Sumsub

Trust Forward

No. of episodes

6

Latest episode

2026-10-27

Where can you listen?

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

Additional Mixing by Amy Thomson

Executive Producer is Alex Jungius, This Is Distorted

Executive Producer is Anna Brusnik, Sumsub

Visual identity and launch creative - Zhanna Stegalina and Georgy Slavin-Rudakov, Sumsub

Trust Forward Homepage: https://trustforward.sumsub.com/

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