 From London, England, it's theCUBE! Covering KUPA Inspire 19, EMEA, brought to you by KUPA. Hey, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin on the ground in London at KUPA Inspire 19. Can you hear all the buzz around me? You probably can hear it. It's electric. The keynote just ended and I'm very pleased to welcome, fresh from the keynote stage, we have Rachel Bossman, author and trust expert from Oxford University. Rachel, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. Your talk this morning about the intersection of trust and technology is so, to say it's interesting as an understatement, you had some great examples where you showed some technology brands that we all know. Yes. And have different relationships with Uber, Facebook and Amazon. And the way that you measure the audience is great. You know, clap the brand that you trust the most and it was so interesting because we expect these technology brands to, they should be preserving our information, but we've also seen recent history, some big examples of that trust being broken. Yeah, yeah. Talk to us about your perspectives. Well, so what I thought was interesting, what kind of unexpected for me was no one trust, no one clap for Facebook, no one person in the room. And this is really interesting to me because the point I was making is that trust is really, really contextual, right? So if I had said to people, do you trust on Facebook that you can find your friends from college? They probably would have clapped, but do I trust them with my data? No. And this distinction is so important because if you lose trust in one area as a company in a brand and it can take time, you lose that ability to interact with people. So our relationship and our trust relationship with brands is incredibly complicated, but I think particularly tech brands, what they're realizing is that how badly things go wrong when they're in a trust crisis. Talk to me about trust as a currency. You gave some great examples this morning where money is the currency for transactions, where trust is the currency of interactions. Yeah, well, I was trying to frame things, not because they sound nice, but how do you create a lens where people can really understand what is the value of this thing and what is the role that it plays? And I'm never gonna say money's not important, money is very important, but people can understand money, people value money, and I think that's because it has a physical, you can touch it, and it has an agreed value, right? Trust, I actually don't believe, can be measured. Trust is, what is it? Like it's something there, there's a connection between people. So you know when you have trust because you can interact with people. You know when you have trust because you can place their faith in them. You can share things about yourself and they'll share things back. So it's kind of this idea that think of it as a currency, think of it as something that you should really value, but that is incredibly fragile in any situation in any organization. How does a company like Koopa or an Amazon or a Facebook, how do they leverage trust and turn it into a valuable asset? Yeah, I mean, I don't like the idea that you sort of unlock trust. I think companies that really get it right are companies that think day in and day out around behaviors and culture. If you get behaviors and culture right, like the way people behave, whether they have empathy, whether they have integrity, whether you feel like you can depend on them, trust naturally flows from that. But the other thing that often you find with brands is they think of trust as like this reservoir, right? So like it's different from awareness and loyalty. It's not like this thing that you can have this really full up battery, which means then you can launch some crazy product and everyone more trusted. We've seen this with like Mattel, the toy brand. They launched a smart assistant for children called Aristotle. And within six months they had to pull it because people didn't trust what it was recording and watching in people's bedrooms. We were talking about Facebook and the cryptocurrency Libra or their new smart assistants. Like I wouldn't trust that. Amazon have introduced smart locks. I don't know if you've seen these. Well, you know, if you're not home, it's inconvenient for a very annoying package slip. So you put an Amazon lock and the delivery person will walk into your home. I trust Amazon to live my parcels. I don't trust them to give access to my home. So what we do with the trust and how we tap into that, it really depends on the risks that we're asking people to take. That's a great point that you bring about Amazon because you look at how they are infiltrating our lives in so many different ways. There's a lot of benefits to it, right, in terms of convenience. You said, I trust Amazon because I know when I order something it's going to arrive when they say it will. But when you said about trust being contextual, I said, do you trust that Amazon pays their taxes? I went, wow, I hadn't thought of it in that way. Would I want to trust them to come into my home to drop off a package? No. Yeah. But the, I don't know if I want to say infiltration into our lives is it's happening whether we like it or not. Yeah, well, I think Amazon is really interesting. First of all, because so often as consumers, and I'm guilty, we let convenience trump trust. So we talk about trust, but you know what, like, I don't really trust that Uber driver, but I really want to get somewhere, I'll get in the car, right? I don't really trust the ethics of Amazon as a company or like what they're doing in the world, but I like the convenience. I predict that Amazon is actually going to go through a major trust crisis. Really? Yeah. The reason why is because their trust is largely, I talked about capability and character. Yes. Amazon's trust is really built around capability. The capability of their performance centres, like how efficient they are. Character wobbles, right? Like does Bezos have integrity? Do we really feel like they care about the bookshops they're eating up or they care about us as, you know, they want us to spend money on the right things. And when you have a brand and the trust is purely built around capability and the character piece is missing, it's quite a precarious place to be. I saw a tweet that you tweeted recently. The difference between capability and character and it was fascinating because you mentioned some big examples of Boeing. Yes. The two big air disasters in the last year, Facebook obviously, the security breach. We work this overly aggressive business model and you said these companies are placing, maybe the blame is not sure if that's the right word, on product or service capabilities and you say it really is character. Can you talk to our audience about the difference and why character is so important? It's so interesting. So you know sometimes you post things. I actually, I post more on LinkedIn, I have more of it. But, and suddenly you hit a nerve, right? Because it's, I don't know, it's something you're summarizing that many people are feeling. And so the point of that was like, if you look at Boeing, Theranos was another example. Yes. We work hundreds of banks. When something goes wrong, they say it was a flaw in the product. It was a flaw in the system. It's a capability problem. And I don't think that's the case because the root cause of capability problems come from character and culture. And so capability is really about the competence and reliability of someone or a product or service. Character's how someone behaves. Character gets to their intentions and motives. Character gets to, did they know about it and not tell us? Even BW is another example. Yes. It's not the product that is the