The Price of Distrust
The block surrounding the St. Regis was barricaded for United Nations General Assembly week. We got out of the car and walked the rest of the way, my black heels avoiding grates and gaps in the sidewalk.
By the time we reached the twentieth floor, the President of Kenya was already speaking.
We slipped quietly into the back of the room.
I should admit here that, for me, a start time is generally useful information about when an event begins, not necessarily an instruction about when I should arrive.
It was a sea of black and navy suits. Government officials, bankers, investors. I noticed a man staring at me from across the room. When I glanced in his direction, he winked.
I looked away.
We had come to hear African political leaders and American investors discuss critical minerals and the possibility of financing their development through U.S. capital markets.
The political leaders spoke eloquently about opportunity. Many African countries possess extraordinary mineral wealth, including materials increasingly essential to technology, infrastructure and the global economy. Their message was clear: this is the time to invest.
Then the investors took the stage.
They spoke about opportunity, too, but they also spoke about risk: political stability, rule of law, capital structures, perception, mitigation.
One panelist discussed the perceptions of Africa that investors bring with them before a transaction has even begun—the fears and assumptions that make it difficult to convince capital to move toward opportunity when the possibility of losing it feels too great.
As I listened, I realized that the most important resource in the room wasn't underground.
It wasn't capital either.
It was trust.
And there wasn't enough of it.
An Obvious Exchange
On paper, the interests appear unusually well aligned.
The United States is an enormous consumer economy.
We want things.
The phones in our hands, the cars we drive, the energy systems we're building, the technology we increasingly organize our lives around—all of it ultimately depends on physical materials that have to come from somewhere.
Many African countries possess resources increasingly important to the United States.
American capital is looking for opportunities to invest.
Infrastructure could be built. Jobs could be created. Investors could earn returns. Countries could capture more of the value of what they possess.
Except neither side arrives at the table without a memory of what can go wrong.
Western interest in African resources doesn't arrive without history. Colonial rule across much of the continent was intertwined with the extraction and export of natural resources, and many African economies still export minerals with limited domestic processing and value addition.
That history inevitably informs contemporary questions about who owns, processes and ultimately profits from what lies beneath the ground.
Capital carries its own fears.
Investors worry about political instability, property rights, changing regulations, contract enforcement and whether the rules governing an investment today will still govern it once that investment becomes valuable.
What looks like an obvious exchange becomes much less obvious when everyone believes they have something to lose.
And somewhere between those fears sits everything that might become possible if they can be overcome.
The Price of Protection
We tend to think of trust as emotional.
In business, trust has a price.
When trust decreases, everything around a transaction becomes more complicated. There are more lawyers, more due diligence, more guarantees and contractual protections. Investors require greater returns to compensate for greater risk.
Every additional layer of protection adds friction.
Eventually, distrust can become expensive enough that something that makes perfect economic sense on paper doesn't happen at all.
Sitting there, I began thinking about how often we do the same thing in the rest of our lives.
Countries protect themselves. Companies and investors protect themselves. People protect themselves.
We build structures around the possibility of being hurt.
And often we should.
Risk is real. Governments do change rules. Investors do exploit opportunity. Business partners betray one another. People break promises. Protection exists because experience teaches us that loss is possible.
But protection has a price too.
At some point, the structures we build to prevent ourselves from losing can also prevent us from receiving:
Opportunity.
Intimacy.
Discovery.
Collaboration.
Love.
Life.
There are the losses we experience because we took the risk.
And then there are the losses we never experience as losses at all:
The relationship we never entered.
The idea we never pursued.
The person we never became.
The life we never lived because we protected ourselves from the uncertainty required to discover it.
Protection can save us from pain. It can also cost us possibility.
That may be its most difficult price to calculate, because an unlived possibility leaves no evidence behind.
We never know exactly what it cost us.
The Performance of Possibility
There was something undeniably performative about the evening.
It was UNGA week in New York, after all.
At one point, Eric Adams was introduced, jokingly, as the former president of one of the wealthiest nations in the world: New York City.
Everyone laughed.
But the joke captured something about the evening.
