The Vance Crowe Podcast

<p>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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a href="https://Articulate.Ventures/IBC/" target="_blank">https://Articulate.Ventures/IBC/</a><br /><a href="https://LegacyInterviews.com/" target="_blank">https://LegacyInterviews.com/</a></p>

<p>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.<br />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.<br />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: <a href="https://machine-consciousness.ai/" target="_blank">https://machine-consciousness.ai/</a> .<br /><br /><a href="https://Articulate.Ventures/IBC/" target="_blank">https://Articulate.Ventures/IBC/</a><br /><a href="https://LegacyInterviews.com/" target="_blank">https://LegacyInterviews.com/</a></p>

<p>A federal judge just blocked Alberta's independence referendum from going on the ballot in October, ruling that the citizen-led petition — which gathered 300,000 signatures in four months — should have consulted First Nations first. Vance sits down with Dustin Newman, an Alberta oil company owner who helped collect those signatures and was active in the Wild Rose party, to figure out what just happened and what it means.&nbsp;<br />Dustin walks through why the movement exists in the first place: a centralized federal system where Ontario and Quebec decide every election, billions of dollars in equalization payments flowing out of Alberta each year, a West Coast tanker ban that forces Alberta to sell its oil to the U.S. at a discount, and pipeline rules so cumbersome that no one will build them. He and Vance get into the history that shaped Alberta's independent streak — homesteaders surviving 40-below winters in sod houses, the trucker convoy, the COVID-era fights that toppled premiers — and the deeper structural pieces most Americans miss, like how First Nations treaties, mineral rights, and the Clarity Act actually work in Canada.&nbsp;<br />They close on what comes next. Premier Danielle Smith can still put the independence question on the October ballot if she chooses, and Dustin argues she may have to: 60% of UCP members back independence, and she could face a leadership vote if she stalls. Polling sits around 30–40% in favor today, but a referendum win would force Canada into a negotiation it has never had to seriously consider — one Dustin believes could go peacefully, or could go the way the American colonies did.<br /><br /><a href="https://Articulate.Ventures/IBC/" target="_blank">https://Articulate.Ventures/IBC/</a><br /><a href="https://LegacyInterviews.com/" target="_blank">https://LegacyInterviews.com/</a></p>

<p>When Vance Crowe learned he needed half his thyroid removed, it sparked a deep question: what does it mean when your body's clock gets disrupted? In this candid and wide-ranging conversation, Vance brings on geneticist and light researcher Kate Crosby — someone he talks to almost daily — to explore the science behind the body's hidden timekeepers.<br />They dig into how the thyroid regulates hormones and why losing it might put you on "synthetic time," why vitamin D and magnesium are so tightly linked, how intense exercise can unlock forgotten memories, and the surprising ways your ancestral latitude shapes everything from your seasonal diet to your fertility. The conversation takes unexpected turns into sunlight exposure, skin hardening, the Protestant vs. Catholic divide mapped onto geography, and whether modern life has knocked our biological clocks permanently off course.<br />This is the kind of conversation Vance wants his daughters to hear — honest, curious, and willing to follow ideas wherever they lead.<br /><strong>Guest:</strong> Kate Crosby is a geneticist and researcher specializing in light biology and light recipes for plant growth and human health.<br /><br />Articulate.Ventures/IBC<br />LegacyInterviews.com</p>

<p>Vance is back in the saddle, kicking off the new run of the show with Shay Falk for a wide-ranging, live conversation that starts in ag-tech and rides straight into faith, leadership, and how AI is reshaping both business and culture.&nbsp;<br /><br /><br />Shay unpacks the origin story of Farm Profit Manager — how he, his brother Mac, and cousin Sam transformed a 30-year consulting tool from AgView Solutions into free software, why they bet on connection and advisory work rather than SaaS fees, and how rapid feedback, GitHub discipline, and even mermaid diagrams are helping them ship fast. Vance and Shay dig into the rise of vibe coding, the coming disruption to pricey ag apps, and the practical lessons of building durable AI systems.&nbsp;<br /><br /><br />From there the conversation pivots into theology and community: the resurgence of churchgoing, the differences between Catholic symbolism and Protestant literalism, how history and geography shaped American denominations, and what leadership and humility actually look like — whether in combat or on a church session. They wrestle with AI's role in faith (should LLMs write homilies?), Dunbar's number, and why shared language and first principles matter just as much in congregations as in companies.&nbsp;<br />It's a candid, spirited conversation about tools, tradition, and purpose — and why now is the moment to build and to reconnect.<br /><br /><a href="https://Articulate.Ventures/IBC/" target="_blank">https://Articulate.Ventures/IBC/</a><br /><a href="https://LegacyInterviews.com/" target="_blank">https://LegacyInterviews.com/</a></p>