perspective that every single person that you talk to out there is doing something in America for America that you can't do. And that's super challenging. So I wish you luck. This is really.

recently at Harmony, we did an analysis of what you read about in the news. 3% of people every day touch climate. 33% see something about Republicans or Democrats. Isn't that interesting? So where I would start that storytelling is with what kind of hero other people want to be.

I know exactly from you describing who you are and where you are in the world, the kind of heroism you want to bring to.

Welcome back to Listening to America. I'm talking with Luke Peterson and Ricky Connery about the difference between having a good idea and then making that idea presentable and exciting, and provocative and useful to a real audience, and not just the one. that's my own kind of birthright demographic. I came along in the age of the typewriter. I remember the first time I understood what email was around 1997..

I remember seeing websites for the first time around the time of the millennium. I remember my pathetic first cell phone and how they've grown exponentially almost every six months since in their capacities. I remember how transportation worked before 9-11 and so on. I come at it as a classically trained humanities scholar from the second half of the 20th century. That was my formation.

Now I'm living in truly a brave new world in which things like TikTok and Instagram and memes and tropes have come to dominate what appears to be our public discourse and have had a revolutionary effect on the way we do almost everything. I'm one of those people, Ricky, who is—and you're infinitely younger than I am, just so everyone knows—I'm one of those people who I can work my way through a smartphone, I can work my way through websites, I can sign up for subscriptions online, I can do stuff, but I'm by no means intuitive. Whereas my daughter, who's 28 years old, and she can book an Airbnb in Istanbul in 15 seconds, whereas it would take me a couple of hours and I would be uncertain and I wouldn't be sure. Is this a scam? You know, in other words, Ricky, that I'm one of those people who's able to make the turn, but I'm not by any means at home in the world.

that is now the standard operating principle system of Western civilization. And so I feel like there's a lot I need to learn if I want to connect with people beyond my own demographic.

It's such a good question. And a ton of people didn't answer it. A ton of people didn't answer it because they don't read books, which is not that they don't story. So when you guys ask the same people, like, tell me when you feel proud of being in America. Tell me where you would take that tourist to show them how we are.

Oh, gosh. A quarter of people said they would show someone new Washington, D.C. in the monuments. Ten percent of people spontaneously volunteered that they feel proud on Fourth of July. So we're doing a story.

Everyone's doing stories. Some of those stories are happening on TikTok. Some of them are happening in books. And a true audience actually links together what they choose in books, what they choose on TV and so on to help reinforce and tell their story. So what you want to do when you're out there is exactly what you intuited doing with that question, which is just ask people something about the stories they're living in.

And you will. I did a big statistical analysis on Luke's survey results. You will find actually that there is a tremendously widespread core narrative of American-ness. This is not the case for every kind of issue. There is actually a set of beliefs about our settings, our heroes, our conflicts, and even a little—we could use more—the resolutions to those conflicts.

that is broadly shared across audiences. There are big differences, too, but I think you can go into every conversation looking for information about what story people are living here.

You know, the woman that I love married the guy in the other cave. From the very beginning, humans were storytelling creatures. That's maybe the definition of who we are. And that all that has changed is that the technologies of stories have changed over time. until now we're in a period of breathtaking, revolutionary change in the way that story happens.

And I'm old school, Ricky. I think if it's valuable, it's in a book. If it's valuable, it must be in linear discourse. And I know that's not true. It's never been true that, you know, millions and millions and millions of people per day in America are telling stories, and only a fraction of them see life through books at all.

So it's important to have a really ecumenical.

And it's so good. It's so good. Stories make meaning out of suffering. And they are the only way you can co-create democracy. And the thing about story that's special that we talk about all the time, it's different from message, which is what people want to do.

They want to give you instruction. Sorry, Luke, buy the toothpaste or vote for the candidate or whatever. A story has movement. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It goes.

And so that is one of the things I'm super curious about. what you learn is how people do or don't envision that future. Because you don't have to convince them today that your issue or your position is right. You don't have to sell them a book. I actually think that books are going to come back because essentially, as Neil Gaiman tells me, Douglas Adams said, nothing is better at being a book than a book, which is really good.

There's just a whole really good set of quotes in there. But I think that the interesting question we can be asking each other is where are we going to go together? How are we going to grow?

We did not get a whole bunch of people coming back and being like, I'm moving to Canada or anything like that. And even Luke, you asked about, do you intend to stay here? The answer is overwhelmingly, absolutely. So. that means that we have a lot of conflicts.

There were shared beliefs about what those conflicts were. And most of the ones that we share a belief about are about danger. Luke, you can talk about that in a minute. There are not good shared beliefs about who the heroes of this story are, as I mentioned. We don't have a good shared belief about how the story is moving.

