Rethink with Rachel is a new and growing community here on Substack, so thank you for choosing to be a part of it. Some of you may have followed my work for a while, and some of you may be completely new to it. Either way, I appreciate that you’ve chosen to be here.
I thought I’d take the time to formally introduce myself (beyond a traditional bio!) and encourage you to do the same:
Why did you join the Rethink community? What do you hope to learn from it that you don't get from work, friends, or other parts of your life? Please comment below with your story.
Hi, I'm Rachel Botsman, a writer, lecturer, and maker of content that aims to help people think differently. Others call me a 'thought leader' in trust. Yes, I've been fortunate to have books published in lots of languages, talk at prestigious places like TED and teach the brightest minds at Oxford University. But (and it's a big but) I think of myself more as a curious creator and voracious reader trying to make sense of complex things in our lives through writing and sketching. I'm fascinated by the gap between our job titles and how we see ourselves.
I'm curious about how spaces make people feel. I'm always making models, puzzles, cakes - anything that keeps my hands in paint, mud or goo, and my brain looking at different things. I love to garden and recently started a graduate program in Landscape Design at Kew. I love reading, long walks with my dog Mack, dragging my kids around art museums (they'll thank me one day!), and hanging out with my family in our home in Oxford.
So now you! It doesn’t need to be as long as mine, but please do say hello below.
Thank you all for your support of this newsletter so far! I really feel this community is growing into something special - and I look forward to getting to know you all a bit better.
Hey Rachel, I am a big fan of your work on trust. Every night when we put our two sons to bed, seven and four, we all say “we are honest, able, reliable, and helpful. I love you, trust you, and like you.” It’s our family’s guiding light and your 4 pillars of trust has guided us there. We use it as a measuring stick for conversation and course correction for not only our kids but for my wife and I! Thank you:)
Thanks Rachel - I came across you by chance on LinkedIn and was just curious to read some of your stuff.
I’m a UK 63 year old retired guy who has bipolar disorder and unfortunately suffers with bad osteoarthritis which is somewhat physically limiting. However I still go to the gym (I know it’s really beneficial to my mental health) two or three times a week and like to get on my bike when the sun is shining. Most importantly I’m in a good place mentally and
Hi Rachel, was introduced to your writing on LinkedIn. I am a trailing edge boomer, husband, father, bean counter, Kentuckian, cardio enthusiast, and sustainability neophyte. As a public sector auditor for over forty years a lot of resources are expended to create trust where it is lacking. Might be overlooking this on the website somehow, but could you share your reply to Shane's question below? Keep up the good work!
Hi Rachel, I'm in the tech industry and located in Brisbane, Australia. I discovered your work a couple of years ago through the Oxford Executive Leadership Programme and Rupert Younger's book The Reputation Game. I'm especially interested in the relationship between trust and productivity. Thanks for all your great work!
Hello, my name is Louis.. I have been following your work on LinkedIn for a few months prior to you moving to SubStack. I enjoy your writing enough that I followed you to SubStack only to continue reading your material! (Now isn't that an ego boost!)
Mindfulness, vegan cooking, musician tattooer, hmmmmm I love kettlebells and Ashtanga, I’m working on my straddle handstand and figuring out how to be than do. Day by day, thought per thought.
Rachel, I'm just feeling my way on substack. I'm the author of The Purple Presidency 2024 from Real Clear and previously, The Evolution of Progress from Random House, 1993. I'm not looking for a revenue stream here, only another avenue for spreading the ideas in my book(s) and eliciting an interchange in ideas. If you happen to know any quality sites along those lines that might give me ideas for a useful approach, I would welcome your guidance. Best, Owen Paepke
Since reading Bruce Schneiers "Liars and Outliers" I've had an interest in what trust means to civil society. I'm new to your work - was intrigued by a reference to your work in a Substack feature today, so I'm interested to find out what you have to say!
Hi Rachel (and everyone!) I was aware of you from linked in but lucky enough to hear you speak at a work conference and your talk on trust in a work context really got my brain cells going. I’m a lawyer in industry and spend a lot of my time trying to build good working relationships with people inside and outside my organisation, around the world (I’m in the UK) and I see trust as a key element in creating effective and fulfilling connections. Always curious about how people are happy to sit in a box and not engage with the diversity and opportunity available to them!
