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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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. Charlie walks through what he actually found in his own warehouse orders, why the more likely explanation is old-fashioned reseller arbitrage and FBA "bookjacking" rather than AI training data, and how that story connects to the real, well-documented case of Anthropic scanning and destroying physical bo
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 ISO certification requirements, the surprising scale of public procurement (roughly 20% of GDP), and how AI and machine learning are reshaping the bidding process. From there the conversation opens up into bigger territory: the changing tolerance for being wrong in an AI-saturated information landscape,
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 Cloudflare are jockeying for position as AI search reshapes the internet, and the messy economics of AI-generated video versus real footage (including Mark's work with Google Omni and Epidemic Sounds). They also get into monetization shifts across YouTube, Substack, and TikTok, the "reality disturbance" the
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 Eliezer Yudkowsky's influence, Roko's Basilisk, and the medieval investiture controversy between church and state, before landing on Anthropic's constitution as a kind of modern catechism, Dario Amodei's essay "Machines of Loving Grace," the tension between secularism and scientism, and closing with a l
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 embedded in stories across generations, unpacking the father, mother, and son roles and what they reveal about tradition, potential, and the individual. From there they get into Jordan Peterson's model of storytelling as a defense against totalitarian thinking, detour through Buddhism, Taoism, and the idea of
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 transhumanism, data ownership, and what it means to maintain human agency in an increasingly automated world. They discuss the dangers of convenience-driven technological adoption, the implications of companies like Palantir and Neuralink, and how bureaucratic incentives push toward total legibility wh
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 brain tool for organizing thoughts and information across fragmented systems, discuss the dangers of AI psychosis and over-reliance on technology, and debate open source AI development versus controlled releases by companies like Anthropic. The conversation weaves through topics including the limitations o
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 background in Silicon Valley technology, New York and Washington finance, and sovereign funds—including senior leadership roles at the World Bank—to explain why 162 of the world's 200 states are actually small states with populations under 12 million, and why these distributed, autonomous entities might
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 artificial intelligence, and how Silicon Valley has lost its authority to lead on technology ethics. Drawing from her background as a computer engineer who worked in Silicon Valley, Bulc argues for creating global AI infrastructure with democratically agreed-upon standards—similar to how the early Internet was
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 linguistics in Argentina. They talk about science fiction as a lens on the present, arguing over Borges versus Cortázar and touching on Philip K. Dick, before turning to Stewart's treasure hunt project and what it means for adults to reclaim a sense of play. The back half of the episode gets into bigger cult
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 across different countries to the evolution of Ekaterina's perspective on artificial intelligence—moving from initial anger and fear in 2023 to active participation in AI model design by 2025. They discuss the importance of including diverse cultural perspectives in AI training, the cross-country diffe
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, AI's growing influence on society, and what it means to maintain inner peace in an increasingly controlled world. Drawing on their shared experience surviving what Stewart describes as "a somewhat traumatic event" in 2021-2022, they explore everything from the vaccine rollout and corporate power to neu
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 research, to the surprising parallels between entropy, ontology, and hand-wrapping a wiring harness on a vintage car. They also get into abductive reasoning, the problem of combinatorial explosion, why consensus is the secret engine of civilization, and what it actually means to build a system with an explici
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 architectural lens, his deep fascination with Pleistocene megafauna and the La Brea Tar Pits, and his vision for creating a "biophilic culture" that reframes humanity's relationship with other species and ecosystems. The discussion ranges from Oliver's early work building mud caves at Meow Wolf to his cu
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 accounts structure to the global competition between nation states racing to build the best tokenization frameworks, then widen the lens to cover the Genius Act and stablecoin politics, why America's biggest companies have stopped going public, the techno feudalism reshaping Silicon Valley, China's strateg
How Damian uses mindfulness to enhance his creative flow in business
