Trust. Ever wondered what it means? How it is defined? How it can be won? Regardless if your answer to these questions is yes or no, this performative lecture by Gijs de Boer will undoubtedly leave you with new insights and – maybe even more – additional food for thought. For example: whether trust can really be trusted…? Sit back, relax and discover if the coin flips your way…

Flip a coin

“Before the coin lands, you know what to do. It’s not that the coin will give you the answer. It will make you answer by pretending to answer for you. As if the solution to uncertainty is not certainty, but bluff.”

And how normcore became the inspiration for a Master thesis “The Shine of Money – A trend report on trust”.

Prologue

The story on the origin of the word trust, on the different ways in which it can be gained and on its relationship with money (“They go a long way back”).

Solid trust

Why banks look like Roman temples. And why the euro sign features two parallel stripes.

Clean trust

On what school pictures have to do with ATMs and product design. And how money became ‘just a digit’.

Fluid trust

Why Kanye West can be trusted (or not?). How obvious illusions can be more trustworthy than the illusions we try to hide. “Does a placebo work if you know it is one?”

Epilogue

“The issue with Homo Economicus may not be that it does not describe us very well. But that too often it describes us really well.” On how reality is maybe nothing but a game and games maybe nothing but reality.