Welcome to Cambridge Forum live in Harvard Square and thank you for joining us for what promises to be a timely and somewhat edgy discussion about trust. A small word that one with huge ramification today in the technological world who can you trust . It is the subject of tonights forum and also the title of rachel latest book on the subject. I director of the forum pleased to have rachel oz our guest speaker tonight on the last stop with her nine week tour which rather begs question of why is trust such a hot topic around the world at this point in history . It is a time when confidence in institution and governments this is all time low. But when theres been a huge surge in growth of shared Economy Companies like airbnb, tinder and uber statistics show that were shifting our trust away from institutions toward individuals. Or some would say strangers in areas is diverse as dating, banking, to sharing rides or hiring nannies been investigating to try to understand how technology is transforming trust and destroying what complications are for our decision in life work and business. Also when completed her post graduate studies at harvard, with and objection pored she divides her life between sydney where she lives with her husband and two children and london. We welcome rachel botsman. Good evening everyone thank you for coming job i know what its cusp of the holiday so happy holidays to all of you it is really lovely to come back to harvard i havent been back for 18 years which is a bit frightening but it is lovely to be become and im excited to talk to you this evening about my work on trust. And when i thought we would explore is this u trust shift what is happening from institutions to individuals. And i hope i can give you the side good and bachelors degree and starting to feel in all areas of our life so im going to talk for a little bit and then i will open it to all of your questions. Before i get started, i just want to get a little bit of a feel for you. So if you could just raise your hand sorry my clicker is not working if you could raise your hand, if u youve ever been a guest on airbnb. Almost all of you anyone a host on airbnb . Few people. Because as acquires more trust to be a host than a guest. Does anyone own the quick currency raise your hand raise your hand if you dont mow what that is okay all of you okay. So ill talk about that liberty a currency like bitcoin. Has anyone been on the dark web and you dont have to tell me what youve bought but on there and seen it . Back who doesnt know what the dark web is . Okay. Well this is where you can go and you can find all kinds of things like gun and pornography ive gone there for Research Purposes i promise. But all of these things, examples of how technology is changing the way that we can trust one another i thought that i would start with a personal story. Its a very important story to me because when you become obsessed with a topic enough that you dedicate your life to researching it and you want to write a book theres a point where you start to ask yourself where this fascination has come from. And started at this very, very young age so what happened was around an like many many women she needed som help because she was going to hire a nanny. Now for some reason, she placed in this british magazine called the lady. So if any of you are down to naby fans youll know that lady is where people hire their butler and man nanny so woman once reported was called doris and i remember the day doris walked into our house because she had this really big curly hair, and glasses, and a very, very thick scottish accent every time she said my name she would roll her eyes and thing i remember so clearly was she was wearing Salvation Army uniform complete with naffny bonnet now these things are very important when they come to trust and theyre called trust signals and trust signals are clues or o symbols that we knowingly or o unknowingly use to decide whether someone is trustworthy or not. You are probably tuning into some of my signals right now. The problem is that some signals are louder than others and sometimes we get influenced by the wrong thing. Now doris lived with us for month and nothing suspicious about her. Until one with weekend she disappeared and by day three my parent are now worried about where doris is so they go around to neighbors house and our neighbors are called lux mburgs and my father says do you know where doris is he said thats so funny youve come around because ive just found out that your nanny and our nanny are running biggest to london. Now at this pongt my parents are really worried that doris is going to come home so they search her room and find things that you really dont want laying around when you have young children. And then what happened was three days later the police come knocking on the door, and they arrest my dads. Because doris wasnt a member of the Salvation Army going off for charity but robbing banks and she would been involved in arm bank robbery and she used our Silver Estate as a getaway car. Now [laughter] i love this story because i like to remind my parents that they left me in the care of a drug dealing bank robber for almost 10 months. But it is really interesting when you think about it because my parents say oh rational people have good judgment and so i started to think of how did they make such a bad decision when it came to doris why do we get often police our faith in people who are untruth worthy . And thing that i realized is that they thought they had enough information to make a decision about her. But in reality they faced a trust gap. And this i think is so profound as to what is happening in Society Today and that is that often in our lives the illusion of information is actually far more dangerous than ignorance. So the way trust theorist put this this is [inaudible conversations] will say that trust has two enemies not one. The first is bad character. And the second is poor information. So the question that i started to ask myself in my research was how can a technology address these problems . Is technology making us smarter about who we trust o or o is it encouragings us to place our