Show Notes
Trust is one of the strangest things about being human. It's completely invisible, entirely made up, and yet it holds all of society together.
Every time you hand over cash, cross the road, or click "buy," you're taking a small leap of faith that the whole system will hold. These are systems we've quietly built to make life with strangers possible. But trust is fragile, it has to be maintained or it breaks, and throughout history we've repeatedly had to rebuild it.
That's what this series is about: trust, making it and breaking it.
Over six episodes, anthropologist and archaeologist Mary-Ann Ochota talks to some of the world's sharpest minds, from poker players and astrophysicists to mafia experts and cryptographers, tracing how trust has evolved from the invention of money and the Scientific Revolution, through conmen, pirates and spies, to gossip and today's digital world.
Beneath every story sits the same question: how do we build the invisible agreements that hold society together, and how do we decide what, and who, to believe?
Trust Forward is a podcast from Sumsub, AI powered trust infrastructure for compliance operations at scale, made in collaboration with This is Distorted. Every story here is a version of the same problem playing out in a different era. Today it plays out online, in the moment a business decides whether to trust a stranger on the other side of a screen. That's the problem Sumsub exists to solve.
CREDITS From Sumsub and This Is Distorted Presented by Mary-Ann Ochota Written, produced, and sound designed by Anna Staufenberg, This Is Distorted Assistant Producer is Sian Heron, This Is Distorted Executive Producer is Alex Jungius, This Is Distorted Executive Producer is Anna Brusnik, Sumsub Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Trust Forward
Pirates may look like the ultimate outsiders. Lawless, dangerous and answerable to nobody. But a pirate ship could not survive without rules. There had to be agreement over food, pay, discipline and what happened when someone was injured. In a world beyond the reach of government, trust was what kept the crew together.
The best conmen never have to steal a thing. They just ask, and people hand it over.
Science is meant to be ruled by reason and evidence. But for centuries, only certain people were trusted to practise it.
Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. It's not backed by gold, or by anything you can hold, but by trust. And that trust had to start somewhere.