 Trust is the lever that can turn scarcity into abundance. What's more, trust can also fix many of our problems with economics and capitalism. I'm a realistic optimist, and I hope that you'll be one too by the end of this short talk. To get there, let's start with a much more familiar equation. Scarcity equals value. Is that something familiar? I went to the Wharton Business School where they taught me this principle, which is central to economics and capitalism. It's easy to extrapolate this idea to believe that scarcity is a prerequisite for a desirable business. No scarcity, no business model, no profits. And from there that almost anything goes when creating scarcity. To make the argument for abundance and trust, I'll tell two stories. One recent, one not so recent. The first is about IBM, which was the 800 pound gorilla in the tech business when I started as a tech industry analyst, and which appeared to be about to fail in the early 90s. Amid other problems, their launch was being eaten by workstation vendors like Sun and Apollo. My peers and I doubted the mainframe would be around for much longer, and maybe not even IBM. Then some internal mavericks convinced IBM's programmers to adopt Apache, the open source web server software, which they installed across their range of computers alongside TCPIP, the communications protocol, and Linux, the operating system. And by using all these pieces of code they did not own, and IBM was known for being very proprietary about its intellectual property, they saved the company, which proceeded to sell multiple billions of dollars in services across its refurbished platforms. Open source software is a fabulous example of abundance born from trust. Open source software is, for all practical purposes, infinite. Anyone can download and use it. But its health depends on many people collaborating to make it better over time. None of them own it, but they all play together because they get to use it. And that takes mechanisms of trust. My second story is about Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia. It turns out that on all three continents before Europeans got there, Indigenous people had figured out how to manage their landscapes, their shared commons, instead of individual plots of land. Paying deep attention to nature and carefully using fire stick farming, they sculpted their landscapes. They created abundance everywhere with forest orchards, places where it was easy to catch game, driving herds into controlled grazing zones, long-lasting fish traps. This weir here might be 20,000 years old. This was hard-won knowledge that took a lot of trial and error, and was then passed down through generations. For more background, I recommend the books 1491 by Charles Mann and Dark Amu by Bruce Pascoe. Alas, the first Europeans thought aborigines were just lazy. They noticed the forest gardens, but they didn't recognize them as human-generated abundance. Then they systematically destroyed it, replacing it with industrial systems based on mass production, mass consumption, and ownership. Then, over time, we all proceeded to lose faith in humans, partly through the senseless, wasteful brutality of World War I, partly through the consumerization of every aspect of our lives which dumbed us down. In the process, we broke trust and tried to industrialize it and automate it. Today's breaches of trust look like the stalker economy and surveillance capitalism, among many other practices we think of as normal. Worse, trust has been weaponized with some parties intentionally undermining our trust in science, journalism, government, and one another. So most of the institutions we take for granted today are actually designed for mistrust. I mean here, the compulsory education system, our electoral system, which is mostly a consumer mass marketing exercise, culture, which was once sacred and is now just art we buy and sell, and everything about our identity, nutrition, and happiness. Do you feel like you have enough? Are you enough? Not likely, consumerism would grind to a halt if you did, so it makes sure you always have unmet needs. I promised an optimistic path, right? Now, happily, we are rediscovering trust, community, meaning, purpose, and abundance. I've discovered hundreds of movements around the world already doing this from the open source example I started with to workplace democracy and self-directed education. Exponential technologies can cut either way. They might help us automate and replicate our way to the much promised world free of disease and want, or they might surveil and enslave us to the point that we're living lives we no longer want. Which way this goes depends on what we do in these days. Our lives in lockdown because of coronavirus really highlight the role of trust and open up tremendous opportunities for change. Remember, scarcity equals abundance minus trust. We can fix economics and capitalism and live amid abundance, but it will take swapping out some well-groove beliefs and taking leaps of trust.