S1 E28: The Trust is in the Details, with Oneza Zaim

In this episode, we sit down with Kazuna Yamamoto, a founder, venture builder and activist based in Berlin. Born in Hong Kong, raised in Singapore and Japan, and shaped by years in Chile, Kazuna learned early that trust is something you build from scratch when you arrive somewhere with no safety net. The conversation moves from a viral petition she launched at 21 against a Japanese tabloid, which made her a national target, to her one-way ticket to Santiago and a fintech startup frozen by COVID. Kazuna and Mat dig into how growing up in multicultural environments changes who you trust by default, why dance taught her that vulnerability is a form of trust, and the moment a friend’s actions cost her credibility with people who had vouched for her. As Mat puts it, trust is a one-to-many relationship. Kazuna also walks through Voice Up Japan, the organization she runs, and its Femicide Project, including an AI-built femicide tracker and an agent that matches domestic violence victims with pro bono lawyers. She closes by naming the human skill she thinks matters most as AI takes on more: empathy. In her words, “I just hate the world a lot, but I love the world a lot.” If you enjoy the episode, don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review!

In this episode, we sit down with Peter Keutgens, an actuary and data scientist who spent more than two decades at WTW in the UK, where he went from quant researcher to leading the firm's quantitative team. Peter grew up in Turnhout, a provincial Belgian town close to the Dutch border. He was the quiet kid in the corner building with Lego. A maths teacher who doubted him early on taught him something he still uses: a title gives someone weight to voice an opinion, but it is still only an opinion. The conversation starts with the manager who pulled Peter out of "The Quant Corner" and taught him to communicate. It moves on to the second career he built after redundancy, which combines actuarial data science, blockchain and his love of flying gyrocopters. Peter explains why what really makes an aircraft fly is "money and paper," and how handwritten maintenance records erode trust when an aircraft changes hands. He also explains why his Aviation Trust Network should be a nonprofit standard. Mat and Peter dig into digital twins and data ownership, including how to keep a pilot's personal flight data apart from an aircraft's permanent record. They then unpack Peter's modelling of costs under the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) and of the supply of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). One finding stands out: if carbon captured from the air earns full ETS credit, that CO2 will sell for at least the price of an allowance. That makes synthetic jet fuel more expensive than many people expect. If you enjoy the episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review.

In this episode, we sit down with Andrew Forson, President of DeFi Technologies and a serial entrepreneur working across asset management, cryptocurrency, and blockchain infrastructure. Raised in a small blue-collar town outside Montreal by two Ghanaian immigrant physicians, Andrew traces his approach to trust in institutions, markets, and government back to a childhood built on self-reliance and hard work. The conversation moves from wrapping digital assets into regulated investment products, to QuickPick's blockchain-powered remittance platform for underbanked users, to the moment a trusted co-founder tried to sell stolen IP behind his back. Andrew and Mat dig into what he calls the real break in global trust: sovereign debt. With nearly all of the world's 195 countries carrying unsustainable debt loads and politicians facing zero accountability for it, Andrew argues "you are certainly a shareholder in the country's outstanding debt" — whether you realize it or not. They also unpack why small, disciplined economies like Switzerland, Singapore, and Rwanda earn outsized trust, and what it would take to give the world's poorest access to fair, inflation-proof investment. If you enjoy the episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review.

From investigating forged documents on Estonia's post-Soviet border to founding ComplyOnce, Raido Saar has spent his career chasing the same question: how do you know who's really on the other side? Along the way, he helped shape Estonia's X-Road digital government infrastructure and built one of the first biometric passport identity solutions in Europe. In this episode, Raido sits down with Mat Yarger to unpack why the world spends $500 billion a year on anti-money-laundering efforts yet recovers just 0.02% of illicit funds, how outdated identity checks let one scammer open five fraudulent accounts using the same stolen face, and how Raido himself nearly got scammed on a fake podcast call. He also shares how LinkedIn and its verification vendor lost his identity data twice, and makes the case for a single encrypted identity key that could replace the passwords, selfies, and stolen accounts fueling today's fraud epidemic. It's a candid, wide-ranging conversation about why our systems for verifying trust are still built on 1990s architecture, and what it will actually take to fix them. If you enjoy the episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review.

In this episode, we sit down with Jeff Mahony, Chief Architect at RYTchain, where he's building a Layer-1 blockchain designed to bring governments and citizens onto a shared, gas-free infrastructure. Jeff grew up poor in Southern California and was working manual labor jobs by age nine, an experience that shaped his belief that talent is everywhere but opportunity is not. That belief carried him from aerospace and defense, where he worked on high-stakes systems, into financial infrastructure, where he built SaveDaily, a no-minimum, no-fee investing platform for what he calls "the other 93 percent" of America. We talk about fatherhood at twenty-nine and the ego it forced him to confront, why he'd rather build for relevance than race to be first, and where he thinks the AI industry is heading without enough seasoning behind its talent. It's a conversation about opportunity, durability, and what it actually takes to build systems people can rely on. If you enjoy the episode, don't forget to subscribe and leave a review.