This publication has a new name. What was Trust Apocalypse is now Spark of Trust. The name changed; the work hasn’t. The white papers are still here, everything is still free to read, the model is still reader-funded, and there are still no ads. If you subscribed for the writing on trust, you’re in the right place.
Why change it? Not because the analysis changed. This publication took its old name from the white paper it was built to serialize. That paper still holds; nothing in it needs revising.
What changed is emphasis. Trust Apocalypse names the problem. And naming the problem is where almost all trust work stops. There is a report every year saying trust is down, and there will be another next year. Spark of Trust names what was always the intent: what is being done about it, and who is doing it. A retired brigadier general I’m lucky to call a mentor, Craig Nixon, put it in a sentence I have kept close since: “We’re not here to admire the problem.” The new name is the original intent, finally spoken aloud.
The diagnosis stands, and it is short to state. Trust broke in three acts over six decades, each stacking on the one before: first in our communities, then in our institutions, then in our information environment. Trust in Washington to do the right thing has fallen from 77 percent in 1964 to 17 percent in 20251, and fewer than three in ten Americans now say most people can be trusted2. The three breaks feed each other, which is why fixing any one of them is necessary but insufficient on its own. The full argument lives here on this site, in the two white papers; this publication is now about what comes after.
After that is the honest part. I don’t have the solution. If I did, I’d be building it. Building things is what I have done my whole working life. What I can do is put out the bat signal. There are people giving this a damn good try, mostly invisible to each other, most of them half-convinced they are the only ones working on it. Making them visible to each other is something I do know how to do.
And the name is not the only thing that’s new. Accompanying this newsletter is a new show:
It starts with an odd episode: I asked a friend to interview me, so that I would have to say out loud, on tape, why any of this exists. Dwayne Kerrigan — entrepreneur, host of The Dwayne Kerrigan Podcast, and one of my dearest friends — turned the chair around and asked better questions than I would have asked myself.
Listen to episode 1 here on Substack, or on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Behind it on the 23rd: the founders of Neya, on rebuilding trust where people actually live (I liked their work enough to put a small amount of my own money in, full disclosure), then an investor, then a general.
There is a line from a two-thousand-year-old text that I did not go looking for. Someone put it on a screen at an event in 2022, and it landed as a kick up the backside:
“It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”3
I’m one spark. The show and this newsletter exist to find the others.
Pew Research Center, “Public Trust in Government: 1958–2025,” December 4, 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/12/04/public-trust-in-government-1958-2025/. Trust in Washington to do the right thing: 77 percent in 1964, 17 percent in 2025.
NORC at the University of Chicago, 2024 General Social Survey, TRUST variable, GSS Data Explorer, https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/441/vshow. My own tabulation: 24.9 percent of valid responses, unweighted.
Rabbi Tarfon, Pirkei Avot 2:16, https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.2.16. Sefaria’s numbering; some print editions have it as 2:21. The rendering above matches Sefaria’s translation; many others end “…to desist from it.”