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.