S1E23 - You Can't Trust What You Can't See, The Case for Federated AI with Tiffany Wang

What happens when someone who spent years studying broken institutions decides to help build the next generation of them?

Tiffany Wang trained as a corporate lawyer, moved into risk assurance and fraud investigation at PwC, and then made the jump to FLock.io — a federated AI company building the infrastructure for private, decentralized model training. Her whole career has been defined by one question: why do institutions say one thing on paper and operate completely differently underneath?

In this episode, we get into her path from law firm to Big Four to AI startup, what federated learning actually means and why it matters for governments and sensitive sectors, and how FLock is working with UNDP to build climate resilience tools and micro-insurance platforms for unbanked communities in the Dominican Republic and Peru. We also dig into the Mauritius healthcare project, the work happening with the state of Sarawak in Malaysia on sovereign AI, and what trust actually looks like when you build it into the architecture instead of just promising it.

Tiffany is also candid about what she learned about trust the hard way — from writing legal contracts designed to exploit ambiguity, to realizing words alone are never enough. Trust needs to be tested in difficult times, not comfortable ones.

This one covers a lot of ground. If you work in government, healthcare, climate resilience, or you're just trying to understand where AI governance is actually heading — worth your time.

Connect with Tiffany Wang:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffany-wang-91a3ab13a

FLock.io: https://flock.ioX

Twitter: @flock_io

Subscribe & follow The Future of Trust:Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6zQ2p7k8q7OAuxqJElQjjh?si=35045c6c6b264f55

Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-future-of-trust-with-mat-yarger/id1792163372

Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@DemiaOfficial

00:00 Introduction

02:00 Meet Tiffany Wang — Lawyer, Risk Investigator, AI Builder

03:00 Why she became a lawyer (and why debates shaped her more than law school)

05:30 What was missing in corporate law — the gap between paper and impact

07:10 The PwC pivot — getting closer to business, finding the same problem

10:20 Joining FLock — why it took three weeks and a regret calculus to say yes

12:40 What startup culture actually looks like vs. Big Four

15:40 Trail running, sacrifice, and how Tiffany thinks about hard things

18:15 Growing up between a risk-averse mom and an open-minded dad

23:00 Dating across cultures and how Tiffany learned to negotiate disagreement

31:25 The recurring question: when was your trust broken or strengthened?

33:00 What legal work taught her about the weaponization of language

35:30 Why she no longer gives 100% trust based on words alone

39:30 The gradual pivot — why there was no single turning point

44:50 What does FLock actually do? Explaining it from the ground up

47:00 Federated learning vs. traditional machine learning — the key difference

51:20 Who FLock is actually for (and who it isn't)

55:00 Working with UNDP — micro-insurance for unbanked women in Latin America

01:01:30 Puerto Rico, climate disasters, and why speed of response matters

01:04:00 Where does trust actually live in a decentralized system?

01:05:00 The verification layer — on-chain, auditable, no black box

01:07:30 Open source, community accountability, and why no one person holds the keys

01:10:00 FLock's healthcare project with the Mauritius government

01:12:00 The 10-year vision — AI tools people can use without fear

01:13:30 Sovereign AI and the work in Sarawak, Malaysia

01:16:00 Why education has to come before adoption

01:18:30 Closing — being known well vs. being well-known

01:21:00 How to connect with Tiffany and follow FLock