Crazy Wisdom
by Stewart Alsop
In his series "Crazy Wisdom," Stewart Alsop explores cutting-edge topics, particularly in the realm of technology, such as Urbit and artificial intelligence. Alsop embarks on a quest for meaning, engaging with others to expand his own understanding of reality and that of his audience. The topics covered in "Crazy Wisdom" are diverse, ranging from emerging technologies to spirituality, philosophy, and general life experiences. Alsop's unique approach aims to make connections between seemingly unrelated subjects, tying together ideas in unconventional ways.
Episodes
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Episode #578: Slow Art in a Scroll Economy: Gage on Rebuilding San Francisco’s Art Soul
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Gage to explore the intersection of classical art and San Francisco's tech scene. Gage, who describes his work as "neo-Renaissance" art—imagining what Michelangelo might create if he were from the nineties—discusses…
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Episode #577: The Machine Gun vs. The Sniper Rifle: How LLMs Changed Data Analytics Forever
Stewart Alsop sits down with Teo Ionita, founder of Ideaticon, a data consulting company that builds data platforms for businesses. Their conversation explores how data engineering has evolved from the traditional analyst-engineer-scientist triad into something fundamentally different with the...
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Episode #576: From a $12K Monthly Bill to Zero: Owning Your AI Stack and Your Data
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Devin Elliot, founder of Monetic xyz, to explore the evolving landscape of AI development, decentralized infrastructure, and the future of software engineering. The conversation ranges from Devin's decision to move…
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Episode #575: The Imagination Bottleneck: When Technology Finally Catches Up to Human Creativity
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with UI designer Peter Petrash to explore the evolving landscape of user interface design and technology. Peter walks through his journey from discovering the early web on GeoCities to working with gaming companies in the...
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Episode #574: Evals, Ontologies and the Unmappable World of Business
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Ryan Marsh of thestack.io to explore what it really takes to build production AI systems. They discuss how production AI has evolved from simple prompt-to-API demos into complex systems requiring evaluation suites,...
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Episode #573: Beyond the Hype: Building Robots for Actual Humans
Stewart Alsop sits down with Antoine Marcel, CEO and cofounder of Flourish, to explore the future of home robotics and what he calls "solarpunk" automation. Antoine discusses why Flourish is building wheeled robots with arms instead of following the humanoid hype, arguing that the expensive legs...
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Episode #572: The Horizontal Truth: Why Everything You Know About Movement is Wrong
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Neil Bortolus, founder of Esteem Biomechanics and Stewart's personal trainer for the past year and a half, to explore the intersection of functional movement, human biology, and emerging technology. Their conversation...
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Episode #571: The Like Button Killed Connection: Rethinking Social Networks from First Principles
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Daniel Segundo to discuss why today's social networks have evolved into entertainment networks and how Daniel is building Bien, a social app focused on depth over breadth. Daniel shares his journey from trading...
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Episode #570: R2-D2 Belongs to You: Building Sovereign AI in the Age of Centralized Power
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with TJ Marbois, founder of Tobiko, for a wide-ranging conversation that spans LLMs, data sovereignty, knowledge management tools like Obsidian, and Terence McKenna's ideas about an increasingly weird future. They explore…
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Episode #569: What the Romans Wrote Over, and What AI Is Erasing Now
In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, Stewart Alsop sits down with Charlie D. Becker, a second-generation bookseller whose family runs Houston's largest used and rare bookstore, to unpack the viral tweet that had people convinced AI companies were secretly buying up used books to train their models....
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Episode #568: AI Is Making Everything More Efficient. What Happens Next?
Stewart Alsop sits down with Juan Verhook, founder of Tender Market, for a second conversation that ranges from the mechanics of European public tenders to the future of how we organize digital information. They cover how Tender Market helps smaller companies work around barriers like SOC 2 and…
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Episode #567: SEO is Dying and AI is Rewriting Marketing from Scratch
In this episode, Stewart Alsop sits down with Mark Quadros, founder of GrowthOG and former link-building agency owner, for a wide-ranging conversation covering the state of Facebook ads and paid marketing, the decline of traditional SEO and backlink building in the age of AI, how Google and...