Hi Rachel! I became interested in your work after watching your TED talks earlier in my career. I work in the Canadian Credit Union system rurally in Marketing, with recently moving to a Change Leadership role. I am looking forward to leveraging your ideas on collaboration and trust in my new role and seeing how they help achieve success for my small credit union and our adaptation to our evolving work.
I have always enjoyed your common sense attitude (very little of that going around these days). And I'm able to relate to many of your topics both personally and professionally (semi retired).
Your Ted talk in 2012 inspired me to look at trust economies and how new tech facilitates same. As a retired detective I have been more concerned with how easy trust can be destroyed by bullies and narcissistic abusers who often use hidden psychological tactics to harm and cause loss to others. 🕵️♂️. As governments seek to be the sole arbiters of who is trusted and who is not to engage in commerce and transport - over regulation of these new innovations by governments has the potential to destroy them and drag us all back into the dark ages. Uber is a case in point here in NZ. 👀
Hey Rachel! Love what you're doing with the place. I learned about you while googling for great books on trust. Yours popped up! I signed up for your list and have been learning more since. My name is Neil Pasricha and I'm a Toronto-based author (and father of four little ones) who's been fascinated by this topic of trust for six years. Not a single book to show for it! Just reading, reading, reading. Trying to reorient myself in the machine, I guess. Wondering if I'm just a negative nelly on the topic -- or if there are larger scale trends at work that I can possibly gird against. Currently reading THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM by Shoshana Zuboff which is wonderful. Also got THE COMMON GOOD by Robert Reich and TEAM HUMAN by Douglas Rushkoff in the pile. Really admire your work and your working-in-publicness. Keep up the great work!
Hi Rachel (and the Rethink Community!) Thank you for your compelling work. I'm a recovering tv news reporter turned author & facilitator based in Sydney. Like many fellow Rethinkers, I was first struck by your work when watching 2012 TED Talk on the Trust Economy. I'm particularly interested in how we establish & accelerate trust in teams, to get important work done - particularly as we continue to negotiate new ways of working. You have prompted me to examine how trust is formed between strangers (often instantly) in the context of a high-performance news crew on assignment - and how that framework can be translated into the corporate arena to newly distributed teams. Thank you for creating this community! Andrea
hi Rachel, got reference to this substack from Substack newsletter as a featured substack, and I am delighted that I explored it further, full of pragmatic widsom on trust and overall in a common sense of way which is not so common or clear unless someone reads the way you present it. Love your insights and recommendations. Thanks a lot for the writing !!
Hi, I was referred by Nola Simon originally and have been a free subscriber for a while and have enjoyed it. That and the realization that all my paid subscriptions were male writers, pushed me over the edge to pay for a subscription.
What I do is teach Sensemaking and Mindshifting, primarily to educators.
Schools spend a great deal of time teaching how to use technology, but none really learning how to effectively deploy the most powerful technology every created, our minds. Each human mind is more powerful than all the computers in the world. Yet we just accept that when we get anxious we should fight, flee, or freeze, that when we get an idea it's the one right answer, that when others disagree with us we should defeat them, and that we have to win while others lose in order to be successful, as the predominant interpretation of survival of the fittest.
But what if we learned that a degree of anxiousness is actually a motivator to try something new, what if we went into situations aware that not all problems have known solutions, or that perhaps any of a dozen possible solutions could work, or that when people disagree or oppose us we can learn from them and come up with something even better, or that instead of winner take all we could be more concerned as a roles of as the current stewards of the world bridging past generations with future ones?
Hi Rachel. In the process of writing an article for one of the UK medical defence associations and I came across your TED talk(s), your thinking complements that of my usual "go to" on Trust the wonderful Onara O'Neill. Just ordered one of your books and look forward to reading more. I'm an ex-clinical dentist who now works with Dentists and their teams as a coach, encourager and supporter.
Hi I am Leslie-Ann Giovnilli, a business owner in the financial market, developing my succession plans to give as much of my life/professional learning to our young professionals as I can whilst looking for more time outside of my work. I have ASD and it was only the last year or so, thanks to the Autism Society, that I got real engagement with the hidden issues here; which is also why Rachel your latest 'I'm a fraud' rang such a bell for me. I am not 'erratic' or 'bad tempered' but widely interested in many things and I am just faster at grasping/doing things than many, which is why I get frustrated! Three cheers for the whole Re-thinking concept.
