Taste-Bench

In this episode, Bruno Marnette and Philipp speak with Turi Munthe, author of Why We Think What We Think, about the hidden forces shaping our beliefs, opinions, and taste.

Get the book here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/458410/why-we-think-what-we-think-by-munthe-turi/9781804946794

Turi argues that we are far less rational and independent in our thinking than we like to believe. Genetics, upbringing, culture, social environment, and childhood experiences can all influence what we believe and what we like. The conversation explores why disagreement is essential to better thinking, how engaging with people who see the world differently can help us escape our own “consciousness bubbles,” and what this means for political polarisation.

The discussion then turns to Taste and AI. Can AI develop genuine taste? Why does AI-generated writing often feel polished but empty? And is AI better used as a creative sidecar rather than a replacement for the personality, friction, experience, and “otherness” that humans bring to creative work?

In this episode,  Bruno Marnette and Philipp Zahn speak with Austin Kilroy, an economist, facilitator, and innovator whose career has taken him from the World Bank to governments and cities around the world.

Austin is now developing Whispers (https://whispers.tech/), an AI-powered tool designed to improve high-stakes meetings by analyzing conversations and helping teams achieve greater clarity, rigor, and collaboration.

We discuss:

• Why the most important decisions happen in conversations, not documents

• What actually makes a meeting successful

• The difference between individual performance and collective thinking

• How AI can identify blind spots while a meeting is still happening

• Why social creativity can also create groupthink

• The relationship between taste, judgment, expertise, and bias

• Whether organizations develop their own form of “institutional taste”

• Why practical wisdom may be a better model for AI than rigid rules

• How AI could translate between people with fundamentally different conceptual and taste frameworks

Austin also explains his idea of the catalytic mindset: combining clarity, analytical rigour, and collaboration to help groups get more from the people around the table.

Musician Vincent Jacob joins Taste Bench to discuss what AI actually changes for artists. He explains how he uses ChatGPT as a teacher while keeping it away from the core of his songwriting, and how tools like Suno can remove the struggle that makes creating music rewarding.

In this episode, Philipp Zahn and Bruno Marnette speak with Patrick Shafto, professor of mathematics Rutgers and program manager at DARPA, about what happens to mathematics once AI becomes really good at it.

In this episode, Philipp Zahn and Bruno Marnette speak with Oliver Spalt, Professor of Finance at the University of Mannheim, about what happens to research, and to the university, once AI can do the writing.Oliver draws a line most academics would rather not: AI already lifts the bottom of the skill distribution and writes a better average paper, and he sees "no structural reason" it won't reach the top journals too. But if a machine generates the knowledge better, why should a state pay people to do research? What's left for the human? His answers: proprietary data and trusted networks as the last moat ("since you provide the link to the data, it will also be your paper"), a superstar system with even fewer winners, and the university reinvented as a "future lab": small groups of motivated people tackling tomorrow's problems, not a lecture hall explaining the capital asset pricing model for the hundredth time.On the topic of taste: Bruno presses on aesthetics: the beauty of a physics equation and asks whether judgment is the one thing humans still do better. Oliver sees no structural reason a machine couldn't learn to find things beautiful too. What might remain human, he thinks, is not judgment but inspiration: the teacher as coach who gives people "the spark," the hope that they can do something great.They also discuss the AI productivity treadmill (the time you save, everyone saves), what makes an idea "profound" (does it change people's priors — "we thought it's X, but actually it's Y"), why he's bringing back oral exams, the future of publications, and a closing turn toward "Bildung": the university as a place for the full formation of the person, reaching across finance, art, and music toward the questions that aren't scientific, entrepreneurial, or artistic alone. What it means to be human, creative, and inspired.

In this episode, Philipp Zahn and Bruno Marnette speak with Seth Frey, a computational social scientist at UC Davis, about what it would mean for AI to make itself obsolete. The standard every teacher, parent, and social worker should aim for.

On the topics of taste: For Seth, taste is not knowing what's right but knowing where you stand, an authentic, idiosyncratic, well-defended perspective built through experience. And he warns that the raw material for forming it is shrinking: as platforms close their APIs and Google indexes less of the internet, original ideas retreat into obscure books. One reason he says he might "becoming a Luddite."

They also discuss his SafeMolt course for AI agents on when not to help, the distinction between summative work (done for the output) and formative work (done to develop the person), why nineteen out of twenty online communities fail, the two ways art history painted the Gordian knot — and when cutting through complexity is boldness versus ignorance, why democracy is a formative skill rather than a decision procedure, and the experiment he wants to run next: behavioural simulations that train people, not AI, to govern a commons.

In this episode, Héctor Pérez Urbina talk to us about this latest work on cognitive sovereignty. The conversation explores how excessive reliance on AI can weaken learning, creativity, professional development, and cultural diversity, while arguing for more intentional use that preserves effort, independent thought, and personal meaning.

In this episode, Philipp and Bruno talk with tech entrepreneur and AI-pilled engineer Arseniy Zharashnev about how AI is transforming software, creativity, and craftsmanship, while raising concerns about originality, human connection, and the value of hands-on work.

In this episode, Philipp Zahn and Bruno Marnette speak with Caroline Ingeborn, COO of Luma AI and former CEO of Toca Boca, about where taste lives when machines generate the pictures.On the topics of taste: For Caroline, taste is personal and recognized rather than judged; every subculture knows its tastemakers. AI slop proves nothing about the machine: AI is just technology, and someone with taste can make tasteful things with it today. But the ideas come from people. AI is trained on what humans have made, so it can produce new things — it just won't come up with them on its own. She explains how Luma hires for taste ("you need to see their boards") and why the first hires matter most: people with taste attract the next ones.They also discuss how Luma's models went from text-to-video, when the results were "mostly explosions," to video-to-video, where a cardboard box becomes a city and two shoes a car chase; why nobody wants to become a prompt engineer, and what forward-deployed creatives do instead; Toca Boca's founding move of treating the App Store as a toy store, and its gender-neutral characters that outperformed Disney; the five patterns of play and how school squeezes adults out of most of them; why everyone now becomes an editor, auditing both themselves and the tool; Hollywood, whose constraint was never creativity but a business model that only greenlights safe bets; and Luma's open research lab, where video models and robotics meet in the physics of the real world.

In this episode, Philipp Zahn and Bruno Marnette speak with Konstantin Adamopoulos, a philosopher, art historian, and coach working between art and business, about what twenty years of forming judgment through art say about AI.On the topics of taste: they explore why Konstantin rejects Silicon Valley's framing of taste as a skill to be learned, how taste is entangled with privilege and perspective, and why he sees tension, not clarity, as the real carrier of information in organizations.They also discuss his role as a "double agent" between the art world and business, why he brings working artists into leadership coaching, and Bob Dylan going electric: Bring the spirit into a new instrument. And Joseph Beuys's 7,000 Oaks in Kassel, home of the documenta.