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Episode #566: We Killed God, Then We Trained Him: How AI Became Theology
In this episode, Stewart Alsop sits down with sdmat (@sdmat123 on Twitter/X) for a wide-ranging conversation that treats the major AI labs—especially Anthropic—as religious institutions rather than businesses, tracing a lineage from the Bay Area's LessWrong and Effective Altruism scenes through...
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Episode #565: What Is, What Should Be, and the Space Between: A Conversation on Story and Consciousness
Stewart Alsop sits down with Daniel Freed, forty thousand words deep into a book that ties together consciousness, totalitarianism, archetypes, and religion, and the two spend the conversation tracing how those threads connect. They work through Jungian archetypes as behavioral blueprints…
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Episode #564: The Trojan Horse of Brain Interfaces: What Neuralink's Terms of Service Won't Tell You
Stewart Alsop sits down with Matias Avalos on this episode of the Wisdom podcast to explore the intersection of technology, humanism, and creative sovereignty. The conversation moves from Matias's work with neural network-based audio plugins and effect chains to broader questions about corporate...
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Episode #563: Primary Mind vs. Extended Mind: Aaron Neyer on Digital Brains
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop speaks with Aaron Neyer, founder of Parachute and community organizer in Boulder, about knowledge management, extended minds, and the intersection of AI with human consciousness. They explore how Parachute functions as a digital…
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Episode #562: When the Rule-Based Order Wobbles: Investing in Resilience Over Size
Stewart Alsop sits down with investor and entrepreneur Adnan Hassan on the Crazy Wisdom Podcast to explore his thesis on creating a small state asset class, using evolutionary insights from asteroids, dinosaurs, and mycelium as a framework for understanding resilient systems. Hassan brings his...
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Episode #561: The Internet Was Democratic By Design. AI Was Built to Concentrate Power.
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Violeta Bulc, former European Commissioner for Transport and coordinator of the book Leadership Challenged, featuring 24 authors from around the world. They explore the dangers of transhumanism, the misuse of…
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Episode #560: Can AI Build a Better Civilization?
In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, Stewart Alsop sits down with Javier Rolandi, who works in investor relations and communications, for a wide-ranging conversation that moves from the SpaceX IPO and the trust people place in Elon Musk to Javier's own path through electronics, literature, and...
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Episode #559: Hug a Tree Before You Upgrade Your Brain: A Conversation on What Makes Us Human
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop speaks with Ekaterina Matveeva, founder of Amolingua and Lingo Plus and co-organizer of AI roundtables with EcoCivilization. The conversation covers a wide range of AI-related topics, from the cultural implications of AI development...
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Episode #558: God Mode Off: Sex, Psychedelics, and Staying Human in a Transhuman World
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with his longtime friend Zach Puchtel, author of the book Coming In (available on Amazon and at zachpuchtel.com). The two dive into a wide-ranging conversation about the collapse of institutions, the rise of transhumanism,...
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Episode #557: Measuring What Matters: When Breaking Things Apart Loses the Truth
In this episode, Stewart Alsop sits down with Aaron Lowry, founder of Circulatory Fidelity, to dig into some genuinely mind-bending territory — from Aaron's framework for measuring load-bearing dependencies between things, to the multi-agent AI lab he's built to do cross-domain scientific…
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Episode #556: From Meow Wolf to Synthetic Landscapes: Designing Conservation Through Deep Time
Stewart Alsop hosts a conversation with Oliver Polzin, a founding team member of Meow Wolf and naturalist, exploring the intersection of creativity, conservation, and architecture. Oliver discusses his current postgraduate work at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles studying synthetic landscapes through an...
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Episode #555: Bonds Without Borders: Tokenization, Sovereignty, and the Truth of Markets
In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, Stewart Alsop sits down with Akin Kadioglu, cofounder of Bondi Finance, to unpack the wild world of tokenized corporate bonds and what it actually takes to bring traditional finance onto the blockchain. They trace the regulatory maze from Bermuda's segregated...
