Shows
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 332 Worldviews: Jim RuttIn a special edition of the new Worldviews series, Brendan Graham Dempsey asks Jim about his life and worldview using a faith development interview. They discuss Jim's life chapters from growing up through becoming a complexity guy and GameB advocate, his age 11 epiphany that religion is bullshit after researching world religions at the library, the formative influence of his wife and parents who built lives from poverty, his realization that exponential growth on a finite planet driven by advertising and economic systems is destructive, understanding the limits of knowledge through complexity science and rejecting naive Newtonianism, his three core values...
2026-02-171h 07
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 331 Worldviews: Michael ShermerJim talks with Michael Shermer about his worldview and his new book, Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. They discuss Michael's self-identification as a monist and realist who believes in a physical objective world, the concept of fallibilism, intersubjective verification of the interobjective, reliance on authorities and institutions, the battle between the book of authority versus the book of nature, balancing rationality with empiricism, the dependence of mathematical truths on axioms, January 6 as an example of people acting rationally on false beliefs, Shermer's journey from born-again Christian to atheist and Jim's opposite journey...
2026-01-291h 11
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 329 Worldviews: David KrakauerIn the inaugural episode of a new series, Jim talks with David Krakauer about his intellectual formation and worldview. They discuss what woke up as David this morning, his commitments to chance and pattern seeking, his epiphany about the idea of the idea at age 12 or 13, his perverse attraction to the arcane and difficult, evolution as integral to intelligence, the risk-averse character of scholars and the sociology of science, the Santa Fe Institute's attempt to maintain revolutionary science, the Ouroboros concept challenging foundationalism in epistemology, the standard model of physics as foundational versus the view that you can establish foundations...
2026-01-1500 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 328 Brendan Graham Dempsey Interviews Jim Rutt on Minimum Viable MetaphysicsIn this flipped episode, Brendan Graham Dempsey interviews Jim about the ideas in his recent Substack essays "A Minimum Viable Metaphysics" and "What I Mean by 'Metaphysics'." They discuss metaphysics as assumptions for learning and reasoning, the difference between deduction, induction, & abduction, Jim's belief that there are no paradoxes in the real world, the reality principle, the asymmetry principle, the lawfulness principle, the potential stochastic nature of reality, why determinism and lawfulness aren't the same, consciousness in the tree of emergence, why emergence is important, causal time, downward causality as the main claim of emergence, temporal reciprocal emergence, Jim's reputation...
2025-11-0555 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 327 Nate Soares on Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us AllJim talks with Nate Soares about the ideas in his and Eliezer Yudkowsky's book If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. They discuss the book's claim that mitigating existential AI risk should be a top global priority, the idea that LLMs are grown, the opacity of deep learning networks, the Golden Gate activation vector, whether our understanding of deep learning networks might improve enough to prevent catastrophe, goodness as a narrow target, the alignment problem, the problem of pointing minds, whether LLMs are just stochastic parrots, why predicting a corpus often requires more mental m...
2025-10-161h 37
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 326 Alex Ebert on New Age, Manifestation, and Collective HallucinationJim talks with Alex Ebert about the ideas in his Substack essay "New Age and the Religion of Self: The Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality." They discuss the meanings of New Age and religion, the New Thought movement, the law of attraction, manifesting, Trump's artifacts of manifestation, the unmooring from concrete artifacts, individual and collective hallucinations, intersubjective verification of the interobjective, the subjective-first perspective, epistemic asymmetry as the cool, New Ageism's constant reference to quantum physics, manifesting as a way to negate social responsibility, the odd coincidence of leaving the gold standard and New Ageism, spiritual bypassing, a global...
2025-10-141h 13
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 325 Joe Edelman on Full-Stack AI AlignmentJim talks with Joe Edelman about the ideas in the Meaning Alignment Institute's recent paper "Full Stack Alignment: Co-Aligning AI and Institutions with Thick Models of Value." They discuss pluralism as a core principle in designing social systems, the informational basis for alignment, how preferential models fail to capture what people truly care about, the limitations of markets and voting as preference-based systems, critiques of text-based approaches in LLMs, thick models of value, values as attentional policies, AI assistants as potential vectors for manipulation, the need for reputation systems and factual grounding, the "super negotiator" project for better contract negotiation...
2025-10-071h 12
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 317 David Shapiro on Post-Labor EconomicsJim talks with David Shapiro about his six-part series on "post-labor economics." They discuss historical economic transitions, the logic of labor substitution, automation & AI's impacts on employment, the four basic human economic offerings (strength, dexterity, cognition & empathy), labor as a societal pillar, the pyramid of prosperity (universal basic services, collectively owned public & private assets, conventional private assets, & residual wages), the pyramid of power (immutable civic bedrock, freedom to transact, radical transparency, direct programmable democracy, & forkable constitutional meta-governance), blockchain & cryptocurrency, radical financial transparency, liquid democracy, governance innovation, and much more.
Episode Transcript
"Post-Labor Economics pt. 1: The Rise of Automation," by David S...
2025-08-131h 39
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 309 Richard David Hames on the Final Performance of Western Civilization?Jim talks with Richard David Hames, picking up from the ideas in his recent Facebook essay about the decline of Western civilization. They discuss the retreat from truth in politics & institutions, postmodernism's impact on rationality, China's governance model, the failure of democratic institutions, wealth inequality & social stratification, the liberation of women as our era's defining achievement, climate change denial, the futility of modern warfare, AI's disruptive potential, the loss of character & virtue in leadership, living in a liminal period between worlds, and much more.
Episode Transcript
Richard's Facebook post
Manmade: 50 Failings of Our Own Making, by Adam Jacoby and Richard...
2025-07-0800 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 295 John Robb on How a Networked Organization Blitzed D.C.Jim talks with John Robb about the ideas in his recent essay "Blitzing DC," about how a networked organization took over Washington. They discuss the early roots of network warfare in Iraq, McLuhan-esque societal rewiring, open source dynamics & plausible promise, the Arab Spring & Occupy movements, empathy triggers, Trump's 2016 campaign as a hybrid swarm, The_Donald as a meme amplifier, the Blue Network's counter-response, the George Floyd protests & moral framework, censorship & 'the long night', digital rights & moderation, the Ukraine conflict & swarm response, the Red Network reconfiguration, digital ledgers & truth-seeking accounts, the professionalization of Red digital warriors, network decision-making at a societal...
2025-04-0158 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 273 Gregg Henriques on the Unified Theory of KnowledgeJim talks with Gregg Henriques about his new book UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge. They discuss the problem the book addresses, 3 vectors of knowing, the metacrisis, avoiding despair & techno-optimism, the enlightenment gap, the iQuad coin, the UTOK garden frame, a descriptive metaphysics for science, behavior & mind, endo-naturalism, 3 kinds of mindedness, webs of justification, the periodic table of behaviors, behavioral investment theory, the influence matrix, the tree of life, why wisdom is the ultimate virtue, the concept of God, the dragon's lair, the fifth joint point, the third attractor, personal information agents, the garden fractal, a transcendent naturalism, and much mo...
2024-12-031h 34
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 270 Nancy Jacobson on No Labels and the 2024 ElectionJim talks with Nancy Jacobson, the founder and CEO of the No Labels political organization, in the last of four conversations featuring non-partisan thinkers on the upcoming US presidential election. They discuss No Labels's mission, the Problem Solvers Caucus, the common sense platform, the quality of No Labels volunteers, the power of party leaders, issues with the current parties, Nancy's vote for the 2024 election, what's next for No Labels, and more.
Episode Transcript
"The Republican Electoral College Advantage," by Jim Rutt
No Labels - Books and Reform Proposals
JRS EP 219 - Katherine Gehl on Breaking Partisan Gridlock
The Politics Industry...
2024-10-3018 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 264 Bret Weinstein and Jim Argue PoliticsJim talks with Bret Weinstein in the second of four episodes featuring heterodox political thinkers on the 2024 presidential election. They discuss Bret's historical voting principles & why they don't apply this time, election interference, what actually happened with Biden's failed debate, current polling & apparent desperation of the Democrats, the long trajectory of feminism & its relationship to the current Democratic party, defections by men, a massive political realignment, hating both teams, voting against the status quo regime, the demographic shift in party alignment, a bias in courage towards religious worldviews, removal from the World Health Organization, understanding the failure of government institutions...