issue. And I think we as consumers and citizens and customers where many companies get it wrong in a trust crisis is they talk about the product fix. We won't forgive them or we won't stop giving them our trust again until we really believe something's changed about their character. I'm not sure anything has changed with Facebook's culture and character which is why they're struggling with every move that they take. Even though their intentions might be good, that's not how people in the world are viewing them. Do you think for taking Boeing as an example? I mean, I fly a lot, I'm sure you do as well. And when the accidents happen, I'm sure everybody including myself was checking what plane is this. Because when you know, especially once data starts being revealed, that demonstrated pilots, test pilots were clearly saying something isn't right here. Why do you think a company like Boeing isn't coming out and addressing that head on from a integrity perspective? Do you think that could go a long way in helping their brand reputation? I never, I mean, I do get it. I'm married to a lawyer. So I understand legal gets involved, governance gets involved. So it's like, you know, let's not disclose that. Like it's, they're so worried about the implications but it's this belief they can keep things hidden. It's a continual pattern, right? And that they try to show empathy but really it comes across as some weird kind of sympathy. They don't really show humility. And so when the CEO sits there, I have to believe he feels the pain of the human consequence of what happened. But more importantly, I have to believe it will never happen again. And again, it's not necessarily, do I trust the products Boeing creates? It's, do I trust the people? Like, do I trust the decisions that they're making? And so it's really interesting to watch companies, Samsung, right? You can recover from a product crisis with the phones. Yes. And they kind of go away. But it's much harder to recover from what Boeing is a perfect example is become a cultural crisis. Right, right. Talk to us about the evolution of trust. You talked about these three waves. Yes. Tell our audience about that and what the third wave is and why we're in it, benefits and also things to be aware of. Yes. I didn't really talk about this today because, you know, it's all about inspiration. But so just to give you a sense, the three, the way I think about trust is three chapters of human history. So the first one is called local trust. We're running around villages and communities. I knew you. I knew your sister. I knew, you know, whoever was in that village. And it was largely based on reputation. So I borrowed money from someone I knew. I went to the baker. Now, this type of trust, it was, it was actually phenomenally effective, but we couldn't scale it. So when we started to want to trade globally the industrial revolution, moving to cities, we invented what I call institutional trust. And that's everything from financial systems to insurance products, all these mechanisms that allow trust to flow on a different level. Now, what's happening today is not those two things are going away and they're not important. They are. It's that what technology inherently does, particularly networks, marketplace and platforms, is it takes this trust that used to be very hierarchical and linear. We used to look up to the CEO. We used to look up to the expert and it distributes it around networks and platforms. So you can see that at Cooper, right? And this is amazing because it can unlock value. It can create marketplaces. It can change the way we share, connect, collaborate. But I think what's happened is that sort of the idealism around this and the empowerment is slightly tinged in a healthy way, realizing a lot can go wrong. So distributed trust doesn't necessarily mean distributed responsibility. My biggest insight from observing many of these communities is that we like the idea of empowerment. We like the idea of collaboration and we like the idea of control. But when things go wrong, they need a center. Does that make sense? Absolutely, yes. A lot of the mess that we're seeing in the world today is actually caused by distributed trust. So when I read a piece of information that isn't from a trusted source and I make a decision to vote for someone, just an example. And so we're trying to figure out what is the role of the institution in this distributed world? And that's why I think things have got incredibly messy. Certainly it has the potential for that, right? Looking at one of the things that I also saw that you were talking about, I think it was in one of your TED talks was reputation capital. You said, you believe that will be more powerful than credit history in the 21st century. How can people like you and I get, I want to say control over our reputation when we're doing so many transactions digitally. I know. I think you were saying in one of your talks, moving from one country to another and your credit history doesn't follow you. How can somebody really control their trust capital and create positive power from it? They can't. They can't. Oh, no. I mean, I don't want to disappoint you, but there's always like something in a TED speech that you wish you could take out like 10 years later and be like, not that you got it wrong, but that there's a naivety, right? So it is working in some senses. So what is really hard is like, if I have a reputation on Airbnb, I have a reputation on Amazon, on either side of the marketplace, I feel like I own that, right? That's my value. And I should be able to aggregate that and use that to get a loan or get a better insurance, because it's a predictor of how I behave in the future. So I don't believe credit scores are a good predictor of behavior. That is very hard to do because the marketplaces, they believe they own the data and they have no incentive to share the reputation. So believe me, like so many companies after, actually it was wonderful after that TED talk, like many tried to figure out how to aggregate reputation. Where I have seen it play out as an idea, and this is really very rewarding, is many entrepreneurs have taken the idea and gone to emerging markets or situations where people have no credit history. So, Tullar is a really good example, which is a lending company. Insurance companies are starting to look at this. There's a company called Trati where they can't get a loan, they can't get a product, they can't even open a bank account because they have no traditional credit history. Everyone has a reputation somewhere so they can tap into these networks and use that to have access to things that were previously inaccessible. So that's the application. I'm more excited about versus having a trust score. A trust score that we would be able to then use for our own advantages, whether it's getting a job, getting a loan. Yeah, and then unfortunately what also happened was China, and God forbid that I in any way inspired this decision, decided they would have a national trust score. So they would take what you were buying online and what you were saying online, all these thousands of interactions and that the government would create a trust score that would really impact your life, the schools that your children could go to and there's a blacklist and, you know, if you jaywalk, your face is projected and your score goes down. This is like an episode of Black Mirror, so. It's terrifying. Yeah. There's a fine line there. Rachel, I wish we had more time because we could keep going on and on and on, but I want to thank you for coming right from the keynote stage to our side. And that dog was not due. And that dog was not due. Yes. Yes. For Rachel Botsman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire London 19. Thanks for watching.