18. The Architecture of Trust: Part 1

Great Houses · Jun 25, 2026 · 54m · transcript

This episode explores trust through the lens of two Substack articles: one critiquing African funeral traditions for keeping people poor, and another on how to become trustworthy. Gregory Treat uses cryptocurrency concepts — proof of work and token burning — as an extended metaphor to argue that what looks like "wasted" wealth in kinship rituals is actually a conversion into social currency on a different ledger.

Central to the discussion is the distinction between traders' games (short-term, transactional, frictionless) and farmers' games (long-term, consistent, relationship-based). Gregory…