13th & Park
"13th & Park" hosts insightful conversations with special guests covering a broad range of topics from politics and government, to technology, culture, economics and the media. Listeners eavesdrop on what feel like private conversations featuring the savviest and most highly regarded minds in the country. The show, co-hosted by media veterans Adam Goodman and Justin Sayfie, is produced by Ballard Partners in the Ballard Studios in Washington DC.
13th & Park
Audrey Tang: Designing AI to Unite Us, Not Divide Us | 13th and Park
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Audrey Tang, Taiwan's former digital minister and one of the world's most recognized civic technologists, joins Adam Goodman and Amy Tong on 13th and Park for a conversation about artificial intelligence, democratic renewal, and how to move a deeply polarized society toward uncommon ground. Tang, now academically based at Oxford, challenges the dominant framing of AI as either existential threat or salvation, arguing that the real problem is the misaligned recommendation engines of 2014 that trained us to mistake outrage for engagement. The path forward, Tang argues, is not to pick a side but to design platforms that surface what people already agree on without knowing it.
Drawing on Taiwan's remarkable turnaround from 9 percent government approval during the Sunflower Movement to broad public trust a decade later, Tang explains how citizen assemblies, deliberative polling, and tools like the Polis platform can compress what took the printing press generations into a matter of weeks. The episode traces concrete examples from Taiwan's 94 percent reduction in deepfake investment scams to citizen-driven policy in Bowling Green, Kentucky and a Connecticut property tax assembly, all powered by the same core idea: when you remove the reply button and the dunk button, people find each other.
Tang and Tong also dig into the question of scale, with Tang pushing back on the assumption that what worked for 23 million Taiwanese cannot work for 330 million Americans. The 50 states, Tang argues, are 50 laboratories of democracy, and California, Utah, and Central Oregon are already running the experiment. The real barrier is not size or polarization. It is simply that most people do not yet know their neighbors are already doing this.
The conversation closes with Tang reflecting on a childhood heart condition that shaped a philosophy of publish before perishing, a habit of sharing half-formed ideas in public that turned disagreement into friendship. Tang's next book, underway at Civic.AI, frames democracy itself as a social technology invented largely in America, one that Taiwan ran at internet scale and is now ready to return home.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
2:34 Doomers vs. Bloomers on AI
4:28 Why Change Feels Faster Now
5:36 Race vs. Mission Framing
7:07 Finding Uncommon Ground
9:02 How Recommendation Engines Broke Us
11:12 Taiwan's Democratic Comeback
14:40 Can This Scale to the US?
18:48 Citizen Assemblies in America
20:00 Tang's Origin Story
22:25 Meeting the AI Moment
24:10 Social Media and Young People
26:52 Democracy as Technology
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