The Vance Crowe Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Jay Curtis: The Joy of Tinkering Jul 18, 2026

Show notes

This week Vance sat down with Jay Curtis - a retired Ontario farmer, pilot, inventor and lifelong tinkerer who believes the best way to understand the world is to take it apart and put it back together again.
In this conversation, Vance & Jay discuss a number of topics including bitcoin, restoring antique machinery, piloting aircraft with a fear of flying, AI-assisted problem solving and the joy of creating something with your own hands.
Jay also shares the story behind his new Curtis Downforce Indicator —a practical invention born from curiosity and countless hours of experimentation.
If you like fixing things, learning how machines work and using technology to solve real-world problems, then this episode is for you.
If you would like to learn more about Jay and his work, you can find him at:
https://curtisdownforce.com/
Or on Twitter: jcurtis@7ac
When not podcasting, Vance is invited to give talks on tangible communication skills. He teaches how to connect with employees, colleagues and family so that you can negotiate, have better relationships and achieve your higher goals.
https://articulate.ventures/lbc
https://www.legacyinterviews.com/
#vancecrowe #tinkering #innovation #agriculture #problemsolving

Benjamin Anderson | Building The Future Jul 09, 2026

Show notes

This week, Benjamin Anderson returns to the podcast for a fascinating conversation with Vance about urban development, technology and the future of medicine. The two discuss revitalizing neglected neighborhoods, balancing privacy with public safety, and why long-term thinking is essential when building communities.
The conversation then shifts to Benjamin's work at AION - where his team explores the use of ultrasound and electromagnetic fields to diagnose and potentially treat disease without relying solely on traditional drugs. Along the way, they examine aging, cancer research, AI, medical regulation, and what the next generation of healthcare could look like.
This is an engaging discussion about pursuing unconventional paths, questioning assumptions, and building technologies that could fundamentally change how we understand and improve human health.
Benjamin Anderson is the founder and CEO of AION, a biotechnology company developing new approaches to treating disease through biophysics. He is also the author of Conscious Repository, a publication exploring biotechnology, entrepreneurship, and the future of human flourishing.
https://www.consciousrepository.com/
When not podcasting, Vance is invited to give talks on tangible communication skills. He teaches how to connect with employees, colleagues and family so that you can negotiate, have better relationships and achieve your higher goals.
https://articulate.ventures/lbc
https://www.legacyinterviews.com/
#vancecrowe #benjaminanderson #innovation #longevity #futureofmedicine

Chris Barron: The Communication Advantage Jul 03, 2026

Show notes

This week Vance sat down with Chris Barron who has spent decades helping agricultural businesses become stronger.
As founder of AgView Solutions, Chris works with farming families and business owners across North America to improve communication, succession planning, leadership, and long-term profitability. Unlike many consultants, he's still actively farming himself - giving him firsthand experience with the challenges his clients face.
In this conversation, Chris explains why the biggest problems in business often aren't financial—they're human. He and Vance explore how better communication can transform family businesses, why mentorship matters more than management, how successful farm transitions happen and why vulnerability and trust are essential ingredients for lasting success.
One can contact Chris and find out more about the work he does at:
https://www.agviewsolutions.com/
When not podcasting, Vance is invited to give talks on tangible communication skills. He teaches how to connect with employees, colleagues and family so that you can negotiate, have better relationships and achieve your higher goals.
https://articulate.ventures/lbc
https://www.legacyinterviews.com/
#communication #agriculture #leadership #familybusiness #farmbusiness

Dan Kloeckener: A Life on the Cutting Edge Jun 26, 2026

Show notes

This week Vance sat down with Dan Kloeckener who has spent more than four decades styling hair in St. Louis - but behind the chair is a remarkable life story…
Dan reflects on his early years working in restaurants, the lure of easy money, his struggles with drugs and alcohol, and the unlikely path that led him into cosmetology. Along the way he shares lessons learned from thousands of conversations with clients, why gratitude became central to his life, and how faith helped him overcome decades of addiction.
The discussion also ventures into unexpected territory—from surviving a gunshot wound that revealed a hidden kidney tumor, to Dan's fascination with shark attacks and his mission to educate beachgoers through his book "The Jaws of Life: How to Avoid Shark Attacks"
This episode is a reminder that extraordinary stories often belong to ordinary people, if we're willing to slow down and ask the right questions.
When not styling hair, Dan has written a fascinating book that is definitely worth checking out: “The Jaws of Life: How To Avoid Shark Attacks”. Audible version now available on Amazon.
When not podcasting, Vance is invited to give talks on tangible communication skills. He teaches how to connect with employees, colleagues and family so that you can negotiate, have better relationships and achieve your higher goals.
https://articulate.ventures/lbc
https://www.legacyinterviews.com/
#vancecrowe #dankloeckener #personalgrowth #gratitude #addictionrecovery

