 What if we trusted you? We're in the middle of a trust crisis. The Edelman Trust Barometer for 2017, their headline was Global Trust Implosion. The 2016 word of the year from Oxford was post-truth. Why? Well, one reason was that the Apex Predator of Capitalism is now running the world's superpower. Behind this are some age-old questions. Why are workers disengaged? Why don't voters vote? Why are students apathetic and alienated? Well, we've been treating them as mere consumers for about 100 years, instead of as trustworthy human beings. Somewhere along the way, we lost trust in humans. We handed the world over to people, to managers and designers, and we said, here, design it for efficiency, scale, and profit. And don't worry about things like meaning and trust and community and society. Those things are soft and squishy and nobody cares about them anyway. But in fact, it turns out that all of these are social systems and these things were the essence of social systems. In fact, let me escalate the argument just a little bit more. I think we're in a titanic battle between trust and mistrust. And despite all of this, I'm an optimist. I think trust is actually the way out. I think it's the way forward. This Patreon page is my invitation to you to join me in this quest, to figure out what to name this thing, how to explain it, how to nurture the organizations that are already doing it, how to connect them up, in fact, possibly even how to build or spark some of the initiatives that still need to exist. Now, this may sound like a huge, huge mission to be on. After all, this is about changing institutions and belief systems behind them. But you know what? Movements around the world have already cracked this code. Open source software is based on trust. The structure of the internet is based on trust. The sharing economy, what you're gonna climb into some stranger's car or give them your bedroom. Microfinance, you give people loans who don't have any collateral. Traffic calming, animal jumbling, unschooling. There's movements all over the place that use these principles of design from trust. We just don't know yet how to connect them to one another, how to accelerate them, how to turn this into more of a movement. This point of view showed up for me 20 years ago when I realized as a tech industry analyst that I didn't like the word consumer, that the word made me kind of itch and crawl. And so I paid attention to it. And it gifted me this delicious thesis that we're entering a relationship economy and that trust is actually central, that we've thrown away the most important ingredient in how to build social systems that work. At the beginning, this project is going to smell like a podcast. I'll have invited guests, I'll explore issues, I'll talk to you this way, you'll talk back. I'll probably write a book somewhere in the process, but then along the way it's going to get a lot more interesting. I'll make pilgrimages to the people in places that are already doing this. We'll create some experiments with media to figure out how do we create shared meaning? How do we trigger collective intelligence and share it with other people? We may become a nursery for some of these ideas either that other people have started or that we may start. As a bonus, I have been curating all of these ideas into a piece of software called The Brain. You're seeing it there above my head right now. I happened to be on their first press tour 20 years ago. The moment I saw it, I was like, oh my God, this is how my brain works. And I started using it. In fact, the file you're looking at is the file that I created that I opened 20 years ago. So there's 340,000 things in there called thoughts all connected up in context. And as we do this work together, I'm going to be feeding that brain memorializing the stuff we work on as our beginning of a shared memory. So please join me on this quest. Joining is really easy. There is a large button right here that says become a patron, choose a level, jump in. We've got a lot of work to do and I think it's going to be a lot of fun. After all, what if we trusted you?