Trust This Film?
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September Club is an Emmy-winning production company that specializes in documentaries - from feature films to digital shorts and docu-series. Their work has been featured at film festivals such as Sundance, Toronto, Venice, Cannes and SXSW and produced in collaboration with clients such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO, A&E Films, CNN Films, Apple TV, and BBC Films.
HeyLet’sGo! is a creative and production agency that has created a variety of award-winning campaigns, including several in the documentary space. Their previous collaboration with September Club was titled make|SHIFT, a documentary about how technology changed the advertising industry.
It used to be that trust was built with a firm handshake. Looking someone square in the eye. But as technology has taken a larger role connecting people and businesses, trust has evolved. Humans now rely on digital platforms for increasingly complicated, essential, everyday tasks. How did we get here? And what are the implications? "Trust This Film?" poses the question to leading tech visionaries: In this age of pervasive technology, how will trust – this essential human emotion – endure?
About The Film
Watch the 0:30 trailer here Watch the full documentary here
What is trust
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© Computershare Limited 1996 - 2024. All rights reserved.
September Club is an Emmy-winning production company that specializes in documentaries - from feature films to digital shorts and docu-series. Their work has been featured at film festivals such as Sundance, Toronto, Venice, Cannes and SXSW and produced in collaboration with clients such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO, A&E Films, CNN Films, Apple TV, BBC Films and ESPN films.
It used to be that trust was built with a firm handshake. Looking someone square in the eye. But as technology has taken a larger role connect-ing people and businesses, trust has evolved. Humans now rely on digital platforms for increasingly complicated, essential, everyday tasks. How did we get here? And what are the implications? "Trust This Film?" poses the question to leading tech visionaries: In this age of pervasive tech-nology, how will trust – this essential human emotion – endure?
Full Short film
meet the experts
“Even if technology is progressing incredibly rapidly, we as human beings still have this mechanism of trust in us which has been honed over our evolution in order for us to determine if we can trust someone.”
About This Expert
Entrepreneur / Professor Harvard, Stanford, Hult
TED LADD
“Even with AI now and all the new tools, I don’t believe humans will give up on humans…this is from working with tech companies for years… people still need people.”
CMO FIVERR
GALI ARNON
“As influencers peddle everything…you don’t know what’s actually good and what’s high quality. I trust somebody who actually uses the product more than I trust somebody that’s being paid to tell me that it’s good.”
PRESIDENT FLIP
Kapil Mokhat
“This is really about whom you are leaving in your home with your children when you are not there. We’ve learned over time how to grow trust more efficiently and how to scale it nationwide.”
CEO & CO-FOUNDER URBANSITTER
LYNN PERKINS
“The definition of trust to me is being able to put your well-being of yourself or those that you love in the hands of somebody else, and knowing that that person is going to protect and keep them safe.”
TYCE & MARY TRAPEZE ARTISTS
DUO TRANSCEND
KAPIL MOKHAT
Kapil is the President at Flip, a digital platform that allows shoppers to both learn about and purchase products via user-generated videos. As of Fall 2023, Flip is one of the top ten fastest growing shopping apps in America. Kapil previously held positions at Venmo and AirBnb.
Ted is Dean and Professor of Entrepreneurship at Hult International Business School and an instructor at Harvard University and Stanford University. Focusing his research on optimized business models for new ventures, he’s participated in five VC-backed startups. The most recent was acquired by Google as the foundation of Android Wear.
Chief Marketing Officer at Fiverr, the dominant global platform for hiring freelancers, Gali leads brand strategies and ensures continued growth within creator communities. She keeps freelancers at the center of everything Fiverr does by maintaining close contact with creators and by evolving the platform based on their feedback.
Lynn is CEO and co-founder of UrbanSitter, a nationwide solution to connect families with reliable caregivers. Heading a business built upon trust from many different angles, she recognizes the importance of peer reviews for families and sitters.
Mary Wolfe-Nielsen and Tyce Nielsen are married trapeze artists who currently headline a show in Las Vegas. Together, they have performed all over the world in productions ranging from America’s Got Talent to Cirque Du Soleil.
