✦Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom

Episode #547: Dead Forests and Living Networks: Why the Future of Knowledge Looks Like Fungi, Not Filing Cabinets

Episode #547 · May 18, 2026 · 58 min

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About this episode

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 into why traditional RAG systems break down at scale and how graph RAG offers a more principled solution. The conversation expands into the philosophy of categorization, the slow death of basic "gentleman science" under institutional pressures, and how decentralized protocols might restore a kind of mycelial knowledge network connecting small groups of researchers, enthusiasts, and communities — much like the original spirit of the encyclopedia before it was co-opted by institutions. You can learn more about Joshua's work at bonfires.ai and deci.world or follow him on X at @Bonfiresai and @DeSciWorld.
Timestamps
  • 00:00Stewart introduces Joshua Bate, founder of Bonfires.ai, discussing personal versus enterprise knowledge management and their fundamental differences at scale.
  • 05:00Joshua explains ontologies as classifiers for knowledge structures, describing their two-year search for a perfect ontology and ultimately building a flat, ontology-less graph protocol.
  • 10:00Stewart connects categorization to shamanic practice and intercategorical theory, noting how major companies like Netflix and Yahoo built graph-based ontologies while the discipline remains underappreciated philosophically.
  • 15:00Joshua traces Bonfires origins through decentralized science, explaining how NFT community excitement inspired redirecting capital toward funding unconventional researchers locked out of institutional systems.
  • 20:00Joshua describes building federated knowledge networks through hackathons and conferences, comparing the vision to what Wikipedia could have been with decentralized incentive structures.
  • 25:00Discussion shifts toward inevitable collapse of rigid scientific institutions, debating patchwork age theory, nation-state fragmentation, and rhizomatic versus arboreal knowledge structures.
  • 30:00Joshua articulates the mycelial network vision, enabling direct cross-cultural information access where individuals control their own narrative lens, warning against collective we thinking and authoritarianism.
Key Insights
  1. Knowledge management exists on a spectrum from personal to enterprise, but the founder of Bonfires argues this split is artificial. He believes knowledge itself does not respect those boundaries, and that small groups, researchers, hobbyists, and large institutions all possess knowledge that can and should interoperate with each other.
  2. After two and a half years of searching for the perfect ontology to structure their knowledge graph, the team concluded that no perfect ontology exists. Their solution was to build the flattest possible graph structure with only events, entities, and edges, creating a base layer others can build specialized ontologies on top of.
  3. Graph-based knowledge systems are more efficient than traditional databases for AI traversal because once a graph is computed, it is relatively free to query. Graph RAG combines the discovery power of vector search with the structured precision of graph traversal, solving many hallucination problems associated with standard retrieval augmented generation.
  4. Basic scientific research, the soil from which applied discoveries grow, is deteriorating because institutional funding structures only reward commercially viable outcomes. The founder built his platform partly to redirect community-driven capital toward researchers who are doing important work without institutional support.
  5. The institutionalization of science has historically blocked the open exchange of ideas that drove the original scientific revolution. The human spirit for open inquiry has not changed, but people cannot pursue it without financial support, and building decentralized infrastructure could restore that possibility.
  6. A federated knowledge network would allow individuals to access information from any contributor and filter it through their own preferred lens, rather than receiving information pre-filtered by centralized platforms. This represents a form of information symmetry similar to how mycelial networks distribute nutrients across a forest.
  7. The concern is not whether current scientific and governmental institutions will change but in what direction the rebuilding goes. Those capitalizing on the transition carry the same incentives as the previous era, which risks reproducing the same problems inside new structures.
Episode transcript
Stewart Alsop III00:00

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you. If you have an insane drive to find the truth of things, it's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there, my guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on itunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcasts.

Stewart Alsop III00:36

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. I've got Joshua Bate here and he is the founder of Bonfires AI. Welcome to the show.

Joshua Bate00:46

Hey, thanks for having me.

Stewart Alsop III00:48

So we met, at an open Claw meetup, and doing knowledge management. You had some really interesting points about knowledge management. and for my listeners, there are two types of knowledge management. There are, well, who knows how many types of knowledge management there are. It's probably a billion, forms of knowledge management. But there in general are personal knowledge management, which was what I was studying for a long time until I ended up in the other form, which is business knowledge management, enterprise knowledge management, and both are wildly different given the scale. what is your take on knowledge management? Did I get that right? Is that the category? Do you have any other forms of knowledge knowledge management?

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