2024-10-141h 09
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 262 Cliff Maloney on a Libertarian's Case for TrumpJim talks with Cliff Maloney about the November election and his get-out-the-vote campaign, The Pennsylvania Chase. They discuss Cliff's libertarian background, why Pennsylvania is a crucial state, a Republican return to grassroots, the structure of the operation, the effectiveness of door-knocking, choosing the highest-impact doors to knock on, why Cliff is helping the Republicans, Jim's political trajectory, oikophobia, why Jim finds Trump intolerable, Cliff's political background, working for Ron Paul, the loss of the anti-war left, Trump's gut instinct, Trump's deficit record, comparing the foreign policy of Nikki Haley & John McCain, hurricane relief & Ukraine relief, whether support for Ukraine is a good...
2024-10-071h 21
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 257 Malcolm and Simone Collins on Fertility Rates and PronatalismJim talks with Malcolm and Simone Collins about declining worldwide fertility rates and pronatalism. They discuss when fertility started declining, the pre-World-War-I fertility catastrophe, the countries entering fertility freefall, a population-based pyramid scheme, different cultural frameworks' resistances to fertility collapse, the urban monoculture, the rise of an anti-natalist mindset, preparing for a consistent economic decline, the UN's misleading statistic, the debt overhang, whether the downsides are overstated, why this is not a wealthy person problem, guillotines, how the urban monoculture affects the gene pool, equality vs removal of in-the-moment pain, oversensitivity to negative stimuli, causes of the current fertility collapse...
2024-08-281h 34
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 231 Vance Crowe Interviews Jim Rutt on AI RiskVance Crowe interviews Jim about how he maps the problem-space of current and future AI risk. They discuss the beginnings of AI, the era of broad AI, artificial general intelligence, the Wozniak test, artificial superintelligence, the paperclip maximizer problem, the timeline of AGI, FOOM, limitations of current governance structure, bad uses of narrow AI, personalized political propaganda, nanny rails, the multipolar trap, the spark of human ingenuity, Daniel Dennett's proposal to make human impersonation illegal, taking moral ownership of LLM outputs, loss of human cognitive capacity, Idiocracy, economic inequality & unemployment, David Graeber's bullshit jobs idea, Marx's concept of alienation, the...
2024-03-271h 04
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 223 Jordan Hall on Cities, Civiums, and Becoming ChristianJim talks with Jordan Hall about the ideas in his essay "From City to Civium" and about his recent conversion to Christianity. They discuss scaling laws, superlinear scaling in cities & Metcalf's law, technologies of density, virtualization of space, ephemeralizing of communication, a tipping point in the virtualization of relationality, cities as killers, reaching the limits of the institutional forms that got us out of the 20th century, decoupling of body & mind, returning to the mesoscale, tech hygiene, reciprocal opening, what makes GameB hard, Jordan's experience with civiums, hierarchies of values & their inevitability, regaining functional cultural toolkits, pouring water on plants v...
2024-02-081h 59
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 220 Lene Rachel Andersen on PolymodernityJim talks with Lene Rachel Andersen about the ideas in her book Polymodernity: Meaning and Hope in a Complex World. They discuss the meaning of polymodernism, working with four cultural codes, polymodernism vs metamodernism, the flaw in combining stage theories with cultural history, the problem with postmodernism's deconstruction of guidance & boundaries, 3 factors leading to modernity, the beginnings of alienation, postmodernism as a critique of modernism, the danger of reifying theories, why a post-modern society would fall apart, learning from indigenous prehistoric cultures, the influence of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Lene's relationship to Christianity and conversion to Judaism, being a practicing do...
2024-01-311h 10
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 215 Cody Moser on Inequality and InnovationJim talks with Cody Moser about the ideas and findings in his and Paul Smaldino's paper "Innovation-Facilitating Networks Create Inequality." They discuss transient diversity, group performance vs the agent level, taking an agent-based modeling approach, Derex & Boyd's group potion-mixing experiment, no free lunch theorem, random network structures, an inverse correlation between network connectivity & performance, effects of sharing intermediate results, Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection, measuring inequality with the Gini coefficient, higher performance in less equal networks, connected caveman networks, ring networks, Ashby's good regulator theorem, exploration vs exploitation, randomly allocating lifetime endowed academic chairs to 25-year-olds, institutional design, generative...
2023-12-201h 01
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 198 Cory Doctorow on Seizing the Means of ComputationJim talks with Cory Doctorow about the ideas in his new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. They discuss Cory's long affiliation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, destroying Big Tech instead of "fixing" it, why tech lords are not evil geniuses, how Big Tech consolidated, antitrust law, the felony contempt of business model, interoperability, the high-speed shell game of digital, the kill zone, the case of Diapers.com, the falling fortunes of tech workers, defining IP, Grokster, "polite competition," automated notice and takedown, Jim's proposal for content moderation, the flexibility of fair use, Interoperable Facebook, prior...
2023-09-2053 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 188 Robert Tercek on Intellectual Property in the Time of AIJim talks with Robert Tercek about the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike and intellectual property rights in the era of generative AI. They discuss Los Angeles as a union town, Jim's screenwriting helper software, likely impacts of AI on writers, the history of Hollywood union negotiations, the devaluation of human labor & humanity, motion picture companies of the future, the suit against Stable Diffusion, whether copyright laws will present obstacles to model-building, fair use, licensing, whether AIs "copy" works, knockoff Wes Anderson film trailers, AI's threat to social media influencers, the rate of progress toward text-to-video systems, why ChatGPT empowers...
2023-06-141h 14
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 096: Jim & Michael Garfield Talk About EverythingJim has an extremely wide-ranging discussion with Michael Garfield. They discuss the upcoming book Michael is drafting in public, the exponential scaling of information production, Jurassic Park, mass distributed computation, a new topology for social connectivity, info agents, stereotyping & police violence, a dehumanizing pace of human interaction, Charles Stross's prophetic visions, heuristic induction, strong vs weak social links, restoration of the mesoscale, from the geographic polity to the noetic, the importance of the ground layer, semi-permeable membranes with commons inside them, Pokemon Go & behavioral control, generative AI & intellectual property, creating a commons to benefit culture, circular economies, dividend money & usury, hi...
2023-06-071h 25
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 187 Carlos Perez on A Pattern Language for Generative AIJim talks with Carlos Perez about the ideas in his new book A Pattern Language for Generative AI: A Self-Generating GPT-4 Blueprint. They discuss GPT-4's ability to introspect on its capabilities, Christopher Alexander's idea of a pattern language, pattern language design, Jim's script-writing program, moving beyond ChatGPT to the OpenAI API, managing the context window, chain of thought prompting, the skyhook effect, the value of using tables, creation patterns, input-output pairs, the power of examples, punctuation, cloze prompts, compressing text, the mystery of LLM capabilities, an explanation for state emulation, the system prompt, explainability patterns, meta-levels of language, procedural p...
2023-06-011h 14
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 094: Matthew Pirkowski on Blockchain Consensus MechanismsJim talks with Matthew Pirkowski about the kinds of consensus mechanisms that can be used to secure blockchains. They discuss active inference, proof of work vs proof of stake & the relationship between them, auto-catalytic networks, proof of work in emergent nature, what consensus means & why it needs to be protected, integrity of the ledger, an analogy with clocks, accelerating entropy, photosynthesis, exploring vs exploiting tensions in emergent systems, coordinating central points of reference, energetic openness, the relationship between energy & information, resistance to manipulation, postmodernity & symbols untethered to reality, the evolution of evolvability, adaptive drift, a stable foundation for building infrastructure, t...
2023-05-051h 49
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 185 Daniel Suarez on the Near Future of Space ExplorationJim talks with Daniel Suarez about his science-fiction imaginings in the near future of space exploration, Delta-V and Critical Mass. They discuss the inspiration for the novels, the beginning of a renaissance in private space exploration, characters in the series, space law, choice-making at the beginning, the nature of explorers, the research process, a frontier economy, experiments with money systems, the Age of Exploration, the debate over asteroid mining, robots vs humans in space missions, speed of light lags, the meaning of delta-V, the nexus of Luxembourg City, carbonyl metallurgy, climate change & economic disruptions, mining operations on the moon, the Sha...
2023-04-201h 36
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 089: Erik Torenberg on Status GamesJim talks with Erik Torenberg about the ideas in his Substack series on navigating the status games of today. They discuss status as reputation allocation, cyclical change in status mobility over time, status in the world of social media, beliefs as fashions, the status games of adolescent girls, therapy as a status signal, status games around changes of gender, the metaphysics of trauma, luxury beliefs, college as the biggest differentiator in belief, universalism & the ban on cousin marriage, the U.S.'s anomalously high religious population, the arms race for crazy ideas, the societal value of status mobility, sincere irony, t...
