✦Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom

Episode #453: Trustware vs. Adware: Toward a Humane Stack for Human Life

Episode #453 · April 18, 2025 · 58 min

MP3 · Apple Podcasts · Spotify

About this episode

On this episode of the Crazy Wisdom podcast, I, Stewart Alsop, sat down once again with Aaron Lowry for our third conversation, and it might be the most expansive yet. We touched on the cultural undercurrents of transhumanism, the fragile trust structures behind AI and digital infrastructure, and the potential of 3D printing with metals and geopolymers as a material path forward. Aaron shared insights from his hands-on restoration work, our shared fascination with Amish tech discernment, and how course-correcting digital dependencies can restore sovereignty. We also explored what it means to design for long-term human flourishing in a world dominated by misaligned incentives. For those interested in following Aaron’s work, he's most active on Twitter at @Aaron_Lowry.
Check out this GPT we trained on the conversation!

Timestamps
00:00 – Stewart welcomes Aaron Lowry back for his third appearance. They open with reflections on cultural shifts post-COVID, the breakdown of trust in institutions, and a growing societal impulse toward individual sovereignty, free speech, and transparency.
05:00 – The conversation moves into the changing political landscape, specifically how narratives around COVID, Trump, and transhumanism have shifted. Aaron introduces the idea that historical events are often misunderstood due to our tendency to segment time, referencing Dan Carlin’s quote, “everything begins in the middle of something else.”
10:00 – They discuss how people experience politics differently now due to the Internet’s global discourse, and how Aaron avoids narrow political binaries in favor of structural and temporal nuance. They explore identity politics, the crumbling of party lines, and the erosion of traditional social anchors.
15:00 – Shifting gears to technology, Aaron shares updates on 3D printing, especially the growing maturity of metal printing and geopolymers. He highlights how these innovations are transforming fields like automotive racing and aerospace, allowing for precise, heat-resistant, custom parts.
20:00 – The focus turns to mechanical literacy and the contrast between abstract digital work and embodied craftsmanship. Stewart shares his current tension between abstract software projects (like automating podcast workflows with AI) and his curiosity about the Amish and Mennonite approach to technology.
25:00 – Aaron introduces the idea of a cultural “core of integrated techne”—technologies that have been refined over time and aligned with human flourishing. He places Amish discernment on a spectrum between Luddite rejection and transhumanist acceleration, emphasizing the value of deliberate integration.
30:00 – The discussion moves to AI again, particularly the concept of building local, private language models that can persistently learn about and serve their user without third-party oversight. Aaron outlines the need for trust, security, and stateful memory to make this vision work.
35:00 – Stewart expresses frustration with the dominance of companies like Google and Facebook, and how owning the Jarvis-like personal assistant experience is critical. Aaron recommends options like GrapheneOS on a Pixel 7 and reflects on the difficulty of securing hardware at the chip level.
40:00 – They explore software development and the problem of hidden dependencies. Aaron explains how digital systems rest on fragile, often invisible material infrastructure and how that fragility is echoed in the complexity of modern software stacks.
45:00 – The concept of “always be reducing dependencies” is expanded. Aaron suggests the real goal is to reduce untrustworthy dependencies and recognize which are worth cultivating. Trust becomes the key variable in any resilient system, digital or material.
50:00 – The final portion dives into incentives. They critique capitalism’s tendency to exploit value rather than build aligned systems. Aaron distinguishes rivalrous games from infinite games and suggests the future depends on building systems that are anti-rivalrous—where ideas compete, not people.
55:00 – They wrap up with reflections on course correction, spiritual orientation, and cultural reintegration. Stewart suggests titling the episode around infinite games, and Aaron shares where listeners can find him online.

Key Insights
  1. Transhumanism vs. Techne Integration: Aaron frames the modern moment as a tension between transhumanist enthusiasm and a more grounded relationship to technology, rooted in "techne"—practical wisdom accumulated over time. Rather than rejecting all new developments, he argues for a continuous course correction that aligns emerging technologies with deep human values like truth, goodness, and beauty. The Amish and Mennonite model of communal tech discernment stands out as a countercultural but wise approach—judging tools by their long-term effects on community, rather than novelty or entertainment.
  2. 3D Printing as a Material Frontier: While most of the 3D printing world continues to refine filaments and plastic-based systems, Aaron highlights a more exciting trajectory in printed metals and geopolymers. These technologies are maturing rapidly and finding serious application in domains like Formula One, aerospace, and architectural experimentation. His conversations with others pursuing geopolymer 3D printing underscore a resurgence of interest in materially grounded innovation, not just digital abstraction.
  3. Digital Infrastructure is Physical: Aaron emphasizes a point often overlooked: that all digital systems rest on physical infrastructure—power grids, servers, cables, switches. These systems are often fragile and loaded with hidden dependencies. Recognizing the material base of digital life brings a greater sense of responsibility and stewardship, rather than treating the internet as some abstract, weightless realm. This shift in awareness invites a more embodied and ecological relationship with our tools.
  4. Local AI as a Trustworthy Companion: There’s a compelling vision of a Jarvis-like local AI assistant that is fully private, secure, and persistent. For this to function, it must be disconnected from untrustworthy third-party cloud systems and trained on a personal, context-rich dataset. Aaron sees this as a path toward deeper digital agency: if we want machines that truly serve us, they need to know us intimately—but only in systems we control. Privacy, persistent memory, and alignment to personal values become the bedrock of such a system.
  5. Dependencies Shape Power and Trust: A recurring theme is the idea that every system—digital, mechanical, social—relies on a web of dependencies. Many of these are invisible until they fail. Aaron’s mantra, “always be reducing dependencies,” isn’t about total self-sufficiency but about cultivating trustworthy dependencies. The goal isn’t zero dependence, which is impossible, but discerning which relationships are resilient, personal, and aligned with your values versus those that are extractive or opaque.
  6. Incentives Must Be Aligned with the Good: A core critique is that most digital services today—especially those driven by advertising—are fundamentally misaligned with human flourishing. They monetize attention and personal data, often steering users toward addiction or anxiety. Fixing this, Aaron suggests, isn’t about regulation alone but about aligning incentives: fostering markets and systems where value emerges from long-term relationships, mutual aid, and anti-rivalrous play rather than short-term competition and dominance.
  7. Infinite Games as Cultural Infrastructure: The conversation closes with a powerful metaphor: we need to build more "infinite games"—cultural systems where the goal is not to win and end the game, but to keep playing in ways that deepen meaning, complexity, and participation. Politics, religion, and even software development can be framed this way. Rivalrous systems breed destruction, but infinite games foster emergence. Building more of them may be our best shot at integrating creativity, competition, and collective progress.
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 III00:37

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. I've got Aaron Lowry today, who has been on a few times now, so I think this is number three. Very excited to talk with you again. We had a great conversation last time and now so much has changed, including the political landscape, which I'm sure we'll get into. Welcome back to the show.

Aaron Lowry00:55

Thanks, Stuart. Always enjoy our conversations. Looking forward to this one. It's always a pleasure.

Stewart Alsop III01:02

Yeah. What do you. So, I mean, there's so many things we could go into. We were talking before about the history of what electricity did to the, to the ability to move power from the place where it's generated to, like a machine and how all of your work with antique, antique restoration, kind of the things you're restoring are back in that old traditional mechanical way. And we can also talk about the political changes. We can talk about AI we can talk about a lot of different things that are happening. As you mentioned, it's a very interesting time. What are you, what are you most excited about?

Your first full transcript is free. After that, an email opens every transcript in the index — a list of readers we can write to, not a guest book.

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