Bridging the gap between old & new trust economies: Ramy Nassar at TEDxCarthage

Ramy Nassar shares the importance of trust and how he is one example of someone who trusts in a person that he doesn't know. He mentions that he rents out his apartment just by trusting a third party, the site airbnb.com He shares about the new Bitcoin currency, which basically is an example of trust in someone else you don't really know.

[In French] Good morning!

My name is Ramy

I come from Canada

But if I speak in French,
my French is Canadian,

I don't think that you will understand me

so I will continue in English.

(Laughter)

RN: Hello!
Audience: Hello!

I am Ramy.

This is my home.

I live in Waterloo in Canada.

This is my apartment and
I just wanted to share it with you

and I'm gonna come back to it
in a couple of minutes.

So, what I want to talk
about today

is, "trust", that's why
we are here today.

And really the question
is often: Who do you trust?

I don't care.

I'm much more interested in "why",

Why do my trust?

and so many times, trust begins with
this fundamental thing,

the handshake.

The handshake goes back
about 2,500 years.

Originally, the handshake was
a way to show someone

that you didn't have a weapon
that you were unarmed.

But what is amazing is that
2,500 years ago,

they didn't know how powerful
a handshake really could be.

This is your brain.

It's not your brain,
it's not my brain, it's a brain

and that colored area that you're seeing

is your nucleus accumbens;

and it's a little piece of your brain

and I'm gonna talk
a little bit more about it.

So, what happens is that in 2012,

some researchers at the
University of Illinois

actually studied the handshake
really for the first time,

and what they did is that initially
they looked up at behaviours,

and they said:
Let's watch transactions happen,

that begin with a handshake
and let's watch when they don't.

And when it was observed, what they saw
was increased feelings of confidence,

trustworthiness and a feeling
of wanting to cooperate.

But they took this reasearch
one step further.

They actually looked
at the brain and they used

functional magnetic resonance imaging,

so, pictures of the brain
like the one I just showed you.

And what they found

was at that moment that the handshake,

that the physical contact happens,
this area of the brain

that I showed you lights up.
It starts to become more active.

Now, that area of the brain
is associated with

reduced avoidance behaviors,

suppressing negative
impressions and emotions

and wanting to further interact.

Basically, that means trust.

So, let's think about this
for a second.

When I reach out, and I touch
your hand and we shake hands,

I'm actually causing
a physiological

and neurological reaction
in your brain.

I see a few people
doing it right now in the audience,

try it, reach to your neighbour,
shake their hand.

So, right now, as you do that,
you're causing electrical

and chemical signals to be released
in that person's brain and vice versa.

So, this is what I'm gonna call
sort of the "old economy of trust".

Trust is such a fundamental thing.

Just by shaking someone's hand
maybe they do not trust you 100%

but it's one piece of it.

So, let's go back
to my apartment.

I actually left something off
of the pictures,

if you see is the same pictures,
but now the logo is up,

it says, airbnb.com
verified photo.

So, I'm one of those people,
I rent my apartment out

when I'm away on this site airbnb.

Right now, there is a young woman
named Karina

and a young man named Jeff,

living in my apartment.
They're from England.

Karina has 642 friends on Facebook,
that's what I know about her.

Jeff has seven positive reviews
on airbnb.com,

that's what I know about him.

I've never met them,
I've never seen them.

They're cooking in my kitchen;
they're watching my TV

They're sleeping in my bed.

I hope just sleeping.

(Laughter)

But I have to trust them.

The system only works,
if I trust them.

So, how can I trust them
when I trust them through

this third party,
I trust them through the site?

So, it's almost like
an implied or inferred trust

that I built with these two people.

And this is sort what I think of
this new economy of trust.

But I think there is a gap,
I think that there is something missing,

and as when switch from
this industrial economy

to a connected one,

as we switch from

centralized systems like
hotels and rental car companies

to online mass collaboration
and consumption systems

like airbnb and car sharing systems,
you can even share pets now,

you can rent someone's dog
for a weekend if you want.

Now we shift from a system
with very few winners

like the big chains, the big hotels,
the car companies

to a system where anyone
can be a winner

and take their extra resources.

We really, really need that trust,
and I think that there is still

a gap between this old economy
of trust and a new one.

So, if we think of trust as a currency,
that's our theme today,

what we can do is we can look
at another currency,

we can look at currency itself.

Almost every country in the world
has their own currency,

there are some unions,
but in general each country

or each collection of countries
has their own currency,

and how the currency
is regulated and valuated

is different in each case,
it's a closed system,

until Bitcoin came along.

And Bitcoin, which started few years ago,
is an attempt to open source currency,

it's a peer-to-peer open platform
in which anyone in the world

can participate in the currency,
help regulate it,

help drive how it's described,
how the system works.

So,my question to you today is:

Can we open source trust?

Can we build a system, and
there are people working on this now,

where we say, let's make trust
an open platform,

and let's say that instead of each site
having its own system for trust,

we actually have
an open peer-to-peer system

that can describe trust, so I'm no longer
just trusting in one system

in order to rent my apartment out.

or to rent someone's else apartment.

So, as we go through the day today,
what I really want you to think about

is that fundamental question,
it's not: who do you trust,

it's: Why do we trust?

Thank you.

(Applause)