2023-04-071h 10
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 084: Mirta Galesic on Global Collective BehaviorJim talks with Mirta Galesic about the ideas in her co-authored paper "Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior." They discuss the meaning of collective behavior, a crisis in network structures, the analogy of the printing press, consequences of person-to-person communication, the capacity for collective forgetting, unpredictable developments in chatbots, bottom-up vs top-down influence, advertising-driven information ecosystems, emergent knobs in social media design, ChatGPT's political bias, the widespread trust in algorithms, suggestions for reforming Twitter, information decay, viscosity, opportunities & dangers of mass surveillance data, the Twitter Files, free speech & cultural evolution, and much more.
Episode Transcript
"Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior," by...
2023-03-081h 12The Jim Rutt ShowEP 179 Gregg Henriques Part 3: Addressing the Enlightenment GapJim talks with Gregg Henriques in the third and final part of a series on his book A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. They discuss the concept of justification, replacing "justice" with "justification," behavioral investment theory, John Vervaeke's recursive relevance realization, 6 principles of animal mindedness, making a living, animals as functional behavioral investors, evolution of mental behavior in 4 stages, the P − M => E learning control theory, emotion vs valence, framing an architecture of human mind, layers of working memory, 3 types of mind, what it is like to be, the 2-step model of consciousness, the...
2023-02-251h 45The Jim Rutt ShowEP 177 Gregg Henriques Part 2: Addressing the Enlightenment GapJim talks with Gregg Henriques in part two of a series on his book A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. They discuss limitations of the standard natural science perspective, the enlightenment gap, BM3, mental behaviorism, justification systems theory, discovering the tree of knowledge system, the evolution of complexification, the emergence of mindedness, resolving a contradiction between Freud & Skinner, the periodic table of behavior, 3 branches of psychology, the history of information processing, the unworkability of Cartesian dualism, top-down causation, Lawrence Cahoone's systematic metaphysics, distinguishing physicalism & naturalism, behavior as the central concept of the natural sc...
2023-02-171h 35The Jim Rutt ShowEP 176 Gregg Henriques Part 1: Addressing the Enlightenment GapJim talks with Gregg Henriques about his book A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. They discuss the book's audacious attempt to explain the universe, definitions of metaphysics & whether it's needed, 4 bins for the history of the universe, the tree of knowledge system, psychology's ontological confusion, the Enlightenment gap, one-world naturalism & the mind-body problem, scientific knowledge's relationship with subjective knowledge, the metamodernist synthesis, psychology's disagreement about its own building blocks, the absence of a meta-paradigm, John Vervaeke's recursive relevance realization, definitions of mind, empiricism, mapping the internal/external relationship, the unified theory of knowledge, t...
2023-02-151h 38
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 081: Layman Pascal Interviews Jim Rutt on Twitter as Collective IntelligenceLayman Pascal interviews Jim about the principles and strategies that could transform Twitter into infrastructure for collective intelligence. They discuss Jim's motivation in engaging the topic, Musk's current lack of strategic intent, the least bad unfairness, avoiding point of view moderation, distinguishing between style and content, decorum, user-controlled filters, GameB's erroneous ban from Facebook, principles of fair enforcement, setting thresholds between private & public domains, whether Twitter is a public utility, advantages & risks of open-sourcing Twitter's code, two kinds of censorship, culpability around links, replacing the ad model with a subscription service, a connection with liquid democracy, issues with de-platforming, modulating...
2023-02-031h 09
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 077: Serge Faguet on Consciousness and Post-AGI EthicsJim continues his conversation with Serge Faguet, this time focusing on the nature of consciousness and its implications for the wise and ethical use of AI systems...Jim continues his conversation with Serge Faguet, this time focusing on the nature of consciousness and its implications for the wise and ethical use of AI systems. They discuss a technological Singularity, the evolution & significance of consciousness, integrated information theory (IIT) vs. John Searle's arguments, whether current AIs exhibit consciousness, applying the golden rule to AIs, AI alignment, consciousness as solution to the combinatoric explosion of inference, the importance of systems thinking, an...
2022-12-301h 26
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 169 Roar Bjonnes on Growing a New EconomyJim talks with Roar Bjonnes about the ideas in his new book co-authored with Caroline Hargreaves, Growing a New Economy: Beyond Crisis Capitalism and Environmental Destruction...
Jim talks with Roar Bjonnes about the ideas in his new book co-authored with Caroline Hargreaves, Growing a New Economy: Beyond Crisis Capitalism and Environmental Destruction. They talk about a quote from Naomi Klein, interlocking crises, COP27, the collective cognition problem, replacing the real economy with a financial economy, the idea of inherent selfishness, 4 integrated circles, the carbon pulse, nature as a machine, the misnomer of de-growth, why the U.S. is a debtor ec...
2022-11-141h 22
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 162 Max Borders on DecentralismJim talks with recurring guest Max Borders about the ideas in his new book The Decentralist: Mission, Morality, and Meaning in the Age of Crypto...
Jim talks with recurring guest Max Borders about the ideas in his new book The Decentralist: Mission, Morality, and Meaning in the Age of Crypto. They discuss happiness as a common ground, a eudaimonistic sensibility, the marshmallow experiment & deferred gratification, how inflation affects behavioral discount rates, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, von Mises's praxeology, reconciling individual & collective agency, coherent pluralism, Chomsky's syndicalism, Enlightenment liberalism, practices of morality, Bitcoin's deflationary tendency, Holochain, recessions as times of healing, gui...
2022-08-161h 56
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 159 Bobby Azarian on the Romance of RealityJim talks with Bobby Azarian about the ideas in his new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, which Jim calls "the most Jim Rutt Show-ish book ever"...
Jim talks with Bobby Azarian about the ideas in his new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, which Jim calls "the most Jim Rutt Show-ish book ever." They discuss the meaning & limits of reductionism, why the universe may not be moving toward an increasingly disordered state, life as a channel for di...
2022-07-062h 01
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 065: Alexander Bard on Protopian NarratologyJim talks with Alexander Bard, continuing a series of encounters between GameB and the Dark Renaissance movement...
Jim talks with Alexander Bard, continuing a series of encounters between GameB and the Dark Renaissance movement. They discuss the Grand Narrative Trilogy Bard has been writing with Jan Söderqvist, the kinds of stories we tell about ourselves, why Hiroshima remains the signal event of modern history, fostering symbiotic intelligence, the difference between the GameA & the GameB mythos, imploitation vs exploitation, 3 historical roots of GameA, why AI & not humans may conquer space, jettisoning the Gnostic dualism of Greek philosophy, protopianism over utopianism, v...
2022-06-3057 min
The Jim Rutt ShowWho Are You EP 01: Seth Jordan on Social ThreefoldingThis is the first, experimental episode of Who Are You, a subseries of the Jim Rutt Show in which Jim has an unplanned conversation with a mystery guest nominated and elected by listeners...
This is the first, experimental episode of Who Are You, a subseries of the Jim Rutt Show in which Jim has an unplanned conversation with a mystery guest nominated and elected by listeners. In this episode he meets Seth Jordan, a writer focusing on the social ideas of Rudolf Steiner. They discuss Steiner’s view of society, the differences between complicated & complex & between operating systems & organisms, the co...
2022-06-161h 19
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 156 James Poulos on Remaining HumanJim talks with James Poulos about the ideas in his new book Human Forever: The Spiritual Politics of Digital War...
Jim talks with James Poulos about the ideas in his new book Human Forever: The Spiritual Politics of Digital War. They discuss his decision to publish the book on the blockchain, going beginner's-mind on media & communications theory, the meaning of Gnosticism, responsibility as worship & its transfer to machines, returning worth to the human, a short introduction to Marshall McLuhan, raising the first fully digital generation, expert engineers vs ethereal ethicists, "peak woke" & the collapse of wokeness, religion as "the only pe...
2022-05-061h 31The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 062: Stephanie Lepp Interviews Jim Rutt on Musk and ModerationIn this episode, Jim Rutt is a guest on his own show! He's interviewed by Stephanie Lepp about the ideas in his Quillette essay "Musk and Moderation"...