Faith, AI, and Modern Life: A Conversation with Monsignor Shamleffer Jun 19, 2026

Show notes

This week Vance sat down with Monsignor Shamleffer for a wide-ranging conversation about faith, technology, human dignity, and the challenges facing society in an age of rapid change.
They reflect on artificial intelligence, the role of work in human flourishing, and why technological progress must remain focused on serving people rather than replacing them. The conversation explores Catholic and Protestant approaches to faith, the importance of symbolism and tradition, the meaning of suffering and the vocation of the priesthood.
Along the way, Monsignor Shamleffer shares insights from decades spent in pastoral ministry and what it means to remain grounded in faith while navigating profound cultural and technological shifts.
Monsignor John B. Shamleffer is a prominent Roman Catholic priest and canon lawyer in the Archdiocese of St. Louis. He has served as the long-time pastor at Ste. Genevieve du Bois parish in Warson Woods, MO, and previously led St. Gabriel the Archangel Parish in south St. Louis
https://articulate.ventures/lbc
https://www.legacyinterviews.com/
#VanceCrowe #Catholicism #ArtificialIntelligence #FaithAndTechnology #PopeLeoXIV

Remembering Jim Rutt: A Life Lived at the Ragged Edge Jun 16, 2026

Show notes

Jim Rutt was a working class kid from the suburbs of Washington DC who somehow ended up at MIT, spent years hitchhiking around the country, stumbled into the world's first consumer online service, and eventually became CEO of Network Solutions and chairman of the Santa Fe Institute. He was a relentless reader — 100 books a year since age 10 — and one of the most genuinely curious people Vance ever sat down with. He died recently after a period of illness, and this episode is a tribute.
What you'll find here is a compilation of the conversations Vance and Jim had together over the years, including sessions recorded in virtual reality — because of course Jim was one of the first people to order a VR headset and try a podcast in it. They covered everything: the origins of the Internet, complexity science and the Cambrian explosion, Game B and how humans organized before hierarchy existed, the risks of artificial superintelligence, machine consciousness, and what it feels like to watch something you built learn on its own.
Jim knew he was dying. Vance had the chance to sit with him for a Legacy Interview — a full recording of his life story — and to talk with him right up until the end. This episode is a small window into what made Jim so remarkable: the sheer breadth of his mind, his refusal to accept conventional wisdom, and his joy in being out on the edge of what's known. He was one of a kind.
Articulate.Ventures/IBC
LegacyInterviews.com

Chris Fisher on the Vance Crowe Podcast: Bitcoin, Chickens & Why Boomers Live in a Different Country Jun 15, 2026

Show notes

Vance finally lands the guest he's been chasing for two years — Chris LAS, host of This Week in Bitcoin, the only podcast Vance listens to every single week. They open on an unexpected topic: Chris's fully automated chicken coop, complete with motion sensors, ammonia monitors, automated doors, egg trapdoors, and local cameras running on Frigate DVR — no cloud, no subscriptions, no Google watching your backyard. From there the conversation widens into surveillance, Flock cameras showing up in neighborhoods without public votes, and why the data being collected today may be the most dangerous in 2035 when AI is powerful enough to mine it retroactively.
The heart of the episode is Bitcoin — Chris's origin story through the 2008 financial crisis, losing what would now be generational wealth in the Mt. Gox hack, and why he stayed convicted anyway. He breaks down why Bitcoin is a money protocol the same way HTTP is a web protocol, explains the Lightning Network in plain language, and makes the case that the generational divide between boomers and millennials is really an asset-ownership divide: inflation has been great if you owned a house, catastrophic if you didn't. He also walks through his value-for-value podcast model — no advertisers, audience as the customer, splits paid automatically over Lightning — and why transparency about how much each episode earns keeps him honest and keeps the show free from capture.
The episode closes on the Clarity Act, Jamie Dimon's very loud objections to Coinbase, AI IPO mania as the biggest financial gamble of the decade, and what question to actually ask a Bitcoiner instead of "what's the price going to be?"
Articulate.Ventures/IBC
LegacyInterviews.com

