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Crazy Wisdom

Stewart Alsop III | AI, Consciousness & Technologygetcrazywisdom.com
Exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence, consciousness, philosophy, and technology with thinkers, builders, and seekers. Hosted by Stewart Alsop III — conversations spanning AI agents, Advaita Vedanta, geopolitics, cryptography, network states, and the future of sovereign technology. 660+ episodes and counting.
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Episodes

Episode #544: 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 surveillance-based business models, the challenges facing open source software and open-weight AI models, the legal landscape around intellectual property and privacy law, and the growing tension between government o...

Apr 27, 202650 minSeason 15Ep. 174

Episode #543: 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 the fast-evolving world of AI and large language models. Mauro shares his background as a math Olympiad competitor and later a coach, his time training coding models at the AI company Cohere, and his thoug...

Apr 20, 202654 minSeason 15Ep. 173

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 consciousness developed by Dr. David Hawkins and where they find themselves skeptical of his calibration methods, the relationship between the chakra system and Hawkins' scale, how consciousness levels apply to bo...

Apr 13, 20261 hr 6 minSeason 15Ep. 542

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 position themselves in the world, the role of GPS and sensor fusion in precise localization, swarm robotics and the debate between centralized and decentralized robot intelligence, the differences between ur...

Apr 06, 202652 minSeason 15Ep. 171

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 position themselves in the world, the role of GPS and sensor fusion in precise localization, swarm robotics and the debate between centralized and decentralized robot intelligence, the differences between ur...

Apr 06, 202652 minSeason 15Ep. 171

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 conversation wanders into bigger territory: the singularity, accelerationism, the philosophical roots of Silicon Valley's techno-anxiety (including the Roko's Basilisk thought experiment and the writings o...

Mar 30, 202657 minSeason 15Ep. 170

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 crypto, breaking down why most people end up relying on centralized custodians despite crypto's original promise of removing third-party trust, and how Ika's novel 2PC-MPC cryptographic protocol addresses th...

Mar 23, 20261 hr 8 minSeason 15Ep. 169

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, the concept of a "fourth establishment" of free people operating outside traditional power structures, the role of greed and self-aggrandizement in politics and tech, and how network states could serve as ...

Mar 16, 202655 minSeason 15Ep. 168

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 perovskite solar cells and portable container-based solar systems, to carbon credits, ESG investing, and blockchain verification of clean energy output. The conversation also winds through AI training data...

Mar 13, 202649 minSeason 15Ep. 167

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 offshoring manufacturing to China, to how he's using Claude Code to automate inventory management and generate supplier RFQs across 200+ SKUs. The conversation stretches into bigger territory too: the San Fran...

Mar 09, 202643 minSeason 15Ep. 166

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 adolescence" to the possibility that we're approaching a point where AI advancement accelerates beyond our ability to keep up, touching on topics ranging from the economics of software development and the future o...

Mar 02, 202658 minSeason 15Ep. 165

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 ZK proofs could offer an alternative to invasive identity verification systems being rolled out by governments worldwide, the potential for continual learning AI models to shift the balance between centr...

Feb 23, 202655 minSeason 15Ep. 164

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, self-organization, and scale-free networks. The conversation ranges from the limits of current AI interpolation versus true discovery (using the fire-to-fusion example), to the emergence of agent swarms and t...

Feb 20, 20261 hr 14 minSeason 15Ep. 163

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, the evolution of music production from classical notation to digital audio workstations like Ableton Live, and how AI is being used on the education side rather than for creation. The conversation cover...

Feb 16, 202658 minSeason 15Ep. 162

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, including Lars's work with Sui and Solana blockchains, the innovative capabilities of Ika's programmatic wallets and blockchain of signatures, and how Inkwell Finance is building revenue-based financing soluti...

Feb 13, 202654 minSeason 15Ep. 160

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 of AI, and how symbolic AI complements the current wave of large language models. The conversation traces the history of neuro-symbolic AI from its origins at Dartmouth in 1956 through the semantic web ...

Feb 09, 202657 minSeason 15Ep. 161

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 role in AI development, to the technical challenges of creating deterministic tools for software development. Tharwat explains how his product creates portable, versionable knowledge graphs from code reposi...

Feb 06, 202656 minSeason 15Ep. 159

Episode #528: Fighting the AI Flood: From Information Overload to Family Sovereignty

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Adrian Martinca, founder of the Arc of Dreams and the Open Doors movements, as well as Kids Dreams Matter, to explore how artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping human consciousness and family structures. Their conversation spans from the karmic lessons of our technological age to practical frameworks for protecting children from what Martinca calls the "AI flood" - examining how AI functions as an alien in...

Feb 02, 20261 hr 3 minSeason 15Ep. 158

Episode #527: Breaking the FinTech Echo Chamber: Tommy Yu's Behavioral Finance Operating System

Stewart Alsop interviews Tomas Yu, CEO and founder of Turn-On Financial Technologies, on this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. They explore how Yu's company is revolutionizing the closed-loop payment ecosystem by creating a universal float system that allows gift card credits to be used across multiple merchants rather than being locked to a single business like Starbucks. The conversation covers the complexities of fintech regulation, the differences between open and closed loop payment sys...

Jan 30, 202651 minSeason 15Ep. 157

Episode #526: From Pythagoreans to AI: How Beauty Became the Foundation of Everything

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Dima Zhelezov, a philosopher at SQD.ai, to explore the fascinating intersections of cryptocurrency, AI, quantum physics, and the future of human knowledge. The conversation covers everything from Zhelezov's work building decentralized data lakes for blockchain data to deep philosophical questions about the nature of mathematical beauty, the Renaissance ideal of curiosity-driven learning, and whether AI agents will eve...

