TrustTalk - It's all about Trust

Severin de Wit
  • 5.0 (2)
  • Documentary
  • Updated Bimonthly

Trust is the invisible force that shapes our world - from the personal to the geopolitical. At TrustTalk, we’re committed to exploring trust in all its complexity. Since 2020, we've been engaging with thought leaders from around the globe to unpack how trust influences relationships, business, technology, society, and global affairs. Every episode offers insightful conversations that reveal why trust matters - and what happens when it breaks down. If you’re curious about the forces that hold people, institutions, and nations together, this is a journey you won’t want to miss.

  1. Trusted Philantrophy

    1d ago

    Trusted Philantrophy

    Most people think philanthropy is about money. John Loudon, Executive Director of the COmON Foundation and one of the best-known philanthropists in conservation and nature preservation, with a career spanning three decades across Europe and Africa, thinks it is about trust. In this episode, we talk about what happens when trust is missing from giving, how philanthropy becomes distant, data-driven, and ultimately ineffective. And what it looks like when trust is genuinely present. John brings two stories to illustrate this. One from Malawi, where a community that had been depleting a national park for survival became its guardian angels once their real need - water - was met. Trust made that possible. And one from the Baviaanskloof in South Africa, where 125 years of goat farming had turned a valley into a near-desert, and where two years of conversation among farmers, guided by Otto Scharmer's Theory U, brought it back to life. The solutions came from within. Nobody arrived with a plan. Nobody needed to — because trust was already in the room. John also introduces a concept most funders have never heard of — Key Transformative Indicators — and explains why he measures success not in outputs but in signs of change. Why is giving harder than fundraising? And why the most important thing an outside organization can do when it arrives in a struggling community is put away its plan, start listening, and earn the trust that makes everything else possible.

    29 min
  2. Understanding the Trust-Law Dynamic: Insights on Legitimacy

    Jun 17

    Understanding the Trust-Law Dynamic: Insights on Legitimacy

    In this replay of a 2023 interview, Severin de Wit speaks with Tom Tyler, professor of law and psychology at Yale and founding director of the Justice Collaboratory. A psychologist teaching in a law school — a rare combination — Tyler argues that legal systems are built on assumptions about human nature that are seldom tested against what psychologists actually know. His research points to something striking: people comply with the law more because they trust it than because they fear it. And what builds that trust is not whether you win or lose your case, but how you were treated along the way — whether you were heard, treated with respect, and felt the process was fair. This is the idea of procedural justice, and it has both a decision-making side (voice, neutrality, consistency) and a relational side (dignity, sincerity, genuine attention to people's concerns). The conversation ranges across criminal justice, civil and administrative law, prisons, and policing, including how police officers who feel fairly treated by their own superiors go on to treat the public more fairly. Tyler explains why a system built on fear requires policing forever, while one built on trust makes communities stronger: people cooperate, testify, engage with their neighbours, and invest in where they live. He also has warm words for the Netherlands, citing the Ombudsman's adoption of procedural justice principles and the influence of empirical research on Dutch policy — and a challenge for the legal world everywhere: take empiricism seriously as a tool for improvement. A thoughtful, evidence-based case for why trust isn't just a different model of legal authority, but a superior one. [ Due to the holiday season, we are publishing this interview again. It was first published on September 6, 2023, as episode 76]

    30 min
  3. Why Trust Matters

    Jun 3

    Why Trust Matters

    In this replay of a 2023 interview, Severin de Wit speaks with Economist Benjamin Ho - Professor of Economics at Vassar College and author of Why Trust Matters: An Economist's Guide to the Ties That Bind Us. What if trust isn't just a feeling, but something humans have been calculating for thousands of years? Ben Ho uses game theory to explain why we cooperate at all, why we keep promises that cost us, and why the words I am sorry almost never work the way we expect. Ben explains why an apology only repairs trust when it carries a real cost. He shares what an experiment with Uber revealed about late rides and unhappy customers, and why Bill Clinton never apologized over Monica Lewinsky - exposing the hidden trade-off between being liked and being respected. The conversation travels from early hunter-gatherer societies, where the first written records were accounting rather than poetry, to the Paris Climate Agreement - a deal built almost entirely on trust rather than enforcement. Ben makes the case that trust is the quiet infrastructure beneath markets, contracts, and treaties. Take it away, and none of it holds. [ Due to the holiday season, we are publishing this interview again. It was first published in May 2023 as episode 63]

    30 min
  4. The Trust We Assume, the Consent We Feel

    May 19

    The Trust We Assume, the Consent We Feel

    Imagine standing in a busy train station, asking strangers to answer a few questions. How many people would you need to approach before five say yes? In a now-classic study, Vanessa Bohns predicted twenty. The actual number was ten. People were almost twice as likely to agree as she expected, and two decades and more than 14,000 requests later, the finding still holds. We consistently underestimate how often others will say yes to us, and how hard it is for them to refuse. This is really a conversation about trust. We tend to assume that when someone agrees to a request, they have thought it through and decided the person asking can be trusted. Vanessa's research suggests something different. People often say yes in the moment because saying no is hard, not because they have decided to trust. The judgment about trust comes later, sometimes much later, and sometimes the trust we thought was there was never really there at all. In this episode we talk about why gratitude letters mean more than we expect, why Monica Lewinsky could call the same relationship consensual in 2014 and question it in 2018, how a single phone call from Countrywide Financial moved Moody's to reverse a credit rating overnight, and why telling people they have the right to refuse changes almost nothing, but giving them the words to do so changes a great deal. We also look at how moving so much of our professional and political life into email and text quietly erodes the trust we build with each other. Vanessa Bohns is the Braunstein Family Professor and Chair of Organizational Behavior at the ILR School at Cornell University. She is the author of You Have More Influence Than You Think, and her next book, Should I Say Something?, is out later this year.