What we have instead is widespread malaise, or kind of a sense that we somewhat agree that something is wrong. But the setting is important because you're doing a place-based storytelling tour. And so you have the power to call on place in your storytelling. All right. That's really fascinating,

Something's not right. That's hard to get at,

So we really cracked people's consciousness. And they gave us, you know, maybe the first thing that popped into their mind, maybe they spent some time with it, produced a very thoughtful answer. But we did get answers from about 2,700 Americans, most of which were quite revealing. There were a handful of people who said, I would change nothing. America's perfect for me, but a handful out of, you know, 2,700 respondents.

And I think one of the things that's a challenge here for you, for this program, and, you know, maybe a little bit for us at this point in our experiment, is we all have our own stories. And, you know, in a media environment, where maybe 20 years ago, you had not so many stories to choose from, we all kind of pick, you know, from a handful of stations that were shown a TV show at eight o'clock at night, or maybe Clay, you pull one of the tens of thousands of books off your shelf and decide what you want to settle down with for the evening, and make your experience fit the narrative that you've selected, and then talk with your friends and colleagues and communities about how you collectively or maybe uniquely, experienced those stories. Now, through things like Instagram and TikTok and blogs and the internet streaming and the, I don't know, 900 channels I have on my cable package, I can pick a story that is pretty finely tuned to reflect the worldview that I have and derive joy from seeing reflected back at me. We still have a lot of people who come together and watch the Super Bowl in real time, State of the Union's another one, convention speeches. One of the things that was so interesting that I found in these open-ended responses, there was a question that asks, when do you feel most American?

And one of the very common answers was when we all come together after a tragedy.

But I also want to see some other things that I would sort of call moral emergencies. So, for example, I would really like to go spend a weekend with a militia group in northern Michigan. I would like to go to a fundamentalist Pentecostal tent revival in Alabama. And I would like to go to, you know, as close as you can get to a Lakota sun dance festival. But to, I won't use the word infiltrate because I don't like the feel of that, but to try to edge near some of these phenomena that are definitely American phenomena.

And to listen carefully and to observe respectfully. This is my philosophy, and you tell me if it's right or wrong, that we cannot heal this country unless we give agency and respect to points of view that are.

What does it mean for you to be in community dancing in that way? And what are, like, because it's not doing the story work that you find so meaningful and important to you, which presumably is in an armchair reading a good book, right? But there's important story work that's taking place for people in those spaces, and the power of freedom, which is the other big thing that people mentioned in Luke's survey, is that we are free to pursue the stories we want to live for ourselves. Comprehending how they can all fit together is the work of democracy. And are you going to heal it today?

No. But it is the work we took on 250 years ago and we will be struggling with 250 years from now. Understanding how to do the work together is more important than solving the problem. I'm not departing on this mission.

There's an attempt to synthesize in a careful and responsible way there that this not just book, but this book, these posts, these videos, these interviews help me make sense of America at a time when we are feeling malaise and are feeling bewilderment. But I know this, if I go into a new community, let's say I drive my Airstream to a campground in Wisconsin Dells, you know, the Fred Flintstone campground and RV park in Wisconsin Dells, and it's five o'clock and I start wandering around. Maybe I sit at my picnic table with, or their picnic table with perfect strangers. I'm not going to start by saying Lenin and Trotsky had this view of America. I mean, if you want to have a conversation, you can't just dive into what went wrong with America.

or how are we going to get out of this mess? Or how do you feel about America? There has to be an.

And my job was to bring them the truth and perspectives about people tens of thousands of miles away with whom I have very little shared experience. So, for me to make sure that I'm not misrepresenting the point of view and motivations of Egyptians, for example, and how a group of business owners might have responded to a particular survey or what was behind, answers to a particular focus group, series of questions that we might have asked. You know, I had to work real hard to know what was under their... What was behind their words, right? And it takes a lot more than what I feel like.

a lot of people who have been on your path have attempted. I think in particular... So, you know, I love John Steinbeck. I have mixed feelings about Travels with Charlie, which is another, you know, similar. let's travel around America, get people's stories.

He absolutely brought his point of view and a pretty strong political bias to the way that he was representing the people he was running into and whose stories he was retelling. And, you know, it was exactly right, probably, to sell books to the audience that wanted to read them. I guess I say all that to say, you know, Clay, you have a particular experience and point of view and set of values and interests that have brought you your audience. You have a lot of people who listen to you, people who travel around the world with you and want to hear what you have to say about stuff. The opportunity that you have, and thing that I'm so excited to see unfurl over the next couple of years, is how you can help bring a multi-dimensional persona and connection to the audience that you've already got.

that authentically represents the people that you meet while you're on the road.