Hi Rachel. I've been a fan of your work on trust for a while. I came to see you deliver a keynote at Nesta in 2017/2018 and remember your story about your daughter, Alexa and blueberries. I really enjoyed 'Who Do You Trust'. Today I run a boutique future of work advisory firm. Much of our work involves educating business leaders on the forces driving change in the way we work and helping co-design new approaches to the way we think about organisational culture. As you'd imagine, much of the conversation focuses on trust, and more precisely trust in the distributed age. I've been receiving your newsletter for 5-6 months and really appreciate your lines of enquiry. I look forward to learning more.
Wow, just saw people really post. And the most amazing: Rachel is actually answering :) Appreciate that, happy to connect. A short interview:
Who are you?
I'm Christof, from Frankfurt, Germany.
What do you do?
I had a career in Private Banking and Institutional Quantitative Asset Management. But jumped ship a few years back because I suddenly found - well - life is limited. And I just did not want to do that all the way through.
It gets clearer and clearer that my new endeavor is to show, teach and motivate non-finance people how to invest better themselves, gain confidence and, well, trust. I try that with a website where I aim to deliver deep, high-quality content but somewhat unconventionally packed and in approachable form (Hence the name Papa und Paul. No link. You will have to find yourself).
Do you consider yourself a thought leader?
With high certainty: no.
But being able now to choose a little more what I spend my time on, I discover there is a difference between 'learning a topic' and 'thinking about a topic' - and what can emerge once you just start taking your own thoughts and ideas a little more serious.
Why are you here, then?
Two main reasons. Firstly, I just like Rachel's content, and I can connect to the thought processes she offers and her ability to ask good questions. That resonates with me, I am thankful for that. It's a little missing in our current world. Also, the natural, unpretentious, 'common-sense way' of her writing and presenting. Really like that – an inspiration to learn from for my own endeavors.
Second: She wrote somewhere something like 'when you sign up I give you practical tips on my process for developing ideas, preparing for talks etc.' Yeah, I admit that sounded interesting :). Happy to connect with you all :)
Hi all, I'm writing a book, ostensibly on "How Do We Establish Truth?", but particularly in our never-been-more-divided society, with a strong message of "We need to LISTEN to one another, because very few of us are the 'Truth-Experts' we think we are". One of many 'sub-processes' in establishing truth in many circumstances, is the process of establishing 'who can we trust' when we are perceiving a variety of reports and due to circumstances we cannot directly establish the truth of a matter with, for example, our own 5 physical senses. Clearly a work like this requires a lot of research and input from sources who at least most people believe they can... you guessed it... trust! That's why I'm here...
Hello Rachel! Thank you for providing the opportunity to connect as we have much in common!! I am located in Portland, Oregon (my parents were from England), come from the tech industry and have a technology strategist and practitioner's perspective. I am best known for starting Intel's efforts in automated driving which led to the $15.3B acquisition of Mobileye and now generates almost $2B in revenue. My career focus is on the future of humans and autonomous systems and I have worked on automated factories, the digital home, the autonomous data center, and the autonomous aerial revolution (delivery drones, flying taxis, aerial ride sharing, and overhauling the world's air traffic control systems). I retired from Intel in early 2020 and have been working on the IEEE standards for governing AI and writing a series of nonfiction books about the future of humans and autonomous systems to make the future "more cool" and "less creepy." My first book is about Creating Trustworthy Technology. Our work is highly complementary and we have similar thought processes and approaches, including use of illustrations to convey complex concepts. I would be thrilled to connect via LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-gould-41910/ and to chat with you. Wendell Wallach also suggested I contact you after seeing a sample of my work. All the very best, Helen A. F. Gould
Hello all, my name is Jeffrey. I am a son, brother, husband, father, dog-papa and thinker who creates designs which rehabilitate buildings and creates totally new ones. I have a very strong sensory memory which enables me to create or recreate environments to augment the human experience. My marketing brain made me say that, I apologize.
