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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 #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 hyperinflation, particularly the naira's dramatic drop in 2023, pushed Nigerians toward stablecoins as a practical savings tool, and how informal kiosk networks have stepped in where traditional banking ...

Jun 08, 202653 minSeason 15Ep. 182

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 research. They discuss how three-dimensional printing, Arduino controllers, and open source designs are dramatically reducing research costs—often by 85-95%—while democratizing access to lab equipment worldw...

Jun 05, 202659 minSeason 15Ep. 181

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 setup of running local AI models across roughly 15 computers, the growing case for open source models over closed ones from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, and how Chinese open source models may be p...

Jun 01, 202655 minSeason 15Ep. 179

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 podcast (with over 660 interviews), shared how he went from teaching people prompt engineering to building his own video conferencing software as a Riverside.fm replacement, while Michael opened up about his...

May 29, 20261 hr 10 minSeason 15Ep. 180

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 role of world models in predicting physical interactions, the advantages of diffusion models over traditional LLMs for certain applications, and the challenges of achieving real-time processing for robot...

May 25, 202656 minSeason 15Ep. 178

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 information. They break down the differences between personal and enterprise knowledge management, explore why flat ontological graphs may be the key to making diverse knowledge bases interoperable, and get...

May 18, 202659 minSeason 15Ep. 177

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 data storage, enabling real-time applications and time-travel capabilities. The conversation ranges from the technical architecture of databases and operating systems to the philosophy of distributed syste...

May 11, 202657 minSeason 15Ep. 176

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 experimental psychology through Charles Spearman's discovery of the g factor, breaking down what IQ actually measures, how verbal, mathematical, and spatial intelligence relate to one another, and why training spe...

May 04, 20261 hr 6 minSeason 15Ep. 175

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 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

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 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 #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
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