Tyce & mary trapeze artists
DUO TRANCEND
Meet the Experts
EXTRA FEATURES
More from this Expert
"Trust This Film?" poses a question about the intersection of trust and technology and presents expert viewpoints from those for whom trust is an integral component to their business performance and success. We've transcribed highlights from the full conversations we had with the stars of this documentary that didn't make it into the film's short runtime. Select a speaker below to see more of what they had to say.
There's more to the story
more OF TED LADD'S conversation...
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Ecommerce’s roots in handheld computing One [of the startups I have been involved with] was the Palm Pilot. [I was] the company's spokesman during our IPO, which meant that I was telling the world the story about how handheld computing would change everything. And it turns out that handheld computing has changed the world much more dramatically than I had ever expected or attempted to persuade people to believe. One of my first jobs at Palm was to go over to eBay, which was one of the largest blossoming, nascent multi-sided platforms. And I sat in a room with the CEO at the time, who is Meg Whitman, and explained to her the benefits of a handheld technology. And she said, ‘Why would I want to do this? What's the point?’ And I said, ‘Because what are the chances your buyers or your sellers only want to buy or sell when they're sitting in front of their desktop at home? They want to buy or sell wherever they are.’ It took her about 15 minutes to say, yes, we need to be part of the mobile Internet. My next trip was up to Seattle to talk to the executives at Amazon. They were still selling books at the time. They recognized that people want to buy books not just when they're sitting in front of their desktop. They want to buy books when they're in a cab or when they're sitting on the sofa. Those now are two of the most significant platforms in the world because they recognize that in order to reduce coordination cost, part of that is ensuring that users have access anywhere at any time. From cognitive math to instinct So, let’s go back and define what trust is. It’s the recognition that I have in myself, the ability to predict what you’re going to do. The second version of trust is that you’re going to do well by me. The third step of trust is moving beyond this cognitive math into an instinct. Even if technology is progressing incredibly rapidly, we as human beings still have this mechanism of trust in us, which has been honed over our evolution, which requires data in order for us to determine whether we trust something. You go on Amazon, and you trust that it’s going to work. It’s now embedded into our instinct…nobody gives it a second thought. Companies come in by building a reputation. If they can secure brand reputation, they move from the calculation in your head into this instinctive brand identity that we hardwire into our brains, so we don’t have to do the math. That’s the brand I trust. I like it. I don’t have to go back and say, will they do well for me? What’s the evidence? They’ve done well for long enough that I am now saying I trust that brand and I’m only going to buy that brand. Can technology swamp human trust? Can artificial intelligence do all of the things that everybody says…it can do? No, it can’t. It’s an accelerating tool. It accesses knowledge very quickly, but it's not creating new knowledge. That's what a large language model is. It's taking everything we already know and being able to help you figure out how to access it. So, the first reason that I don't think that technology is going to swamp trust is because there are lots of products that…are…overhyped. And then they'll come back down to earth and human beings will have a better, more realistic expectation of what these products actually can do for them, and then their ability to predict with confidence what this could do is going to be better, which means that they'll start trusting these products and services more—once we get through the hype. The reason that I teach business isn’t so I can get all of my students saying, blockchain, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence. That’s not the point. If those technologies are useful tools to build products that solve people’s problems and solve social problems and global problems, great. But there are lots of social problems, global problems, [and] customer problems that can be solved with low or no tech. ###
The highlights above were transcribed from our original recorded conversation, with punctuation edits and thematic headers added for improved readability.
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Trust is so integral to our business, we created a documentary film about it. Computershare Corporate Trust is a financial services organization with decades of experience as a provider of trustee and sophisticated agency services for private and public companies, investment bankers, asset managers as well as governments and institutions. We produced this documentary in the hopes that it will facilitate important conversations about how human trust endures in the age of technology. Learn more.
Presented by Computershare Corporate Trust
“We, as human beings, have this mechanism of trust in us, honed by evolution, that requires data.”
more OF GALI ARNON'S conversation...