I grew up in the Midwest of the United States and would storm chase toward thunderstorms marching across the wide open plains, lay on the hood of my car and be bombarded by the first sheets of rain. I graduated from college as a History major and spent a semester in Jerusalem, an historic monolith. Upon graduation, a friend and I traveled Europe exploring, many things, but for me Architecture. My wife is a sensitive soul who is a dog groomer by trade, and a backpacker. My hobby is car restoration, I have a nice and running Triumph Spitfire and a not so nice and not running Triumph TR7. But enough about me, I'd like to hear from more of you.
Let’s get to know each other
Hey Rachel, I am a big fan of your work on trust. Every night when we put our two sons to bed, seven and four, we all say “we are honest, able, reliable, and helpful. I love you, trust you, and like you.” It’s our family’s guiding light and your 4 pillars of trust has guided us there. We use it as a measuring stick for conversation and course correction for not only our kids but for my wife and I! Thank you:)
I meant to finish off saying most importantly I’m happy, in a good place mentally and long may it last.
Thanks for sharing your writing - much appreciated.
Regards Alan Wardle
Thanks Rachel - I came across you by chance on LinkedIn and was just curious to read some of your stuff.
I’m a UK 63 year old retired guy who has bipolar disorder and unfortunately suffers with bad osteoarthritis which is somewhat physically limiting. However I still go to the gym (I know it’s really beneficial to my mental health) two or three times a week and like to get on my bike when the sun is shining. Most importantly I’m in a good place mentally and
Hi Rachel, was introduced to your writing on LinkedIn. I am a trailing edge boomer, husband, father, bean counter, Kentuckian, cardio enthusiast, and sustainability neophyte. As a public sector auditor for over forty years a lot of resources are expended to create trust where it is lacking. Might be overlooking this on the website somehow, but could you share your reply to Shane's question below? Keep up the good work!
Spatial apathy sounds like Manuel from Fawlty Towers. Rachelisms are okay. You say enough things that are spot on.
Hi Rachel, I'm in the tech industry and located in Brisbane, Australia. I discovered your work a couple of years ago through the Oxford Executive Leadership Programme and Rupert Younger's book The Reputation Game. I'm especially interested in the relationship between trust and productivity. Thanks for all your great work!
Hello, my name is Louis.. I have been following your work on LinkedIn for a few months prior to you moving to SubStack. I enjoy your writing enough that I followed you to SubStack only to continue reading your material! (Now isn't that an ego boost!)
Thanks so much.
Rachel how are you?
& what do you do.?.
Mindfulness, vegan cooking, musician tattooer, hmmmmm I love kettlebells and Ashtanga, I’m working on my straddle handstand and figuring out how to be than do. Day by day, thought per thought.
Rachel, I'm just feeling my way on substack. I'm the author of The Purple Presidency 2024 from Real Clear and previously, The Evolution of Progress from Random House, 1993. I'm not looking for a revenue stream here, only another avenue for spreading the ideas in my book(s) and eliciting an interchange in ideas. If you happen to know any quality sites along those lines that might give me ideas for a useful approach, I would welcome your guidance. Best, Owen Paepke
Since reading Bruce Schneiers "Liars and Outliers" I've had an interest in what trust means to civil society. I'm new to your work - was intrigued by a reference to your work in a Substack feature today, so I'm interested to find out what you have to say!
Hi Rachel (and everyone!) I was aware of you from linked in but lucky enough to hear you speak at a work conference and your talk on trust in a work context really got my brain cells going. I’m a lawyer in industry and spend a lot of my time trying to build good working relationships with people inside and outside my organisation, around the world (I’m in the UK) and I see trust as a key element in creating effective and fulfilling connections. Always curious about how people are happy to sit in a box and not engage with the diversity and opportunity available to them!
Hi Rachel! I became interested in your work after watching your TED talks earlier in my career. I work in the Canadian Credit Union system rurally in Marketing, with recently moving to a Change Leadership role. I am looking forward to leveraging your ideas on collaboration and trust in my new role and seeing how they help achieve success for my small credit union and our adaptation to our evolving work.
Hi Rachel,
I have always enjoyed your common sense attitude (very little of that going around these days). And I'm able to relate to many of your topics both personally and professionally (semi retired).