In this episode, Jim Rutt is a guest on his own show! He's interviewed by Stephanie Lepp about the ideas in his Quillette essay "Musk and Moderation." They discuss where things stand with Musk's recent purchase of Twitter, Jim's 41-year background in online community moderation, strengthening & clarifying Twitter's decorum moderation, loosening point-of-view moderation, the "green sprouts" issue & the importance of tolerating fringe ideas, an appeal protocol for rulebreakers & stepping through an imagined violation by Tru...
2022-05-0359 min
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 049: Ashley Colby & Jason Snyder on Doomer OptimismJim talks with Ashley Colby & Jason Snyder about the growing movement of Doomer Optimism...
Jim talks with Ashley Colby & Jason Snyder about the growing movement of Doomer Optimism. They discuss Ashley's coinage of the term, doomer optimism as an open-source structure of feeling, avoiding pathologies of despair & naive optimism, balancing philosophy with action, cosmopolitan localism, healthy skepticism, theory-of-change pluralism, building local capacity toward the meso-scale, the social power of skill-building, Tucker Max's surprise embrace of the movement & what to do when movements take unexpected turns, doomer optimism's mainstream potential, recentering the hard-won knowledge of longtime homesteaders & builders, and much more.
...
2022-02-041h 02
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 151 Daniel Mezick on Ritual and HierarchyJim talks with Daniel Mezick about two books on leadership & social coherence, Michael Suk-Young Chwe's Rational Ritual & Christopher Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest...
Jim talks with Daniel Mezick about two books on leadership & social coherence, Michael Suk-Young Chwe's Rational Ritual & Christopher Boehm's Hierarchy in the Forest. They discuss ritual as a mechanism for large-scale coordination, mimicry in beer choice and Super Bowl ads, fragmentation of audiences through microtargeting, the relationship between common knowledge & ritual, China's management of common knowledge, America's weak-sauce rituals, meetings as games, how egalitarianism increases group decision quality, role-based vs position-based leadership, anti-puffing-up mechanisms, social values of...
2022-01-311h 15
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 048: Welf von Hören on PotentialJim has a wide-ranging talk with Welf von Hören, co-founder of the recently beta-launched Potential app...
Jim has a wide-ranging talk with Welf von Hören, co-founder of the recently beta-launched Potential app. (Listeners who download the app can use the invitation code "jimruttshow".) They discuss Potential's goal of upgrading the human capacity for omni-considerate choices, the co-evolutionary relationship between increasing individual capacity & improving institutions, the risk of creating "more efficient destroyers of the universe," GameB's three-part model of sovereignty, online as the primary conditioning environment, asymmetry between the human mind & AI-driven platforms, bridging the intention-action gap, the decision to...
2021-12-2747 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP147 John Vervaeke Part 5: Awakening from the Meaning CrisisJohn Vervaeke joins Jim for the final episode of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis...
John Vervaeke joins Jim for the final episode of a five-part series examining the ideas put forward in Vervaeke’s popular YouTube series, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. They discuss relevance's lack of essence, sacredness as inexhaustibility, separating cognitive indispensability from metaphysical necessity, religio & the perennial problems, whether Enlightenment++ principles can offer a place to stand, the need for new symbols of self-transcendence, reverse-engineering Enlightenment, mindfulness practices as serious play, the "religion of no reli...
2021-11-151h 56
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 045: Dorian Abbot on Protecting Academic FreedomJim has a timely discussion with geophysicist Dorian Abbot, whose public lecture was recently canceled by MIT—Jim's alma mater—due to Dorian's views on affirmative action...
Jim has a timely discussion with geophysicist Dorian Abbot, whose public lecture was recently canceled by MIT—Jim's alma mater—due to Dorian's views on affirmative action. They discuss the (unrelated) scientific content of the canceled lecture, Abbot's & Ivan Marinovic's proposed Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) framework, the Chicago Principles, the Kalven Report, mainstream support for merit-based hiring decisions, the relationship between liberal humanism & academic freedom, results of a secret-ballot poll of MIT faculty...
2021-11-0544 min
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 040: Jim Rutt Show Changes & ReflectionsJim Rutt Show producer, Jared Janes & Jim announce some changes to the podcast...
Jim Rutt Show producer, Jared Janes & Jim announce some changes to the podcast, preview upcoming guests, talk about the Jim Rutt Show (JRS) origin story, Jim's guest prep process, the evolution of JRS, its impact on Jim's reading habits, reading fiction, civilization collapse, contemporary influencers & counter cultures, curation as a service, what Jim likes the most about the podcast, core JRS themes, the art of yarning, stand out episodes & collaborations that came from the podcast, meditation, and more.
Episode Transcript
Mentioned Future Guests – Robin Dunbar, Heather E Hey...
2021-08-0249 min
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 032: Tyson Yunkaporta on Spirits, GameB & ProtopiasTyson Yunkaporta joins Jim for another wide-ranging yarn that covers DMT & machine elves, survivance, ego death, selling souls, and much more...
Tyson Yunkaporta joins Jim for another wide-ranging yarn that starts off with DMT & machine elves. They cover Jim's misspent youth, police violence, nuance vs Occam's razor, Tyson's impressions of GameB & the sensemakers, Tyson's unpublished Survivance essay, Jim's recent emu encounter & live intentional ego death, utilizing drugs, selling our souls to social media, debt jubilee & the road to GameB, ProtoBs as a dynamic exploration, utopia vs protopia, the value of cognitive dissonance, and much more.
Episode Transcript
Tyson's Podcast, The...
2021-05-071h 09
The Jim Rutt ShowEP124 Jim Hackett on Ford, Electric Cars & MoreFormer Ford CEO, Jim Hackett & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about the history & future of electric cars, the automotive industry, and much more...
Former Ford CEO, Jim Hackett & Jim have a wide-ranging talk about the history & future of electric cars. They cover Ford & Edison's first electric car, the current state of the electric cars, understanding scaling & natural systems, business change vs death, the evolution of car models & sizes, all-electric car plausibility, carbon taxes, electric range & charging time, electricity demand & smart grids, the history of Ford's Mustang Mach-e, the road to self-driving cars, safety & trust, startup car companies, the importance of u...
2021-05-041h 35
The Jim Rutt ShowEP117 Samo Burja on Societal DeclineSamo Burja talks to Jim about his book, Great Founder Theory: theories & limits of history, institutions, design vs evolution, declining empires, and much more...
Samo Burja talks to Jim about his freely available book, Great Founder Theory. They cover long-lasting societies, theories & limits of history, cultures that prioritize documentation, long-term priorities, institutional organization, social technologies, design vs evolution, what makes a great founder, times of slow change, market reform dynamics, censorship, social coordination costs, social media reformation, centralized vs decentralized declining empires, closed vs open academic journals, pre-registered research, post-modernism, noble lies, technology & society connections, institutional decline, the overproduction of elit...
2021-03-231h 54
The Jim Rutt ShowEP110 Brad Kershner on Education & ComplexityBrad Kershner & Jim on his book, Understanding Educational Complexity: Integrating Practices and Perspectives for 21st Century Leadership...
Brad Kershner talks to Jim about his book, Understanding Educational Complexity: Integrating Practices and Perspectives for 21st Century Leadership. They cover how Brad defines complexity, key contextual aspects of education, the four quadrants of Integral Theory & how he used them when observing schools, identifying & working with strange attractors, leadership, driving change in complexity, turbulence vs perturbation, position-based vs role-based leadership, complex vs complicated systems, mixed-age education, enabling creativity in teaching, and the importance of autonomy. They finish the episode by talking about theories of...
2021-02-081h 26
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 026: Bill Ottman on Minds.comBill Ottman & Jim have a wide-ranging talk on the state of social media and his open-source social platform, Minds.com...
In this currents episode, Bill Ottman & Jim have a wide-ranging talk on the state of social media and his open-source social platform (Minds.com). They talk about what makes Minds different than other social networks: open-source, community-owned, profit-shared, decentralized, free speech, privacy, decentralized reputation, moderation process, monetization & incentives, tokens, AWS & decentralizing the back-end, Ethereum, and more. They also chat about Jim's recent Facebook banning, GitHub censorship, Reddit's move away from open-source, power & corruption, radicalizing dynamics of censorship, doxing, Google’s demands...
2021-02-061h 13
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 019: Alexander Beiner on Indigenous NarcissismJim talks to Alexander Beiner about his new article on Indigenous Narcissism: western cultural norms, tribalism, social media, ethics, and much more...
