Incongruent

S5E16 Banking The New Majority: Tamara Laine

Spill the tea - we want to hear from you!Credit scores were built for a world of steady paycheques and long mortgages—so what happens when half the workforce earns through gigs, multiple clients, and flexible hours? We sit down with Tamara Lane, an Emmy-winning journalist turned fintech founder, to explore how AI and verified alternative data can open fair credit to the people traditional underwriting overlooks: drivers, carers, creators, renters, and newly arrived citizens who keep the economy moving.Tamara walks us through Empower’s approach to building lender-ready profiles from real life signals—rent payments, utilities, bank inflows, and multi-source income—sourced directly from institutions rather than hype-heavy tech. We unpack why human-in-the-loop systems matter for trust, how feedback loops keep products grounded in user reality, and why diverse teams aren’t a “nice to have” but essential to preventing bias at scale. Along the way, we challenge outdated assumptions about the gig economy and map a path where financial inclusion is not charity, but overdue modernisation.You’ll hear a clear case for storytelling and community as the engines of adoption, practical ways to evaluate AI tools for privacy and safety, and a forward look at the next decade of work where soft skills and emotional intelligence rise in value. If you’ve ever paid your rent on time yet struggled to access credit, or if you build products and want to keep people at the centre, this conversation offers both strategy and hope.If this resonates, follow and share the show with someone who needs a fairer shot at finance. Subscribe, leave a quick review, and tell us: what everyday data should count toward credit that doesn’t today?Support the show

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.Support the show

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-1Enjoyed the conversation? Follow the show, share this episode with a friend, and leave a review to help more curious listeners find us.Support the show

S5E13 AI, Advertising, And The Future Of Trust: Nadeem Ibrahim

Spill the tea - we want to hear from you!What if AI didn’t arrive overnight but grew up with us—and only now stepped into the spotlight? We’re joined by Nadeem Ibrahim to map the real story: from Spectrum tapes and pagers to telco‑powered data flows and the rise of large language models that collapse research, recommendation, and purchase into a single conversation.We get honest about the agency dilemma: when a strategist uses AI to draft research or polish slides, is that cheating or smart leverage? Nadim argues for a different metric—returning 30% of brainspace to strategy, creative judgement, and client problem‑solving. The machine assembles; the human interrogates, edits, and decides. That’s how brands earn distinctiveness in a sea of sameness. Along the way, we unpack how user‑generated public data fuels models, why conversational commerce is a direct threat to traditional search, and how marketers can meet customers at the moment of intent inside AI interfaces.The stakes rise with ownership and trust. Deepfakes, synthetic voices, and viral misinformation make provenance non‑negotiable. We dive into talent IDs and authenticity metadata designed to protect artists, route royalties, and help platforms block abuse. Today it safeguards public figures; tomorrow it should extend to everyone, because a face and a voice are not public domain. We also explore fintech’s convergence with e‑commerce and AI, envisioning systems that can nudge healthier spending while delivering uncanny personalisation—if guardrails like consent and auditability are built in.If you’re leading a team, start small but deliberate: automate low‑leverage tasks, codify human review, treat prompts and logs as sensitive data, and pilot conversational commerce with clear measurement. If you’re a creator, add authenticity signals and demand the same from partners. Subscribe for more sharp, human‑centred takes on AI, advertising, and digital culture—and tell us: where should AI never cross the line?Support the show

S5E12 When Emotions Become Data, Leaders Finally Hear: James Warren

Spill the tea - we want to hear from you!Start with a bold idea: stories are data. Not the soft kind you file under “nice to have,” but structured, analysable insight that explains why people choose, stay, leave or change. We sit down with James Warren, founder of Share More Stories, to unpack how narrative plus AI can outclass dashboards built on clicks and demographics, and why the shift begins with designing for trust.James walks us through SEEQ, a platform that invites customers and employees to share personal experiences in writing or audio, primed by sensory prompts that activate memory and emotion. Instead of over-engineered chatbots, a simple, humane flow draws out richer accounts and reduces performance pressure. Those stories are then segmented and analysed across 55 emotional signals, creating an emotional map leaders can act on. The payoff is clarity: not just what happened, but how it felt and what is likely to happen next.We dive into privacy and ethics—anonymised identities, clear boundaries between “personal” and “private,” and reporting that avoids exposing individuals. Then we get practical about leadership. When trust is shaky, go first and model vulnerability; when trust exists, step back and listen before you speak. A recent energy-sector case shows how new hire and hiring leader stories revealed overlooked friction and emotional strain, guiding more humane fixes than another round of survey tweaks.As AI-generated content floods every channel, authentic human voice becomes a competitive advantage. Real-time querying and emotion-aware analysis can scale insight, but meaning still starts with people willing to share. If you’re in HR, marketing, or internal comms, and you’re tired of numbers that don’t move behaviour, this conversation offers a cleaner path: fewer assumptions, deeper listening, and decisions anchored in emotion-driven truth. If it resonates, follow the show, share it with a colleague who cares about culture, and leave a review with one story you think leaders need to hear.~~~Share More Stories: https://sharemorestories.com/Support the show