Thanks,
KCA
Your Ted talk in 2012 inspired me to look at trust economies and how new tech facilitates same. As a retired detective I have been more concerned with how easy trust can be destroyed by bullies and narcissistic abusers who often use hidden psychological tactics to harm and cause loss to others. 🕵️♂️. As governments seek to be the sole arbiters of who is trusted and who is not to engage in commerce and transport - over regulation of these new innovations by governments has the potential to destroy them and drag us all back into the dark ages. Uber is a case in point here in NZ. 👀
Hey Rachel! Love what you're doing with the place. I learned about you while googling for great books on trust. Yours popped up! I signed up for your list and have been learning more since. My name is Neil Pasricha and I'm a Toronto-based author (and father of four little ones) who's been fascinated by this topic of trust for six years. Not a single book to show for it! Just reading, reading, reading. Trying to reorient myself in the machine, I guess. Wondering if I'm just a negative nelly on the topic -- or if there are larger scale trends at work that I can possibly gird against. Currently reading THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM by Shoshana Zuboff which is wonderful. Also got THE COMMON GOOD by Robert Reich and TEAM HUMAN by Douglas Rushkoff in the pile. Really admire your work and your working-in-publicness. Keep up the great work!
Hi Rachel (and the Rethink Community!) Thank you for your compelling work. I'm a recovering tv news reporter turned author & facilitator based in Sydney. Like many fellow Rethinkers, I was first struck by your work when watching 2012 TED Talk on the Trust Economy. I'm particularly interested in how we establish & accelerate trust in teams, to get important work done - particularly as we continue to negotiate new ways of working. You have prompted me to examine how trust is formed between strangers (often instantly) in the context of a high-performance news crew on assignment - and how that framework can be translated into the corporate arena to newly distributed teams. Thank you for creating this community! Andrea
hi Rachel, got reference to this substack from Substack newsletter as a featured substack, and I am delighted that I explored it further, full of pragmatic widsom on trust and overall in a common sense of way which is not so common or clear unless someone reads the way you present it. Love your insights and recommendations. Thanks a lot for the writing !!
Hi, I was referred by Nola Simon originally and have been a free subscriber for a while and have enjoyed it. That and the realization that all my paid subscriptions were male writers, pushed me over the edge to pay for a subscription.
What I do is teach Sensemaking and Mindshifting, primarily to educators.
Schools spend a great deal of time teaching how to use technology, but none really learning how to effectively deploy the most powerful technology every created, our minds. Each human mind is more powerful than all the computers in the world. Yet we just accept that when we get anxious we should fight, flee, or freeze, that when we get an idea it's the one right answer, that when others disagree with us we should defeat them, and that we have to win while others lose in order to be successful, as the predominant interpretation of survival of the fittest.
But what if we learned that a degree of anxiousness is actually a motivator to try something new, what if we went into situations aware that not all problems have known solutions, or that perhaps any of a dozen possible solutions could work, or that when people disagree or oppose us we can learn from them and come up with something even better, or that instead of winner take all we could be more concerned as a roles of as the current stewards of the world bridging past generations with future ones?
Those are the skills I want to see developed in the next generation, which I'm teaching in mindshifting classes and games https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fOoW82xDyCExOsV7crmW-M5OASyrU1qSO6jK0XYjo90/edit?usp=sharing
Hi! ❤️
Hi Rachel. In the process of writing an article for one of the UK medical defence associations and I came across your TED talk(s), your thinking complements that of my usual "go to" on Trust the wonderful Onara O'Neill. Just ordered one of your books and look forward to reading more. I'm an ex-clinical dentist who now works with Dentists and their teams as a coach, encourager and supporter.
Hi I am Leslie-Ann Giovnilli, a business owner in the financial market, developing my succession plans to give as much of my life/professional learning to our young professionals as I can whilst looking for more time outside of my work. I have ASD and it was only the last year or so, thanks to the Autism Society, that I got real engagement with the hidden issues here; which is also why Rachel your latest 'I'm a fraud' rang such a bell for me. I am not 'erratic' or 'bad tempered' but widely interested in many things and I am just faster at grasping/doing things than many, which is why I get frustrated! Three cheers for the whole Re-thinking concept.