trust in the wrong people and the wrong places . Are we giving trust and technology playing a role in that . Why is this an important question . Lets do a quick exercise you can kind of see where this is going, and so im going to give you a boo it is going to sound loud in this church, and you can use that boo for the person you think is the least trustworthy okay so when i say their name you boo if you think you get one boo. Right so if you think Harvey Weinstein is least trustworthy person on this earth say boo now. One boo. If you think trump is the least trustworthy person on this slide say now. Boo. Now i dont know if you know this sofia the robot and shes the first robot that has citizenship. Shes made cats citizen of saudi arabia if you think sofia is least trustworthy person on this slide say boo now. Okay so the robot is more trustworthy in the president of the United States dont need to worry about that right now. So lets do this in rears you can clap. So i would like you to clap for the company you think is the most trustworthy if you think google is the most Trustworthy Company on this slide clap now. But that as facebook who is facebook is the most Trustworthy Company on this slide . No one. Okay. Amazon lz so i think amazon and google were i dont know maybe amazon was slightly ahead. But a rubbish exercise but i thought one of you might say rachel trust them to do what . And this is a really important point and it is something that i find very hard when i open up the newspapers or o i listen to the yeedz or the way were talking about trust is in these very, very general terms. It is very dangerous because we can trust that President Trump will tweet something ridiculous at 3 a. M. But we dont trust him to negotiate with north korea. We can trust even that Harvey Weinstein could make great movies but donts trust his behavior necessarily around women. And amazon is really interesting right so when people i think when they say what they trust amazon they say they are saying that they have confidence that when they make an order online those will show up. Hay dont necessarily trust them to pay taxes. Or to treat their employees well so this is the first thing that i would like you to think about is when were talking about trust it is a keep in mind in our live and talk about institutions leadsers and individuals, that trust is highly con you can trust me to write an article to teach students do not get in the car with me because im a material driver. Terrible driver so why did i show you this . I showed you this because if you look at the survey so reuters harvard are doing surveys theyre all telling the same, sad story. And that story is very depressing and very worrying so narrative is that trust is in a state of crisis and coming from if you look at the survey trust in all a major institutions theyre not just government but religious organizations, big businesses, and the media is at an all time historic low. Now, look at the survey because one of the problems is the way they ask the question is how we did that exercise do you trust the media . U do you mean, you know, reddit or New York Times what are you trusting media to do but that said you you can see in historic pattern and we have to look at institutions of the lowest level of trust but the Government Trust is always deemed low. Is the institutions of the sharpest decline, and institution that is sharpest decline is the media. In the west its around average of 16 points within less than 1 months which is very significant so all reasons as to why this is happening and ill explain a little bit why. Because a trust erosion of trust is basically lack of faith, and its a lack of faith or confidence in the system but a feeling that had the system is failing us. Weinstein scandal and the movement he created that institutions cannot protect people no matter how powerful they are when they divert peoples trust. But, i dont think this narrative that is helpful. I dont think its healthy. What it actually does it amplifies peoples fears. Amplifies peoples anger and it creates a and the other reason i dont like the narrative i think there is plenty of trust out there its just flowing in Different Directions through different people. Its like energy. You know that energy cant be destroyed. Energy is continually changing form so whats happening is trust, our trust that used to flow upwards whether that the two leaders, to ceos to regulators to experts to academics is being inverted and its not flowing sideways through networks through systems through marketplaces through technologies. Sometimes complete strangers and sometimes friends on the internet, sometimes there are colleagues and sometimes there are peers. Why is this so profound . When you look back historically and you look at the history of trust and i promise you its interesting when you actually go back and you look at how trust really is like a social move of society. Trust is like liquid gold. Without trust human beings cant trade, they cant collaborate, they can cooperate. The trust has always existed within its first chapter of very long period in History Trust was local. We all lived in villages and communities and trust was largely personal so i would trust you because i knew that you or someone do you and if you did something wrong you would get a bad reputation. That would impact your ability to have relationships in the future. Now, what happened is when we went through mass migration when we wanted to trade internationally the trust didnt work so as a society we invented institutional trust. We invented things like corporate brands, brand that would tell us what products and services we should buy. We invented insurance and lots of intervene areas where there be Real Estate Brokers or lawyers so trust started flowing. Institutions. Im not saying these two forms of trust dont exist and shouldnt exist in society but whats happening is theres a third form of trust winding up and challenging particularly institutional trust. Its what i call distributed trust. The irony is that this is a trust that flows directly between people again. Its flowing at a scale that has never been possible before