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Episode #554: When Fluency Lies: The Knowledge Problem at the Heart of AI
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Larry Swanson, creator of the Knowledge Graph Insights Podcast, for their second conversation together. The two cover a wide range of interconnected topics, starting with a correction Larry makes about the true origin…
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Episode #553: The Connection Economy: What Recruiting Teaches Us About Human Value
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with client strategist Amadeus Huff to cover a wide range of topics that wind their way from the nuts and bolts of recruiting and payment models to the rapidly shifting landscape of AI adoption in business. The two dig into...
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Episode #552: The Unbanked Advantage: How Nigeria's Financial Chaos Made It Crypto-Ready
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with software engineer and entrepreneur Arowolo Muritadhor for a wide-ranging conversation that moves from agriculture and manufacturing in Nigeria to the evolving role of crypto in the country's economy. They touch on how...
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Episode #551: From Trash to Tools: The Open Hardware Revolution Powering Solarpunk Science
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop interviews Joshua Pearce, the John Thompson Chair in Innovation at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Ivey Business School at Western University, about the revolution in open source hardware for scientific...
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Episode #550: From Armies to Algorithms: Why the Biggest Player No Longer Wins
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with returning guest Ekue Kpodar for their third conversation together, covering a wide range of topics at the intersection of technology, geopolitics, and the evolving information age. They dig into Ekue's unconventional...
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Ep549_From MS-DOS to Vibe Coding: How Non-Technical Founders Build Complex Software
Stewart Alsop sat down with Michael Shackelford to discuss their experiences building applications through vibe coding—the practice of using AI to create software without traditional programming expertise. Stewart, who runs the AI Whispers community in Buenos Aires and hosts the Crazy Wisdom...
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Ep548_The Pixel Path: From Perception to Action, and the Future of Intelligent Robots with Nizar
Stewart Alsop interviews Nizar, CEO of Pixel Robotics, on the Crazy Wisdom Podcast to explore the intersection of AI, robotics, and perception. The conversation covers a wide range of technical topics including how transformers enable multimodal representation across text, images, and voice, the...
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Ep547_Dead Forests and Living Networks: Why the Future of Knowledge Looks Like Fungi, Not Filing Cabinets
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Joshua Bate, founder of Bonfires.ai and DeciWorld, for a wide-ranging conversation covering knowledge management, graph technology, ontologies, decentralized science, and the future of how humans organize and share...
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Ep546_Beyond Postgres and Node.js: What Happens When Your Database Runs Your Code
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Tyler Cloutier, founder of Clockwork Labs and creator of SpaceTimeDB. They explore how SpaceTimeDB functions as more than just a database—it's essentially a distributed operating system that merges server logic with…
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Ep545_Measuring the Unmeasurable: Agency, IQ, and the Men Who Change History
In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, Stewart Alsop sits down with Kieran Zimmer — a software developer and independent researcher in psychology and psychometrics — to explore the science behind intelligence and personality. They trace the origins of psychometrics from Wilhelm Wundt's early…
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Ep544_Privacy Is the New Counterculture
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for a wide-ranging conversation covering the EFF's origins and mission, the countercultural roots of Silicon Valley, the rise of...
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Ep543_The Year of Agents and the Industries Not Ready for Them
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Mauro Schilman, CTO and Co-founder of Tuki, the distribution standard for the AI agent era in travel, for a wide-ranging conversation that moves from the joys of international travel and the beauty of mathematics to…
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Episode #542: Let the Angels Go: Consciousness, Carbon, and the Coming Renaissance
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Nicholas Faulkner, author of Angelic Physics, for a wide-ranging conversation that picks up where their last discussion left off years ago. The two cover an impressive amount of ground, including the map of…
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Episode #541: Where Am I? The Hidden Infrastructure Powering the Robot Revolution
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Lucas McKenna, Director of Europe at Point One Navigation, for a wide-ranging conversation about the future of robotics and autonomous systems. They cover topics including the SLAM algorithm and how robots map and...