In this Currents episode, Jim and Alexander Beiner have a wide-ranging chat about his recent article on Indigenous Narcissism. They cover western cultural norms, tribalism & belonging, social media as a tribal battlefield, addiction dynamics of social media, voluntary organization decline, the erosion of trust in institutions, ethics, postmodern cultural influence & dynamics, indigenous perspectives, cultures as operating systems, integral theory & the messiness of progress, fixing vs replacing systems, bottom-up vs top-down cultural innovation, the GameB approach, and more.
Rebel Wisdom
...
2020-11-171h 00
The Jim Rutt ShowEP93 Brent Cooper on Critique, Consensus & PoliticsBrent Cooper talks to Jim about the meta-crisis, critique, politics, GameB, monetary theory, climate policy, meta/post-modernism, and much more...
Brent Cooper talks to Jim about his academic & intellectual background, the under-appreciation of sociology, the meta-crisis, useful critique, time-scales & approaches to solving the meta-crisis, Jim & Brent's political perspectives, GameB values, monetary theory, smuggling bad ideas, the cost of war, climate change & the Green New Deal, mapping & utilizing metamodernism, the diversity of postmodernism, the danger of cherry-picking from systems, the value in disagreement, and more.
Episode Transcript
Mentions & Recommendations
Brent's Blog
JRS: EP90 Joshua Epstein on Agent-Based Modeling
JRS: EP73 James Li...
2020-11-161h 26
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 017: Bret Weinstein on Unity 2020Jim talks to Bret Weinstein about his banning from Facebook, censorship on Twitter, the aspirations for his Unity 2020 movement, and much more...
In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Bret Weinstein about the possible explanations for his banning from Facebook, social media & ideological bubbles, the history & goals for Bret's Unity 2020 movement & its ballot access strategy, the tyranny of "the lesser of two evils", election game theory, what he's learned from Unity 2020 supporters, types of non-voters, 2020 voters & candidates, post-election strategies to break our political duopoly, a non-ideological groundswell & Jim's idea for 'parametric social democracy', Twitter's censorship of Unity, and more.
Episode Tra...
2020-10-271h 26
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 016: Robin Hanson on Are We Living In A Simulation?Jim talks to Robin Hanson about whether we live in a simulation or not, why it matters if we do, simulation types, the Fermi paradox, and much more...
In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Robin Hanson about whether we live in a simulation or not, why it would matter if we do, his view of Nick Bostrom's simulation logic, Boltzmann brains & other possible simulation types, the appeal of simulating magic, the quantum Hilbert space, simulation accuracy, cost, & sizes, simulation theory induced paranoia, the value of & justifications for simulations, evolutionary universes, the Drake equation & Fermi paradox, impacts of increased pressure for human co...
2020-10-2249 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP82 Hanzi Freinacht on Building a Metamodern FutureHanzi Freinacht talks to Jim about political metamodernism, Gameb, sensemaking, conspiracy, top-down vs bottom-up tactics, coherent pluralism, and much more...
In a wide-ranging all-new episode, Hanzi Freinacht talks to Jim about the dynamics of political metamodernism & commonalities with Gameb, our meta-crisis & diminished sensemaking capabilities, our culture of alienation, conspiracy theories, collective sensemaking, negative impacts of market economies, top-down vs bottom-up interventions, liquid democracy & other governance innovations, optimizing for emergence, coherent pluralism, the value of ritual & social norms, localism, building coherence & action orientation, prioritizing mental health, changing minds, and much more.
Episode Transcript
Mentions & Recommendations
Metamoderna.org
JRS: EP36 Hanzi Freinacht on...
2020-10-051h 33
The Jim Rutt ShowEP76 Max Borders on the Social SingularityMax Borders talks to Jim about singularities, social innovation, dysfunctional politics, democracy, vaccines, decentralization, cryptocurrency, and much more...
Max Borders talks to Jim about how he sees the role of the futurist, optimism, the characteristics of singularities, types of social innovation, collective intelligence, signaling systems & incentives, our dysfunctional &/or out-dated politics, analyzing our democracy, re-embracing local experimentation, fractal governance, dangers of scientism, anti-vaxxers, fast-tracking COVID-19 vaccines, decentralization, non-hierarchical collaboration, financial incentives, cryptocurrency, multiple sovereignties, and much more.
Episode Transcript
Mentions & Recommendations
Social Evolution
Max's book, The Social Singularity
Jim's article, An Introduction to Liquid Democracy
JRS: EP73 James Lindsay on Cy...
2020-09-071h 32
The Jim Rutt ShowEP74 Daniel Christian Wahl on Regeneration DynamicsDaniel Christian Wahl talks with Jim about GameB, recycling, development, eastern perspectives, consciousness, community, and much more...
Daniel Christian Wahl talks with Jim about living at a Findhorn eco-village, humanity as a capstone species, regenerative vs sustainable, the three horizons & GameB, night soil in urban & rural contexts, recycling essential resources, personal & collective development, defining science & its challenges, eastern vs western thought & philosophy, impacts of language, escaping the hedonistic treadmill, self & community actualization, Jordan Hall's Civium Project, bioregionalism, urban farming, projecting global population post-COVID, Jim & Daniel's perspectives on consciousness, developmental psychology, cultural development & Hanzi metamodernism, acting locally & globally, community building, and much...
2020-08-281h 45The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 011: Robin Hanson on RightTalkismJim talks to Robin Hanson about social signaling & their tribal roots, politics, fighting RightTalkism, rationality, social media, wokeism, and more...
In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Robin Hanson about RightTalkism & our word fixation, social signaling, corporate speech, police reform, education & IQ, legalism vs Confucianism in China, Protestant & Catholics wars, floating abstractions, the tribal roots of our words, political duality, how to fight RightTalkism, saying "I don't know", rational talk vs action, social media, James Lindsey, wokeism & cancel culture, theory vs empiricism, abstract vs concrete speech, and more.
overcomingbias.com
Robin's book, The Elephant in the Brain
Robin's book, The A...
2020-08-1139 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP70 Art Brock & Ferananda Ibarra on CurrenciesArt Brock & Ferananda Ibarra talk with Jim about the dynamics of currencies as seen in education, culture, reputation, relationships, markets, and much more...
Art Brock & Ferananda Ibarra talk with Jim about the dynamics & characteristics of currencies, credentials, competence, reputation, the broad range of non-monetary currencies, relational-backed social currency, pros & cons of scarcity & measuring, time banks, how mutual credit systems work, financial collapses, fiat currency, speculative vs resource-backed markets, currency plurality, designing currencies, non-numeric currency, amazon ratings, and more.
Episode Transcript
Mentions & Recommendations
JRS: EP56 Art Brock on Holo Tech
Commons Engine
Holochain
HoloFuel
JustOne Organics
Jim's Talk on Dividend Money
A...
2020-08-041h 28The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 010: Tyson Yunkaporta on Humans As Custodial SpeciesJim talks to Tyson Yunkaporta about what makes us a custodial species, time, increase vs growth, complex systems intervention, domestication, and much more...
In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Tyson Yunkaporta about seeing humanity as a custodial species, our unique capacities, creation myths, the significance of the human hand, haptic cognition, tool making & syntactic language, our singing instinct, in-between space & interactions, GameB, information velocity, currency, humanity getting off track, seeing time as an arrow & the lie of progress, the illusion of time, interest's future discounting, increase vs growth, unplanned outcomes in complex systems intervention, ritual as an abstract metaphor, w...
2020-07-2952 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP68 Mara Zepeda on Innovative CollaborationMara Zepeda talks to Jim about co-founding a community platform, capital & creativity, alternative investment, extractive growth, empowering cooperatives, and much more...
Mara Zepeda talks to Jim about what led Mara to co-found the Switchboard community platform, the ask & offer dynamic, GameB, the interaction of capital & creativity, Jim's entrepreneurial history, alternative investment structures & unjust financial systems, the meat collective, community-based growth vs extractive growth hacking, the rarity of great community managers, the importance of deep listening, the CARE (Engagement Response Framework), the history & goals of Zebras Unite, dynamics of empowering cooperatives & hybrid cooperatives, working through bureaucracy, dynamics of angel investment, and more.
...
2020-07-281h 27
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 009: Gregg Henriques on Theory Of Meta-Cultural TransitionJim talks to Dr. Gregg Henriques about his tree of knowledge & meta-cultural transition, justification theory, meaning, consciousness, integrative pluralism, and much more...
In this Currents episode, Jim talks to Dr. Gregg Henriques about complexity in his tree of knowledge & how it's connects to meta-cultural transition, the power of justification theory, understanding meaning & its connection to western history, GameB, the enlightenment 2.0 & enlightenment gap, mind & matter, Jim's AI deer, the hard problem of consciousness, mysticism, Gregg's ingredients for integrative pluralism, importances of core values, and much more.
