Incongruent

The Incongruables

Podcast edited by Stephen King, award-winning academic, researcher and communications professional. Chester | Dubai | The World.  Correspondence email: steve@kk-stud.io.

Episodes

  1. S5E15 Trust, Code, And The Future Of Truth: Billy Luedtke

    15/12/2025

    S5E15 Trust, Code, And The Future Of Truth: Billy Luedtke

    Spill the tea - we want to hear from you! What happens when a handful of companies can quietly steer what we see, buy, and believe? We sit down with Billy Ludke, founder of Intuition and a veteran of EY and ConsenSys, to map a path where trust is built on cryptographic proof, portable reputation, and your own data — not a platform’s black box. Billy argues that while crypto started by decentralising money, the bigger prize is decentralising information itself. If discovery flows through opaque feeds and proprietary AIs, power concentrates. The antidote is simple in concept and ambitious in practice: verifiable attestations about people, agents, and platforms that travel with you anywhere. We dig into how cryptographic attribution shows who said what, while reputation adds the nuance that pure math cannot. One trusted voice beats ten thousand gamified reviews, so Intuition focuses on a neutral substrate for signed claims and lets multiple scoring models compete on top. That choice avoids a central arbiter of truth and keeps bias in check. From there we explore the rise of agent swarms — many specialised agents coordinating like a brain — and why open, portable reputations will decide how requests are routed and which tools act on your behalf. Billy also shares how this vision lands on device with Samsung’s Gaia phones: a second brain for your preferences and trusted sources that you control, usable across any model without lock‑in. We talk healthcare records, bank reputations, and why your ChatGPT context should be yours to carry. The through‑line is clear: don’t let anyone control the truth. Treat it as a prism of perspectives anchored by verifiable facts and accountable actors. If that future excites you — or challenges your assumptions — tune in, share with a friend, and leave a review so more curious listeners can find us.

    31 min
  2. S5E14 Algorithms, Beauty, And The Artist: Gretchen Andrew

    08/12/2025

    S5E14 Algorithms, Beauty, And The Artist: Gretchen Andrew

    Spill the tea - we want to hear from you! What if the internet that trained today’s AI also rewired our sense of beauty, originality, and self? We sit down with artist and former Googler Gretchen Andrew to explore how algorithms shape culture—from who gets seen on social platforms to why so many rooms, faces, and feeds now look the same. Gretchen’s path from information systems to the Whitney offers a rare inside-out view: she uses AI not to generate images, but to expose how machine-enforced standards flatten difference and reward sameness. Gretchen breaks down the feedback loop that began a decade ago when adtech and SEO drove the kind of content the web produced. Those archives became the fuel for generative models, and now those models steer taste back into the feed. We talk practical signals for spotting AI images, the difference between building your own dataset versus prompting in a black box, and why the best AI artists still make work that is unmistakably theirs. Her Facetune Portraits turn invisible edits into physical marks, revealing the embedded judgements inside “beautifying” tools and how they travel from screens to surgeons’ offices. The conversation gets personal and urgent. Filters can destabilise your self-image even when you know how they work. Plastic surgery trends among men and women rise as we optimise our 2D selves for Zoom and Instagram. For artists worried about replacement, Gretchen offers a path forward: study art history to know what’s actually new, build a practice that explains why the tool matters, and lean into the messy human qualities machines can’t convincingly fake. If you care about AI, culture, and creative integrity, this one will challenge how you see your feed—and your face. Enjoy Gretchen's work: https://www.gretchenandrew.com/facetune-portraits/facetune-portraits-gretchen-1 Enjoyed the conversation? Follow the show, share this episode with a friend, and leave a review to help more curious listeners find us.

    35 min

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

Podcast edited by Stephen King, award-winning academic, researcher and communications professional. Chester | Dubai | The World.  Correspondence email: steve@kk-stud.io.