Pushkin

According to the Cambridge English dictionary, to trust, is to believe that someone is good and honest and will not harm you,

or that something is safe and reliable.

As loyal listeners to cautionary tales, you will have heard countless stories of people who were not good

and not honest and did do harm, people such as Ponzi Scheme fraudster Samuel Israel III,

art forger, Han van Megeren, and the murderous Dr Harold Shipman.

And yet, these men were trusted. Why?

I've told you about people who trusted in technology when they shouldn't, and those who didn't trust it when they should. Again, why? To help us get to grips with issues of trust, I am joined by my friend and fellow Pushkin voice, Rachel Botsman. Rachel lectures in trust at Oxford University and her new audiobook, How to Trust and

be trusted, is available via pushkin.fm, or wherever else audiobooks are sold.

Hello, Rachel.

Hello, Tim.

It's nice to see you.

It's great to see you as well.

So we have asked listeners to cautionary tales and subscribers to your newsletter, Rethink, to get in touch for this special trust-based edition of cautionary questions.

Before we dip into the mailbag, though, please tell me, why is this topic so interesting to you?

For so many reasons, but I generally am interested in things that aren't always

visible that are quite difficult to see or complex to understand. And trust is one of those

forces. You can't see or touch trust. And yet you feel it and you know when it's gone. So I like topics that are very complex and ever-changing and that impacts so many different

areas of our lives.

And I guess that's very true for trust.

It's hard to think of an area of our life that isn't touched by trust.

Yeah.

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