Episode Transcript
Gregg's Site
JRS: EP59 Gregg Henriques on Unifying Psychology
Gregg's article, The 11th...
2020-07-181h 11The Jim Rutt ShowEP66 Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous KnowledgeTyson Yunkaport talks to Jim about GameB, indigenous cognition, elders & initiation, growth, spirit, sustainability agents, cryptocurrencies, cultural evolution, and much more...
Tyson Yunkaport talks to Jim about GameB, woodworking as a theory of mind & information entanglement, interconnected indigenous cognition, the iceman, taming crocodile, culture & systems designed to check narcissism, context-dependent leadership, the role of indigenous elders & cultural initiation, the commons, close vs open systems, roles & checks for sociopaths, complex vs complicated systems, humanity as a custodial species, finding balance & managing change, the money on money growth mindset, Avatar depression, debt jubilee dynamics, UBI, knowledge in rocks, spirit as metaphor, integrated info...
2020-07-161h 36
The Jim Rutt ShowEP64 Colin Wright on The New Evolution DeniersColin Wright talks with Jim about the new evolution deniers & its impact on his academic career, sex & gender, nature AND nurture, postmodernism, whiskey, and more...
Colin Wright talks with Jim about his critiques of the new evolution deniers & the impact it had on his search for academic faculty positions, the connections & differences between sex & gender, primary vs secondary sex traits, the re-emergence of the blank slate theory, the naturalistic fallacy, embracing nature AND nurture, dangers of postmodernism, critical race theory, religion & dogma, religious behavior without the supernatural, Colin & Jim's appreciation of whiskey, and more.
Episode Transcript
Mentions & Recommendations
Colin's Quillette artic...
2020-07-101h 08
The Jim Rutt ShowEP63 Michel Bauwens on P2P & CommonsMichel Bauwens talks to Jim about the P2P Foundation, markets & commons, alternative collaborative systems, seed to niche to norm, value, the future, and much more...
P2P Foundation founder & director Michel Bauwens talks to Jim about being a 'vision coordinator', history & dynamics of peer to peer (P2P) collaboration, P2P in markets & commons, the evolution of commons, licensing, contributive accounting & other alternative collaborative systems, GameB, misconceptions of the tragedy of the commons, competing with Game A, from seed to niche to norm, experimentation vs speculation, understanding value, commodity vs contribution value, the myth of neutral technology, the pace of...
2020-07-061h 25
The Jim Rutt ShowCurrents 006: Jim Coan on Our Social RecessionIn this Currents episode, Jim talks to Jim Coan about social recession, social origins & impacts on humanity, emergent group collaboration, 'selfing' beyond the individual, bioenergetic resource management & its connection to social isolation & depression, physicological weathering & health risks of involuntary isolation, mental impacts leading to less COVID-19 social distancing, dynamics of virtual communication, academia impacts & risks of reopening, and more.
Episode Transcript
Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory
Jim Coan's appearance on CBC Radio
Expecting Students to Play It Safe if Colleges Reopen Is a Fantasy
Dr. James Coan is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Virginia Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the Univer...
2020-06-1947 minThe Jim Rutt ShowEP59 Gregg Henriques on Unifying PsychologyDr. Gregg Henriques talks to Jim about his unified theory of psychology; clinical vs scientific, postmodernism, justification theory, Gameb, shadow work, and much more...
Dr. Gregg Henriques talks to Jim about the many facets of his unified theory of psychology -- basic vs human psychology, the value of folk psych, the field of psychology compared to other academic fields, clinical vs scientific psych & what can be learned from the medical field, pros & cons of unifying theories, postmodern influences, systems justification, behavioral investment theory as seen on Jim's farm, the influence matrix & its connection to modern culture & Gameb, Gregg's tree of knowle...
2020-06-121h 35
The Jim Rutt ShowExtra: Memetic Warfare & Pandemic Responses with John RobbJim talks to John Robb about Defeat Disinfo, memetic armies, emerging economic implications of COVID-19, wicked risks, the break up of US, and more...
In this short extra episode, Jim talks to John Robb about the implication of Defeat Disinfo & how social platforms might respond, memetic armies & street fights, weak political responses to the pandemic, the emerging economic implications of COVID-19, the long-term complexity perspective, wicked risks & robust response methodologies, potential regional US border controls, leaky quarantines, possible break up of The United States, and more.
Episode Transcript
John Robb's post, August 2019 GG Report: Street Battles
Jim's article, Blood in...
2020-05-0736 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP51 Richard Bartlett on Self-Organizing CollaborationRichard Bartlett talks to Jim about his experiences with decentralized work & organization, Gameb, group size dynamics, big change movements & much more...
Richard Bartlett talks to Jim about his experiences with decentralized work & organization, transitioning from game a to Gameb, models for financial solidarity, technology-first vs psychology-first approaches to collaboration, dyad vs crew vs congregation dynamics, competency-based networks, practices vs principles, moving podcasts towards community, activism vs actionism, decision-making methods & conflict management, post-COVID network change potential, fundamentals focus in big change movements, intentions vs competencies, the power of modularity, and more.
Episode Transcript
Mentions & Recommendations
Rich on Twitter
Enspiral
The Hum
...
2020-04-271h 18
The Jim Rutt ShowBonus: Jim on The Stoa, COVID & Game BOn this Bonus episode, Jim hosts a talk & Q&A on The Stoa. He reflects on the impacts & opportunities created by COVID-19, Game A vs Game B, complexity, & much more...
In this bonus episode, Jim hosts a talk & Q&A on The Stoa. Peter Limberg sets the context for this talk and they then go on to reflect on the impacts & opportunities created by COVID-19, homeostasis vs hysteresis, flaws of Game A thinking, Game B in the developing world & evolution vs revolution, parasitizing Game A, complex systems design, meta-narratives, the evolution of media, and more.
Episode Transcript
Mentions & Recommendations
Game B
...
2020-03-3153 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP47 Mark Burgess on the Physics of MoneyMark Burgess talks with Jim about money through the promise theory lense -- banks, debt, interest, deflation, stockpiling, entropy, crypto, and much more...
Author, founder & scientist Mark Burgess talks with Jim about promise theory, the many functions of money, its network transfer & physical components, spacetime’s connection to money’s ability to store value, the role of banks, memory & debt, interest & the logic of never-ending growth, deflation & negative interest rates, micro vs macro perspectives on money, geopolitics & foreign exchange, monetary velocity & impacts of stockpiling, currency demurrage, entropy in money, trust, the emerging monetary system in China, Mark’s views on crypto...
2020-03-231h 24
The Jim Rutt ShowEP41 Daniel Mezick on the Agile OrganizationDaniel Mezick talks with Jim about agile process & organizations, how agile scrums work, openspace tech, change management, leadership, authority, complex systems, and much more...
Daniel Mezick talks with Jim about how he got into business consulting & agile processes, what an openspace organization is & how it scales with business size/type, Jim’s experience with agile, how an agile scrum is structured, the value of DevOps & product managers, types of agile processes & common pitfalls, learned helplessness, what openspace technology is & how it works, managing ambiguity & change management, inviting vs delegating as a leader, understanding authority & its connection to complex system functionality, bo...
2020-02-131h 33
The Jim Rutt ShowEP40 Eric Smith on the Physics of Living SystemsEric Smith talks with Jim about geochemistry & the origins of life, monetary systems & dynamics, interdisciplinarity linguistics, sustainability, civil society, and much more...
Multidimensional thinker Eric Smith has a wide-ranging talk with Jim about the origins of life, monetary systems, language & sustainability. Eric starts by sharing how geochemistry informs the origin of life topic, the dynamics of autocatalytic processes, how little we know about biological systems & what this might tell us about the Fermi paradox. The conversation then goes into the importance of institutions & a dynamic perspective on monetary systems, the subprime mortgage crisis, money substitutes & crypto. They then finish this...
2020-02-101h 26
The Jim Rutt ShowEP39 John Koza on Bleeding EdgesJim talks to the multi-talented thinker & creator John Koza about his secure lottery ticket tech, his genetic programming work, how & why he created the National Popular Vote bill, and much more...
Multi-talented thinker & creator John Koza & Jim start by talking about what led him to create secure lottery ticket tech early in his career. They then go on to talk about how he got interested in genetic algorithms, his pioneering work in genetic programming, how powerful it is, and some of its stand-out applications. Lastly, John tells Jim what led him to create the National Popular Vote bill, how it...
