The Vance Crowe Podcast

Vance Crowe
  • 4.7 (145)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Weekly

The Vance Crowe Podcast is a thought-provoking and engaging show where Vance Crowe, a former Director of Millennial Engagement for Monsanto, and X-World Banker, interviews a variety of experts and thought leaders from diverse fields. Vance prompts his guests to think about their work in novel ways, exploring how their expertise applies to regular people and sharing stories and experiences. The podcast covers a wide range of topics, including agriculture, technology, social issues, and more. It aims to provide listeners with new perspectives and insights into the world around them.

  1. 3d ago

    Dan Kloeckener: A Life on the Cutting Edge

    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

    1h 6m

  2. Jun 19

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

    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

    1h 42m

  3. Jun 16

    Remembering Jim Rutt: A Life Lived at the Ragged Edge

    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

    1h 7m

  4. Jun 15

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

    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

    1h 33m

  5. Jun 11

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

    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

    1h 8m

  6. May 22

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

    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/

    1h 54m

  7. May 19

    Joscha Bach on AI, Religious War, and Cyber Animism

    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/

    1h 26m

  8. May 15

    Why Alberta Wants to Leave Canada, with Dustin Newman

    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.  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.  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. https://Articulate.Ventures/IBC/ https://LegacyInterviews.com/

    1h 3m
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4.7
out of 5
145 Ratings

About

The Vance Crowe Podcast is a thought-provoking and engaging show where Vance Crowe, a former Director of Millennial Engagement for Monsanto, and X-World Banker, interviews a variety of experts and thought leaders from diverse fields. Vance prompts his guests to think about their work in novel ways, exploring how their expertise applies to regular people and sharing stories and experiences. The podcast covers a wide range of topics, including agriculture, technology, social issues, and more. It aims to provide listeners with new perspectives and insights into the world around them.

Information

  • Creator
    Vance Crowe
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    486
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Articulate Ventures
  • Show Website
    The Vance Crowe Podcast

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