What is Fiverr Let’s talk about the world without Fiverr. What do you need to do in order to make sure you have enough work to make a living? You would need to, first of all, advertise yourself, promote yourself. You would need to negotiate with clients. You would need to negotiate prices. You would need to close the contract. Then you would need to do some kind of a legal contract, and then you would need to collect the money. So, the part where you actually do your job, the part you like…is becoming very minor out of this whole process. The foundation of trust On Fiverr, we take care of everything…and you can just do your own thing. If we have this contract between us and the freelancer…then he can actually focus on what he likes and what he's good at. That's the very basic or fundamental part of building this trust. We have this relationship with him. The second level of trust is that they need to be good at what they do, and they need to create satisfaction. They need to create satisfied customers because this will be a win-win. The more Fiverr will have satisfied customers, [the] more customers will come back to the same freelancers, but will come back to other freelancers as well. So that's the second level of trust. The evolution of digital trust I think trust online is something that was already created even before Fiverr, right? So, people started with the e-commerce and then with Airbnb and this whole idea of, well, we can create trust in different methods. I would never buy a pair of shoes without trying them first, never. And then I did it, and then I, you know, now I buy all my groceries online, and I buy all my, you know, almost all my clothes online… …Trust, 30 years ago, was, if you want[ed] to close a deal with someone, right, how would you trust them? You would look him in the eyes, you would shake his hand, and then you will decide, this is a person I can trust. Now, it's not a handshake. It's a review system…or a leveling system, or a communication online that gives you the feeling that you're in the right place in the right time. It's the same fundamental needs of human beings to create trust in order to do things together, to cooperate, to collaborate. The medium has changed, and so has the way we do things. On AI and human touch I can't believe we’ll ever give up on human touch. I think we want, you know, technology and machines to do their own thing when we are less involved emotionally, or it’s a very simple task that there’s no need for a human touch to be involved in. And even with AI now and all those new tools, I don't believe humans will give up on humans. There still is a lot of fear around AI, and how AI will impact work, and [how it] will impact human beings and will impact jobs and talent. I actually believe that this combination between human talent and AI will create better products and better things. Trust begins with oneself Trust is this foundation, this solid foundation…in which you can build things upon it, whether it's relationships, whether it's businesses, whether it's, you know, human interaction. Let's say you have a safe job and one day you decide to leave everything and go freelance. What does it mean? It means that first and foremost, you have trust in yourself because all of the sudden, it's all about you. You don't have this system around you to get your back whenever things go wrong. You are on your own. And those are people who trust their capabilities, who trust their skills. And they have this courage to do it by themself. In my opinion, human beings…tend to trust from the very beginning. You need to give them a reason not to trust you in order to be skeptical. But I think that the first tendency will be to trust. So, Fiverr is basically revolutionizing how the world works together. And it's making this whole process easier, shorter, and with less friction. So, I think what we realized is what creates trust for those businesses is actually the same way it is in the offline world. This is how you take a simple process of the way people think and the way people create trust, and you productize it using technology to facilitate those interactions. ###
“Even with AI now and all these new tools, I don’t believe humans will give up on humans.”
© Computershare Limited 1996 - 2023. All rights reserved.
more OF KAPIL MOKHAT'S conversation...
Trust and ecommerce I'm Kapil Mokhat, President of Flip. Flip is a social network built around shopping. The core problem and thesis that [we’re] trying to solve is actually put trust back into online commerce. Trust in online reviews and advertising has been weaning because everything has been paid for. It went from big known celebrities to even smaller micro people that have a thousand followers [that] are now paid to say something about a product they probably never used. As influencers peddle everything you could possibly imagine and every product underneath the sun, you don't know what's actually good and you don't know what's actually even high quality these days. It's usually beautiful people, beautiful packaging. It fits perfect—everything you could ever think about, but there's never anything negative. I trust somebody that actually uses this product more than I trust somebody that's been paid to tell me that it's a great product. Authentic customer input What we're trying to do with Flip, and this is kind of how we're kind of breaking the problem down, is actually not allow brands and our shoppers to have a connection. Let the shoppers say whatever they want. Positive or negative. And sometimes the brands get upset about that. But by taking that connection away, by rewarding them for their input, they're going to tap into this authentic learning process. [Brands] actually care about customer input as well. When they were building the product, I bet you they got a lot of customer input in building that product. They didn't just build and throw it on the shelves. And this platform allows them to continue to learn in that process. Yes, is this a bit more public than others? Absolutely. When you actually log into Flip, you're actually presented with content, short form video by a person, or a person on the screen talking about a product. Trust is not having to think about it I define trust by saying that it's about a person's intention and honoring what they say, what they're going to do. You can apply that to business, you can apply that to a platform, you can apply that to all walks of life. And once you learn those intentions and then you really look at the character behind those intentions, I think you're building a level of trust that becomes a foundation of what you do next. Rarely do business deals get done where you don't trust the other party. Yes, there's a formal contract at the end of it to say, let's put this in paper, but paper is not coming without the inherent trust between the two parties. Technology is leverage to not let you worry about trust. Just because you don't think about it…it's not because a lot of people haven't thought about it — to make sure that you don't think about it. ###
“Tech is leveraged so you don’t worry about trust. People have thought about it, so you don’t have to.”