2020-02-031h 16The Jim Rutt ShowEP37 Jared Janes on SpiritualityJared Janes talks with Jim about spiritual language, altered states vs traits, suffering, the confabulated self, embodiment, concentration practices, metaphysics, and more...
Meditator & thinker Jared Janes talks with Jim about why he still uses the word ‘spiritual’, altered states vs altered traits, the equation & dynamics of suffering, understanding our own intentions, the confabulating mind, embodied intuition, the value & limits of conceptuality, what the self is & its usefulness, attention & awareness, the pleasure of concentration, metaphysics, and more.
Episode Transcript
Mentions & Recommendations
Jared’s Website
Jared on Twitter
Waking Up by Sam Harris
The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young
The Mind is Fla...
2020-01-231h 27
The Jim Rutt ShowEP36 Hanzi Freinacht on MetamodernismHanzi Freinacht talks with Jim about postmodernism, value memes, cognitive complexity, societal code, the promises/dangers of metamodernism, and much more...
Hanzi Freinacht, political philosopher, historian, sociologist, & author has a wide-ranging talk with Jim that starts by exploring what postmodern views are, how many postmodernists there might be & how they act. They, then go on to cover effective values memes & how they arise/interact, the dynamics of the model of hierarchical complexity, societal code, the progression from modern to post-modern & metamodern perspectives, how code & cognitive complexity interact, whether post-modernism is valuable, similarities of metamodernism & GameB, the promises & dangers of running...
2020-01-201h 37
The Jim Rutt ShowEP32 Jason Brennan on Irrational Democracy & AcademiaAuthor & Professor Jason Brennan talks with Jim about teaching business school, libertarianism, poor incentives/outcomes in democracy & academia, and much more...
Author & Research Professor Jason Brennan talks with Jim about teaching in business school after studying philosophy, what a bleeding heart libertarian is, the ignorance & irrationality of voters, how well group identity predicts personal values, whether political engagement leads to rational politics, political discrimination, social signaling, epistocracy & other alternatives to democracy, what course evaluations actually measure in academia, grading inconsistencies & their unintended outcomes, college advertising & tuition costs, the moral grandstanding of tenure, and much more.
Episode Transcript
Mentions & Recommendations
Jason’s...
2019-12-301h 31
The Jim Rutt ShowEP27 Jamie Wheal on Flow's FutureJamie Wheal talks to Jim about flow, intrinsic & extrinsic motivation, group flow, GameB, the future of ecstatic state tech, cult leaders, and much more...
Author Jamie Wheal talks with Jim about working with the Navy SEALs, what characterizes flow, intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation, the Eleusinian Mysteries, Plato, Aristotle & Pythagoras, soft-leadership & dynamic hierarchies, group flow, if courage & integrity can be taught & what that means for Game B, coherent pluralism, spiritual bypassing, the dangers & promises of ecstatic state technology, the realities of collapse, what we might learn from the Amish, cult leaders & the dynamics of their power, and more.
Episode Transcript
Mentions...
2019-11-221h 03
The Jim Rutt ShowEP25 Gary Marcus on Rebooting AIAuthor & CEO Gary Marcus talks with Jim about his book, Rebooting AI, driverless cars, AI learning & intelligence, hybrid AI models & AI bias, and much more...
Scientist, author & entrepreneur Gary Marcus talks with Jim about his latest book, Rebooting AI. In this wide-ranging conversation they cover the gullibility gap, the illusory progress gap, the robustness gap, driverless car progress & safety, how narrow AI is today, model building, the free-lunch theorem, nativism in animals & humans, how Jim’s experience with war games demonstrates the learning limitations of AI, Cyc & ConceptNet, symbolic algorithms, potential of graph neural nets, why Gary thinks hybrid models ar...
2019-11-151h 17The Jim Rutt ShowEP24 Bret Weinstein on Evolving CultureBret Weinstein & Jim talk about unsustainable culture, dangerous algorithms, GameB, complexity, trade-offs, social media, today's left, Darwinian religion, and much more...
Bret Weinstein and Jim talk about the evolutionary & game-theoretic dynamics that have led humanity to an unsustainable place, the impact of today’s algorithms & how they’re connected to human evolution, the recent shift of corporate values, how Game B should view complex systems, design vs. navigation, trade-offs from a theoretical biology perspective, approaches to keeping online collaboration & networks net-positive, how the political left has changed & how Jim & Bret relate to it, the biological perspective & its connection to the is–o...
2019-11-121h 29
The Jim Rutt ShowEP23 Jeff Gomez on Narrative & Cultural ChangeJim talks with CEO Jeff Gomez about working on movies, games & media, transmedia storytelling, fandom, working with the US gov, propaganda, Game B, and much more...
CEO Jeff Gomez and Jim have a wide-ranging talk about Jeff’s work with massive movies like Pirates of the Caribbean, his work with transmedia storytelling & worldbuilding, how nerdy Jim really is, how narrative & story differ & the role the audience plays, fandom, the perennial Star Wars vs Star Trek question, the far reaches of fan fiction, Jeff’s work in Collective Journey & its broader connection to the internet & politics, the hero’s journey & its ‘Hollywoo...
2019-11-051h 23The Jim Rutt ShowEP19 John Robb on Asymmetric & Networked Conflict & StrategyAuthor, inventor, tech analyst, engineer, and military pilot John Robb talks to Jim about drone attacks, internet-age networks, geopolitics, AGI, and much more...
This conversation with Jim and John Robb–author, inventor, entrepreneur, technology analyst, astro engineer, and military pilot–starts by covering the impact of the recent drone attack on a Saudi fuel processing center, and the current US political situation. They then go on to talk about how John compares resistance and the insurgency networks, the dynamics of tribes, institutions & markets in this internet age, the role open-source dynamics play, coherence vs. corruption, how Extinction Rebellion & Game B fit...
2019-10-211h 27
The Jim Rutt ShowEP17 – Bonnitta Roy on Process Thinking and ComplexityBonnitta Roy teaches insight practices for individuals who are developing meta-cognitive skills, and hosts collective insight retreats for groups interested in breaking away from limiting patterns of thought. She teaches a masters course in consciousness studies and transpersonal psychology at the Graduate Institute. Her teaching highlights the embodied, affective and perceptual aspects of the core self, and the non-egoic potentials from which subtle sensing, intuition and insight emerge.
Through her company, APP-AI, Bonnitta is developing applications that can visualize changing patterns as teams work through complex problems. Her research shows how simple but powerful protocols that underlie these patterns can...
2019-10-141h 46
The Jim Rutt ShowEP16 Anaconda CTO Peter Wang on The Distributed InternetPeter Wang is Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of Anaconda, the leading Python tools and data analytics company. Peter holds a B.A. in Physics from Cornell University and has been developing applications professionally using Python since 2001.
Before co-founding Anaconda (formerly Continuum Analytics) in 2011, Peter spent seven years designing and developing applications for a variety of companies, including investment bankers, high-frequency trading firms, oil companies, and others. Peter also developed Chaco, an open-source, Python-based toolkit for interactive data visualization.
Introduction to Peter Wang, Anaconda + New Python Tools 20 minutes
Deep Fakes, Virtuality + Speciation 15 minutes
Gatekeepers, Sensemaking + The Cycle of Glut 21 minutes
...
2019-10-071h 26
The Jim Rutt ShowEP15 Futurist David Brin on The Case for OptimismDavid Brin is best-known for shining light — plausibly and entertainingly — on technology, society, and countless challenges confronting our rambunctious civilization. His bestselling novels include The Postman (filmed in 1997) plus explorations of our near-future in Earth and Existence. Other novels are translated into over 25 languages. His short stories explore vividly speculative ideas. Brin's nonfiction book The Transparent Society won the American Library Association's Freedom of Speech Award for exploring 21st century concerns about security, secrecy, accountability and privacy.
As a scientist, tech-consultant and world-known author, he speaks, advises, and writes widely on topics from national defense and homeland security to astronomy and spac...
2019-09-301h 24
The Jim Rutt ShowEP14 Astrophysicist Jill Tarter on SETI and TechnosignaturesJill Tarter received her Bachelor of Engineering Physics Degree with Distinction from Cornell University and her Master’s Degree and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. She served as Project Scientist for NASA’s SETI program, the High Resolution Microwave Survey, and has conducted numerous observational programs at radio observatories worldwide.
