TrustTalk - It's all about Trust

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.

TrustTalk - It's all about Trust is a society podcast hosted by Severin de Wit, with 146 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Severin de Wit hosts TrustTalk - It's all about Trust, a society show with 146 episodes published.

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  Episode #144

  God, Money and the Nation, A History of Trust

  Sep 10, 202628 min

  It opens in one of Stalin's prisons: a condemned man writing to the very dictator about to have him shot, still pleading to be trusted. From that chilling scene, historian Geoffrey Hosking sets out to explain one of history's strangest achievements: how we ever learned to trust far beyond the people we know. In Trust: A History, he traces that story across the centuries - through religion, money, and the nation - then carries it right up to now: Russia and Ukraine, an America that no longer looks like the anchor it once was, social media, and the risk of an AI bubble. A wide-ranging, quietly urgent conversation about the invisible force that holds a society together, and how easily it can fall apart.

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  Episode #143

  Trusted Brands: Voice, Volume, Vulnerability

  Aug 26, 202626 min

  If you build or look after a brand, this is a practical half-hour on the one thing every marketing budget quietly rests on: earning trust and keeping it. Before you read a single word on a website or pick a product off the shelf, you've already decided whether you trust it — in about seven seconds, just from how it looks. So how do the smartest brands earn that trust? This week's guest is Margot Bloomstein, brand and content strategist, founder of the Boston consultancy Appropriate, Inc., and author of Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap. She distills trustworthiness into three words: voice, volume, and vulnerability - speaking consistently, sharing the right amount, and having the nerve to admit when you've got something wrong. Why a little healthy skepticism is good for us, and where it tips over into corrosive cynicism. The counterintuitive idea that giving customers more control wins their trust. Why saying less can sometimes say more, and what TED did when its own platform began to lose its way. They look at how a genuine apology actually works - and the weasel words that wreck it - and at the design principles, from the MAYA rule to the old idea that "things should look like what they are," that make us trust something on sight. Margot also names the one thing any organization could change on Monday morning to become more trustworthy. A conversation for anyone who builds a brand, writes for one, or simply wonders why we believe what we see.

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  Episode #142

  Being Right Never Earns Trust

  Aug 7, 202624 min

  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.

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  Episode #141

  Trusting, Line by Line

  Jul 24, 202628 min

  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?

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  Episode #140

  How Medicine Earns Trust

  Jul 9, 202622 min

  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.

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