Transcriber: Teresa Mison Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
[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)