Since the termination of funding for NASA’s SETI program in 1993, she has served in a leadership role to secure private funding to continue the exploratory science. Currently, she serves on the management board for the Allen Telescope Array, an innovative array of 350 (when fully...
2019-09-231h 05
The Jim Rutt ShowEP13 Trent McConaghy: Blockchain, AI and DAOsTrent McConaghy is the Founder of Ocean Protocol. He has 20 years of deep technology experience with a focus on machine learning, data visualization and user experience. He was a researcher at the Canadian Department of Defense and in 1999, he co-founded Analog Design Automation Inc. and was its CTO until its acquisition by Synopsys Inc. In 2004, he co-founded Solido Design Automation Inc., once again in the role of CTO.
Trent has written two critically acclaimed books on machine learning, creativity and circuit design and has authored or co-authored more than 40 papers and patents. He lives in Berlin, Germany.
Introduction to Trent M...
2019-09-161h 16
The Jim Rutt ShowEP12 Brian Nosek – Open Science and ReproducibilityBrian Nosek is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science (COS) that operates the Open Science Framework. COS is enabling open and reproducible research practices worldwide. Brian is also a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2002.
Brian co-founded Project Implicit, an multi-university collaboration for research and education investigating implicit cognition — thoughts and feelings that occur outside of awareness or control. Brian investigates the gap between values and practices, such as when behavior is influenced by factors other than one's intentions and goals. Research ap...
2019-09-121h 19
The Jim Rutt ShowEP11 Dave Snowden and Systems ThinkingDave Snowden is Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry looking at complex issues relating to strategy and organizational decision-making. He has pioneered a science-based approach to organizations drawing on anthropology, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems theory. He is a popular and passionate keynote speaker on a range of subjects, and is well-known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style.
Dave holds visiting Chairs at the Universities of Pretoria and Hong Kong Polytechnic University as well as a visiting fellowship at the University of Warwick. He is a...
2019-09-091h 14
The Jim Rutt ShowEP10 David Krakauer: Complexity ScienceDavid Krakauer is President and William H. Miller Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute. David’s research focuses on the evolutionary history of information processing mechanisms in biology and culture. This includes genetic, neural, linguistic and cultural mechanisms. The research spans multiple levels of organization, seeking analogous patterns and principles in genetics, cell biology, microbiology and in organismal behavior and society.
Introduction to David Krakauer and the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) 5 minutes
Complexity, Reductionism, Emergence + Causality 15 minutes
Time, Entropy + Selection 7 minutes
Cutting Edge Complexity + Theory of Circuits 7 minutes
The Evolution of Intelligence and Stupidity 9 minutes
Order, Discipline, Po...
2019-09-031h 10
The Jim Rutt ShowEP9 Joe Norman: Applied ComplexityJoe Norman is an applied complexity scientist with a focus on transforming insights gleaned from complex systems science into practical and implementable strategies and tactics for grappling with an increasingly uncertain and dynamic world. Joe is an Affilate at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, MA, an instructor at the Real World Risk Institute, and founder of Applied Complexity Science, LLC. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife where they are focusing their energy on homesteading and local agriculture on an old mill property that has been an actively running homestead for over 130 years.
Introduction to Joe...
2019-08-271h 08
The Jim Rutt ShowSpecial Episode: Zachary VorhiesZachary Vorhies recently resigned as a senior software engineer at YouTube. Employed by Google since 2008, Vorhies collected a large cache of documents that he claims demonstrates that Google intentionally skews search results to drive a political agenda. Vorhies shared these documents with James O'Keefe of Project Veritas, which released a video about the documents on August 14, 2019. Vorhies' candid interview with Jim Rutt was conducted five days later on August 19, 2019.
Meet Zack Vorhies, "The Snowden of Google" 12 minutes
Machine Learning Fairness and the Fairness Bias 8 minutes
Did Google Commit Perjury Before U.S. Congress? 7 minutes
Why Doesn't Google AutoComplete match Search...
2019-08-2150 min
The Jim Rutt ShowEP8 Jordan “Greenhall” Hall and Game BJordan is the Co-founder and Executive Chairman of the Neurohacker Collective. He is now in his 17th year of building disruptive technology companies. Jordan's interests in comics, science fiction, computers, and way too much TV led to a deep dive into contemporary philosophy (particularly the works of Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda), artificial intelligence and complex systems science, and then, as the Internet was exploding into the world, a few years at Harvard Law School where he spent time with Larry Lessig, Jonathan Zittrain and Cornel West examining the coevolution of human civilization and technology.
Introduction: Thinking vs. Simulated Thinking 7...
2019-08-191h 33
The Jim Rutt ShowEP7 Daniel Schmachtenberger and the Evolution of TechnologyDaniel Schmachtenberger is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue. The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal. Towards these ends, he’s had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science. Motivated by the belief that advancing collective intelligence and capacity is foundational to th...
2019-08-121h 22
The Jim Rutt ShowEP 6 Douglas Rushkoff – Memetics, Money + TeamHumanDouglas Rushkoff is the host of the Team Human podcast and author of Team Human as well as a dozen other bestselling books on media, technology, and culture, including, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, Media Virus, and the novel Ecstasy Club. He is Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens.
Introduction to Douglas Rushkoff 8 minutes
"Team Human," Timothy Leary and the Long Boom 11 minutes
The Rise of the Attention Economy 16 minutes
Memes and Memetics 9 minutes
Figure and Ground; Money as an Operating System 8...
2019-08-051h 12
The Jim Rutt ShowEP5 Lee Smolin – Quantum Foundations and Einstein’s Unfinished RevolutionLee Smolin is a theoretical physicist who has been since 2001 a founding and senior faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His main contributions have been so far to the quantum theory of gravity, to which he has been a co-inventor and major contributor to two major directions, loop quantum gravity and deformed special relativity.
Lee also contributes to cosmology, through his proposal of cosmological natural selection — a falsifiable mechanism to explain the choice of the laws of physics. He has also contributed to quantum field theory, the foundations of quantum mechanics, theoretical biology, and the philosophy of science an...
2019-07-261h 19
The Jim Rutt ShowEP4 Cory Doctorow – “Radicalized,” Race and ResilienceCory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, blogger, and co-editor of Boing Boing. He is the author of Radicalized and Walkaway, science fiction for adults; a young adult graphic novel called In Real Life; the nonfiction business book Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, and more.
Cory works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University, a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of South Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science, and the co-founder of the U.K. Open Rights Group. Bo...
2019-07-191h 31
The Jim Rutt ShowEP3 Dr. Ben Goertzel – OpenCog, AGI and SingularityNETDr. Ben Goertzel is Chief Scientist of robotics firm Hanson Robotics and financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC and bioinformatics company Biomind LLC; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation; Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity+; Scientific Advisor of biopharma firm Genescient Corp.; Advisor to the Singularity University and Singularity Institute; Research Professor in the Fujian Key Lab for Brain-Like Intelligent Systems at Xiamen University, China; and general Chair of the Artificial General Intelligence conference series.
His research work encompasses artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, data mining...
2019-07-151h 24
The Jim Rutt ShowRobin HansonRobin Hanson is an Associate Professor of Economics, and received his Ph.D in 1997 in social sciences from Caltech. He joined George Mason's economics faculty in 1999 after completing a two-year post-doc at U.C Berkely. His major fields of interest include health policy, regulation, and formal political theory.
Index to The Jim Rutt Show featuring Robin Hanson
Introduction and "The Age of Em" (00:00:00 - 00:36:00) = 36 minutes
Rates of Change (00:36:00 - 00:39:00) = 3 minutes
The Fermi Paradox (00:39:00 - 00:59:00) = 20 minutes
"The Elephant in the Brain" (00:59:00 - 01:14:00) = 15 minutes
Political Decision Making Section (01:14:00 - 01:26:00) = 12 minutes
Should We Publish Tax Returns? (01:26:00 - 01:37:00) = 11 minutes
Transcript of The Jim Rutt...
2019-07-081h 38
The Jim Rutt ShowEP1 Simon DeDeo – The Evolution of ConsciousnessSimon DeDeo is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also affiliated with the Cognitive Science program at Indiana University, where he runs the Laboratory for Social Minds. For three years, from 2010 to 2013, he was an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.
He and his collaborators study how people use words and signals, and the ideas they represent, to create a world. They have studied a diverse set of systems that includes the French Revolution, the courtrooms of Victorian London, the...
2019-07-071h 38