Almost every company today has a purpose, a mission, and core values. But how do you know any of it is true? For Stephan Ummelen, that question came from his father, a journalist, while he was running an advertising agency and writing those values for clients. When he asked their employees what they really thought, many told him the values were empty words from the top. He went on to study the gap between what companies believe and what they sell, and wrote Betekenis & Bullshit (Meaning and Bullshit). We talk about Volkswagen’s core values before and after Dieselgate, why leaders can name their company’s values while employees often can’t, what breaks first and what breaks hardest in a working relationship, and why meaning is becoming the work of the marketing department. We end with his next book, which looks for trust in a different place, inside ourselves, and offers a simple tip: stop looking only ahead at who you should become, and look back at where you have found real meaning.

We like to think of trust as one thing: you either have it, or you don't. My guest's research says otherwise. People can trust a regulator and distrust it at the same time.

Yannis Papadopoulos is a Professor emeritus of political science at the University of Lausanne and a member of the coordination team of the EU-funded TiGRE project, a nine-country study of trust in regulators. He has also written a book on accountability: how we hold power in check, and what happens when all that checking starts working against us.

We talk about why trust in regulators is holding up better than trust in politics generally, whether expertise really matters for trust, why silence is the worst thing a regulator can do after a scandal, even though it's the most common response, whether mistrust can be healthy, and whether more accountability really means more trust.

Two people can look at the very same trade deal, the same tariff, the same wave of globalization, and walk away with opposite conclusions about who's winning and who's losing. Anthea Roberts, professor at the Australian National University and one of the world's leading scholars of global governance, has spent her career studying exactly why: not who's right, but why we're all arguing from such different stories in the first place. Her book, Six Faces of Globalization, argues that most of our fights over trade and technology aren't really about the facts; they're about six competing stories, and most of us are only fluent in one. We go through all six: establishment, left- and right-wing populist, corporate power, geoeconomic, and global threats. We talk about Australia's own trust dilemma, caught between the country that protects it and the country that pays its bills. And we end somewhere unexpected: whether artificial intelligence can actually help us disagree better, or make us more set in our ways.

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.

You decide whether you trust a brand in about seven seconds — before you've read a word, just from how it looks. So how do the smartest brands earn that trust, and keep it? Margot Bloomstein — brand and content strategist, founder of Appropriate, Inc., and author of Trustworthy - joins us to unpack the three qualities that make a brand credible: voice, volume, and vulnerability. A practical half-hour for anyone who builds, writes for, or looks after a brand.

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.

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?

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.