Episode Details

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

00:00 - Stewart introduces Joshua Bate, founder of Bonfires.ai, discussing personal versus enterprise knowledge management and their fundamental differences at scale.
05:00 - Joshua 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.
10:00 - Stewart 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.
15:00 - Joshua traces Bonfires origins through decentralized science, explaining how NFT community excitement inspired redirecting capital toward funding unconventional researchers locked out of institutional systems.
20:00 - Joshua describes building federated knowledge networks through hackathons and conferences, comparing the vision to what Wikipedia could have been with decentralized incentive structures.
25:00 - Discussion shifts toward inevitable collapse of rigid scientific institutions, debating patchwork age theory, nation-state fragmentation, and rhizomatic versus arboreal knowledge structures.
30:00 - Joshua 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