more OF LYNN PERKINS' conversation...
Making connections If you need to find a forklift, or a rabbi that speaks French, or you are looking for a spouse… I just love setting people up. And so, when I had young kids and I was taking some time off of work, I found myself trying to help other parents find good care providers. I'm Lynn Perkins. I'm the CEO of UrbanSitter. UrbanSitter is a site, an app where families can go to find care providers. And on the care provider side, they can set what type of hours they're looking for, what type of work they're looking for, and then both parties can connect. So, people have always looked for care to help with their children and their pets and their elder family members. And really, when you think about it, what do people really want? They want a trusted recommendation from somebody that they already know or have a connection to. When I took those two problems and I looked at what was happening in the online space…and looking at peer-to-peer payments and online booking, I felt like that technology could sort of intersect with how people want to find care. Childcare: a category you “can’t mess up on” One of the things when I started UrbanSitter that really struck me as why this product was needed, and why you needed to leverage both technology but also best practices for the offline world, was that this is a category you just can't mess up on. This…is really about who you're leaving in your home with your children when you're not there. So, the bar for trust is automatically set much higher. UrbanSitter really works hard to make sure that we're taking data that comes from the sitter’s experiences on our platform, combined with…what I’ll call background check data that, in my opinion, is just [a] base level requirement. And then on top of that, we're also trying to infuse what I would say are more like soft factors so we can show you…great, you need somebody last minute; this sitter responds in under an hour. Families have booked her more than once, which feels like a more objective measure of trust. And we know that she lives within a mile of our home, so she's likely to show up on time. Taking money out of the conversation Something that I think became apparent to us early on is that sitters also really like being paid through the platform. Sitters tell us that it's really uncomfortable at the end of a booking when a parent comes home. They've done all the work. You know, “I've been at your house for six hours. Not only did I put your two kids to bed, but I did the dishes, and I left the place neater than I found it. You walk in the room and then you ask me, ‘What's your rate?’ And it's really uncomfortable for me at the end of the job to then remind you what the rate was that we agreed upon.” And so, sitters tell us that not only is it really comfortable when they come home and all of that is taken care of through the platform, but also it doesn't feel as transactional. And we're talking about a relationship where you’re face-to-face in someone's home and it's nice to take out that piece of it. Defining trust If I had to define trust to my family or friends, I would say that…trust is either going into a situation with another person or looking at a product and having a feeling that what I'm going to get, or who I'm going to be meeting with, is what I'm expecting--that what you see is what you get and that the other product or party is going to uphold their commitment. I still think that in a person-to-person world, there's always going to be some subjectivity. And what the technology can do is get us as close as possible to the right solution for our need and then the solution or the person has to deliver to meet our expectations. ###
“Don’t just tell me I should trust you. Give me data. Give me evidence.”
more OF the DUO TRANCEND conversation...