and sometimes the other person is a real human being and other times its an artificially intelligent bot. What i thought i would explore with you is some of the consequences of how distributed trust works and how we see it enabling incredible things but also how we are seeing it can be precarious because too much trust in the wrong people isnt necessarily a good thing. So lets look at this in three different ways through three different lenses. First of all we will look at trust in the ideas and new ideas really could be anything. They could get new technology that they could be a new political idea. They could he a new philosophy so how do people build trust and new ideas . Im not sure this is going to work but we will try it. Just take out your phone and i want you to swap your phone with the person behind you or the person next to you. Just find someone to swap your phone with. Okay, great. What i want you to do is im going to give you 20 seconds. You can do whatever you want with that person. I can give you these directions. Do whatever you want with that persons phone and 20 seconds. Its not along period of time. Go. I see there are some nervous swappers out there. Youve got 10 seconds. Its very quiet. Five more seconds. Now give the phones back. You are also respectful. This does not happen. I expect some people did not want to play this game so they pretended they didnt have a phone. I really dont believe you. I think you did have a phone. Thats okay. You swapped but you didnt do anything with the phone. Use look to the other person and then there were one or two of you that you actually went into that phone. Im not looking at you, dont worry that you are looking at photos and maybe facebook or maybe sending a message retweeting something. But what i was sensing is it was a little bit uncomfortable, right . It was only 20 seconds and i wish her phone so this is what makes many of these ideas so remarkable when we see new technology often sharing with complete strangers based on very different information. Let me tell you a story that brings it to life. These preach a moment here are the brilliant entrepreneurs that found at nbc and their names are brian john in a. I first met them in 2008 so nine years ago. At the time it wasnt what it is today. It was the site where people were renting out mattresses and so two things happen. I was running my facebook and i found the opening story. This is an example of people taking their assets and creating value from them. I cannot let you open this story because this company is going to be dead by the time it goes to publication. I was really glad. The funny thing is if you read it you have 10,000 properties which is nothing compared to today. The other person i am told was my husband. I came home and i said i think i just found the next ebay and i think we should give them our money. It was actually his money. He had some money. He was a corporate lawyer and he said tell me what they do and i said first of all let me tell you about the entrepreneurs because i can tell you they are going to be successful. They are so curious about the world and so curious about Human Behavior but they are also so resilient and when you see those in a human being they often have the dna of a great entrepreneur. I went into the speech and i said just bear with me and keep in mind i only have these photos. Im not really selling it very well. This is the beginning and the idea is that People Like Us and other people around the world their bedrooms and bathrooms they will take photographs and post them on the internet and strangers from all around the world are going to scan these rims and this is going to be the future of travel. He looked at me like you want to give these people this idea your money go ask the first thing he said was a lot can go wrong. But he said this ideas never going to work. Strangers wont trust one another. Strangers while trust one another with their homes. They said to him chris i think you are wrong. Think of ebay. People buy second hand cars on ebay without driving them. People trade with an invisible wizard. This is just to be gained the beginning. He made a really good point in his point was that ebay was about on line transaction so transactions so when you buy something on ebay you dont need that human being. What i was talking about was using the internet to get off the internet and for people to be facetoface. Now he was right in some ways because even nine years ago was really hard to see how toality particularly social networks how would change the way we can trust one another. He was also really wrong, i mean really wrong. Youll see its not just holiday homes. If you want to make money go to a tree house. The treehouse is one of the most popular categories. You can stay in an igloo, you can stay in an aquarium. Now what they have done for space is for experiences. I learned the other day that one of the most popular tricks is going to meet someone. I just go to treehouse and i find a pack of wolves and i dont have to work again. These people make serious money. They are making more than 150,000 a year through these experiences. What they have done is very small. They use technology to create a marketplace that actually never had a marketplace before. This graph really shows it. An airbnb was on top for quite a long time. An airbnb was a Company Built on strangers trusting one another and its now the second most valuable hospitality brand in the world. I like to show this graph to my husband as a reminder that you should always listen to me when it comes to future investing decisions. The other thing i found remarkable is that we have this conversation. You know how some conversations stick in your mind and you can get rid of them. They are just there and i remember i said to him we are building a marketplace. He said we are not building a marketplace. Marketplaces are built of money and most businesses are built on money and money only goes so far far. If you create a business that is about money that business becomes transactional. Our business is going to be built under different currency. If money is the currency the transaction trust is the currency o