Welcome back to Listening to America. Really fascinating conversation with new friends who really want to help us succeed in this project of Listening to America. You know, one of the things that happened to John Steinbeck, Luke, is that he traveled around the country and he didn't really do much listening. And he was used to being the author. He was a famous author and people would listen to him.

He didn't have to listen to anybody at this point in his life. So, in a certain sense, he fudged this journey in 1960, which has been great, because I've been studying it backwards and forwards and reading books about it and reading books about books about it. And so I know a lot now about what went wrong and how be it, you know, I shouldn't, as a mere obscure humanities scholar, be saying, oh, Steinbeck failed. It's not for me to say that, but I do think he did in many respects miss his opportunity. He then went away and wrote a charming book about it.

All you really need to do to be a good listener is to shut up and listen and make sure they see that you're listening and that you're asking the follow-up questions, which show that you're not just a recording angel here. You're also engaged in a real dialogue with real people. And you're not, you're not hiding yourself. You're not, you're not posturing in any way. You're authentic, but you are curious, but you're not simply buying it.

You're not simply saying fair enough. I guess that's America. So, so that's the approach that I've used for years. It's worked very well for me. I don't know if it will continue to work well, but that's how I would do it in the absence of any expertise.

You know, when we think about how to open,

So, just at the top, you know,

Broad range of income. About 42% of the respondents work full-time. About 62% of the respondents have no children. And the other 38% have one or many. And again, it's not representative of all American experiences, because what we were interested in getting for the survey was a broad collective of responses, right?

So, we wanted to hear as many different kinds of people's stories as we could possibly get, so that we could start to identify places where those stories were coming together and identities were converging. So,

about 95% of the audience were born in the or. the respondents were born in the U.S. and say they're U.S. citizens. People who are younger were more likely to say that they weren't.

About 15% were dual nationals or non-citizens but live here in the U.

S. About 80% say their parents were born in the U.S. 70% say their grandparents were born in the U.S. Most say said that they primarily speak English at home, which is because we ran the survey in English. And if we wanted something else, we would have done it in a different language.

About 80% of the respondents said that they intended to live in the U.

S. permanently, like, very strongly convinced. And about 10% of respondents said that they intend to leave the U.S. and eventually live elsewhere. When we think about Ricky's quadrants that she just introduced, about 20 to 30% of Americans fell into one of those four buckets, or each one of those four buckets.

So the smallest one was 21%. For the people power group, the biggest one was 32%. For the. if you say so, group, tough cookies and don't tread on me, we're right in the middle. So I'd say top learnings.

as we approach the country's 250th birthday, Americans are concerned. A healthy majority do think we're at risk of losing our democracy. But it was like a soft degree, you know, people are not alarmed. They're mildly concerned, which is in fact concerning to me, right? It seems like the kind of thing that if you have a small amount of concern for you, should have a tremendous amount of concern for it.

So that that was troubling. One thing that was interesting is that when we looked into the demographics of people who said that they were concerned, the more marginalized you are, income, ethnicity, education, if you're living on the margins, you're more likely to be concerned about the state of our country. And many more people feel divided than feel united. Most people would see division as polarized into at least two Americas. But those more marginalized groups, interestingly, would say, maybe it's more than two Americas, right?

It seems like there's the sort of the red team and the blue team, and then I'm on neither of those teams. But I also don't necessarily feel like my experience matches everybody else who doesn't fit on one of those two teams. So more of like a fractionalized rather than a polarized America. Your formulation, we muddle along, but we'll get there, gets a lot of support. That was one of the statements that people agreed with the most, but people don't have a lot of conviction in their agreement with that statement, you know?

So I think people would sort of roughly say, we're concerned about the future of our country, but also, we have some confidence that we'll get there eventually, which is interesting. So, you know, we mentioned when we're recording this in time. yesterday, in the afternoon before the State of the Union, I was at a little event with former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who basically said that on stage, you know? Like, I, have some concerns about our country, but, you know, I have every confidence that we'll figure it out. It might be kind of bumpy, but we'll get there.

And I was just sort of thinking about that in the context of this conversation, you know? It's interesting that... Doesn't he have to say that? I mean, isn't that?

We have a lot of issues. They're complicated. They're a lot more complicated than are easily explainable in a soundbite, you know? And from his perch as a former CIA director, as former Secretary of State, it's like, can't even talk about most of the complexities within the issues that he's seeing. So, yeah.