From Salt Lake City to the world [Mary] My name is Mary, and this is my husband Tyce, and we are professional acrobats. [Tyce] Our stage name is Duo Transcend. We have worked for Cirque du Soleil. [Mary] NBA halftime shows. We do a lot of performances, so those are fun. [Tyce] We've performed multiple times on America's Got Talent. We've been on the Ellen Show. [Mary] Some places we've performed [are] Malta, Andorra. [Tyce] Kazakhstan. [Mary] We'll be going to Italy this summer. [Tyce] We've probably performed in every single state in the U.S. [Mary] We're currently headlining at the Luxor and the America's Got Talent Superstar show. I was a ballet dancer growing up, and then I moved to Salt Lake City to go to school, and I needed a job. And I saw that there was a show hiring cliff divers. And I had no experience, but I did grow up jumping off cliffs. That's where I started with my acrobatics/ stunt career, I guess. [Tyce] It was [the] same thing. I just grew up playing sports, so I was [in] football, basketball, baseball, all the American sports. And this little show in Salt Lake City, they were basically like, we just need a meat head that would wear a Speedo and jump off cliffs. So, I fit the description. [Mary] And then that's where I met him. Becoming Duo Transcend [Tyce] In one of the dive shows, Mary had a really bad accident. She had fallen off one of the platforms and fell about ten or fifteen feet to the cement, and it just shattered her right heel. Once we realized the severity of her heel break, it basically just ended. [Mary] So, I didn’t want to give up performing because I loved it. And then we went and saw a Cirque du Soleil show, and there was a couple that did the duo trapeze, and I was like, That’s so cool. I wonder if we could do that. I’m like, you’re big. I think you can throw me around. So, we weren’t married at this point, but I was like, out of all the guys, I’m like – you. [Tyce] And so, we took like four to five months and all we did was train. And then we started auditioning for shows and we got hired within about eight months of us on this journey to perform. Blind trust [Tyce] So yeah, to add, to add to the trust factor, as if what we do isn’t already dangerous enough. We started learning how to do our entire act blindfolded. And so, I already have an eye condition I don’t see very well. And part of, part of our story was [that] my vision was getting to a point to where I'm legally blind in my right eye, and my left eye, I was losing the sight rapidly. So, I had seen many doctors all through the country, and all of them had told me that the disease I have, it had progressed too far to where they…couldn't stop the progression of it anymore. When it comes to the trust on stage, it's always scary. The nerves are always high. But, like, she trusts me, I trust her. We have to trust that that the cables, the steel... [Mary] The computer. [Tyce] The tech guys, everything we do hinges on trust. Not just between us, but also all the technical side too. Deepening mutual trust [Mary] I think the trust...it just came natural because he just knows me so well and it's just there. [Tyce] The definition of trust, to me, is being able to put your well-being of yourself or those that you love in the hands of somebody else, and knowing that that person is going to protect and keep them safe. [Mary] The definition of trust for me is almost just not even having to think about it.I almost can't even explain, like, where does the trust come from? It's just there. [Tyce] I see her training every day. She's working out, she's doing her stretches, she's doing she's doing all these things, constantly working on, like, the trust. Because I see that. And now I trust her. And then same with me. She sees me doing the same things. It is a constant effort to maintain the trust. I think we all know that human beings are capable of being very dishonest. But I think there's this yearning that we just hope that we can trust. ###
“Everything we do hinges on trust.”
Why We care About Trust
Trust is integral to our business. It's also a key ingredient in our long-standing client relationships. We believe that even as technology advances, trust must be earned and developed through human connections. We produced this documentary in the hopes that it will facilitate important conversations about how human trust endures in the age of technology.
About Computershare
Computershare Corporate Trust offers a wide range of services that fulfill our clients' unique and emerging needs in corporate and structured finance, debt issuance, escrows, and mergers and acquisitions. We are a team of more than 2,000 employees committed to delivering the highest standards of service and value to our entire client base.
What We Do
Computershare Corporate Trust is a financial services organization with decades of experience as a provider of trustee and sophisticated agency services for private and public companies, investment bankers, and asset managers, as well as governments and institutions.
Who We are
Learn more about our TrustConnect Technology
TM
Learn more about us at TrustMakesItWork.com
It used to be that trust was built with a firm handshake. Looking someone square in the eye. But as technology has taken a larger role connect-ing people and businesses, trust has evolved. Humans now rely on digital platforms for increasingly complicated, essential, everyday tasks. How did we get here? And what are the implications? "Trust this Film?" poses the question to leading tech visionaries: In this age of pervasive tech-nology, how will trust – this essential human emotion – endure?
Documentary Short
Watch the full film here
film trailer
Watch the 0:30 trailer here
September Club is an Emmy-winning production company that specializes in documentaries - from feature films to digital shorts and docu-series. Their work has been featured at film festivals such as Sundance, Toronto, Venice, Cannes and SXSW and produced in collaboration with clients such as Netflix, Hulu, HBO, A&E Films, CNN Films, Apple TV and BBC Films.
Click to watch the film here.
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