Mark Reardon: St. Louis Radio, AI Fears & the Generational Divide Jun 11, 2026

Show notes

Vance sits down with St. Louis radio veteran Mark Reardon — 97.1 FM Talk — for a wide-ranging conversation that quickly reveals just how different two people's information worlds can be. Mark has been in talk radio since he was 15, has survived firings and format flips, and still believes in live local radio. But when Vance starts talking about the Bitcoin Clarity Act or Cynthia Lummis, Mark draws a complete blank — and neither of them finds that reassuring. The gap between boomer and younger media diets, they agree, is now so wide that the two groups are essentially living in different realities.
From there the conversation gets into territory that makes Mark visibly uncomfortable in the best way: Vance's argument that young people aren't just disengaged from voting — they're losing faith in the entire system. Housing costs, inflation funneled into boomer-owned assets, Social Security nobody will touch, and now AI threatening whatever intellectual edge younger workers thought they had. Mark pushes back but doesn't fully disagree. He also opens up about his own AI intimidation — just getting started with help from a friend at ThrottleNet — and Vance walks him through the Cambrian explosion framing and Pope Leo's encyclical on building AI like Nehemiah's wall, not the Tower of Babel.
The episode covers Iran, the Catholic Church abuse scandal, Vance's prediction of a Pentecostal revival, and whether lynch-mob justice is actually coming — before Mark rescues everyone with an extended, genuinely delightful tangent about Oreo, his litter-trained Dutch rabbit who has taken over his couch and his heart.
Articulate.Ventures/IBC
LegacyInterviews.com

Rob Long: AI, Scorpions in the Office & Why Local Optima Ruin Careers May 22, 2026

Show notes

Vance sits down with data engineer Rob Long — self-described as scoring near zero on the agreeableness scale — to dig into what professional AI use actually looks like. Rob walks through his work at Bayer building "Sales Companion," an iOS app that lets sales agronomists dump field notes, photos, and voice memos after customer visits, then uses an AI agronomy agent to surface product recommendations and flag crop disease issues the salesperson might have missed. It's a grounded, unglamorous look at how enterprise AI actually gets built and deployed.
The conversation ranges widely, from the local optima problem (why hill-climbing strategies trap you on foothills instead of mountains) to how AI has turbocharged both of their understanding of history — Greek empires, Byzantine splits, the hard fork of the Protestant Reformation. Rob also makes a sharp case that English is simply the next layer of abstraction above high-level programming languages, the same way C replaced assembly — and that most "software engineers" are quietly becoming software engineering leads managing agents instead of writing code.
As Bitcoin joins the conversation, Rob explains that his view is simple — figure out how to get paid in it, and stack what you can. He and Vance also trade takes on AI surveillance fears, driverless cars, the cost of keeping underperforming employees, and the surprisingly good lesson hiding inside every embarrassing work story.
https://Articulate.Ventures/IBC/
https://LegacyInterviews.com/

Joscha Bach on AI, Religious War, and Cyber Animism May 19, 2026

Show notes

Joscha Bach is back on the show, and Vance opens by asking the question almost everyone is asking right now: should we be afraid of AI? Joscha’s answer is no, and his reasons are not the usual ones. AI is creating more jobs than it removes, it’s already the most equitable technology ever built (a $20-a-month plan gives anyone in the world access to a thousand Einsteins), and most of the fear is a media reaction to a business model under threat — not a reflection of what’s actually happening in the economy.
From there the conversation moves through the strangest version of an AI episode you’ll hear. Joscha frames hallucinations as the natural state of a “dream machine” not coupled to reality, dreams themselves as fine-tuning on synthetic data, the history of why neural nets won over symbolic AI (Rich Sutton’s “bitter lesson”), and why every modern model — including Grok — inherits the same biases from the same training data. He and Vance then turn to religion as the same problem from another angle: why modern secular thought is structurally a form of Protestantism, why Harvard became its Vatican, why birth rates are collapsing in liberal societies, and why Joscha worries we are badly underprepared for a coming religious conflict.
The episode reaches its philosophical core when Joscha lays out what he calls cyber animism — the idea that spirits are real, and that they are literally self-organizing software running on physics. Your “self” is not your cells or your electricity; it’s the pattern that keeps the cells coordinated, the same way a religion keeps a civilization stable across generations. Vance, who has heard Joscha describe this idea for ten years, says this is the first time it has actually landed. They close on Joscha’s upcoming inaugural machine consciousness conference, MC001, hosted by the California Institute for Machine Consciousness: https://machine-consciousness.ai/ .
https://Articulate.Ventures/IBC/
https://LegacyInterviews.com/

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