Presidents and government officials made speeches. Investors talked about opportunity. Bankers talked about structures. Everyone shook hands in a beautiful hotel and described the future that could exist if the right people could figure out how to work together.
At moments, the choreography of it all was impossible not to notice.
As the formal program loosened, so did the room. People moved between tables. Some left. Dinner appeared while conversations continued. The polished language of the stage gave way to the more complicated conversations people have when they're no longer holding microphones.
The certainty softened.
The skepticism became easier to see.
The seriousness of presidents and capital markets existed alongside the ordinary strangeness of a dinner: people watching one another, looking for someone they knew, trying to meet someone they didn't, eating, exchanging cards, posing for photographs.
I've been thinking differently about the performance since.
Think about a first date.
We choose what to wear. We sit across from someone we barely know. We tell stories about ourselves. We reveal some things and withhold others. We behave as though spending the evening together is perfectly ordinary when underneath it we're both trying to determine whether we want to see each other again.
A job interview is a performance. So is a pitch. A wedding is a ritualized performance of an extraordinarily consequential promise.
Maybe diplomacy isn't so different.
Sometimes performance is simply how we create enough structure around uncertainty to approach one another at all.
Political leaders need capital. Investors need returns. Consumer economies need resources. Resource-rich economies need infrastructure and access to markets.
Maybe trust isn't what brings people to the table.
Need does.
Trust determines what becomes possible once they're there.
Six Minutes Away
Dinner began during the final conversation.
I asked a waiter about wine.
There wasn't any.
My husband looked at me and knew fairly quickly that we weren't staying for dinner.
Six minutes away was Milos.
Earlier that afternoon, walking home from getting my hair blown out, I had looked down at the sidewalk and found a penny.
Heads up.
I picked it up and put it in my bag.
I hadn't thought much about it until my husband suggested Milos.
The first night we met, years earlier, we had drinks at the Peninsula and then walked to Milos for dinner. Somewhere along the way, I found a penny.
I handed it to him for luck.
He kept it.
That night, without having planned any of this, I happened to be wearing the same dress I'd worn the first night we met.
We walked into Milos, and it was packed.
The room was loud and alive. Sophisticated New Yorkers crowded the tables, drinking wine and talking over dinner.
My husband enjoys reminiscing about our early days. Once he realized we had somehow ended up at the same restaurant where we'd had our first dinner, with me in the same dress, he wanted to recreate the night.
I leaned in and teased him about how faithfully he intended to recreate it.
Some memories can remain ours.
We ordered wine and dinner and enjoyed the night.
A few minutes earlier, we'd been sitting in a room with presidents, government officials, bankers and investors trying to imagine what might become possible if people with different histories, interests and fears could find a way to work together.
Now I was sitting across from the man to whom I had once handed something worth one cent.
Neither of us could possibly have known that first night what we were beginning.
What We Risk
We talk about trust as though it should precede risk.
First I'll trust you. Then I'll let myself become vulnerable.
First prove this is safe. Then I'll invest.
First show me how this ends. Then I'll begin.
But life rarely offers that sequence.
Trust requires evidence, and evidence requires experience.
At some point, someone has to risk something first.
Not recklessly.
Not blindly.
Not without discernment.
But enough.
Enough to have the conversation.
Enough to make the investment.
Enough to go to dinner.
Enough to allow something to happen whose outcome you cannot guarantee.
A summit won't erase history. A speech won't eliminate political risk. A dinner won't suddenly make investors trust governments or governments forget what exploitation has cost them before.
Perhaps that isn't what these rooms are for.
Maybe the first requirement isn't trust.
It's enough mutual need to enter the room, enough curiosity to stay, enough willingness to risk something small before risking something larger.
We want to know the value of something before we give ourselves to it.
Whether the relationship will last.
Whether the investment will pay off.
Whether the person is safe.
But guarantees require knowing the future.
And the cost of demanding certainty may be all the lives we never get to discover.
Earlier that evening, the conversation had been about resources worth billions of dollars.
By the end of the night, I kept thinking about a penny.
About all the things whose value we cannot know when they first appear.
