Show Notes
Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. It's not backed by gold, or by anything you can hold, but by trust. And that trust had to start somewhere.
In this first episode, Mary-Ann Ochota takes us back roughly two thousand years, to a Roman trading site buried beneath a working farm in Yorkshire. Guided by archaeologist Dr Brendon Wilkins, who's spent the last decade excavating the site, she pieces together what life looked like for the traders who passed through, haggling over pottery and silver coins, deciding in the moment whether to trust a stranger.
It's a question that's been with us ever since. How do two people who've never met agree on what something is worth, and how does that tiny act of trust scale up into the systems we rely on today, from the coins in your pocket to the number on your banking app?
To help answer that, Mary-Ann talks to Bruce Schneier, cryptographer and author of Liars and Outliers, about how humanity built trust between strangers on a global scale. Cognitive neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott also joins to unpack what's going on in our brains every time we decide to trust someone.
It's the first step in a story running from ancient coins to today's digital world, starting with one slippery question: what is money, really?
Trust Forward is a podcast from Sumsub, AI powered trust infrastructure for compliance operations at scale, made in collaboration with This is Distorted. Every story here is really a version of the same problem playing out in a different era. Today it plays out online, in the moment a business has to decide whether to trust a stranger on the other side of a screen. That's the problem Sumsub exists to solve.
Sumsub's Website: sumsub.com Sumsub's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/sumsub Sumsub's Instagram: instagram.com/sumsubcom Sumsub on X: x.com/Sumsubcom Sumsub's YouTube Channel: youtube.com/@sumsubcom Mary-Ann Ochota on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mary-ann-ochota-frgs-9234aa61/ Bruce Schneier: www.schneier.com Dr Brendon Wilkins on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brendonwilkins1 Professor Sophie Scott on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sophie-scott-179b6610/
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Resources for this episode can be found here: https://trustforward.sumsub.com/episodes/money-is-a-made-up-thing/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Trust Forward
Pirates may look like the ultimate outsiders. Lawless, dangerous and answerable to nobody. But a pirate ship could not survive without rules. There had to be agreement over food, pay, discipline and what happened when someone was injured. In a world beyond the reach of government, trust was what kept the crew together.
The best conmen never have to steal a thing. They just ask, and people hand it over.
Science is meant to be ruled by reason and evidence. But for centuries, only certain people were trusted to practise it.
Trust is one of the strangest things about being human. It's completely invisible, entirely made up, and yet it holds all of society together.