Hi Rachel. I've been a fan of your work on trust for a while. I came to see you deliver a keynote at Nesta in 2017/2018 and remember your story about your daughter, Alexa and blueberries. I really enjoyed 'Who Do You Trust'. Today I run a boutique future of work advisory firm. Much of our work involves educating business leaders on the forces driving change in the way we work and helping co-design new approaches to the way we think about organisational culture. As you'd imagine, much of the conversation focuses on trust, and more precisely trust in the distributed age. I've been receiving your newsletter for 5-6 months and really appreciate your lines of enquiry. I look forward to learning more.
Wow, just saw people really post. And the most amazing: Rachel is actually answering :) Appreciate that, happy to connect. A short interview:
Who are you?
I'm Christof, from Frankfurt, Germany.
What do you do?
I had a career in Private Banking and Institutional Quantitative Asset Management. But jumped ship a few years back because I suddenly found - well - life is limited. And I just did not want to do that all the way through.
It gets clearer and clearer that my new endeavor is to show, teach and motivate non-finance people how to invest better themselves, gain confidence and, well, trust. I try that with a website where I aim to deliver deep, high-quality content but somewhat unconventionally packed and in approachable form (Hence the name Papa und Paul. No link. You will have to find yourself).
Do you consider yourself a thought leader?
With high certainty: no.
But being able now to choose a little more what I spend my time on, I discover there is a difference between 'learning a topic' and 'thinking about a topic' - and what can emerge once you just start taking your own thoughts and ideas a little more serious.
Why are you here, then?
Two main reasons. Firstly, I just like Rachel's content, and I can connect to the thought processes she offers and her ability to ask good questions. That resonates with me, I am thankful for that. It's a little missing in our current world. Also, the natural, unpretentious, 'common-sense way' of her writing and presenting. Really like that – an inspiration to learn from for my own endeavors.
Second: She wrote somewhere something like 'when you sign up I give you practical tips on my process for developing ideas, preparing for talks etc.' Yeah, I admit that sounded interesting :). Happy to connect with you all :)
Hi all, I'm writing a book, ostensibly on "How Do We Establish Truth?", but particularly in our never-been-more-divided society, with a strong message of "We need to LISTEN to one another, because very few of us are the 'Truth-Experts' we think we are". One of many 'sub-processes' in establishing truth in many circumstances, is the process of establishing 'who can we trust' when we are perceiving a variety of reports and due to circumstances we cannot directly establish the truth of a matter with, for example, our own 5 physical senses. Clearly a work like this requires a lot of research and input from sources who at least most people believe they can... you guessed it... trust! That's why I'm here...
Hello Rachel! Thank you for providing the opportunity to connect as we have much in common!! I am located in Portland, Oregon (my parents were from England), come from the tech industry and have a technology strategist and practitioner's perspective. I am best known for starting Intel's efforts in automated driving which led to the $15.3B acquisition of Mobileye and now generates almost $2B in revenue. My career focus is on the future of humans and autonomous systems and I have worked on automated factories, the digital home, the autonomous data center, and the autonomous aerial revolution (delivery drones, flying taxis, aerial ride sharing, and overhauling the world's air traffic control systems). I retired from Intel in early 2020 and have been working on the IEEE standards for governing AI and writing a series of nonfiction books about the future of humans and autonomous systems to make the future "more cool" and "less creepy." My first book is about Creating Trustworthy Technology. Our work is highly complementary and we have similar thought processes and approaches, including use of illustrations to convey complex concepts. I would be thrilled to connect via LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/helen-gould-41910/ and to chat with you. Wendell Wallach also suggested I contact you after seeing a sample of my work. All the very best, Helen A. F. Gould
Hello all, my name is Jeffrey. I am a son, brother, husband, father, dog-papa and thinker who creates designs which rehabilitate buildings and creates totally new ones. I have a very strong sensory memory which enables me to create or recreate environments to augment the human experience. My marketing brain made me say that, I apologize.
I grew up in the Midwest of the United States and would storm chase toward thunderstorms marching across the wide open plains, lay on the hood of my car and be bombarded by the first sheets of rain. I graduated from college as a History major and spent a semester in Jerusalem, an historic monolith. Upon graduation, a friend and I traveled Europe exploring, many things, but for me Architecture. My wife is a sensitive soul who is a dog groomer by trade, and a backpacker. My hobby is car restoration, I have a nice and running Triumph Spitfire and a not so nice and not running Triumph TR7. But enough about me, I'd like to hear from more of you.