    22 min
  5. San Francisco: Where Progress Meets Distrust

    May 6

    San Francisco: Where Progress Meets Distrust

    We tend to think of trust as something that grows where people agree. Where neighbors share values, where voters share a party, where a city sees itself as forward-looking and inclusive. The more common ground, the more trust. That, at least, is the intuition. San Francisco complicates that picture. Eighty per cent of voters belong to the same party. Almost everyone calls themselves progressive. The city is wealthy, diverse, and proud of both. And yet, by one well-known measure, it is also among the least trusting cities in the United States. The deepest political conflicts are no longer between left and right. They run between people who all believe they are on the same side. Our guest today has spent years thinking about why. She grew up in a modest stucco house beneath Sutro Tower, watched her neighborhood empty out in what was later named "white flight", and went on to become a political theorist. Her current book project asks the mirror image of the famous question Thomas Frank posed about Kansas. Not what is the matter with the American right, but what is the matter with the American left, and what San Francisco, as its laboratory, reveals about the limits of progressive politics. She identifies four kinds of leftists in the city, traces the school board recall and the Chesa Boudin recall to something deeper than pandemic frustration, and reaches back to a nineteenth-century French idea - solidarism - for a way out. Her argument about trust is unusual: that distrust, the willingness to challenge entrenched power, is sometimes what makes genuine trust possible later on. Our guest is Margaret Kohn, Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and the author of the forthcoming book What's the Matter with San Francisco?

    24 min
  6. Trust Me, I'm Emotional

    Apr 23

    Trust Me, I'm Emotional

    We tend to distrust people who lead with their emotions. In business, in politics, in negotiation. Someone who gets angry, who shows empathy, who wears their feelings openly is seen as a liability. Not quite serious. Possibly dangerous. Our guest today disagrees. Quite fundamentally. He has spent years studying how people actually make decisions — under pressure, in competition, in cooperation. And what he finds is that emotions don't cloud judgment. They are part of how judgment works. Trust is not a calculation with feelings getting in the way. Trust is a feeling — one that shapes the calculation from the start. He has conducted experiments showing that a single hormone can make people more trusting than they should be. How mistrust becomes self-fulfilling. And how a toxic workplace doesn't just harm the people inside it, it spreads outward into society. He calls it social pollution. Our guest is Eyal Winter, Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the author of Feeling Smart: Why Our Emotions Are More Rational Than We Think.

    20 min
  7. Why Wikipedia Runs on Trust

    Apr 8

    Why Wikipedia Runs on Trust

    Wikipedia serves 11 billion pages a month and almost nobody questions it anymore. But how did millions of anonymous strangers, unpaid and from every culture, manage to build the world's largest encyclopedia together and keep it honest? The answer, according to Jimmy Wales, is trust — and trust by design. In this conversation, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and author of The Seven Rules of Trust, talks about what it actually takes to build trust at scale. We discuss why assuming good faith works better than suspicion, why civil conversation is rare online but does not have to be, and what the Nixon checkers speech teaches us about transparency. We also look at how organizations can recover from a trust crisis, and why, more often than people think, they can.

    20 min
  8. Leading with Trust

    Mar 26

    Leading with Trust

    Every day, millions of people trust retailers to decide what ends up on their table. But that trust extends far beyond the products themselves. It touches supply chains, leadership decisions, sustainability, and the values that guide a company, often under pressure and out of public view. In this episode of TrustTalk, we speak with Dick Boer, former CEO of Ahold Delhaize and now a board member and advisor to several large companies, who led one of the world’s largest food retail companies through major transformations, including a global merger and the aftermath of a corporate crisis. He reflects on how trust operates at every level of retail, from food quality and sourcing to employees, customers, and society. Dick Boer shares candid insights on the dilemmas leaders face when values collide with commercial pressures, why trust must be actively rebuilt after a crisis, and how leadership culture differs across countries. He also discusses the importance of purpose-driven leadership, the role of transparency with boards and teams, and why trust in leadership ultimately begins with building the right team. Looking back on his career, he reflects on the hardest lessons he learned about trust, the importance of staying grounded as a leader, and why openness, honesty, and the courage to make difficult decisions are essential to maintaining trust over time.

    24 min
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About

Trust is the invisible force that shapes our world - from the personal to the geopolitical. At TrustTalk, we’re committed to exploring trust in all its complexity. Since 2020, we've been engaging with thought leaders from around the globe to unpack how trust influences relationships, business, technology, society, and global affairs. Every episode offers insightful conversations that reveal why trust matters - and what happens when it breaks down. If you’re curious about the forces that hold people, institutions, and nations together, this is a journey you won’t want to miss.

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