TrustTalk - It's all about Trust

Hosted by Severin de Wit

Business Management Society Culture ScienceInterviews guestsExplicit

Website RSS feed

Episodes

144

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

EN-NL

About the show

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.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

August 7, 2026Episode 14223 min

Being Right Never Earns Trust

Most people think an institution earns trust by being right. Katherine McComas thinks it earns trust by asking, and after a career studying what happens when science and power arrive in a community's own backyard, she has the cases to prove it. We talk about Cornell's Lake Source Cooling - a project so clean it cut the university's carbon footprint, yet fractured its relationship with the town next door for more than twenty years. Not because the science was wrong, but because of how the decision was made, and who was never asked. And why the same small earthquake is resented when it profits a private company but accepted when it helps the local school. It was never really about the earthquakes - it's a referendum on whose interests people believe are being served. Katherine's reframe is one most institutions miss: you cannot generate trust through better messaging. Trust is something a community gives you; the real goal is to earn and demonstrate trustworthiness; trust follows. So what does that actually look like in a public meeting, beyond giving people three minutes at the very end? Katherine McComas is a professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, where she studies risk, science communication, and how communities react when science arrives close to home.

July 24, 2026Episode 14128 min

Trusting, Line by Line

Most people think trust is something you either have or you don't. Ann Merrit Rikke Nielsen, assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen and vice director of Centre for Interaction Research and Communication Design (CIRCD,) thinks it is something you build, one turn of conversation at a time. In this episode, we talk about why trust is nearly invisible until the moment it is tested, and why Ann stopped trusting surveys and interviews to study it. Instead, she records real conversations between social workers and the vulnerable citizens they support, and listens back - sometimes pause by pause - for the exact second trust is built or broken. Ann brings a recording to illustrate this: a man recently released from prison, listing the changes he has made, stumbles mid-sentence over a word he doesn't want to say. What his caseworker does in the next eighteen seconds decides whether he will trust this institution more than the last one. In another recording, a client discloses a relapse — and it is the caseworker's silence, not her words, that keeps the trust intact. Ann also introduces a method she calls “the Montessori of trust”: playing practitioners' own recordings back to them, so they discover for themselves what built or broke the trust in the room. Why does trust rarely get spoken out loud, even by the people building it every day? And what does it actually sound like when it works?

July 9, 2026Episode 14022 min

How Medicine Earns Trust

What does it actually take for a hospital, a research institution, or a public health agency to deserve the trust of the communities it serves? Consuelo H. Wilkins has spent her career asking that question — not as a philosopher, but as a physician who sees patients and as a researcher who has built the tools to measure whether trust is really there. Prof. Wilkins is Professor of Medicine and Senior Vice President at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, where she also holds the Mildred Thornton Stahlman Chair in Rural Health. She led the development of Vanderbilt's Racial Equity Plan, and her team created one of the first measurement tools designed specifically to capture how historically excluded communities perceive trustworthiness. In this conversation, she argues that institutions get the direction of trust the wrong way round: they ask to be trusted before demonstrating that they are trustworthy. She reflects on what it feels like to sit across from a patient who does not trust the system behind the white coat, why so many institutions respond to broken trust with the wrong remedy — the glamorous ad campaign that avoids the underlying grievance — and what the Covid pandemic revealed about the transparency and humility so often missing from public health. She also explains what the numbers show about the specific fears Black and Latino communities bring into medical research — fears clustered around secrecy, being misled, and loss of control over their own data - and why lumping all marginalized groups together is a mistake that leads to interventions that do not work. Along the way, she offers a hard-earned lesson from leading Vanderbilt's Racial Equity Plan: equity work only endures if it is embedded across every function of an institution. Because when political pressure arrives, isolated initiatives are the first to fall.

June 25, 2026Episode 13929 min

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.

June 17, 2026Episode 13829 min

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]

June 3, 2026Episode 13729 min

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]

May 19, 2026Episode 13621 min

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.

May 6, 2026Episode 13523 min

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?

April 23, 2026Episode 13420 min

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.

April 8, 2026Episode 13319 min

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.