And I don't want to put words in Secretary's mouth, but I just thought that that was sort of an interesting observation. So, when we think about... Ricky mentioned that when we ask about, what does America represent to you? It represents home. One of the things that we saw.

also, people would say freedom. People would say America represents a way of life, or they describe it as some sort of like, America is like a set of shared values. But if you peel those three things, so way of life, shared values and freedom, peel off one layer and look for agreement. And it's not there, right? People agree that America represents their way of life, but what America means in terms of a way of life is profoundly diverse, depending on who you speak with.

And basing it on geography.

That's why those questions are important. Finding out where people sit and what's important to them tells a big story about how they see America, help or hinder. One of the things that I found interesting, so we think about sort of the Maslow's hierarchy, when respondents were more likely to talk about, when we asked what's the biggest problem in America today, if the thing that they had to say was something about security, economic security or physical security, their overall point of view was a lot more likely, a lot bleaker, I guess, in that they feel like there is some large systemic issue that is creating an existential threat to them. And to Ricky's earlier point, perhaps it is on the system to solve or on just the president to solve. Could you talk more about that, Ricky?

Because you went deep in this.

And what we found was that, to add to that, the things that everyone agrees across all the audiences are issues of interest, like important, are crime and money, cost of living, prices. And sometimes people use this phrase, the economy, but when people use that, they really mean whether or not they feel like they can pay for stuff. And those are the things that everybody, when they're alarmed about them, that's not audience specific. The things that are more audience specific from this particular analysis are things like immigration, political polarization, those belong to specific neighborhoods in the audience map, healthcare and racism, as concerns belong to specific audiences. But one thing we can agree on is that the core conflicts that we face in the United States have to do with these very basic needs, safety, physical safety, and safety from crime, and the access to money, which is access to all those other things, housing and food.

Yeah. A big bird flu last year led to a rise in the cost of a dozen eggs to $8 or more. And for people who rely on that as a primary protein source, that was a significant drain on their wallets. It's a very real thing. that's happening for people.

And so if you are a political communicator, and you want access to just without respect to which kind of group, you can talk about the cost of eggs and get their attention. So I don't know that it's a particularly good news for any particular candidate, but it is a strategy I see candidates using.

So I have a couple of bones to pick about the way that that's organized. I think it's a dramatic oversimplification. What happens is you have a lot of people in America who will always inconsistently vote against whoever they see as having power, because they aren't getting what makes them feel like whole people, or they're not getting what they need. So it's somebody else's fault, throw the bums out. Always, doesn't matter who the bums are, right?

Like, I vote for one person this election, and then I'm going to vote for the person who's out of office the next election against the person who's in, because I still am not where I want to be in life. You have other people who are absolutely locked in to one party set of preferences or another, but that is consistently shrinking as a percentage of the overall American electorate for one party or the other. We've seen that going down over time. I think Pew and Gallup put out a new report every year about how far down party ID has gotten election over election. And then you have a bunch of other buckets of cohesive ideologies where people feel like they have some strong points of view that occasionally overlap with the things that are being said by major parties in power.

But what we're talking about here is, I think your supposition was what? Because people are saying that they can't afford stuff, that it's a good thing for the Trump administration, or for the Trump campaign. I would say those are the same people often whose difficult experience three years ago was a good thing for the Biden campaign.

It's a static feature of the system.

Are you planning on spending some time trying to encounter Americans who are not part of your tour group while you're on the road and asking them, you know, so how is it stumbling around these ruins? Tell me about how you ended up here. And why don't you answer this short questionnaire that I have for you about whether it's more important for you to be a leader or?

. I'm not very good at that. You know, having read about and witnessed the ugly American, the kind of the American abroad, I work really hard never to be that guy. So I lower my voice, I change my body language, I listen more and ask less. And of course, I'm often hurting the 20-some people that I'm with too.

But in this course I'm about to teach, starting tomorrow, actually, an online course, America 250, the first of two books that I signed was Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, which is the greatest book ever written about us by somebody who was not an American. But that just, Ricky, that just shows what an old fossil I am, right? I mean, my idea of looking at how to think about America 250 is to start with Alexis de Tocqueville. Now I'm in a pretty small subset of Americans who want to start that way.

Nobody knows where we're going. Nobody can volunteer to us what the destination is. And I do actually think you have a unique perspective that helps, whether it's book-based or not, helps us set some of these problems in context, because we've done some of this before. We have, in fact, gotten here through 250 years, and a lot of stuff has changed, and a lot of stuff has gotten legitimately better. So what would be really fun is to have these conversations with people in their moment, in their audience, from their perspective, what they want, the problems they perceive, and then to zoom out and take some studio time and bring Alexis de Tocqueville to bear.

Like, you know, what I observed from our history is that people who have looked at us from the outside have always thought X and Y and Z. And where we are going, which is the missing piece of the story, even for me, is here. This is how we can go forward. So, Ricky, Luke, this is just the.