Jan 26, 202657 minSeason 15Ep. 156

Episode #525: The Billion-Dollar Architecture Problem: Why AI's Innovation Loop is Stuck

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop welcomes Roni Burd, a data and AI executive with extensive experience at Amazon and Microsoft, for a deep dive into the evolving landscape of data management and artificial intelligence in enterprise environments. Their conversation explores the longstanding challenges organizations face with knowledge management and data architecture, from the traditional bronze-silver-gold data processing pipeline to how AI agents are revolutioniz...

Jan 23, 202654 minSeason 15Ep. 155

Episode #524: The 500-Year Prophecy: Why Buddhism and AI Are Colliding Right Now

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Kelvin Lwin for their second conversation exploring the fascinating intersection of AI and Buddhist cosmology. Lwin brings his unique perspective as both a technologist with deep Silicon Valley experience and a serious meditation practitioner who's spent decades studying Buddhist philosophy. Together, they examine how AI development fits into ancient spiritual prophecies, discuss the dangerous allure of LLMs as potent...

Jan 19, 20261 hr 1 minSeason 15Ep. 154

Episode #523: Space Computer: When Your Trusted Execution Environment Needs a Rocket

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Daniel Bar, co-founder of Space Computer, a satellite-based secure compute protocol that creates a "root of trust in space" using tamper-resistant hardware for cryptographic applications. The conversation explores the fascinating intersection of space technology, blockchain infrastructure, and trusted execution environments (TEEs), touching on everything from cosmic radiation-powered random number generators to the fu...

Jan 16, 20261 hr 4 minSeason 15Ep. 153

Episode #522: The Hardware Heretic: Why Everything You Think About FPGAs Is Backwards

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Peter Schmidt Nielsen, who is building FPGA-accelerated servers at Saturn Data. The conversation explores why servers need FPGAs, how these field-programmable gate arrays work as "IO expanders" for massive memory bandwidth, and why they're particularly well-suited for vector database and search applications. Peter breaks down the technical realities of FPGAs - including why they "really suck" in many ways compared to ...

Jan 12, 202653 minSeason 15Ep. 152

Episode #521: From Borges to Threadrippers: How Argentina's Emotional Culture Shapes the AI Future

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop interviews Aurelio Gialluca, an economist and full stack data professional who works across finance, retail, and AI as both a data engineer and machine learning developer, while also exploring human consciousness and psychology. Their wide-ranging conversation covers the intersection of science and psychology, the unique cultural characteristics that make Argentina a haven for eccentrics (drawing parallels to the United States), and...

Jan 09, 20261 hr 8 minSeason 15Ep. 151

Episode #520: Training Super Intelligence One Simulated Workflow at a Time

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Josh Halliday, who works on training super intelligence with frontier data at Turing. The conversation explores the fascinating world of reinforcement learning (RL) environments, synthetic data generation, and the crucial role of high-quality human expertise in AI training. Josh shares insights from his years working at Unity Technologies building simulated environments for everything from oil and gas safety scenarios...

Jan 05, 202650 minSeason 15Ep. 150

Episode #519: Inside the Stack: What Really Makes Robots “Intelligent”

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, host Stewart Alsop interviews Marcin Dymczyk, CPO and co-founder of SevenSense Robotics, exploring the fascinating world of advanced robotics and AI. Their conversation covers the evolution from traditional "standard" robotics with predetermined pathways to advanced robotics that incorporates perception, reasoning, and adaptability - essentially the AGI of physical robotics. Dymczyk explains how his company builds "the eyes and brains of mobile robots...

Jan 02, 20261 hr 2 minSeason 15Ep. 149

Episode #518: Decentralization Without Romance: Incentives, Mesh Networks, and Practical Crypto

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop sits down with Mike Bakon to explore the fascinating intersection of hardware hacking, blockchain technology, and decentralized systems. Their conversation spans from Mike's childhood fascination with taking apart electronics in 1980s Poland to his current work with ESP32 microcontrollers, LoRa mesh networks, and Cardano blockchain development. They discuss the technical differences between UTXO and account-based blockchains, the ch...

Dec 29, 20251 hr 9 minSeason 15Ep. 148

Episode #517: How Orbital Robotics Turns Space Junk into Infrastructure

In this episode of the Crazy Wisdom Podcast, host Stewart Alsop speaks with Aaron Borger, founder and CEO of Orbital Robotics, about the emerging world of space robotics and satellite capture technology. The conversation covers a fascinating range of topics including Borger's early experience launching AI-controlled robotic arms to space as a student, his work at Blue Origin developing lunar lander software, and how his company is developing robots that can capture other spacecraft for refueling...

Dec 26, 202559 minSeason 15Ep. 147

Episode #516: China’s AI Moment, Functional Code, and a Post-Centralized World

In this episode, Stewart Alsop sits down with Joe Wilkinson of Artisan Growth Strategies to talk through how vibe coding is changing who gets to build software, why functional programming and immutability may be better suited for AI-written code, and how tools like LLMs are reshaping learning, work, and curiosity itself. The conversation ranges from Joe’s experience living in China and his perspective on Chinese AI labs like DeepSeek, Kimi, Minimax, and GLM, to mesh networks, Raspberry Pi–powere...

Dec 22, 20251 hr 5 minSeason 15Ep. 146
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