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Episode #540: Own the Software or Go Amish
Stewart Alsop sits down with Karol, a 3D generalist and digital artist with 25 years of experience, to talk about the evolving landscape of 3D art — from sculpting in ZBrush to the deep technical rabbit hole of Houdini, and how AI tools like Claude are quietly reshaping creative workflows. The...
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Episode #539: Zero Trust Everything: Rebuilding the Internet's Money Layer
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with David Lachmish, co-founder of Ika, to explore the cutting-edge world of decentralized cryptography and its real-world applications. They cover the foundational problem of zero-trust custody and interoperability in...
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Episode #538: Outside the Three Institutions: Network States, Sovereign Tech
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Vahram Ayvazyan, founder of the Armenian Network State, for a wide-ranging conversation touching on AI and the future of work, the cyclical nature of human conflict throughout history, the decay of the nation-state…
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Episode #537: Free From the Grid, Connected to the World
In this episode, Stewart Alsop III sits down with Tom Faye — experimenter, author of The 90 Day Client Acquisition Code, and founder of Carbon Credits Marketplace — to talk about solar energy, off-grid living, and the solarpunk vision of a technology-powered utopia. They cover everything from...
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Episode #536: From Filament to Agents: The Tools Keep Getting Cheaper and the Judgment Keeps Getting Scarcer
In this episode of Crazy Wisdom, Stewart Alsop sits down with Andre Oliveira, founder of Splash N Color, a bootstrapped 3D printing e-commerce business selling consumer goods on Amazon. The two cover a lot of ground — from how Andre went from running 40 FDM printers out of South Florida to...
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Episode #535: The Technological Adolescence: Can Humans Keep Up With AI's Puberty?
Stewart Alsop sits down with Ulises Martins on the Crazy Wisdom podcast to explore how artificial intelligence is fundamentally disrupting professional careers, labor markets, and the pace of human adaptation itself. They discuss everything from Dario Amodei's concept of "technological…
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Episode #534: From COVID's Trust Bonfire to Decentralized Everything
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Jake Hamilton, founder of Groundwire and Nockbox, to explore zero-knowledge proofs, Bitcoin identity systems, and the intersection of privacy-preserving cryptography with AI and blockchain technology. They discuss how…
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Episode #533: The Universe Doing Its Thing: AI Evolution Is Already Here
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Markus Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT, to explore how seemingly different systems—from proteins and music to knowledge structures and AI reasoning—share underlying patterns through hierarchy,...
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Episode #532: From Pythagoras to Plugins: Why We Still Need Human Musicians
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop interviews John von Seggern, founder of Future Proof Music School, about the intersection of music education, technology, and artificial intelligence. They explore how musicians can develop timeless skills in an era of generative AI,...
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Episode #531: Revenue-Based Lending Meets Crypto: Building Leviathan on Sui
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Lars van der Zande, founder and CEO/technical architect of Inkwell Finance, for what Lars describes as his first-ever podcast appearance. The conversation covers a wide range of blockchain infrastructure topics,...
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Episode #530: The Hidden Architecture: Why Your Startup Needs an Ontology (Before It's Too Late)
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Larry Swanson, a knowledge architect, community builder, and host of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. They explore the relationship between knowledge graphs and ontologies, why these technologies matter in the age...
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Episode #529: Semantic Sovereignty: Why Knowledge Graphs Beat $100 Billion Context Graphs
In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop explores the complex world of context and knowledge graphs with guest Youssef Tharwat, the founder of NoodlBox who is building dot get for context. Their conversation spans from the philosophical nature of context and its crucial…
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About this show
In his series "Crazy Wisdom," Stewart Alsop explores cutting-edge topics, particularly in the realm of technology, such as Urbit and artificial intelligence. Alsop embarks on a quest for meaning, engaging with others to expand his own understanding of reality and that of his audience. The topics covered in "Crazy Wisdom" are diverse, ranging from emerging technologies to spirituality, philosophy, and general life experiences. Alsop's unique approach aims to make connections between seemingly unrelated subjects, tying together ideas in unconventional ways.
Hosted by
Stewart Alsop
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